The young observer had seen a different worldview, not necessarily one to which he aspired, but one with significance nonetheless. One of his favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, had grappled with conflicting messages of religion, but she had not placed it in the scope of a boy coming of age amid familial and social conflict. Somewhere between McComb and New Orleans, driving on a country road at night, Toole asked his friend to pull over. Laird, somewhat confused as to Toole's intent, did as requested. The New Orleanian who had spent most of his life seeing nights illuminated with street lamps that glowed in the river mist stepped out of the old Studebaker and looked up. He “gasped at the beauty of the millions of stars in the sky” and exclaimed, “âI didn't know there were this many stars in the heavens!'” It seemed a revelation had hit him. They all paused to appreciate the twinkling lights. Back in the car, heading south toward New Orleans, Toole told his friend, “I have to write a book.” He started muttering to himself, making mental notes of what he intended to do. Laird encouraged his enthusiasm, although he did not realize the seriousness with which Toole would pursue his idea.
Back at home, Toole set to work on writing the book, distilling his impressions of Mississippi. The trip to the country sparked his interests in this world of God and land and the small Southern town. And for all the dozens of road signs blazing in his memory from the trip home, New Orleans provided him the central image to his novel, as well as the title. Along Airline Highway in Metairie, in the outskirts of New Orleans, a sign for Mid-City Baptist Church lit up at night. It was a radiant bible with red letters and yellow pages, opened to the passage of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The holy text beamed in commercial illumination like a commodity
sold to customers. It embodied that tension between religion and commercialism. He had found the ironic symbol to place at the center of his book:
The Neon Bible
.
In this short novel, Toole drew upon tensions between religious virtue and the sins of the faithful in a small Mississippi town during World War II. Under the veneer of a simple country life, a boy named David is driven to the edge and, in the end, kills a preacher to protect the body of his dead mother. At the heart of the novel is a tent revival that compels the townspeople to “find Jesus.”
While Toole never attended a revival meeting in Mississippi, at the invitation of his friend Cary Laird, Toole went with his mother to “hear Billy Graham at a revival meeting at the old first Baptist church on St. Charles near the old Touro Infirmary.” He and his mother watched the impassioned evangelical preacher hold sway over the congregation. His mother recalled,
We were fascinatedâprofessing for Christâyoung minister, very handsome, in a beige suit and a salmon tie showed how wicked social dancing was. I said to my son, “This is a fine religious meeting.” And they laughed their heads off. I didn't think they were funny. My son gained a great deal from that.
Toole must have appreciated the theatrical quality of the tent revival. And while Billy Graham may disagree that his revivals were “shows,” his organization used the same tactics that stage productions use to generate interest. Before coming to a city, a media blitz preceded him with posters and advertisements. Then for a series of nights, sometimes weeks on end, he preached the gospel. In Los Angeles in 1949, Graham spoke behind a huge stage prop bible opened toward the audience. And several years after his New Orleans “crusade” he would take Manhattan by storm, drawing in thousands upon thousands of audience members, filling Yankee stadium and Madison Square Garden. His preaching always culminated in the “altar call,” which was when members of the congregation would step forward to declare their promise to Jesus. Toole stood on stage as a young boy, but he had never held such power over an audience. And while his Catholic church had the regal and austere theater of ceremony, it was nowhere near as lively as the jam-packed seats of
believers calling to Christ and professing aloud their faith. But mixed with his appreciation, he showed some disdain for the simplicity of the believers to be swayed by such theatrics, and so, as Thelma says, “they laughed their heads off.”
As Toole drafted
The Neon Bible
, he must have recalled Billy Graham. The evangelist in the book who comes to the small Mississippi town appears remarkably similar to how Graham looked in 1954. David, the narrator protagonist, explains his first impressions of the evangelist:
The first thing I noticed about him, even before his clothes and how skinny he was, were his eyes. They were blue, but a kind of blue I never saw before. It was a clear kind of eye that always looked like it was staring into a bright light without having to squint. His cheeks weren't full like a boy's would be, but hung in toward his teeth. You could hardly see his upper lip, not because it was thin, but because he had a long, narrow nose that sort of hung down at the end. He was blond-headed, with his hair combed straight back and hanging on his neck.
And in the tent the spirits of the townspeople awaken. Even David nearly goes to the altar to profess his faith. The tent bonds the town together. But once it is taken down and the evangelist leaves town, everything begins to crumble. Having lost his father to the war, his Aunt Mae to the wind, and his mother, who died in his arms one night as he wiped the blood from her mouth, David, in the end, defends the family home when the preacher from the local church comes to take his mother to the mental hospital. Unaware of her death, the preacher's presence threatens to uncover their poor and secretive existence. So as the preacher ascends the stairs, David shoots him in the back and kills him, then flees town. Like Flannery O'Connor, Toole uses violence to twist the plot, moving it from the subdued, coming-of-age story of a Mississippi teenager to the tale of a boy pushed to the brink to defend his mother, resulting in his being ousted from the community he had known all his life.
While
The Neon Bible
has become known as a work of juvenilia, an accomplishment in respect to Toole's age at the time he wrote it, the novel remains a work that demonstrates his keen awareness of character
and dialogue. Kerry Luft, senior editor at the
Chicago Tribune
, expresses this early talent: “Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” He likely gleaned this style of simplicity from one of his favorite novels at the time,
The Catcher in the Rye
. But his first novel also appears as a counter principle to Toole's introduction to verbal expression under the guidance of his mother. Thelma expressed herself in the most florid ways possible. She prided herself on the occasional, elaborate “literary sentence” that she would contribute to her son's school papers.
But Toole decided the voice of the narrator in his novel needed to sound like an average teenager of the time. When David explains the experience of being beat up by high school bullies, he does so using the straightforward vocabulary of a sixteen-year-old:
The first sock came. It was on my head right above my eye, and I began to cry again, only this time harder. They were all on me at once, I thought. I felt myself falling backward, and I landed with them on top of me. My stomach made a sick grinding noise, and I started feeling the vomit climb up into my throat. I was tasting blood on my lips now, and an awful scaredness was creeping from my feet up my legs. I felt the tingling go up till it grabbed me where I really felt it. Then the vomit came, over everything. Me, Bruce, and the other two. They screamed and jumped off me. And I laid there and the sun was hot and there was dust all over me.
Toole clearly had the ability to describe this moment with more ornamentation, as is evident in his school papers, but he stays true to the diction of his character, describing the all-too-common experience of a boy terrorized by bullies.
For some reason, Toole never told his mother he was writing a novel. And she had no idea that he submitted it to a writing contest. She explained years later, “He didn't want me to worry, you see.” She never explained what worries she would have had. The very fact that he had written a novel deserved some celebration, but he kept the whole thing a secret. It was his first serious attempt to write fiction, and from his return from Mississippi to completing the novel in New Orleans, he took measures to ensure his mother remained completely unaware of it. The
novel is an expression all his own, a definitive departure from his performances as a speaker, actor, or singer, and drafted in an energetic burst of writing. He had successfully expressed himself as a perceptive observer and a writer. But perhaps he never told his mother about
The Neon Bible
for fear of what could happen and what did happen. When he received word he lost the contest, he tucked away the manuscript, hiding his failure, suffering the pangs of rejection alone.
Despite his perceived failure as a novelist, his senior year was a busy time, overall, as he garnered recognition and accomplishment. He was elected a state representative at Boys' State in August of 1953. He became managing editor of the school newspaper and assistant editor to the yearbook. In October of 1953 he appeared as a guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club. He was inducted into the honor society. He took fifth place in a Spanish language contest. And on December 16, the day before his sixteenth birthday, he appeared on local television with six other students to review the epic novel
Tree of Liberty
. A month later,
Silver and Blue
published a “Senior Spotlight” on him, naming him “one of Fortier's big wheels.”
For all the awards and positions he held, his most seminal moment, one that would plant a seed for his future, came in May of 1954 when Toole left New Orleans with a school group to take a tour of historic sites along the eastern seaboard. He was one of thirty-one students from Fortier selected to receive a National Freedom Foundation award at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. These students represented “how the ideals of the American way of life are taught in classes at Fortier.” Boarding a train at 8 a.m., they made the long journey northward. They visited Washington, DC, taking in the sights of the Lincoln Monument, the White House, the Capitol, and ascending the Washington Monument. They watched the “solemn changing of the guard at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” At Valley Forge they were honored in a ceremony, and they stopped in Philadelphia to pay tribute to Liberty Hall. And like true New Orleanians, they carried the spirit of their hometown with them. In the city of brotherly love, they enjoyed a “costume party at the Sylvania Hotel.”
The most exciting part of the trip for Toole must have been the three days he spent in New York City. The group made the typical tourist stops, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building,
and the United Nationsâall symbols of the American identity and its value of freedom, competition, and diplomacy. They took a ferry to Ellis Island, and they stepped into St. Patrick's Cathedral. But the highlight of his visit to New York was the glitz and glamour of Broadway shows. In an article Toole wrote for the school newspaper upon their return, he summarizes the trip, noting, “Entertainment was an outstanding feature of the tour. The gawking Fortierites viewed Cinerama, the new movie wonder, the world famous âRockettes' at the fabulous Radio City Music Hall, and one of the biggest musicals on Broadway,
Wonderful Town
.”
While much of the trip was spent invigorating the patriotic spirit of the students, the rolling hills of Valley Forge and the then sleepy Southern town of Washington, DC, would be difficult to rival the heart-pounding verve of New York. In a promotional map of Manhattan that Toole saved in his scrapbook the tourist is informed, “Manhattan is the financial, cultural, manufacturing, and theatrical CAPITAL of the World!” It was a statement that Toole heard loud and clear, a statement that, for better or worse, returned to his ears throughout his life, both drawing him to and repelling him from New York City.
In primary school he had strutted upon the stage, but in high school he stepped into the world, observing his city, dating women, and making his first movements toward social critique through satire. Some of the key characters of
Confederacy
were beginning to germinate. Joel Zelden, a friend and neighbor, recalled how one afternoon they invented the name Ignatius Reilly, finding the mere sound of it funny. And perhaps even then he reflected on how he might use his impressions of Irene Reilly and her boisterous mother. He also gained a reputation for his wit and humor. Jane Pic Adams never forgot seeing Toole through the window and across the green in another class on the other side of the school. Locking eyes, Toole would make hilarious facial expressions. Adams struggled not to laugh, trying to keep her composure as she sang in chorus. And yet his antics never compromised his standing as a scholar. His classmates voted him most intelligent in his senior year, and he was awarded a full merit scholarship to attend Tulane University.
Most importantly, between writing a novel and managing the school newspaper, he pursued his interests in writing and had his first experience of New York City. And yet, despite his clear passion for literature
and the arts, in his senior year of high school he decided to major in engineering in college. He must have understood his career path would likely have a direct impact on his family's future prosperity, one that had been compromised, resulting in the loss of their home. After all, there was no one else but Toole to take care of his parents when they would inevitably succumb to old age. His mother claimed that his father persuaded him to study engineering, but Thelma was not one to passively approach these kinds of crossroads, either. She dedicated her life to creative endeavors, and she also endured the instability of it. “He was an artist,” but perhaps he could earn a respectable living creating works in a different discipline. Just like he tucked away his failed novel underneath his bed, he relegated his passion for writing to a hobby. Determined in his career choice, he announced his plans in the school newspaper.