Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  That night Ginsberg read “Kiddish,” a poem about the consuming insanity of his mother, her commitment to a mental hospital, and her eventual death. It is a wrenching narrative that would speak to any young man, particularly an only child caught between a sense of filial duty and a longing to fulfill his own life dreams. At the end of the reading, Ginsberg, in tears, embraced his father who sat in attendance. Trilling expresses the overwhelming pity of the audience, which was a surprising emotional response from supposed foul-smelling rebels. Granted, Toole may have been inclined to mock such displays of emotion in the company of friends. But he was not heartless. In some ways, Toole would be able to relate to Ginsberg. Toole’s father was developing neuroses, which would fester into a full-blown mental illness that relegated him to the backroom. In Toole’s most private moments, he proclaimed his love and expressed his exhaustion with his parents, much like Ginsberg had done with his mother on that Thursday night in 1959.

  Ginsberg also offered a vociferous reproach of academics at Columbia. During the question-and-answer period, Ginsberg proclaimed, as Trilling paraphrases, “No one at Columbia knew anything about prosody; the English department was stuck in the nineteenth century, sensible of no meter other than the old iambic pentameter.” This diatribe was soft compared to his rant against Columbia in September of 1958. In a letter to his friend John Hollander, Ginsberg writes, “What a Columbia instructor can recognize in Pound he can’t see in Olson’s method, what he can see in Lorca or Apollinaire he can’t see in Howl—it’s fantastic. You call this education? I call it absolute brainwashed bullshit.” Ginsberg wanted to reclaim poetry from the hands of the arbiters at Columbia.

  Even if Toole missed Ginsberg’s reading, the event evoked the spirit of the times in New York City. Fred Kaplan, author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed, identifies Ginsberg’s reading as one of the keystone moments that preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed the changing tides moved about Toole in New York City in 1959, although what that change would mean was yet unclear. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue at Columbia 30th Street Studio; Harry Truman gave a three-day lecture series at Columbia; Fidel Castro toured the Bronx Zoo, and the owner of Grove Press published the uncensored version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Toole was no anarchist or experimentalist, but in New York, on the home turf of the Beats, he must have heard his generation growing discontent by the old order of its elders. It was the generational difference, as Trilling puts it, between the aged scholar, sitting in his comfortable living room, dressed in a suit, dryly critiquing literature, while his protégé passionately reads poetry on the school stage, bringing audience members to tears. If Toole was there that night, he witnessed the butterfly emerge from the typewriter in his full brilliance, refusing to be crushed by the arbiter.

  Ultimately Toole found his style in refined wit and slapstick humor. In fact, Toole playfully mocks the beatniks in Confederacy. Myrna Minkoff, an angry revolutionary looking to usurp the establishment without any clear sense of why she rebels, is a classic beatnik. And in the last pages of the novel, as Ignatius and Myrna run for the car to make their escape to New York City, the next-door neighbor calls out from behind the shutters, “Hey, where are you two beatniks going?” While he pokes fun at followers of the Beats, he does not take aim at their works. And to whatever degree he sympathized with the discontent of the youth generation, at the very least he considered the complex layers of New York, just as he saw the complexity of New Orleans. It would be all too easy for him to entrench in the libraries and halls of Columbia for his short time in the city. But Toole was too interested in humankind to be so obtuse. He cultivated a vision of New York that stretched from the ivory tower in Morningside Heights to the subterranean realm of the “angel-headed hipsters” of the Beats.

  By spring Toole had to narrow his expansive vision of the metropolis. He put to rest his winter of poetry to focus on fulfilling the requirements of his degree. By then he had the attention of John Wieler, who named Toole “the number one student in the sixteenth century seminar in which there were nine students, three of which were Woodrow Wilson Fellows.” And he was also well prepared for his master’s thesis. Already approved in October of 1958, it was to be another essay on the women characters of John Lyly’s plays. Scholars and biographers have noted that his thesis was a “rewrite” of his undergraduate honor’s essay, but it is, virtually, the same paper. He changed the title, and he added a three-page introduction. He changed some words, and he shifted around some phrases and a few paragraphs. Essentially, he edited it. Even his conclusion reads nearly verbatim from his undergraduate essay, except a sentence he added at the end where he claims Lyly’s works as a predecessor to Shakespeare’s. Submitting an essay originally written for another purpose was uncharacteristic of Toole. Of course, it may have been a choice driven by finances. A thesis in need of only a few touchups would help him complete the program in two semesters. And the choice may have been affirmed by his winter suspicions of the role of the critic. He had dissected Lyly before. He would not have to heft another work of art onto his examination table. And the fact that the essay he essentially wrote at Tulane satisfied the degree requirements for his MA from Columbia testifies to his academic virtuosity in his undergraduate days. Surely he could have crafted another essay, but as usual, time and money worked against him. In March of 1959, his thesis was approved. Professor Wieler commented that his work “reflected wide reading, critical acumen and literary sensitivity.”

  During his last few months at Columbia, he prepared for the final examinations. On May 18 he took the six-hour essay test that covered literary theory and literary history. His nine months of reading and attending lectures had boiled down to these essays. Like most challenges in his life thus far, he excelled. He passed the exam and was approved to graduate. But not all graduates were equal at Columbia. The English department had a ranking system, tied to continuance into the PhD program. As the Graduate Student’s Guide explains, “The Third Class is considered a Pass; the Second, Honors; the First, rarely awarded, High Honors.” Toole graduated with High Honors.

  With this distinction he could have continued on to the PhD program, but this would mean he would need funding. Many PhD students in the English department taught at other colleges to make ends meet. Wieler tried to secure Toole a teaching position at Hunter College. But Hunter maintained a rigid rule of hiring only professors with experience. Despite his attempts to convince Hunter to make an exception in the case of Toole, the college was unyielding. Without experience, his prospects of landing a teaching job in New York were grim. But a break from graduate studies may have been a welcomed reprieve as well. The winter season had provoked serious questions over the role of the literary critic. And he did, after all, harbor aspirations of becoming a fiction writer. In the Woodrow Wilson fellowship directory, his listing appears as “John Kennedy Toole . . . MA 1959; Columbia University; Graduate studies interrupted—plans uncertain.” Despite the completion of his degree, Toole still found himself in limbo, somewhere between scholar, writer, and teacher.

  With his future unclear, Toole graduated on a cool spring day in Manhattan. On June 2, more than six thousand students gathered to participate in commencement at Columbia. Usually the ceremony would take place on the South Lawn under the watchful eye of the goddess Alma Mater, but with light rain drizzling throughout the day, graduation was moved to St. John the Divine, the nearby Episcopal cathedral. Like most graduations, the president praised students for their accomplishments and sent them forth to work for a better tomorrow. He reminded them that they were an elite group, graduating from an institution undistracted by the lunacy of sports or socializing, fully invested in intellectual growth. The graduation ceremony in the cathedral, jam-packed with nearly ten thousand people culminated an intense year for Toole. It had tested his intellect and his fortitude for living in New York, a city he found both exhilarating and exhausting.

  Regardless of where he would end up, New York left its
imprint on Toole. He adopted a rapid cadence in his speech, discarding his Southern drawl. He picked up the Ivy League style—a form-fitting coat and a slim tie. He also heeded the advice of the Graduate Student’s Guide, which suggested upon graduation the student should “leave the institution he has learned to consider his intellectual nest and fly under his own power in a new academic environment, no longer a student but an officer of instruction.”

  However, he took an opposite direction from the subsequent advice in the handbook, which snobbishly states, “Better to teach first-rate minds in a good preparatory school than to waste one’s spirit on the tenth-rate in an inferior college.” As a graduate of one of the premier institutions of higher education in the country, he applied for his first job teaching English at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, a small college with open enrollment admissions in the backwaters of southern Louisiana. Toole tapped his professor at Tulane to write a letter of recommendation. Therein, Richard Fogle comments on Toole, “He is certainly a good bet. . . . He is attractive in a slightly dour fashion (heavy eyebrows) and talks well.... He seems an extremely solid fellow who has developed a great deal in the past couple of years.... All in all . . . you’ll be lucky to get Toole as far as prospects go.”

  Wieler also wrote a glowing letter, recounting Toole’s stellar year at Columbia and offering his “unqualified recommendation.” But that letter suggests Toole may have understood this to be a temporary move. Wieler indicates that Toole would have a place in New York once he gained some teaching experience. “If Mr. Toole ever returns to Columbia to complete his Ph.D.,” Wieler writes, “I shall make every effort to give him some work while he completes his degree.” As Toole prepared to leave New York City, he was likely aware that the doorway back to Columbia was clear and open to him.

  The job offer from Southwestern Louisiana Institute came quickly. They would pay him four thousand dollars for the academic year, teaching five freshman-level writing courses per semester. Toole accepted, and the department was thrilled to have him on board. Professor Paul Nolan wrote to Toole in the summer of 1959, suggesting that he would enjoy Lafayette. He warned Toole the town was small, but “in matters of personal and academic liberty it compares favorably to both” New York and New Orleans. However, Nolan draws one major distinction between New Orleans and Lafayette. In Cajun country “the crawfish is better.”

  So Toole packed his belongings and left his tenth floor room with the view of the high rises and bell towers. He returned to the second-floor apartment on Audubon Street, the family home under the canopied green of Uptown New Orleans. Back in his hometown, he spent the rest of his summer counting the days before moving to the bayou, a journey that would change his life forever.

  Chapter 6

  Cajun Country

  Driving west out of New Orleans in the late summer of 1959, Toole crossed over the undulating land of southern Louisiana, watching as it sank into murky brown waters then rose to the flat fields where plantations once grew sugar cane and rice. He crossed the Atchafalaya swamp, open and expansive, where water and land mingle, where alligators lurk beneath the surface, and where the warm breeze gently moves through the cypress trees. In his epic poem Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imagined this same ancient place “resplendent in beauty” with “numberless sylvan islands” and air “faint . . . with the odorous breath of magnolia blossoms.”

  For centuries, the bayous of southern Louisiana have been home to the Cajuns, descendants of the French settlers who were banished from their homes in the eighteenth century, following the British invasion of Acadiana, the land now called Nova Scotia. Seeking refuge under a French government, the Acadians arrived in New Orleans to find the ruling Spanish pointing them toward the wild western territory, a land left to the native tribes and freed blacks willing to attempt a life in its treacherous beauty.

  For much of Louisiana history, Cajuns have been viewed as the rural poor, cast in popular culture as bumbling and toothless hicks. To outsiders they appeared ignorant and uncivilized. But in truth they hailed from a rich cultural history. Perhaps through the isolation of the bayou or from their shared story of exile, they kept their French legacy alive, while incorporating the African and Native American traditions of their neighbors. They blend the flavors of those varied cultures in pots of gumbo, crawfish étouffée, and jambalaya. They dance and sing to the earthy sounds of Zydeco, to another day alive. They seem to celebrate their understanding that all human endeavors slowly slip back into the water.

  At the western edge of the vast swamp, the land ascends to an elevated plateau, and there sits Lafayette, the capital of Cajun country. When Toole arrived, French was still spoken in the shops and restaurants, but the Cajun way of life was quickly changing. Since the early 1950s, Texas oil companies that had moved into the region had been propelling the city toward modernization. Sons and daughters left their family farms, their flat-bottom boats, and their kitchens to attend Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), hoping to secure a future with more money and less hardship. The school that once focused on agricultural studies and was still completely bordered by farms now bustled with mostly Cajun students taking all manner of courses, seeking a different kind of life.

  In early September the annual frenzy of course registration took over the campus. Meanwhile, Toole settled into his new home. He had found a two-room ground floor apartment in a converted carriage house outside the home of Elisabeth Montgomery on Covent Street. His landlady, “a hyperactive widow in her sixties,” came from a wealthy family, but she kept her guesthouse in modest condition. Toole once described it to his friend Joel Fletcher as “a cramped heart of darkness with cockroaches and a linoleum floor.” The dark dips and crevices of the pecky cypress wall paneling made perfect homes for spiders and other little bugs. But for all its discomforts, it was a place of his own, absent the clamor of dorm life or the presence of his parents. On the second floor apartment lived the artist Elmore Morgan Jr., with whom Toole could discuss literature and art in the lazy moments of an evening or a Sunday afternoon.

  It would take some time for Toole to adjust to life in Lafayette. He had to slow his New York pace. And on the first day of class, he reckoned with his new place of employment. From the front of the campus, SLI looked like many colleges—distinguished red brick buildings with white-columned porticos connected to arched walkways, offering the architectural accents that dignify an institution of higher learning. But Toole would have no corner office overlooking the green lawn where undergraduates mingle between classes. His post was with the rest of the English teachers at the back of the campus in an orderly collection of decomposing army surplus buildings. Originally constructed as a temporary training facility during World War II, SLI had purchased the buildings to accommodate the increase in students. It seemed so far away from the main campus that students named it Little Abbeville after the town twenty miles south of Lafayette. It was the home of the English department.

  Isolated from the rest of campus, the push for modernity in Lafayette did not reach the decrepit little “town” on the edges. Few of the classrooms in Little Abbeville had the luxury of a fan; most depended on open windows in the summer and a potbelly stove to keep warm in the winter. Paint peeled from the thin walls, water dripped from the ceilings, and wood desks were crammed into every space available. Humidity and termites had fed on the buildings so badly that if female students wore high heels the wood floor would crumble under their steps. Occasionally, in the midst of a lecture, a professor would go to write on the blackboard and under the pressure of his hand a small section of the wall would give way.

  And yet, despite the condition of the buildings, SLI was in many ways a perfect place for Toole to gain experience teaching. While much of the South remained racially segregated, holding on to the delusion of “separate but equal,” SLI had opened its doors to black students a few months after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which made it unconstitut
ional for black students to be segregated into separate schools. It was the first college in Louisiana to do so. So Toole walked into racially integrated classrooms. And because the students largely came from segregated school districts, teaching required patience and tolerance in order to address the disparities in their varied skill levels.

  Regardless of race, the rural roots of the students were obvious. Many of them primarily spoke Cajun French, even though speaking French had been banned in the school systems. Many of them came from families adept at life in southern Louisiana—able to hunt alligator, trap crawfish, tend to crops, and make a perfect roux—all-important skills in the bayou. Writing an academic essay, however, posed a formidable challenge. It was clear his labors in Lafayette would differ drastically from honor’s classes and graduate seminars. Just a few months prior, Toole had strolled between the towering skyscrapers of New York and conversed with the sophisticates of Columbia; it all must have seemed like another life once lived in a vague past. And yet, even as he carried the air of an Ivy League graduate into his remedial English courses, he treated his students with unequivocal respect. “He was always gracious to them,” his friend and colleague Patricia Rickels remembers, “and they loved him.”