Butterfly in the Typewriter (28 page)

 

The “Queen Mother” in her glory. After
Confederacy
won the Pulitzer Prize, Thelma Toole became a local celebrity in New Orleans. Performing at events in her honor, she gave readings, played piano, and sang. She spent the last few years of her life relishing the attention, but she always gave her son credit and often ended an evening with the line, “I walk in the world for my son.” (LaRC, Tulane University)

 

A picturesque view down Chartres Street leading to the iconic Saint Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square in the French Quarter. New Orleans was Toole's greatest source of inspiration. (Joseph Sanford)

As such, he welcomed his return to 390 Audubon Street as a temporary arrangement.

Content and focused on his life after the army, with his departure date set for August 6, Toole sought opportunities to escape Fort Buchanan. He visited Ponce, a fishing village on the coast of the Caribbean Sea in Puerto Rico. And he took a short leave to visit the Virgin Islands. He brought his typewriter along, but he rested much of the time. He splurged on hotel rooms equipped with air conditioning. And he observed scenes of island life he had not witnessed from the window of his barracks room.

He also received word that his best friend Cary Laird had become engaged. He writes to his parents, ribbing his old friend,

Toole's droll response to his friend's nuptials may have come from his own loneliness. He continues,

By mid-July he prepared for his return to New Orleans. In his makeshift writer's studio, the sparse furnishings accented the seriousness of his artistic pursuit; he shipped his typewriter home, insuring it for two hundred dollars; it was his most valued possession. He asked his parents to make his car presentable as he planned to take some road trips, likely to visit Kubach in Wisconsin. And he accepted a teaching position at St. Mary's Dominican College, a small Catholic school in Uptown just a few blocks from his parents' house. He bragged and
likely exaggerated to his mother that Dominican seemed to think it had a celebrity on its hands:

At $6,000 a year, his salary was a substantial increase from army pay. He would once again return to the task of teaching English; the job would serve his family's financial needs, as he worked to publish his novel. Ideally, once published, he would have the means to live and write independently. It seemed, in 1963, to be an exciting plan that would benefit everyone.

It is unclear how much of the novel he had completed by the time he sent his typewriter home, but it seems certain most of it was finished. What he had was enough to convince him of its imminent success. And by end of July it had become much more than a New Orleans story. He had developed a complex network of literary allusions, echoing the dark humor and sharp phrasing of Evelyn Waugh, employing insights from A. J. Liebling who concisely expressed the paradoxes of New Orleans from a New Yorker perspective, and perhaps gleaning lessons from Robert Gover, whose novel featuring a jive-talking black prostitute akin to Burma Jones,
One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding
, Toole had acquired in Puerto Rico. And once people read Toole's novel, they would see in his characters hints of Miguel Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens.

In addition to his wide-ranging inspirations from the canon of Western literature, Toole also applied the lesson he had expressed as an undergraduate at Tulane: every writer is “a mirror to the temper of his times.” So as he drew upon his literary predecessors, he also satirized American society in the early 1960s, primarily through Ignatius Reilly.
The rotund medievalist sings in falsetto the wildly popular song “Big Girls Don't Cry” that played on radios all over the country. Ignatius becomes a ludicrous civil rights leader, seeking to spark the violent “Crusade for Moorish Dignity,” at a time when the Civil Rights Movement reached a fever pitch. Ignatius also tries to form “The Army of Sodomites,” as gay rights groups, taking cues from the Civil Rights Movement, gained traction in major cities. The absurdities of Ignatius's exploits are drawn from entrenched camps of the culture wars in American society of the early 1960s. But alas, Ignatius's plans are vested when the black laborers are unmoved by his suggestive gyrations and he is pummeled by a group of belligerent lesbians.

Toole had originally set out to write the quintessential New Orleans novel. His close friend Emilie Dietrich Griffin remembers that he felt New Orleans writers had operated under stereotypes of the city and “Out of the stereotypes . . . each writer had created some delusionary myth, missing the genuine texture of the place.” His predecessors, such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, had missed the greatest lesson of New Orleans: that its texture does not come from its gritty underbelly but rather from its centuries-long ability to enfold new voices, while never losing track of its elaborate roots, a cultural value that comes from living on the edge of existence. Toole not only understood this lesson, but in writing
Confederacy
he applied it, and in doing so he wrote a novel that did more than capture the essence of New Orleans; he struck a chord that would eventually reverberate through many countries and many languages.

Finally, his departure day arrived. On August 6 he awoke to his last morning in Puerto Rico. The sun shining through the louvered windows announced a day he had long awaited. He would no longer tread through the wet clay in the rainy season or retreat to his mosquito net in the evenings. He would no longer eat army-rationed meals or worry about surprise military inspections. But he would also surrender his private room, his creative sanctuary where he composed his literary masterpiece. In a letter to Fletcher, he reflected on his time in Puerto Rico:

In the afternoon, he boarded an Air Force plane bound for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Ascending over the Atlantic, the island gradually shrank behind him, a small green sentinel in the vast ocean. He was free. And yet Puerto Rico would always be a part of him. In fact, it gave him more than a room to write. It offered him distance and perspective. It offered him a pace of life that allowed him to take stock of his dreams and seize opportunities. But years would pass before he fully realized the significance of his time in Puerto Rico. Stepping down from the plane, he may have “kiss[ed] the ground in South Carolina,” as he had said he would. After two days of processing his discharge papers, Toole traded in his army uniform for a gray suit. He returned to civilian life, he returned to New Orleans with his manuscript in hand.

T
oole loved his city, and he undoubtedly loved his parents. But having held a teaching position at two colleges and earning a series of promotions and commendations in the army, he aspired to something more than a small apartment with two aging parents as roommates. He must have had some inclination that such a living condition would be difficult, although he may have underestimated the stress of it. Whatever the challenges, he could take solace in his master plan. So, like Theseus entering the Labyrinth, Toole held his novel as the string to lead him out of the maze that New Orleans and life at home would inevitably become.

In the year ahead he would use his spare time to refine his manuscript for submission to publishers. And in that year his mother, overjoyed to have him back home, encouraged his pursuit. She recalled the day he returned and presented her his manuscript. She read the first chapter and told him it was “promising.” The next day she completed reading the whole thing. “It's a masterpiece, son,” she told him. She was excited at the prospect of her son's work, but she noticed something different about him. He seemed quieter, as if completely absorbed by his book. She would eventually find his restraint and retreat worrisome, but for now he was to begin his teaching job, and the Toole household would enjoy a boon to its anemic coffers.

A few days after his return home, Toole visited Bobby Byrne. The two former officemates chatted over coffee. Never mentioning the novel, Toole told Byrne about his new job at Dominican. As a staunch
devotee to the Franciscan order, Byrne was horrified. He found the Dominicans ridiculous and potentially dangerous. He cautioned Toole that “that Byzantine institution” would surely ruin him. Toole likely dismissed the comment with his trademark half smile. What an Ignatian thing to say. Despite Byrne's ill feelings toward the Dominicans, Toole had his plan that would ensure a short tenure at the college. And he retained his optimism as he began the school year.

In September Toole wrote to Fletcher, who was traveling across Europe,

The quaint college, a few blocks from Tulane and Loyola universities, offered him a warm welcome. While it did not hold the stature of its larger academic neighbors, the small school had a charming campus and rich traditions. Two towering palm trees marked the entryway to campus along St. Charles Avenue, and a brick pathway led to the main hall; a three-story building adorned with a cupola, onion-shaped dormers and a two-level arcade shading the huge sash windows. Toole taught in a classroom on the second floor. And among the faculty composed primarily of clergy, he quickly gained the adoration of his colleagues and students. The students were thrilled to have a smart, young scholar—who was also a New Orleanian—from the Ivy League teaching them. He left an impression of intelligence and gentility. In 1980 the Dominican alumni newsletter described him as