Butterfly in the Typewriter

Driving west out of New Orleans in the late summer of 1959, Toole crossed over the undulating land of southern Louisiana, watching as it sank into murky brown waters then rose to the flat fields where plantations once grew sugar cane and rice. He crossed the Atchafalaya swamp, open and expansive, where water and land mingle, where alligators lurk beneath the surface, and where the warm breeze gently moves through the cypress trees. In his epic poem Evangeline, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imagined this same ancient place “resplendent in beauty” with “numberless sylvan islands” and air “faint . . . with the odorous breath of magnolia blossoms.”

For centuries, the bayous of southern Louisiana have been home to the Cajuns, descendants of the French settlers who were banished from their homes in the eighteenth century, following the British invasion of Acadiana, the land now called Nova Scotia. Seeking refuge under a French government, the Acadians arrived in New Orleans to find the ruling Spanish pointing them toward the wild western territory, a land left to the native tribes and freed blacks willing to attempt a life in its treacherous beauty.

For much of Louisiana history, Cajuns have been viewed as the rural poor, cast in popular culture as bumbling and toothless hicks. To outsiders they appeared ignorant and uncivilized. But in truth they hailed from a rich cultural history. Perhaps through the isolation of the bayou or from their shared story of exile, they kept their French legacy alive, while incorporating the African and Native American traditions of their neighbors. They blend the flavors of those varied cultures in pots of gumbo, crawfish étouffée, and jambalaya. They dance and sing to the earthy sounds of Zydeco, to another day alive. They seem to celebrate their understanding that all human endeavors slowly slip back into the water.

At the western edge of the vast swamp, the land ascends to an elevated plateau, and there sits Lafayette, the capital of Cajun country. When Toole arrived, French was still spoken in the shops and restaurants, but the Cajun way of life was quickly changing. Since the early 1950s, Texas oil companies that had moved into the region had been propelling the city toward modernization. Sons and daughters left their family farms, their flat-bottom boats, and their kitchens to attend Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), hoping to secure a future with more money and less hardship. The school that once focused on agricultural studies and was still completely bordered by farms now bustled with mostly Cajun students taking all manner of courses, seeking a different kind of life.

In early September the annual frenzy of course registration took over the campus. Meanwhile, Toole settled into his new home. He had found a two-room ground floor apartment in a converted carriage house outside the home of Elisabeth Montgomery on Covent Street. His landlady, “a hyperactive widow in her sixties,” came from a wealthy family, but she kept her guesthouse in modest condition. Toole once described it to his friend Joel Fletcher as “a cramped heart of darkness with cockroaches and a linoleum floor.” The dark dips and crevices of the pecky cypress wall paneling made perfect homes for spiders and other little bugs. But for all its discomforts, it was a place of his own, absent the clamor of dorm life or the presence of his parents. On the second floor apartment lived the artist Elmore Morgan Jr., with whom Toole could discuss literature and art in the lazy moments of an evening or a Sunday afternoon.

It would take some time for Toole to adjust to life in Lafayette. He had to slow his New York pace. And on the first day of class, he reckoned with his new place of employment. From the front of the campus, SLI looked like many colleges—distinguished red brick buildings with white-columned porticos connected to arched walkways, offering the architectural accents that dignify an institution of higher learning. But Toole would have no corner office overlooking the green lawn where undergraduates mingle between classes. His post was with the rest of the English teachers at the back of the campus in an orderly collection of decomposing army surplus buildings. Originally constructed as a temporary training facility during World War II, SLI had purchased the buildings to accommodate the increase in students. It seemed so far away from the main campus that students named it Little Abbeville after the town twenty miles south of Lafayette. It was the home of the English department.

Isolated from the rest of campus, the push for modernity in Lafayette did not reach the decrepit little “town” on the edges. Few of the classrooms in Little Abbeville had the luxury of a fan; most depended on open windows in the summer and a potbelly stove to keep warm in the winter. Paint peeled from the thin walls, water dripped from the ceilings, and wood desks were crammed into every space available. Humidity and termites had fed on the buildings so badly that if female students wore high heels the wood floor would crumble under their steps. Occasionally, in the midst of a lecture, a professor would go to write on the blackboard and under the pressure of his hand a small section of the wall would give way.

And yet, despite the condition of the buildings, SLI was in many ways a perfect place for Toole to gain experience teaching. While much of the South remained racially segregated, holding on to the delusion of “separate but equal,” SLI had opened its doors to black students a few months after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which made it unconstitutional for black students to be segregated into separate schools. It was the first college in Louisiana to do so. So Toole walked into racially integrated classrooms. And because the students largely came from segregated school districts, teaching required patience and tolerance in order to address the disparities in their varied skill levels.

Regardless of race, the rural roots of the students were obvious. Many of them primarily spoke Cajun French, even though speaking French had been banned in the school systems. Many of them came from families adept at life in southern Louisiana—able to hunt alligator, trap crawfish, tend to crops, and make a perfect roux—all-important skills in the bayou. Writing an academic essay, however, posed a formidable challenge. It was clear his labors in Lafayette would differ drastically from honor’s classes and graduate seminars. Just a few months prior, Toole had strolled between the towering skyscrapers of New York and conversed with the sophisticates of Columbia; it all must have seemed like another life once lived in a vague past. And yet, even as he carried the air of an Ivy League graduate into his remedial English courses, he treated his students with unequivocal respect. “He was always gracious to them,” his friend and colleague Patricia Rickels remembers, “and they loved him.”

But for Toole, courtesies rarely overshadowed the humor of humanity. He found daily comical moments as his students, many of them well into their adulthood, periodically stumbled in attempts to sound scholarly. They would try to impress him with elaborate vocabulary that they clearly misunderstood and often misused. He once shared with friends a quote from one of his female students. In a slow, deliberate Southern drawl, he repeated, “Intrinsically, I knowed it to be true.” The conviction with which she expressed her nonsensical statement amused him. Of course, he would have never mocked her to her face. Such humor was shared and kept between colleagues.

As a new teacher, Toole also benefitted from a department that took its mission of teaching seriously—more than it pressured the faculty to publish or conduct research. The faculty’s dedication created a robust camaraderie between its members. In fact, many of them recognized they could learn a great deal from each other. Rickels remembers how faculty members used to sit outside of classroom doors, listening to their colleagues lecture. Closing her eyes, imagining back to 1960, she recalled, “Dick Wagner, Ken Toole, Bobby Byrne . . . you would always learn something.” Far from the seats of authority, in Little Abbeville, professors made their classrooms self-contained worlds that they could shape with their students, even if that world was physically crumbling around them. With the support of colleagues passionate about teaching and without worries of overbearing administrators, Toole had the freedom to refine his skills as a teacher.

But just as the isolation of the Cajuns created some of the colorful culture in southern Louisiana, so too the English faculty, largely left to their own means in Little Abbeville, seemed to attract and cultivate eccentrics. Toole would later playfully call them a “faculty composed of fiends and madmen.” Shortly after his arrival in Lafayette, he must have marveled at the madcap personalities, like most new faculty members did. George Deaux, an aspiring novelist who came to work at the college a few weeks after Toole left, never forgot the “peculiar behavior” in the department. Reviewing some of the most memorable moments, Deaux recalls,

One guy had a fixation that he could only grade papers after he had found a four-leaf clover. As hundreds of freshmen essays piled up on his desk, he searched even at night with a flashlight for a four-leaf clover. Another colleague became convinced that the voice of Dorothy Wordsworth was speaking to her from the radiator in her room.

Joel Fletcher and several others at the college recall the hallucinating instructor was actually a “skinny young male” who believed Emily Dickinson, not Dorothy Wordsworth, spoke through the radiator. Regardless of the instructor’s gender or what nineteenth-century author communicated from beyond the grave, one day George Deaux and a small group of faculty “gathered around the radiator to debunk this nonsense only to hear the voice speaking from it.” They “finally concluded that the radiator was picking up a radio signal.”

Of course, not all the strange behavior was so humorous. English professor Thomas Sims suffered a mental breakdown the year after Toole taught at SLI. Bereaved by his wife’s early death from cancer, Sims “stopped talking altogether, would meet his classes, sit silently at his desk for an hour, and then leave the room.” The college transferred him to an administrative position.

While some faculty showed the fragility of the mind, most exhibited foibles of outrageous hilarity. By far the most memorable and monumental specimen of eccentricity who left an indelible impression on Toole was Bobby Byrne, a mustached medievalist, tall and burly with dark hair. He lived in a little cabin behind the house of a fellow professor, where he played his harp, his violà de gamba, and a harpsichord he had custom made in England. As an avid devotee to Boethius, he assigned The Consolation of Philosophy to every class he taught, even freshman composition. As Professor Rickels remembers, “He believed the climax of civilization occurred sometime during the fourteenth century; it had been on a steady decline ever since.” Byrne often said of people their “geometry and theology are all wrong,” echoing a favorite line of his from an H. P. Lovecraft short story. And while he had completed his doctoral course work at Tulane, he never wrote his dissertation. At one time, one of Byrne’s professors is reported to have said to him, “Bobby, just give me a piece of paper with something written on it, and I will give you your PhD.” But he deemed the exercise of a dissertation unnecessary. “I wasn’t going to learn anything from it, and besides I already had tenure,” he admitted in an interview in 1995 with University of Louisiana graduate student Carmine Palumbo. “Ya see,” he explained further, “I have a birth defect. I am amazingly unambitious.” And yet this supposedly unambitious man taught himself to read Welsh and ancient Japanese, simply because he had heard they were the two most difficult languages to learn.

Behind his supercilious posturing, Byrne was also known for his ill-timed flatulence, and he harbored a deep devotion to hot dogs. He once told Rickels a story from his childhood that explained and justified his passion for the common street food. When he was growing up, his mother had become convinced that “wieners were not good for children.” But taking pity on her son, she would occasionally yield to his pleas. Preparing the rare and savory treat, she carefully buttered both sides of a split bun as the young Bobby watched with anticipation. Then she nestled the sanctioned sausage into its soft throne. But as she handed it to little Bobby, she would squeeze the bun so the hot dog would slip back into her hand, leaving the child only the buttered bun to eat. “I felt cheated all my life,” he would say, thinking back to all the hot dogs that had eluded him in his youth. In adulthood, he reclaimed those lost wieners.

Whether by chance or choice, Byrne and Toole shared an office at SLI. They actually had much in common. Byrne was hired the year before Toole, so he was relatively new to the faculty. They were both raised in Uptown, had an interest in medieval thought, and graduated from Tulane, although Byrne had finished his undergraduate studies nearly a decade prior to Toole. They also felt a fierce sense of devotion to their hometown. And like any two New Orleanians, their histories connected long before a formal introduction. Byrne’s aunt was Toole’s second-grade teacher, who remembered the bright child and his hovering mother.

Their similarities of background aside, one could not conceive of a more opposite pair sitting together in an office. Toole’s average height and trendy fashion sense contrasted with Byrne’s burly physique and his incomprehensibly bizarre manner of dressing. Byrne cared little about coordinating his attire. And his blatant disregard for appearances occasionally shocked Toole, who always had his clothes “fit, tapered, neat as a pin . . . carefully fitted pants with a good crease in them.” One day Byrne came to their office “wearing three different kinds of plaid and an absurd hat.” Toole later told his friend Joel Fletcher of the shocking vision that had materialized in front of him. He could not help but comment, “My God, Bobby! . . . You look like the April Fool cover of Esquire!”

Byrne usually dismissed such comments, especially from a young man who clearly put stock in appearances. But as a faculty member with higher rank, Byrne need not suffer reprisals from his junior colleague. When Toole once reproached him for the loose fit of his clothes, Byrne responded with a pointed and detailed lecture on the sartorial philosophy of the Arabs, who, he argued, wear flowing fabrics in order to retain moderately warm body air and keep out the desert heat.

Indeed, with his encyclopedic knowledge and bellowing voice, it seemed Byrne could dissertate on any topic. Those who kept company with him learned to endure his preaching. But Toole not only enjoyed Byrne, on occasion he provoked him, as if to test his reaction. In an article published in Acadian Profile, Trent Angers interviewed several of Toole’s friends who recalled one cool spring morning Bobby Byrne, J. C. Broussard, and Toole sat at “an outdoor table next to the concession stand . . . engrossed in a bull session.” Angers describes the scene:

Bobby Byrne, was giving a verbal dissertation on the lack of taste and social redeeming value in music and literature created since the Medieval period.... John Kennedy Toole, was sitting across the table with his head cocked to the side with eyebrows raised and with a smirk on his face as if he were trying to break in with something like, “I can’t believe that’s coming out of your mouth!” Byrne continued pontificating, and Toole began trying to harass the orator with facial contortions that reflected increasing incredulity at what he was hearing.

Accustomed to Byrne’s tirades, Broussard sat at the table silently drinking his coffee. Then Broussard noticed that Toole “seemed to be studying and subtly mimicking the speaker’s gestures.” In his year at Lafayette, Toole found in Byrne a New Orleans character almost too much to take, the ironies and absurdities layered into his larger-than-life existence. The contradictions of his bizarre clothes and his demeanor of sophistication made him ripe for the plucking. Toole closely watched Byrne, taking note of his sayings and inflections. And Byrne remained unaware of the impressions he made on Toole for decades. In recalling their many conversations, Byrne admits, “I didn’t know I was under observation.”

Almost twenty years later, when Rickels read an excerpt of Confederacy published in the New Orleans Review, she immediately recognized the basis for the slovenly character Ignatius Reilly. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed to her husband, “This is about Bobby Byrne!” She worried Byrne would read it, and find out what Toole had done. But Byrne made it a point not to read popular fiction, especially not best-sellers. He finally gave in after someone leant him a copy, telling him he must read it because obviously Toole based the main character on him. Byrne recognized some likenesses between himself and Ignatius. The devotion to Boethius, his passion for hot dogs, the motto of “theology and geometry,” and his dress all seemed to be derived from him. Toole even seemed to have recalled Byrne’s lecture on Arab dress when describing the fashion philosophy of Ignatius Reilly whose “voluminous tweed trousers” had “pleats and nooks” that “contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed” him.

But Byrne also recognized clear differences between himself and Ignatius. As a tenured professor, he enjoyed professional success. He was a true academic. His colleagues recognized him as a walking encyclopedia. These were not the accomplishments of a lazy man loafing off his mother. And while Ignatius claims devotion to Boethius, Byrne actually held The Consolation of Philosophy as his creed; to a degree, he lived the principles of Boethius who accepted the meaninglessness of the body and focused on the mind and soul. For Byrne, pretentions in appearance exhibited mere vanity.

Upon these differences, Byrne denied he was the inspiration for Ignatius. Rather, he identified Ignatius as the alter ego of Toole, imbued with all the characteristics that Toole feared he might become: messy, alienated, fat, and such a tremendous failure that everyone laughs at his blunders. In fact, Byrne believed that Toole envied him in some ways, citing a conversation he had with Rickels where she admitted that Toole once marveled at Byrne’s ability to dismiss the materialism of the world and still be content. “He has it all figured out,” Toole commented. Alas, tenure at a small rural college, a cabin in which to live, and spending free time playing fourteenth-century music, would never satisfy Toole. Byrne noticed a burning drive in his young colleague to become “rich and famous,” to achieve greatness. This drive deprived him of a lasting sense of contentment.

Interestingly, in the same interview that Byrne offers this psychoanalytic reading of Ignatius Reilly, he rails against the absurdity of using Freudian psychology to interpret literature. Byrne might have a point in Ignatius being the alter ego of Toole, but he seems to miss the more likely possibility of why Toole grinned and reveled in his observations of his over-the-top colleague. To any medievalist, Byrne could be seen as a textbook rendition of a medieval clown: a character both of the mind and of the body, humorous in that he speaks with knowledge and eloquence but still succumbs to the whims of the belly, much like Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

With Byrne at the forefront of absurdity, Toole watched this great play of humanity at SLI. He could not stop himself from mimicking such a rich palate of colorful personas. His colleagues were astounded at his ability to mirror the mannerisms and inflections in a person. People he spoke with, conversations he overheard, everyone was potential material to Toole. At dinner parties or interludes between classes, he would tell entertaining stories about people at SLI or sometimes people from New Orleans, impersonating them with precision. Eventually his colleagues started to wonder if anyone was safe from his observations. One night at dinner with Rickels and her husband, Milton, two of his dearest friends in Lafayette, Milton asked him directly, “Ken, you make fun of so many people. Do you make fun of us when we aren’t around?” “Certainly” he replied.

Toole had no misgivings over mimicking someone, even friends for whom he cared deeply. His friend Nick Polites, who was in Dr. Fogle’s graduate class with Toole at Tulane and who also joined the SLI English department in the fall of 1960, saw Toole’s full repertoire of SLI professor impersonations. Because Polites never mingled much with the rest of the English faculty, Toole was free to tell his stories of the faculty, and he did so with enthusiasm. As Polites recalls,

Ken used to regale me with his tales of his evenings with members of the English faculty, where he was always the star, and he would mimic the personalities of each person.... He told a story of one of the senior members of the English faculty, a very proper sort of woman.... One evening at a party when he was carrying on, she waited for a pause, then pursed her lips and said to him, almost coyly, “Oh, Ken, you’re so droll.” He mimicked her tone and gestures with dead accuracy.

In the course of an evening, Toole might repeat his impersonations several times, as if refining them to perfection. Like many of his friends, Polites made a good audience, laughing and marveling. Of course, Toole maintained a steadfast rule to never turn his mirror of imitation on someone in his presence. Had Polites ever asked a question similar to that of Milton Rickels, Toole would have likely confirmed; of course he mimicked Polites when he was not around.

So with the pressures of success somewhat alleviated, he enjoyed working and socializing with department members. In doing so he reaped much material for his future novel—he had his main character Ignatius Reilly in the works. And while Toole probably thought of Lafayette as a pit stop on his journey elsewhere, either toward a writing career or back to graduate school, it became much more to him than a way station. Observing the absurdity and hilarity in Lafayette, he quickly became quite the entertainer at parties, but this is only one side of his experience there. The other side is a story of the heart. In Lafayette, he made endearing and long-lasting friendships. Many of his colleagues cared deeply for him, but no one loved him more than Patricia Rickels.

Toole appeared to Rickels as the impressive new hire, fresh in from New York City. She knew he originally came from New Orleans, but everything about him emanated a Manhattan vogue. He dressed in the Ivy League style, and while most faculty and students strolled along the walkways, Toole would throw his tie over his shoulder and dash across campus “as if he was off to some place important, or running for office.” When Patricia met Toole she quickly recognized his brilliance. “He was young. He was handsome. He was flashy . . . smart as a whip and funny as hell.” She often invited Toole over to eat dinner with her husband and child. And while he received many dinner invitations, usually from his married colleagues who were sympathetic to the loneliness of bachelorhood, he favored the company of the Rickels family.

It’s not surprising Toole was so fond of them. By all accounts they were an extraordinary family. Patricia, having endured a regretful marriage to a Mississippi man, had divorced, finished graduate school, and moved to Lafayette where she fell in love with and married Milton Rickels, a successful professor whose mind was sharp, but whose legs had been crippled by polio. Together they doted on Patricia’s son from her previous marriage, Gordon, who was thrilled to have “a real father” in Milton. And Milton, who was unable to have children, now felt the joy of fatherhood. In some ways they mirrored the Toole family: a strong mother, a father who struggled with illness, and a beloved son. However, the Rickels home was filled with an evident unconditional love between husband and wife and between parents and child. Patricia never chided Milton for not being the man she wanted him to be. While he depended on crutches to walk and physically struggled with common tasks like standing up from a chair, his disability never stopped him from living a full life of publishing, researching in archives all over the country, teaching, and of course being a dedicated husband and stepfather. Gordon, like Toole, was an extraordinarily bright child. And Toole felt a particular connection with him, perhaps seeing something of himself in the only child. On occasion, with Patricia’s permission, he would pick up Gordon in his small two-door car, and they would “play bachelors for the day.” Gordon liked to ride fast in Toole’s sporty Chevy, and Toole enjoyed having company while grocery shopping, a chore he loathed. Before leaving Lafayette, Toole gave Gordon all of his childhood books—Alice in Wonderland, The Yearling, Heidi, and others—some of the stories that his mother used to read to him before bed, those same works that had sparked his own imagination at a young age.

The Rickelses must have provided Toole a welcomed escape from the pressures of his own family. Toole rarely spoke to anyone in Lafayette about his home life, but on occasion he opened up to Patricia. He told her of his days acting on the stage when he was a boy. And he told her of his father’s odd behavior, sharing with her that, for a period, his father became obsessed with the virtue of apples, handing out the shiny red fruit to visitors, all the while “preaching at the difference it would make in them and how regular their bowels would be.” Such a story was funny for a moment, until it was clear the humor in the absurd behavior of his father was never far from the pain that it caused him.

But Patricia didn’t need anecdotes from Toole’s childhood to see that even as he cared deeply for his parents, they could distress him. One weekend his parents came to visit, seeing their son for the first time in the environment of his own home. Toole introduced them to the artist-tenant upstairs, Elmore Morgan, who remembered them in good spirits as they laughed and made jokes. But during their stay, Toole’s father noticed that his son’s apartment lacked sufficient protection from intruders. Over the weekend John installed deadbolt locks on the external and internal doors. In the event of a break-in, he explained, one would have a plan of retreat. This strategy may have made sense in their apartment in New Orleans with its rooms branching off a long hallway. But the extreme measures made little sense in a two-room apartment in a small rural community, where few people locked their doors at night. Patricia witnessed the new locks on the doors and the embarrassment behind her dear friend’s half-smile when explaining his father’s behavior.

An evening with the Rickelses meant some moments with a stable family that was genuinely content with spending time together. On the weekends, Toole often joined them on their days in the country, clearing the plot of land they had recently purchased to build their dream home. Because of his weak legs, Milton could not do strenuous labor, so Patricia, Gordon, and Toole hacked away at the thick overgrowth. After hours of work, they would have a picnic, eating together as they watched the Spanish moss sway in the trees and the slow steady stream of the Bayou Vermillion make its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. After lunch they returned to clearing the land. Occasionally, Toole showed his true colors as a city boy. One day as they cut through thick vines and tall weeds, Pat heard Toole shriek, “Snake!” She looked up to see him running away from the area he had been working. Expecting a venomous serpent to greet her, Patricia carefully approached the cleared section to find a common garden snake. She killed it, and they all had a good laugh at Toole. After all, they bordered the swamps of Louisiana that had been home to reptiles long before humans arrived. With Toole’s help, they cleared the land to build the house where, years later, he would come to visit, taking retreat from his life in New Orleans.

Toole survived days in the countryside with the Rickelses, but clearly he felt far more comfortable in the social setting of the dining room. Over modest meals of pasta and wine, the Rickelses relished his witty conversation, lively impersonations, and his stories. Sometimes he would tell them of his shameless pranks he played on the department chair Mary Dichmann. A tall and proud woman, Dichmann had been an officer in the Navy in World War II. As Patricia remembers, “You didn’t want to mess with her.” But Toole did. On occasion he would sneak into Dichmann’s classroom as soon as the doors in Little Abbeville were opened in the morning and write a message on the board, inoffensive, but sure to embarrass the proud professor. His favorite line was, “Mary Dichmann eats Fritos.” Minutes later, as the students entered and took their seats, they tried to make sense of the cryptic message on the board. When Dichmann arrived and read the message as the students laughed under their breath, she was outraged and embarrassed, but she had no way of knowing who did it. And with her blind devotion to any graduate of Tulane, she would never suspect Toole. Knowing this, he could carry on his pranks and confess to other faculty members, hopefully over dinner, that he was the culprit.

To his friends’ enjoyment, Toole also made up stories of two androgynous, globetrotting friends, Flip and Sandy, who were always visiting exotic locales like Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. He would begin each tale with the line, “I got a letter from Flip and Sandy today.” Then he explained the colorful adventures they described in the letter and what he had written back to them. Intrigued by his most interesting friends, Patricia would sometimes ask if they would ever have a chance to meet Flip and Sandy. “I’m afraid not,” Toole always replied. They finally figured out that Toole was making it all up, but they didn’t care. The stories and characters were so interesting they enjoyed losing themselves in the fiction.

From harmless pranks to imaginative storytelling, Toole seemed like an unending wealth of entertaining conversation. But his charm had its limits in the eyes of his colleagues. In addition to his frequent visits to the Rickelses, he visited the homes of other couples in the department. Nearly everyone played host to the young bachelor, and after a meal the wives would often sew buttons on his pants and coats for him. Everyone appreciated his company and conversation, but their sympathies started to wear thin, especially when they recognized his miserliness. “He was a cheapskate!” Patricia Rickels remembers, “He would sponge off of everybody, and everyone would invite him to dinner.” Toole offered good company, but he seemed content to dine at the expense of his friends. Of course, with all these invitations to dinner, and with the convivial sort in what he once called “the fattest English department in the lower Deep South,” Toole experienced a common side effect of moving to Cajun country. Having gone through school as a portly adolescent, he was horrified to discover he was gaining weight. The slim-fitting jacket with which he arrived in Lafayette began to bulge, and his white shirt started to show through the slit in the back. Perhaps that is why the buttons on his shirts and pants kept popping off.

As his body showed signs of his indulgences, the faculty had had enough of his willingness to consume and not contribute. They demanded Toole throw them a party. At first he resisted, saying, “I don’t know if I can.” Regardless of his hesitation, they informed him, “You have to!” With an apartment far too small to entertain the English department, he asked his landlord, Mrs. Montgomery, if he could have a party in her garden. After some persuasion, she agreed, and Toole welcomed his colleagues to a small affair with few refreshments. He seemed out of his element as a host. When one of the professors accidentally broke one of Mrs. Montgomery’s lawn chairs, Toole became nervous, exclaiming, “She’s gonna kill me!”

The party ended without another incident, except for Toole’s own flirtatious behavior. Emboldened by cocktails, he focused his attention on Patricia Rickels, as Milton ushered her into the car. Patricia vividly remembers the scene that ensued. Toole positioned himself in the car window, preventing their departure. “He didn’t want me to go,” Patricia recalls. “He was leaning over me inside the car and wouldn’t leave.” Milton liked Toole very much, but like many of the other husbands in the department, he found his company irritating at times. He had a way of stepping too close to the bond between husband and wife. Milton had enough of Toole’s flirtations. “Get out of the window, Ken. We want to leave!” he said. Toole replied, “Well, I’m not through saying goodbye.” “Yes you are!” Milton shot back as he rammed the window up, choking Toole at the neck. “I’m gonna strangle you to death if you don’t get out of the window,” he yelled. Toole nodded, removed his head from the window, and returned to his apartment. It was, by far, the boldest move he ever made on Patricia and fairly out of character for him. But on another occasion, when he forgot himself in the company of another bachelor, he expressed in crude terms his attraction and desire for Patricia.

Patricia took Toole’s affection as flattery, not temptation. She was devoted to her husband. But she also cared deeply for her friend. Looking back on her many years at SLI, she said, “There have been people I have known here for thirty, forty years, but they didn’t leave the impression that Ken left on me. It’s hard to believe he was here only for one year.” Her eyes glimmered as she remembered her friend who walked into her life in 1959. She even saw some part of herself in his novel. She was convinced Toole recalled her Civil Rights activities on campus when he wrote about the Crusade for Moorish Dignity in Confederacy . She, too, wanted some lasting connection between her and her friend.

In Patricia, Toole found a smart, warm, loving, and at times maternal woman. She never sought to manipulate or gain anything from him. She simply wanted his company. And Milton eventually overlooked the episode in the car window. After some time apart and a little distance, they, too, became close friends again. The Rickelses offered Toole an enthralled audience and an example of what a family life could be, the kind for which he may have yearned.

His relationship with the Rickelses, his honorary Lafayette family, did not alleviate him from the devotion he felt to his own parents. Throughout his year in Lafayette, he often returned to New Orleans on weekends. Usually one of the other professors wanted to go, too, so a few people would split the cost of gas and share company during the drive. Nick Polites often traveled with Toole. Initially they would go their separate ways, spend time with their families, and return to Lafayette together for Monday classes. But as they grew closer as friends, Polites invited Toole to meet his mother. In turn, Toole invited Polites to meet his family. On that day Polites entered their small apartment on Audubon Street, “furnished in the inexpensive, period-style furniture at the time.” He saw in passing Toole’s father, who “just glided through and went into one of the back rooms.” Mrs. Toole came to the living room and, at her son’s request, sat down at “the tiniest baby grand piano” Polites had ever seen. For months Toole had bragged about his mother’s musical talents. “My mother could have been a concert pianist,” Toole once said to Polites. But what Polites heard bewildered him:

She played the first movement of a Haydn sonata. The instrument was out of tune, she had the score on the piano’s music rack, and her playing didn’t make musical sense at all. She’d stop when she had to turn a page, and slow down when she couldn’t play the eighth or sixteenth notes at tempo.

Perhaps she was losing her touch with the ivory keys, although, her students would not speak so critically. But her playing is not what surprised Polites most of all; it was his friend’s ability to overlook it. “When Ken could be dismissive about so many things, it was interesting to see the mother/son relationship expressed so totally uncritically and unrealistically.” Perhaps this unwavering devotion to each other’s talents was how Thelma and her son expressed their unconditional love.

Over the course of a few months, spending time in Lafayette and traveling back and forth to New Orleans, Toole and Polites eventually breached a conversation on sexuality. Toole was aware of Polites’s “gay side,” so it came as no surprise when he invited Toole to a gay party in the French Quarter. And Toole expressed interest in going. “There were a lot of silly people there,” Polites admits. But there were also “a few thoughtful people that he might have had a really good conversation with.” However, upon entering the apartment Toole became visibly uncomfortable. The personality that blossomed at social events in Lafayette now shriveled into a corner. Even after Polites introduced him to a few acquaintances, Toole sat without saying a word. He “talked to no one, and no one talked to him.” Soon after they arrived, Toole mentioned to Polites his intentions to leave. Recognizing his discomfort, Polites agreed to leave the party as well. Later that evening, Toole “expressed his negative feelings about the gay world, or gay life.” Polites detected that his friend saw it all in stereotypes; he determined Toole “was intimidated” by what he saw at the party. But Polites is also quick to mention that, while they spent a lot of time together, they were not close confidants. Much of what Polites concluded from that conversation, he warns, is conjecture.

It is interesting that as a teenager Toole boundlessly explored his city, and he now found a place that discomfited him. It is tempting to deduce some conclusion about Toole’s intent in going to the party, but that presumes more than even Polites would surmise from that night. “Toole kept his own counsel,” as Bobby Byrne once observed. Whether disgusted, intimidated, enticed, or shocked by what he saw, no one knows for sure, and it matters little. He likely used his impressions of the party to create the scene of the gay soirée in Confederacy, where Ignatius tries to organize the Army of Sodomites. Whatever Toole’s reasons for going to the party, his curiosity, from wherever it stemmed, spurred him to see all sides of New Orleans life, even if that led to some discomfort.

Joel Fletcher, another friend from SLI, also witnessed this innate curiosity in Toole. Near the end of the academic year, Fletcher, who was working in the basement office of the news bureau at the college and was also the son of the president of SLI, met the young scholar from New Orleans. Polites had suggested that the two meet, but they didn’t get around to it until the beginning of the summer, months after Polites left for the army in January. As predicted, Fletcher and Toole sparked an immediate friendship. They were both Tulane graduates, cultured intellectuals, and held much higher ambitions than Lafayette, Louisiana. Throughout the remaining weeks of the school year, they drove to bars and talked about literature, music, and art. And every so often they traveled to New Orleans.

In July of 1960 they took a trip to the Crescent City where Fletcher saw Toole observe a unique New Orleans scene. The day after they arrived, they met up at the Napoleon House to eat lunch. They spent the rest of the afternoon meandering through the Quarter. They browsed bookstores and had a memorable encounter with the sizeable posterior of New Orleans writer Frances Parkinson Keyes. And they walked to Elysian Fields, the childhood neighborhood of Toole’s parents, where his aunt and uncle still lived. They strolled through the once respectable section of town, which had since become depressed. They walked by people standing in doorways and “dirty-looking mothers screaming at their much dirtier children.” As it started pouring rain, Toole became “transfixed by the scene” of a mother who violently struck her child in an attempt to protect him from the downpour. Fletcher recounts in his memoir,

“GET IN OUTTA DAT RAIN, CHA’LIE” one of the mothers yelled at her child, and (WHAP!) struck the child with a convenient board. “GET IN OUTTA DAT RAIN! YOU’LL GET SICK!” (WHAP!). She struck again.

Later that day as they drank coffee, Toole “mimicked the Elysian Fields mother braining her child while voicing such concern over his welfare, chuckling to himself, delighted by the comic irony.” Fletcher had witnessed Toole’s process of observation. Heeding a moment unfolding before him, Toole watched and then shortly thereafter rehearsed the narrative and the voices, working his way to the spirit of the moment, not to merely report or accurately represent it, but to boil it down to its most humorous essence. And then he likely cataloged it somewhere in his mind, ready to recall on another occasion, at a party, talking with friends, or when he finally sat down to write his novel.

Such a mentality requires a degree of detachment. Instead of expressing sympathy for the child or judgment of the mother, Toole recognized it as one of the many tragi-comic vignettes that abound in New Orleans on any given day. Elmore Morgan, the artist who lived in the apartment above Toole, concisely described this character trait in Toole when he said in an interview: “He had a sort of detached view, in a sense; he was an observer. Rather than get terribly upset by some situation, he would be more likely to deal with it in a sort of humorous way, to see the absurdity and irony and humor in it.... Humor was a way of dealing with things that he couldn’t do anything about.”

Toole’s reactions suggest his recognition of forces in this world he could not change, and laughter was the way to overcome them. In comparing the two moments of New Orleans life, Toole was far more comfortable watching a scene in the street than sitting in that party with Polites, but in both cases, this was his city to absorb and reflect, in all its unsettling humor. And regardless of the situation, from watching a scene of domestic violence unfold on Elysian Fields to awkward moments at a party in the French Quarter, during this period Toole is said to have had a constant “half-smile on his face, as though he were up to something, as though he were amused by the people in the world around him.”

Toole and Fletcher returned to Lafayette to finish out the remaining days of the semester. At SLI Toole found companions with whom he could discuss art and literature. He relished the eccentricities of his colleagues. And he had the joy of partaking in life with the Rickels family. As Patricia recalls, Toole was “in his season of glory” in Lafayette. He was coming closer to his own spark of innovation, collecting the voices that would echo through his own work. Joking with Patricia, he once commented that “he couldn’t stay at SLI more than a year because he didn’t want to get any fatter.” But truthfully, he must have felt that nagging compulsion toward achieving something great, whether in writing or in teaching. And it was not going to happen in Cajun country, or at any college at this point. As Toole well understood, a master of arts, even from Columbia, walks in limbo. He could teach classes, but rarely would an MA gain promotion or achieve tenure. So he set his sights on returning to graduate school to get his PhD.

In May of 1960 the SLI English department newsletter announced that Toole was “resigning his position . . . at the end of the summer semester to return to Graduate Studies.” He would attend the University of Washington on a three-year university fellowship and “do his specialized study in the field of Renaissance English Literature.” Washington was an odd choice for him, but for a penny-pinching scholar such an offer would be difficult to refuse. According to Patricia Rickels, “He wanted to be in New York more than anything.” He also wanted the prestige of Columbia. The logistics of finances created a substantial barrier between him and New York. Fortunately, in June, word came from his mentor, John Wieler, who was able to make good on the promise stated in his recommendation letter to SLI a year earlier. The English department newsletter announced that Toole would “return to graduate school at Columbia University this September . . . [after receiving] an appointment to the faculty of Hunter College, and he will teach at Hunter while attending Columbia.” Even with a job in New York, between tuition, living expenses, and a schedule stretched between teaching and taking courses, the stage was set for a life of intense financial pressure. But after a year in the bayou, New York may have once again appeared a luminous city in the distance, a metropolis of aspirations ascending into the sky.

He taught for the summer session at SLI in order to save some money, and he enjoyed the leisurely pace. He went out to Cajun bars with Fletcher and Broussard, and over cold beers they would talk about literature. He had recently become obsessed with British novelist Evelyn Waugh. Fletcher appreciated Waugh’s dark humor as well. Although Nick Polites remembers with some irritation how Toole was so infatuated with the “brilliance and economy of his writing” that he “talked incessantly about Waugh.” On occasion he met with his high school friend Cary Laird, who was finishing up his graduate degree at Tulane. One weekend in New Orleans, Toole heard of a party taking place in Lafayette. Eager to show Laird the popularity he had gained in the small town, Toole convinced his friend to borrow his sister’s white Chevrolet convertible, the one Toole’s father had sold her, and the two cruised westward, crossing the Atchafalaya Basin with the wind in their hair. He must have enjoyed his corner of Cajun country all the more now that he was about to leave.