Butterfly in the Typewriter (18 page)

But his proud smile withered as he returned to his routine during days that seemed successively colder and snowier. He walked to class against the frigid winds that whipped between the buildings—that burning winter air that creeps into one's bones. The
New York Times
declared the snowfalls in January and February of 1961 created “the worst winter in 80 years.” Toole observed that New Yorkers developed a “snowbound mentality.” Bundled under layers of clothing, he saw the millions of faces walking the streets and casting their gaze downward to avoid the chilly blast. For a man accustomed to the subtropical climate
of Louisiana, the winter of 1961 proved nearly insufferable. He wrote to Joel Fletcher, “In my present snowbound condition, I find that letter writing alleviates some of the drabness and discomfort of the below-zero temperature.” During this period of reflection, his track in New York started to mirror his previous experience. In the autumn he had absorbed and observed the character of the city, but winter bred bitterness, reflection, and questions of meaning and purpose. His New York endeavor grew tiresome. He confides to Fletcher, “As time passes, the tedium of graduate school magnifies; the Ph.D. looks like a nebulous and questionable reward for financial scrimping, stultifying research, and meaningless seminars.” When he had finished his teaching contract at SLI in the humid haze of the Louisiana summer, it seemed he had understood the purpose of his return to Columbia; but now, once again entrenched in the reality of life in Manhattan, it all lacked a clear point. Of course, his financial struggles colored his perception. Egos volleying across a graduate seminar table, displaying one's own brilliance and seeking to gain the approval or even slight recognition from a professor, can seem pointless when compared to the weight of surviving in the city.

While Toole had come to New York for Columbia, now Hunter College took much more of his time and energy. By the spring semester he rarely spoke of Columbia in letters home. In March he writes, “I can only write about work, work, and work.” Being so close to his place of employment meant he could teach in the mornings and be available to substitute for night classes at Hunter. Of course, more classes meant more students. And after completing one full semester, he gained a far more complex picture of Hunter than his initial assessment in October. Like many teachers, he expressed mixed feelings about his students. He varied from excitement over their potential to a view no more flattering than his cartoons of the Newcomb College women at Tulane. But his vacillating reactions indicate his students held his interests more so than did his professors at Columbia. And, in turn, his students found him an engaging and refreshing teacher.

Ellen R. Friedman took only one class with him, but he she never forgot him. On the first day of class he walked into the room of all female students and issued a writing assignment. “Answer this question:
What profession would you like to pursue and why?” He knew many of them wanted to be schoolteachers, the basis upon which the college was founded. Predicting cliché responses he stipulated, “And don't tell me you want to be a teacher because you like children. That is not a sufficient reason.” Little did his students know, he was struggling with his own career path. Reflecting the same question he asked of himself, he pushed the students to think deliberately about their answers and their futures. “He turned on an intellectual light,” Friedman remembers. “He began a chain of thinking for me. . . . He was one of the first professors that actually made me think.” Years later, after reading
Confederacy
, it became clear to Friedman that there was another side of Toole she had not seen in class. She does not recall humor as central to his teaching. He was more caustic in his responses. “He had a way of letting you know that what you said was not that good or that you missed something.” Considering he was only a few years older than his students Toole had to walk a fine line; he had to maintain his professional stance and focus, never to be misinterpreted as a friend. Friedman recalls how young he looked, and yet he carried himself in the classroom with the ease of a confident professor. He dressed in a tweed jacket with a collared shirt and tie. Sitting on the edge of his desk, one foot propped up and the other dangling to the ground, he lectured with clarity. Inevitably, some of the students developed a crush on him.

One woman, apparently a student from this time period, expressed deep feelings for Toole in a handwritten letter sent to him shortly after his return to New Orleans. The letter suggests a romantic relationship or at the very least an intense friendship. It remains one of the most puzzling letters in the Toole Papers.

The author of this letter remains a mystery. It was not from his student Ellen Friedman at Hunter, nor would he normally invite one of his students to call him Ken. In fact, he usually reserved Ken for his friends in Louisiana. But this woman appears to live in New York, considering her visit to Sebago Beach. And Toole apparently charmed her mother and became familiar with her family. But who was Ellen? A fellow graduate student? A person he met at a bar? Perhaps an undergraduate at Columbia or Hunter? Whoever she was, she energetically bounces from school to vacation to her family and repeatedly declares her love for him. It seems he developed some affection for her, as well, after seeing her “night club pallor,” likely during an evening of dancing.

It has been said that Myrna Minkoff is a composite character of the Jewish students at Hunter. As Fletcher suggests, Toole looked to his Hunter students and “Myrna Minkoff, the unlikely heroine of
Confederacy
was under observation.” Thelma Toole understood that Myrna Minkoff was an actual student of his at Hunter. In fact, she worried a lawsuit would come out of publishing the novel with the actual name of the student. And Anthony Moore, who served with Toole later in the army and was in his company during the period that he wrote
Confederacy
, remembered that Myrna was “based off a girl that was infatuated
with him in New York.” Moore felt it mean of Toole to mock a woman who loved him, as Ellen clearly did. Of course, there is no spirit of revolution in Ellen's letter. It has no plots for social upheaval or unsolicited advice like the letters of Myrna Minkoff's to Ignatius Reilly. But it does suggest that Toole had a relationship with a young lady in New York City. And if he used her for Myrna Minkoff, it would certainly illustrate his boundless satire.

As a professor, Toole clearly earned the respect of both the students and the administration. His supervisor, John Wieler, filed a “highly favorable” report on his teaching. And in the spring semester they awarded him a literature course, a rare honor for a part-time faculty member without a PhD. As he admitted to Fletcher, “The Hunter hierarchy has been more than kind toward me.” At least for one course he could delve into what he loved. In a letter to his parents he refers to this course as the Stein class, likely referencing Gertrude Stein, either in the character of the students or the content of the course. “Classes are all proceeding perfectly, The Stein Class, after a little slapping about the head and shoulders has developed into one of the most interested, alert of the four classes.” In general, students enjoyed his classes, or so he tells his parents when he reports evidence of his virtuosity as a teacher:

As Patricia Rickels often said of Toole, “Always on stage.... He was always on stage.” Wieler praised him, and his students adored him. But like any teacher he had moments of frustration. Ellen Friedman sensed that Toole was “a little baffled by New York girls. We were a bit more
independent, not Southern belles.” Dalferes remembers some moments where he felt he could not get through to them:

It is no surprise a young, bright professor, one who had a remarkable writing talent in his first year of college at the age of sixteen, would lament a crop of freshman or sophomore papers. But Toole had not forgotten where he had taught the previous year, which offered him some perspective on the skill level of the Hunter students. Nick Polites notes that Toole “acknowledged they were a lot more sophisticated and brighter than the students in Lafayette.” And if he was unimpressed by their writing or preoccupation with politics he at least found some pleasure in observing them. At first he found in the students an amusing strain of reckless rebellion. He admits to Fletcher, “I like Hunter—principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, ‘liberal' girl students are continuously amusing.” Like many college students, their rebellion was often enacted under vague and half-formed notions of the world. While students picketed for everything from academic freedom to the cost of tuition, they also fought against oppressive traditions like the onerous yearbook dedication page. In the 1961
Wistarion
the staff dedicated the yearbook to “friendship,” declaring, “This is the year we are free from such shackles” of dedicating the book to a person. It was this kind of absurd rebellion that Toole found amusing and silly.

The influence of Judaism at Hunter and New York also intrigued and at times unsettled him. In the drafts of his poem “New York: Three Aspects,” he sketched three Stars of David and compared the entire city to a mixed metaphor of both a biblical ark and a bank. And many students were declaratory about their Jewish heritage. They had a robust Jewish identity the likes of which Toole had not faced in Louisiana. Their intense sensitivities toward anti-Semitism blended with their aggressive political statements tried his patience at times.
Polites remembers, “[When] Ken spoke of his students at Hunter . . . I recall a somewhat derogatory note in his voice. Maybe it was that he thought them ‘pushy.'” Toole, in his own way, pushed back. Emilie Griffin remembers visiting one of his courses in May of 1961 when he wrote on the board, “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the liberal.” It was a line she would quote back to him years later in a letter, having never forgotten the provocativeness of the statement. Griffin identified Toole as a liberal, but she is quick to point out that the liberal way of thinking in New York City troubled Toole. He felt that New York liberals quickly cast a Southerner as a racist and a Catholic as a papist. As he saw it, while they railed against bigotry, they failed to understand their own prejudice.

In Louisiana Toole avoided declaring a particular political persuasion, preferring to observe and satirize people. But the North seemed to thrust him into political commentary. When it came to the South and the escalating social upheaval in the Southern states, combined with the brash comments he encountered in Manhattan, he could barely hold his tongue. Dalferes tells of one occasion when they went to see
Birth of a Nation
at the New Yorker Theatre. During intermission they overheard a conversation between a man and a woman. The woman remarked, “The movies take a grain of truth and blow it out of proportion.” The man replied sarcastically, “What truth is there in the South?” Unable to restrain himself, Toole interrupted the conversation and began a passionate tirade in the likes of Bobby Byrne. “During Reconstruction,” he bellowed as he began his sermon, recounting the injustices dealt to Southerners at the hands of the Yankee carpetbaggers and the policies of the federal government aimed at punishing the Southern states. Dalferes was as surprised with his eruption as the man and woman were. But she recognized, “It took guts to do that in New York at the time.” She eventually determined, “In New Orleans he was a liberal—but not in the North. He was Southern to the core.”

For as much as New York grated his social and political sensibilities, it also provided him opportunities to see artists he would not otherwise witness. It was one of the reasons he originally fell in love with New York. He had access to forms of entertainment available nowhere else in the United States at the time. And aside from the obvious Broadway
productions, Toole loved a good concert. In New York he saw one of his favorite singers, Frances Faye. As Polites recalls,