| Name | John Kennedy Toole |
|---|---|
| Birthdate | December 17, 1937 |
| Birthplace | New Orleans, Louisiana, United States |
| Deathdate | March 26, 1969 |
| Deathplace | Biloxi, Mississippi, United States |
| Occupation | novelist, professor, soldier |
| Influences | Charles Dickens, Flannery O'Connor, Theodore Dreiser |
| Notableworks | A Confederacy of Dunces |
Toole was born to a middle class family in New Orleans. From a young age, his mother taught him an appreciation of culture. She was thoroughly involved in his affairs for most of his life, and at times they had a difficult relationship. With his mother's encouragement, Toole became a stage performer at the age of 10 doing comic impressions and acting. At 16 he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, which he later dismissed as "adolescent". The first of the Creole Ducoing family arrived in Louisiana from France in the early 19th century, and the Tooles immigrated to America from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Toole's father worked as a car salesman, and his mother, forced to give up her teaching job when she married (as was the custom), gave private lessons in music, speech, and dramatic expression. Toole was known to friends and family as "Ken" until the final few months of his life, when he insisted on being called John.
Toole's highly cultured mother was a controlling woman, especially with her son. His father was less involved and sometimes complained of his lack of influence in their child's upbringing. Despite this, he and his father bonded through a mutual interest in baseball and cars. Toole's mother chose the friends he could associate with, and felt his cousins on his father's side were too common for him to be around. Toole received high marks in elementary school, and from a young age expressed a desire to excel academically. He skipped ahead a grade, from first to second, after taking an IQ test at the age of six.
When Toole was ten, his mother gathered a group of child stage entertainers she named the Junior Variety Performers. The troupe consisted of 50 children of varying skills and ages. It was well-received, and he also engaged in other entertainment ventures, such as playing the lead in three productions of the Children's Workshop Theatre of New Orleans, MCing a radio show called "Telekids", and a solo show of comic impersonations entitled Great Lovers of the World.
Although an excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school to concentrate on his academic work. He wrote for the school newspaper, worked on the yearbook, and won several essay contests on subjects such as the Louisiana Purchase and the American Merchant Marine. He took up debating, a skill his father had won the state championship in during high school. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organizations such as Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. In high school, Toole spent a lot of time at the home of classmate Larry McGee, and dated McGee's sister, Jane. Jane later said that Toole never wanted to go home and would purposefully spend almost all of his free time at the McGees'. With the McGees, Toole would engage in mischievous pranks and go on double dates with Larry and his girlfriend Buzz. The couples often spent their free time at the local pool, or cruising around in Toole's car.
As a teenager in 1954, Toole made his first trip out of Louisiana to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. on a field trip. He especially enjoyed New York and filled a cherished scrapbook with pictures from his visit, which included trips on the New York Subway System, an excursion on a boat in the New York Harbor, visits to the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, Times Square, and the program from a performance of the "Rockettes" he had seen.
Toole became the editor of the news section of the school newspaper, and maintained high marks throughout high school. He received a full scholarship to Tulane University at 17.
During his senior year, Toole wrote The Neon Bible a short novel of Southern Gothic Fiction that has been compared in style to Flannery O'Connor, a favorite author of Toole's. before his father lost his job forcing them into a small shoddily built home. Set in 1940's Mississippi, the backwoods Baptist community setting is similar to a location where Toole had once traveled to with a high school friend for a literary contest. The novel's sudden outburst of violence at the end has been described as incongruous with what has preceded it. It failed to attract interest from publishers and was not released until after Toole's death.
In May, Toole accepted a three-year fellowship to study for a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at the University of Washington at Seattle. However, when he was offered a teaching position at Hunter College, which suited his desire to study at Columbia, he chose to go there instead. At 22, he became the youngest professor in Hunter's history. Although he pursued a doctorate at Columbia, he became unhappy with his Ph.D. However, he wrote to Fletcher that he still liked Hunter, "principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, 'liberal' girl students are continuously amusing." Fletcher surmised that from these girls the character of Myrna Minkoff from Dunces was born. Although he was generally only a "Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer" "Every time the elevator door opens at Hunter, you are confronted by 20 pairs of burning eyes, 20 sets of bangs and everyone waiting for someone to push a Negro" he is reported to have said. Both women said their relationships with Toole never progressed beyond the level of a good night kiss.
He also engaged in one of the favorite activities of military personnel on the island; alcohol consumption. Both the soldiers and the instructors at the base drank excessively, as alcohol was cheap and plentiful. Toole remarked in another letter to Fletcher, "We are all rotting here at the moment. The decreased draft has meant no trainees since June...the inactivity here, coupled with the remnants of a rainy and enervating summer has (have?) plunged the English instructors into an abyss of drinking and inertia. Occasionally someone will struggle off to the beach or to San Juan, but the maxim here remains, "It's too hot."" When Emilie Griffin paid Toole a visit in December of 1961 she was dismayed at what she saw. Toole was notably depressed and while dining at a local hotel she noted that "the windows on all sides of our table were filled with perfect rainbows. Ken was sitting in a pocket of darkness surrounded by these brilliant colored arches and he never looked at them." Disgusted, he wrote home, "It's a wonder I haven't been stabbed yet or paralyzed by intestinal diseases on this insane little geographical mountain top protruding from the Caribbean. However, under any circumstances the loss of the ring affects me deeply." Toole's army buddy David Kubach, was also an aspiring writer and he lent him a green Swedish-made Halda typewriter for use in his office. The barracks consisted solely of college educated English professors, which gave it a different makeup from usual army companies. In contrast to almost all other army barracks where gays kept their sexual orientation a secret, there was an openly gay contingent which flaunted their homosexuality. The gay men reserved a portion of the barracks for themselves and as they did not proposition any of the straight instructors, they were left alone. Toole's response was to ignore their behavior and it lost him the respect of some of the men in the barracks. The problem came to a head when a gay instructor attempted suicide by overdosing on APC (aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine) tablets after being spurned by another soldier. When Toole found the man he waited a half hour to call for help, hoping he would awaken on his own. Some of his fellow soldiers were livid and held a meeting deciding whether to report Toole's negligence. Ultimately, they did not report his behavior and the army never filed any charges but his relationships with many of the men were irrevocably changed.
After this incident, Toole became withdrawn and began spending more and more time in his office typing what would eventually become his master work, A Confederacy of Dunces. It was not a secret that Toole was writing a book. Late at night, his fellow soldiers could often hear the sound of the typewriter keys. Although he was secretive about the novel among the other men, Toole showed the early portions of it to Kubach who gave him positive feedback. He later commented that he began to "talk and act like Ignatius" during this period as he became more and more immersed in the creation of the book. His letter home to his parents of April 10, 1963 shows these similarities:
The book eventually reached senior editor Robert Gottlieb, who had talked the then-unknown Joseph Heller into completing the classic comic novel Catch 22. They began a two-year correspondence and dialogue over the novel which would ultimately result in bitter disappointment on both sides. While Gottlieb felt Toole was undoubtedly talented, he was unhappy with the book in its original form. He felt that it had one basic flaw which he expressed to Toole in an early letter:
building in New York City in February 1965. When he found out Gottlieb was out of town, Toole felt humiliated.]] Initially, although Toole was disappointed that the novel could not be published as is, he was exuberant that a major publisher was interested in it. He entered his second year of teaching at Dominican as one of the favorite new professors on staff. Students marveled at his wit, and Toole would make entire classes burst into laughter while hardly showing expression. He never retold a story or joke, and had many repeat students. Gottlieb told Toole they felt he was "... wildly funny often, funnier than almost anyone around". Toole decided that it would be best for Gottlieb to return the manuscript, saying "Aside from a few deletions, I don't think I could really do much to the book now—and of course even with revisions you might not be satisfied." Toole made a trip to New York to see Gottlieb in person; however, he was out of town and Toole came back disappointed. He felt that he had embarrassed himself by giving a rambling, uncomfortable speech explaining his situation to one of Gottlieb's office staff. He returned home having left a note for Gottlieb to call him, and they later talked for an hour on the phone. In this conversation Gottlieb re-iterated that he would not accept the novel without further revision. He suggested that Toole move on to writing something else, an idea which Toole ultimately rejected.
Gottlieb wrote him an encouraging letter, in which he stated again that he felt Toole was very talented (even more so than himself) and that if Toole were to re-submit the manuscript he would continue to "read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me. What more can I say?"
Except for a few trips by car to Madison, Wisconsin to see army pal David Kubach, Toole spent most of the last three years of his life at home only leaving to go to Dominican. In the winter of 1967, Kubach, who had came down to visit Toole, noticed an increased sense of paranoia on Toole's part; once when driving around New Orleans, Toole became convinced they were being followed and attempted to lose the car. The family moved to a larger rental house on Hampson Street, and Toole continued teaching, with his students noticing that his wit had become more acerbic. He continued to drink heavily, and gained a great deal of weight, causing him to have to purchase an entire new wardrobe. Toole began having frequent and intense headaches, and as aspirin was no help, he saw a doctor. The doctor's treatment was also ineffective, and he suggested Toole see a neurologist, an idea which Toole rejected.
Toole tried to maintain a sense of normalcy and enrolled in Tulane in the fall of 1968 with the hopes of acquiring a Ph.D. He took a course studying Theodore Dreiser, who he had lectured on while at Hunter, and was particularly interested in Dreiser's close relationship with his mother and his anti-Catholic beliefs. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 added to his feelings of grief and heightened his paranoia. Several of Toole's longtime friends noticed he had an increasing sense of feelings of personal persecution. Toole went to see his friend Bob Byrne at his home in August 1968, where he again expressed sadness and humiliation that his book would not be published. Toole told Byrne that people were passing his home late in the night and honking their car horns at him, that students whispered about him behind his back, and that people were plotting against him. Byrne had a talk with him, which he felt, for the time being, calmed him down. He also began to exhibit signs of paranoia, including telling friends that a woman who he erroneously thought had worked for Simon & Schuster was plotting to steal his book so that her husband, the novelist George Deaux, could publish it.
Toole became increasingly erratic during his lectures at Dominican, resulting in frequent student complaints, and was given to rants against church and state. Toward the end of the 1968 fall semester, he was forced to take a leave of absence and stopped attending classes at Tulane, resulting in him receiving a grade of incomplete.
When Toole was unable to resume his position at Dominican in January, the school had to hire another professor. He stopped by the house the next day to pick up some things and spoke only to his father, as Thelma was out at the grocery store. He left home for the final time and withdrew $1500 from his saving account. Thelma became convinced that Toole's friends the Rickels knew where he was and called them repeatedly, even though they denied knowing where he had gone. This was succeeded by a drive toward New Orleans. It was during this trip that he stopped outside Biloxi, Mississippi, and committed suicide by running a garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window of his car on March 26, 1969. His car and person were immaculately clean, and the police officers who found him reported that his face showed no signs of distress. An envelope discovered in the car was marked "to my parents". The suicide note inside the envelope was destroyed by his mother, who later gave varying vague accounts of its details. In one instance she said it expressed his "concerned feeling for her" and later she told a Times-Picayune interviewer that the letter was "bizarre and preposterous. Violent. Ill-fated. Ill-fated. Nothing. Insane ravings." He was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in New Orleans. A few years earlier, Toole had driven his army buddy David Kubach to the exact spot where he would later commit suicide. As the location was inconspicuous, Kubach did not understand why Toole had taken him there. He left his parents a two thousand dollar life insurance policy, several thousand dollars in savings, and his car. The students and faculty at Dominican were grief stricken at Toole's death and the school held a memorial service for him in the college courtyard. The head of Dominican gave a brief eulogy, however as the institution was Catholic, his suicide was never mentioned.
Despite Percy's great admiration for the book the road to publication was still difficult. It took over three more years, as he attempted to get several parties interested in it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1980, and Percy provided the foreword. At his recommendation, Toole's first draft of the book was published with minimal copy-editing, and no significant revisions. The first printing was only 2,500 copies, and a number of these were sent to Scott Kramer, an executive at 20th Century Fox, to pitch around Hollywood, but the book initially generated little interest. However, the novel attracted much attention in the literary world. A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book has sold more than 1.5 million copies, in 18 languages.
Toole's only other novel, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989. It was adapted into a feature film in 1995, directed by Terence Davies, which was a critical and commercial failure.
Category:1937 births Category:1969 deaths Category:American novelists Category:American satirists Category:American writers of Irish descent [Category:Louisiana Creole people]] Category:Writers from Louisiana Category:People from New Orleans, Louisiana Category:Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners Category:Tulane University alumni Category:Columbia University alumni Category:University of Louisiana at Lafayette faculty Category:Writers who committed suicide Category:Suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning Category:Suicides in Mississippi Category:Tulane University faculty Category:Hunter College faculty
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
