Butterfly in the Typewriter (2 page)

O
n a Sunday afternoon in 1963 in a small barracks room at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, Sergeant John Kennedy Toole rested his fingers on the keyboard of a borrowed typewriter and stared into the emptiness of a blank page. For years he had dreamt of becoming a writer, but his attempts were fraught with disappointment. The novel he wrote at sixteen failed to win a writing contest and now sat in a box under his bed in New Orleans collecting dust. He deemed the poems and short stories he wrote in graduate school unworthy. And his summer before boot camp, which he dedicated to writing, yielded nothing substantial. Still, dozens, maybe hundreds of colorful characters populated his imagination, all developed from his observations of people. Weaving these characters into a narrative proved the great challenge.

So, once again, he approached the defining line where his story would either take flight or crash into obscurity. But this time his circumstances were different. His station in Puerto Rico offered him relief from the financial and familial pressures of his civilian life. And living one thousand miles away from home, he could ponder the unique ways of his city, New Orleans. Distanced and unburdened, Toole seized the moment. He recalled a character he had been developing for years, a behemoth of contradictions, a mustached man of refined intellect and grotesque manners, a highbrow buffoon with mismatched eyes, offering the perfect distorted lens through which to examine his city.

He broke the silence of the room with the first few keystrokes, sending forth the fat medievalist Ignatius Reilly into the carnival of New
Orleans life. The language started to pour out. Pent up energies of a decade flowed, filling page after page as he conjured the characters of his past and spun a tale of absurdity and hilarity. And over the next few months, a thrilling sense emerged in him that he was writing something readable, something publishable. His future success, the rave reviews, the devoted readers, the accolades and awards that would come, were entirely unknown to him. Nonetheless, as he cranked away at the typewriter in his small private room, as that fluttering music of the novelist danced out of the open windows, borne aloft in the Caribbean breeze, he ascended to his pinnacle moment. He crafted his masterpiece,
A Confederacy of Dunces
. And all the while he dreamt of his beloved New Orleans, that ark of culture, clinging to the banks of the Mississippi River. “The Paris of the South,” “the birthplace of jazz,” and “America's most interesting city,” his hometown moved to its own rhythm, beckoning all the varieties and colors of humanity into the streets, where together they stirred the traditions of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and America, to create sounds and flavors all their own, making a world unto itself.

It is from this cultural complexity that the life and artistic vision of John Kennedy Toole came into being. As his friend Joel Fletcher once observed, Toole “was indigenous New Orleans. It was part of the fabric of who he was.” Indeed, Toole spent much of his life discerning the unique people of his city, from flamboyant French Quarter drifters to elderly downtown women who yacked away over department store counters. He developed a sensitive ear and a sharp eye for the subtle quirks in a personality, even in a city brimming with eccentrics. But the foundations of his uncanny insights into a place that has fascinated and eluded writers for centuries actually began long before his birth. For New Orleans was far more than the place where he had grown up. He was a native son of the city, hailing from the European lines that merged in the expanding neighborhoods of the antebellum metropolis. His ancestors came from France, Spain, and Ireland, and all became New Orleanians, planting family roots in the wet soil of southern Louisiana.

Toole's earliest ancestor to the New World was his mother's great-grandfather, Jean François Ducoing, who came to the city from France near the turn of the nineteenth century. Ducoing gained local fame after “skillfully [handling] the solitary mortar” under the command of
Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Toole's mother proudly documented this deed in a baby book she kept for her son, but she seemed to overlook other historical accounts. For example, Ducoing was an associate of the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte. Both a romanticized outlaw and a fellow hero at the Battle of New Orleans, Lafitte led a gang of Baratarians who smuggled slaves and other goods taken from Spanish ships that eventually ended up in the markets of New Orleans. Toole's honored ancestor had some involvement in such exploits, ranging from insurance fraud of a marine vessel to the founding of Lafitte's sham government in Galveston. But such intrigue was not lost on Toole. Perhaps stretching the truth of his lineage, he once declared to one of his friends that he was not only the descendent of the celebrated Jean Ducoing, but he was also related to the famed corsair Jean Lafitte.

In addition to his French ancestor, Toole's grandmother on his father's side, Mary Orfila, was the daughter of a Spanish commission merchant, who came to New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century. And thus Toole had the two primary pillars of New Orleans European heritage: the French, who founded the city in 1718, and the Spanish, who governed it over forty years. Their descendants were dignified by the classification of “Creole” and traditionally honored as “pure” New Orleanians.

But Toole's privileged ancestry was tempered by the earthy influx of the Irish. Both his mother and his father had ancestors from Ireland that had come to New Orleans during the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Initially seen as a source of cheap labor, many Irish immigrants ended up digging canals waist deep in the swamps behind the city, a job determined too hazardous for valuable slaves. The Irish settled south of the old city, along the Mississippi River in an area that became known as the Irish Channel. Surviving great hardships, they eventually thrived, and they made a lasting impact on the unique downtown accent called Yat, which is resonant of dialects heard in the boroughs of New York City.

Toole's mixed lineage tells part of the story of New Orleans—how it grew by waves of immigration and how ethnicities established their own neighborhoods in which they kept their traditions alive. In this way New Orleans mirrors some of the great port cities of Baltimore, New York, and Boston. But eventually, as families merged and moved, ethnic
lines blurred. While his mother's side proudly carried the Creole heritage of the French name Ducoing and his father's side carried the Irish name Toole, in the late 1800s the Ducoings and the Tooles ended up neighbors in an area of the city called the Faubourg Marigny, just outside the old city. The fact that a Creole and the son of an Irish immigrant were neighbors, signifies, on one hand, the decline of the Creole stature in the economy of New Orleans, but on the other hand speaks to the ability of the working class to carve a respectable place for themselves in the city, despite the old social order. And each of these families had a child born to them near the turn of the century: the Toole boy and the Ducoing girl grew up one block away from each other on Elysian Fields Avenue, the same “raffish” street that Tennessee Williams set his ill-fated romance
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Toole's mother, Thelma Agnes Ducoing, was born in 1901. From her earliest days she aspired to theatrical stardom through acting, dancing, and singing. Later in life, she proudly boasted her early entrance into performance art. “I began my stage training at the age of three,” she would say, rolling her R's with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor. A proud Creole, her father instilled in her an appreciation of the arts and “culture,” which she passed on to her son. Unfortunately, her father also had a proclivity for other women. As an unremitting adulterer throughout Thelma's childhood, he came and went as he pleased. Only later in life did it strike Thelma as odd that he would openly take another woman on a leisure trip to Cuba, leaving his wife and family behind. He was the first of many men that disappointed Thelma. But such pain caused by her father likely fueled her fiery spirit. In 1920 she graduated from The Normal School of New Orleans with a certificate to teach kindergarten. And in that same year she earned a degree from the Southern College of Music. For a time she entertained dreams of going to New York City, but she could never abandon the place for which her ancestor, Jean François, fought to protect. She decided to stay in her hometown and teach music and theater at the public schools.

As she began her career as a teacher, she started her courtship with John Dewey Toole Jr., a man vastly different from her father. Quiet and subdued, his focus and his talents must have signaled to her a promising future. She remembered him in his early days as, “A handsome man . . . with legal ability, oratorical ability, and mathematical ability.”
Born in 1899, John Toole Jr. was always a bright student. When he was eight years old his father died, bringing great hardship to the family, but John maintained his dedication to academics with the encouragement of his older brother. At the newly opened Warren Easton High School on Canal Street he earned top grades, showing strength in mathematics. In 1917 he took first honor in a debate contest and was awarded a full scholarship to Louisiana State University. But he turned it down, deciding to stay in New Orleans. He served in the army at the end of World War I, although he never left the country. And while he attended a few courses at Tulane University—one final attempt at higher education—in 1919 he settled into a job managing a parts department at a car dealership. Holding a position of “great responsibility” and a “high salary,” he began courting his outgoing young neighbor Thelma Agnes Ducoing.

Although John and Thelma were gainfully employed, they never fulfilled the aspirations of their youth. He never achieved a college degree, and she never stood in the limelight of a Broadway show. But they were both in their mid-twenties, nearing the age when marital prospects would become limited. So with their grandest dreams deferred, the would-be scholar and the would-be actress wedded on December 29, 1926, at Saint Peter and Paul Church around the corner from their homes. They began their life as husband and wife at the height of the Roaring Twenties. They moved to a house on Bayou St. John, next to the expansive City Park, where they enjoyed throwing parties and entertaining guests.

Thelma fondly remembered those early days, but she never forgot how she suffered the sexist policies of the time. The New Orleans public schools would not allow a married woman to hold a full-time position. Forced to give up her job as a teacher, but never content to be a homemaker, she continued to teach as a self-employed instructor, director, and piano player, offering lessons in music, charm, and elocution. Around the time they were married, John left his managerial position in the parts department to sell Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. It must have been a potentially lucrative prospect in 1926. They moved to the edge of the affluent Uptown neighborhood for a time, just a few blocks from Tulane University. The Great Depression sparked by the economic crash of 1929 hit John and Thelma hard, since John's salary was
dependent on commission. John lost his job; they lost their furniture, and they lost their home. In 1932, much to Thelma's disappointment, they were forced to move back to the Marigny and live with John's mother.

With the honeymoon glow of their nuptials having long extinguished, the couple found themselves in the same neighborhood in which they started. Six years passed as the old Marigny fell into further disrepair, like many areas of the city. John and Thelma crept into their thirties, and it appeared Thelma was unable to conceive. They had spent a decade together in a childless marriage, each year their happier days receding further into the shadow of memory.

But in 1937 the Fates spun an unexpected thread. As their son would later tell his friends, one day at a party, which is never without libations in New Orleans, Thelma Toole tripped on some steps and tumbled to the ground. The fall must have jostled her insides enough to remove whatever stood in the way of her and motherhood, because shortly thereafter, she got pregnant. And her son, telling the story of his mother's fortunate fall, seemed to relish the accidental nature of his origin.

As was expected, the pregnancy changed everything. John secured a new salesman job at Ponchartrain Motors in the Central Business District. Car sales increased as the country emerged from the Great Depression. And the Tooles moved to a house in the heart of Uptown, an ideal place to raise children in New Orleans. It was home to palatial suburban estates along St. Charles Avenue, two private universities, two all-girl colleges, the best primary and secondary schools in the city, a lush park that spanned 190 acres, including fountains, palm tree–lined promenades, and a zoo—all shaded from the hot Louisiana sun under vast canopies of evergreen, live oaks. It is no wonder that the Tooles, once established in Uptown, remained so dedicated to staying in that neighborhood, even when they could barely afford it.

With all the preparations for a new baby in place, the Christmas season began, heightening their anticipation. And on Friday, December 17, 1937, at Touro Infirmary in the Garden District of New Orleans, John and Thelma welcomed their one and only child into this world, giving him the first name of John, and the name of Thelma's grandmother, Kennedy, as his middle name. For short, they would call him Kenny.
After the successful delivery, John Toole handed the attending physician a five-dollar tip. Remembering the awkward transaction between her husband and the doctor, Thelma would sneer, “He didn't even give me a bottle of perfume.” Even the tender moments after the birth of their son could not soften some of the bitterness that had developed between John and Thelma over the years. But nonetheless, they cooed and awed over their little Kenny who had, as Thelma recalled, the most enchanting eyes.