Butterfly in the Typewriter (10 page)

Clearly, 1957 proved a seminal year for Toole.
While he explored his city in high school with Cary Laird, creating a variety of characters from their observations, at Tulane his eye focused on the people at the university, and his creative ideas took more substantive shape. Furthermore, he refined his ideas in philosophy, literature, and humor that he clearly drew upon when writing
Confederacy
. In the yearbook of 1957, Toole no longer appears in the fraternity pages. He poses among a group of writers and editors from various university publications. Wearing a pea coat with a popped collar and his shirt slightly unbuttoned, he looks the part of a young and bright artist. It seems he had found his place.

After such a successful school year, Toole certainly deserved a break. Unsurprisingly, he got an itch for New York City. He still kept in touch with his high school friend Cary Laird, although Laird was pursuing a degree in geophysics at Tulane, a far cry from English coursework. Laird's father had just bought a new Chevrolet and they asked Mr. Laird if they could take his car to New York. While they were only nineteen years old, Mr. Laird trusted them, and, much to the consternation of Mrs. Laird, he simply replied, “Okay, go ahead.” So Toole was off to New York again, and from what Laird's sister recalls, they both enjoyed it immensely.

In his senior year, Toole dedicated his time to his course work, writing an undergraduate honors essay and securing funding for graduate school. In fact, he pursued his studies like a professional, enrolling in a graduate-level English course and deciding to leave
The Hullabaloo
and
Carnival
. In one of his classes he met Nick Polites, who recognized that Toole “must have had special permission to take a graduate seminar course while an undergraduate.” Indeed he did. Professor Richard Fogle later wrote that Toole “was the only undergraduate I can recall we let take a 700 level course.” Despite his youth, he kept pace with the graduate students. He socialized with a group of them, often eating lunch in the cafeteria, discussing matters of literature, history, and culture. The professor complimented his work years later when he recalled that he “wrote a surprisingly good essay on Coleridge for me.” And like most professional academics he felt the drive to contribute something original to literary studies. In his essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne he
writes, “I have attempted some original work in the field. . . . It is an attempt to find Hawthorne's representation of the reality he might not have found apparent in his society, a reality from which Americans might be hiding even today.” Toole felt compelled to reflect on modern society, even as he discussed a nineteenth-century author. And his desire to contribute something new to his discipline likely led him to the subject of his undergraduate honor's essay: the obscure British playwright John Lyly.

In the essay Toole argues that Lyly, a playwright of the late sixteenth century, remarkably depicted women as empowered, educated, relatively independent, and often the equal to male characters. Lyly also brought the convention of euphuism—an ornate, witty style of writing—into English literature through his two novels, which Toole argues influenced both the high society for whom he wrote and other playwrights at the time, including Shakespeare. Toole may have taken interest in Lyly as a personality as well. “He seems always to have been determined to maintain his reputation as a clever figure . . . who would impress courtly circles with his understanding and extremely timely interpretations of the contemporary scene.” The same description could be aptly applied to Toole.

The essay on Lyly as a culmination of Toole's work at Tulane also accents his interest in the role of women in society. In his cartoons, he depicts mostly women, either frumpy or sultry. In the margins of his class notes, he sketched faces and figures of women, studies of the female form. And in his honor's essay, he focuses on women during the Elizabethan era as seen through the eyes of a male writer. These contemplations may have been a reflection of his own ponderings of women in his life. At home, his mother was the dominant personality, and while she contended that she never pried in her son's business, others remember that she was quite overbearing. While attending Tulane, Toole brought a young woman home on one occasion. His mother deemed that she had a “hoity toity” way of talking. Would another woman ever be welcomed into the Toole home? Or must they remain as unreal as Marilyn Monroe? Toole offers no personal musings on this subject. But his query into the nature of woman throughout his work at Tulane, from his cartoons to his honor's essay, surely signifies something more than an intellectual interest. These female characters mark the beginning of an inquiry in
which, years later near the end of his life, he would contemplate the role and the meaning of a mother.

That is not to say that his exploration of the female sex was confined to pen and paper. He connected with several women at Tulane. While working at
Carnival
and
Hullabaloo
, Toole was reacquainted with Emilie “Russ” Dietrich, a childhood friend who had lived next door to the Tooles when they lived on Webster Street. She was an aspiring writer whose “Bacchanalia” was featured in
Carnival
. On Mardi Gras day in 1957, Toole asked Dietrich to dance while she waited for her date to pick her up. She mused years later, “It would be easy to fall in love with a man that could dance like John Kennedy Toole.” Their brief dance was not the end of their relationship. They would reconnect several years later in New York City.

On another occasion, he escorted Marcia Suthon to one of the final church services at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, before it was destroyed to make way for a ramp onto the Crescent City Connection, the bridge that spans the Mississippi River, connecting downtown to Algiers Point. It was a historic moment, one of the unfortunate compromises that New Orleans made as it attempted to step toward modernity. On the winter evening of the last service in 1958, Toole and Suthon saw Jane Gwynn, another Fortier alumna and the same girl who used to ride with Toole up and down the elevator eating
petits fours
in Cornelia Sansum's house. After the service, they went to the Napoleon House in the French Quarter for some drinks. They shared an evening of laughter, reminiscing over their high school days.

And according to a biographical article on Toole by Dalt Wonk, the most enduring relationship he had with a woman began at Tulane when he started dating Ruth Lafranz who also worked on
Carnival
and
Hullabaloo
. They had first met on a blind date. Mmahat recalls the couple coming to meetings of the Newman Club. Eventually they started going out regularly, to the movies or to dances at the Roosevelt Hotel. They enjoyed sipping “tall drinks at the Napoleon House, where they laughed about the unrelenting 1812 Overture on the record player.” She majored in journalism, and Toole took four journalism classes in his junior year. As the chapter president of Theta Mu, Lafranz sent him an invitation to join the honorary journalism fraternity. While it would be far more fitting than his Greek venture into Delta
Tau Delta, Toole still did not join, but their relationship would continue long after graduation.

While Toole was no socialite, by all accounts he was great fun to be with. He danced well, from the waltz to the Jitterbug. And he made people laugh with his impersonations of professors, fellow students, and anyone who struck his fancy. But as a gentleman, he took care not to impersonate people in his company. His friends during this time recognized that he saw the world in a most unique way. He delivered his observations as hilarious one-man skits, teasing out the absurdities in everyday life, bringing his friends to tears with laughter.

Above all, Toole proved to be an exceptional student at Tulane, from his first day to his last. And his reputation as a scholar supposedly extended past the bounds of the university. His friend Cary Laird reported that, one day, as the two friends contemplated life after graduation, Toole told him the agent of Yul Brynner had asked him to serve as a personal tutor to the Brynner's children as the family traveled about the country. Of course, in 1956 Brynner famously played Ramses in
The Ten Commandments
. And in 1958 he starred as Jean Lafitte in
The Buccaneer
, a remake of the Cecile B. DeMille film that premiered in New Orleans a few months after Toole was born. The Brynner film also made its world premiere in New Orleans, and considering Toole's interest in the movies and his ancestral connection to the pirate Lafitte, he likely attended. Upon hearing of the remarkable offer made to Toole, Laird believed that his friend was telling the truth. But had this offer actually been made, Thelma Toole would have surely gloated, as it would be another validation of her son's talents. Thelma never publicly mentioned such an opportunity offered to her son, or perhaps he had kept it from her. Toole was likely trying to impress Laird. It would be one of many incidents to come in which Toole exaggerated in order to impress a friend, even through his friends rarely doubted his talent. Perhaps Toole needed to reassure himself that he was on some grand path toward greatness.

In his final semester, Toole lived up to his reputation as an exceptional scholar. On one of his papers, his professor, Dr. Fogle, commented, “You have done an excellent job, I think; if you were a graduate student I would still give you perhaps an A- on this paper.” He was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, and a faculty member
nominated him for a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship. He had secured the key to his future in graduate school.

He probably could have stayed at Tulane to get his master's degree, but Toole felt it was time to move on. At the time, job prospects after graduating from an Ivy League school were much brighter than what Tulane would be able to offer. The fellowship would help him attend a school that he could not otherwise afford. According to Thelma, he wanted to attend Harvard, but he was not accepted. So once again, the electric lights and the energy of New York City beckoned. In late March he opened a letter welcoming him to Columbia University. Luckily, he would not be alone in the city as Ruth Lafranz was also heading to Columbia for her master's in journalism.

After graduation from Tulane, he secured a summer job. The fellowship was generous, but he knew the expense of New York would be challenging. He was hired at the Haspel Brothers, the company that made seersuckers famous. He worked at the factory, located on the east side of the city. Toole was accustomed to the low wages of temporary jobs, and working at the factory was certainly better than selling hot dogs at football games. Such jobs were the pragmatic means to an end—a little more money in his pocket so he could reach his goal of one day becoming a writer, or a professor, or both. Best of all, the factory and its array of characters made for ripe storytelling material. While his friend Laird never envied the conditions in which Toole labored, he loved it when Toole would tell him about the people and the absurd conflicts unfolding at the factory. Toole had found his model for Levy Pants, the first place of employment for Ignatius in
Confederacy
. Although, unlike Ignatius who negotiated a sixty-dollar-per-week salary, Toole's payroll stub suggests he made $34.10 after taxes. It was a rate closer to that of the character Miss Trixie, the aged office worker with rheumy eyes.

Fortunately, his summer before leaving for New York was not all work. Toole visited the Gulf Coast, piling into a convertible with friends, heading east out of the swampy environs of New Orleans to enjoy a day at the beach. The Mississippi coast has long served as a retreat for summer-worn New Orleanians, who long to wade in the water, feel the cool breeze, and watch as those ancient-looking pelicans gracefully fly in low formation across the horizon. But in 1958, viewing the common scenes of the gulf, Toole must have reeled with the excitement of
his future prospects. He would trade beignets for bagels, the streetcar for the subway, and the slow, easy pace of his sultry town on the Mississippi River for the bustling thoroughfares of New York City. In several pictures taken at the beach during this summer, Toole shows off his “brawny physique,” as his mother had described. His body had filled out from his freshman year. He stands triumphant, ready to take on the world.

New York is today's Noah's Ark.

 

 

T
he Manhattan skyline emerges out of the Hudson and East rivers, an American symbol of human ambition. Businessmen, restaurateurs, artists, all manner of disciplines come to New York, hoping to carve a legacy out of this labyrinth; and the city, unforgiving, demands their best. Toole's successes in New Orleans served as stepping-stones to this moment. Far removed from the quaint temper of Tulane, he entered another kind of world at Columbia—a mammoth institution that drew people from every walk of life, students from more than sixty-three nations, and a star-studded faculty from the forefront of knowledge. To a young scholar from the South, Columbia must have seemed a place of limitless possibilities. Here, Toole pursued his dream vision of New York, the place where he would cast a mold for himself far from the comforts and burdens of home. His previous visits to the Big Apple had offered him an introduction to the city, but he understood graduate school in New York would be quite different from a weekend taking in Broadway musicals.