Butterfly in the Typewriter (16 page)

The party ended without another incident, except for Toole's own flirtatious behavior. Emboldened by cocktails, he focused his attention on Patricia Rickels, as Milton ushered her into the car. Patricia vividly remembers the scene that ensued. Toole positioned himself in the car window, preventing their departure. “He didn't want me to go,” Patricia recalls. “He was leaning over me inside the car and wouldn't leave.” Milton liked Toole very much, but like many of the other husbands in the department, he found his company irritating at times. He had a way of stepping too close to the bond between husband and wife. Milton had enough of Toole's flirtations. “Get out of the window, Ken. We want to leave!” he said. Toole replied, “Well, I'm not through saying goodbye.” “Yes you are!” Milton shot back as he rammed the window up, choking Toole at the neck. “I'm gonna strangle you to death if you don't get out of the window,” he yelled. Toole nodded, removed his head from the window, and returned to his apartment. It was, by far, the boldest move he ever made on Patricia and fairly out of character for him. But on another occasion, when he forgot himself in the company of another bachelor, he expressed in crude terms his attraction and desire for Patricia.

Patricia took Toole's affection as flattery, not temptation. She was devoted to her husband. But she also cared deeply for her friend. Looking back on her many years at SLI, she said, “There have been people I have known here for thirty, forty years, but they didn't leave the impression that Ken left on me. It's hard to believe he was here only for one year.” Her eyes glimmered as she remembered her friend who walked into her life in 1959. She even saw some part of herself in his novel. She was convinced Toole recalled her Civil Rights activities on campus when he wrote about the Crusade for Moorish Dignity in
Confederacy
. She, too, wanted some lasting connection between her and her friend.

In Patricia, Toole found a smart, warm, loving, and at times maternal woman. She never sought to manipulate or gain anything from him. She simply wanted his company. And Milton eventually overlooked the episode in the car window. After some time apart and a little distance, they, too, became close friends again. The Rickelses offered Toole an enthralled audience and an example of what a family life could be, the kind for which he may have yearned.

His relationship with the Rickelses, his honorary Lafayette family, did not alleviate him from the devotion he felt to his own parents. Throughout his year in Lafayette, he often returned to New Orleans on weekends. Usually one of the other professors wanted to go, too, so a few people would split the cost of gas and share company during the drive. Nick Polites often traveled with Toole. Initially they would go their separate ways, spend time with their families, and return to Lafayette together for Monday classes. But as they grew closer as friends, Polites invited Toole to meet his mother. In turn, Toole invited Polites to meet his family. On that day Polites entered their small apartment on Audubon Street, “furnished in the inexpensive, period-style furniture at the time.” He saw in passing Toole's father, who “just glided through and went into one of the back rooms.” Mrs. Toole came to the living room and, at her son's request, sat down at “the tiniest baby grand piano” Polites had ever seen. For months Toole had bragged about his mother's musical talents. “My mother could have been a concert pianist,” Toole once said to Polites. But what Polites heard bewildered him:

Perhaps she was losing her touch with the ivory keys, although, her students would not speak so critically. But her playing is not what surprised Polites most of all; it was his friend's ability to overlook it. “When Ken could be dismissive about so many things, it was interesting to see the mother/son relationship expressed so totally uncritically and unrealistically.” Perhaps this unwavering devotion to each other's talents was how Thelma and her son expressed their unconditional love.

Over the course of a few months, spending time in Lafayette and traveling back and forth to New Orleans, Toole and Polites eventually breached a conversation on sexuality. Toole was aware of Polites's “gay side,” so it came as no surprise when he invited Toole to a gay party in the French Quarter. And Toole expressed interest in going. “There were
a lot of silly people there,” Polites admits. But there were also “a few thoughtful people that he might have had a really good conversation with.” However, upon entering the apartment Toole became visibly uncomfortable. The personality that blossomed at social events in Lafayette now shriveled into a corner. Even after Polites introduced him to a few acquaintances, Toole sat without saying a word. He “talked to no one, and no one talked to him.” Soon after they arrived, Toole mentioned to Polites his intentions to leave. Recognizing his discomfort, Polites agreed to leave the party as well. Later that evening, Toole “expressed his negative feelings about the gay world, or gay life.” Polites detected that his friend saw it all in stereotypes; he determined Toole “was intimidated” by what he saw at the party. But Polites is also quick to mention that, while they spent a lot of time together, they were not close confidants. Much of what Polites concluded from that conversation, he warns, is conjecture.

It is interesting that as a teenager Toole boundlessly explored his city, and he now found a place that discomfited him. It is tempting to deduce some conclusion about Toole's intent in going to the party, but that presumes more than even Polites would surmise from that night. “Toole kept his own counsel,” as Bobby Byrne once observed. Whether disgusted, intimidated, enticed, or shocked by what he saw, no one knows for sure, and it matters little. He likely used his impressions of the party to create the scene of the gay soirée in
Confederacy
, where Ignatius tries to organize the Army of Sodomites. Whatever Toole's reasons for going to the party, his curiosity, from wherever it stemmed, spurred him to see all sides of New Orleans life, even if that led to some discomfort.

Joel Fletcher, another friend from SLI, also witnessed this innate curiosity in Toole. Near the end of the academic year, Fletcher, who was working in the basement office of the news bureau at the college and was also the son of the president of SLI, met the young scholar from New Orleans. Polites had suggested that the two meet, but they didn't get around to it until the beginning of the summer, months after Polites left for the army in January. As predicted, Fletcher and Toole sparked an immediate friendship. They were both Tulane graduates, cultured intellectuals, and held much higher ambitions than Lafayette, Louisiana. Throughout the remaining weeks of the school year, they drove to bars
and talked about literature, music, and art. And every so often they traveled to New Orleans.

In July of 1960 they took a trip to the Crescent City where Fletcher saw Toole observe a unique New Orleans scene. The day after they arrived, they met up at the Napoleon House to eat lunch. They spent the rest of the afternoon meandering through the Quarter. They browsed bookstores and had a memorable encounter with the sizeable posterior of New Orleans writer Frances Parkinson Keyes. And they walked to Elysian Fields, the childhood neighborhood of Toole's parents, where his aunt and uncle still lived. They strolled through the once respectable section of town, which had since become depressed. They walked by people standing in doorways and “dirty-looking mothers screaming at their much dirtier children.” As it started pouring rain, Toole became “transfixed by the scene” of a mother who violently struck her child in an attempt to protect him from the downpour. Fletcher recounts in his memoir,

Later that day as they drank coffee, Toole “mimicked the Elysian Fields mother braining her child while voicing such concern over his welfare, chuckling to himself, delighted by the comic irony.” Fletcher had witnessed Toole's process of observation. Heeding a moment unfolding before him, Toole watched and then shortly thereafter rehearsed the narrative and the voices, working his way to the spirit of the moment, not to merely report or accurately represent it, but to boil it down to its most humorous essence. And then he likely cataloged it somewhere in his mind, ready to recall on another occasion, at a party, talking with friends, or when he finally sat down to write his novel.

Such a mentality requires a degree of detachment. Instead of expressing sympathy for the child or judgment of the mother, Toole recognized it as one of the many tragi-comic vignettes that abound in New Orleans on any given day. Elmore Morgan, the artist who lived in the apartment above Toole, concisely described this character trait in Toole
when he said in an interview: “He had a sort of detached view, in a sense; he was an observer. Rather than get terribly upset by some situation, he would be more likely to deal with it in a sort of humorous way, to see the absurdity and irony and humor in it.... Humor was a way of dealing with things that he couldn't do anything about.”

Toole's reactions suggest his recognition of forces in this world he could not change, and laughter was the way to overcome them. In comparing the two moments of New Orleans life, Toole was far more comfortable watching a scene in the street than sitting in that party with Polites, but in both cases, this was his city to absorb and reflect, in all its unsettling humor. And regardless of the situation, from watching a scene of domestic violence unfold on Elysian Fields to awkward moments at a party in the French Quarter, during this period Toole is said to have had a constant “half-smile on his face, as though he were up to something, as though he were amused by the people in the world around him.”

Toole and Fletcher returned to Lafayette to finish out the remaining days of the semester. At SLI Toole found companions with whom he could discuss art and literature. He relished the eccentricities of his colleagues. And he had the joy of partaking in life with the Rickels family. As Patricia recalls, Toole was “in his season of glory” in Lafayette. He was coming closer to his own spark of innovation, collecting the voices that would echo through his own work. Joking with Patricia, he once commented that “he couldn't stay at SLI more than a year because he didn't want to get any fatter.” But truthfully, he must have felt that nagging compulsion toward achieving something great, whether in writing or in teaching. And it was not going to happen in Cajun country, or at any college at this point. As Toole well understood, a master of arts, even from Columbia, walks in limbo. He could teach classes, but rarely would an MA gain promotion or achieve tenure. So he set his sights on returning to graduate school to get his PhD.

In May of 1960 the SLI English department newsletter announced that Toole was “resigning his position . . . at the end of the summer semester to return to Graduate Studies.” He would attend the University of Washington on a three-year university fellowship and “do his specialized study in the field of Renaissance English Literature.” Washington was an odd choice for him, but for a penny-pinching scholar such an offer would be difficult to refuse. According to Patricia Rickels, “He
wanted to be in New York more than anything.” He also wanted the prestige of Columbia. The logistics of finances created a substantial barrier between him and New York. Fortunately, in June, word came from his mentor, John Wieler, who was able to make good on the promise stated in his recommendation letter to SLI a year earlier. The English department newsletter announced that Toole would “return to graduate school at Columbia University this September . . . [after receiving] an appointment to the faculty of Hunter College, and he will teach at Hunter while attending Columbia.” Even with a job in New York, between tuition, living expenses, and a schedule stretched between teaching and taking courses, the stage was set for a life of intense financial pressure. But after a year in the bayou, New York may have once again appeared a luminous city in the distance, a metropolis of aspirations ascending into the sky.

He taught for the summer session at SLI in order to save some money, and he enjoyed the leisurely pace. He went out to Cajun bars with Fletcher and Broussard, and over cold beers they would talk about literature. He had recently become obsessed with British novelist Evelyn Waugh. Fletcher appreciated Waugh's dark humor as well. Although Nick Polites remembers with some irritation how Toole was so infatuated with the “brilliance and economy of his writing” that he “talked incessantly about Waugh.” On occasion he met with his high school friend Cary Laird, who was finishing up his graduate degree at Tulane. One weekend in New Orleans, Toole heard of a party taking place in Lafayette. Eager to show Laird the popularity he had gained in the small town, Toole convinced his friend to borrow his sister's white Chevrolet convertible, the one Toole's father had sold her, and the two cruised westward, crossing the Atchafalaya Basin with the wind in their hair. He must have enjoyed his corner of Cajun country all the more now that he was about to leave.

As the sweltering heat of the summer hit its August peak, Toole packed his belongings and bid adieu to his friends. Heading east, the mud of the Louisiana swamp dried from his shoes as he prepared his return to the fast-paced frenzy of Manhattan.

R
eturning to the realm of brick and limestone, Toole found little had changed in Manhattan since he'd left. The skyscrapers still towered over the people who still hurried along sidewalks. The bohemians of Greenwich Village still gathered in Washington Square Park. The Beats still preached their anti-establishment message in cafés and dive bars. And Columbia still held its regal poise in Morningside Heights. But Toole had changed. As an experienced instructor, he could now manage a classroom, not just ace a course. And the terms of his survival in Manhattan had changed, too. No longer under the wing of the Woodrow Wilson fellowship, Toole intended to work while attending Columbia part-time until he earned his PhD, which would take at least three years—three years of bouncing between the west and east sides of Manhattan. With the pressures of earning enough money to survive and his rigorous daily routine, it would be a year vastly different from his first foray to New York City. And yet there remains a mirrored dynamic between those two years. They both began with his initial excitement but led to his eventual dismay with a place that he found hard to love at times, despite his best efforts. And at some point in the midst of his mind-spinning schedule, he would begin sketching his ideas for what would become
A Confederacy of Dunces
. It was to be Toole's busiest year. For the first time he took on the roles of student, teacher, and writer all at once. And after donning all three hats that year, he would leave New York with a clearer sense of what he wanted to do, what he
had
to do with his life.