Butterfly in the Typewriter (38 page)

Meanwhile, Percy got word that a friend in Covington knew an editor at Louisiana State University Press. At that time it was unusual for a university press to publish novels. However, LSU Press had recently started a fiction program, intended to nab talented writers who had been cast to the margins of the megalithic publishing industry. The manuscript made its way west to Baton Rouge and landed on the desk
of editor Martha Hall. Like Bunt Percy, Hall immediately loved
Confederacy
. She encouraged Les Phillabaum, the director of LSU Press, to publish it. Phillabaum later claimed that he never doubted they would publish the book. However, Bunt recalls that Martha had to repeatedly prod Phillabaum to go through with it. The novel was sure to lose money, but eventually the risk Phillabaum took on
Confederacy
paid off more than he ever imagined.

Still, Phillabaum took six months to make the decision—a review time common among academic presses. Thelma had grown impatient with New York publishers when they did not respond in a few weeks; six months must have seemed unending. Yet LSU Press was really the end of the road, and a longshot at that. If they declined the novel, Thelma had few options left. Rhoda Faust remained dedicated to publishing it, although ahead of her still lay the long process of establishing a publishing house, which could take more time than Thelma had left to live. Thelma entertained self-publication, but that lacked credibility and required more money than she had. So she urged Percy to contact Phillabaum and ask for his intentions. On April 19, 1979, just over ten years after her son's death, Phillabaum wrote to Thelma,

Respectfully, Thelma called Faust to see where she stood with the upstart publishing house. Faust could not offer what LSU offered. So she called Percy to ask his advice. “Don't make the Pullman wait any longer,” he responded. Not wanting to stand in the way of the novel, Faust encouraged Thelma to accept the contract—a decision Thelma had likely already made.

Perhaps feeling some pangs of guilt and wanting to reward Faust for her dedication, Thelma later gave Faust her son's collection of books to sell in her store and to collectors. Faust cataloged each one—from
The Poetical Works
by Geoffrey Chaucer to a first edition of Walker Percy's
The Moviegoer
. The books that he studied, enjoyed, and used in the creation of his own novel were sold in the little store on Maple Street in Uptown after the publication of
Confederacy
. The gift certainly helped Faust's cash-strapped store. But then, according to Faust, Thelma offered a prize of far greater value than Toole's old books; she promised her the rights to publish her son's first novel,
The Neon Bible
.

Thelma would eventually deny ever making that promise, but at that point, she wanted to keep Faust's friendship. Both women would benefit from an agreeable relationship. And Thelma would need an advocate for the last unforeseen hurdle between her son's genius and the world's recognition of it: the Toole Family.

While Thelma possessed the manuscript and held the copyright to the novel, she did not hold exclusive rights to the work. Both her son and her husband died without a will. And under Louisiana law, based on the Napoleonic Code, her husband's surviving relatives had claim to a portion of the rights to
Confederacy
, as lawful heirs to John Dewey Toole's estate. Thelma was outraged. At first, she maintained a degree of decorum, but for some reason she abandoned diplomacy. The thought of the Tooles profiting from her son's work incensed her. She claimed the Tooles had a long history of exploiting her for money—something she called “The Old Toole money squeeze.” While Thelma had two lawyers to work on the case, Faust found herself going back and forth between Thelma's rants and Marion Toole Hosli—Thelma's niece to whom she taught piano as a young girl—trying to figure out a way for them to agree. The Tooles wanted to read the manuscript to ensure that it did not reflect poorly on the family. But Thelma refused to give them a copy of it. Recognizing a stalemate was forming that would prevent the publication of the book, Faust went against the wishes of Thelma and lent the Tooles her copy. Once ensured it would have no impact on them, the Tooles signed over their rights to
Confederacy
. They had no way of knowing the value that those rights would carry.

At that point LSU Press took
Confederacy
fully under its wing, from resetting the type to the cover design. Walker Percy authored the foreword to the novel. Thelma sent a picture of her beloved son, with the anticipation that it might adorn the dustcover. She selected a photo from his senior year of high school, sixteen years old, casting him in his infinite youth.

It was a project more than twenty years in the making, and it passed through countless hands before reaching publication. And history, as it so often does, has tended to shine a light on the integral male figures in this saga. Aside from Thelma, people like Robert Gottlieb, Walker Percy, and Les Phillabaum are the ones seen shaping the story. And while these figures performed major roles, they tended to overshadow the women that recognized Toole's talent before their male counterparts did. Jean Ann Jollett was the first to see the novel's greatness and suggested Gottlieb read it. Bunt Percy gave it her approval before passing it along to her husband. Martha Hall championed the book at LSU, pressing Phillabaum to publish it. And Rhoda Faust eased the concerns of the Toole family, which helped clear the legal pathway for its publication. From his honor's thesis to his lectures on “The Mother,” Toole had spent many hours pondering the female role in literature and life. It is fitting then that at every major impasse there was a woman who proclaimed faith in his work and encouraged its progression. And yet these women would recede to the backstage, as Thelma prepared for her debut.

With her son's novel passing through copy editors and running through presses, Thelma frequently invited the Percys to her home in New Orleans. It was upon their first visit to the modest house on Elysian Fields that it became quite clear Thelma was no Uptown daisy with a personal driver. They saw the working-class neighborhood, and Walker recognized the individual he had originally thought to be her driver: her brother, Arthur. Thelma preferred to keep her guests to herself, so Arthur knew to keep his distance. And she also preferred Walker visit without his wife, confessing years later how she had an innocent crush on him—“the guardian spirit” of her son's novel.

Before the release of the book, Thelma arranged her finances for the change she anticipated. She removed Arthur from all of her accounts, requesting that he sign an agreement to “no longer associate . . . with Mrs. Thelma D. Toole in money matters of any kind.” It was perhaps for the best, considering the financial boon she was about to receive.

LSU Press printed three thousand copies of the first edition. And as it circulated among reviewers, it quickly gained attention, in part because of its merits as a novel, but also because of the remarkable story of its publication. From its first moments in the public, the novel became
indelibly linked to the story of Toole's death and the resilience of his mother to ensure his dream came true. In March 1980,
Kirkus Reviews
, a first-stop reviewer for book critics, billed it as “a masterpiece of character comedy” with its “mix of high and low comedy,” making it “almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.” But the review ended with regret that having committed suicide, Toole left “only one astounding book.” A month later
Publisher's Weekly
released a glowing review, claiming of the author, “The way he crams invention and exuberance into a perversely logical plot and molds his Pandora's box of ills into a comic novel which rings with laughter is something of a miracle.” LSU Press had added a “classic” and a “miracle” of fiction to its list. But it was quickly apparent the small academic press would never be able to meet public demand for the book. In April, Grove Press bought subsidiary rights to publish
Confederacy
in paperback, which would allow it to meet the market demand. It had taken fifteen years for the manuscript to find its way to publication, but the success that followed happened at breakneck speed. Editions of
Confederacy
flew off the shelves. And as a Cinderella story of the publishing world, large newspapers and magazines took interest in both the novel and the tale of its publication.

In the summer and fall of 1980, reviews came in overwhelmingly positive. From small town papers to big-city book reviews, from novelists to professional critics, it seemed almost every week somewhere in the country a paper published a review of
A Confederacy of Dunces
. Several of these echoed
Kirkus
, claiming it an immediate classic, an original masterpiece, and one of the few books that made austere reviewers laugh until tears welled in their eyes and their bellies hurt. They compared the novel to the works of Dickens, Joyce, Rabelais, Waugh, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. It seemed every reviewer strived to compare Toole's sense of comedy, his use of plot, and his characters to one of his literary predecessors. But they still acknowledged that Toole was no mimic of other novelists. Most agreed, his work was highly original.

As reviewers celebrated the achievement of the novel, they were bound to discuss its remarkable path to publication. Prior to the commercial success of the book, they knew far less about Toole than most readers do today. Initially limited to Percy's foreword, the unanswered
questions surrounding Toole's tragic end haunts these reviews. Desperate to understand the author, at times reviewers had difficulty distinguishing Toole from Ignatius. In 1980 in the
Bloomsbury Review
, Michael O'Connel merges the author and protagonist into a single entity, claiming, “Toole-Ignatius despises living in the world, inveighs and scolds; Ignatius in his Big Chief diary and Toole in his fiction.” Even the
Chicago Tribune Review of Books
, after declaring the novel was not a good book, suggested that it was “an exorcism, a cry nobody heard.” Seeing his novel as a call for help offers a poignant and rich answer to the mysteries surrounding Toole. But such an interpretation served the reader's curiosity about the author at a time when little was known, more so than offering insight into his life. From the earliest discussions of his life, there have been misgivings in approach, people looking for answers in places without considering who he was or from what circumstances he had come.

Gradually, interviews and reporters discovered more information about Toole's sense of dejection. Writers sympathized with his struggle with the publishing industry, expressing heartfelt indignation as they imagined Toole suffering rejection after rejection. But this sympathy seems to veil their own incredulity. David Shields barely restrained himself from a tirade against the monstrosity of New York publishing when he wrote, “One has to believe there was a deliberate effort somewhere in those ivory towers along the northeastern seaboard to keep this book from the reading public. Why? Well, the answer to that would overrun this space and wouldn't be very pretty to boot.” His suspicions seem to stem from his own frustration with publishers.

Jonathan Yardley, in a review reprinted in several papers across the country, proclaimed the utter fallibility of New York editors, and in doing so expressed the underlying issue that threads many of the positive reviews: the system of book publishing may serve the interests of a company more so than the interests of readers and the art of literature. The meeting point between art and business has never been easy. Writers such as Toole watched, in the late 1960s, as publishers grew into multimillion-dollar corporations and agents became facilitators between writers and editors. And while the filtering process became more rigorous, there emerged an uneasy sense that it didn't produce higher-quality work. Writers and readers grumbled that the publishing industry, in its
shift toward big business, might be rejecting works that deserved publication as a valuable, cultural product, not just a sellable item created to attract the whims of the mass market. Yes,
Confederacy
had its problems, reviewers admitted, but so did the last five books from Random House or Knopf or Simon and Schuster. And those books, they seemed to say, didn't give me half the enjoyment
Confederacy
did.

This silencing is part of why the story of its publication held such interest to readers. It suggests that the presumed cultural role of publishers to deliver quality literature may be compromised by motives of profit and marketability. Ironically, as this story validates a critique of the commercialism of the publishing industry, it simultaneously made the novel more marketable. Toole didn't have this story to reference in 1963. A solitary writer complaining about publishers, convinced no one appreciates his genius, has few sympathizers. Toole's heartbreaking life story disables dismissal of those complaints, allowing many readers and writers to feel vindicated in their frustrations and suspicions of the publishing world.

Of course, the history of Toole that emerged in the popular media did not take into full context his circumstances. Thelma did not want to talk about her son's death, especially the notion that he suffered from mental illness. She all but rejected that possibility by blaming Gottlieb. And Toole's struggle and his mystery spurred reviewers to engage in mythmaking. Anthony Burgess imagined Toole “hawking [the manuscript] around the publishing houses of New York” and after receiving the final rejection from “the biggest of the publishing mavens” committed suicide. And one reviewer in the
San Francisco Review of Books
imagined that Toole likely killed himself directly following his completion of the final page of the novel, as if the labor pains of his glorious creation were so taxing he could live no longer. The critics were unaware that Toole sent it to only one editor, an editor that sustained a lengthy correspondence for more than two years and never closed off the possibility of publication to him. He could have sought publication through another press, perhaps a smaller one. And reviewers seem to overlook the risky territory of publishing a manuscript of a dead, unknown writer. After all, if the novel had been poorly received by readers and reviewers, the question would have gone the other way: Why would they publish a dead author's work when there were plenty of talented writers still living?