Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  He taught for the summer session at SLI in order to save some money, and he enjoyed the leisurely pace. He went out to Cajun bars with Fletcher and Broussard, and over cold beers they would talk about literature. He had recently become obsessed with British novelist Evelyn Waugh. Fletcher appreciated Waugh’s dark humor as well. Although Nick Polites remembers with some irritation how Toole was so infatuated with the “brilliance and economy of his writing” that he “talked incessantly about Waugh.” On occasion he met with his high school friend Cary Laird, who was finishing up his graduate degree at Tulane. One weekend in New Orleans, Toole heard of a party taking place in Lafayette. Eager to show Laird the popularity he had gained in the small town, Toole convinced his friend to borrow his sister’s white Chevrolet convertible, the one Toole’s father had sold her, and the two cruised westward, crossing the Atchafalaya Basin with the wind in their hair. He must have enjoyed his corner of Cajun country all the more now that he was about to leave.

  As the sweltering heat of the summer hit its August peak, Toole packed his belongings and bid adieu to his friends. Heading east, the mud of the Louisiana swamp dried from his shoes as he prepared his return to the fast-paced frenzy of Manhattan.

  Chapter 7

  Hunter and Columbia

  Returning to the realm of brick and limestone, Toole found little had changed in Manhattan since he’d left. The skyscrapers still towered over the people who still hurried along sidewalks. The bohemians of Greenwich Village still gathered in Washington Square Park. The Beats still preached their anti-establishment message in cafés and dive bars. And Columbia still held its regal poise in Morningside Heights. But Toole had changed. As an experienced instructor, he could now manage a classroom, not just ace a course. And the terms of his survival in Manhattan had changed, too. No longer under the wing of the Woodrow Wilson fellowship, Toole intended to work while attending Columbia part-time until he earned his PhD, which would take at least three years—three years of bouncing between the west and east sides of Manhattan. With the pressures of earning enough money to survive and his rigorous daily routine, it would be a year vastly different from his first foray to New York City. And yet there remains a mirrored dynamic between those two years. They both began with his initial excitement but led to his eventual dismay with a place that he found hard to love at times, despite his best efforts. And at some point in the midst of his mind-spinning schedule, he would begin sketching his ideas for what would become A Confederacy of Dunces. It was to be Toole’s busiest year. For the first time he took on the roles of student, teacher, and writer all at once. And after donning all three hats that year, he would leave New York with a clearer sense of what he wanted to do, what he had to do with his life.

  He began his semester with intense focus on his studies. He rented a “large and bright” room on Riverside Drive, which offered him “a limited view of the Hudson and New Jersey across the river.” He registered for four graduate courses, a daring endeavor in combination with his new teaching post. And while his courses were all on aspects of British literature, he selected ones that reflected his expansive interest in various time periods of history. He registered for a course with William Nelson, the same professor from his MA studies who read The Faerie Queen aloud. Under the guidance of the energetic Jerome Buckley, he studied Charles Dickens in Victorian Prose and Poetry. And he took a seminar on the Augustan satirists with James Clifford, a course aligned with his creative interests as a humorist more than it was with his academic pursuits. In this class he likely encountered the epigram by the master of satire Jonathan Swift:When a true genius appears in the world,

  You may know him by this sign, that the dunces

  Are all in confederacy against him.

  These lines would inspire the title of Toole’s novel.

  Again taking his seat in the lecture rooms of Philosophy Hall, listening to erudite professors postulate on form, genre, and aesthetics, he had resumed his place in the city he so desperately craved. “He loved New York, and he loved Columbia,” Patricia Rickels remembers. “He wanted nothing more than to return.” Yet, unexpectedly, Morningside Heights proved quite sedate compared to his post at Hunter College on the Upper East Side. In the fall of 1960 the affluent neighborhood became a stage for the Cold War capers of the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. On September 19, the first day of classes at Hunter, Toole approached the campus on Park Avenue to find police had barricaded the road and posted guards in front of the Soviet embassy across the street. The security detail remained for several weeks, keeping watch over Khrushchev, who was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. The New York Times reported that classes at Hunter remained undisturbed by the presence of the Soviet leader, but the calm did not last. As Toole reported home, “Refugees from communist controlled countries in Europe demonstrated here every day, screaming, singing, chanting. . . . ” The refugees acted on the fundamental American freedom to protest, an act that may have resulted in execution in their homelands. But the civilized residents of the Upper East Side, accustomed to the serenity of their corner of Manhattan, found the protests bothersome. Toole observed how they “retaliated (in the cause of quiet and order) by pouring water from their apartment windows onto the demonstrators below.” From September to October, as Toole watched the comings and goings in and out of the Soviet embassy, he saw the key players that would throw the United States into the most intense years of the Cold War—“Krushchev [sic], Malenkov, Kadar, Castro, and the others in their clique.” Abandoning the decorum of diplomacy, Khrushchev made headlines with his zany antics. Upon hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” blaring out of an apartment window, which was obviously timed for his passing by, he stopped on the sidewalk and moved his hands in rhythm like the conductor of an orchestra. And he made a desperate attempt to derail a United Nations session when he removed his shoe, “brandished [it] at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall” and then “banged the shoe on his desk.” Initially humored by the insane behavior of Khrushchev, Toole expressed an underlying sense that the “carnival atmosphere . . . could have, of course, erupted into something more serious.” Most New Yorkers, particularly those living near Hunter, were eager to see Khrushchev go and their lives returned to normal.

  One morning in mid-October, Toole found the police barricades removed. The departure of Khrushchev had “restored peace” to the Upper East Side. And feeling optimistic about his place at Hunter, he sat down in his twelfth-floor office, with its nice view of Midtown Manhattan, and wrote a letter to his Aunt “Nandy” and Uncle Arthur, detailing his current situation in New York. He compared the appearance of Hunter to Charity Hospital in New Orleans in its “institutionalized aspect” remnant of “the late 1930s.” He conveyed the intrigue of Khrushchev and the demonstrations that took place in the streets. And he described his first impressions of his students, who had far more potential than what he encountered in Lafayette. He reports, The students here are—for the most part—very sharp, very eager and interested, very worthwhile. The all-girl student body is principally Jewish and Irish, balanced in about a 50-50 split, and all drawn from the New York metropolitan area. I’m teaching a Dominican nun, Sister Martha.

  As he wrote the letter, looking outside the window, he observed, “I have a fine view of Midtown Manhattan, which at the moment is hidden somewhat by usually present blue-gray haze that hangs over the city.” The initial optimism that usually began his ventures to New York City still shines, but something ominous brews in the air above Midtown.

  To a new arrival, Manhattan can create an odd sense of alienation as one finds his way through the throngs of people constantly moving toward some unclear end. Toole confesses, “I find that I must readjust to this maelstrom after my leisurely stay on the Bayou Teche.” Longing for some Southern warmth, he contacted a few fellow Louisianans living in New York at the time. When Toole told Mario Mamalakis—Nick Polites’s aunt and a librarian at SLI—of his return to New York
, she suggested that once he got settled he call Clayelle Dalferes, a native of Lafayette. So, Toole called Dalferes one afternoon, waking her from a nap. She picked up the phone, and before Toole could say a word, she sleepily asked, “Is this business or pleasure?” Toole thought her greeting “was hilarious,” Dalferes remembers. “He never let me forget it. He repeated the phrase to me throughout our friendship.” Together they went to movies, browsed bookstores, and dined. On one occasion she ate lunch with him at Columbia, and she was struck by how he “treated women in the cafeteria the same way that he treated professors. The women loved it.” Even amid the masses of New York, he remained “very much a Southern gentleman.”

  Toole also contacted Emilie Russ Dietrich, who had shared that impromptu dance with him during Mardi Gras in their Tulane days, a moment impressive enough for her to remember how talented a dancer he was. She was living and working in New York City, so Dietrich joined Toole at movies or at the Roseland Dance Hall, where people danced “cheek to cheek” to the tunes of big band jazz. And one night they went to Harlem—an adventurous outing for two white Southerners in the early 1960s—to see “Moms” Mabley perform at the Apollo Theater. That night they were welcomed to that shrine of African American performance art. And they laughed at comedy derived from the African American experience. And, of course, they had engaging conversations. Dietrich (now Emilie Griffin) fondly remembers, “Toole’s way of smoking his cigarette hidden behind his hand and his way of talking without looking straight at you, but smiling a little superior smile.” There must have been a certain comfort Toole took in exploring New York with his friend—they were in an exciting place that could quickly become lonely and cold without fellow companions with similar sensibilities. In a letter to her mother in late November, Griffin confessed that she “just had one of the funniest phone calls ever with Ken Toole.” As she remembered, he spoke with speed, and his humor was just as quick. She explains what it was like to be in his company:With great skill and without warning, Ken would move from being a “colored cat” to being what New Orleans people now call a “yat” (as in “Hey, dawlin’ where yat?”), jumping from one impersonation to another with little explanation. I was expected to follow him. I was supposed to know. Moments later, leaving me in stitches, Ken would return to his own character, asking me if I wanted a Coca-Cola or if I wanted to dance.

  His pursuits at Columbia and Hunter provided few opportunities for his energetic, comical skits, but his friends from New Orleans understood his humor. Evenings at a movie or a dancehall likely offered him much needed relief from studying and teaching. For a short time he had a personal audience, something he periodically desired, not out of vanity, but rather out of a need to express his observations and release the apparent comical energy that was central to his conversations.

  In November, when he spoke to Dietrich with such spirited hilarity, Toole had reason for excitement. A few days after presidential candidate Richard Nixon paraded down Broadway while celebrants threw paper streamers into the air, his opponent, John F. Kennedy, was announced the next president of the United States. Toole wrote to his friend Joel Fletcher months later, feeling encouraged about the new president with whom he shared a similar name and religious identity, “It looks as if Kennedy may justify my faith in him, although I’m only very grateful that we were spared Dick and Pat.” For the first time in American history, a Catholic with Irish roots would hold the highest office in the nation.

  Socializing with a small circle of friends and appearing hopeful over the future of the country, Toole enjoyed the “cool, clear autumn” of New York. In fact, it was that same season in New York that the iconic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s was shot. In mid-October of 1960 Audrey Hepburn was spotted throughout the city shooting the adaptation of the novel by New Orleans–born writer Truman Capote. On one occasion a crowd gathered as Hepburn walked to a window in Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue, wearing “a stark Givenchy evening gown.” The crowd appeared disappointed that it was not a jewelry heist or Khrushchev in one of his curious episodes. But once released, Breakfast at Tiffany’s crystallized the glitz and glamor of New York for millions of Americans. It presented a bedazzling city, where writers and elegant socialites walked the streets in the latest fashions, all set to the backdrop of the city in the fall of 1960. It was a vision of the city Toole would have loved to live. But after eight days the cameras stopped rolling, Hepburn returned to sunny California, and, as it always did, the lovely autumn made way for the cold winter nip that moved eastward from the Catskill Mountains.

  New York grasped at the last moments of vibrancy with bells jingling and the Rockettes jollily kicking in unison at Radio City Music Hall. But holiday fanfare did little to ease Toole’s daily commute. Every day he passed the same stores, the same delis, traveled through the same dark tunnels of the subway—a commute that was more than an hour long with two subway transfers. He coursed back and forth through the subterranean bowels of Manhattan, professor in the morning and student in the afternoon, only to discover that after tuition, rent, and food he barely had any money left over. The ominous blue haze he saw from his twelfth-floor office in mid-October descended, and he saw the city as “its usual busy, preoccupied, hustling self.”

  By the end of the fall semester it was clear he needed more income to survive. He decided to teach four classes at Hunter in the spring and take only one class at Columbia. This would substantially delay his degree for years. The Columbia Graduate Student’s Guide fairly warned, “A program of less than three courses puts study so far out in the margin of one’s consciousness that it seldom leads to tangible results.” But as was often the case, financial practicality took precedence.

  With the weight of his spring semester shifted to teaching, it made sense for him to move closer to Hunter. He found a fourth-floor apartment and roomed with fellow Tulane alumnus Kent Taliaferro at 128 East 70th Street—a slender, red brick house on a quiet side street, shaded by an overarching canopy of trees. Ironically, while Toole struggled for financial viability, he now lived in the Upper East Side, one of the most affluent sections of Manhattan. Granted, the block of 70th Street he lived on was originally built in the 1870s for stables and stable hands. The relatively modest homes, for Upper East Side standards, created a quaint feel to the block. At the corner of Lexington and East 70th Street, the neon sign of Neil’s Coffee Shop glowed, even in the blurry white of the winter snow, welcoming students and professors, a place where Toole could get a hot cup of coffee before walking a block to Hunter.

  Toole spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve that year in New Orleans and Lafayette, enjoying the calm pace and mild weather of Louisiana. Fortified with home-cooked meals, he returned to blustery Manhattan. At first the novelty of snow brought him some enjoyment. He went sledding with friends in Central Park, where they climbed the hill of the pilgrim statue near the entrance at 72nd Street, and they could see the three towers atop the Beresford—an upscale apartment building on the Upper West Side, which hovers like a dreamy castle keeping watch over the urban forest. During this playful winter day, Toole plopped into a mound of snow. A companion snapped a photo: the New Orleanian sits in his frigid New York throne.

  But his proud smile withered as he returned to his routine during days that seemed successively colder and snowier. He walked to class against the frigid winds that whipped between the buildings—that burning winter air that creeps into one’s bones. The New York Times declared the snowfalls in January and February of 1961 created “the worst winter in 80 years.” Toole observed that New Yorkers developed a “snowbound mentality.” Bundled under layers of clothing, he saw the millions of faces walking the streets and casting their gaze downward to avoid the chilly blast. For a man accustomed to the subtropical climate of Louisiana, the winter of 1961 proved nearly insufferable. He wrote to Joel Fletcher, “In my present snowbound condition, I find that letter writing alleviates some of the drabness and discomfort of the below-zero temperature.” During this period of reflec
tion, his track in New York started to mirror his previous experience. In the autumn he had absorbed and observed the character of the city, but winter bred bitterness, reflection, and questions of meaning and purpose. His New York endeavor grew tiresome. He confides to Fletcher, “As time passes, the tedium of graduate school magnifies; the Ph.D. looks like a nebulous and questionable reward for financial scrimping, stultifying research, and meaningless seminars.” When he had finished his teaching contract at SLI in the humid haze of the Louisiana summer, it seemed he had understood the purpose of his return to Columbia; but now, once again entrenched in the reality of life in Manhattan, it all lacked a clear point. Of course, his financial struggles colored his perception. Egos volleying across a graduate seminar table, displaying one’s own brilliance and seeking to gain the approval or even slight recognition from a professor, can seem pointless when compared to the weight of surviving in the city.

  While Toole had come to New York for Columbia, now Hunter College took much more of his time and energy. By the spring semester he rarely spoke of Columbia in letters home. In March he writes, “I can only write about work, work, and work.” Being so close to his place of employment meant he could teach in the mornings and be available to substitute for night classes at Hunter. Of course, more classes meant more students. And after completing one full semester, he gained a far more complex picture of Hunter than his initial assessment in October. Like many teachers, he expressed mixed feelings about his students. He varied from excitement over their potential to a view no more flattering than his cartoons of the Newcomb College women at Tulane. But his vacillating reactions indicate his students held his interests more so than did his professors at Columbia. And, in turn, his students found him an engaging and refreshing teacher.