Butterfly in the Typewriter (36 page)

One reviewer of
Ignatius Rising
praised the work, stating, “The authors present considerable evidence that Toole was alcoholic, gay and closeted.” But the authors don't offer any substantive evidence to support those conclusions. It is tempting to fit Toole into the trope of the fatally troubled artist, his genius unrecognized, sinking into an abyss of vices. This narrative is so commonplace that we seem willing to overlook a lack of evidence to believe it. After all, we have grown to expect the artistic genius to descend into a dark world of indulgence, perhaps searching for some sensation to once again find himself or seeking a sedative to dull the pain. But such a naïve approach to a man's crisis tragically oversimplifies the complexity of a mental illness.

Feelings of dejection from the failure to publish his novel, conflicted sexual identity, alcohol addiction, a narcissistic mother, and an insufferable home life, all provide convenient answers to the question of why he committed suicide. And while they may or may not be true, they ultimately fail as reasons for his suicide. When using such measures, the result, as Thelma Toole once said of her son's final decision to take his own life, appears “insupportable.” Suicide is not simple. Despite our best efforts to understand the ghastly human potential for self-destruction, it cannot be explained by a series of events like some kind of formula. And yet we tend to approach the question of suicide from this insupportable
angle, seeking the single, loosened lynchpin that caused a mind to come undone.

Foremost suicidologist Edwin Shneidman described suicide as an incredibly complex event. He coined the term “psychache” to express the intricate and complicated condition leading up to suicide. After years of studying suicides and interviewing people with suicidal tendencies, some of whom ultimately carried out the act despite his efforts to help them, Shneidman determined that suicide is not reactive, but rather “purposive.” In his definition it is a “concatenated, complicated, multidimensional, conscious, and unconscious ‘choice' of the best possible practical solution to a perceived problem, dilemma, impasse, crisis or desperation.” And before arriving at the decision to kill oneself, Shneidman argues, the person is in excruciating pain; the pain may have no physical manifestation but still relentlessly tortures the subject. To the person suffering from this “psychache,” the pain is just as potent and troubling as the ghost pain riddling the body of an amputee. They cannot point to the wound they feel, but they feel it intensely. In this context, suicide is not a moment of weakness, but rather a final attempt to take control of the pain, regardless of its origin. Understandably, Thelma and many people who have pondered his life want to name a single source of that pain. However, Shneidman's research indicates that a single event or a single person is rarely the cause of suicide. Gottlieb, his mother, or his sexuality ultimately falter as isolated reasons for his final actions.

Perhaps the most arresting insight into Toole's mind in regards to suicide comes from his own hand. In his papers at Tulane, there is an undated short story he wrote titled “Disillusionment.” It is an experimental piece, a fairly chaotic story with flashes of characters in New Orleans at different time periods, its earliest moment beginning in 1937, the year of Toole's birth. In the rough of this story, there are some gems. It opens with a boy, Samuel, looking for a home. We discover that his love died in a boat accident and, determined a coward for not saving her, he was driven from his town in shame. Searching for a place to lay his weary head, he comes to a house on the outskirts of the French Quarter, owned by a lonely woman. Samuel approaches the middle-aged homeowner, and Toole offers his most poetic description of New Orleans that he ever composed. At twilight in the Crescent City,

Unlike the absurd carnival of
Confederacy
, which also begins as day turns into night, here the narrator sees the city filled with the walking dead. And like Poe in “The Conqueror Worm,” Toole uses the theater metaphor, albeit far less emphatic, to approach the existential problem at the heart of the story. The woman realizes that life is “a parade, filled with all the characters in the world. Not one of them caring about the other. Even if you fell out of step it would keep moving.” In response to this dilemma, Samuel offers a solution. At first it seems these two characters of the world, trampled upon by the unstoppable parade, could take solace in each other. But Samuel has another intention. Once alone in his room, he slits his wrists. The description casts the moment of death as a passageway to serenity, where Samuel's lost love beckons him:

We will never know what Toole experienced in his final moments. Naturally his friends and family wondered if there was something more they could have done for him, if they could have somehow saved him. Cary Laird thought if he had stayed in New Orleans perhaps he could have helped his friend. David Kubach wondered if he should have paid another visit to Toole. And staring out the large windows of her home, looking over the land that her dear friend helped clear, Patricia Rickels wondered if they had just planned the book club meeting for another night, maybe he would have gotten out of his car and knocked on their door, and they could have diverted him from the path he ultimately took. But his friends also recognized with a mind as intense as his that there was little they could do. Perhaps that is what a small group of his confidants realized early on: all they could really do was listen. Toole chose to confide in a select few as he descended into his illness. Despite attempts by critics and scholars to find answers to the questions of Toole's demise, there are those who promised and kept his secrets. Sister Beatrice at Dominican, his artist friend Angela Gregory, and Tulane professor Huling Ussery, had no connections to his family or other friends, and Toole chose to open up to them. Even Ruth Lafranz Kathmann, the woman he dated at Tulane and Columbia, expressed regret over a single interview she once offered a reporter in 1981. She remarks, “What Ken and I shared was special, and it was between us.” These confidants carry his confessions in their hearts. But they keep them sacred, not out of selfishness, but out of respect, out of honor, out of love for their friend.

Whatever path he took to arrive on that road outside Biloxi, he had determined his own end, likely seeing no other way out. He had mired under the binds of filial duty. He had two failed novels tucked away in his house. In some ways he became what he must have feared most: a so-called scholar who lectured to undergraduates with nothing of note to his name, no legacy to leave behind, and an endless pursuit to keep
his parents afloat as they deteriorated into old age. He left New Orleans but seems to have been compelled to return. In the end, like Boethius trapped in a cell, Toole resolved that this earthly prison had just one escape. Fortuna had pushed him to the bottom of his existence, and there she held him down. But just as Boethius learns before his execution, Fortuna only holds physical bonds over a person. The soul is free. In answer to his own existential dilemma, Toole designed a solution and freed himself of his body.

Coincidentally, on the day of Toole's disappearance, a poet living in New Orleans going by the name Mallord sent Toole a book of self-published poems titled
Love Alone Finds Cold
. Toole must have left before he had a chance to read it. But perhaps his mother perused the pages as she waited for her son to call or as she tried to make sense of his end. One untitled poem reads

W
hile the weight of unknowing had been lifted from the Toole home, it was replaced by the terrifying silence of solitude. As the news of Toole's demise sent a shockwave through the lives of his friends and family, the closed doors of the Hampson Street house concealed two aging parents who suffered the wrenching heartache of their son's damnable death. One by one, his friends, students, and classmates received word, and the awkwardness of the death made it difficult for people to know how to respond. The obligatory sympathy cards must have come in the mail. But just as Thelma destroyed the suicide note, she also must have discarded such expressions of condolence. In the Toole Papers—a collection that holds everything from letters to financial statements—the absence of these initial reactions to his death creates an eerie silence, as if his end, and in part his life, could be edited somehow.

Thelma kept only one letter of condolence sent a few weeks after the suicide. His devoted student, Joan Trader Bowen, aimed to honor him. In 1969 she writes,

Bowen felt that she had come to know Toole “as a person, more than just a teacher.” She counted herself “fortunate to have been his student.” So impacted by his teaching, for decades she cherished her notes she took in his classes, which she would occasionally consult in developing her own lessons during her career as a high school English teacher in Alabama. Despite her best intentions in 1969, there was never a Toole scholarship established at Dominican.

The college did, however, hold a memorial service for him. Thelma served as the sole representative for the family. Her husband's physical and mental health had so declined that he rarely left the house. The students also dedicated a memorial page to Toole in their yearbook. Therein, he appears professorial in his academic robes at the 1968 graduation ceremony. In their tribute, the yearbook staff writes,

Once the belated eulogies were made, the pragmatic consequences of his absence had to be addressed. As the breadwinner in the home, Toole's death created momentary financial turbulence for his parents. Fortunately, he had a life insurance policy. And with that payment, Thelma invested in bonds, aiming to derive some interest income. By 1971 their financial affairs settled into a position comfortable enough that they decided to contribute fifty dollars to the Columbia University
capital campaign. In a reply letter addressed to John Toole, Columbia acknowledged the generosity of their charitable alumnus. Clearly, they were unaware their high honors graduate was dead.

Several years passed, during which his parents seemed to live a quiet existence in their home on Hampson Street. But inside the home, John Toole was suffering from his own health complications, both mental and physical. As such, Thelma tended to his needs, keeping him inside the house as much as possible. The shame she suffered from her son's suicide was enough; a senile husband need not add insult to injury. Harold Toole recalls his father, who was the brother of John Toole, one day going to the house on Hampson Street and demanding entry into the back room to see his ailing brother. By then the relationship between Thelma and the Tooles was deeply embittered for reasons that remain unclear other than a long-standing disdain for each other. Harold's father nearly broke down the door to find his brother diminished by the cruelty of dementia. “Near the end,” Harold Toole recalls, “he didn't even recognize anyone.” While his son was a flash of brilliance gone too soon, John Toole eroded slowly. On December 28, 1972, having lived a life that seemed a colossal disappointment to his wife, having suffered from an illness that estranged him from everyone he knew, and having buried his “Kenny boy,” John Toole died of a stroke and heart attack.