Butterfly in the Typewriter

The Manhattan skyline emerges out of the Hudson and East rivers, an American symbol of human ambition. Businessmen, restaurateurs, artists, all manner of disciplines come to New York, hoping to carve a legacy out of this labyrinth; and the city, unforgiving, demands their best. Toole’s successes in New Orleans served as stepping-stones to this moment. Far removed from the quaint temper of Tulane, he entered another kind of world at Columbia—a mammoth institution that drew people from every walk of life, students from more than sixty-three nations, and a star-studded faculty from the forefront of knowledge. To a young scholar from the South, Columbia must have seemed a place of limitless possibilities. Here, Toole pursued his dream vision of New York, the place where he would cast a mold for himself far from the comforts and burdens of home. His previous visits to the Big Apple had offered him an introduction to the city, but he understood graduate school in New York would be quite different from a weekend taking in Broadway musicals.

Distanced from the tourist centers of Manhattan, Columbia is situated in Morningside Heights between the Upper West Side and Harlem. Originally named King’s College, the school was established in 1754 by a charter from King George II and located in lower Manhattan. It was renamed Columbia out of patriotic fervor that followed the Revolutionary War, but one can still sense its regal distinction while walking through its current campus. The columned, neoclassical buildings surround green lawns, where students stroll from class to class, from genius lecture to genius lecture. And during Toole’s time at Columbia, when the graduate student searched for “overtly social occasions,” the Graduate Student’s Guide suggested visiting “the Graduate Student Lounge . . . about tea-time” where one would find the knowledgeable Mrs. Edgar Grim Miller “presiding over the students and staff members gathered there.” With the crown emblem and lion mascot, the faculty and students sat upon their thrones as urbane kings of an urban jungle. In this royal sanctuary, a world apart from the frenzy of Times Square or the bohemian quarters of Greenwich Village, Toole could quietly study in the libraries or ponder literature while sitting along the Hudson in Riverside Park. And yet, the endless diversions of the metropolis were at most a subway ride away. For a young man at the age of twenty, it offered the best of both worlds, serene and exhilarating.

But for all its opportunities, Columbia offered no escape from the sobering, financial reality of living and studying in Manhattan. Even with the good fortune of a fellowship, the imposition of money determined Toole’s course from day one. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship covered tuition and awarded him fourteen hundred dollars for the entire year, from which he had to pay for room and board, books, and supplies. But it lasted only for the fall and spring semesters. In two semesters it was possible to complete the degree, which required ten courses, writing a thesis, and passing two comprehensive exams. But according to the student guide such an achievement was “unusual.” Most master of arts candidates completed the degree requirements over three semesters, usually finishing in the summer. If Toole followed the typical track, he would need money to pay for a summer session. Put into perspective, the student guide presented financial figures for a student with a university loan, savings from a summer job, and income from a part-time job on campus, which still left the student seven hundred dollars short. These funds would “have to be filled from ‘outside’ sources: [such as] help from family or sponsors, savings, other loans.” Toole had no outside sources, certainly no substantial help from his family; they simply could not afford it. It was clear, he had to accomplish the unusual. He had to graduate in two semesters, after which, if approved, he could continue on to the PhD program at Columbia.

With his deadline established, he began his life as a graduate student. He moved into Furnald Hall, room 1008. It was sparsely furnished with two beds, a sink, and an alcove at the far end, offering enough space for a desk or a chair, positioned under the bay windows. The top floor room offered a view over Broadway. Out of the windows he could see the bell towers of the Union Theological Seminary and Broadway Presbyterian Church, the soaring gothic tower of Riverside Church, and the new high-rise dorms under construction at Barnard College. Ten floors down, the wood-paneled lounge of Furnald Hall with its grand marble fireplace and huge chandelier offered students a spacious escape from the confines of their small rooms. Crown emblems embossed on the coffered ceiling subtly reminded students of their privileged place.

Unpacked and settled in his room, Toole set his sights on the work ahead. He had lectures to attend, much reading to do, and a thesis to write. In the brisk autumn air, he headed to class. His short walk across the South Lawn to Philosophy Hall soon became commonplace. But each day he passed the buildings and statues that ever so clearly evidenced his elevation from Tulane. Upon exiting Furnald, he passed the Graduate School of Journalism, founded by Joseph Pulitzer and where the famed Pulitzer Prize annually originates. To the right, on the south end of the lawn, Toole could see the Butler Library, the giant columns upholding the names of poets and philosophers Homer, Plato, and Socrates. On the north end of the lawn, he passed the iconic Alma Mater statue, sitting upon her throne on the steps of the Low Library with an open book in her lap, her arms outstretched, welcoming all her chosen ones. Finally, approaching Philosophy Hall, he passed an original cast of Rodin’s The Thinker, the timeless statue prompting contemplation. Renowned academics, poets, and writers had made a similar trek to arrive at those same oak doors. He walked in the footsteps of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, and Upton Sinclair. Here it was that great thinkers came to study and teach, as they had for decades. Inside, professors sat in their offices, the doors slightly ajar, as they worked on their latest projects. The faint clacking of typewriters echoed into the wood-paneled corridors. Lecture rooms filled with students quietly chatting, awaiting professors. Taking his seat, Toole set his course for something greater than what New Orleans could offer him.

He enrolled in an eighteenth-century British Literature class that was taught by the department chair, Marjorie Nicolson, a “short tank of a woman” often seen “drawing on a cigarette with her thin lips.” She declared her independence through her fierce dedication to academic rigor. But never a tyrant, she tailored her questions so as to challenge students, not demoralize them. Students affectionately called her Miss Nicki behind her back.

He also took two courses with the lively William Nelson, another ranking official listed as the department representative in the Graduate Student’s Guide. Robert Parker, who studied extensively under Nelson, remembers him as an underrated scholar and gentleman. In the seminar on British poet Edmund Spencer, Nelson would often read passages of poetry. He maintained that when read aloud, Spencer’s The Faerie Queen becomes one of the great joys in literature, despite its intentional archaic language and reputation for difficulty. Nelson’s lectures became a kind of literary theater, which may have demonstrated to Toole a way to blend both performance and teaching to create memorable classroom moments. And any young scholar harboring aspirations of a writer in the mid-twentieth century would benefit from William Tindall’s Contemporary British Literature course. Under Tindall’s guidance, Toole leapt into the world of James Joyce, reading Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses. Tindall encouraged students to discard the confines of historical context and read a work of literature in its present-day significance, an approach that differed from Toole’s undergraduate instruction. But such a challenge may have provided him an opportunity to appreciate Joyce in a new light. As an author steeped in the place of his birth, Joyce used his city, Dublin, to parallel the roots of Western literature in Ulysses. And yet, Tindall argued, one need not understand those roots to appreciate the work. Similarly, in Confederacy, Toole would compose a reflection of New Orleans, while connecting the work to the long line of his literary predecessors, from Chaucer to Dickens, and yet he would achieve an accessibility open to anyone with a sense of humor.

By far the most important professor he met at Columbia was John Wieler who taught a course on sixteenth-century literature, the area of Toole’s particular interest. Wieler was a graduate of the PhD program at Columbia and must have been teaching there as a part-time faculty member. By 1959 he was already acting chairman at Hunter College, an all-girls school located on the east side of Manhattan. Wieler would prove integral in Toole’s professional life, essentially opening the door to his transition from student to professor. The two would spend an academic year getting to know each other, a year in which Wieler became very impressed by Toole.

It is quite possible Toole also attended other lectures outside the courses for which he registered. At that time, graduate students did not earn grades for each class. There was no attendance taken and most lecture courses required no term papers. The English department held the philosophy that “Students devote themselves to preparation for final examinations and to Essays or Dissertations. Courses . . . are designed as aids to their progress, rather than as ends in themselves.” One need not appear on a specific class roster to partake in the learning; they just needed to show up early enough to find a seat. Many graduate students registered for courses, as they needed to pay for thirty credits of coursework, but they attended other classes out of interest. William Cullen Bryant II could be giving a lecture on Romanticism, or Mark Van Doren might be discussing his recent book Don Quixote’s Profession. Toole could take full advantage of the intellectually rich environment.

Clearly the opportunities for learning at Columbia were abundant. But as a student sitting in a class among eighty peers, and as a young scholar trying to navigate the ways of a new institution, Columbia could also be a lonely place. It offered little warmth in its welcome to graduate students. Toole had received the Graduate Student Guide in June, giving him sufficient time to read what the dean of the graduate faculties referred to as “the law.” Therein students were forthrightly told,

There is no disgrace in acknowledging that you are not cut out for a scholarly career; and the sooner this discovery is made, the better. . . . Far better to be in doubt and withdraw than to “grind out” a degree by brute persistence.

According to this handbook, the successful student would read incessantly, type to perfection, not burden his professors with inane questions of policy, and, most importantly, become an independent scholar. It preemptively forgives the professors burdened with thought if they overlook the questions of students. “If it should happen that in the welter of . . . multifarious and yearly increasing demands, an officer of instruction should accidentally overlook a student’s legitimate need of consultation time, it would not be surprising.” Another graduate student in the English department in 1958, Robert Bozanich, took away from the handbook the lesson that “one should not greet a professor in a casual encounter on campus and . . . one should not feel rebuffed if ignored.” Like many students at the time, Toole must have found this abrasiveness off-putting. He wanted the rigor and prestige of Columbia, but he would tire of this institutional condescension.

Furthermore, the English department ran a massive operation where MA candidates often felt insignificant. Thelma Toole referred to it as a machine, churning out graduates. The clear sense of hierarchy between the PhD and the MA students could make the graduate experience “very impersonal.” And the “huge lecture classes” offered “few opportunities for student-to-student or student-to-professor” interaction. At Columbia, Toole learned much from his professors, and he fortunately found a mentor in Wieler, but such a bond was not the usual for everyone, especially at the MA level.

Despite the institutional shortcomings of Columbia, Toole had at his doorstep one of the invaluable benefits of coming to New York, the artistic and cultural capital of the country. When not in class, he reveled in his explorations of the city, especially in the autumn when New York appears most alive. Trees arch over walkways; yellow, red, and orange leaves burst with color, a vibrant spectacle against the backdrop of black pavement and gray concrete. Ruth Lafranz, his romantic interest from Tulane, accompanied him on some of these excursions. As Dalt Wonk reports, “The two Southerners did up Gotham. They went to Coney Island, rode the Staten Island Ferry. They frequented Roseland, a dance palace. They took in plays and operas and the Bronx zoo.”

And naturally Toole enjoyed wandering through Greenwich Village, the artistic hub of New York in 1958. While New Orleans had the Quarter, New York had the Village, and both places attracted colorful characters. Within the first few weeks after Toole arrived in New York, he strolled through the Village and reported some of his observations in a letter to Dave Prescott, an acquaintance and graduate student from Tulane. Prescott responded, “Your first reactions to life at Columbia and to the Village proved most interesting reading.” In a four-page reply letter, Prescott offered Toole a detailed update of Tulane, reviewing new graduate students, additions to their “lunchroom coterie,” and other New Orleans news. He also tells of an occurrence in the French Quarter, a story of violence and dark humor Toole likely found amusing. Prescott sets the scenario with the well-publicized murder of a Mexican tour guide by three Tulane students. Amid the subsequent tensions between whites and Hispanics, a friend of Prescott’s was victimized. A new graduate student to Tulane named Shmuel Barovsky was walking in the Quarter when three Latinos “bludgeoned . . . his skull three times with a lead pipe and robbed” him. Prescott writes that Shmuel “began screaming at the top of his lungs causing a resident to open her window and in turn cry out.” The attackers grabbed what looked like his wallet but was really his address book and ran away. A patrolman soon came, and the two “were off to Charity” hospital. But on the way to Charity, they saw the three assailants, chased them down, and caught them as other police converged on the scene. The officers began to push the “disturbers-of-the-peace” into a police van. And as Shmuel stood “dazedly beside the patrol car with blood pouring down over his shoulders” a policeman started pushing him toward the van. Another officer noticed the commotion and yelled out, “That’s the victim!” Shmuel was let go, spent a few days in the hospital, and returned to school, “wearing his beret everywhere to cover his stitches.”

Dimwitted burglars, a victim mistaken for the criminal, a comedy of errors in the Quarter—even in Toole’s absence New Orleans remained the same. And with such an unusual name as Shmuel, the original Hebrew version of Samuel, it seems beyond coincidence that Myrna Minkoff mentions a Shmuel in a letter to Ignatius in Confederacy. In Toole’s novel Shmuel is the writer of a “bold and shattering movie” about an “interracial marriage.” The screenplay, as Myrna reports, is “chock-full of disturbing truths and had the most fascinating tonalities and ironies.” Prescott tells Toole of Shmuel suffering from racial tensions in New Orleans, and Toole puts him in New York commenting on interracial marriage.

But even for a seasoned urban dweller such as Toole, someone who was much more comfortable riding a streetcar than walking through the woods, both cities could overwhelm him. At times, he needed to get away from the bright lights and clamor. In New Orleans he would retreat to the Gulf. While in the northeast, he took a November sojourn to Massachusetts. Snapshots from this trip capture views of boulders and tree-lined beaches on Marblehead Neck, the bayside estates across the water, and the Marblehead lighthouse that he ascended to capture a shot of the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge rocks along the coast, just outside Salem, made for a scene quite different from the creeping waters of Louisiana. This was the same seaside town that inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional town Kingsport. He was the same writer from whom the phrase of Ignatius Reilly—“theology and geometry”—stems. Toole also visited Cambridge, taking a snapshot of the recently built Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a building praised as a prime example of modern architecture. Interestingly, no pictures from this trip capture an image of Toole or, if present, traveling companions. Perhaps, after months in Manhattan, he cherished these moments because they were solitary.

If his cool November day on the rocky coast of Massachusetts offered him respite from New York, it also signaled the coming of winter. The winds had stripped the weakened leaves from the trees. With no exams or final papers at Columbia, the semester ended quietly, and he began the long holiday break. He now had more time to venture about the city. But the frigid northeast winter brought out an aspect of New York he had never witnessed. People covered from head to toe, their eyes pointed downward, averting the cold air; they quickly ducked into buildings and into taxis, escaping the winter winds. The homeless curled into corners, sitting on greasy cardboard, their shaking hands sticking out from mismatched layers of coats and blankets. His dream vision of Manhattan faded as he tried to make sense of this disturbing collage. And Toole turned to poetry to express what he saw. In his poem “New York: Three Aspects,” he surveys the city and its people, focusing on the tensions between the cold winter and the glistening sunlight that hit the windows of skyscrapers, between “An East Side Heiress” and the “Hopeless of Third Avenue.” At the end of the poem he brings together this incongruous diversity: “New York / is today’s Noah’s Ark.” And while Noah’s Ark stands as a symbol of rebirth and hope amid devastation, Toole originally ended the poem with the line that cynically defines New York, as “The American way in a biblical bank.” In the typed version he struck that line, ending the poem with more ambiguity.

As time passed, Toole no longer found humorous observations of life in the city as he did in his first weeks at Columbia. The winter set the contrasts between the rich and the poor, the light and the dark, the high and the low in harsh relief. In “New York: Three Aspects,” his perspective takes on shades of what the French call a flâneur, like Charles Baudelaire wandering about Paris, an observer of humanity, finding a bitter existentialism in all that he sees. The rosy-colored glasses through which Toole once viewed New York darkened. And if his poems were expressions of his perspective, then his view of academics darkened as well.

During the winter break, he drafted a poem titled “The Arbiter,” wherein he expresses misgivings over the role of the literary critic. The speaker of the poem cynically summarizes the argument of a literary scholar and author who echoes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in proclaiming poetry dead. The critic asserts that “writers sought to mirror their existence,” which was not worthy of poetry but “mere ritual / Falsely spiritual.” In the retelling of the argument, Toole mocks the conventions of literary scholarship with parenthetical references to other works. And ironically the scholar seems wholly unaware that his position undermines his own legitimacy. A poetry critic has no purpose if poetry is really dead. But it becomes evident in the poem that the critic has no intention of enriching people’s understanding of literature; he wants to sell copies of his book, even at the expense of poetry. The poem ends with these lines:

The book sold well, we understand,
Although the cover itself would command
A buyer’s attention: a large, abstract bee
Crushing a butterfly with a typewriter key.

Through the act of writing, the critic violently kills the beautiful and transformative spirit of the poet. Toole may have seen himself as the butterfly. After The Neon Bible failed to win the contest, he determined the work lifeless and put it to rest. In this poem, he attempts to revitalize his creative pursuits. And just as he did with his novella, he intended to submit the poem to a contest. On February 1 he wrote to his mother:

“The American Scholar” is sponsoring a poetry contest. With the long holidays here and a degree of free time on my hands I figured, why not try?

Enclosed is the first poem I wrote (in 2 hours). I know that some of it may seem esoteric to you, but please read it and let me know what you think. I first wrote “thing” as that last word. Must be the Lawrence Welk influence.

Love—and read it, please. Ken.

He never let his mother see The Neon Bible, but now he sought her opinion on this poem. He repeats his request of her to read it, as if something in it was meant for her, perhaps a veiled confession of his wavering confidence in his academic pursuits. The poem looks with suspicion at the scholar who “consistently attacked / the writers of reaction.” As such, “The Arbiter” springs from a query into the relationship between artist and critic. Was Toole being groomed by scholars who dismissed contemporary literature, attempting to wield power over it? And if a division exists between writer and critic, what side would he choose? This poem seems to signal his growing discontent with literary criticism. These questions would resurface throughout his life, as he repeatedly stepped into and fell out of the pursuit of a PhD. And this inquiry ultimately led to larger questions. “New York: Three Aspects” and “The Arbiter” are two of several unpublished poems and stories likely written in New York during this time. On these manuscripts, as well as on his college essays, he uses varied forms of his name—Kennedy Toole, Kenny Toole, John Toole, and J. K. Toole. Considering his first name comes from his father and his middle name from his mother’s grandmother, these choices may well indicate self-reflective questions of identity. He appears to be asking himself: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How will I be remembered?

Writers of a new literary movement that was taking shape in the New York neighborhood in which he lived proposed similar questions. While Toole attended classes and wandered about New York City, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others were enjoying their newfound literary fame, which had roots in their days at Columbia. In fact “The Arbiter,” with its description of the poet as a “poetical Bramin and self-conscious intellectual,” may have been inspired by the conservative reaction from critics who deplored the Beats. While there are few parallels to draw between the writings of the Beat Generation and the writings of Toole, in 1959 he evidently took an interest in Beat writers, particularly Kerouac.

While in New York, Toole purchased Kerouac’s newly published novella The Subterraneans. Since it was by no means recommended reading for his graduate courses, he must have selected it out of his own interests. His copy, inscribed with his Furnald address, resides in the Toole Papers at Tulane. It is the only book from his library that was not sold or given away after his death. The Subterraneans deals with the contradicting forces of an artist’s need to create and his desire to maintain a steady relationship with a woman. The opening lines illustrate the battle between ego and insecurity in a “self-conscious intellectual.” Toole fought a similar battle until the end of his life:

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time an ego-maniac.

The narrator recognizes there is meaning in love, and yet he has to “rush off and construct construct for nothing.” In the end, he makes his decision that fills him with regret: “I go home having lost her love. And write this book.” It was a message that may have spoken directly to Toole. As he explored the city with Lafranz, he still found himself compelled to achieve some greatness he had not yet fully designed, perhaps at the compromise of a relationship he held dear.

Toole also had the opportunity to see Kerouac in New York. On November 6, 1958, Kerouac sat on a panel at Hunter College (where his mentor John Wieler chaired the English department) to discuss the question “Is there such thing as a Beat Generation?” On the Road was published in 1957, and The Subterraneans had just been released by Grove Press, catapulting Kerouac from an obscure drifter to a leader of a literary movement that was gaining momentum. British novelist Kingsley Amis, a writer that Toole also admired, sat on the panel that night, along with anthropologist Ashley Montagu and journalist James Wechsler. By all accounts, it was an odd mix. Amis earnestly questioned the meaning of the Beat movement, while Kerouac, under the initial impression he was going to lecture and read from his works, drunkenly responded to questions and identified some comical roots of the Beat generation. He named influences such as Harpo Marx and Krazy Kat, from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Ignatz.

As the literary wild child of the day, Kerouac was an iconoclast, discarding the restraints of tradition in both his works and his life. In reading Kerouac, and perhaps witnessing his antics at Hunter, Toole encountered an alternative track toward a literary life. Rejecting the narrow walls of academia, Kerouac searched for America, taking a physical and spiritual journey, the basis for On the Road. His travels westward inspired a generation to follow his lead—perhaps influencing Toole to take his own trip across America ten years later. In the late 1960s, Toole would incorporate the Beats into his class lectures, particularly praising the work of Kerouac. And both writers share some compelling biographical similarities. They both attended Columbia; they both struggled to make the world see their unique genius, often heeding an editor’s requests to make their work “publishable”; they both retreated from a society that no longer made sense to them; and they both took their final journey to the grave in 1969.

If Toole missed seeing Kerouac at Hunter College, he had another opportunity to witness the Beat poets on February 5, 1959, a short walk from his dormitory at Columbia. Five days after Toole sent his poem “The Arbiter” to his mother, Allen Ginsberg returned to his alma mater for a controversial reading. It is not certain that Toole was in the audience that night. He was not one of the self-identified Beats, unshaven and dressed in black, but he surely knew about the event taking place less than a block away. The obscenity trial over Ginsberg’s poem Howl made national news, and Ginsberg’s return to Columbia created chatter on campus among faculty and students. The English department officially disassociated from the whole event. However, Diana Trilling, the wife of Ginsberg’s former English professor Lionel Trilling, sneaked away to the reading, while her husband held a meeting in their home with far less controversial literary figures such as W. H. Auden. As Diana reports, the time drew near for the reading, and “word spread of vast barbarian hordes converging on poor dull McMillin Theater from all the dark recesses of the city, howling for their leader.” When she arrived at the theater, she expected to see a congregation of degenerates. Instead she found a group of nearly fourteen hundred people, mostly inoffensive youth who, to her surprise, “smelt clean.”

That night Ginsberg read “Kiddish,” a poem about the consuming insanity of his mother, her commitment to a mental hospital, and her eventual death. It is a wrenching narrative that would speak to any young man, particularly an only child caught between a sense of filial duty and a longing to fulfill his own life dreams. At the end of the reading, Ginsberg, in tears, embraced his father who sat in attendance. Trilling expresses the overwhelming pity of the audience, which was a surprising emotional response from supposed foul-smelling rebels. Granted, Toole may have been inclined to mock such displays of emotion in the company of friends. But he was not heartless. In some ways, Toole would be able to relate to Ginsberg. Toole’s father was developing neuroses, which would fester into a full-blown mental illness that relegated him to the backroom. In Toole’s most private moments, he proclaimed his love and expressed his exhaustion with his parents, much like Ginsberg had done with his mother on that Thursday night in 1959.

Ginsberg also offered a vociferous reproach of academics at Columbia. During the question-and-answer period, Ginsberg proclaimed, as Trilling paraphrases, “No one at Columbia knew anything about prosody; the English department was stuck in the nineteenth century, sensible of no meter other than the old iambic pentameter.” This diatribe was soft compared to his rant against Columbia in September of 1958. In a letter to his friend John Hollander, Ginsberg writes, “What a Columbia instructor can recognize in Pound he can’t see in Olson’s method, what he can see in Lorca or Apollinaire he can’t see in Howl—it’s fantastic. You call this education? I call it absolute brainwashed bullshit.” Ginsberg wanted to reclaim poetry from the hands of the arbiters at Columbia.

Even if Toole missed Ginsberg’s reading, the event evoked the spirit of the times in New York City. Fred Kaplan, author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed, identifies Ginsberg’s reading as one of the keystone moments that preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed the changing tides moved about Toole in New York City in 1959, although what that change would mean was yet unclear. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue at Columbia 30th Street Studio; Harry Truman gave a three-day lecture series at Columbia; Fidel Castro toured the Bronx Zoo, and the owner of Grove Press published the uncensored version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Toole was no anarchist or experimentalist, but in New York, on the home turf of the Beats, he must have heard his generation growing discontent by the old order of its elders. It was the generational difference, as Trilling puts it, between the aged scholar, sitting in his comfortable living room, dressed in a suit, dryly critiquing literature, while his protégé passionately reads poetry on the school stage, bringing audience members to tears. If Toole was there that night, he witnessed the butterfly emerge from the typewriter in his full brilliance, refusing to be crushed by the arbiter.

Ultimately Toole found his style in refined wit and slapstick humor. In fact, Toole playfully mocks the beatniks in Confederacy. Myrna Minkoff, an angry revolutionary looking to usurp the establishment without any clear sense of why she rebels, is a classic beatnik. And in the last pages of the novel, as Ignatius and Myrna run for the car to make their escape to New York City, the next-door neighbor calls out from behind the shutters, “Hey, where are you two beatniks going?” While he pokes fun at followers of the Beats, he does not take aim at their works. And to whatever degree he sympathized with the discontent of the youth generation, at the very least he considered the complex layers of New York, just as he saw the complexity of New Orleans. It would be all too easy for him to entrench in the libraries and halls of Columbia for his short time in the city. But Toole was too interested in humankind to be so obtuse. He cultivated a vision of New York that stretched from the ivory tower in Morningside Heights to the subterranean realm of the “angel-headed hipsters” of the Beats.

By spring Toole had to narrow his expansive vision of the metropolis. He put to rest his winter of poetry to focus on fulfilling the requirements of his degree. By then he had the attention of John Wieler, who named Toole “the number one student in the sixteenth century seminar in which there were nine students, three of which were Woodrow Wilson Fellows.” And he was also well prepared for his master’s thesis. Already approved in October of 1958, it was to be another essay on the women characters of John Lyly’s plays. Scholars and biographers have noted that his thesis was a “rewrite” of his undergraduate honor’s essay, but it is, virtually, the same paper. He changed the title, and he added a three-page introduction. He changed some words, and he shifted around some phrases and a few paragraphs. Essentially, he edited it. Even his conclusion reads nearly verbatim from his undergraduate essay, except a sentence he added at the end where he claims Lyly’s works as a predecessor to Shakespeare’s. Submitting an essay originally written for another purpose was uncharacteristic of Toole. Of course, it may have been a choice driven by finances. A thesis in need of only a few touchups would help him complete the program in two semesters. And the choice may have been affirmed by his winter suspicions of the role of the critic. He had dissected Lyly before. He would not have to heft another work of art onto his examination table. And the fact that the essay he essentially wrote at Tulane satisfied the degree requirements for his MA from Columbia testifies to his academic virtuosity in his undergraduate days. Surely he could have crafted another essay, but as usual, time and money worked against him. In March of 1959, his thesis was approved. Professor Wieler commented that his work “reflected wide reading, critical acumen and literary sensitivity.”

During his last few months at Columbia, he prepared for the final examinations. On May 18 he took the six-hour essay test that covered literary theory and literary history. His nine months of reading and attending lectures had boiled down to these essays. Like most challenges in his life thus far, he excelled. He passed the exam and was approved to graduate. But not all graduates were equal at Columbia. The English department had a ranking system, tied to continuance into the PhD program. As the Graduate Student’s Guide explains, “The Third Class is considered a Pass; the Second, Honors; the First, rarely awarded, High Honors.” Toole graduated with High Honors.

With this distinction he could have continued on to the PhD program, but this would mean he would need funding. Many PhD students in the English department taught at other colleges to make ends meet. Wieler tried to secure Toole a teaching position at Hunter College. But Hunter maintained a rigid rule of hiring only professors with experience. Despite his attempts to convince Hunter to make an exception in the case of Toole, the college was unyielding. Without experience, his prospects of landing a teaching job in New York were grim. But a break from graduate studies may have been a welcomed reprieve as well. The winter season had provoked serious questions over the role of the literary critic. And he did, after all, harbor aspirations of becoming a fiction writer. In the Woodrow Wilson fellowship directory, his listing appears as “John Kennedy Toole . . . MA 1959; Columbia University; Graduate studies interrupted—plans uncertain.” Despite the completion of his degree, Toole still found himself in limbo, somewhere between scholar, writer, and teacher.

With his future unclear, Toole graduated on a cool spring day in Manhattan. On June 2, more than six thousand students gathered to participate in commencement at Columbia. Usually the ceremony would take place on the South Lawn under the watchful eye of the goddess Alma Mater, but with light rain drizzling throughout the day, graduation was moved to St. John the Divine, the nearby Episcopal cathedral. Like most graduations, the president praised students for their accomplishments and sent them forth to work for a better tomorrow. He reminded them that they were an elite group, graduating from an institution undistracted by the lunacy of sports or socializing, fully invested in intellectual growth. The graduation ceremony in the cathedral, jam-packed with nearly ten thousand people culminated an intense year for Toole. It had tested his intellect and his fortitude for living in New York, a city he found both exhilarating and exhausting.

Regardless of where he would end up, New York left its imprint on Toole. He adopted a rapid cadence in his speech, discarding his Southern drawl. He picked up the Ivy League style—a form-fitting coat and a slim tie. He also heeded the advice of the Graduate Student’s Guide, which suggested upon graduation the student should “leave the institution he has learned to consider his intellectual nest and fly under his own power in a new academic environment, no longer a student but an officer of instruction.”

However, he took an opposite direction from the subsequent advice in the handbook, which snobbishly states, “Better to teach first-rate minds in a good preparatory school than to waste one’s spirit on the tenth-rate in an inferior college.” As a graduate of one of the premier institutions of higher education in the country, he applied for his first job teaching English at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, a small college with open enrollment admissions in the backwaters of southern Louisiana. Toole tapped his professor at Tulane to write a letter of recommendation. Therein, Richard Fogle comments on Toole, “He is certainly a good bet. . . . He is attractive in a slightly dour fashion (heavy eyebrows) and talks well.... He seems an extremely solid fellow who has developed a great deal in the past couple of years.... All in all . . . you’ll be lucky to get Toole as far as prospects go.”

Wieler also wrote a glowing letter, recounting Toole’s stellar year at Columbia and offering his “unqualified recommendation.” But that letter suggests Toole may have understood this to be a temporary move. Wieler indicates that Toole would have a place in New York once he gained some teaching experience. “If Mr. Toole ever returns to Columbia to complete his Ph.D.,” Wieler writes, “I shall make every effort to give him some work while he completes his degree.” As Toole prepared to leave New York City, he was likely aware that the doorway back to Columbia was clear and open to him.

The job offer from Southwestern Louisiana Institute came quickly. They would pay him four thousand dollars for the academic year, teaching five freshman-level writing courses per semester. Toole accepted, and the department was thrilled to have him on board. Professor Paul Nolan wrote to Toole in the summer of 1959, suggesting that he would enjoy Lafayette. He warned Toole the town was small, but “in matters of personal and academic liberty it compares favorably to both” New York and New Orleans. However, Nolan draws one major distinction between New Orleans and Lafayette. In Cajun country “the crawfish is better.”