Ellen R. Friedman took only one class with him, but he she never forgot him. On the first day of class he walked into the room of all female students and issued a writing assignment. “Answer this question: What profession would you like to pursue and why?” He knew many of them wanted to be schoolteachers, the basis upon which the college was founded. Predicting cliché responses he stipulated, “And don’t tell me you want to be a teacher because you like children. That is not a sufficient reason.” Little did his students know, he was struggling with his own career path. Reflecting the same question he asked of himself, he pushed the students to think deliberately about their answers and their futures. “He turned on an intellectual light,” Friedman remembers. “He began a chain of thinking for me. . . . He was one of the first professors that actually made me think.” Years later, after reading Confederacy , it became clear to Friedman that there was another side of Toole she had not seen in class. She does not recall humor as central to his teaching. He was more caustic in his responses. “He had a way of letting you know that what you said was not that good or that you missed something.” Considering he was only a few years older than his students Toole had to walk a fine line; he had to maintain his professional stance and focus, never to be misinterpreted as a friend. Friedman recalls how young he looked, and yet he carried himself in the classroom with the ease of a confident professor. He dressed in a tweed jacket with a collared shirt and tie. Sitting on the edge of his desk, one foot propped up and the other dangling to the ground, he lectured with clarity. Inevitably, some of the students developed a crush on him.
One woman, apparently a student from this time period, expressed deep feelings for Toole in a handwritten letter sent to him shortly after his return to New Orleans. The letter suggests a romantic relationship or at the very least an intense friendship. It remains one of the most puzzling letters in the Toole Papers.
Dear Ken,
I took my last exam today, followed it with a voice lesson “chaser,” and then found your letter waiting for me, as effective as a soma holiday.
I spent Tuesday reading, sunning myself, and playing a terrible game of tennis at Sebago Beach. I’m not sure whether its sunburn, windburn, or frostbite, but I did lose my “nightclub pallor.”
It has been suspiciously quiet around here. Today is Henry’s birthday and I’m sure that 42 relatives are going to pop out of closets when I’m not looking.
If you happen to receive a loaf of rye bread in the mail, don’t mistake it for a displaced “care” package—it would more likely be from my mother. She misses serving dinner to you, but not possibly as much as I miss being with you. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Ellen
p.s.: the package hasn’t arrived yet—I can hardly wait. My love to you darling—Ellen.
The author of this letter remains a mystery. It was not from his student Ellen Friedman at Hunter, nor would he normally invite one of his students to call him Ken. In fact, he usually reserved Ken for his friends in Louisiana. But this woman appears to live in New York, considering her visit to Sebago Beach. And Toole apparently charmed her mother and became familiar with her family. But who was Ellen? A fellow graduate student? A person he met at a bar? Perhaps an undergraduate at Columbia or Hunter? Whoever she was, she energetically bounces from school to vacation to her family and repeatedly declares her love for him. It seems he developed some affection for her, as well, after seeing her “night club pallor,” likely during an evening of dancing.
It has been said that Myrna Minkoff is a composite character of the Jewish students at Hunter. As Fletcher suggests, Toole looked to his Hunter students and “Myrna Minkoff, the unlikely heroine of Confederacy was under observation.” Thelma Toole understood that Myrna Minkoff was an actual student of his at Hunter. In fact, she worried a lawsuit would come out of publishing the novel with the actual name of the student. And Anthony Moore, who served with Toole later in the army and was in his company during the period that he wrote Confederacy , remembered that Myrna was “based off a girl that was infatuated with him in New York.” Moore felt it mean of Toole to mock a woman who loved him, as Ellen clearly did. Of course, there is no spirit of revolution in Ellen’s letter. It has no plots for social upheaval or unsolicited advice like the letters of Myrna Minkoff’s to Ignatius Reilly. But it does suggest that Toole had a relationship with a young lady in New York City. And if he used her for Myrna Minkoff, it would certainly illustrate his boundless satire.
As a professor, Toole clearly earned the respect of both the students and the administration. His supervisor, John Wieler, filed a “highly favorable” report on his teaching. And in the spring semester they awarded him a literature course, a rare honor for a part-time faculty member without a PhD. As he admitted to Fletcher, “The Hunter hierarchy has been more than kind toward me.” At least for one course he could delve into what he loved. In a letter to his parents he refers to this course as the Stein class, likely referencing Gertrude Stein, either in the character of the students or the content of the course. “Classes are all proceeding perfectly, The Stein Class, after a little slapping about the head and shoulders has developed into one of the most interested, alert of the four classes.” In general, students enjoyed his classes, or so he tells his parents when he reports evidence of his virtuosity as a teacher:The professor whose classes I assumed in night school last week phoned me this afternoon to ask, “what did you do to those classes? They said they were the most exciting classes they’d ever had, covering psychology, philosophy, history and literature. All the classes want you back. They spent all the time telling me how thorough and fascinating you were.” (One of the classes applauded when I finished one night!) So there’s some recompense—aside from the financial—for all this fatigue.
As Patricia Rickels often said of Toole, “Always on stage.... He was always on stage.” Wieler praised him, and his students adored him. But like any teacher he had moments of frustration. Ellen Friedman sensed that Toole was “a little baffled by New York girls. We were a bit more independent, not Southern belles.” Dalferes remembers some moments where he felt he could not get through to them:He used to get very annoyed with the stupidity of Hunter. He felt the students were only interested in anti-Semitism. He wanted to bring the glory of literature to people. If people couldn’t recognize that he would get depressed.
It is no surprise a young, bright professor, one who had a remarkable writing talent in his first year of college at the age of sixteen, would lament a crop of freshman or sophomore papers. But Toole had not forgotten where he had taught the previous year, which offered him some perspective on the skill level of the Hunter students. Nick Polites notes that Toole “acknowledged they were a lot more sophisticated and brighter than the students in Lafayette.” And if he was unimpressed by their writing or preoccupation with politics he at least found some pleasure in observing them. At first he found in the students an amusing strain of reckless rebellion. He admits to Fletcher, “I like Hunter—principally because the aggressive, pseudo-intellectual, ‘liberal’ girl students are continuously amusing.” Like many college students, their rebellion was often enacted under vague and half-formed notions of the world. While students picketed for everything from academic freedom to the cost of tuition, they also fought against oppressive traditions like the onerous yearbook dedication page. In the 1961 Wistarion the staff dedicated the yearbook to “friendship,” declaring, “This is the year we are free from such shackles” of dedicating the book to a person. It was this kind of absurd rebellion that Toole found amusing and silly.
The influence of Judaism at Hunter and New York also intrigued and at times unsettled him. In the drafts of his poem “New York: Three Aspects,” he sketched three Stars of David and compared the entire city to a mixed metaphor of both a biblical ark and a bank. And many students were declaratory about their Jewish heritage. They had a robust Jewish identity the likes of which Toole had not faced in Louisiana. Their intense sensitivities toward a
nti-Semitism blended with their aggressive political statements tried his patience at times. Polites remembers, “[When] Ken spoke of his students at Hunter . . . I recall a somewhat derogatory note in his voice. Maybe it was that he thought them ‘pushy.’” Toole, in his own way, pushed back. Emilie Griffin remembers visiting one of his courses in May of 1961 when he wrote on the board, “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the liberal.” It was a line she would quote back to him years later in a letter, having never forgotten the provocativeness of the statement. Griffin identified Toole as a liberal, but she is quick to point out that the liberal way of thinking in New York City troubled Toole. He felt that New York liberals quickly cast a Southerner as a racist and a Catholic as a papist. As he saw it, while they railed against bigotry, they failed to understand their own prejudice.
In Louisiana Toole avoided declaring a particular political persuasion, preferring to observe and satirize people. But the North seemed to thrust him into political commentary. When it came to the South and the escalating social upheaval in the Southern states, combined with the brash comments he encountered in Manhattan, he could barely hold his tongue. Dalferes tells of one occasion when they went to see Birth of a Nation at the New Yorker Theatre. During intermission they overheard a conversation between a man and a woman. The woman remarked, “The movies take a grain of truth and blow it out of proportion.” The man replied sarcastically, “What truth is there in the South?” Unable to restrain himself, Toole interrupted the conversation and began a passionate tirade in the likes of Bobby Byrne. “During Reconstruction,” he bellowed as he began his sermon, recounting the injustices dealt to Southerners at the hands of the Yankee carpetbaggers and the policies of the federal government aimed at punishing the Southern states. Dalferes was as surprised with his eruption as the man and woman were. But she recognized, “It took guts to do that in New York at the time.” She eventually determined, “In New Orleans he was a liberal—but not in the North. He was Southern to the core.”
For as much as New York grated his social and political sensibilities, it also provided him opportunities to see artists he would not otherwise witness. It was one of the reasons he originally fell in love with New York. He had access to forms of entertainment available nowhere else in the United States at the time. And aside from the obvious Broadway productions, Toole loved a good concert. In New York he saw one of his favorite singers, Frances Faye. As Polites recalls,He was a great admirer [of Frances Faye], and his admiration was infective.... He had seen her in performance at a nightclub during his New York days. He had all kinds of stories about her, how she fell off a stage during one performance and broke a leg, which he thought hilarious.
Polites probably references Faye’s broken hip, not from a fall off stage, but rather from slipping on the bathroom floor in her hotel room. It caused her anguish, but she continued playing, at times using medication for the pain. The accident itself was no joke, but much like Toole, when performing, Faye turned everything into a laughing matter. In June of 1959 the New York Journal American reported that Faye opened at the Crescendo, a famed nightclub in Los Angeles, while “still on crutches, but that does not affect her repartee.”
Her banter drew audiences, especially Toole, to her shows as much as her singing did. She was quick witted, an absolute parody of gender roles, and confident beyond measure. While no scarlet beauty or nightingale, she was a masterful satirist. At a time when sexuality and gender remained a cloaked and closeted conversation, she held a mirror up to society and made them all laugh at the reflection of the sexual complexities around them. In one of her most famous songs, “Frances and Her Friends,” she strings rhyming names together, twisting gender roles, and turning relationships into a string of lovers: “I know a guy named Joey / Joey goes with Moey / Moey goes with Jamie / And Jamie goes with Sadie. . . . ” This could go on in limitless variations, each verse ending with, “What a drag, what a drag / I’m not mad / I’m too hip to get mad.” In the gay community, Faye has been celebrated as a pioneer for her openness. But her audacity and fearlessness on stage attracted both gay and straight listeners. As the Washington Post reported of her concert on February 18, 1961, “Frances Faye hit the New York scene with the impact of a 10-ton truck smashing through a concrete wall.” Her shows were nonstop adrenaline-infused jazz sessions. She cranked out riffs on the piano, bellowed her lyrics, playfully changing lines here and there, adding jokes as she went along. It was precisely the kind of humor Toole loved—fast, witty, and unpredictable. And yet critics observed she achieved a balance of intensity and intimacy. Variety reports of her March concert in 1961, “She makes the big 750-seater an intimate room, turning the stint into one big house party.” Having started performing on stage when she was fifteen, she knew how to hold masterful control over her audience.
Much like Faye, Toole fostered his talents of quick wit, interpretation, and satire at an early age. He was attracted to this artist that projected her style: bold, raw, and unrefined. Polites observes, “It wasn’t necessarily the voice [he] admired, it was the style.” In other words, it wasn’t the aesthetic of what she created, as much as how she created it. So impressed with her, Toole once wondered aloud to Fletcher, “Is Frances Faye God?” As Toole lifted Faye on high as a deity of artistic creation, he reflected on his dream of becoming an artist who, like Faye, would burst onto the New York scene.
He began drafting “sketches” of a character he named Humphrey Wildblood, who would eventually become Ignatius Reilly. He left no detail of these sketches, although from what friends remember of his stories, they were likely short narratives, quick comical vignettes, a method of creation similar to his comics at Tulane. Since the earliest reference Toole makes to working on the book is described as “sketches,” it is no surprise that Confederacy is a picaresque, a series of episodes, akin to the method of storytelling he preferred. Here were the beginnings of Ignatius, drafted in New York City, the place to which he would send Ignatius at the end of the novel, exiling him from New Orleans.
Unfortunately, all that remains of these “sketches” is the name Humphrey Wildblood, mentioned in a letter. Were the sketches set in New Orleans? Were they set in New York? What did Humphrey Wildblood look like? Nobody seems to know. Perhaps they were sketches only in his mind, narratives crafted from observations and drafted in his imagination to pass the time on the subway between Columbia and Hunter. Whatever the case, his movement away from academics and toward a creative endeavor in the early months of 1961 mirrors the winter season of 1959 when he wrote “The Arbiter,” critiquing the role of the scholar-critic through poetry. In the winter of his discontent he makes his turn toward becoming a novelist. And New York, the epicenter of publishing, was an appropriate place to do it.
While he had yet to compose something he considered worthy of publication, he now entertained the life of a writer more seriously than the life of a scholar. And perhaps an attraction to the “literary life” in New York offered him some incentive. Along these lines, Polites recalls Toole telling him that he had become friends with the novelist James Purdy in New York. Purdy’s novel, Malcolm, had been published in 1959 to international acclaim. And Polites remembers Toole being “impressed knowing a published writer.” But Toole also “talked about how strange, almost weird, Purdy seemed to be.”
In 1960 Purdy moved to New York, so their encounter was possible. And Purdy could certainly speak to Toole about the struggle to find one’s own voice as a writer and the challenges of getting published. He had worked for years as an aspiring novelist until he sent his privately printed short story collection to poet Dame Edith Sitwell who jump-started his literary career. Undoubtedly, Toole could have learned a great deal from Purdy. But if they had been acquaintances, there is no record of it in the Toole Papers. And he never mentioned Purdy to Fletcher or Rickels. Like his supposed offer from Yul Brynner that he once bragged about to his friend Cary Laird, Toole may have been trying to impress Polites, which he often tried to do. Whate
ver the case, the story suggests that Toole wanted to see himself in the literary circles of New York. How he saw himself fitting into that scene, if at all, is unclear. He was far too straight-laced for the Beats. Purdy may have been a bit too offbeat for him. One thing became clear, though; he did not see himself traveling the long road to the PhD.
Perhaps that was just as well. As Toole questioned the point of his academic pursuits, the army called his number. With growing tensions in Berlin and Vietnam, Toole could no longer defer the draft. In June he packed his belongings in his apartment. The neighborhood that gave way to the raucous Cold War scenes nine months earlier, offered little excitement as he prepared his departure. Dalferes came to his apartment to see him off. To save money, he told Dalferes, he had sent his belongings on a bus and then would take a flight to New Orleans. He despised long rides on buses. Dalferes and Toole parted ways in Manhattan, and he quietly left the bustling metropolis behind.
Some people say that New York has a way of breaking people. The friends closest to Toole sensed that he saw the city as much of a convoluted cultural mélange as his own hometown. But Dalferes noticed he seemed restrained in Manhattan. She knew that he, “Loved to party. But he couldn’t do that in New York. He was more formal.” Ultimately, she resolved, “He didn’t feel comfortable there,” largely in part due to the cultural abrasiveness he found in the north. While Pat Rickels claims he wanted nothing more than to return to Columbia, Dalferes claims, “He preferred New Orleans. He just wanted the prestige of Columbia.” Perhaps Polites got it right when he concluded, “While New York obviously meant a lot to Ken, I suspect he may have had something of an ambivalent relationship with the city.” In that regard, it paralleled his relationship with New Orleans. From far away, the city glows in myth and memory. Distance reinvigorates the spirit of the place. But once returned, the reality of the city rarely achieves those expectations.
Butterfly in the Typewriter Page 14
