Butterfly in the Typewriter (14 page)

Isolated from the rest of campus, the push for modernity in Lafayette did not reach the decrepit little “town” on the edges. Few of the classrooms in Little Abbeville had the luxury of a fan; most depended on open windows in the summer and a potbelly stove to keep warm in the winter. Paint peeled from the thin walls, water dripped from the ceilings, and wood desks were crammed into every space available. Humidity and termites had fed on the buildings so badly that if female students wore high heels the wood floor would crumble under their steps. Occasionally, in the midst of a lecture, a professor would go to write on the blackboard and under the pressure of his hand a small section of the wall would give way.

And yet, despite the condition of the buildings, SLI was in many ways a perfect place for Toole to gain experience teaching. While much of the South remained racially segregated, holding on to the delusion of “separate but equal,” SLI had opened its doors to black students a few months after the 1954
Brown vs. Board of Education
decision, which made it unconstitutional for black students to be segregated into separate schools. It was the first college in Louisiana to do so. So Toole walked into racially integrated classrooms. And because the students largely came from segregated school districts, teaching required patience and tolerance in order to address the disparities in their varied skill levels.

Regardless of race, the rural roots of the students were obvious. Many of them primarily spoke Cajun French, even though speaking French had been banned in the school systems. Many of them came from families adept at life in southern Louisiana—able to hunt alligator, trap crawfish, tend to crops, and make a perfect
roux
—all-important skills in the bayou. Writing an academic essay, however, posed a formidable challenge. It was clear his labors in Lafayette would differ drastically from honor's classes and graduate seminars. Just a few months
prior, Toole had strolled between the towering skyscrapers of New York and conversed with the sophisticates of Columbia; it all must have seemed like another life once lived in a vague past. And yet, even as he carried the air of an Ivy League graduate into his remedial English courses, he treated his students with unequivocal respect. “He was always gracious to them,” his friend and colleague Patricia Rickels remembers, “and they loved him.”

But for Toole, courtesies rarely overshadowed the humor of humanity. He found daily comical moments as his students, many of them well into their adulthood, periodically stumbled in attempts to sound scholarly. They would try to impress him with elaborate vocabulary that they clearly misunderstood and often misused. He once shared with friends a quote from one of his female students. In a slow, deliberate Southern drawl, he repeated, “
Intrinsically
, I knowed it to be true.” The conviction with which she expressed her nonsensical statement amused him. Of course, he would have never mocked her to her face. Such humor was shared and kept between colleagues.

As a new teacher, Toole also benefitted from a department that took its mission of teaching seriously—more than it pressured the faculty to publish or conduct research. The faculty's dedication created a robust camaraderie between its members. In fact, many of them recognized they could learn a great deal from each other. Rickels remembers how faculty members used to sit outside of classroom doors, listening to their colleagues lecture. Closing her eyes, imagining back to 1960, she recalled, “Dick Wagner, Ken Toole, Bobby Byrne . . . you would always learn something.” Far from the seats of authority, in Little Abbeville, professors made their classrooms self-contained worlds that they could shape with their students, even if that world was physically crumbling around them. With the support of colleagues passionate about teaching and without worries of overbearing administrators, Toole had the freedom to refine his skills as a teacher.

But just as the isolation of the Cajuns created some of the colorful culture in southern Louisiana, so too the English faculty, largely left to their own means in Little Abbeville, seemed to attract and cultivate eccentrics. Toole would later playfully call them a “faculty composed of fiends and madmen.” Shortly after his arrival in Lafayette, he must have marveled at the madcap personalities, like most new faculty members
did. George Deaux, an aspiring novelist who came to work at the college a few weeks after Toole left, never forgot the “peculiar behavior” in the department. Reviewing some of the most memorable moments, Deaux recalls,

Joel Fletcher and several others at the college recall the hallucinating instructor was actually a “skinny young male” who believed Emily Dickinson, not Dorothy Wordsworth, spoke through the radiator. Regardless of the instructor's gender or what nineteenth-century author communicated from beyond the grave, one day George Deaux and a small group of faculty “gathered around the radiator to debunk this nonsense only to hear the voice speaking from it.” They “finally concluded that the radiator was picking up a radio signal.”

This eccentricity even extended to some of the students. “Deaux recalls one student named Ted, who for unknown reasons emptied his .38 revolver into his TV set while his seventy-year-old mother in her rocking chair egged him on: ‘Shoot it agin, Ted. Shoot it agin!'”

Of course, not all the strange behavior was so humorous. English professor Thomas Sims suffered a mental breakdown the year after Toole taught at SLI. Bereaved by his wife's early death from cancer, Sims “stopped talking altogether, would meet his classes, sit silently at his desk for an hour, and then leave the room.” The college transferred him to an administrative position.

While some faculty showed the fragility of the mind, most exhibited foibles of outrageous hilarity. By far the most memorable and monumental specimen of eccentricity who left an indelible impression on Toole was Bobby Byrne, a mustached medievalist, tall and burly with dark hair. He lived in a little cabin behind the house of a fellow professor, where he played his harp, his
violà de gamba
, and a harpsichord he had custom made in England. As an avid devotee to Boethius, he
assigned
The Consolation of Philosophy
to every class he taught, even freshman composition. As Professor Rickels remembers, “He believed the climax of civilization occurred sometime during the fourteenth century; it had been on a steady decline ever since.” Byrne often said of people their “geometry and theology are all wrong,” echoing a favorite line of his from an H. P. Lovecraft short story. And while he had completed his doctoral course work at Tulane, he never wrote his dissertation. At one time, one of Byrne's professors is reported to have said to him, “Bobby, just give me a piece of paper with something written on it, and I will give you your PhD.” But he deemed the exercise of a dissertation unnecessary. “I wasn't going to learn anything from it, and besides I already had tenure,” he admitted in an interview in 1995 with University of Louisiana graduate student Carmine Palumbo. “Ya see,” he explained further, “I have a birth defect. I am amazingly unambitious.” And yet this supposedly unambitious man taught himself to read Welsh and ancient Japanese, simply because he had heard they were the two most difficult languages to learn.

Behind his supercilious posturing, Byrne was also known for his ill-timed flatulence, and he harbored a deep devotion to hot dogs. He once told Rickels a story from his childhood that explained and justified his passion for the common street food. When he was growing up, his mother had become convinced that “wieners were not good for children.” But taking pity on her son, she would occasionally yield to his pleas. Preparing the rare and savory treat, she carefully buttered both sides of a split bun as the young Bobby watched with anticipation. Then she nestled the sanctioned sausage into its soft throne. But as she handed it to little Bobby, she would squeeze the bun so the hot dog would slip back into her hand, leaving the child only the buttered bun to eat. “I felt cheated all my life,” he would say, thinking back to all the hot dogs that had eluded him in his youth. In adulthood, he reclaimed those lost wieners.

Whether by chance or choice, Byrne and Toole shared an office at SLI. They actually had much in common. Byrne was hired the year before Toole, so he was relatively new to the faculty. They were both raised in Uptown, had an interest in medieval thought, and graduated from Tulane, although Byrne had finished his undergraduate studies nearly a decade prior to Toole. They also felt a fierce sense of devotion to their
hometown. And like any two New Orleanians, their histories connected long before a formal introduction. Byrne's aunt was Toole's second-grade teacher, who remembered the bright child and his hovering mother.

Their similarities of background aside, one could not conceive of a more opposite pair sitting together in an office. Toole's average height and trendy fashion sense contrasted with Byrne's burly physique and his incomprehensibly bizarre manner of dressing. Byrne cared little about coordinating his attire. And his blatant disregard for appearances occasionally shocked Toole, who always had his clothes “fit, tapered, neat as a pin . . . carefully fitted pants with a good crease in them.” One day Byrne came to their office “wearing three different kinds of plaid and an absurd hat.” Toole later told his friend Joel Fletcher of the shocking vision that had materialized in front of him. He could not help but comment, “My God, Bobby! . . . You look like the April Fool cover of
Esquire
!”

Byrne usually dismissed such comments, especially from a young man who clearly put stock in appearances. But as a faculty member with higher rank, Byrne need not suffer reprisals from his junior colleague. When Toole once reproached him for the loose fit of his clothes, Byrne responded with a pointed and detailed lecture on the sartorial philosophy of the Arabs, who, he argued, wear flowing fabrics in order to retain moderately warm body air and keep out the desert heat.

Indeed, with his encyclopedic knowledge and bellowing voice, it seemed Byrne could dissertate on any topic. Those who kept company with him learned to endure his preaching. But Toole not only enjoyed Byrne, on occasion he provoked him, as if to test his reaction. In an article published in
Acadian Profile
, Trent Angers interviewed several of Toole's friends who recalled one cool spring morning Bobby Byrne, J. C. Broussard, and Toole sat at “an outdoor table next to the concession stand . . . engrossed in a bull session.” Angers describes the scene:

Accustomed to Byrne's tirades, Broussard sat at the table silently drinking his coffee. Then Broussard noticed that Toole “seemed to be studying and subtly mimicking the speaker's gestures.” In his year at Lafayette, Toole found in Byrne a New Orleans character almost too much to take, the ironies and absurdities layered into his larger-than-life existence. The contradictions of his bizarre clothes and his demeanor of sophistication made him ripe for the plucking. Toole closely watched Byrne, taking note of his sayings and inflections. And Byrne remained unaware of the impressions he made on Toole for decades. In recalling their many conversations, Byrne admits, “I didn't know I was under observation.”

Almost twenty years later, when Rickels read an excerpt of
Confederacy
published in the
New Orleans Review
, she immediately recognized the basis for the slovenly character Ignatius Reilly. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed to her husband, “This is about Bobby Byrne!” She worried Byrne would read it, and find out what Toole had done. But Byrne made it a point not to read popular fiction, especially not best-sellers. He finally gave in after someone leant him a copy, telling him he must read it because obviously Toole based the main character on him. Byrne recognized some likenesses between himself and Ignatius. The devotion to Boethius, his passion for hot dogs, the motto of “theology and geometry,” and his dress all seemed to be derived from him. Toole even seemed to have recalled Byrne's lecture on Arab dress when describing the fashion philosophy of Ignatius Reilly whose “voluminous tweed trousers” had “pleats and nooks” that “contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed” him.

But Byrne also recognized clear differences between himself and Ignatius. As a tenured professor, he enjoyed professional success. He was a true academic. His colleagues recognized him as a walking encyclopedia. These were not the accomplishments of a lazy man loafing off his mother. And while Ignatius claims devotion to Boethius, Byrne actually held
The Consolation of Philosophy
as his creed; to a degree, he lived the
principles of Boethius who accepted the meaninglessness of the body and focused on the mind and soul. For Byrne, pretentions in appearance exhibited mere vanity.

Upon these differences, Byrne denied he was the inspiration for Ignatius. Rather, he identified Ignatius as the alter ego of Toole, imbued with all the characteristics that Toole feared he might become: messy, alienated, fat, and such a tremendous failure that everyone laughs at his blunders. In fact, Byrne believed that Toole envied him in some ways, citing a conversation he had with Rickels where she admitted that Toole once marveled at Byrne's ability to dismiss the materialism of the world and still be content. “He has it all figured out,” Toole commented. Alas, tenure at a small rural college, a cabin in which to live, and spending free time playing fourteenth-century music, would never satisfy Toole. Byrne noticed a burning drive in his young colleague to become “rich and famous,” to achieve greatness. This drive deprived him of a lasting sense of contentment.