Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  But for Toole, courtesies rarely overshadowed the humor of humanity. He found daily comical moments as his students, many of them well into their adulthood, periodically stumbled in attempts to sound scholarly. They would try to impress him with elaborate vocabulary that they clearly misunderstood and often misused. He once shared with friends a quote from one of his female students. In a slow, deliberate Southern drawl, he repeated, “Intrinsically, I knowed it to be true.” The conviction with which she expressed her nonsensical statement amused him. Of course, he would have never mocked her to her face. Such humor was shared and kept between colleagues.

  As a new teacher, Toole also benefitted from a department that took its mission of teaching seriously—more than it pressured the faculty to publish or conduct research. The faculty’s dedication created a robust camaraderie between its members. In fact, many of them recognized they could learn a great deal from each other. Rickels remembers how faculty members used to sit outside of classroom doors, listening to their colleagues lecture. Closing her eyes, imagining back to 1960, she recalled, “Dick Wagner, Ken Toole, Bobby Byrne . . . you would always learn something.” Far from the seats of authority, in Little Abbeville, professors made their classrooms self-contained worlds that they could shape with their students, even if that world was physically crumbling around them. With the support of colleagues passionate about teaching and without worries of overbearing administrators, Toole had the freedom to refine his skills as a teacher.

  But just as the isolation of the Cajuns created some of the colorful culture in southern Louisiana, so too the English faculty, largely left to their own means in Little Abbeville, seemed to attract and cultivate eccentrics. Toole would later playfully call them a “faculty composed of fiends and madmen.” Shortly after his arrival in Lafayette, he must have marveled at the madcap personalities, like most new faculty members did. George Deaux, an aspiring novelist who came to work at the college a few weeks after Toole left, never forgot the “peculiar behavior” in the department. Reviewing some of the most memorable moments, Deaux recalls,One guy had a fixation that he could only grade papers after he had found a four-leaf clover. As hundreds of freshmen essays piled up on his desk, he searched even at night with a flashlight for a four-leaf clover. Another colleague became convinced that the voice of Dorothy Wordsworth was speaking to her from the radiator in her room.

  Joel Fletcher and several others at the college recall the hallucinating instructor was actually a “skinny young male” who believed Emily Dickinson, not Dorothy Wordsworth, spoke through the radiator. Regardless of the instructor’s gender or what nineteenth-century author communicated from beyond the grave, one day George Deaux and a small group of faculty “gathered around the radiator to debunk this nonsense only to hear the voice speaking from it.” They “finally concluded that the radiator was picking up a radio signal.”

  This eccentricity even extended to some of the students. “Deaux recalls one student named Ted, who for unknown reasons emptied his .38 revolver into his TV set while his seventy-year-old mother in her rocking chair egged him on: ‘Shoot it agin, Ted. Shoot it agin!’”

  Of course, not all the strange behavior was so humorous. English professor Thomas Sims suffered a mental breakdown the year after Toole taught at SLI. Bereaved by his wife’s early death from cancer, Sims “stopped talking altogether, would meet his classes, sit silently at his desk for an hour, and then leave the room.” The college transferred him to an administrative position.

  While some faculty showed the fragility of the mind, most exhibited foibles of outrageous hilarity. By far the most memorable and monumental specimen of eccentricity who left an indelible impression on Toole was Bobby Byrne, a mustached medievalist, tall and burly with dark hair. He lived in a little cabin behind the house of a fellow professor, where he played his harp, his violà de gamba, and a harpsichord he had custom made in England. As an avid devotee to Boethius, he assigned The Consolation of Philosophy to every class he taught, even freshman composition. As Professor Rickels remembers, “He believed the climax of civilization occurred sometime during the fourteenth century; it had been on a steady decline ever since.” Byrne often said of people their “geometry and theology are all wrong,” echoing a favorite line of his from an H. P. Lovecraft short story. And while he had completed his doctoral course work at Tulane, he never wrote his dissertation. At one time, one of Byrne’s professors is reported to have said to him, “Bobby, just give me a piece of paper with something written on it, and I will give you your PhD.” But he deemed the exercise of a dissertation unnecessary. “I wasn’t going to learn anything from it, and besides I already had tenure,” he admitted in an interview in 1995 with University of Louisiana graduate student Carmine Palumbo. “Ya see,” he explained further, “I have a birth defect. I am amazingly unambitious.” And yet this supposedly unambitious man taught himself to read Welsh and ancient Japanese, simply because he had heard they were the two most difficult languages to learn.

  Behind his supercilious posturing, Byrne was also known for his ill-timed flatulence, and he harbored a deep devotion to hot dogs. He once told Rickels a story from his childhood that explained and justified his passion for the common street food. When he was growing up, his mother had become convinced that “wieners were not good for children.” But taking pity on her son, she would occasionally yield to his pleas. Preparing the rare and savory treat, she carefully buttered both sides of a split bun as the young Bobby watched with anticipation. Then she nestled the sanctioned sausage into its soft throne. But as she handed it to little Bobby, she would squeeze the bun so the hot dog would slip back into her hand, leaving the child only the buttered bun to eat. “I felt cheated all my life,” he would say, thinking back to all the hot dogs that had eluded him in his youth. In adulthood, he reclaimed those lost wieners.

  Whether by chance or choice, Byrne and Toole shared an office at SLI. They actually had much in common. Byrne was hired the year before Toole, so he was relatively new to the faculty. They were both raised in Uptown, had an interest in medieval thought, and graduated from Tulane, although Byrne had finished his undergraduate studies nearly a decade prior to Toole. They also felt a fierce sense of devotion to their hometown. And like any two New Orleanians, their histories connected long before a formal introduction. Byrne’s aunt was Toole’s second-grade teacher, who remembered the bright child and his hovering mother.

  Their similarities of background aside, one could not conceive of a more opposite pair sitting together in an office. Toole’s average height and trendy fashion sense contrasted with Byrne’s burly physique and his incomprehensibly bizarre manner of dressing. Byrne cared little about coordinating his attire. And his blatant disregard for appearances occasionally shocked Toole, who always had his clothes “fit, tapered, neat as a pin . . . carefully fitted pants with a good crease in them.” One day Byrne came to their office “wearing three different kinds of plaid and an absurd hat.” Toole later told his friend Joel Fletcher of the shocking vision that had materialized in front of him. He could not help but comment, “My God, Bobby! . . . You look like the April Fool cover of Esquire!”

  Byrne usually dismissed such comments, especially from a young man who clearly put stock in appearances. But as a faculty member with higher rank, Byrne need not suffer reprisals from his junior colleague. When Toole once reproached him for the loose fit of his clothes, Byrne responded with a pointed and detailed lecture on the sartorial philosophy of the Arabs, who, he argued, wear flowing fabrics in order to retain moderately warm body air and keep out the desert heat.

  Indeed, with his encyclopedic knowledge and bellowing voice, it seemed Byrne could dissertate on any topic. Those who kept company with him learned to endure his preaching. But Toole not only enjoyed Byrne, on occasion he provoked him, as if to test his reaction. In an article published in Acadian Profile, Trent Angers interviewed several of Toole’s friends who recalled one cool spring morning Bobby Byrne, J. C. Broussard, and Tool
e sat at “an outdoor table next to the concession stand . . . engrossed in a bull session.” Angers describes the scene:Bobby Byrne, was giving a verbal dissertation on the lack of taste and social redeeming value in music and literature created since the Medieval period.... John Kennedy Toole, was sitting across the table with his head cocked to the side with eyebrows raised and with a smirk on his face as if he were trying to break in with something like, “I can’t believe that’s coming out of your mouth!” Byrne continued pontificating, and Toole began trying to harass the orator with facial contortions that reflected increasing incredulity at what he was hearing.

  Accustomed to Byrne’s tirades, Broussard sat at the table silently drinking his coffee. Then Broussard noticed that Toole “seemed to be studying and subtly mimicking the speaker’s gestures.” In his year at Lafayette, Toole found in Byrne a New Orleans character almost too much to take, the ironies and absurdities layered into his larger-than-life existence. The contradictions of his bizarre clothes and his demeanor of sophistication made him ripe for the plucking. Toole closely watched Byrne, taking note of his sayings and inflections. And Byrne remained unaware of the impressions he made on Toole for decades. In recalling their many conversations, Byrne admits, “I didn’t know I was under observation.”

  Almost twenty years later, when Rickels read an excerpt of Confederacy published in the New Orleans Review, she immediately recognized the basis for the slovenly character Ignatius Reilly. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed to her husband, “This is about Bobby Byrne!” She worried Byrne would read it, and find out what Toole had done. But Byrne made it a point not to read popular fiction, especially not best-sellers. He finally gave in after someone leant him a copy, telling him he must read it because obviously Toole based the main character on him. Byrne recognized some likenesses between himself and Ignatius. The devotion to Boethius, his passion for hot dogs, the motto of “theology and geometry,” and his dress all seemed to be derived from him. Toole even seemed to have recalled Byrne’s lecture on Arab dress when describing the fashion philosophy of Ignatius Reilly whose “voluminous tweed trousers” had “pleats and nooks” that “contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed” him.

  But Byrne also recognized clear differences between himself and Ignatius. As a tenured professor, he enjoyed professional success. He was a true academic. His colleagues recognized him as a walking encyclopedia. These were not the accomplishments of a lazy man loafing off his mother. And while Ignatius claims devotion to Boethius, Byrne actually held The Consolation of Philosophy as his creed; to a degree, he lived the principles of Boethius who accepted the meaninglessness of the body and focused on the mind and soul. For Byrne, pretentions in appearance exhibited mere vanity.

  Upon these differences, Byrne denied he was the inspiration for Ignatius. Rather, he identified Ignatius as the alter ego of Toole, imbued with all the characteristics that Toole feared he might become: messy, alienated, fat, and such a tremendous failure that everyone laughs at his blunders. In fact, Byrne believed that Toole envied him in some ways, citing a conversation he had with Rickels where she admitted that Toole once marveled at Byrne’s ability to dismiss the materialism of the world and still be content. “He has it all figured out,” Toole commented. Alas, tenure at a small rural college, a cabin in which to live, and spending free time playing fourteenth-century music, would never satisfy Toole. Byrne noticed a burning drive in his young colleague to become “rich and famous,” to achieve greatness. This drive deprived him of a lasting sense of contentment.

  Interestingly, in the same interview that Byrne offers this psychoanalytic reading of Ignatius Reilly, he rails against the absurdity of using Freudian psychology to interpret literature. Byrne might have a point in Ignatius being the alter ego of Toole, but he seems to miss the more likely possibility of why Toole grinned and reveled in his observations of his over-the-top colleague. To any medievalist, Byrne could be seen as a textbook rendition of a medieval clown: a character both of the mind and of the body, humorous in that he speaks with knowledge and eloquence but still succumbs to the whims of the belly, much like Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

  With Byrne at the forefront of absurdity, Toole watched this great play of humanity at SLI. He could not stop himself from mimicking such a rich palate of colorful personas. His colleagues were astounded at his ability to mirror the mannerisms and inflections in a person. People he spoke with, conversations he overheard, everyone was potential material to Toole. At dinner parties or interludes between classes, he would tell entertaining stories about people at SLI or sometimes people from New Orleans, impersonating them with precision. Eventually his colleagues started to wonder if anyone was safe from his observations. One night at dinner with Rickels and her husband, Milton, two of his dearest friends in Lafayette, Milton asked him directly, “Ken, you make fun of so many people. Do you make fun of us when we aren’t around?” “Certainly” he replied.

  Toole had no misgivings over mimicking someone, even friends for whom he cared deeply. His friend Nick Polites, who was in Dr. Fogle’s graduate class with Toole at Tulane and who also joined the SLI English department in the fall of 1960, saw Toole’s full repertoire of SLI professor impersonations. Because Polites never mingled much with the rest of the English faculty, Toole was free to tell his stories of the faculty, and he did so with enthusiasm. As Polites recalls,Ken used to regale me with his tales of his evenings with members of the English faculty, where he was always the star, and he would mimic the personalities of each person.... He told a story of one of the senior members of the English faculty, a very proper sort of woman.... One evening at a party when he was carrying on, she waited for a pause, then pursed her lips and said to him, almost coyly, “Oh, Ken, you’re so droll.” He mimicked her tone and gestures with dead accuracy.

  In the course of an evening, Toole might repeat his impersonations several times, as if refining them to perfection. Like many of his friends, Polites made a good audience, laughing and marveling. Of course, Toole maintained a steadfast rule to never turn his mirror of imitation on someone in his presence. Had Polites ever asked a question similar to that of Milton Rickels, Toole would have likely confirmed; of course he mimicked Polites when he was not around.

  So with the pressures of success somewhat alleviated, he enjoyed working and socializing with department members. In doing so he reaped much material for his future novel—he had his main character Ignatius Reilly in the works. And while Toole probably thought of Lafayette as a pit stop on his journey elsewhere, either toward a writing career or back to graduate school, it became much more to him than a way station. Observing the absurdity and hilarity in Lafayette, he quickly became quite the entertainer at parties, but this is only one side of his experience there. The other side is a story of the heart. In Lafayette, he made endearing and long-lasting friendships. Many of his colleagues cared deeply for him, but no one loved him more than Patricia Rickels.

  Toole appeared to Rickels as the impressive new hire, fresh in from New York City. She knew he originally came from New Orleans, but everything about him emanated a Manhattan vogue. He dressed in the Ivy League style, and while most faculty and students strolled along the walkways, Toole would throw his tie over his shoulder and dash across campus “as if he was off to some place important, or running for office.” When Patricia met Toole she quickly recognized his brilliance. “He was young. He was handsome. He was flashy . . . smart as a whip and funny as hell.” She often invited Toole over to eat dinner with her husband and child. And while he received many dinner invitations, usually from his married colleagues who were sympathetic to the loneliness of bachelorhood, he favored the company of the Rickels family.

  It’s not surprising Toole was so fond of them. By all accounts they were an extraordinary family. Patricia, having endured a regretful marriage to a Mississippi man, had divorced, finished graduate school, and moved to Lafayette where she fell in love with and married Milton Rickels, a successful professor whose mind wa
s sharp, but whose legs had been crippled by polio. Together they doted on Patricia’s son from her previous marriage, Gordon, who was thrilled to have “a real father” in Milton. And Milton, who was unable to have children, now felt the joy of fatherhood. In some ways they mirrored the Toole family: a strong mother, a father who struggled with illness, and a beloved son. However, the Rickels home was filled with an evident unconditional love between husband and wife and between parents and child. Patricia never chided Milton for not being the man she wanted him to be. While he depended on crutches to walk and physically struggled with common tasks like standing up from a chair, his disability never stopped him from living a full life of publishing, researching in archives all over the country, teaching, and of course being a dedicated husband and stepfather. Gordon, like Toole, was an extraordinarily bright child. And Toole felt a particular connection with him, perhaps seeing something of himself in the only child. On occasion, with Patricia’s permission, he would pick up Gordon in his small two-door car, and they would “play bachelors for the day.” Gordon liked to ride fast in Toole’s sporty Chevy, and Toole enjoyed having company while grocery shopping, a chore he loathed. Before leaving Lafayette, Toole gave Gordon all of his childhood books—Alice in Wonderland, The Yearling, Heidi, and others—some of the stories that his mother used to read to him before bed, those same works that had sparked his own imagination at a young age.

  The Rickelses must have provided Toole a welcomed escape from the pressures of his own family. Toole rarely spoke to anyone in Lafayette about his home life, but on occasion he opened up to Patricia. He told her of his days acting on the stage when he was a boy. And he told her of his father’s odd behavior, sharing with her that, for a period, his father became obsessed with the virtue of apples, handing out the shiny red fruit to visitors, all the while “preaching at the difference it would make in them and how regular their bowels would be.” Such a story was funny for a moment, until it was clear the humor in the absurd behavior of his father was never far from the pain that it caused him.