Butterfly in the Typewriter (39 page)

A few reviews maintained sympathy for the tragic end of the writer but were not ready to offer the book accolades that pervaded media discussion. Negative reviews tended to fault Toole for not following the rule of creating a dynamic main character. They argue that no one changes in the book. Such reviewers saw no hope in this world that Toole created and therefore despaired in the creation of it. And the most damning reviews cast doubt on the novel's ability to stand had the author not committed suicide. Such sharply critical responses mostly came from media venues with small, local readerships, not a national audience.

By and large reviewers acknowledged some faults of the novel. Granted, had Simon and Schuster published
Confederacy
it would have been a very different book. Toole made changes, but Thelma destroyed the “Gottlieb revisions.” She instructed LSU Press not to edit a word, “not even a preposition.” So it appears the version of
Confederacy
we have today is the first version, the one that Thelma deemed pure, even though Toole may have believed that the novel was getting better with those edits. There was another version of
Confederacy
in the making, but Thelma determined that anything to do with Gottlieb would taint the genius of her son. And while critics identified technical flaws in the novel, most reviewers resisted literary pretentiousness. They recognized that the joy to be garnered from the reading of the book might be as valuable a literary contribution as a political or social message.

But perhaps such issues stem from our awkward cultural relationship with comedy, especially when it strives to be high art. America has long seen comedy as a genre for the masses, unsophisticated and often adolescent. It is a sideshow to more serious endeavors, like tragedies or histories. But Toole did not see comedy as an afterthought. The humor in a story, ironies, and contradictions were emblematic of real life. David Evanier, fiction editor of the
Paris Review
, may have offered the most perceptive comment regarding the way to understand the humor of this novel when he wrote, “
A Confederacy of Dunces
transcends the suffering of life through laughter.” Evanier echoes literary critic, historicist, and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who, in analyzing Rabelais, recognizes that in the culture of carnival, the culture from which
Confederacy
springs, laughter is not a veiled cry for help or a reminder of tragedy, but rather the sound of victory.

Indeed, the triumph of Toole's novel seemed unstoppable. It was one of five books nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award in 1981. It made best-seller lists in the
New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, and the
Los Angeles Times
. Translated versions of the book were printed in nearly every European country. But the greatest recognition came when a select group of representatives from the publishing world gathered together at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Inside the same brick building that Toole had passed by every day during his first year at Columbia, the Pulitzer Board reviewed the submissions for fiction writing. After deliberations, the announcement came. In April of 1981 John Kennedy Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
A Confederacy of Dunces
. It was only the second time the board had awarded a posthumous prize and the first to a writer who was previously unknown. And to date
Confederacy
is the only novel published at a university press to be awarded a Pulitzer.

While reviewers despaired over some aesthetic issues, and some cynics suspected the story of Toole's death a grand hoax to boost sales, in winning the Pulitzer Prize he gained official recognition for the literary merit of his work. Thereafter, a tide of interest in finding out more about this author and his mother swelled from the media. Newspapers and journals ran exposés on Thelma Toole. She was invited to dinners and conferences. She was interviewed on
Canada A. M.
, a national television show broadcast from Toronto. And a few weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she received a request to appear on the
Tomorrow Show
with Tom Snyder in New York. While she had spent her youth dreaming of stardom on the stage and her adulthood preparing her students for performances, claiming only the edge of the spotlight for herself, in her final years Thelma was the star. She rose to the occasion. She was the keeper of her son's story, the hero of the tale. And as she took her place on her throne as the Queen Mother of the literati, people came to her doorstep to pay tribute, offering praise and tokens of gratitude for her accomplishment. She received them graciously.

However, when it came to gifts of flowers, she preferred silk ones. She hated to watch the colors fade, she said. She hated to watch them die.

S
itting in his NBC studio in April of 1981, Tom Snyder must have thought the interview with Thelma Toole would be a soft piece compared to his other interviews. Snyder was known for bringing Americans face to face with figures such as John Lennon, Charles Manson, and Iggy Pop. Sitting across from his guests, Snyder would smoke cigarettes as he asked hard-hitting questions. But how hard hitting could he get with a seventy-nine-year-old woman who used a walker and who had relentlessly fought to have her dead son's novel published? Joel Fletcher, who accompanied Thelma to New York, recalled that Snyder didn't know what to make of her. Thelma commanded a surprising presence in the interview. She told the story of her son's life, the book's publication, and she talked about her Irish lineage. Nearing the end of the interview, she gave her signature line that she used to conclude most of her public appearances. “I walk in the world for my son,” she said. “I'm humble because I was a vessel to bring a scholarly genius—he was a scholarly genius and a literary genius.” Snyder replied, “Well, I'll tell you something, his mom ain't too shabby either.” She looked back at Snyder. “I ain't something the cat dragged in, am I?” she said. “You sure ain't,” Snyder agreed.

In the great play of life, Thelma reached her pinnacle in her final act. She had her moment of fame in the national media. As reporters sought information on her son, they were also taken by Thelma's unique personality, characterized at times in unflattering terms. When Dalt Wonk did a two-part series on Toole, he ended it with a rather embarrassing,
although humorous, depiction of Thelma the socialite, being lifted by a crane onto a boat to meet the consul of Venezuela. And when
People
magazine ran an article by Mary Vespa, who quoted John Broussard calling Thelma a “megalomaniac” and suggesting that Toole “was getting back at Mrs. Toole in the book,” it created a dividing line between those who saw Thelma as more of a villain than a hero. Granted, many of Toole's friends in Lafayette never had a rosy impression of Thelma. After all, in 1964 Broussard had listened to his friend in his cups confess his awful situation living with his parents. And four years after that confession, Toole committed suicide. But many people were quick to come to Thelma's defense; several were her previous students. Nola Schneider wrote to
People,
declaring,

And as the public continued to see Thelma as both entertaining and overblown, her students felt compelled to show their appreciation for her instruction and guidance. Even Marion Toole Hosli, aware of the dreadful sentiments Thelma had expressed about the Toole family, wrote her a letter thanking her for the time she had spent with her as a young girl. After congratulating Thelma on her accomplishment in getting the book published, she writes,

Clearly Thelma touched the lives of many people. But now edging into her eighties she had a stage like she had never had before. The trumpets of her success blared, although she always gave credit to her son, the genius.

But as if publication and the Pulitzer were not enough vindication, in her triumph, her derision of Robert Gottlieb became vicious. In a 1981 interview she claimed that she never read the Gottlieb letters until her son had passed away, because, she said, “I never pried into his life.” And yet Nick Polites specifically recalled her tirades on Gottlieb after one of his letters had arrived. When asked if those letters would be made public she explained at the advice of her lawyer that she could not do anything with them without Gottlieb's permission, which was both true and convenient. Readers had no other sources to go by other than her side of the story. She claimed that the last letter Gottlieb had sent to Toole devastated her son with the line “It could be improved upon, but it wouldn't sell.” In fact, Gottlieb's last letter left the door open to Toole, even inviting him to submit another manuscript if he ever decided to work on another novel. But every hero needs a foe. And in this saga she unabashedly declared of Gottlieb, “He is the villain!” Gottlieb responded to Thelma's assertions by simply stating he was sorry for her loss, happy the book was published, but saw no connection between Toole's suicide and their correspondence, which ended years before he took his life. Still, Thelma continued her invective against him. In September of 1980, she made her most scathing attack on him in
Horizon Magazine
when she exclaimed, “He's a creature . . . a Jewish creature.... Not a man. . . . Not a human being.” Her words were reprinted in an article in the
New York Times
in 1981.

Granted, there was an undercurrent of anti-Semitic discourse surrounding the novel at the time. It was suggested, although not coming from Toole directly, that Gottlieb never accepted the novel on the basis of its representation of Jews, particularly Myrna Minkoff and the Levys, characters he felt did not work in the novel. While teaching at Hunter
College, Toole had witnessed the intense sensitivity toward anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. It would not be surprising if Toole felt the Jewish characters were misinterpreted by Gottlieb. Furthermore, in the early 1960s, many of the publishing houses in New York were privately owned by Jewish families. There remained, according to Michael Korda, who served as editor and editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, a slight sense of division between the houses founded by Jewish entrepreneurs and those without Jewish founders, although this seems to have colored competitiveness between houses more so than interactions with writers. Thelma harbored suspicions of a Jewish plot to suppress the genius gentile voice of her son. She responded with clearly anti-Semitic language. It may have been a moment of indiscretion on her part. But in a letter to the author of the article in
Horizon
, Thelma conveys her pleasure with the piece and requests a subscription to the magazine, thereby suggesting she was not misquoted, misrepresented, or the least bit remorseful.

While Gottlieb is a renowned editor, having guided into print works by Toni Morrison, John Cheever, and Ray Bradbury, he is also a human being. In Korda's remembrances of him, he appears as a brilliant and dedicated editor who cut through the clout of the editor's role and could see the greater vision of the work at hand. That doesn't mean he did not make mistakes or turn down authors who went on to have success elsewhere. But for all the criticism he offered writers, which is by definition part of his job, it is evident, especially in his letters to Toole, he recognized the emotional investment writers had in their work.

For the words Thelma repeatedly said, both her anti-Semitic sentiments and her outright claim that Gottlieb drove her son to suicide, he could have sued her for slander. But the fallout of litigation would only worsen the matter. Regardless of the result, Gottlieb would end up even more of a villain had he appeared to be abusing an elderly mother who had suffered the tragedy of her son's suicide. So Gottlieb left Thelma on her stage to gesture, to point, to bite her thumb at him—a man who had never met her son, had never officially rejected his manuscript, and who could be blamed only for seeing talent in a young writer whose work he felt needed refining.

Thelma had a clear answer to the question of her son's suicide, but when interviewers asked more pressing questions about his demise, she
usually steered the conversation back to her script, by way of some memory of his childhood. Eventually, the national media turned its head toward other topics, but New Orleans upheld her as a local celebrity. She was named Queen Mother of a Mardi Gras krewe in 1982, a high honor for a New Orleanian. Southeastern Louisiana University awarded her an honorary doctorate degree. Someone from NASA sent her a piece of a spacecraft. And she appeared all over the city in what became one-woman variety shows of interview, lecture, dramatic interpretations, and “musical highlights.”

During her talks, she always gave her “genius son” credit. And as a tribute to his creation, she performed wonderful renditions of his characters, from Irene Reilly to Burma Jones. Barely ambulatory, standing at her walker, her voice, facial expressions, and hands would come alive with the characters of
Confederacy
. She also reserved some of the spotlight for herself. She never failed to mention her training in the dramatic arts and her “culture” that she “gave freely” to her son. At most events in her honor, she would perform songs, from jazz numbers to Disney sing-a-longs, dedicating them to people close to her. Her voice, and at times the piano, was out of tune, and she seemed to have lost her sense of rhythm. Still, audience members were entertained, mostly by her vibrant spirit.