Reading A Confederacy of Dunces is like eating Pop Rocks. You go along enjoying yourself until a particularly good line like “…someone had shown him a pornographic photograph and he had collapsed against a water cooler, injuring his ear” bursts with such brightness that it almost hurts. Cory McLauchlin’s new biography of Confederacy’s author John Kennedy Toole sparkles in much the same way: “…Thelma Toole tripped on some steps and tumbled to the ground. The fall must have jostled her insides enough to remove whatever stood in the way of her and motherhood, because shortly thereafter, she got pregnant.” Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces is full of these revealing little grace notes that turn a biography into a character study and bring its subject to life.
An author could easily write an unsympathetic biography of Toole. At a casual glance, he looks like a mama’s boy, and the stigma attached to suicide plays into efforts to write him off as an unstable one-hit wonder. Other biographers have applied trendy theories to Toole’s life and work, announcing gleefully that he was a closeted homosexual and alcoholic, as though these were complete explanations in themselves. MacLauchlin puts his impressively exhaustive research to work exploding both the convenient caricature of Toole as a spoiled, real-life Ignatius Reilly and the later, pseudo-scholarly attempt to force him into a Tennessee Williams mold; instead, he shows us a kinder, more comprehensible man, an engaging jokester who bounced between the conflicting desires of wanting to be taken seriously and needing to get a laugh.
Raised in the lower middle class in New Orleans by a stage mother proud of her Creole blood, Toole excelled at nearly everything he did. At sixteen, he both graduated high school and finished his first novel, The Neon Bible, which (as one might guess from the title) was heavily influenced by Flannery O’Connor’s work. When The Neon Bible failed to win a contest in which he entered it, Toole packed it away and began his academic career, whipping through undergrad at Tulane and a master’s at Columbia. He then taught college at the proto-UL Lafayette before enlisting and teaching cadets English at an army base in Puerto Rico for two years. While in Puerto Rico, preparing a bilingual force for the expected eventual war with Cuba, Toole borrowed a typewriter and began work on Confederacy, drawing pieces of the novel from impressions of friends and memories of Louisiana. He continued working on it after returning to New Orleans at the end of his tour to support his mother and increasingly mentally ill father, even entering into a lengthy, and ultimately fruitless, correspondence with fabled editor Robert Gottlieb.
Eventually, strained by the tension of supporting his parents and the seeming failure of his second novel, Toole’s own sanity began to falter; and he abruptly left New Orleans to drive around the country in the early weeks of 1969. The writer who would come to be so closely associated with New Orleans returned only as far as a road outside Biloxi before committing suicide; in one of the most haunting details of his story (and one Toole would probably have relished), most of the papers he had with him when he died, including the beginnings of a third novel, were destroyed when Hurricane Camille savaged the Mississippi coast later that year.
Often, we say that someone good at their job “makes it look easy,” but what’s impressive about Butterfly in the Typewriter is the amount of hard work that obviously went into it. Even in a review copy, which hasn’t gone through the final round of buffing and polishing on the text, the prose is clean and strong. The acknowledgements section reads like a roll call of Toole’s surviving friends and colleagues, all tracked down by McLauchlin for interviews.
The text occasionally veers too far into literary criticism for the casual reader—in my notes, I referred to this as “patchy dryness” and giggled at my own joke—but this is probably a necessary evil when discussing an enigmatic author so closely associated with his masterwork, and doesn’t do serious harm to the book as a whole. If you enjoyed A Confederacy of Dunces, read this book. If you’ve never read A Confederacy of Dunces, read it, then read this book. If you hated A Confederacy of Dunces … well, frankly, I don’t know what to tell you.
