John Kennedy Toole, one of the most famous “failures” in the history of American literature, spent most of his life being good at things. The prized only child of older parents, Toole began high school at twelve and finished at sixteen. He entered Tulane University as an engineering major—predictably, he was a teen-age math whiz—but switched to English after a year. Following Tulane, he attended Columbia and earned his master’s degree with a barely reëdited version of his undergraduate thesis, for which he received high honors. (Toole’s academic specialty was sixteenth-century literature, with a focus on the plays of John Lyly, whose work was formative for Shakespeare.) At twenty-two, Toole became the youngest professor in the history of Hunter College. In 1961, he was drafted by the Army and wound up teaching English in Puerto Rico, where his innovative language classes earned him frequent accolades and promotions. He was also a talented mimic and a surprisingly graceful dancer. As one of his female friends said, “It would be easy to fall in love with a man that could dance like John Kennedy Toole.”
In 1969, at the age of thirty-one, Toole asphyxiated himself—in despair, it is often assumed, over his failure to publish “A Confederacy of Dunces,” the comic novel he wrote mostly while stationed in Puerto Rico, and which went unpublished until 1980, when it was released by Louisiana State University Press. “Dunces” details the adventures of a scabrous, slothful, and hippopotamically fat medievalist named Ignatius J. Reilly, who lives in New Orleans with his overweening mother, Irene. Over the years, many who’ve read the book have assumed that Reilly is Toole’s comically exaggerated alter ego. It’s not an outrageous insinuation, as Toole, too, was a medievalist, struggled for much of his life with his weight, and hailed from New Orleans. Furthermore, Toole’s overweening mother, Thelma, was instrumental in getting her late son’s book published: she famously cornered the novelist Walker Percy, then teaching in the city, and demanded that he read it. Even with Percy backing the book, it took three long years to place it.
Whenever a talented artist kills himself or herself, we’re conditioned to view the act as having a kind of tragic nobility—another oversensitive canary, say, in society’s poisoned mineshaft. But as Cory MacLauchlin establishes in “Butterfly in the Typewriter,” his exemplary biography of Toole, from 2012, the author of “A Confederacy of Dunces” didn’t kill himself merely because his novel went unpublished. In fact, most everything people have assumed about Toole’s life (and death) is at least a little wrong. Shortly after its publication, the Chicago Tribune described “Dunces” as “a cry nobody heard,” but the novel wasn’t a product of despair. It was written, with discipline, by a confident, steadily ascending young man. As for Ignatius, he appears to have been heavily modelled on Bobby Byrne, a burly and amply mustached medievalist whom Toole met while teaching at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. Byrne, like Ignatius, believed that human society peaked around the fourteenth century and reliably dressed like a slob, much to the amusement of the always stylish Toole.
The last year of Toole’s life began with his reënrollment at Tulane, to finish his Ph.D. He was soon suffering from severe paranoia, culminating with him standing up in class and declaiming a “plot” against him. Following an argument with Thelma, he lit out on a two-month road trip that ended with him sticking a hose into his car near an unremarkable clearing in rural Mississippi. (Thelma, who had more than nothing to do with her son’s deteriorating mental state, destroyed the suicide letter.) Today, one of “Dunces” ’s most haunting passages has Ignatius admitting, in his journal, that he’s begun to think about how his mother would react if he died. “I can see her at the funeral,” Ignatius writes, “a shoddy, low-cost affair held in the basement of some dubious funeral parlor.” Ignatius predicts that “the inherent tragedy would soon become melodrama,” but his creator was spared that fate. In fact, Toole’s funeral was quiet; only three people attended. While the tragedy of Toole’s short life was complete, the melodrama of his literary afterlife was just beginning.
I first read “A Confederacy of Dunces” when I was in my early twenties. Of that reading I can recall only a vivid, tingling antipathy, akin to walking into a party and realizing instantly that you want to leave. The book, which has become a classic of Southern literature and a mainstay on college syllabi, is entertaining—by any metric, the work of a hugely promising young writer. It’s also repetitive and numbingly antic. Shorn of its unusual publishing history and its author’s heartbreaking fate, it’s hard to imagine it receiving anything resembling the acclaim that occasioned its 1980 publication, much less the Pulitzer Prize that it was awarded, by a jury eager to tweak the New York publishing leviathan. Toole would almost certainly have published better novels had he been given the opportunity to write them.
Still, as I settled into the book again, twenty-three years later, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. For one, there is its impish spirit; Toole’s jolly novel of New Orleans remains somewhat anomalous in the Southern canon, especially in how it skewers that canon’s presiding deity. “Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate,” Ignatius asserts at one point. At another, he refers to Twain as a “dreary fraud” and announces, “I have never seen cotton growing and have no desire to do so.” “A Confederacy of Dunces” might be the only novel ever written about New Orleans in which jazz is described as “obscene.”
One of the novel’s particular virtues is its screwball dialogue, the closest approximation of which might be that of the Coen brothers’ great comedic films: “The Big Lebowski,” “Raising Arizona.” Of the writers of his era, Toole most closely resembles Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, and Stanley Elkin, all of whom were partial to dialogue-heavy novels. But Toole’s characters don’t use human speech to exchange useful information. Although they argue constantly, they never do anything so banal as change their minds. They’re more akin to musicians, each waiting for a chance to solo. Early in the novel, Ignatius stands outside a department store with his mother while a dim-witted police officer named Mancuso attempts to arrest him:
This confrontation sets the novel in motion, for, shortly after Ignatius and Irene make their escape, Irene smashes her car into a building, causes a thousand dollars in damage, and forces Ignatius to go to work to help pay off her debts.
Walker Percy, in a foreword to the book, refers to Ignatius’s “succession of jobs,” but Ignatius works only two jobs to help Irene. The first places him in the front office of Levy Pants, a fading clothing factory; the second has him selling—or, rather, refusing to sell—hot dogs. Ignatius frames both endeavors as his “fevered attempt to wrest a living from an unthinking and uncaring society.” His true goal, however, is to impress his “passionless flame,” Myrna Minkoff, a self-styled New York City revolutionary who briefly lived in New Orleans and exchanges letters with Ignatius throughout the book. By out épater-ing the bourgeoisie, Ignatius hopes to “Save the World Through Degeneracy,” thereby wooing Myrna.
He starts at Levy Pants, where he agitates the Black factory workers into joining a so-called Crusade for Moorish Dignity, before trying, and failing, to turn it into a riot. (Explaining the failure, Ignatius tells his mother, “My excellence confused them.”) Later, he plots to turn all the armies of the world gay, so that when opposing warriors meet on the battlefield they will decide only “to have dances and balls and learn some foreign dance steps.” He is no less dyspeptic—or offensive—outside of the workplace. After watching what appears to be “American Bandstand” on television, Ignatius has this reaction: “The children on that program should all be gassed.” He pines for the emergence of “a good, authoritarian pope.” Anyone who disagrees with him, meanwhile, is swiftly decried as a “mongoloid.”
These antics, so jarring to modern sensibilities, can nevertheless be hilarious. (The Levy Pants sequence especially is a comedic tour de force.) But Ignatius simply is not compelling enough to make lovable the repulsive qualities that his creator takes immense pains to describe, such as the smell of his body (“old tea bags,” we’re told), his filthy bedsheets, or his volcanic flatulence. By the time I hit page 241, which finds Ignatius feeling “worse and worse” and describes how “great belches tipped out of the gas pockets of his stomach and tore through his digestive tract,” I suddenly recalled why I found the novel so repellent the first time I read it. It’s not that I “don’t like” or “can’t relate” to Ignatius; no serious reader should care about such things. It’s more that, at every turn, Ignatius is exactly the character you expect him to be. Late in the novel, one character asks him, “Don’t you ever shut up?” He doesn’t. That’s the problem.
One of Toole’s odder tics is to tag otherwise normal dialogue with “screamed”: “ ‘I’ve always wanted you to assume more responsibility and authority,’ the office manager screamed.” This is clearly Toole’s goof on staid literary convention, but his constant need to nudge even prosaic moments toward tonal anarchy suggests a desperation to entertain at any cost. This is to say nothing of Toole’s adverbs, which rank among the most thuddingly tautologic I’ve encountered: “ ‘You are distributing your weight incorrectly,’ he told them didactically.” It’s fitting that virtually every cover of every edition of the book features a caricature of Ignatius; “A Confederacy of Dunces” is essentially a long, R-rated cartoon in prose. In this, it achieves a curious distinction: a novel that might have been considerably more fun to write than it is to read.
Famously, Toole had a long correspondence with the editor Robert Gottlieb, then at Simon & Schuster, concerning “A Confederacy of Dunces.” (Gottlieb, who would go on to edit The New Yorker, was given the manuscript by an editorial assistant named Jean Ann Jollett, a Southerner herself.) For years, Thelma portrayed Gottlieb as a villain whose rejection of “Dunces” all but condemned her son to death. In an interview, she monstrously referred to him as “a Jewish creature” and “not a human being.” What she didn’t know, as MacLauchlin points out, was the degree to which Toole had confided in Gottlieb and others about his deteriorating home life. Writing to a friend, Toole complained that his mother “spends all her time telling me how stupid I am.”
Gottlieb recognized Toole’s talent, but he couldn’t get around the fact that the novel seemed too content with its discursive narrative logic. “There must be a point to everything you have in the book,” Gottlieb told Toole, “a real point, not just amusingness forced to figure itself out.” Toole duly revised, cutting several sequences and characters, but Gottlieb remained unsatisfied. What pained Toole was that many of the segments that Gottlieb suggested cutting were, arguably, the best parts of the book, including much of the material surrounding Ignatius’s tenure at Levy Pants. Surely, he must have thought, not everything in a novel has to make a point. When has ruthless efficiency ever been the calling card of fiction?
But Gottlieb’s problems with “Dunces” ran deeper. In the novel, Myrna tells Ignatius that he must commit himself “to the crucial problems of the times.” If Ignatius indulges this idea, Toole does not: “Dunces” is a rebuke of the socially committed novel. In many ways, it’s a warning about the lunacy of committing yourself to “the crucial problems of the times.” Toole was temperamentally ambivalent about politics; as one of his friends told MacLauchlin, “In New Orleans he was a liberal—but not in the North. He was Southern to the core.” This is painfully evident when Toole writes about Black people, obliviously allowing his hero to express a desire to be “a Negro” living “in a state of ambitionless peace.” In the mid-nineteen-sixties, when Toole completed his manuscript, anguished centrism and racial obtuseness would hardly have disqualified it. But a few years later, when Toole was trying to publish the book, America was well into its latest flirtation with civil war. It was the sort of time that makes a centrist realize that he’s not a centrist so much as he is surrounded.
Toole was also encircled by other novelists, who had rushed into the political fray. In 1968 and 1969, the best-selling literary novels in America were John Updike’s “Couples,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner”—pushy, culturally raucous books that not only tapped into the Zeitgeist but helped create it. This might account for Gottlieb’s complaint that “Dunces” wasn’t “about anything.” In one sense, the critique is well founded. Toole’s characters seem bizarrely determined—even proud—to learn nothing from their choices, other people, or the world around them. At the end of the book, when Ignatius’s plans have come to ruin and his mother arranges for his involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility, Myrna miraculously pops up to whisk Ignatius to New York. “Just wait till they hear all that originality pouring out of your head,” she tells Ignatius. “To think that I fought your wisdom for years,” he responds. Whether Toole intends this to be a happy ending is an interestingly open question, but if you’re the type of reader who needs fictional characters to grasp the importance of self-improvement—or the importance of anything, really—such opacity is frustrating.
Toole either didn’t care about or couldn’t achieve a traditionally satisfying narrative. What did interest him? Character, mainly, though a peculiarly prescribed form of it. Over and over in “Dunces,” Toole launches his obdurately one-dimensional creations into predicaments that they are comically incapable of understanding, and then mercilessly records the results. Artistically speaking, this is the book’s core problem: the thing that makes it interesting is also the thing that makes it unsatisfying. Solving the problem Gottlieb identified meant ruining the logic of the novel Toole had written.
Gottlieb requested that Toole come to New York so they could discuss “specific editorial suggestions.” Somehow, Toole managed to screw this up. Twice he travelled to New York to see Gottlieb; twice the editor was out of town. On the second trip, Toole suffered a nervous breakdown in the Simon & Schuster office, which MacLauchlin views as the first outward sign of Toole’s decline into madness. And yet Gottlieb continued to correspond with him. “I have to come out of this though, or I’ll never do anything,” Toole wrote to Gottlieb. “Please write me short or long at any time,” Gottlieb responded. “Cheer up. Work.” After their last exchange, Toole put “Dunces” in a box and began his final spiral toward infinity.
According to MacLauchlin, Toole was influenced by Cervantes, Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh. From Cervantes, he likely inherited his love of episodic, picaresque narrative; from Dickens, his fondness for grotesque yet effective characterization; from Waugh, his taste for mock-heroic snobbery. “With the breakdown of the Medieval system,” Ignatius writes, in one of his treatises, “the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendency.” That Toole might have been only half kidding when giving voice to such pronouncements was suggested forty years ago, by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. “A fair amount of the author’s ridicule and venom is reserved for female liberals and liberationists,” Rosenbaum noted, while the book’s “ostensible right-wingers” (such as Mancuso, the moronic police officer in desperate search of someone to arrest) are usually depicted “as lovably harmless and ineffectual creatures.” Rosenbaum, who admired the novel, nevertheless judged it to be “reactionary.” Well, there’s reactionary and there’s reactionary. Ignatius doesn’t want to go back to the nineteen-fifties, or even the eighteen-fifties. He wants to go back to the thirteen-fifties.
For anyone contemplating the book today, the tendencies that Rosenbaum identified might be the most arresting thing about Toole’s novel, even more than its literary achievement, which despite the book’s longueurs remains considerable. As I soldiered on beside Ignatius, I was struck by the purity of the archetype that Toole had inadvertently created. You see, one of Ignatius’s greatest joys is going to the movie theatre and closely reading the credits: “Ignatius . . . noted that several of the actors, the composer, the director, the hair designer, and the assistant producer were all people whose efforts had offended him at various times in the past.” Once the film starts, Ignatius cries out, “What degenerate produced this abortion!” To make matters worse, Ignatius’s favorite superhero is Batman, who, he explains, “tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.” And here is Ignatius at his most horrifyingly, presciently archetypal, watching a film starring an ingénue with whom he’s obsessed: “How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”
Early in the novel, Ignatius tells us, “I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.” In 1968, Toole’s hero mystified one of the country’s finest editors of fiction. In 1980, he seemed harmless. Forty years later, this red-pilled malcontent calling for a theofascist revival seems something else entirely. Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism. He was a prediction.
