Chapter 9
A Writer Emerges
At Fort Buchanan, Toole fell back into the lull of lazy afternoons. But the “inertia” of his holiday visit to New Orleans would give way to a tide of motivation. New Orleans would have its bard yet. He carried with him the seeds of inspiration; the essence of the Crescent City that he knew deserved expression. In late January, he writes to Fletcher,
Back to the Caribbean again after New Orleans and all that it stands for. My holidays were very pleasant and very relaxing and, physically, New Orleans looked wonderful, as it always does. It is certainly one of the most beautiful cities in the world, although how the people who live there managed to make it so remains a mystery to me.
Toole was well aware that Fletcher lived within meters of countless Italian masterpieces of art. Certainly Florence was far more renowned for its beauty than was New Orleans. But for a New Orleanian, the majesty of Saint Louis Cathedral rivals Il Duomo, the intricacy of the ironwork in the French Quarter compares to the gilded Gates of Paradise on the Baptistery of St. John, and the estates of Uptown are the Medici palaces of the American South. For the native son, New Orleans is the center of the world.
Keeping one eye toward his city, Toole restarted the familiar routine in Puerto Rico of managing instructors and preparing for company inspections. In another letter to Fletcher dated February 9, Toole appears relaxed and contemplative:
A fairly cool period here seems to have succumbed to Puerto Rico’s traditional warmth. Today has been warm, sunny, completely enervating. I ended the afternoon with several rums with lemon and water and lay beneath my mosquito net to contemplate the universe and my position in it. The results of this contemplation were negligible at best.
Emilie Dietrich Griffin detected such contemplation when she came to Puerto Rico in 1962 and spent a day with him. She deemed that he was “walking insanely along the far edges of experience not so much wanting to take reckless chances but wanting to confront the universe, to pierce through to the meaning of things.” A year later, he returned to this meditation.
And one Sunday afternoon in 1963 he found the meaning for which he had searched for years. Sometime in late February or early March he realized he was in an ideal place for writing. He had a room of his own, substantial periods of free time, and a regular paycheck. Seizing the opportunity at hand, he decided to put his assets to good use and try once again to fulfill his dream of authorship. He lacked only the necessary accouterment of any serious novelist. But his good friend David Kubach was aptly equipped. Toole asked Kubach if he could borrow his typewriter, and Kubach agreed.
Toole placed the small portable typewriter on his desk. He rolled a piece of paper into position. His fingers settled into the shallow cups of the typewriter keys. With the first percussive smack of a keystroke, he broke the contemplative silence of his room. He recalled Humphrey Wildblood, the character he created while in New York, renamed him Ignatius Reilly, and set the beginning of his tale under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store on Canal Street. And as his fingers started their fluttering dance across the keys, the world of Fort Buchanan and Puerto Rico, just outside his window, faded away. And from the recesses of memory, that immense catalog of personalities he had gathered over the past two decades opened. There Bobby Byrne preached the gospel of Boethius and psychoanalyzed his own obsession with hot dogs. Irene Reilly screamed and cursed, her voice carrying through the bathroom vents into the house next door, while the gum-smacking Irish Channel gal with large hoop earrings smiled coyly at her beefy Italian boyfriend. Hunter College girls scowled at those conservatives breeding in the vast lands west of Manhattan, while the poor mother on Elysian Fields whacked her son over the head with a plank. And sweaty, colored workers labored in the back of the suit factory, while flamboyant merrymakers exchanged witty flirtations at a party in the French Quarter. The sun was setting on the Mississippi River as the clock at D. H. Holmes neared the hour of five and a middle-aged son waited for his elderly mother with the wine cake she promised him before they headed home in their old Plymouth. From this vast parade, Toole selected, merged, refined, and wove characters together with all the absurdities that form the human condition. And there on the once blank sheet of paper in his private room in Puerto Rico emerged the city he had known all his life, his New Orleans.
It all sounds like a myth of the artist struck by genius one day, but for Toole this was the wave that had been building, and now it had unleashed with consuming urgency. For nearly ten years he had tried to muster his muse, ever since he wrote The Neon Bible. Since then, his attempted poems and short stories flopped. But this time everything aligned for him; he had an almost unwavering energy. Instructors in all three companies could hear the clacking of the typewriter at all hours of the day and night when they walked by his private room. Chatter circulated that he was writing a humorous novel about a fat medievalist in New Orleans. He shared bits and pieces to a select few, primarily his friend Kubach, and they praised his work.
Toole was well aware of the change that had come over him. He fancied himself in the midst of literary history when he writes in a letter to his parents, “In my private room with the fan, easy chair, book case and plant, I settle down with a borrowed typewriter . . . and grind out my deathless prose.” Through his writing, he once again found purpose and place in his world; he had direction. On March 23 he writes home,
I am trying to leave this place with something to show for the time I have vegetated here. Lately, I have been doing a great deal of writing, and what I am working on—one of my perennial “novels”—is very good—and that criticism comes from a most reliable source whom I permitted to read one (the first chapter). It is rolling along smoothly and is giving me a maximum of detachment and release from a routine which had long ago become a somewhat stale second nature. I hope that nothing develops which will slow my pace of writing or turn me from the particular goal. The book is amusing and well paced; however, it is unwise to make comments upon a work which is so far from completion—and it is not my duty to judge it.
He relinquishes his critical eye, dedicating his energies to the creative process, hoping his motivation would not wane. Almost two weeks later, Toole writes home again reporting the value of his writing to his own disposition.
I am writing with great regularity. It seems to be the only thing that keeps my mind occupied; I have never found writing to be so relaxing or so tranquilizing, and I still like what I am working on. Quite a bit has been completed already. Some of it, I think is very funny.
The pace at which he wrote pleased and surprised him, although he began to doubt the finished quality of the prose, recognizing the need for revision. And he remained wary that his muse could desert him at any moment, as it had in the past. On April 10 he writes,
Writing feverishly, I have completed three chapters and am deep into the fourth. I only hope that my inspiration and dedication last long enough to preclude abandonment of the project. I want to come out of this experience with something to show for my time. What I am doing will require a great amount of revision, editing, and rewriting, I imagine, but I should have a basis at least.
For several weeks, occupied with his novel, Toole expressed pleasure with his situation at Fort Buchanan. “All is still going very well . . . ” he writes, “and, surprisingly, for me, I am more or less content.” The end of April brought a potential threat to his progress. Kubach was again transferred to Salinas, taking his typewriter with him. Perhaps in private Toole expressed disappointment about his closest friend moving miles away, but to his parents he voiced his concerns about accessing a typewriter. He writes,
Unfortunately, PFC Kubach is being sent to the Salinas Training Area for the summer this Sunday. Therefore, I will have to find another typewriter on which to work, for it is his which I have been using to type my writing. The writing, incidentally, is now over 100 pages and is still going strong.
His writing was paramount; it was worthy of a substantial investment. In early May he bought a new typewriter, which he would use to finish his novel. He details this purchase to his parents:
This letter is written on the new Underwood-Olivetti typewriter I bought yesterday. It is a rather large portable that retails for something like $135.00. However, I bought it in the PX for only $69.00; the Olivetti name has become world famous, especially for portables, and this seems to be a fine machine. It is something that I have needed for some time, and I do not regret the outlay of carefully saved dollars.
As he continued to write, he fixed his eye on the end of his service. The uncertainty of life after the army, which had loomed in the distance during his trip home in January, now pressed upon him. And his writing project was such that he prepared to dedicate the next step of his life to its publication. Hunter had offered him an instructor position for the upcoming academic year, but he declined it. He informs his parents that
At the moment, I want to spend some time in New Orleans, at least until I can decide or return to some semblance of civilian behavior . . . I am preoccupied with this writing project at the moment and feel that with some time in New Orleans, I might be able to wrap it up and polish it. Therefore, the plans [sic] to return to the city.
He requests his mother to send him contact information for private schools and colleges in New Orleans, as he planned to teach while finishing the novel. And despite all things going well for him, he ends the letter with a surprisingly spiteful description of an evening spent with the parents of fellow instructor Dave Farr. The disdainful voice of Ignatius shines through in this account. However funny, the humor came at the expense of two people who were welcoming and generous:
I can not attempt to describe these people; it sounds unpleasant I know, to say that they are appalling, but I can say nothing else. They look like two skinny haystacks, burr-like r’s rolling from their thin lips. About them there is no hint of social grace, civilization, etc. Hillbillies are bad, but these people were worse. The mother, emaciated to almost skeletal proportions wore a hair net, a house dress, and white Keds with socks, smoking continually and assuming frontiersman poses on chairs and tables. The father is indescribable simply because I doubt whether he exists.... For dinner I was served boiled chicken served in its own broth, a lettuce salad with Kraft French dressing, a slice of pineapple (fresh Puerto Rican variety, the tastiest thing on the menu), and pan bread and butter. That was it; however, as we were finishing our silent meal, a Tastee Freez truck jingled outside and the mother ran down in her keds to buy four sundaes for us. . . . I have never seen such gray-white, sandy, freckled, powdery skins in my life. These people were almost inhuman and gave me at least a glimpse of what is lurking on the plains of the great central area of our nation.
During dinner, Toole likely maintained his Southern charm and social graces in front of the parents of his friend. Even after their time in the army, Dave Farr kept in contact with Toole, eagerly wishing to keep his friendship. But Toole’s comments speak to the razor-sharp cruelty of which he was capable. The letter also illustrates the degree to which he invested himself into his characters and the toll it took on him. Years later, looking back on this time, he explained, “In the unreality of my Puerto Rican experience, this book became more real to me than what was happening around me; I was beginning to talk and act like Ignatius.” At least in letters, this Ignatian voice was reserved for his mother. In letters to friends like Fletcher, his witty remarks are far less sharp and not nearly as mean.
However regretful his comments, his process worked. On May 15 he documents his progression and begins to take stock in his accomplishment, recognizing both its personal and professional value.
The “creative writing” to which I turned about three months ago in an attempt to seek some perspective upon the situation has turned out to have been more than simple psychic therapy. I am now well over one hundred pages and feel that the story shows no signs of bogging or faltering . . . . My most immediate hope is that I will at least be able to complete the first draft before I am released from the Army; at the rate of my current progress, this may be possible. You both know that my greatest desire is to be a writer and since I finally feel that I am doing something that is more than barely readable, I am very concerned about a civilian situation which will make completion and revision of this particular work possible. That is why I am planning on New Orleans for a while at least . . . If this thing can be worked upon, I am almost certain that a publisher would accept it and so do one or two others to whom I have shown excerpts.
Toole writes with confidence but tempers his arrogance when he handwrites into the typed letter, “I must not set my hopes too high.” Throughout his letters during this period, he claims certainty of the novel’s success and then restrains his certitude with expressions of doubt. Toole understood he was investing in a project that would make him vulnerable to rejection. For a person whose natural talents propelled him to extraordinary heights, rejection would strike a devastating blow. The failure of The Neon Bible to win the writing contest may have cast a long shadow over his successive attempts to write fiction. Accordingly, he may have taken measures to protect himself against the feelings of failure.
But in Puerto Rico, his inner critic did not stifle his motivation. Day by day, he progressed toward another completed chapter, another step closer to his discharge. It was not until the tenor of Fort Buchanan changed that his motivation lagged. As surprise inspections became more common and the trainees far more disruptive, Toole found it difficult to write. At the end of May, he finished a training cycle that left him exhausted. His one place of refuge was his private room:
Heat, wild trainees, and inspections combine to make conditions more unpleasant than they have ever been here; but I am still in my white room with my fan and bookcase, having survived somehow through it all. Writing comes only with great difficulty these days.
While Toole’s writing had provided him relief, it also caused him to retreat from the social atmosphere of Fort Buchanan. He became further detached from everything and everybody. He donned dark sunglasses when off duty and seemed to avoid the carousing at the officers’ club or the bars in San Juan. In pictures taken during a large picnic at Fort Buchanan, he appears as a blurred, sunglassed figure, moving unnoticed through crowds of people, like Burma Jones in
Confederacy. Toole describes himself as a tragically humorous character in a picture he sent to his parents:
Enclosed is a photograph of Sgt. Toole emerging from the English Instructors’ barracks; the window on the right is my room; the people in the foreground are two duds. The sunglasses and pith helmet add a tropical note to Sgt. Toole’s appearance . . . as he slouches off to new triumphs.
By June he fell into a slump similar to the previous summer; however, his upcoming discharge offered him encouragement. And he still took pride in the recognition the army continued to offer him: he was promoted to Specialist Fifth Class. The army placed laurels upon his brow every few months. But more importantly, the promotion may have sustained him during a particularly bad cycle of trainees. With a decrease in instructors, Toole returned to teaching, while maintaining administrative duties. His writing suffered. And the trainees were more colorful but also more brazen compared to the trainees a year prior. He writes to his parents,
If only you knew how ludicrous this “Training Center” is, a place where almost all the trainees this cycle are wearing stocking caps. It is a general practice for Puerto Rican men to use pancake make-up on their faces and to use neutral polish on their fingernails, and it is not unusual to see a trainee opening a compact during a break in the English classes or working on his nails.
The image offers humor, but his jest clearly springs from frustration. He had endured disrespect and insubordination, uncharacteristic of army discipline and unusual for Toole who had enjoyed popularity as an instructor. On one occasion during the cycle, “a ball of paper flew through the air” and hit him on the head. Toole insists on the hilarity of the situation but then, once again, generalizes the incident as representative of Puerto Rico. “What a frightening civilization exists on this island: ignorant, cruel, malicious, infantile, self-centered, undependable, and very proud withal.”
As he commanded less respect from the trainees, his relationship with the instructors of Company A soured as well. Toole had earned their trust as a superior who protected them from the authoritative whims of their commanders. They saw him as a fair and honest sergeant. But on one occasion his actions resulted in the downfall of his reputation. As Kubach recalls, one evening he and Toole walked into the Company A office and found Private First Class Bob Morter slumped over a desk with a large, empty bottle of pain killers next to him. All signs indicated Morter had tried to commit suicide.
Most of the instructors recognized Morter as a troubled individual. Some instructors in Company A recalled Morter drinking himself into oblivion all too often. And his mannerisms signaled to them that he was homosexual, a substantial personal challenge in both the military and civilian society of the early 1960s. While the instructors of Company A maintained a relaxed attitude toward Morter’s behaviors, the group of young men periodically chided him, as he seemed marginal from the group, never quite fitting in. Whatever haunted Morter, his struggle culminated one evening as he sat alone in the Company A office.
As head of the company, Toole should have called an ambulance upon seeing Morter’s limp body. While Toole was not particularly fond of Morter, he also knew that a suicide attempt would tarnish Morter in the eyes of the military and increase his suffering. He delayed calling the authorities, hoping Morter might revive on his own. After some time passed and Morter remained unresponsive, Toole called the ambulance. Morter survived, but the instructors questioned Toole’s reason for delay.
Kubach maintains that Toole was trying to protect Morter from further embarrassment. But the rest of Company A found Toole’s hesitation disturbing; they interpreted it as a chilling indifference to human life. According to Tony Moore, one instructor asked, “Why would Morter do something like this?” Toole dismissively and unsympathetically responded, “Why does Morter do anything?” Moore recalls a group of instructors in Company A convening one evening to decide if they should report Toole’s delayed response. For many of the men, Toole had violated their trust and failed to fulfill his duty as a leader. But they also remembered that he had made their lives in Puerto Rico more pleasant than it might have been without his leadership; he often protected them from the tirades of their superiors. Moore suggests that their sense of appreciation prevented the group of instructors from pursuing official action, but they had lost respect for Toole. According to one account, to settle the score, several guys roughed up Toole one night outside his private room. But it resolved nothing. As Kubach recalls, “Everything really went downhill for him after that.”
The incident prompted Toole to reflect over some hard-learned lessons. He writes a cryptic letter to his parents on June 30. Even his mother likely had difficulty making sense of what provoked such introspection.
While I have had unusual success in the Army, I have also had unusual problems (This is a statement, not a complaint. I believe that I have matured sufficiently to avoid complaining—previously one of my more apparent characteristics.). Handling a contingent of English instructors trapped here together for almost two years and half-maddened by continual exposure to the trainees has not been easy. Some aspects of this have almost been tragic. I can sincerely say that nothing could phase [sic] me any more . . . and that nothing is all-inclusive.”
As a leader, he had faltered. Once again, his daydreams of home offered consolation:
If I am fortunate I will be able to forget many things that have happened in the last few months; however, this place is so far removed from reality that the happenings here tend to fade from your mind when you get away for only a day . . . I would like to sit in the living room and talk for hours and hours and hours . . . over black coffee, lemonade, bourbon or whatever you are willing to serve me.
In the summer heat, deviant trainees and military politics burdened him, but fortunately in late June his writing resurged. It was the glimmer of his future after the army. He reported this development to his parents and detailed his precise purpose in returning home:
On the writing, I have experienced a “renaissance” and have been regularly adding to the manuscript page by page. My one hope in civilian life (in the immediate months following discharge) is that I will have conditions favorable to trying to complete this thing and to polish it. That is why I am planning to stay in New Orleans, for I feel that I should be able to do some work there while I am unburdened by having to shift for myself so far as housing and food are concerned. I must make one try at getting something published and I feel that this is the time . . . . One point should be made clear: I do not intend to go to Law School or to any other school at the present time. About the thing I am writing I have one conviction: it is entertaining and publishable, and I have more than a degree of faith in it.
He finally proclaims unrestrained belief in his talents and his creation. While returning to Columbia University was the more conventional road toward a life in academia, he chose an uncertain path, leading to either his dreams of authorship or nightmares of rejection. But in several letters, he returns to his reasons for moving back to New Orleans, as if he needed to repeatedly justify his decision, perhaps even to himself. Despite his attempts to idealize his visions of home, requesting gold-framed pictures of his mother and imagining quaint disagreements with neighbors, moving back to New Orleans came with substantial peril. After years of independence, two of which he had excelled in the military, he would once again live under his parents’ roof, and once again he would answer to his mother. From his letters, he appears purely motivated by his literary aspirations, but his apparent need to validate his decision calls this premise into question.
The Tooles still struggled financially. Ever since he garnished his army paycheck for their benefit, he felt obligated to help them. If he negotiated between his sense of filial duty and his own desires, the publication of his novel offered him an exit plan and the possibility of financial security. His decision to move back home required both faith in his talents and faith in his plan to free himself from a life bound to his parents.
Thelma Toole in the year of her marriage, 1927. Her son requested she send this photo in a gold frame to him while stationed in Puerto Rico, where he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. (Personal Collection of Joel Fletcher)
John Toole circa 1919. He enlisted in the Marines at the end of World War I, although he never left the country. (LaRC, Tulane University)
“The Beauteous Babe,” as Toole’s mother often referred to him. From the moment he was born, she noted how he was bright-eyed and observant. (LaRC, Tulane University)
From an early age, Toole took an interest in automobiles. His father was a car salesman, and his mother proudly claimed “Kenny Boy” could name the makes and models of cars at the age of two. When he was five, his father let him drive around the block with a friend, unattended. His mother was outraged. (LaRC, Tulane University)
A rare picture of father and son. John Toole lifts his “Kenny Boy” to the sky. (LaRC, Tulane University)
One of the posed shots taken during the time Toole performed with youth theater troupes. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The director at work. In addition to piano and elocution lessons, Thelma put together pageants and variety shows at local schools. In the late 1940s, she started a youth theater troupe that featured her son. Occasionally, she wrote parts specifically for him to perform. (LaRC, Tulane University)
In McComb, Mississippi, Toole works the gears of a tractor while his high school friend Cary Laird smiles for the camera. Toole and Laird were the best of friends in high school. At the age of sixteen, he visited Laird’s extended family in Mississippi. Toole was so inspired by this trip that he wrote his first novel, The Neon Bible, shortly after his return to New Orleans. (Personal collection of Myrna Swyers)
In 1955, Toole hit the road with his friend Stephen Andry. In a Bel-Air convertible, they drove from New York City to New Orleans before the start of the fall semester at Tulane. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The Hullabaloo, October 5, 1956. Toole was well aware of the politics of his age but usually searched for the absurdities in any situation. Here he depicts the tension between equally oblivious sides of academia and supporters of communism. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The Hullabaloo, November 9, 1956. This was part of a series of comics by Toole, inspired by the 1956 film Bus Stop, starring Marilyn Monroe. Toole was infatuated with Monroe and was devastated by her death in 1962. (LaRC, Tulane University)
A satire of the staff of Carnival, a student-run literary magazine at Tulane. In 1956, Toole contributed art and served as nonfiction editor. In this full-page comic, Toole depicts himself in the back, wearing sunglasses and holding a beer bottle. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The Hullabaloo, February 22, 1957. Toole was an avid moviegoer. He shows humorous irreverence in this comic inspired by the 1956 epic film The Ten Commandments. (LaRC, Tulane University)
In the summer of 1958 before leaving for graduate school, Toole visited the beaches on the Gulf of Mexico just outside New Orleans. Throughout his life, he retreated to the Gulf Coast. In 1969 he returned to one of his favorite spots off the coast and committed suicide. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The view from Toole’s dorm room on the top floor of Furnald Hall at Columbia University. Overlooking Broadway, the dorms for Barnard College are under construction and the bell tower of Riverside Church rises in the distance. (LaRC, Tulane University)
From Manhattan high-rises to Louisiana low-rises, Toole left New York and went to work at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in the capital of Cajun country—Lafayette, Louisiana. English classes were taught in “Little Abbeville,” a group of old, termite-ridden buildings at the very back of the college. They were originally built as temporary structures by the U.S. Army to train troops during World War II. (University Archives, University of Louisiana at Lafayette)
The 1959–1960 English Department at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. Toole once playfully commented this was a “faculty composed of fiends and madmen.” Department chair, Mary Dichmann, is in the far left of the front row. Nick Polites is in the front row to the far right. Moving to the left of Polites is Patricia Rickels, Muriel Price, Milton Rickels, and J. C. Broussard. Toole is in the top row to the far right. And Bobby Byrne, the most likely model for Ignatius Reilly, is the mustached man in the center of the top row. (L’Acadien, Southwestern Louisiana Institute, 1960)
In New York in February of 1961, Toole enjoys the mounds of snow in Central Park. He once observed that New Yorkers develop a “snowbound mentality” in the winter months. (LaRC, Tulane University)
Toole taught English to draftees in Puerto Rico. He was praised in the local newspaper for his engaging classes and remarkable success as a teacher. Toole was fluent in Spanish, although speaking Spanish was forbidden in the classrooms. (LaRC, Tulane University)
After being promoted to leader of Company A, Toole was given a private room. Here, one thousand miles away from New Orleans, he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. (LaRC, Tulane University)
Toole enjoyed traveling while in the army. He visited Aruba, the Virgin Islands, and parts of Puerto Rico. Here he leans on a window sill confidently looking into the distance. (LaRC, Tulane University)
The English instructors enjoyed access to the officers’ club where they would drink and socialize. With laughter in his eyes, Toole looks to Bob Young. Walter Carreiro prepares a smoke, and Toole’s close friend Dave Kubach, whose typewriter he borrowed to begin Confederacy, digs into Christmas dinner. (Personal collection of Walter Carreiro)
The original building of Dominican College facing St. Charles Avenue. Toole taught on the second floor. (Joseph Sanford)
Toole in his academic robes at a commencement ceremony at Dominican. This picture appeared on his memorial page in the 1969 yearbook. (St. Mary’s Dominican College)
Head of the English department at Dominican, Sister Beatrice was a close confidant to Toole. After the publication of Confederacy, she refused to grant interviews to reporters, vowing never to violate the trust Toole had in her.
Sculptor Angela Gregory was another of Toole’s confidants at Dominican. They would often walk to and from campus together.(St. Mary’s Dominican College)
Taken in the fall of 1968, this is the last picture of Toole before his death. He always prided himself on looking sharp, but in his Tulane library card photo he appears to have gained weight and looks unshaven. (LaRC, Tulane University)
Toole was laid to rest in the Ducoing tomb. Only three people attended his funeral: his mother, his father, and his childhood nanny, Beulah Mathews. (Joseph Sanford)
The “Queen Mother” in her glory. After Confederacy won the Pulitzer Prize, Thelma Toole became a local celebrity in New Orleans. Performing at events in her honor, she gave readings, played piano, and sang. She spent the last few years of her life relishing the attention, but she always gave her son credit and often ended an evening with the line, “I walk in the world for my son.” (LaRC, Tulane University)
A picturesque view down Chartres Street leading to the iconic Saint Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square in the French Quarter. New Orleans was Toole’s greatest source of inspiration. (Joseph Sanford)
As such, he welcomed his return to 390 Audubon Street as a temporary arrangement.
Content and focused on his life after the army, with his departure date set for August 6, Toole sought opportunities to escape Fort Buchanan. He visited Ponce, a fishing village on the coast of the Caribbean Sea in Puerto Rico. And he took a short leave to visit the Virgin Islands. He brought his typewriter along, but he rested much of the time. He splurged on hotel rooms equipped with air conditioning. And he observed scenes of island life he had not witnessed from the window of his barracks room.
He also received word that his best friend Cary Laird had become engaged. He writes to his parents, ribbing his old friend,
The announcement of Cary’s impending marriage came as no surprise.... However, the poor girl will have to adjust to a life free of the most sentimentally romantic notions along with a permanently bare coin purse. For all of Cary’s sighs and valentines, I seriously doubt that he will ever permit his heart to govern his Hearty Green financial concepts.
Toole’s droll response to his friend’s nuptials may have come from his own loneliness. He continues,
Sgt. Toole, alas, is rapidly approaching spinsterhood, it seems. I will have to cultivate a pet or two upon my return to civilian life.
By mid-July he prepared for his return to New Orleans. In his makeshift writer’s studio, the sparse furnishings accented the seriousness of his artistic pursuit; he shipped his typewriter home, insuring it for two hundred dollars; it was his most valued possession. He asked his parents to make his car presentable as he planned to take some road trips, likely to visit Kubach in Wisconsin. And he accepted a teaching position at St. Mary’s Dominican College, a small Catholic school in Uptown just a few blocks from his parents’ house. He bragged and likely exaggerated to his mother that Dominican seemed to think it had a celebrity on its hands:
The administration hired me with breathtaking dispatch. Later, they asked for a photo, and, after I had sent one, asked whether I would be willing to teach a course on WYES-TV also . . . I receive two page letters from Dominican almost daily; the nuns, apparently, are growing more and more excited as my date of arrival nears. Who knows? It might be a relatively pleasant experience . . . and will certainly provide me with the financial security for writing.
At $6,000 a year, his salary was a substantial increase from army pay. He would once again return to the task of teaching English; the job would serve his family’s financial needs, as he worked to publish his novel. Ideally, once published, he would have the means to live and write independently. It seemed, in 1963, to be an exciting plan that would benefit everyone.
It is unclear how much of the novel he had completed by the time he sent his typewriter home, but it seems certain most of it was finished. What he had was enough to convince him of its imminent success. And by end of July it had become much more than a New Orleans story. He had developed a complex network of literary allusions, echoing the dark humor and sharp phrasing of Evelyn Waugh, employing insights from A. J. Liebling who concisely expressed the paradoxes of New Orleans from a New Yorker perspective, and perhaps gleaning lessons from Robert Gover, whose novel featuring a jive-talking black prostitute akin to Burma Jones, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, Toole had acquired in Puerto Rico. And once people read Toole’s novel, they would see in his characters hints of Miguel Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens.
In addition to his wide-ranging inspirations from the canon of Western literature, Toole also applied the lesson he had expressed as an undergraduate at Tulane: every writer is “a mirror to the temper of his times.” So as he drew upon his literary predecessors, he also satirized American society in the early 1960s, primarily through Ignatius Reilly. The rotund medievalist sings in falsetto the wildly popular song “Big Girls Don’t Cry” that played on radios all over the country. Ignatius becomes a ludicrous civil rights leader, seeking to spark the violent “Crusade for Moorish Dignity,” at a time when the Civil Rights Movement reached a fever pitch. Ignatius also tries to form “The Army of Sodomites,” as gay rights groups, taking cues from the Civil Rights Movement, gained traction in major cities. The absurdities of Ignatius’s exploits are drawn from entrenched camps of the culture wars in American society of the early 1960s. But alas, Ignatius’s plans are vested when the black laborers are unmoved by his suggestive gyrations and he is pummeled by a group of belligerent lesbians.
Toole had originally set out to write the quintessential New Orleans novel. His close friend Emilie Dietrich Griffin remembers that he felt New Orleans writers had operated under stereotypes of the city and “Out of the stereotypes . . . each writer had created some delusionary myth, missing the genuine texture of the place.” His predecessors, such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, had missed the greatest lesson of New Orleans: that its texture does not come from its gritty underbelly but rather from its centuries-long ability to enfold new voices, while never losing track of its elaborate roots, a cultural value that comes from living on the edge of existence. Toole not only understood this lesson, but in writing Confederacy he applied it, and in doing so he wrote a novel that did more than capture the essence of New Orleans; he struck a chord that would eventually reverberate through many countries and many languages.
Finally, his departure day arrived. On August 6 he awoke to his last morning in Puerto Rico. The sun shining through the louvered windows announced a day he had long awaited. He would no longer tread through the wet clay in the rainy season or retreat to his mosquito net in the evenings. He would no longer eat army-rationed meals or worry about surprise military inspections. But he would also surrender his private room, his creative sanctuary where he composed his literary masterpiece. In a letter to Fletcher, he reflected on his time in Puerto Rico:
The two years in the Caribbean were, surprisingly worthwhile from several points of view. I at least completed the active military obligation, and the Army treated me well (Remember that we are speaking here in the context of military treatment.) and gave me the leisure to accomplish several projects of my own. Puerto Rico itself was worth experiencing: one can appreciate Conrad much more deeply after having lived there for two years.
In the afternoon, he boarded an Air Force plane bound for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Ascending over the Atlantic, the island gradually shrank behind him, a small green sentinel in the vast ocean. He was free. And yet Puerto Rico would always be a part of him. In fact, it gave him more than a room to write. It offered him distance and perspective. It offered him a pace of life that allowed him to take stock of his dreams and seize opportunities. But years would pass before he fully realized the significance of his time in Puerto Rico. Stepping down from the plane, he may have “kiss[ed] the ground in South Carolina,” as he had said he would. After two days of processing his discharge papers, Toole traded in his army uniform for a gray suit. He returned to civilian life, he returned to New Orleans with his manuscript in hand.
