Butterfly in the Typewriter

During the first eight years of Toole’s schooling, the country had recovered from the Great Depression and emerged victorious from World War II. The ideology of sacrificing for the war effort subsided. And while the Cold War generated some unnerving fears and men still fought on battlefields in Korea in the early 1950s, the spectre of a world torn asunder by axis powers gave way to a growing desire for all things new. After all, one way to combat communism was to exercise the right to purchase. Families bought suburban homes, seeking some semblance of domestic utopia. These homes away from city centers necessitated new automobiles. As Toole had predicted, televisions became commonplace in the living rooms of the middle class. And New Orleans, now a foremost tourist city, was undergoing a renaissance. Canal Street bustled with shoppers; tourists crowded the streets of the French Quarter; and from the city that once served as the cradle of blues and jazz, the developing genre of rock and roll emanated from dance halls and music studios. An emboldened generation, tapping their feet, softened the social barriers of race as they danced to the supposedly corrupting, yet utterly intoxicating music. It was a great time to be young in New Orleans.

In the fall of 1950 Toole entered Alcée E. Fortier High School, named after the professor and scholar of Creole and Cajun literature. It resembled many of the brick and limestone schools built in the early twentieth century: a three-door entrance with hallways four stories high, forming a U shape—its arms extending to the rear to form a quad in the back. The tall ceilings and draft windows offered the only relief from the sweltering heat. Eventually, in 1969, Fortier would become a microcosm of the challenges facing the integration of whites with African Americans. But the civil rights movement of the 1950s, while gaining momentum in Louisiana, had yet to get its footing in the school systems of New Orleans, such were the rigid segregationist power structures of the city. Fortier was an all-white school, and for the first two years of Toole’s attendance it was an all-boys school.

Only twelve years old, Toole looked much younger than his classmates, although he had slimmed down from days at McDonogh 14. And while he must have grown accustomed to the two-year age difference between him and his peers, he now walked the same halls with eighteen-year-old seniors who were nearing college life and adulthood. But whatever social bearing the age difference had on him, it did not impact his academic performance. He breezed through the four years of high school as one of those rare students who needs only to attend class and submit the assignments to achieve high marks. He rarely studied and spent much time reading books of his own interests. So impressed with his son, John Toole once declared, “There is not a classroom into which he would go that he wouldn’t excel.” Indeed, Toole maintained a high “A” average every quarter, passing all classes with flying colors. But yet, he never reached the top of his class or expressed a desire to prevail in that regard. Without feeling particularly challenged, he contentedly glided through courses with ease. Besides, his head was turning elsewhere. He proved to be a talented mathematician, and he loved books, but human behavior captured his interest above all. As his mother once observed, “The seeing eye and the hearing ear characterized him all his life.”

Throughout his high school years, Toole set to observe and mimic the personalities he encountered in New Orleans. He had surely visited relatives living downtown, but he now had the independence and mobility to explore and observe other neighborhoods, often without his mother knowing of his adventures. Piercing through the façade of the city, exploring the intricacy of its culture, he began his ever-expanding catalog of characters. While tourists came to watch Carnival floats pass by at the Mardi Gras parades, Toole came to understand that the spirit of the city lay in a display of unmasked revelers dispersed throughout its many neighborhoods. He was beginning the long process of assembling his own parade. And there was no greater companion in this endeavor than his friend Cary Laird.

Much like Toole, Laird had skipped two grades. In their freshman year they shared a common bond in being the youngest students at Fortier. Both incredibly bright, their names always appeared every quarter in the honor roll column in the school newspaper, Silver and Blue. The two friends often competed with each other to get the highest scores on tests. They loved to read, and they both liked opera. But their sophistication was never beyond adolescent infatuations. They were both wild about Marilyn Monroe, although Toole developed a near obsession with her. In 1955 he wrote a letter of praise to the New York Times for an article by Bosley Crowther, who described the central tension in Monroe’s new film The Seven Year Itch as “the primal urge in the male animal,” meeting a “voluptuous young lady” for a “summer in the hot city.” Any fan of Marilyn Monroe’s would find his review titillating, but Toole felt compelled to compliment the author.

While Toole and Laird had much in common, they looked like opposites. Laird was blond, while Toole had dark hair. Laird was Southern Baptist, while Toole was Roman Catholic, although not devout. And while Toole was an only child with aging parents and a household that held itself up to a rigor of formality, Laird had a sister and a devoted mother and father who created a relaxed home life. Despite the differences between the two friends, Laird’s sister, Lynda, remembers how their personalities complemented one another. Whenever Toole visited the Laird house, the family rollicked, as the two friends became a comic duo, mimicking everyone from their teachers to Hollywood stars. They would enter into impromptu skits, impersonating their teachers or people they had overheard on the street. And they left everyone in the Laird house in stitches.

One of their favorite duets was Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong from the 1956 film High Society. Without warning, the two friends would break into song, recreating the quick jazzy exchange between the smooth, debonair Crosby and the wide-eyed, smiling Armstrong. In his later years Laird would sometimes do the routine on his own, bouncing back and forth from the velvety baritone of Crosby to the raspy improvisations of Armstrong. And when done, people stood astonished at how he could change his voice and mannerisms so quickly. Laird would often say, “If you think that was good, you should have seen Ken. He was even better.”

Of course, living in New Orleans, Toole didn’t have to look to the big screen to find great characters. Toole and Laird found a wealth of material in their immediate surroundings, which inspired them to embellish scenes they witnessed for the sake of humor. They talked about their busty Spanish teacher who always sat astutely at her desk. But whenever she opened her desk drawer, her breasts flopped in, making it impossible to close. Unaware of the obstruction, she would slam her breasts in the compartment, and yelp expletives in Spanish. And the Latin teacher seemed to blame all the misfortunes of the world on people who weren’t studying Latin. Pretending to be newscasters, Toole and Laird would report a horrible tornado had ripped through Louisiana and killed hundreds of people, or a hurricane had carried away thousands of homes, or a horrific trolley car accident resulted in the deaths of dozens. Whatever the tragedy, the reason was the same: “Well it looks like somebody did not study their Latin.”

Outside the bounds of their school, the two friends ventured around New Orleans, absorbing the flavors of the different neighborhoods and creating fictional characters based on their observations. Downtown, there was little Tammie Reynolds whose mother would tell her to play on the sidewalks, what New Orleanians call banquettes. “Awww—little Tammie,” she would say, “go’on da banket by ya grammaw.” From the Irish Channel there was Antoinette, the promiscuous girl who “always wore dangling earrings and smacked gum.” She was just crazy about her beefy boyfriend named AJ, who was obviously an Italian because he used his initials as his nickname. And roaming throughout the city, looking for suspicious characters, was Captain Romigary, one of New Orleans finest policemen. He specialized in “hawtatheft.”

Toole and Laird went to the French Quarter, downtown, and to the Irish Channel. They even crossed over the race line, at a time when segregation was prevalent. They attended a service at a black Baptist church, participating in the long, lively ceremony of music and dance. And one day they observed a jazz funeral, watching as the brass band, playing dirges, led the deceased to the cemetery while the second line—those following the slow parade—marched sadly behind. As the funeral ended, the brass band erupted in songs of jubilation and the second line of the returning parade danced in the streets, celebrating the life of the deceased.

From a Fortier Latin teacher to Mid-City burial ceremonies, Toole witnessed the wealth of inspiration in his city. And yet he found some of the most memorable personalities during his high school years right next door to the Laird home on General Taylor Street. On the other side of the Laird’s rented duplex lived their landlady, a widow by the name of Irene Reilly. Her husband had died in World War II, and she now lived with her boyfriend, her son, and her mother. She worked at the corner market and talked to the neighborhood customers in that New Orleans Yat accent. “Where Ya’t, honey?” she would ask a local shopper. “Aw fine. Just makin’ some groceries.” Her boyfriend held the steady job of a postman, but because Irene collected a government check for her husband’s death, the two did not marry. The family was an amicable bunch until, as with many families, they started fighting. A disagreement quickly erupted into screams and bellows, and Irene’s elderly mother had some of the foulest language in all of New Orleans. When she slung her colorful rants in her deep New Orleans accent, her words carried throughout the house, resonating through a shared vent and into the bathroom in the Laird household. If Toole happened to be visiting the Lairds, which he often did, and the Reillys got into a fight, he would sit in the bathroom with his ear to the vent, listening and chuckling, as the profanity poured from the old woman’s mouth. Years later when he wrote Confederacy, Toole took the name Irene Reilly for Ignatius’s mother, a woman of unending sympathy for her son. But Toole may have transferred some of the profane spirit of Irene’s mother to the character Santa Battaglia, who shockingly exclaims, “Fuck Ignatius!”

And yet as he sought out such colorful personalities throughout his city, he had a prime example of New Orleans eccentricity at home—although, in the case of his parents it seemed far less humorous. Laird saw firsthand some of the odd ways of John and Thelma during his visits to the Toole house. Thelma made rigorous demands on her son (Laird was always careful of his pronunciation around her), but her theatrical expressions made her interesting and enjoyable company. However, Toole’s father, while always cordial, displayed sure signs of his developing neuroses, signs that may have gone unnoticed when Toole was a child but now could no longer be ignored. The same man who once let his five-year-old son drive a car was now obsessed with safety and security. He feared intruders could come in the home at any moment, so he installed deadbolt locks on all the internal doors of the house. Once he felt safe inside, he made himself quite comfortable, preferring to walk about in his jockey shorts. Since Laird was a regular visitor, John made few changes in his attire for him, although it must have cut a striking difference next to Thelma’s formal reception of guests. One day, as John walked through the house in his underwear, he spotted a prop sword placed in the umbrella stand by the door—surely one of Thelma’s harmless items used in one of her productions. John identified it as a deadly weapon that could be turned against the entire family. He drew out the sword from the umbrella stand and turned toward Thelma, scolding her for leaving it close to the entryway. “Someone is going to break in here, find this weapon, and kill us all in our sleep!” he yelled. Laird barely withheld his laughter as he watched the aged man in his underwear wielding the sword above his head, chasing his well-dressed wife about the room, reprimanding her on safety. Looking to Ken, Laird could tell the scene mortified his friend. It was a moment of humor and pain, a conflicted experience that must have permeated the Toole home at times.

Whether or not they acknowledged it, his father was gradually sinking into a debilitating mental illness. For lack of an official diagnosis, his nephew, Harold Toole, termed it senility. But the initial signs of his neuroses seemed to be exhibited in moments of slight paranoia throughout the 1950s, although they were far less dramatic than the saber episode. In addition to John’s concerns over home security, he began displaying extreme caution when selling a car. When Lynda, Laird’s sister, went to John to purchase her first vehicle, she had to meet some of his rigorous criteria. Even though she had the money to buy the car outright, he needed to ensure her finances demonstrated she could actually afford the car. He then required her to drive down St. Charles Avenue, to prove she could handle the car. Once she passed his financial and driving tests, she said she wanted a convertible, and he replied he would sell her a white one only. That way people could easily see her coming down the street. It was the safest option, he explained. So Lynda left with her brand new white Oldsmobile convertible, and shortly thereafter John retired from automobile sales.

Such eccentric behavior eventually turned into more bizarre obsessions with safety and the apparent onset of paranoia. But this was a private matter. Thelma and her son kept John’s illness largely a secret as it gradually worsened, perhaps to protect John or perhaps out of shame. And while Toole’s father worked throughout the 1950s, Laird witnessed the early stages of the slow deterioration to come. Toole later confided to one of his adult friends that growing up he rarely invited friends over to his house for fear of embarrassment. Clearly, Laird was an exception.

While Toole may have felt bringing guests to the house was too risky, he still led an enjoyable social life in high school as he entered into a new and challenging world of dating. In 1952, when Toole was fourteen, Fortier opened its doors to female students. The mixture of boys and girls in classrooms and hallways changed the social dynamic in the school. The newspaper, Silver and Blue, received a telling facelift, adding the gossip sections “Cat Nips” and “Social Whirl,” which covered student affairs. The first time “Cat Nips” appeared, the anonymous reporter wrote, “We are all one big happy family . . . and the gossip is about you.” In that first column, Toole was snagged by the snooping gumshoe with the suggestive question, “Every morning JOSEPHINE T. meets KENNY before school to discuss lessons????” “Social Whirl” focused on who was seen about town on weekends. The sons and daughters of the social elite might still dance a waltz at formal balls, but a new sound was taking shape in New Orleans, which characterized the social scene of teenagers all over the country in the 1950s. It was a movement that arguably began in the alter ego of Uptown—the poor black neighborhood of the Ninth Ward—and it created just as much frenzy and fear as jazz did in the early 1900s.

While Toole was performing in blackface at an outdoor theatre in Uptown in the late 1940s, a young black musician from the Ninth Ward named Fats Domino was playing piano in honkytonk bars in New Orleans. An undisputed innovator in music, Domino quickly catapulted to a recording studio and began touring across the country. In the mid-fifties, audiences went wild for “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Blueberry Hill.” Such success terrified old order white Southerners. Organizations such as the KKK attacked early rock and roll concerts, and they urged parents to save their children from the evils of listening to “Negro music” with its sexually suggestive language. But young people of every color won out.

Despite its initial controversy, eventually white musicians, who were inspired in part by Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, eased the music’s transition to mainstream, predominantly white audiences. The nation tuned into the Louisiana Hayride broadcast in Shreveport, Louisiana, to listen to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. And throughout the fifties, American youth watched Dick Clark’s American Bandstand to learn the newest dances to the hottest songs. Like most teenagers in the 1950s, Toole listened to rock and roll. And any young man hoping to enter the dating scene in New Orleans would need to know how to dance to it. Cary Laird asked his younger sister, Lynda, to give him some lessons, and Toole joined them to learn the latest moves. They cleared some space in the basement where they had set up a record player. They practiced dances like the Jitterbug and the Cha-Cha. And to Toole’s amusement, they covered the Dirty Bop, a provocative and taboo variation of the Jitterbug that had been banned from many school dance floors, which made it all the more interesting to teenagers.

By all accounts Toole was a wonderful dancer. Evenings out for the students at Fortier usually included either going to a party, a school dance, a dance hall, or, on special occasions, the Blue Room at the Roosevelt Hotel. Of course, taking those first few steps into the rituals of dating can be awkward, especially as a teenager. But this meant the opportunity for new experiences and new humorous stories, which Toole eagerly shared with Laird. In his senior year, Toole dated a girl everyone called Buzzy, who, according to Lynda Laird, attended the prestigious Holy Name of Jesus School, in Uptown. In January of 1954, “Cat Nips” reported “Ken T. and Buzzy P” as “seen doing the town.” But Toole may have underestimated Buzzy’s level of devotion to the Catholic Church. One evening when Toole went to pick up Buzzy for a night out, she welcomed him into her house so he could offer the customary greeting to her parents. Her mother, unaware of Toole’s arrival, yelled down from the second floor, “Buzzy, you’d better get some romance before you become a nun!” Buzzy was humiliated. Toole was amused. But perhaps Buzzy’s devotion to clergy life was not as firm as her mother believed. Toole told Laird that he broke up with her when she brought up the topic of marriage.

Whatever embarrassment Buzzy suffered paled in comparison to Toole’s embarrassment over his own parents. In regard to dating, his father had an unobtrusive piece of advice: “Kenny boy,” he would say, “you need to beware of loose women!” His mother, however, took a different approach. While she maintained that she stayed out of her son’s business when it came to dating, Laird told a different story. According to his account, Thelma would sometimes follow her son on dates. This was not necessarily typical behavior but happened enough times for Laird to retell the story to his sister. Thelma undeniably coveted her relationship with her son. He was everything to her. And while she wanted him to be desired, she also harbored anxiety that he might one day abandon her. She often said that the ladies loved him, but “he only had eyes for her.” And she was convinced that she was his only confidant. This intensity may have stifled Toole’s growth toward independence. What was once heartwarming devotion between a young boy and his mother became somewhat distorted in high school—a crucial time when a young man explores relationships with others, as he envisions what form his life will take once out from under the roof of his parents.

Regardless of his mother’s intrusions, Toole gained a reputation for being an enjoyable date—a good dancer, polite, always well dressed. It was a reputation he carried into college and beyond. But romantic interests always seemed secondary to his drive to achieve some form of greatness. What that form was still remained unclear. However, in high school, his energetic exploration of writing styles suggested a particular direction.

Toole’s academic essays show his interest in both popular culture and history. In “Television, Tomorrow’s Entertainment,” he returned to the idea that he muttered to John Geiser on their way to school in kindergarten. Citing historical and statistical evidence, and noting the decline in attendance at cinemas, Toole argues for the growing trend and popularity of television. He declares at the end of the short essay, “Television is here to stay and soon it may be the world’s chief entertainment.” He was acutely perceptive. Around the time he wrote this paper, the Golden Age of television began, a time of innovation and experimentation in the medium.

Toole also understood well the language of patriotism, and for his teachers he embraced it in his writing, showing energy and vision. In a short essay on the Louisiana Purchase, he casts the American heartland in picturesque detail:

On the Great Plains spring up the graceful, golden “gift of God”—wheat. Beneath the fertile surface lay the extensive pools of blue-black oil lying dormant until the greedy drill should pierce their slumber.

These are the same plains that still bear the wagon tracks of the 1850s in the furious rush westward. Up from the virgin forests have sprung the great industrial and commercial centers. Above the banks of the Mississippi rise the smoke-blacked factory towers representing the nation’s strength....

At the tip of this cornucopia lies New Orleans, the insuperable gateway to the Mississippi and America’s region of prosperity.

He wrote his high school essays in idealized language about America and American history, which was quite common for the historical narrative offered at the time. In an essay titled “Democracy Is What We Make of It,” the young Toole explores the citizen’s responsibility to uphold the principles of “the greatest nation of the earth” and overcome “Communist tyranny.” Without cynicism or humor he expresses a loyal affirmation of the creed of the country. The overtly patriotic voice he used in his class assignments does not indicate the skepticism he may have felt toward the ideal vision of the United States and the Cold War mentality.

In college he would directly undermine such idealistic precepts of the nation, a sentiment that eventually culminated in his character Ignatius Reilly whose New Orleans–centric vision of the world is laughable and who finds the country lacking in “geometry and theology.” And Toole would also mock simplistic notions of government and economies, humorously voiced in Confederacy through the character Claude Robichaux, who is convinced anyone that opposes him is a “comuniss.” While Toole maintained a patriotic line in his classwork, early traces of this cynical tendency appear outside of his schoolwork. In 1951 he joined the staff of the school newspaper, making his entry through a satire edition titled Ess and Bee, presumably an inversion of B.S. Taking on the character of a Russian ring-toss athlete Ivan Vishivsky O’Toole of the Russian institution Liquidate University, he offers testimony of losing to a Fortier student at the world ring toss championship held in “Upper Lower Slobbovia.” O’Toole testifies in his Russian dialect:

Vhy, oh vhy, does effryting haff to hoppin to me?

Chust when I t’ought I had der voild’s ring toss championship in der bag, Fortier’s Villie Harrison (dorty capitalist) came from behind to win hands and feets.

Da, I vas sure dat I had von it, ven dot slob made a beautivul 10-foot toss mit der rink, and I vent down in dorty democratic defeat. Siberia, heer I come.

Toole employed the use of dialect in some of his creative writing in high school as well. In the John Kennedy Toole Papers at Tulane University (called the Toole Papers hereafter), there is an undated manuscript titled “Going Up” that is likely from this time period. His name appears on this manuscript as Kennedy Toole, which he started using again in print when he became the managing editor of Silver and Blue in his senior year. Told in the voice of an elevator operator who speaks in the downtown New Orleans accent, the narrator tells of a serendipitous event when he accidentally left a lady on the twelfth floor, although she asked for the thirteenth. He feared her reprisals, but because his mistake resulted in her securing employment, everything ended for the best. Despite the flaws of “Going Up,” it demonstrates Toole’s early interest in capturing the cadence of speech in the commoner of New Orleans.

These stabs at fiction and satire may have been a warm-up to his watershed moment as an aspiring author. By 1953 the Tooles had moved to 2226 Cambronne Street in a less desirable neighborhood on the edges of Uptown, away from the lush green archways and park spaces. Thelma later explained to reporter Dalt Wonk that they moved in order to be closer to Fortier, but Cambronne was farther away from Fortier than Webster Street was. Most likely, their move had more to do with a decrease in income. And leaving the heart of Uptown was a sacrifice Thelma would have met with bitterness. Perhaps the pressures of home primed Toole for some time away from New Orleans. In Toole’s senior year the Lairds invited Toole on a family visit to an aunt and uncle that lived on a farm in Mississippi. Toole eagerly accepted. In 1954 he and the Lairds piled into their old Studebaker and headed due north to McComb, Mississippi. To the Lairds, there was little novelty in visiting the family farm, but to Toole everything teemed with the uniqueness of country life. The dairy farm and fields of crops offered new scenery. Toole rode on the back of a tractor and, as his best friend watched, eventually took his hand at driving one. It was no Oldsmobile. He struggled to shift the gears of the foreign contraption. Toole’s enthusiasm made him a welcomed visitor. Laird’s aunt Alice loved his company, which was in no small part due to his flattery of her. He commented that she had the look of the Italian actress Anna Magnani.

The weekend visit soon came to an end, but Toole didn’t want to leave. He had seen another side of life, with different kinds of people. On the way back to New Orleans, he seemed invigorated by the whole experience. They passed road sign after road sign of religious platitudes, messages pleading for the moral sensibility of the passersby, signs that said “Drink and Drive and Burn Alive.” The overt dogma emblazoned on highway signs spoke to the tension between salvation and damnation, between religion and commercialism. Toole looked at Mississippi and its staunch religious conservatism as ripe, literary material. It was not a reflection of his own beliefs. While raised Catholic in a city with deep ties to Catholicism, the Tooles were not avid churchgoers. The parade of wealth made of the religious ceremony in Uptown churches drove Thelma and her son away from attending mass, so she claimed. Although, she maintained that her son was always “a Christian in the true sense of the word.” But what repulsed Thelma about the Catholic service intrigued Toole when he encountered it in another form in the Baptist church. The highway signs in Mississippi were religious messages blended with advertisements for products such as Burma-Shave shaving cream. And thus pleas to the faithful were simultaneous pleas to the consumer.

The young observer had seen a different worldview, not necessarily one to which he aspired, but one with significance nonetheless. One of his favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, had grappled with conflicting messages of religion, but she had not placed it in the scope of a boy coming of age amid familial and social conflict. Somewhere between McComb and New Orleans, driving on a country road at night, Toole asked his friend to pull over. Laird, somewhat confused as to Toole’s intent, did as requested. The New Orleanian who had spent most of his life seeing nights illuminated with street lamps that glowed in the river mist stepped out of the old Studebaker and looked up. He “gasped at the beauty of the millions of stars in the sky” and exclaimed, “‘I didn’t know there were this many stars in the heavens!’” It seemed a revelation had hit him. They all paused to appreciate the twinkling lights. Back in the car, heading south toward New Orleans, Toole told his friend, “I have to write a book.” He started muttering to himself, making mental notes of what he intended to do. Laird encouraged his enthusiasm, although he did not realize the seriousness with which Toole would pursue his idea.

Back at home, Toole set to work on writing the book, distilling his impressions of Mississippi. The trip to the country sparked his interests in this world of God and land and the small Southern town. And for all the dozens of road signs blazing in his memory from the trip home, New Orleans provided him the central image to his novel, as well as the title. Along Airline Highway in Metairie, in the outskirts of New Orleans, a sign for Mid-City Baptist Church lit up at night. It was a radiant bible with red letters and yellow pages, opened to the passage of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The holy text beamed in commercial illumination like a commodity sold to customers. It embodied that tension between religion and commercialism. He had found the ironic symbol to place at the center of his book: The Neon Bible.

While Toole never attended a revival meeting in Mississippi, at the invitation of his friend Cary Laird, Toole went with his mother to “hear Billy Graham at a revival meeting at the old first Baptist church on St. Charles near the old Touro Infirmary.” He and his mother watched the impassioned evangelical preacher hold sway over the congregation. His mother recalled,

We were fascinated—professing for Christ—young minister, very handsome, in a beige suit and a salmon tie showed how wicked social dancing was. I said to my son, “This is a fine religious meeting.” And they laughed their heads off. I didn’t think they were funny. My son gained a great deal from that.

Toole must have appreciated the theatrical quality of the tent revival. And while Billy Graham may disagree that his revivals were “shows,” his organization used the same tactics that stage productions use to generate interest. Before coming to a city, a media blitz preceded him with posters and advertisements. Then for a series of nights, sometimes weeks on end, he preached the gospel. In Los Angeles in 1949, Graham spoke behind a huge stage prop bible opened toward the audience. And several years after his New Orleans “crusade” he would take Manhattan by storm, drawing in thousands upon thousands of audience members, filling Yankee stadium and Madison Square Garden. His preaching always culminated in the “altar call,” which was when members of the congregation would step forward to declare their promise to Jesus. Toole stood on stage as a young boy, but he had never held such power over an audience. And while his Catholic church had the regal and austere theater of ceremony, it was nowhere near as lively as the jam-packed seats of believers calling to Christ and professing aloud their faith. But mixed with his appreciation, he showed some disdain for the simplicity of the believers to be swayed by such theatrics, and so, as Thelma says, “they laughed their heads off.”

As Toole drafted The Neon Bible, he must have recalled Billy Graham. The evangelist in the book who comes to the small Mississippi town appears remarkably similar to how Graham looked in 1954. David, the narrator protagonist, explains his first impressions of the evangelist:

The first thing I noticed about him, even before his clothes and how skinny he was, were his eyes. They were blue, but a kind of blue I never saw before. It was a clear kind of eye that always looked like it was staring into a bright light without having to squint. His cheeks weren’t full like a boy’s would be, but hung in toward his teeth. You could hardly see his upper lip, not because it was thin, but because he had a long, narrow nose that sort of hung down at the end. He was blond-headed, with his hair combed straight back and hanging on his neck.

And in the tent the spirits of the townspeople awaken. Even David nearly goes to the altar to profess his faith. The tent bonds the town together. But once it is taken down and the evangelist leaves town, everything begins to crumble. Having lost his father to the war, his Aunt Mae to the wind, and his mother, who died in his arms one night as he wiped the blood from her mouth, David, in the end, defends the family home when the preacher from the local church comes to take his mother to the mental hospital. Unaware of her death, the preacher’s presence threatens to uncover their poor and secretive existence. So as the preacher ascends the stairs, David shoots him in the back and kills him, then flees town. Like Flannery O’Connor, Toole uses violence to twist the plot, moving it from the subdued, coming-of-age story of a Mississippi teenager to the tale of a boy pushed to the brink to defend his mother, resulting in his being ousted from the community he had known all his life.

While The Neon Bible has become known as a work of juvenilia, an accomplishment in respect to Toole’s age at the time he wrote it, the novel remains a work that demonstrates his keen awareness of character and dialogue. Kerry Luft, senior editor at the Chicago Tribune, expresses this early talent: “Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” He likely gleaned this style of simplicity from one of his favorite novels at the time, The Catcher in the Rye. But his first novel also appears as a counter principle to Toole’s introduction to verbal expression under the guidance of his mother. Thelma expressed herself in the most florid ways possible. She prided herself on the occasional, elaborate “literary sentence” that she would contribute to her son’s school papers.

But Toole decided the voice of the narrator in his novel needed to sound like an average teenager of the time. When David explains the experience of being beat up by high school bullies, he does so using the straightforward vocabulary of a sixteen-year-old:

The first sock came. It was on my head right above my eye, and I began to cry again, only this time harder. They were all on me at once, I thought. I felt myself falling backward, and I landed with them on top of me. My stomach made a sick grinding noise, and I started feeling the vomit climb up into my throat. I was tasting blood on my lips now, and an awful scaredness was creeping from my feet up my legs. I felt the tingling go up till it grabbed me where I really felt it. Then the vomit came, over everything. Me, Bruce, and the other two. They screamed and jumped off me. And I laid there and the sun was hot and there was dust all over me.

For some reason, Toole never told his mother he was writing a novel. And she had no idea that he submitted it to a writing contest. She explained years later, “He didn’t want me to worry, you see.” She never explained what worries she would have had. The very fact that he had written a novel deserved some celebration, but he kept the whole thing a secret. It was his first serious attempt to write fiction, and from his return from Mississippi to completing the novel in New Orleans, he took measures to ensure his mother remained completely unaware of it. The novel is an expression all his own, a definitive departure from his performances as a speaker, actor, or singer, and drafted in an energetic burst of writing. He had successfully expressed himself as a perceptive observer and a writer. But perhaps he never told his mother about The Neon Bible for fear of what could happen and what did happen. When he received word he lost the contest, he tucked away the manuscript, hiding his failure, suffering the pangs of rejection alone.

Despite his perceived failure as a novelist, his senior year was a busy time, overall, as he garnered recognition and accomplishment. He was elected a state representative at Boys’ State in August of 1953. He became managing editor of the school newspaper and assistant editor to the yearbook. In October of 1953 he appeared as a guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club. He was inducted into the honor society. He took fifth place in a Spanish language contest. And on December 16, the day before his sixteenth birthday, he appeared on local television with six other students to review the epic novel Tree of Liberty. A month later, Silver and Blue published a “Senior Spotlight” on him, naming him “one of Fortier’s big wheels.”

For all the awards and positions he held, his most seminal moment, one that would plant a seed for his future, came in May of 1954 when Toole left New Orleans with a school group to take a tour of historic sites along the eastern seaboard. He was one of thirty-one students from Fortier selected to receive a National Freedom Foundation award at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. These students represented “how the ideals of the American way of life are taught in classes at Fortier.” Boarding a train at 8 a.m., they made the long journey northward. They visited Washington, DC, taking in the sights of the Lincoln Monument, the White House, the Capitol, and ascending the Washington Monument. They watched the “solemn changing of the guard at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” At Valley Forge they were honored in a ceremony, and they stopped in Philadelphia to pay tribute to Liberty Hall. And like true New Orleanians, they carried the spirit of their hometown with them. In the city of brotherly love, they enjoyed a “costume party at the Sylvania Hotel.”

The most exciting part of the trip for Toole must have been the three days he spent in New York City. The group made the typical tourist stops, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the United Nations—all symbols of the American identity and its value of freedom, competition, and diplomacy. They took a ferry to Ellis Island, and they stepped into St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But the highlight of his visit to New York was the glitz and glamour of Broadway shows. In an article Toole wrote for the school newspaper upon their return, he summarizes the trip, noting, “Entertainment was an outstanding feature of the tour. The gawking Fortierites viewed Cinerama, the new movie wonder, the world famous ‘Rockettes’ at the fabulous Radio City Music Hall, and one of the biggest musicals on Broadway, Wonderful Town.”

While much of the trip was spent invigorating the patriotic spirit of the students, the rolling hills of Valley Forge and the then sleepy Southern town of Washington, DC, would be difficult to rival the heart-pounding verve of New York. In a promotional map of Manhattan that Toole saved in his scrapbook the tourist is informed, “Manhattan is the financial, cultural, manufacturing, and theatrical CAPITAL of the World!” It was a statement that Toole heard loud and clear, a statement that, for better or worse, returned to his ears throughout his life, both drawing him to and repelling him from New York City.

In primary school he had strutted upon the stage, but in high school he stepped into the world, observing his city, dating women, and making his first movements toward social critique through satire. Some of the key characters of Confederacy were beginning to germinate. Joel Zelden, a friend and neighbor, recalled how one afternoon they invented the name Ignatius Reilly, finding the mere sound of it funny. And perhaps even then he reflected on how he might use his impressions of Irene Reilly and her boisterous mother. He also gained a reputation for his wit and humor. Jane Pic Adams never forgot seeing Toole through the window and across the green in another class on the other side of the school. Locking eyes, Toole would make hilarious facial expressions. Adams struggled not to laugh, trying to keep her composure as she sang in chorus. And yet his antics never compromised his standing as a scholar. His classmates voted him most intelligent in his senior year, and he was awarded a full merit scholarship to attend Tulane University.

Most importantly, between writing a novel and managing the school newspaper, he pursued his interests in writing and had his first experience of New York City. And yet, despite his clear passion for literature and the arts, in his senior year of high school he decided to major in engineering in college. He must have understood his career path would likely have a direct impact on his family’s future prosperity, one that had been compromised, resulting in the loss of their home. After all, there was no one else but Toole to take care of his parents when they would inevitably succumb to old age. His mother claimed that his father persuaded him to study engineering, but Thelma was not one to passively approach these kinds of crossroads, either. She dedicated her life to creative endeavors, and she also endured the instability of it. “He was an artist,” but perhaps he could earn a respectable living creating works in a different discipline. Just like he tucked away his failed novel underneath his bed, he relegated his passion for writing to a hobby. Determined in his career choice, he announced his plans in the school newspaper.

But Toole would discover that Tulane, the university four blocks from Fortier, was undergoing major changes as it transitioned from a primarily New Orleans institution with a focus on applied technical skills to one of the leading liberal arts universities in the United States. As the university grew, students came in greater numbers from farther away, increasing diversity and bringing with them ideas of progress. The coeds enjoyed a city that unabashedly offered indulgences found nowhere else in the South. They also came to study at a university that was growing in notoriety as it added graduate programs and earned federal research grants, attracting high-caliber professors. The world of Tulane was about to open up before Toole, not just as a means to a job, but also as a place to refine and explore his ideas.