Butterfly in the Typewriter (41 page)

Rhoda Faust filed suit against the estate to grant her the rights to publish the book or compensate her for damages, as she depended on Thelma's promise of
The Neon Bible
to get her publishing house started. The judge dismissed Faust's case, and the Tooles immediately filed suit against the estate to force Holditch to release the novel for publication. They argued that under Louisiana law the novel was considered shared property and fifty percent of it belonged to the Tooles. Keeping his promise to Thelma, Holditch fought against the publication, although he came under increasing criticism from readers who were hungry for more of Toole's writing. Two years later a Louisiana judge resolved the dispute with a directive to either publish it or put it up for auction. Holditch was backed into a corner, wanting to honor Thelma's wishes, but realizing a public auction was far more risky to the future of the
book. So it was submitted to several publishers. Many, including Louisiana State University Press, declined. But Grove Press, which held the rights to the paperback edition of
Confederacy
saw an opportunity. In 1989, Grove Press published
The Neon Bible
; Holditch authored the introduction; and the Tooles maintained their position as benefactors.

Thelma once claimed that, when published,
The Neon Bible
would “set the world on fire. It would make young people stop doing drugs.” But it was not met with the same fervor of
Confederacy
. In many ways it was a surprising let down. With few moments of humor, the Southern gothic tale clearly emulates Flannery O'Connor. Reviewers acknowledged that Toole's early work showed remarkable talent for a sixteen-year-old. And eventually the film industry came sniffing around looking to buy movie rights. The adaptation of
The Neon Bible
was released in 1995, and it flopped. The director and screenplay writer, Terence Davies, admitted the film “doesn't work.” He described it as a “transitional piece” for his development as a director. His interest in perspective and cinematic tableaus take clear precedence over pace of the plot or character development. Having served the purpose of Davies, the film left the novel perhaps in its rightful place as a work of juvenilia, a classification with which Toole would have likely agreed.

Undoubtedly, Thelma would be incensed to discover in the end the book was published and turned into a film, while the Tooles received royalties. Considering Thelma never sought riches, her vehement dedication to preventing the Tooles from establishing rights to
The Neon Bible
is puzzling. She had at one time taken Marion Toole Hosli under her wing, teaching her how to play the piano and recite poetry, but her loathing for the Tooles ran so deep she could not overcome it. The intricacies of family feuds aside, Toole's legacy was better served by what Thelma accomplished more so than what she tried to prevent.

We have
A Confederacy of Dunces
today because of her tenacity and dedication. She shepherded an invaluable contribution to American literature into print. And her theatrics certainly prevented the story of the publication from shrinking away. Yet, in designing her son's legacy, Thelma remains a complicated figure. She was keenly aware of her ability to influence how the public viewed her son and how history would remember him. In many ways she did much good. She diligently worked in the last few years of her life to ensure her son's place in literary
history. She established the John Kennedy Toole scholarship fund at Tulane, starting it with a $100,000 donation along with the royalties from
Confederacy
. And with a current worth of more than $1 million, the Toole scholarship continues to enable students “with financial need and literary talent” to attend Tulane. She intended to gift the Ducoing home on Elysian Fields to Tulane with the agreement they would turn it into a museum on the life of her son, although because her brother still owned the house, it was never technically hers to donate. She compiled her son's papers, all the letters, school essays, photographs, memorabilia, and miscellany—a great deal of material—and started to write a biography of him using these documents. She abandoned the biography and then aimed to edit and compile some of his academic writings into a collection she would title
The Scholarly Papers of John Kennedy Toole
. But neither of these projects exceeded a few drafted pages. In 1983 she approached LSU to see if they would like to house her collection of papers, and they declined. So she left them to seven men who had stood by her near the end of her days. Shortly after her death, the executor of the estate, John Geiser, maneuvered to persuade all the heirs to donate their shares of the papers to Tulane to form the Toole Papers in the Special Collections at Howard Tilton Memorial Library.

Her efforts in collecting and keeping materials related to his life and the willingness of the heirs to donate them created an important resource to researchers. But her presence is still felt in this collection. The surviving documents provide details into his mind and the events of his life, but there are major pieces missing, letters that did not survive time, or perhaps Thelma's own edited version of her son's life. Suspicion of such gaps are thrown into relief when one ponders the possible contents of the suicide note that Thelma destroyed but yet discovers her dental bridge carefully preserved in an archival folder. Whether out of a mother's love or a desire to recast her son in a particular image, Thelma shaped his story. But in the end time forced her to let go, leaving many questions about his life wide open to interpretation.

W
ith the voices of Toole and his mother silent, his legacy became susceptible to the conjectures surrounding his death. Thelma may have felt she was protecting her son's memory by circumventing questions about his suicide or his social life, focusing almost exclusively on his “scholarly genius.” But this ultimately led to speculation in the absence of clear information. In some ways Toole's life and death are so indelibly linked to his works, readers are primed to use them as windows into his life. Statements like the one made by film critic Georgia Brown of the
Village Voice
who described
The Neon Bible
as “the autobiographical novel of a sixteen year old American Southerner, John Kennedy Toole” typify this tendency to read his works as a veiled testimony of his life.

This trend has led to grave missteps in biographical and literary interpretations of Toole. The suggestion that Toole was latently homosexual has proliferated into readings of his novel. In 2007 Michael Hardin applied the lens of queer theory to both of Toole's novels, appearing to validate the interpretation that Ignatius Reilly from
Confederacy
and David from
The Neon Bible
are reflections of Toole's conflicted sexuality. Hardin combs the texts for homoerotic coding, going so far as to suggest Ignatius sucking the jelly out of donuts as “an explicit homoerotic allusion.” Hardin then argues that
Confederacy
“becomes darker, even tragic, when read as indicative of a closeted sexuality.” But whose sexuality? While Hardin focuses on Ignatius at the beginning of his essay, he laments that “the extra-textual clues to issues such as [Toole's] sexuality have been destroyed,” as if to suggest his suicide note contained clues to
his sexual identity. He then subtly asserts that these clues may still reside hidden in the two novels, thereby the “queer performance” of the novels is actually an implicit declaration of Toole's own sexuality.

Similar suppositions thread through popular discussion of Toole's life and work as well. For example, in 2004, Raymond-Jean Frontain, professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas, makes a direct claim about Toole's sexuality in an entry in
GLPTQ: The World's Largest Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture
. He writes of the author,

It is unclear when Toole ever expressed “animosity towards the powers that enforce conformity.” Certainly he didn't do so when he climbed the ranks in the army or as he lectured in a coat and tie, mocking the loose rebelliousness of the late 1960s. But what is more disconcerting in this passage is that Frontain could have made his point about Toole's works as depicting homosexuality without suggestion of Toole's own sexual preference. Such assertions do nothing more than drag a dead man out of the proverbial closet. If in the case of Toole “homosexuality” was something more than a label, if he had claimed that identity in any way, then it might make a difference in interpreting his life and his work. Without his own admission or substantial evidence to support the point, such suggestions remain conjecture.

And yet, perhaps such spicy speculation about Toole's supposed secrets add to his mystery. Perhaps in some backward way it propels his legacy. Readers have long filled the unknowns of an artist's life with inferences derived from his works. And these claims through the digestion of popular discourse solidify into “truths.” After all, for more than 160 years readers have concluded that Edgar Allan Poe was an opium addict, an alcoholic, and manic-depressive, citing the content of his works as clear evidence. Of course, in the case of Poe (and perhaps Toole as well) such lore was crystalized by a damaging biography, the first to be written after his death, which purported the ill-contrived assumptions.

Clearly the question of Toole's legacy is a far more complicated one than Thelma likely ever imagined. Sensationalism aside, his name will survive on the lasting merits of his literary work. Commercial success alone does not secure a place in the American literary canon. Plenty of best-sellers have been long forgotten by the reading public. Soon after the publication of
Confederacy,
scholars grappled with the novel. Several early critics responding to the book attempted to classify or explicate it in critical terms. Scholars generally tried to find ways to decode it, as if they were to answer Gottlieb's commentary on the books pointlessness. Some discussed Toole's religion, others discussed the tensions between worldviews in the novel, and others spoke to its function as a satire. In September of 1981, Robert Coles consolidated many of those initial thoughts in a lecture where he claimed Ignatius represented the Catholic Church. His approach elevated the discourse surrounding the novel. But his analysis weakens as he struggles and stretches to find religious symbolism at every turn. Some scholars have tried to define
Confederacy
as a specifically Southern novel. From a regional perspective, it certainly speaks to New Orleanians. The dialect of the characters is unique to the city. And the eccentricity of the characters often strikes a chord with New Orleans readers. And yet, Toole's novel has exceeded the confines of regional literature. Translated editions of the novel sell in bookstores all over the world.

It might very well be that the likenesses between characters in
Confederacy
and those from British, Spanish, and French literature enable international audiences to connect with a novel unique to New Orleans. The British reader certainly understands the wise and indulgent clown from Shakespeare's Falstaff. When the Spaniard picks up the translated version of the novel, there is something familiar. She has followed Don Quixote through his delusions of grandeur and now does the same with Ignatius Reilly. The French have certainly witnessed the grotesque play out in their national literature, starting with Rabelais's
Gargantua and Pantagruel
. And to some translators, Toole's control over his language eases the transition between languages and cultures. When the Italian translation of
Confederacy
by Luciana Bianciardi won the prestigious
Premio Monselice
, Bianciradri wrote to Thelma giving Toole most of the credit, “The novel is ‘universal' in itself so that all I needed was to keep silent, and at the right moment, to lend it my language's idioms.”

The ease with which European readers access the novel should come as no surprise. As a scholar fluent in Spanish and studied in French, Toole had intimate knowledge of his European literary predecessors. And the tradition and psychology of Carnival so infused in European traditions enables a natural familiarity with the parade of characters. Most importantly to him, he offered an authentic depiction of New Orleans. But in drawing from his vast knowledge of classical and contemporary literature, he created a novel that garners readers from New Orleans to Rome. Toole's novel is no more confined by region than Dickens is restricted to London or Cervantes to Spain.

Recently, scholars have taken note of the book's expanse and have discarded the approach of applying a limited lens of identity or region to Toole's work. They recognize that
Confederacy
has effectively eluded rigorous definition or confined placement within the canon, and yet it shows no signs of waning from its popularity. Scholars such as Robert Rudnicki and H. Vernon Leighton explore the variety of influences on Toole, not as a way to define the novel, but rather as a way to open up both the book and his process of creation, in essence to speak to Toole's multiplicity of views. Rudnicki asserts, “
A Confederacy of Dunces
is . . . a novel of ‘influences' and indeed one about the process of influence and artistic development itself.” In fact there is so much interweaving of his literary predecessors there is a sense that scholars have yet to fully tap the literary influences present in the novel.

Admittedly, many readers dislike the book, often finding Ignatius insufferable. Some critics maintain that it could use a good editor. But there are those who continue to find both enjoyment and depth in the novel. Scholars continue to look for threads and clues, keeping the book in conversation. It has made its way to high school classrooms and college courses. And it seems the pathway for its continued success is clear.