Butterfly in the Typewriter

Much of Toole’s life had been a continual progression toward achieving some stature of greatness, either in academics or fiction writing. And many of his accomplishments had come easy to him. But the novel had posed the most formidable challenge; it also held the greatest potential to elevate him and his parents out of their financial state. The fact that he could not revise it to the satisfaction of a New York editor must have been a devastating blow to his pride. What would his life become now that the path leading out of the drudgery of working to merely sustain his family seemed inaccessible? Many of his friends had left New Orleans: Emilie Dietrich had married William Griffin in 1963 and was living and writing in New York City. Nick Polites was writing and publishing articles on design and architecture while working at a prestigious design firm in Manhattan. Cary Laird was living in Miami and working for an insurance company. Joel Fletcher was living in Paris. And each day Toole walked to the small Catholic college a few blocks away to teach, and then walked home at night, living with his parents in the same neighborhood that he had known all his life. But there was something at play more sinister than personal failures or a sense of confining filial duty. Toole’s brilliant mind was falling under the grasp of mental illness.

His family history had more than its fair share of mental health issues. His father slowly deteriorated into senility. Thelma’s uncle, James Ducoing, committed suicide a few months before Toole was born. In December of 1941, several years after Thelma’s sister died of an illness, her surviving husband threw himself off a high-rise building on Canal Street. And in 1966 one of Thelma’s brothers, George Ducoing, exhibited a full-blown mental illness that was getting out of control. Excluding Thelma, the Ducoing siblings lived in a small home on Elysian Fields, two doors down from the home where they had grown up. In a letter to the coroner dated February 28, 1966, Arthur Ducoing sought to have his brother committed:

My brother’s nervousness is apparent by his incessant loud talking at home. A source of great annoyance to three other people in the house, ranging in age from sixty-six to eighty. Placing him in the House of Detention—his last stay of three weeks—doesn’t seem to accomplish much good.

His need for institutional treatment is most urgent at this time. I would certainly like to see him placed in the Psychiatric Department at Charity Hospital, and would appreciate your helping the family as we really need it.

It is difficult to determine when Toole started suffering from his illness. It appears the letters from Gottlieb, especially in their encouraging moments, sustained him in some ways. But Toole had embarrassed himself in New York with an uncharacteristic outburst, perhaps the first sign of his decline. One year later, Gottlieb still encouraged Toole to keep working at his revisions. But Toole tried to justify his decision to stop working on the novel when he told his army friend David Kubach that “if his book were published it was such a scathing satire of New Orleans that he wouldn’t be able to live there, but he couldn’t live anywhere else.” Kubach had read enough of the manuscript “to know it was fairly tame as far as satires go.” Toole’s conviction seemed to offer him some comfort, so Kubach did not challenge his friend’s reasoning. But packing up his novel must have put his life in terrifying perspective. As Kubach observed, “I think he thought his life was going to get long.”

In 1963 Toole had arrived in New Orleans, sensing his own assent; now he found himself at the bottom of Fortuna’s wheel. And, at the bottom, the world looks different, as if the top seems unreachable. Toole succumbed to an inner force as he gradually lost grasp on reality. At first there came isolated incidents of strange behavior that his friends dismissed as anomalies. In retrospect, these episodes offer glimpses into the complex distortions of a brilliant mind suffering from paranoia; some people have conjectured paranoid schizophrenia. Whatever his diagnosis would have been, these episodes now appear as signposts pointing to a tragic end.

In 1966 Toole was still teaching at Dominican with no pervasive signs of illness. His students still enjoyed his lectures. However, Pam Guerin recalls that during this period he spoke frequently about “the Mother,” not his mother, specifically, but rather a caricature of a mother dragging her child to dance lessons and other performances, instilling in her offspring all the crucial social graces to be expected but also living vicariously through her child. Many of his students, having experienced the upbringing of a “proper lady,” could relate to such a figure. But his insightful description of this mother and child dynamic suggested “he was part of it.” Guerin and other students could tell that he had intimate knowledge of the very character he mocked.

As he explored this notion of the mother figure, he began having long conversations outside of class with his department chair, Sister Beatrice. She was described as “a master listener” because people often started conversations with her about literature and minutes later found themselves pouring out their souls. Sister Beatrice became one of Toole’s closest confidants. And as their friendship matured, as he opened up to her, she recognized his suffering. On at least one occasion, she visited the Toole home for dinner, a visit that would take special approval for a nun at the time. While Toole often seemed indifferent about his faith, it is ironic that in his descent into illness one of his closest confidants was a nun. Despite many attempts by journalists and writers to interview her, she took his confidences to her grave in 2004.

Kubach, who had lent Toole his typewriter in Puerto Rico, also witnessed moments in his tragic decline. In the summer of 1967 Toole visited Kubach in Madison, Wisconsin. It had been years since they had seen each other in Puerto Rico, and Kubach was eager to show Toole his city. But he was not prepared for some of Toole’s odd behaviors. One day, as the two were walking in downtown Madison, Kubach spotted a friend approaching. Toole suddenly dove into a store, leaving Kubach awkwardly alone as he greeted his friend who had seen him walking with a companion. As Kubach recalls, “John was in fairly good spirits, so the action caught my attention.” He was puzzled as to why his affable friend had behaved so strangely to avoid meeting a new acquaintance.

During that trip, Toole sent two postcards on July 20. He wrote to his parents, “The weather is clear, pleasant; the air is very fresh and clean. I’m having a very interesting time and will see you sometime next week.” His language seems forced and trite. He also sent a postcard to his friend Angela Gregory with a simple message on the back: “Wish you were here.” While a cliché script for a postcard, he may have desired her company. He had spent many hours with Gregory, as they slowly walked home after classes, pausing at the corner of Hampson and Pine, continuing on with their conversation. Perhaps if she had been there in Wisconsin, he could tell her his thoughts, why he had suddenly fled to avoid meeting someone new.

The trip ended without further incident. Months later, Kubach visited Toole in New Orleans. Taking an overnight train from Madison, Wisconsin, he fell asleep in the northern reaches of the United States and awoke to “beautiful pastoral images of Northern Louisiana.” Toole met him at the train depot, and within a few turns they were in downtown New Orleans. As Kubach recalls, “He showed me right away the place that he would eventually be buried, those above ground mausoleums.” Often called “cities of dead,” the above-ground graves necessitated by the frequent floods are a popular tourist attraction in New Orleans. But it was certainly a morbid way to start his tour.

They continued on to the French Quarter where Toole “had a number of quips to say” about the “exotic looking people walking around.” Passing old colonial structures, such as the Old Absinthe House and Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, Toole bragged to Kubach that the famed pirate Lafitte, who had inspired Lord Byron’s poem “The Corsair,” was his ancestor. But then, as they drove through the historic city center, the paranoia that Kubach had seen in Wisconsin appeared once again. Toole became increasingly nervous. Looking in his rearview mirror, he explained to Kubach that his students from Dominican were following him, again. Determined to lose them, he started taking “evasive maneuvers” through the tight, cramped streets. Kubach saw no suspicious cars filled with deranged Catholic schoolgirls behind him. But since Toole was his guide, Kubach respectfully kept quiet. Eventually they slowed down, turned toward Uptown, and headed back home to Hampson Street. Kubach presumed they had successfully eluded the stalker students.

While Toole played tour guide for part of the trip, he appeared generally uninterested in showing off his unique city. After the long journey south, Kubach wanted to experience New Orleans. But Toole just wanted to talk. “John never wanted to be out,” Kubach remembers. “His favorite scenario with me was drinks and talk. And he did most of the talking. I sometimes feel like I disappeared entirely in our friendship. I was just an audience really.” Eager to connect with his friend, perhaps Toole wanted to recapture some of the spirit of his army days. Kubach even suspected that Toole warned his mother not to interfere with their conversations. Thelma seemed to go out of her way to keep her distance. And somehow Kubach never met Toole’s father during their many hours spent in the small home. As the main breadwinner of the family, Toole had grounds to request his parents stay out of the way. He would need to make the inside of the home comfortable for him and his friend, especially if the outside world stoked his anxieties.

Eventually, Toole and Kubach left the house to see the environs of New Orleans. They crossed Lake Pontchartrain, traveling the long twenty-three-mile bridge to Mandeville, and then returned. They headed west to Lafayette, although they did not stop to see the Rickelses or other friends. They also drove east to Biloxi, Mississippi. And after seeing the waterfront town, they headed back to New Orleans. But there was one more place Toole wanted to show Kubach. As they drove along the Gulf, Toole suddenly turned off the road. He drove north for a short distance and then pulled over onto the shoulder. They looked out to a nondescript field with a few pine trees. Toole seemed to think that this was a beautiful, peaceful place, a special spot that he wanted to share with his friend. But Kubach, accustomed to the majestic vistas of the upper-Midwestern states, found it unimpressive. “I suppose I wouldn’t have brought someone to that place,” Kubach comments, “unless something had happened there, or in this case something was about to happen.” Slightly puzzled by the trip, Kubach said goodbye to Toole and returned to Wisconsin.

Granted, it would be unfair to cast Toole as a perpetually brooding, melancholy soul. Despite the episodes of odd behavior, he still had moments where his personality shined. Charlotte Powell enjoyed his company at several of her parties in 1967. Her apartment on Decatur Street in the French Quarter was a popular gathering place, in part because she had the luxury of a spacious kitchen. They would boil shrimp and crawfish, spread the feast on newspaper-covered tables, and a full array of French Quarter characters from hippies to professors would dig in. While some guests railed against the Vietnam War, Toole preferred more convivial conversation, playing off puns, discussing the current state of literature, bemoaning the popularity of Valley of the Dolls, and of course talking about New Orleans. Powell marveled at how Toole “brought the city to life” whenever he talked about it. She told him about a time she asked a lady for directions and couldn’t understand a word the lady said. She struggled to mimic the lady’s accent. Without skipping a beat, Toole went into an interpretation of a New Orleans woman giving directions. To Powell’s amazement, he sounded exactly like her. His humor, his intellect, and his quick wit, Powell recalls, made him “a most amazing person.” And despite some of the stories about Toole’s mental illness, Powell has no recollection of him appearing uneasy or behaving strangely. In fact, she marveled at how he “would walk into a room not knowing a single person and within twenty seconds be at ease, comfortable, and chatting with someone.”

Toole also appeared cheerful during the Christmas of 1967, according to Thelma. Enjoying the extra income from his promotion at Dominican, they purchased a large Christmas tree and took out those fine European ornaments that they had bought just after Toole was born. They reminisced about their early days as a family. Thelma Toole would remember that holiday season as their finest Christmas in their new home.

Unfortunately, the yuletide cheer could not dispel the clouds that gathered over the charming house on Hampson Street. Polites had been to the Toole home many times since his friend had returned from Puerto Rico, and he witnessed the storm building. Usually, Polites visited several times with Toole when he was in town, but the last time he saw him in 1968 the weight of depression pervading the house nearly chased him away. Polites recalls,

After a dreary session I took my departure saying something like, “I’ll call and hope to see you once more before I leave.” But being with the Tooles had been such a downer that I couldn’t bring myself to call again, except when leaving from the airport. I said to Ken that I was sorry not to have seen him again before leaving, but that I became tied up and was busy for the rest of my visit and hadn’t had a chance to call. I felt guilty saying it. It wasn’t true. Maybe Ken recognized it. Certainly, his response literally shocked me. “That’s okay,” he said, “we saw each other just the right amount of time.” There was bitterness in his voice.

Shortly after Polites’s return to New York, Fletcher called to ask about their friend whom he had not heard from for some time. Polites recounts,

I told him about Ken and his parting line and said, “Ken’s not with us anymore.” I sensed Ken’s deep depression but I’m not certain whether I really articulated it to myself. I had no conscious notion of what I was saying to Joel. I never saw Ken again. I wish I’d known of the danger to come, though I doubt I could have done much.

As Toole descended into depths his friends could not follow, everything seemed to be changing around him. The student body at Dominican, which had been previously required to wear high heels to dinners and prohibited from wearing pants to class during Toole’s first years at the school, was coming under the influence of the hippie generation. One of the three Trader sisters, Elise Trader Diament, sensed that Toole was baffled by these students who sat in class in raincoats and hair rollers and just stared at him, not engaging in discussion. He talked to them about authors one would expect the youth of the late 1960s to embrace—the predecessors of the hippie movement, the Beats. Elise recalled how he admired the Beat Generation and how he “thought Jack Kerouac was wonderful.” Yet the students in hair rollers remained unresponsive. And perhaps this silence represented the chasm that was growing between the way he saw the world and the way the world seemed to be headed. It was painfully clear that Dominican could never serve as the peak of his literary life. As Elise explained, he was “a very deep person—too deep for Dominican.”

By the fall of 1968, the students at Dominican started to notice that Professor Toole was not acting like his usual self. He was humorless, serious, and bitter—some students described him as “caustic.” He made snide remarks to girls who had received flowers during the holiday season. “How ridiculous,” he muttered. Chatter started to circulate about Professor Toole’s odd behavior. As Elise admits, “He had a few dark days.”

Eventually his visions of Dominican students chasing him through the Quarter landed on his doorstep. One weekend over coffee, Toole told Bobby Byrne that students were driving by his house at night and honking the horn to taunt him. Even though Byrne had predicted the Dominicans would surely ruin him, he recognized that Toole was not well. While the threat of students may have been hallucinated, according to one Dominican student, some girls did honk their horns as they drove by his house at night. It was likely youthful teasing and some degree of flirtation. Clearly Toole’s state of mind misinterpreted their behavior as hostile. But these occurrences were irritants atop the far more disturbing confession he made to Byrne. He confessed he believed that the government had implanted a device into his brain. “Do you think I am imagining these things?” he asked his friend. Byrne recognized the telltale signs of paranoid schizophrenia. He replied, “Yes,” and advised him to get help. Unbeknownst to Byrne, Toole had gone to his family practitioner about debilitating headaches he was suffering. Of course any physician requires openness from a patient in order to achieve an accurate diagnosis. And while the conversations between doctor and patient remain confidential, his friends acknowledge Toole, even in his darkest moments, held a fierce dedication to his own perception. “He was so convinced of his own mind,” Kubach recalls, “you couldn’t change it.” In a rare moment he had opened up to Byrne, acknowledging the possibility that his perception might be distorted. But he had refined his mind over the years to be acute, sharp, quick, and accurate. He trusted it. Barring rarely seen moments of self-doubt, it appeared he would have faith in his own delusions. Then, as they sipped coffee, it seemed as if Toole flipped a switch somewhere in his mind; he returned to his usual self, making small talk about mutual friends in Lafayette and New Orleans.

Perhaps in an attempt to re-center himself on a track toward the prestigious and gratifying future he so deserved, Toole once again took up the pursuit of his PhD. But his condition and commitment to his parents left Tulane the only viable option for graduate studies. Between Dominican and Tulane he walked in two different worlds, a professor by day and a student by night, just as he had done at Hunter and Columbia. He took only two courses: a seminar on Dreiser and an Old English course with Professor Huling Ussery. His classmates remember him as intelligent and well prepared. His class notes demonstrate clear thinking and the ability to reason. These were not the scribblings of a madman, but rather notes from a mind that could parse out academic pursuits and the unnerving anxiety that something was not right in his world. Toole often visited Professor Ussery during office hours and after class. They began frequent and long one-on-one discussions, conversations that convinced Ussery his student was not well. Ussery could tell Toole was suffering. Just as Toole had done with Sister Beatrice and Angela Gregory, he confided in Ussery. When asked about the nature of their discussion, Ussery declined to comment. But he admits they did not discuss Old English or the PhD program. They were delving deeper and more personal than two professors talking shop. With growing concern for his student’s well being, Ussery went to his department chair to suggest they recommend Toole for psychological evaluation. The chair decided that the department would not get involved in the personal matters of a student.

Toole’s paranoia came to a head one day in Ussery’s class. Thomas Bonner was in the course with Toole and remembers him as “competent in his preparations and quiet in demeanor.” Having taught at University of Southwestern Louisiana (formerly SLI), Bonner knew Toole’s old Lafayette circle. But after acknowledging their common acquaintances, such as the Rickelses, Byrne, and Broussard, their communication ceased. It appeared Toole kept to himself, not socializing with other graduate students. One day in the basement classroom in Gibson Hall, as Toole sat in his regular seat by a pillar in the middle of the room, he stood up during the class session. As Bonner recalls, Toole announced

“There’s a plot against me here.” There was sudden quiet. Professor Ussery asked him to point out the plotters. Toole said nothing. Then Professor Ussery asked those who had nothing to do with this situation to leave the room. Everyone left but Toole. My last sight of him was his standing silently facing Professor Ussery, who was partially sitting on the edge of his desk.

But, these neuroses were minor compared to his most horrifying realization that he shared with Patricia and Milton Rickels. Since returning from Puerto Rico, he often spent an overnight in Lafayette visiting the Rickelses. Typically he would make the drive on a Saturday afternoon; they would have dinner and drinks, talking into the evening, then enjoy a relaxing breakfast the next morning before he returned to New Orleans. But on one of his weekend visits in 1968, he pulled into the Rickelses driveway after the two-hour trip and remained in the car. Noticing he was not moving, Patricia went out to greet him. “What are you doing, Ken? Come on inside.” He looked at her and said, “No. I don’t think you want me.” Patricia dismissed his self-pity. “Oh don’t be an ass!” she replied. “Come on inside.” Ken nodded, “Ok. But I am going to leave my bags in here, because I don’t think you want me.” He came into the home, and they enjoyed a pleasant meal. After dinner they sat around the table, talking as usual, but Toole’s conversation surprised them. For the first time, he told them that he had written a novel and that it had been under consideration at Simon and Schuster. They praised his worthy accomplishment. But then Toole shared his shocking insight: A Confederacy of Dunces had been stolen and given to another author at Simon and Schuster.

In what sounded like an elaborate conspiracy theory, Toole explained that George Deaux, the writer who came to teach at SLI a few weeks after Toole left for Columbia University, had gained access to A Confederacy of Dunces and Simon and Schuster published it under a different title. Indeed, during the time Toole and Gottlieb exchanged letters and the manuscript, Simon and Schuster had published three of Deaux’s novels, and Robert Gottlieb had worked as an editor on them all. Deaux’s second wife worked in the publishing industry, as well, and Toole somehow connected her to Simon and Schuster. According to Toole, Deaux had gained access to the manuscript through his wife and Robert Gottlieb.

Patricia listened to her dear friend explain how the work that was supposed to save him from the rigors of teaching and the pressures of living with his parents, had been unjustly taken from him. Sympathetic to his distress, Patricia assumed him correct. While there was no evidence to support his claim, she had an unfavorable view of Deaux from his days at SLI. But Milton Rickels placed the story in context with Toole’s odd behavior in the driveway. Much like Byrne, Milton recognized his symptoms of paranoia and his increasing detachment from reality. That night, as Toole rested in the guest room across the hall, Milton explained to his wife that her dear friend was losing his mind. “No. No, it can’t be true,” Patricia muttered, as she lay on her pillow in disbelief.

While Toole’s faculties of reason might have made emotional leaps of logic, perhaps spurred by jealousy of Deaux’s success as a novelist at Simon and Schuster, his suspicions were not entirely unfounded. Toole never mentioned any specific titles by Deaux, but there are some remarkable similarities between A Confederacy of Dunces and Deaux’s third novel, Superworm, which was published in 1968 just before Gottlieb left Simon and Schuster to become editor-in-chief at Knopf. Considering Toole’s theory sprang from a troubled mind, it should be stressed that a comparison between the two novels serves only to offer insight into how Toole may have come to believe his work was stolen from him, not to legitimize his claims.

Toole owned Deaux’s first novel, The Humanization of Eddie Cement , which had been published in 1964, but that novel as well as Deaux’s second book, Exit, are nothing like Confederacy. Toole must have read Superworm to conclude that his novel had been stolen. In Superworm , history professor Claude Flowers can no longer stand the villainies of modern times. Taking to task adversaries that represent modernity, Claude dons a self-made superhero costume and plots to undermine the grand inequities in “the system.” The dust jacket commentary describes Claude as an American Don Quixote. In the foreword of Confederacy, Walker Percy defines Ignatius as “a fat Don Quixote.” And while Toole was not alive to read Percy’s commentary, he was certainly well aware of the quixotic nature of his main character.

Both Ignatius Reilly and Claude Flowers are self-marginalized intellectuals. They bite their thumb at the modern world through their actions, comments, and dress. Claude “wears Clark’s desert boots and Rooster ties, and shirts with button-down collars.” Most days his jacket and trousers are mismatched. Ignatius wears a hunting cap, a plaid flannel shirt, “voluminous tweed trousers,” and “suede desert boots.” Through their misadventures, both characters modify their apparel. Claude becomes Superworm, dressed in long underwear dyed black. And Ignatius becomes a piratical hot dog vendor, complete with eye patch, plastic cutlass, and hot dog cart. They both disregard social standards of dress, and both characters find costumes that empower them to revolt boldly against society.

Claude is much more proactive than Ignatius in his attack on the Modern Age. He is highly attuned to the places of the worst offense with a “nose, sensitive to evil” and the “fetid wave of wrong thought.” He searches for the perfect opportunity to “leap” into his superhero roll. His lectures in history classes bore his students, but his subversive actions inspire them. The laziness of Ignatius prohibits such zest, although his physique certainly gains destructive momentum. While Claude aims to embody the revolutionary spirit, Ignatius aims to incite revolution.

And through their social activism, they develop a savior complex, wherein they continually speak and act for the disenfranchised populations of society. But in both books their schemes to save the world are more about legitimizing their own place in society, rather than a sincere attempt at social reform. In Confederacy Ignatius feels compelled to impress the radical activist Myrna Minkoff, his epistolary love. From his Crusade for Moorish Dignity to the Army of Sodomites, he fantasizes about Myrna’s amazed reaction. And Claude’s subversive heroism offers him an avenue of personal expression, where he can render the paradox of lecturing students on the glories of revolution from the bourgeois comforts of a university professorship; he can operate in mainstream society but take on a persona to become the revolutionary. But the villains they take on—a polluting pizza factory, a billboard sign, and an old custodian in the Smithsonian in the case of Claude, and a pants factory in the case of Ignatius—convey the absurdity of their revolutionary spirit.

And in the end Ignatius and Claude must leave their home. Ignatius narrowly escapes the Cadillac ambulance coming to take him to the psychiatric ward in Charity Hospital, as he heads to New York City with Myrna Minkoff. Claude is not so lucky; the men “in immaculate white suites” place him in the “padded compartment” of a police wagon. While they meet different fates, both characters are purged from the community; their psychotic self-indulgence had become a consuming vortex. And despite the pleading of their loved ones to change, they could not. The only way to deal with Ignatius and Claude is to get rid of them.

Of course, despite their numerous similarities, one glaring difference between these two novels remains. Under the auspices of Robert Gottlieb, Superworm was published; Confederacy was not. Toole must have asked, “Why Deaux and not me?” Some key aesthetic differences between the two novels offers insight into Gottlieb’s decision against Confederacy . Superworm has a focused plot, closely following the protagonist and not wandering into the lives of other characters. In essence, the plot drives the characters. But the plot of Confederacy is the medium providing opportunity for the humorous expression of the characters. Indeed, Toole had spent his life observing and mimicking characteristics of personalities, and his characters take a primary role in the book. In this regard Confederacy is quite Dickensian: the seemingly disparate yarns of various characters strewn about the city weave together to form the narrative. But this approach requires time, space, and patience from the reader—and perhaps a willingness to lose oneself in a character. But unlike Dickens, Toole avoids sentimentality and agendas of social reform.

Furthermore, Superworm offers a pointed commentary on society in the 1960s. Its message was quite clear. The final words of the novel cast Claude, the radical activist, as “just another naked nut.” Through satire, it critiques the tide of social activism in the late 1960s. Thomas Lask of the New York Times explains, “Mr. Deaux makes a few sharp comments on the do-gooders who are more concerned with action than with results.... He is also acute in showing how often personal drives are elevated to crusades.” Clearly Gottlieb’s final criticism of Confederacy was not only an expression of his opinion, but a valid observation from the standpoint of an editor with the responsibility of finding sellable material in a particular market. In Superworm, Gottlieb may have seen marketability; it must have had that “meaning” that he deemed missing in Confederacy.

And yet Superworm received similar criticism to that of Confederacy, even though a decade separated the publication of the novels. Reviewers said of both writers they were “trying too hard.” Lask observed that Deaux’s “humor was too mechanical.... You can feel him cranking the machine up. But there are scenes of genuine hilarity.” Lask sees the meaningful commentary in the novel but finds the point and humor forced at times.

In his belief that Confederacy had been stolen, Toole had created a compelling and elaborate narrative of Gottlieb and Deaux conspiring against him. Deaux points out that Gottlieb actually had very little to do with Superworm. And it would be remarkably out of character for Gottlieb, who had behaved with so much compassion and took two years to help a writer with whom Simon and Schuster had no contract, only to lift the ideas and hand them to another writer in their house that had proved a moderate success. But to a powerless and once aspiring writer now defeated, the publishing world could be enigmatic. Writers on the margins have used all kinds of methods to understand the road to publication, looking for clues at the bottom of teacups, hoping to make sense out of the exclusive and seemingly insurmountable stratosphere in those high-rise buildings of midtown Manhattan.

If Toole kept up with the New York Times, then he may have seen in March of 1968 the profile detailing the sweeping changes in the publication world, including Gottlieb’s transition to Knopf. As Henry Raymont reported, “Possibly the most striking change was that of Mr. Gottlieb, who took with him Simon and Schuster’s top editorial production team.” Raymont acknowledges that in the midst of this consolidation and emergence of multimillion-dollar publishing houses, a shift from family-owned businesses to huge corporations, publishing houses would be less likely to take risks on writers. Ultimately, the publishing world was getting bigger, stronger, more concentrated, and far more difficult to navigate, and the media cast Gottlieb’s move to Knopf as a key indicator of this dramatic change. In this context the exchange Toole had with Gottlieb appears remarkably rare. And if Toole read the newspaper article, it may have put a final end to any thoughts of resubmitting the novel. The editor who once said he would never abandon Mr. Micawber likely seemed unreachable now. Gottlieb finished up his spring 1968 list for Simon and Schuster. Superworm was one of the last novels under his wing. From Toole’s perspective, Gottlieb had thrown his creative work to another writer as he jumped ship, and there was nothing Toole could do about it.

Patricia and Milton caught the allusion to the poem with the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s poem is an allegorical tragedy of Man, who succumbs to the all-consuming worm. Over the breakfast table at the Rickelses house, Toole cited the horrific futility of life. He determined the world had entered into a confederacy against him. And it seems he began to see his life as if he were sitting in the theater of Poe’s mind:

Lo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast shadowy things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each dying form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the seraphs, all haggard and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Poe was an artist who explored the darkest aspects of the human mind. And Toole could find many relatable traits to the Gothic poet. Poe had an actress mother. He had lived a life of financial struggle. As a Southern writer, he had faced a literary field dominated by figures in New England. His most famous poem “The Raven” was essentially stolen from him, widely published without his permission or benefit. And it has been theorized that Poe also grappled with mental illness. Of course there were few options for treatment, let alone diagnosis in his day. In the end, Poe ended up unconscious in a ditch. A few days later, estranged and muttering nonsense in a hospital in Baltimore, he died.

Over a hundred years of medical advances separated Poe’s death from Toole’s descent into mental illness. And yet the therapy for severe mental disorders was a grim prospect in Toole’s day. Plenty of writers in the mid-twentieth century illustrate this point. When Ernest Hemingway fell into debilitating depression and displayed suicidal tendencies, doctors administered electroshock therapy, sending a current of electricity coursing through his body. In July of 1961 Hemingway decided only the blast from his shotgun could cease his suffering. And when Allen Ginsberg “saw the best minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness,” he had in mind his friend Carl Solomon in Rockland Psychiatric Center, who was undergoing insulin-shock therapy—repeatedly induced into a convulsive coma through massive injections of insulin. Fortunately, Solomon survived. But poet and novelist Sylvia Plath did not. She had undergone both insulin and electroshock therapy in her periodic stints in mental hospitals. In February of 1963, at the age of thirty, she laid her head down in her gas oven and the hissing fumes filled her lungs. And in 1966 Toole’s Uncle George had reached the point to where his own siblings made a plea to the coroner to commit him to the psychiatric ward at Charity Hospital, a place that was described in the 1950s by one doctor as “a giant cage” where “most patients were strapped to the beds, and they had to be untied in order to examine them.” Had Toole’s illness been delayed a few more years, he might have had the benefit of advances in drug therapy and humanitarian laws implemented within the field of mental health. But that was not to be the case.

Having completed the fall semester at Dominican, the winter holidays of 1968 offered Toole a reprieve from teaching as well as several weeks at home with his parents. He weathered Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But after the holiday season, the blinking lights, pine trees propped in living rooms shedding dry needles on the floor, smiling plastic Santa Clauses on lawns, and giant wreaths on department store windows, always seem sad and surreal in the bleakness of January. From the windy snows of New York to the chilling rains in New Orleans, winter usually dampened Toole’s spirits. This melancholy season was worse than others. As the holidays concluded, and with Mardi Gras on the horizon, Toole decided he could not return to his position at Dominican. He was absent the first day of class, and he never came back. In this decision, he compromised the family’s livelihood. The illness that plagued his mind now threatened to consume the whole family.

On January 19, the bough snapped. Toole and his mother had a disagreement that erupted into a devastating fight. Thelma never confessed to the cause of the argument. Whatever the tipping point, the dispute escalated beyond reason. Bitterness, resentment, and a mind riddled with paranoia exploded in their house on Hampson Street. Toole stormed out. The next day he returned while his mother was away. He packed some of his belongings and went to the bank to withdraw his money. He quit his job, and he quit his parents. In his blue Chevy Chevelle he left New Orleans and took to the road embarking on his final journey.