Biography

A literary son of the South, John Kennedy Toole was born on December 17, 1937, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of John Dewey Toole Jr. and Thelma Ducoing Toole. A precocious child with a reported IQ of 133, Toole skipped a grade of his early schooling—his mother would later claim two grades—and spent much of his leisure time in the arts, following her encouragement. At Alcee Fortier High School, his activities and accomplishments included contributing to the school newspaper and yearbook, writing his novella The Neon Bible, and being selected as Most Intelligent Senior Boy by his classmates.

Following these early scholastic successes, Toole won a National Merit Scholarship and attended Tulane University, first studying engineering before switching to English literature. During his senior year, he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and, after graduating, he moved to New York City to attend Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Toole soon completed his master’s degree, based largely on his thesis addressing John Lyly, the sixteenth-century author of Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. Toole began studying for a PhD at Columbia while teaching at Hunter College, but in 1959, he accepted a teaching position at Southwestern Louisiana State University (now known as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette). There Toole met Bob Byrne, a fellow faculty member in the English Department who inspired various aspects of Ignatius Reilly’s characterization in A Confederacy of Dunces, including his predilections for medieval literature and outré clothing. In 1960, Toole decided to resume pursuing his doctorate, and, although accepted to the University of Washington at Seattle, he instead returned to New York City and Columbia University while teaching at Hunter College.

In August 1961, the US Army drafted Toole and stationed him at Fort Buchanan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where his fluency in Spanish proved a great asset to the local command. During these years, he began writing A Confederacy of Dunces, often late at night after tending to his daily responsibilities. Two years into his tour, the army granted Toole a hardship discharge in light of family issues, and he returned to New Orleans in 1963, taking a teaching position at Dominican College. Upon completing his novel, Toole sent it to Simon & Schuster, where it reached the desk of Robert Gottlieb, the famed editor who had championed Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. For several years, Gottlieb corresponded with Toole about A Confederacy of Dunces before finally rejecting it due to its ostensible lack of narrative unity among its various storylines. In a letter, he explained his reasoning to Toole: “In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that’s forced to figure itself out.” Throughout these years, Toole’s personal life remains somewhat obscure, and he is largely remembered as a gregarious, but private, person. The question of Toole’s sexual orientation generates continued controversy. Biographers René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy, in their Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole, produce suggestive recollections from his friends that indicate he likely was gay, whereas Cory MacLauchlin, in his Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, argues that no conclusive evidence supports this view.

In the final years of his life, Toole taught at Dominican College, began work on another novel (tentatively titled The Conqueror Worm), and fell into depression and paranoia. On March 26, 1969 in Biloxi, Mississippi, he committed suicide by asphyxiation, rigging a hose from his car’s exhaust pipe through its window. Following his death, Toole’s mother Thelma single-mindedly pursued publishing A Confederacy of Dunces, finally convincing Walker Percy, famed author of The Moviegoer and Lancelot, to read the manuscript. Even with Percy’s endorsement, several publishing houses again rejected the novel until Louisiana State University Press published a small print run in 1980. A Confederacy of Dunces sold through this initial printing, quickly became a bestseller, and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, thereby establishing Toole as a major American author despite his limited output. Thelma Toole died in 1984, and Toole’s other major work, The Neon Bible, was published in 1989.

Analysis

John Kennedy Toole’s literary reputation stands squarely on his accomplishments with A Confederacy of Dunces. His work is both highly invested in the literary tradition while appropriating it for comic and carnivalesque purposes. The title of A Confederacy of Dunces is taken from 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”—with this allusion linking the novel to Swift’s sharply satiric style. Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, cites Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy as the lodestar of his life, with this autobiographical and philosophical work detailing the author’s suffering as he awaits his unjust execution. Boethius debates with the allegorical figure of Lady Fortune over the vicissitudes of life, as he gradually comes to accept her wisdom and her final call for virtuous action despite unfavorable circumstances. The influence of John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit on Toole is evident in Ignatius’s overwrought, explosive, and verbose speech. In a particularly pointed barb, Ignatius dismisses Mark Twain—“Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate”—yet there is little reason to suspect that Ignatius’s comic views reflect Toole’s own. These examples give a hint of the wide-ranging scope of Toole’s literary tradition, which is both erudite and frequently exploited for its comic effect.

In A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole created a uniquely compelling world—a grandly comic vision of New Orleans and its citizens, in overlapping storylines that surprisingly merge in an unruly conclusion. Throughout the narrative, Ignatius both unleashes the comic madness and stands aghast at a fallen world, resulting in the paradox of a Rabelaisian hero who both embodies excess and fumes at disorder. A Confederacy of Dunces belongs to the realm of carnivalesque literature, a tradition reflected in the novel’s New Orleans setting. The carnivalesque world celebrates earthly pleasures in a setting where the typical rules of everyday life are overturned. As a religious holiday, Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday,” is the final day before the Lenten season of fasting commences, and so this last gasp of seasonal pleasure inspires the manic lunacy for which New Orleans is known. Toole’s carnivalesque themes unite surprisingly well with his philosophical motifs, for Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in much more measured tones, likewise addresses the difficulties of living a virtuous life in a topsy-turvy world.

One of Toole’s primary themes, both in A Confederacy of Dunces and his novella The Neon Bible, concerns the challenges of family relationships, particularly the fragile and frayed bonds between children and their parents. Ignatius rages against his mother, and, as much as his hyperbolic tirades continually position her as a convenient scapegoat for his troubles, her decision to commit him to a mental institution so that she may preserve her hopes of marrying her suitor Mr. Robichaux indicates that she privileges her happiness over her child’s freedom. In The Neon Bible, the protagonist David’s father dies fighting in World War II; his mother sinks into an eventually fatal depression. In both settings, the comic grotesquery of A Confederacy of Dunces and the gentle realism of The Neon Bible, children learn that they cannot rely on their parents to rescue them from their troubles.

Toole’s status as a Southern author influences the theme of alienation in his novels, particularly in that both of his protagonists must escape from their stultifying hometowns in order to emancipate themselves from the region’s hidebound mores. Ignatius’s friend Myrna Minkoff continually advises him to flee from his home in New Orleans (“Please leave that decaying city and come north”), and in the conclusion of A Confederacy of Dunces, she unexpectedly arrives to rescue him from his troubles. The Neon Bible story begins and ends as the young protagonist David reminisces on a train taking him to an unknown destination—but one as far from his home as his money will carry him. For Toole, the South is a land of repression and social conformity, and for his characters to flourish, they must leave it far behind. This theme of social and geographical alienation resonates in a variety of masterworks of Southern literature, including Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, which both aligns Toole with this tradition while highlighting as well his uniquely comic voice.

The plot of A Confederacy of Dunces trails antihero Ignatius J. Reilly on his numerous misadventures throughout New Orleans, with various overlapping storylines that almost mystically cohere into a single thread. The chaos begins as Ignatius awaits his mother outside the D. H. Holmes department store yet attracts the unwanted attention of police officer Mancuso, a meek man in fear of being fired from the force unless he arrests a “suspicious character.” Ignatius and his mother slip away from the chaos, as Mancuso instead arrests Mr. Claude Robichaux who, following a string of coincidences and unexpected introductions, begins to court Mrs. Reilly. After a drunken car accident, Ignatius’s mother insists that he find a job to assist her in paying the damages. Horrified by the thought of labor, Ignatius unwillingly pursues employment but soon accepts a position as a file clerk at Levy Pants. This company employs Miss Trixie, an elderly woman who desperately wants to retire, mistakenly calls Ignatius “Gloria,” and continually complains that she has not been given an Easter ham as her bonus. While employed there, Ignatius writes a defamatory letter to Mr. Abelman, one of Levy Pants’ contractors, and signs Mr. Levy’s name, which later initiates Mr. Ableman’s $500,000 dollar lawsuit against Mr. Levy. After being fired for inciting a rebellion among the workers, Ignatius finds a new job as a hotdog vendor in the French Quarter—to his mother’s dismay. During his daily forays into the French Quarter, he encounters Lana Lee, who runs the Night of Joy, a seedy bar that serves as a front for her pornography racket for high school students. Lana’s employees include Darlene, who dreams of stardom through a stripping act involving her pet bird, and Burma Jones, an African American man antagonized by the police who plots Lana’s downfall so that he may escape her employment. Additional members of the primary cast of characters include George, Lana’s young confederate in the pornography ring, and Dorian Greene, a gay man who buys Mrs. Reilly’s hat upon their first encounter and then invites Ignatius to a party, where Ignatius conspires to topple world governments by infiltrating them with homosexuals.

These plotlines unite as a carnivalesque night of revelations unfolds. Ignatius’s outrageous politicizing causes an uproar at Dorian Greene’s party, and so he escapes to the Night of Joy, hoping to meet the mysterious woman in the pornographic photo he confiscated from George. Darlene’s bird, trained to pull the rings from her wardrobe to undress her, instead attacks Ignatius’s earring, leaving him a bloodied heap on the sidewalk. As the police investigate the chaos, Burma Jones tips them off to Lana’s pornography, and so Mancuso succeeds in arresting his “suspicious character.” After a short stay in the hospital, Ignatius returns home, where Mr. Levy, desperately concerned over Mr. Abelman’s lawsuit, finds him. Ignatius convinces him that Miss Trixie wrote the defamatory letter, and Mr. Levy—relieved that she, in her bewildered state, will admit culpability—finally allows her to retire. Meanwhile, Mrs. Reilly, who hopes to marry Mr. Robichaux, decides that Ignatius must be committed to a mental hospital to preserve her chances with her suitor. In a deus ex machina ending, Myrna Minkoff, a social activist in New York City with whom Ignatius has maintained a blistering correspondence, arrives on his doorstep and drives him to safety, far from the madness of New Orleans.

As this whirlwind sketch tacitly admits, no plot summary can do justice to these interweaving storylines, which must be experienced by the reader for their comic brio to emerge in full force. The carnivalesque comedy of Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is sufficient to make it a memorable novel, and his detailed knowledge of New Orleans as a hybrid space of various peoples and traditions gives his work a setting that animates its every scene, particularly in his masterful use of dialect that brings his various characters to life, as many native residents of New Orleans would attest. A Confederacy of Dunces proves the ways in which comedy transcends regional particularities while embracing them, elevating the local color of its topography into a vibrant tableau for a tale truly universal in its scope, aims, and accomplishments.

Written during Toole’s adolescence, The Neon Bible is a precocious work, but Toole himself recognized its juvenility and flaws. In a letter to Robert Gottlieb, he dismissed it as a “grim, adolescent sociological attack upon the hatreds spawned by the various Calvinist religions in the South. . . . The book, of course, was bad.” The novel begins with its protagonist David traveling away from his home town on a train, as he mulls over various incidents of his past, including marital conflicts between his parents, his Aunt Mae’s dreams of a musical career, his struggles with his close-minded teacher Mrs. Watkins, and his first kiss with his girlfriend Jo Lynne. David’s troubles arise largely due to his parochial neighbors, whose insularity is exemplified when they burn the town library’s copy of Gone with the Wind. As David realizes, “If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out.” After he kills the preacher determined to commit his mother to a mental institution, David flees to liberate from his hometown’s hidebound mores.

The Neon Bible illuminates readers’ understanding of Toole’s evolution as an author, but few authors would desire to be judged on their teenage endeavors. Still, his depiction of adolescent alienation, his eye for local color, and his ear for characters’ voices are evident in this early work. As a Southern bildungsroman, Toole’s teenage effort belongs to the literary tradition of precocious children learning about the South’s history, past and present, of social and racial injustice, alongside such works as Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. One can see the bare foundations of literary genius in The Neon Bible, although it offers little foreshadowing that the author would become one of the most beloved humorists of his time.

Summary

Toole’s literary contribution rests almost entirely on A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel singularly capable of assuring his longevity as a beloved and esteemed author for countless readers. Ignatius’s sprawling, rollicking adventures throughout New Orleans render him an antihero for the ages and a defining character of American literature—a Don Quixote of the American South, tilting not at windmills but at modern life. A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—a fitting commendation for the novel and yet a poignant accolade for the author who did not live to see it.

Bibliography

By the Author