John Kennedy Toole
Encyclopedia
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana
, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces
. He also wrote The Neon Bible
. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he committed suicide at the age of 31.
Toole was born to a middle class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting. At 16 he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he later dismissed as "adolescent".
Toole received an academic scholarship to Tulane University
. After graduating from Tulane, he studied English at Columbia University
in New York while teaching simultaneously at Hunter College
. He also taught at various Louisiana colleges, and during his early career as an academician he was highly valued on the faculty party circuit for his rapier wit and impressionist skills. His studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the army to teach English to Spanish-speaking recruits in San Juan, Puerto Rico
. After receiving a promotion, he used his private office to begin writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which he finished at his parents' home after his discharge.
Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale
cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. Both of these experiences were later adapted into his fiction.
Toole submitted Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster
, where it reached noted editor Robert Gottlieb
. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., he shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of self-persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country. He stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi
to end his life by running a garden hose in from the exhaust of his car to the cabin. Some years later, his mother brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy
, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
.
Ducoing family arrived in Louisiana from France in the early 19th century, and the Tooles immigrated to America from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Toole's father worked as a car salesman, and his mother, forced to give up her teaching job when she married (as was the custom), gave private lessons in music, speech, and dramatic expression. Toole was known to friends and family as "Ken" until the final few months of his life, when he insisted on being called John. As a child, Toole had an intense affection for his black nursemaid Beulah Matthews, who cared for him when his parents were both working.
Toole's highly cultured mother was a controlling woman, especially with her son. His father was less involved and sometimes complained of his lack of influence in their child's upbringing. Despite this, he and his father bonded through a mutual interest in baseball and cars. Toole's mother chose the friends he could associate with, and felt his cousins on his father's side were too common for him to be around. Toole received high marks in elementary school, and from a young age expressed a desire to excel academically. He skipped ahead a grade, from first to second, after taking an IQ test at the age of six.
When Toole was ten, his mother gathered a group of child stage entertainers she named the Junior Variety Performers. The troupe, with Toole as its star, consisted of 50 children of varying skills and ages. It was well-received, and he also engaged in other entertainment ventures, such as playing the lead in three productions of the Children's Workshop Theatre of New Orleans, MCing
a radio show called Telekids, modeling for newspaper ads, and developing a solo show of comic impersonations entitled Great Lovers of the World.
Although an excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school (Alcée Fortier
High), to concentrate on his academic work. He wrote for the school newspaper Silver and Blue, worked on the yearbook The Tarpon, and won several essay contests on subjects such as the Louisiana Purchase
and the American Merchant Marine. He took up debating
, a skill his father had won the state championship in during high school. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organizations such as Kiwanis
and Rotary Clubs. Toole's father bought him an Oldsmobile
, in which Toole was delivering newspapers at the age of 13, even though the legal driving age was 15. In high school, Toole spent a lot of time at the home of classmate Larry McGee, and dated McGee's sister, Jane. Jane later said that Toole never wanted to go home and would purposefully spend almost all of his free time at the McGees'. With the McGees, Toole would engage in mischievous pranks and go on double dates with Larry and his girlfriend Buzz. The couples often spent their free time at the local pool, or cruising around in Toole's car.
As a teenager in 1954, Toole made his first trip out of Louisiana to Philadelphia, New York City
, and Washington, D.C.
on a field trip. He especially enjoyed New York and filled a cherished scrapbook with pictures from his visit (which included trips on the New York Subway System, an excursion on a boat in the New York Harbor, visits to the Statue of Liberty
, Chinatown
, Times Square
) and with the program from a performance of The Rockettes
he had seen.
Toole became the editor of the news section of the school newspaper, and maintained high marks throughout high school. He received many accolades, including winning a National Merit Scholarship, selection to the National Honor Society
, and being named the Most Intelligent Senior Boy by the student body. He was one of two New Orleanians voted outstanding citizen at the Pelican (now Louisiana) Boys State
convention and he was invited back to serve the following year as a counsellor. He took also took part in the Newman Club, a Catholic organization for teenagers, where he won an award for outstanding student in the group. He received a full scholarship to Tulane University
at 17.
During his senior year, Toole wrote The Neon Bible
, a short novel of Southern Gothic
Fiction that has been compared in style to Flannery O'Connor
, a favorite author of Toole's. The book's protagonist, a boy named David, had once lived with his family in a "little white house in town that had a real roof you could sleep under when it rained," before his father lost his job forcing them into a small shoddily built home. Set in 1940s Mississippi
, the backwoods Baptist community setting is similar to a location where Toole had once traveled to with a high school friend for a literary contest. The novel's sudden outburst of violence at the end has been described as incongruous with what has preceded it.
Toole later described the novel during correspondence with an editor, "In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway." It failed to attract interest from publishers and was not released until after Toole's death.
, and the Irish Channel
. Toole's classmates and family looked down on the French Quarter as being for tourists and the Irish Channel as being a place for low lifes, so Toole kept his trips there a secret. His closest friend was guitarist Don Stevens, nicknamed "Steve Cha-Cha", with whom he bonded over their shared love of Blues music and Beat poets. Stevens also had a side job pushing a hot tamale
cart around town, and on days when he was unavailable for work, Toole would fill in for him. According to Stevens' bandmate Sidney Snow, Toole loved eating the tamales. Toole later used these experiences as material for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, whose protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly pushes a hot dog cart around town, usually eating most of the profits. Also, like Reilly, Toole later worked at a family business that manufactured men's clothing, Haspel Brothers. He worked for J.B. Tonkel, who married one of the Haspel daughters. "Ken watched the Haspels' business dealings with great interest, absorbing and remembering their troubles and intrigues," and he later constructed the similar Levy Pants Company in Dunces, with Gus Levy and his wife becoming significant supporting characters in the novel.
In 1958, Toole graduated from Tulane with honors. He enrolled in Columbia University
in New York on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
to study English Literature. He took on a heavy workload so that he could earn his Masters in a single year. In his free time he dated Ruth Kathmann, another student from Tulane, who was studying journalism at Columbia. The couple would go dancing at the Roseland Ballroom
, as the $2.00 entrance fee allowed them to dance all night and suited their limited budget. Toole was noted to be a talented dancer. There is some question as to whether they were engaged, with friends claiming they were but Kathmann saying only that Toole asked her to marry him, but she said no. After he returned to New Orleans they rarely saw each other, and she married another man. Toole wrote his Masters essay on Elizabethan poet John Lyly
, which was made easier by the fact that he had also written his honors thesis at Tulane on Lyly.
Toole returned home in 1959 to spend a year as assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana
(now University of Louisiana at Lafayette). Joel L. Fletcher, a close friend, noted, "Ken has a real gift for mimicry and a refined sense of the absurd... The English Faculty at USL which is divided into several camps of war, both fear and court Ken because of his biting comic talent." This year is generally considered one of the happiest of his life. While at USL he rented a dilapidated apartment from an elderly and eccentric widow on Convent Street. Toole described the apartment in "Conradian
metaphor" to friends.
He was in constant demand and went to all the parties where it was said "he was encouraged and sometimes forced to perform, Ken would enter a room armed with quiver full of sharp stories and barbed one-liners. He would zing these out until his audience was weak with laughter, though he hadn't cracked a smile." Because he was saving for a return to Columbia to get his Ph.D., Toole was a notorious skinflint during his year at USL. His friends noticed this and forced him to pay for and throw a party at his home. The party was a success and generally considered the best party thrown that year. In contrast to this image of an outgoing, lively young man, when Toole's mother came to visit, friends noticed that he became sullen and withdrawn. His friend Pat Rickels commented that Thelma "was absolutely convinced that he was without flaw and that all the hopes of the world lay in him. It was an extreme form of maternalism, where all your pride and all your hopes are in one person. He had to grow up with that burden. She was a very ostentatious, shrill, loud-voiced, bossy, bragging woman."
It was at USL that Toole met Bob Byrne, an eccentric English professor who is considered one of the primary inspirations for Ignatius J. Reilly. Byrne specialized in the medieval period, and he and Toole frequently discussed the philosopher Boethius and the wheel of Fortuna
, as described in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
. Boethius was the favorite philosopher of Ignatius J. Reilly, who frequently referred to Fortuna and Consolation of Philosophy. Like Ignatius, Byrne was a self-admitted devoted slob who played the lute, and also wore a deerstalker
hunting cap, which Toole frequently chided him about.
When he wasn't studying or on the faculty party circuit, Toole frequented country bars and drank beer. He would usually listen to singer Frances Faye
, whom he had once heard perform in New York. On several occasions while listening to her music with friends he allegorically remarked, "Is Frances Faye God?" He was also an avid Marilyn Monroe
fan who was devastated by her suicide and once described his interest in her as having "reached the stage of obsession".
In May 1960, Toole accepted a three-year fellowship to study for a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at the University of Washington at Seattle. However, when he was offered a teaching position at Hunter College
in New York, which suited his desire to study at Columbia, he chose to go there instead. At 22, he became the youngest professor in Hunter's history. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia
, he became unhappy with his Ph.D. However, he wrote to Fletcher that he still liked Hunter, "principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, 'liberal' girl students are continuously amusing." Fletcher surmised that from these girls the character of Myrna Minkoff from Dunces was born. Toole, although generally only a "Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer", had some apprehension about the anti-Catholic intellectualism of some of his students, and about them seeming ever watchful for a cause they could throw their liberal zeal behind. "Every time the elevator door opens at Hunter, you are confronted by 20 pairs of burning eyes, 20 sets of bangs and everyone waiting for someone to push a Negro" he is reported to have said. When he first arrived back in New York Toole dated Emilie Dietrich Griffin, another Louisiana transplant, with whom he had worked on the Hullabaloo staff, and later he dated another Louisianan Clayelle Dalferes whom he had learned of through Fletcher. The couple loved the cinema and movie-going was a constant staple of their dates. Both women said their relationships with Toole never progressed beyond the level of a good night kiss.
, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. He rose quickly in the military ranks. In under a year, he attained to the rank of Sergeant, and received numerous awards and citations. While serving in Puerto Rico, he frequently traveled throughout the Caribbean, either alone or with members of his company. Toole however, began to dread the frustrations of military life and the oppressive heat of Puerto Rico. He described his work there in a letter to a friend:
He also engaged in one of the favorite activities of military personnel on the island: alcohol consumption. Both the soldiers and the instructors at the base drank excessively, as alcohol was cheap and plentiful. Toole remarked in another letter to Fletcher, "We are all rotting here at the moment. The decreased draft has meant no trainees since June...the inactivity here, coupled with the remnants of a rainy and enervating summer has (have?) plunged the English instructors into an abyss of drinking and inertia. Occasionally someone will struggle off to the beach or to San Juan, but the maxim here remains, "It's too hot."" When Emilie Griffin paid Toole a visit in December of 1961 she was dismayed at what she saw. Toole was notably depressed and while dining at a local hotel she noted that "the windows on all sides of our table were filled with perfect rainbows. Ken was sitting in a pocket of darkness surrounded by these brilliant colored arches and he never looked at them." Adding to Toole's dismay, his class ring from Tulane went missing and he searched the entire base for it, questioning everyone, until concluding that it had been stolen. Disgusted, he wrote home, "It's a wonder I haven't been stabbed yet or paralyzed by intestinal diseases on this insane little geographical mountain top protruding from the Caribbean. However, under any circumstances the loss of the ring affects me deeply."
In the early portion of Toole's military career one of his primary motivations for advancement was to acquire a private office. Privacy was a significant luxury on the island with some of the men renting rooms in nearby hotels so they could have some solitude. Toole's army buddy David Kubach, was also an aspiring writer and he lent him a green Swedish-made Halda typewriter for use in his office. The barracks consisted solely of college educated English professors, which gave it a different makeup from usual army companies. In contrast to almost all other army barracks where gays kept their sexual orientation a secret, there was an openly gay contingent which flaunted their homosexuality. The gay men reserved a portion of the barracks for themselves and as they did not proposition any of the straight instructors, they were left alone. However, this particular group of gay men drank significantly more than the rest of the group and eventually began to exhibit a loud, rowdy, and vulgar brand of behavior that made the straight men uncomfortable. Toole's response was to ignore their behavior and it lost him the respect of some of the men in the barracks. The problem came to a head when a gay instructor attempted suicide by overdosing on APC (aspirin, phenacetin
, and caffeine) tablets after being spurned by another soldier. When Toole found the man he waited a half hour to call for help, hoping he would awaken on his own. His friend Kubach stated that this was because it would look bad for the soldier and that he would most likely get himself court martialed for a suicide attempt. Some of his fellow soldiers were livid and held a meeting deciding whether to report Toole's negligence. Ultimately, they did not report his behavior and the army never filed any charges but his relationships with many of the men were irrevocably changed.
After this incident, Toole became withdrawn and began spending more and more time in his office typing what would eventually become his master work, A Confederacy of Dunces. It was not a secret that Toole was writing a book. Late at night, his fellow soldiers could often hear the sound of the typewriter keys. Although he was secretive about the novel among the other men, Toole showed the early portions of it to Kubach who gave him positive feedback. Around this time, Kubach was transferred and took his typewriter with him, so Toole was forced to buy his own. He later commented that he began to "talk and act like Ignatius" during this period as he became more and more immersed in the creation of the book. His letter home to his parents of April 10, 1963 shows these similarities:
, a Catholic all female school. He initially liked the position as it allowed him to teach for only 10.5 hours a week and afforded him the same leisure time he had during his less active periods in the service. The nuns on the faculty were enamored with Toole from the start, considering him well mannered, genteel, and charming. He used his free time to work on his novel, and to spend some time with his musician friend Sidney Snow at Snow's home in the Irish Channel and at various night clubs where he would watch Snow and his bandmates perform, among other things, covers of songs by The Beatles
. The November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy
caused Toole to fall into severe depression. He stopped writing and drank heavily. In February 1964 he resumed writing, at which point he added an ending and sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster
.
Dunces has been described as a "grand comic fugue" and is considered one of the seminal works of twentieth century Southern literature. It has received praise for its accurate use of various New Orleans dialects, including the Yat dialect. It concerns protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a slothful, obese, self-styled philosopher who lives with his mother. After an early financial setback for the Reilly family, caused by Ignatius, he is forced by his mother to seek employment in a variety of menial jobs to help the household financially, for which he is continually resentful of her. He subsequently takes revenge on several businesses for perceived slights. He incites black workers to insurrection at Levy Pants Company, eats more hot dogs than he sells, and attempts to break up a strip club. Along the way he runs into a divergent cast of characters, including Myrna Minkoff, a rebellious socialist intellectual with whom he conducts an ongoing literary correspondence. Although Reilly is partially modeled after Toole's eccentric friend Bob Byrne, Byrne and others have stated that much of Reilly is actually based on Toole himself:
The book eventually reached senior editor Robert Gottlieb
, who had talked the then-unknown Joseph Heller
into completing the classic comic novel Catch 22. They began a two-year correspondence and dialogue over the novel which would ultimately result in bitter disappointment on both sides. While Gottlieb felt Toole was undoubtedly talented, he was unhappy with the book in its original form. He felt that it had one basic flaw which he expressed to Toole in an early letter:
Initially, although Toole was disappointed that the novel could not be published as is, he was exuberant that a major publisher was interested in it. He entered his second year of teaching at Dominican as one of the favorite new professors on staff. Students marveled at his wit, and Toole would make entire classes burst into laughter while hardly showing expression. He never retold a story or joke, and had many repeat students. Shortly before Christmas break in 1964, Toole received a letter from Gottlieb. In it Gottlieb remarked that he had shown the novel to Candida Donadio, a literary agent whose clients included Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon
. Gottlieb told Toole they felt he was "... wildly funny often, funnier than almost anyone around". Also they liked the same portions and characters of the book and disliked the same parts as well. Gottlieb gave a list of things he did not like concluding with:
Later on in the letter, Gottlieb stated that he still had faith in Toole as a writer and that he wished to hold onto the manuscript in case he or Toole would be able to see a way around his objections. Toole decided that it would be best for Gottlieb to return the manuscript, saying "Aside from a few deletions, I don't think I could really do much to the book now—and of course even with revisions you might not be satisfied." Toole made a trip to New York to see Gottlieb in person; however, he was out of town and Toole came back disappointed. He felt that he had embarrassed himself by giving a rambling, uncomfortable speech explaining his situation to one of Gottlieb's office staff. He returned home having left a note for Gottlieb to call him, and they later talked for an hour on the phone. In this conversation Gottlieb re-iterated that he would not accept the novel without further revision. He suggested that Toole move on to writing something else, an idea which Toole ultimately rejected.
In a long, partially autobiographical letter he sent to Gottlieb in March 1965, Toole explained that he could not give up on the book since he wrote the novel largely from personal observation and because the characters were based on real people he had seen in his life.
Gottlieb wrote him an encouraging letter, in which he stated again that he felt Toole was very talented (even more so than himself) and that if Toole were to re-submit the manuscript he would continue to "read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me. What more can I say?" In early 1966, Toole wrote Gottlieb one final letter, which has never been located. Gottlieb wrote him back on January 17, 1966, concluding their correspondence with a letter where he re-iterated his feelings on the book and stated that he wanted to read it again when Toole created another revision.
's "The Fall of the House of Usher
", but he found little peace at home. Toole's mother persuaded him to take Dunces to Hodding Carter Jr., who was well known as a reporter and publisher for the Delta Democrat Times
in Greenville, Mississippi
, and was spending a semester teaching at Tulane. Carter showed little interest in the book, but complimented him on it. The face-to-face rejection Carter dealt Toole drove him further into despair and he became angry with his mother for causing him further embarrassment.
Except for a few trips by car to Madison, Wisconsin
to see army pal David Kubach, Toole spent most of the last three years of his life at home only leaving to go to Dominican. In the winter of 1967, Kubach, who had came down to visit Toole, noticed an increased sense of paranoia on Toole's part; once when driving around New Orleans, Toole became convinced they were being followed and attempted to lose the car. The family moved to a larger rental house on Hampson Street, and Toole continued teaching, with his students noticing that his wit had become more acerbic. He continued to drink heavily, and gained a great deal of weight, causing him to have to purchase an entire new wardrobe. Toole began having frequent and intense headaches, and as aspirin was no help, he saw a doctor. The doctor's treatment was also ineffective, and he suggested Toole see a neurologist, an idea which Toole rejected.
Toole tried to maintain a sense of normalcy and enrolled in Tulane in the fall of 1968 with the hopes of acquiring a Ph.D. He took a course studying Theodore Dreiser
, on whom he had lectured while at Hunter, and was particularly interested in Dreiser's close relationship with his mother and his anti-Catholic beliefs. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 added to his feelings of grief and heightened his paranoia. Several of Toole's longtime friends noticed he had an increasing sense of feelings of personal persecution. Toole went to see his friend Bob Byrne at his home in August 1968, where he again expressed sadness and humiliation that his book would not be published. Toole told Byrne that people were passing his home late in the night and honking their car horns at him, that students whispered about him behind his back, and that people were plotting against him. Byrne had a talk with him, which he felt, for the time being, calmed him down.
In the months before his suicide, Toole, who was usually extremely well groomed, "began to appear in public unshaved and uncombed, wearing unpolished shoes and wrinkled clothes, to the amazement of his friends and students in New Orleans." He also began to exhibit signs of paranoia, including telling friends that a woman who he erroneously thought had worked for Simon & Schuster was plotting to steal his book so that her husband, the novelist George Deaux, could publish it.
Toole became increasingly erratic during his lectures at Dominican, resulting in frequent student complaints, and was given to rants against church and state. Toward the end of the 1968 fall semester, he was forced to take a leave of absence and stopped attending classes at Tulane, resulting in him receiving a grade of incomplete. The Tooles spent Christmas of 1968 in disarray with Toole's father in an increasing state of dementia, and Toole searching the home for electronic mind-reading devices.
When Toole was unable to resume his position at Dominican in January, the school had to hire another professor. This greatly upset his mother and on January 19, 1969 they had a horrible final argument. He stopped by the house the next day to pick up some things and spoke only to his father, as Thelma was out at the grocery store. He left home for the final time and withdrew $1500 from his saving account. After a week she called the police, but without any evidence to his whereabouts, they took a report and waited for him to surface. Thelma became convinced that Toole's friends the Rickels knew where he was and called them repeatedly, even though they denied knowing where he had gone.
Items found in Toole's car show that he drove to California where he visited the Hearst family mansion
and then to Milledgeville, Georgia
. Here he most likely attempted to visit Andalusia, the home of deceased writer Flannery O'Connor, although her house was not open to the public. This was succeeded by a drive toward New Orleans. It was during this trip that he stopped outside Biloxi, Mississippi
, and committed suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car on March 26, 1969. His car and person were immaculately clean, and the police officers who found him reported that his face showed no signs of distress. An envelope discovered in the car was marked "to my parents". The suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother, who later gave varying vague accounts of its details. In one instance she said it expressed his "concerned feeling for her" and later she told a Times-Picayune interviewer that the letter was "bizarre and preposterous. Violent. Ill-fated. Ill-fated. Nothing. Insane ravings." He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery
in New Orleans. A few years earlier, Toole had driven his army buddy David Kubach to the exact spot where he would later commit suicide. As the location was inconspicuous, Kubach did not understand why Toole had taken him there. He left his parents a two thousand dollar life insurance policy, several thousand dollars in savings, and his car. Toole's funeral service was private and only attended by his parents and his childhood nursemaid Beulah Matthews. The students and faculty at Dominican College were grief-stricken over Toole's death, and the school held a memorial service for him in the college courtyard. The head of Dominican gave a brief eulogy, however as the institution was Catholic, his suicide was never mentioned.
was becoming a faculty member at Loyola University New Orleans
. Thelma began a campaign of phone calls and letters to Percy to get him to read the manuscript. He even began complaining to his wife about a peculiar old woman's attempts to contact him. With time running out on his term as professor, Thelma pushed her way into his office and demanded he read the manuscript. Initially hesitant, Percy agreed to read the book to stop her badgering. He admitted to hoping it would be so bad that he could discard it after reading a few pages. Ultimately, he loved the book, commenting in disbelief:
Despite Percy's great admiration for the book the road to publication was still difficult. It took over three more years, as he attempted to get several parties interested in it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published by Louisiana State University Press
in 1980, and Percy provided the foreword. At his recommendation, Toole's first draft of the book was published with minimal copy-editing, and no significant revisions. The first printing was only 2,500 copies, and a number of these were sent to Scott Kramer, an executive at 20th Century Fox
, to pitch around Hollywood, but the book initially generated little interest. However, the novel attracted much attention in the literary world. A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
. The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies, in 18 languages.
Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989. It was adapted into a feature film
in 1995, directed by Terence Davies, that was a critical and commercial failure.
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic, and later a...
. He also wrote The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible is John Kennedy Toole's first novel, written at the age of 16. Its main appeal is as an early look at the writer who would later write A Confederacy of Dunces....
. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected during his lifetime. After suffering from paranoia and depression due in part to these failures, he committed suicide at the age of 31.
Toole was born to a middle class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting. At 16 he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he later dismissed as "adolescent".
Toole received an academic scholarship to Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
. After graduating from Tulane, he studied English at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York while teaching simultaneously at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
. He also taught at various Louisiana colleges, and during his early career as an academician he was highly valued on the faculty party circuit for his rapier wit and impressionist skills. His studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the army to teach English to Spanish-speaking recruits in San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan , officially Municipio de la Ciudad Capital San Juan Bautista , is the capital and most populous municipality in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 395,326 making it the 46th-largest city under the jurisdiction of...
. After receiving a promotion, he used his private office to begin writing A Confederacy of Dunces, which he finished at his parents' home after his discharge.
Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale
Tamale
A tamale — or more correctly tamal — is a traditional Latin American dish made of masa , which is steamed or boiled in a leaf wrapper. The wrapping is discarded before eating...
cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. Both of these experiences were later adapted into his fiction.
Toole submitted Dunces to publisher Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
, where it reached noted editor Robert Gottlieb
Robert Gottlieb
Robert Adams Gottlieb , is an American writer and editor. From 1987 to 1992 he was the editor of The New Yorker.-Personal:Robert Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan...
. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. Despite several revisions, Gottlieb remained unsatisfied, and after the book was rejected by another literary figure, Hodding Carter Jr., he shelved the novel. Suffering from depression and feelings of self-persecution, Toole left home on a journey around the country. He stopped in Biloxi, Mississippi
Biloxi, Mississippi
Biloxi is a city in Harrison County, Mississippi, in the United States. The 2010 census recorded the population as 44,054. Along with Gulfport, Biloxi is a county seat of Harrison County....
to end his life by running a garden hose in from the exhaust of his car to the cabin. Some years later, his mother brought the manuscript of Dunces to the attention of novelist Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
, who ushered the book into print. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
.
Early life
John Kennedy Toole was born to John Dewey Toole Jr. and Thelma Ducoing Toole. Kennedy was the name of Thelma's grandmother. The first of the CreoleLouisiana Creole people
Louisiana Creole people refers to those who are descended from the colonial settlers in Louisiana, especially those of French and Spanish descent. The term was first used during colonial times by the settlers to refer to those who were born in the colony, as opposed to those born in the Old World...
Ducoing family arrived in Louisiana from France in the early 19th century, and the Tooles immigrated to America from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Toole's father worked as a car salesman, and his mother, forced to give up her teaching job when she married (as was the custom), gave private lessons in music, speech, and dramatic expression. Toole was known to friends and family as "Ken" until the final few months of his life, when he insisted on being called John. As a child, Toole had an intense affection for his black nursemaid Beulah Matthews, who cared for him when his parents were both working.
Toole's highly cultured mother was a controlling woman, especially with her son. His father was less involved and sometimes complained of his lack of influence in their child's upbringing. Despite this, he and his father bonded through a mutual interest in baseball and cars. Toole's mother chose the friends he could associate with, and felt his cousins on his father's side were too common for him to be around. Toole received high marks in elementary school, and from a young age expressed a desire to excel academically. He skipped ahead a grade, from first to second, after taking an IQ test at the age of six.
When Toole was ten, his mother gathered a group of child stage entertainers she named the Junior Variety Performers. The troupe, with Toole as its star, consisted of 50 children of varying skills and ages. It was well-received, and he also engaged in other entertainment ventures, such as playing the lead in three productions of the Children's Workshop Theatre of New Orleans, MCing
Master of Ceremonies
A Master of Ceremonies , or compere, is the host of a staged event or similar performance.An MC usually presents performers, speaks to the audience, and generally keeps the event moving....
a radio show called Telekids, modeling for newspaper ads, and developing a solo show of comic impersonations entitled Great Lovers of the World.
Although an excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school (Alcée Fortier
Alcée Fortier
Alcée Fortier was a renowned Professor of Romance Languages at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the late 19th and early 20th century, he published numerous works on language, literature, Louisiana history and folklore, Louisiana Créole languages, and personal reminiscence. His perspective...
High), to concentrate on his academic work. He wrote for the school newspaper Silver and Blue, worked on the yearbook The Tarpon, and won several essay contests on subjects such as the Louisiana Purchase
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of America of of France's claim to the territory of Louisiana in 1803. The U.S...
and the American Merchant Marine. He took up debating
Debate
Debate or debating is a method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion...
, a skill his father had won the state championship in during high school. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organizations such as Kiwanis
Kiwanis
Kiwanis International is an international, coeducational service club founded in 1915. It is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Current membership is 240,000 members in 7,700 clubs in 80 nations...
and Rotary Clubs. Toole's father bought him an Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile
Oldsmobile was a brand of American automobile produced for most of its existence by General Motors. It was founded by Ransom E. Olds in 1897. In its 107-year history, it produced 35.2 million cars, including at least 14 million built at its Lansing, Michigan factory...
, in which Toole was delivering newspapers at the age of 13, even though the legal driving age was 15. In high school, Toole spent a lot of time at the home of classmate Larry McGee, and dated McGee's sister, Jane. Jane later said that Toole never wanted to go home and would purposefully spend almost all of his free time at the McGees'. With the McGees, Toole would engage in mischievous pranks and go on double dates with Larry and his girlfriend Buzz. The couples often spent their free time at the local pool, or cruising around in Toole's car.
As a teenager in 1954, Toole made his first trip out of Louisiana to Philadelphia, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
on a field trip. He especially enjoyed New York and filled a cherished scrapbook with pictures from his visit (which included trips on the New York Subway System, an excursion on a boat in the New York Harbor, visits to the Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886...
, Chinatown
Chinatown, Manhattan
Manhattan's Chinatown , home to one of the highest concentrations of Chinese people in the Western hemisphere, is located in the borough of Manhattan in New York City...
, Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
) and with the program from a performance of The Rockettes
The Rockettes
The Rockettes are a precision dance company performing out of the Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, New York City. During the Christmas season, the Rockettes have performed five shows a day, seven days a week, for 77 years...
he had seen.
Toole became the editor of the news section of the school newspaper, and maintained high marks throughout high school. He received many accolades, including winning a National Merit Scholarship, selection to the National Honor Society
National Honor Society
The National Honor Society is a recognition program for high school students in grades 10-12 in the United States and in several other countries...
, and being named the Most Intelligent Senior Boy by the student body. He was one of two New Orleanians voted outstanding citizen at the Pelican (now Louisiana) Boys State
Boys/Girls State
Boys State and Girls State are summer leadership and citizenship programs sponsored by the American Legion and the American Legion Auxiliary for high school students between their junior and senior years. Boys and Girls State programs both began in 1937 and are held in each of the U.S. states ,...
convention and he was invited back to serve the following year as a counsellor. He took also took part in the Newman Club, a Catholic organization for teenagers, where he won an award for outstanding student in the group. He received a full scholarship to Tulane University
Tulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
at 17.
During his senior year, Toole wrote The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible
The Neon Bible is John Kennedy Toole's first novel, written at the age of 16. Its main appeal is as an early look at the writer who would later write A Confederacy of Dunces....
, a short novel of Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. It resembles its parent genre in that it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot...
Fiction that has been compared in style to Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, a favorite author of Toole's. The book's protagonist, a boy named David, had once lived with his family in a "little white house in town that had a real roof you could sleep under when it rained," before his father lost his job forcing them into a small shoddily built home. Set in 1940s Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, the backwoods Baptist community setting is similar to a location where Toole had once traveled to with a high school friend for a literary contest. The novel's sudden outburst of violence at the end has been described as incongruous with what has preceded it.
Toole later described the novel during correspondence with an editor, "In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway." It failed to attract interest from publishers and was not released until after Toole's death.
College studies and professorships
In high school Toole, as editor of the school newspaper, had written a section of gossip and wit under a pseudonym entitled Fish Tales, and while at Tulane he worked on the college newspaper, the Hullabaloo, writing articles, reviewing books, and drawing cartoons. The cartoons were noted for their subtlety and sophistication. At Tulane he first majored in engineering on the recommendation of his father; however, after a few weeks, he changed his major to English, stating "I'm losing my culture" to his mother in explanation. Around this time, Toole began hanging around a local blues band which performed at area high schools and also around the French QuarterFrench Quarter
The French Quarter, also known as Vieux Carré, is the oldest neighborhood in the city of New Orleans. When New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the city was originally centered on the French Quarter, or the Vieux Carré as it was known then...
, and the Irish Channel
Irish Channel, New Orleans
Irish Channel is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Central City/Garden District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: Magazine Street to the north, 1st Street to the east, the Mississippi River to the south and Toledano to the...
. Toole's classmates and family looked down on the French Quarter as being for tourists and the Irish Channel as being a place for low lifes, so Toole kept his trips there a secret. His closest friend was guitarist Don Stevens, nicknamed "Steve Cha-Cha", with whom he bonded over their shared love of Blues music and Beat poets. Stevens also had a side job pushing a hot tamale
Tamale
A tamale — or more correctly tamal — is a traditional Latin American dish made of masa , which is steamed or boiled in a leaf wrapper. The wrapping is discarded before eating...
cart around town, and on days when he was unavailable for work, Toole would fill in for him. According to Stevens' bandmate Sidney Snow, Toole loved eating the tamales. Toole later used these experiences as material for his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, whose protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly pushes a hot dog cart around town, usually eating most of the profits. Also, like Reilly, Toole later worked at a family business that manufactured men's clothing, Haspel Brothers. He worked for J.B. Tonkel, who married one of the Haspel daughters. "Ken watched the Haspels' business dealings with great interest, absorbing and remembering their troubles and intrigues," and he later constructed the similar Levy Pants Company in Dunces, with Gus Levy and his wife becoming significant supporting characters in the novel.
In 1958, Toole graduated from Tulane with honors. He enrolled in Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in New York on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is a private non-profit foundation based in Princeton, New Jersey. It administers programs that support leadership development and build organizational capacity in education. Its current signature program is the...
to study English Literature. He took on a heavy workload so that he could earn his Masters in a single year. In his free time he dated Ruth Kathmann, another student from Tulane, who was studying journalism at Columbia. The couple would go dancing at the Roseland Ballroom
Roseland Ballroom
The Roseland Ballroom is a multi-purpose hall, in a converted ice skating rink, with a colorful ballroom dancing pedigree, in New York City's theatre district, on West 52nd Street....
, as the $2.00 entrance fee allowed them to dance all night and suited their limited budget. Toole was noted to be a talented dancer. There is some question as to whether they were engaged, with friends claiming they were but Kathmann saying only that Toole asked her to marry him, but she said no. After he returned to New Orleans they rarely saw each other, and she married another man. Toole wrote his Masters essay on Elizabethan poet John Lyly
John Lyly
John Lyly was an English writer, best known for his books Euphues,The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England. Lyly's linguistic style, originating in his first books, is known as Euphuism.-Biography:John Lyly was born in Kent, England, in 1553/1554...
, which was made easier by the fact that he had also written his honors thesis at Tulane on Lyly.
Toole returned home in 1959 to spend a year as assistant professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, or UL Lafayette, is a coeducational, public research university located in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Acadiana...
(now University of Louisiana at Lafayette). Joel L. Fletcher, a close friend, noted, "Ken has a real gift for mimicry and a refined sense of the absurd... The English Faculty at USL which is divided into several camps of war, both fear and court Ken because of his biting comic talent." This year is generally considered one of the happiest of his life. While at USL he rented a dilapidated apartment from an elderly and eccentric widow on Convent Street. Toole described the apartment in "Conradian
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
metaphor" to friends.
He was in constant demand and went to all the parties where it was said "he was encouraged and sometimes forced to perform, Ken would enter a room armed with quiver full of sharp stories and barbed one-liners. He would zing these out until his audience was weak with laughter, though he hadn't cracked a smile." Because he was saving for a return to Columbia to get his Ph.D., Toole was a notorious skinflint during his year at USL. His friends noticed this and forced him to pay for and throw a party at his home. The party was a success and generally considered the best party thrown that year. In contrast to this image of an outgoing, lively young man, when Toole's mother came to visit, friends noticed that he became sullen and withdrawn. His friend Pat Rickels commented that Thelma "was absolutely convinced that he was without flaw and that all the hopes of the world lay in him. It was an extreme form of maternalism, where all your pride and all your hopes are in one person. He had to grow up with that burden. She was a very ostentatious, shrill, loud-voiced, bossy, bragging woman."
It was at USL that Toole met Bob Byrne, an eccentric English professor who is considered one of the primary inspirations for Ignatius J. Reilly. Byrne specialized in the medieval period, and he and Toole frequently discussed the philosopher Boethius and the wheel of Fortuna
Fortuna
Fortuna can mean:*Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck -Geographical:*19 Fortuna, asteroid*Fortuna, California, town located on the north coast of California*Fortuna, United States Virgin Islands...
, as described in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
Consolation of Philosophy
Consolation of Philosophy is a philosophical work by Boethius, written around the year 524. It has been described as the single most important and influential work in the West on Medieval and early Renaissance Christianity, and is also the last great Western work that can be called Classical.-...
. Boethius was the favorite philosopher of Ignatius J. Reilly, who frequently referred to Fortuna and Consolation of Philosophy. Like Ignatius, Byrne was a self-admitted devoted slob who played the lute, and also wore a deerstalker
Deerstalker
A deerstalker is a type of hat that is typically worn in rural areas, often for hunting, especially deer stalking. Because of the hat's popular association with Sherlock Holmes, it is also a stereotypical hat of a detective.-Construction:...
hunting cap, which Toole frequently chided him about.
When he wasn't studying or on the faculty party circuit, Toole frequented country bars and drank beer. He would usually listen to singer Frances Faye
Frances Faye
Frances Faye was an American cabaret and show tune singer and pianist. She was born to a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City. She was a second cousin of actor Danny Kaye.-Career:...
, whom he had once heard perform in New York. On several occasions while listening to her music with friends he allegorically remarked, "Is Frances Faye God?" He was also an avid Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
fan who was devastated by her suicide and once described his interest in her as having "reached the stage of obsession".
In May 1960, Toole accepted a three-year fellowship to study for a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at the University of Washington at Seattle. However, when he was offered a teaching position at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
in New York, which suited his desire to study at Columbia, he chose to go there instead. At 22, he became the youngest professor in Hunter's history. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, he became unhappy with his Ph.D. However, he wrote to Fletcher that he still liked Hunter, "principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, 'liberal' girl students are continuously amusing." Fletcher surmised that from these girls the character of Myrna Minkoff from Dunces was born. Toole, although generally only a "Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer", had some apprehension about the anti-Catholic intellectualism of some of his students, and about them seeming ever watchful for a cause they could throw their liberal zeal behind. "Every time the elevator door opens at Hunter, you are confronted by 20 pairs of burning eyes, 20 sets of bangs and everyone waiting for someone to push a Negro" he is reported to have said. When he first arrived back in New York Toole dated Emilie Dietrich Griffin, another Louisiana transplant, with whom he had worked on the Hullabaloo staff, and later he dated another Louisianan Clayelle Dalferes whom he had learned of through Fletcher. The couple loved the cinema and movie-going was a constant staple of their dates. Both women said their relationships with Toole never progressed beyond the level of a good night kiss.
Military service
Toole's studies were interrupted by his being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961. Toole served two years in Puerto RicoPuerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
, teaching English to Spanish-speaking recruits. He rose quickly in the military ranks. In under a year, he attained to the rank of Sergeant, and received numerous awards and citations. While serving in Puerto Rico, he frequently traveled throughout the Caribbean, either alone or with members of his company. Toole however, began to dread the frustrations of military life and the oppressive heat of Puerto Rico. He described his work there in a letter to a friend:
He also engaged in one of the favorite activities of military personnel on the island: alcohol consumption. Both the soldiers and the instructors at the base drank excessively, as alcohol was cheap and plentiful. Toole remarked in another letter to Fletcher, "We are all rotting here at the moment. The decreased draft has meant no trainees since June...the inactivity here, coupled with the remnants of a rainy and enervating summer has (have?) plunged the English instructors into an abyss of drinking and inertia. Occasionally someone will struggle off to the beach or to San Juan, but the maxim here remains, "It's too hot."" When Emilie Griffin paid Toole a visit in December of 1961 she was dismayed at what she saw. Toole was notably depressed and while dining at a local hotel she noted that "the windows on all sides of our table were filled with perfect rainbows. Ken was sitting in a pocket of darkness surrounded by these brilliant colored arches and he never looked at them." Adding to Toole's dismay, his class ring from Tulane went missing and he searched the entire base for it, questioning everyone, until concluding that it had been stolen. Disgusted, he wrote home, "It's a wonder I haven't been stabbed yet or paralyzed by intestinal diseases on this insane little geographical mountain top protruding from the Caribbean. However, under any circumstances the loss of the ring affects me deeply."
In the early portion of Toole's military career one of his primary motivations for advancement was to acquire a private office. Privacy was a significant luxury on the island with some of the men renting rooms in nearby hotels so they could have some solitude. Toole's army buddy David Kubach, was also an aspiring writer and he lent him a green Swedish-made Halda typewriter for use in his office. The barracks consisted solely of college educated English professors, which gave it a different makeup from usual army companies. In contrast to almost all other army barracks where gays kept their sexual orientation a secret, there was an openly gay contingent which flaunted their homosexuality. The gay men reserved a portion of the barracks for themselves and as they did not proposition any of the straight instructors, they were left alone. However, this particular group of gay men drank significantly more than the rest of the group and eventually began to exhibit a loud, rowdy, and vulgar brand of behavior that made the straight men uncomfortable. Toole's response was to ignore their behavior and it lost him the respect of some of the men in the barracks. The problem came to a head when a gay instructor attempted suicide by overdosing on APC (aspirin, phenacetin
Phenacetin
Phenacetin is an analgesic, once widely used; its use has declined because of its adverse effects.-History:Phenacetin was introduced in 1887, and was used principally as an analgesic, and was one of the first synthetic fever reducers to go on the market...
, and caffeine) tablets after being spurned by another soldier. When Toole found the man he waited a half hour to call for help, hoping he would awaken on his own. His friend Kubach stated that this was because it would look bad for the soldier and that he would most likely get himself court martialed for a suicide attempt. Some of his fellow soldiers were livid and held a meeting deciding whether to report Toole's negligence. Ultimately, they did not report his behavior and the army never filed any charges but his relationships with many of the men were irrevocably changed.
After this incident, Toole became withdrawn and began spending more and more time in his office typing what would eventually become his master work, A Confederacy of Dunces. It was not a secret that Toole was writing a book. Late at night, his fellow soldiers could often hear the sound of the typewriter keys. Although he was secretive about the novel among the other men, Toole showed the early portions of it to Kubach who gave him positive feedback. Around this time, Kubach was transferred and took his typewriter with him, so Toole was forced to buy his own. He later commented that he began to "talk and act like Ignatius" during this period as he became more and more immersed in the creation of the book. His letter home to his parents of April 10, 1963 shows these similarities:
Return home and completion of Dunces
Toole received a hardship discharge as his parents were having difficult economic times, his father struggling with deafness and increasing incidences of irrational fear and paranoia. Toole looked forward to coming home and spending time talking with his mother. Toole turned down an offer to return to his post at Hunter, and arrived home to a teaching position at Dominican CollegeSt. Mary’s Dominican College
St. Mary’s Dominican College was a liberal arts college for women in New Orleans.-History:The college was founded by the Dominican Sisters congregation of St. Mary. It developed out of St. Mary's Academy, which is currently called St. Mary's Dominican High School.St. Mary’s Dominican College was...
, a Catholic all female school. He initially liked the position as it allowed him to teach for only 10.5 hours a week and afforded him the same leisure time he had during his less active periods in the service. The nuns on the faculty were enamored with Toole from the start, considering him well mannered, genteel, and charming. He used his free time to work on his novel, and to spend some time with his musician friend Sidney Snow at Snow's home in the Irish Channel and at various night clubs where he would watch Snow and his bandmates perform, among other things, covers of songs by The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
. The November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
caused Toole to fall into severe depression. He stopped writing and drank heavily. In February 1964 he resumed writing, at which point he added an ending and sent the manuscript to Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...
.
Dunces has been described as a "grand comic fugue" and is considered one of the seminal works of twentieth century Southern literature. It has received praise for its accurate use of various New Orleans dialects, including the Yat dialect. It concerns protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a slothful, obese, self-styled philosopher who lives with his mother. After an early financial setback for the Reilly family, caused by Ignatius, he is forced by his mother to seek employment in a variety of menial jobs to help the household financially, for which he is continually resentful of her. He subsequently takes revenge on several businesses for perceived slights. He incites black workers to insurrection at Levy Pants Company, eats more hot dogs than he sells, and attempts to break up a strip club. Along the way he runs into a divergent cast of characters, including Myrna Minkoff, a rebellious socialist intellectual with whom he conducts an ongoing literary correspondence. Although Reilly is partially modeled after Toole's eccentric friend Bob Byrne, Byrne and others have stated that much of Reilly is actually based on Toole himself:
The book eventually reached senior editor Robert Gottlieb
Robert Gottlieb
Robert Adams Gottlieb , is an American writer and editor. From 1987 to 1992 he was the editor of The New Yorker.-Personal:Robert Gottlieb was born in New York City in 1931 and grew up in Manhattan...
, who had talked the then-unknown Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...
into completing the classic comic novel Catch 22. They began a two-year correspondence and dialogue over the novel which would ultimately result in bitter disappointment on both sides. While Gottlieb felt Toole was undoubtedly talented, he was unhappy with the book in its original form. He felt that it had one basic flaw which he expressed to Toole in an early letter:
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
. Gottlieb told Toole they felt he was "... wildly funny often, funnier than almost anyone around". Also they liked the same portions and characters of the book and disliked the same parts as well. Gottlieb gave a list of things he did not like concluding with:
Later on in the letter, Gottlieb stated that he still had faith in Toole as a writer and that he wished to hold onto the manuscript in case he or Toole would be able to see a way around his objections. Toole decided that it would be best for Gottlieb to return the manuscript, saying "Aside from a few deletions, I don't think I could really do much to the book now—and of course even with revisions you might not be satisfied." Toole made a trip to New York to see Gottlieb in person; however, he was out of town and Toole came back disappointed. He felt that he had embarrassed himself by giving a rambling, uncomfortable speech explaining his situation to one of Gottlieb's office staff. He returned home having left a note for Gottlieb to call him, and they later talked for an hour on the phone. In this conversation Gottlieb re-iterated that he would not accept the novel without further revision. He suggested that Toole move on to writing something else, an idea which Toole ultimately rejected.
In a long, partially autobiographical letter he sent to Gottlieb in March 1965, Toole explained that he could not give up on the book since he wrote the novel largely from personal observation and because the characters were based on real people he had seen in his life.
Gottlieb wrote him an encouraging letter, in which he stated again that he felt Toole was very talented (even more so than himself) and that if Toole were to re-submit the manuscript he would continue to "read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me. What more can I say?" In early 1966, Toole wrote Gottlieb one final letter, which has never been located. Gottlieb wrote him back on January 17, 1966, concluding their correspondence with a letter where he re-iterated his feelings on the book and stated that he wanted to read it again when Toole created another revision.
Final years
Toole took the rejection of the book in his intended form as a tremendous personal blow. He eventually ceased work on Dunces and for a time left it atop an armoire in his bedroom. He continued to teach at Dominican where he remained a favorite among the student body with his classes regularly filling up well before official registration. His comedic performances during lectures remained especially popular among students. He attempted to work on another novel which he titled The Conqueror Worm, which referenced death as portrayed in Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
's "The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...
", but he found little peace at home. Toole's mother persuaded him to take Dunces to Hodding Carter Jr., who was well known as a reporter and publisher for the Delta Democrat Times
Delta Democrat Times
The Delta Democrat Times is a daily newspaper that has been published in Greenville, Mississippi, United States since 1938, when Hodding Carter merged his Delta Star, which he started in 1936, with the Democrat Times, which had been in publication since 1868...
in Greenville, Mississippi
Greenville, Mississippi
Greenville is a city in Washington County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 48,633 at the 2000 census, but according to the 2009 census bureau estimates, it has since declined to 42,764, making it the eighth-largest city in the state. It is the county seat of Washington...
, and was spending a semester teaching at Tulane. Carter showed little interest in the book, but complimented him on it. The face-to-face rejection Carter dealt Toole drove him further into despair and he became angry with his mother for causing him further embarrassment.
Except for a few trips by car to Madison, Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
to see army pal David Kubach, Toole spent most of the last three years of his life at home only leaving to go to Dominican. In the winter of 1967, Kubach, who had came down to visit Toole, noticed an increased sense of paranoia on Toole's part; once when driving around New Orleans, Toole became convinced they were being followed and attempted to lose the car. The family moved to a larger rental house on Hampson Street, and Toole continued teaching, with his students noticing that his wit had become more acerbic. He continued to drink heavily, and gained a great deal of weight, causing him to have to purchase an entire new wardrobe. Toole began having frequent and intense headaches, and as aspirin was no help, he saw a doctor. The doctor's treatment was also ineffective, and he suggested Toole see a neurologist, an idea which Toole rejected.
Toole tried to maintain a sense of normalcy and enrolled in Tulane in the fall of 1968 with the hopes of acquiring a Ph.D. He took a course studying Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, on whom he had lectured while at Hunter, and was particularly interested in Dreiser's close relationship with his mother and his anti-Catholic beliefs. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 added to his feelings of grief and heightened his paranoia. Several of Toole's longtime friends noticed he had an increasing sense of feelings of personal persecution. Toole went to see his friend Bob Byrne at his home in August 1968, where he again expressed sadness and humiliation that his book would not be published. Toole told Byrne that people were passing his home late in the night and honking their car horns at him, that students whispered about him behind his back, and that people were plotting against him. Byrne had a talk with him, which he felt, for the time being, calmed him down.
In the months before his suicide, Toole, who was usually extremely well groomed, "began to appear in public unshaved and uncombed, wearing unpolished shoes and wrinkled clothes, to the amazement of his friends and students in New Orleans." He also began to exhibit signs of paranoia, including telling friends that a woman who he erroneously thought had worked for Simon & Schuster was plotting to steal his book so that her husband, the novelist George Deaux, could publish it.
Toole became increasingly erratic during his lectures at Dominican, resulting in frequent student complaints, and was given to rants against church and state. Toward the end of the 1968 fall semester, he was forced to take a leave of absence and stopped attending classes at Tulane, resulting in him receiving a grade of incomplete. The Tooles spent Christmas of 1968 in disarray with Toole's father in an increasing state of dementia, and Toole searching the home for electronic mind-reading devices.
When Toole was unable to resume his position at Dominican in January, the school had to hire another professor. This greatly upset his mother and on January 19, 1969 they had a horrible final argument. He stopped by the house the next day to pick up some things and spoke only to his father, as Thelma was out at the grocery store. He left home for the final time and withdrew $1500 from his saving account. After a week she called the police, but without any evidence to his whereabouts, they took a report and waited for him to surface. Thelma became convinced that Toole's friends the Rickels knew where he was and called them repeatedly, even though they denied knowing where he had gone.
Death
Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle is a National Historic Landmark mansion located on the Central Coast of California, United States. It was designed by architect Julia Morgan between 1919 and 1947 for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who died in 1951. In 1957, the Hearst Corporation donated the property to...
and then to Milledgeville, Georgia
Milledgeville, Georgia
Milledgeville is a city in and the county seat of Baldwin County in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is northeast of Macon, located just before Eatonton on the way to Athens along U.S. Highway 441, and it is located on the Oconee River. The relatively rapid current of the Oconee here made this an...
. Here he most likely attempted to visit Andalusia, the home of deceased writer Flannery O'Connor, although her house was not open to the public. This was succeeded by a drive toward New Orleans. It was during this trip that he stopped outside Biloxi, Mississippi
Biloxi, Mississippi
Biloxi is a city in Harrison County, Mississippi, in the United States. The 2010 census recorded the population as 44,054. Along with Gulfport, Biloxi is a county seat of Harrison County....
, and committed suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car on March 26, 1969. His car and person were immaculately clean, and the police officers who found him reported that his face showed no signs of distress. An envelope discovered in the car was marked "to my parents". The suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother, who later gave varying vague accounts of its details. In one instance she said it expressed his "concerned feeling for her" and later she told a Times-Picayune interviewer that the letter was "bizarre and preposterous. Violent. Ill-fated. Ill-fated. Nothing. Insane ravings." He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery
Greenwood Cemetery, New Orleans
Greenwood Cemetery is a cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana.The cemetery was opened in 1852, and is located on City Park Avenue in the Navarre neighborhood.The cemetery has a number of impressive monuments and sculptures...
in New Orleans. A few years earlier, Toole had driven his army buddy David Kubach to the exact spot where he would later commit suicide. As the location was inconspicuous, Kubach did not understand why Toole had taken him there. He left his parents a two thousand dollar life insurance policy, several thousand dollars in savings, and his car. Toole's funeral service was private and only attended by his parents and his childhood nursemaid Beulah Matthews. The students and faculty at Dominican College were grief-stricken over Toole's death, and the school held a memorial service for him in the college courtyard. The head of Dominican gave a brief eulogy, however as the institution was Catholic, his suicide was never mentioned.
Posthumous publications
After his death, Thelma Toole became mired in depression for two years and the manuscript for Dunces remained atop an armoire in Toole's former room. She then became determined to have it published, believing it would be an opportunity to prove her son's talent. Over a five year period, she sent it out to seven publishers and they each rejected it. "Each time it came back I died a little," she said. However, in 1976 she became aware that author Walker PercyWalker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
was becoming a faculty member at Loyola University New Orleans
Loyola University New Orleans
Loyola University New Orleans is a private, co-educational and Jesuit university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Originally established as Loyola College in 1904, the institution was chartered as a university in 1912. It bears the name of the Jesuit patron, Saint Ignatius of Loyola...
. Thelma began a campaign of phone calls and letters to Percy to get him to read the manuscript. He even began complaining to his wife about a peculiar old woman's attempts to contact him. With time running out on his term as professor, Thelma pushed her way into his office and demanded he read the manuscript. Initially hesitant, Percy agreed to read the book to stop her badgering. He admitted to hoping it would be so bad that he could discard it after reading a few pages. Ultimately, he loved the book, commenting in disbelief:
Despite Percy's great admiration for the book the road to publication was still difficult. It took over three more years, as he attempted to get several parties interested in it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published by Louisiana State University Press
Louisiana State University Press
The Louisiana State University Press is a nonprofit book publisher and an academic unit of Louisiana State University. Founded in 1935, the press publishes scholarly, general interest, and regional books as part of the university’s mission to disseminate knowledge and culture...
in 1980, and Percy provided the foreword. At his recommendation, Toole's first draft of the book was published with minimal copy-editing, and no significant revisions. The first printing was only 2,500 copies, and a number of these were sent to Scott Kramer, an executive at 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
, to pitch around Hollywood, but the book initially generated little interest. However, the novel attracted much attention in the literary world. A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
. The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies, in 18 languages.
Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989. It was adapted into a feature film
The Neon Bible (film)
The Neon Bible is a 1995 drama film written and directed by Terence Davies, based on the novel of the same name by John Kennedy Toole. The film is about a boy named David coming of age in Georgia in the 1940s...
in 1995, directed by Terence Davies, that was a critical and commercial failure.
Sources
- Fletcher, Joel L. Ken & Thelma, Pelican Publishing Company, Inc. 2005 ISBN 1589802969
- Nevils, René Pol & Hardy, Deborah George. Ignatius Rising, Louisiana State University Press. 2001 ISBN 0807130591
External links
- Sanford, Joseph. John Kennedy Toole: The Omega Point Documentary. Pelican Pictures, 2009.
- John Kennedy Toole papers at Tulane University, with photograph of Toole