Butterfly in the Typewriter (12 page)

Dimwitted burglars, a victim mistaken for the criminal, a comedy of errors in the Quarter—even in Toole's absence New Orleans remained the same. And with such an unusual name as Shmuel, the original Hebrew version of Samuel, it seems beyond coincidence that Myrna Minkoff mentions a Shmuel in a letter to Ignatius in
Confederacy
. In Toole's novel Shmuel is the writer of a “bold and shattering movie” about an “interracial marriage.” The screenplay, as Myrna reports, is
“chock-f of disturbing truths and had the most fascinating tonalities and ironies.” Prescott tells Toole of Shmuel suffering from racial tensions in New Orleans, and Toole puts him in New York commenting on interracial marriage.

The letter exchange between Toole and Prescott also illustrates a primary connection between New Orleans and New York that attracted Toole to both cities. They are places where all the complicated characteristics of the human condition are on display all the time; one merely needs to walk through the streets to find the tragically funny scenes of everyday life.

But even for a seasoned urban dweller such as Toole, someone who was much more comfortable riding a streetcar than walking through the woods, both cities could overwhelm him. At times, he needed to get away from the bright lights and clamor. In New Orleans he would retreat to the Gulf. While in the northeast, he took a November sojourn to Massachusetts. Snapshots from this trip capture views of boulders and tree-lined beaches on Marblehead Neck, the bayside estates across the water, and the Marblehead lighthouse that he ascended to capture a shot of the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge rocks along the coast, just outside Salem, made for a scene quite different from the creeping waters of Louisiana. This was the same seaside town that inspired H. P. Lovecraft's fictional town Kingsport. He was the same writer from whom the phrase of Ignatius Reilly—“theology and geometry”—stems. Toole also visited Cambridge, taking a snapshot of the recently built Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a building praised as a prime example of modern architecture. Interestingly, no pictures from this trip capture an image of Toole or, if present, traveling companions. Perhaps, after months in Manhattan, he cherished these moments because they were solitary.

If his cool November day on the rocky coast of Massachusetts offered him respite from New York, it also signaled the coming of winter. The winds had stripped the weakened leaves from the trees. With no exams or final papers at Columbia, the semester ended quietly, and he began the long holiday break. He now had more time to venture about the city. But the frigid northeast winter brought out an aspect of New York he had never witnessed. People covered from head to toe, their eyes pointed downward, averting the cold air; they quickly
ducked into buildings and into taxis, escaping the winter winds. The homeless curled into corners, sitting on greasy cardboard, their shaking hands sticking out from mismatched layers of coats and blankets. His dream vision of Manhattan faded as he tried to make sense of this disturbing collage. And Toole turned to poetry to express what he saw. In his poem “New York: Three Aspects,” he surveys the city and its people, focusing on the tensions between the cold winter and the glistening sunlight that hit the windows of skyscrapers, between “An East Side Heiress” and the “Hopeless of Third Avenue.” At the end of the poem he brings together this incongruous diversity: “New York / is today's Noah's Ark.” And while Noah's Ark stands as a symbol of rebirth and hope amid devastation, Toole originally ended the poem with the line that cynically defines New York, as “The American way in a biblical bank.” In the typed version he struck that line, ending the poem with more ambiguity.

As time passed, Toole no longer found humorous observations of life in the city as he did in his first weeks at Columbia. The winter set the contrasts between the rich and the poor, the light and the dark, the high and the low in harsh relief. In “New York: Three Aspects,” his perspective takes on shades of what the French call a
flâneur
, like Charles Baudelaire wandering about Paris, an observer of humanity, finding a bitter existentialism in all that he sees. The rosy-colored glasses through which Toole once viewed New York darkened. And if his poems were expressions of his perspective, then his view of academics darkened as well.

During the winter break, he drafted a poem titled “The Arbiter,” wherein he expresses misgivings over the role of the literary critic. The speaker of the poem cynically summarizes the argument of a literary scholar and author who echoes Nietzsche's Zarathustra in proclaiming poetry dead. The critic asserts that “writers sought to mirror their existence,” which was not worthy of poetry but “mere ritual / Falsely spiritual.” In the retelling of the argument, Toole mocks the conventions of literary scholarship with parenthetical references to other works. And ironically the scholar seems wholly unaware that his position undermines his own legitimacy. A poetry critic has no purpose if poetry is really dead. But it becomes evident in the poem that the critic has no intention of enriching people's understanding of literature; he wants to
sell copies of his book, even at the expense of poetry. The poem ends with these lines:

Through the act of writing, the critic violently kills the beautiful and transformative spirit of the poet. Toole may have seen himself as the butterfly. After
The Neon Bible
failed to win the contest, he determined the work lifeless and put it to rest. In this poem, he attempts to revitalize his creative pursuits. And just as he did with his novella, he intended to submit the poem to a contest. On February 1 he wrote to his mother:

He never let his mother see
The Neon Bible
, but now he sought her opinion on this poem. He repeats his request of her to read it, as if something in it was meant for her, perhaps a veiled confession of his wavering confidence in his academic pursuits. The poem looks with suspicion at the scholar who “consistently attacked / the writers of reaction.” As such, “The Arbiter” springs from a query into the relationship between artist and critic. Was Toole being groomed by scholars who dismissed contemporary literature, attempting to wield power over it? And if a division exists between writer and critic, what side would he choose? This poem seems to signal his growing discontent with literary criticism.
These questions would resurface throughout his life, as he repeatedly stepped into and fell out of the pursuit of a PhD. And this inquiry ultimately led to larger questions. “New York: Three Aspects” and “The Arbiter” are two of several unpublished poems and stories likely written in New York during this time. On these manuscripts, as well as on his college essays, he uses varied forms of his name—Kennedy Toole, Kenny Toole, John Toole, and J. K. Toole. Considering his first name comes from his father and his middle name from his mother's grandmother, these choices may well indicate self-reflective questions of identity. He appears to be asking himself: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How will I be remembered?

Writers of a new literary movement that was taking shape in the New York neighborhood in which he lived proposed similar questions. While Toole attended classes and wandered about New York City, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others were enjoying their newfound literary fame, which had roots in their days at Columbia. In fact “The Arbiter,” with its description of the poet as a “poetical Bramin and self-conscious intellectual,” may have been inspired by the conservative reaction from critics who deplored the Beats. While there are few parallels to draw between the writings of the Beat Generation and the writings of Toole, in 1959 he evidently took an interest in Beat writers, particularly Kerouac.

While in New York, Toole purchased Kerouac's newly published novella
The Subterraneans
. Since it was by no means recommended reading for his graduate courses, he must have selected it out of his own interests. His copy, inscribed with his Furnald address, resides in the Toole Papers at Tulane. It is the only book from his library that was not sold or given away after his death.
The Subterraneans
deals with the contradicting forces of an artist's need to create and his desire to maintain a steady relationship with a woman. The opening lines illustrate the battle between ego and insecurity in a “self-conscious intellectual.” Toole fought a similar battle until the end of his life:

The narrator recognizes there is meaning in love, and yet he has to “rush off and construct construct for nothing.” In the end, he makes his decision that fills him with regret: “I go home having lost her love. And write this book.” It was a message that may have spoken directly to Toole. As he explored the city with Lafranz, he still found himself compelled to achieve some greatness he had not yet fully designed, perhaps at the compromise of a relationship he held dear.

Toole also had the opportunity to see Kerouac in New York. On November 6, 1958, Kerouac sat on a panel at Hunter College (where his mentor John Wieler chaired the English department) to discuss the question “Is there such thing as a Beat Generation?”
On the Road
was published in 1957, and
The Subterraneans
had just been released by Grove Press, catapulting Kerouac from an obscure drifter to a leader of a literary movement that was gaining momentum. British novelist Kingsley Amis, a writer that Toole also admired, sat on the panel that night, along with anthropologist Ashley Montagu and journalist James Wechsler. By all accounts, it was an odd mix. Amis earnestly questioned the meaning of the Beat movement, while Kerouac, under the initial impression he was going to lecture and read from his works, drunkenly responded to questions and identified some comical roots of the Beat generation. He named influences such as Harpo Marx and Krazy Kat, from George Herriman's
Krazy Kat and Ignatz
.

As the literary wild child of the day, Kerouac was an iconoclast, discarding the restraints of tradition in both his works and his life. In reading Kerouac, and perhaps witnessing his antics at Hunter, Toole encountered an alternative track toward a literary life. Rejecting the narrow walls of academia, Kerouac searched for America, taking a physical and spiritual journey, the basis for
On the Road
. His travels westward inspired a generation to follow his lead—perhaps influencing Toole to take his own trip across America ten years later. In the late 1960s, Toole would incorporate the Beats into his class lectures, particularly praising the work of Kerouac. And both writers share some compelling biographical similarities. They both attended Columbia; they both struggled to make the world see their unique genius, often heeding an editor's requests to make their work “publishable”; they both retreated from a society that no longer made sense to them; and they both took their final journey to the grave in 1969.

If Toole missed seeing Kerouac at Hunter College, he had another opportunity to witness the Beat poets on February 5, 1959, a short walk from his dormitory at Columbia. Five days after Toole sent his poem “The Arbiter” to his mother, Allen Ginsberg returned to his alma mater for a controversial reading. It is not certain that Toole was in the audience that night. He was not one of the self-identified Beats, unshaven and dressed in black, but he surely knew about the event taking place less than a block away. The obscenity trial over Ginsberg's poem
Howl
made national news, and Ginsberg's return to Columbia created chatter on campus among faculty and students. The English department officially disassociated from the whole event. However, Diana Trilling, the wife of Ginsberg's former English professor Lionel Trilling, sneaked away to the reading, while her husband held a meeting in their home with far less controversial literary figures such as W. H. Auden. As Diana reports, the time drew near for the reading, and “word spread of vast barbarian hordes converging on poor dull McMillin Theater from all the dark recesses of the city, howling for their leader.” When she arrived at the theater, she expected to see a congregation of degenerates. Instead she found a group of nearly fourteen hundred people, mostly inoffensive youth who, to her surprise, “smelt clean.”

That night Ginsberg read “Kiddish,” a poem about the consuming insanity of his mother, her commitment to a mental hospital, and her eventual death. It is a wrenching narrative that would speak to any young man, particularly an only child caught between a sense of filial duty and a longing to fulfill his own life dreams. At the end of the reading, Ginsberg, in tears, embraced his father who sat in attendance. Trilling expresses the overwhelming pity of the audience, which was a surprising emotional response from supposed foul-smelling rebels. Granted, Toole may have been inclined to mock such displays of emotion in the company of friends. But he was not heartless. In some ways, Toole would be able to relate to Ginsberg. Toole's father was developing neuroses, which would fester into a full-blown mental illness that relegated him to the backroom. In Toole's most private moments, he proclaimed his love and expressed his exhaustion with his parents, much like Ginsberg had done with his mother on that Thursday night in 1959.