Butterfly in the Typewriter

On the day Toole left New Orleans, Richard Nixon ascended to the office of president to take the helm of a country mired in the Vietnam Conflict and countless Cold War fronts. In his inaugural address, Nixon spoke of peace and love and of the world as God sees it, “Beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.” Just as the pristine blue-and-white marble spinning in space belies the heartache of its inhabitants, the silent passing of days tormented Thelma as she waited to hear from her son. He was out in the world somewhere. He could have gone in any direction.

She suspected he would head to Lafayette to the home of the Rickelses. In his moment of crisis, it would make sense to seek refuge in the warm embrace of the family that always appeared to him stable and lovely. The next day Thelma called Patricia Rickels to make sure her son had arrived. Patricia told her that she had not seen him. Thelma did not believe her. “Please, Please!” she begged, “From one mother to another, just tell me he is there. I won’t even ask to speak with him. Just tell me he is safe.” Hearing the guilt-racked pleas, Patricia wanted to tell her that her son was okay, but she could not. “I am sorry, Mrs. Toole,” she said. “I have not seen him.” “How could you be so cruel?” Thelma turned on her. “Why would you torment me so?”

Days turned into weeks. Thelma called anyone she could think of who might know where he was. No one in Lafayette had seen him, so they told her. She called Cary Laird, who was now living in Florida. Laird had not seen him. “How long has he been gone?” he asked. “For several weeks,” she responded. He could sense her distress, and he reassured her that Toole would never do anything to harm himself. He would certainly come back.

By mid-February, Mardi Gras celebrations were in full swing. Streets echoed with the sounds of marching bands and laughter. The Mardi Gras Indians danced in their costumes of vibrant feathers and beads. And yet her son never broke the aching silence in their home. Her boy with those “dark, luminous eyes” who once doted on her, praised her piano playing, and requested gold-framed pictures of her, never relieved her pain.

But this wasn’t about Thelma. Toole had unbound himself from his roles as professor, writer, and son. With money in his pocket, throwing care out the window, he roamed the country. North, south, east, or west, he was on a journey, looking for something he had not yet found, perhaps something more to life than the confinement of his dutiful expectations. He spent two months on the road. The details of his trip remain largely a mystery. But one certainty lay in the distance: every journey must come to an end. After such a long period, perhaps the challenges of home weren’t as bad as he thought. Perhaps he just needed some time away from it all, a little room to breathe. It seems he turned back toward New Orleans.

It was nearing the end of March, when the warm sun chases away the cold rainy days of winter, when the irises bloom in the bayou. But as he headed west toward New Orleans, the road signs, the landscape, the smells must have grown familiar. And perhaps those sights, no longer recollections softened by the sepia tones of memory, cut with the sharpness of reality. He turned off the main route onto Popps Ferry, an inconspicuous road just outside Biloxi. He parked his car under the shade of pine trees, the same area he took his friend Dave Kubach years before.

In those woods, removed from the beaches, it seems he found some peace. He placed a final letter to his parents atop the pile of papers in the passenger seat. He unwound a garden hose, inserted one end into the exhaust pipe and propped the other end in the window crevice. Returning to the driver’s side seat, he shut the door. He had followed the ritual: a final word in writing, a method of his choosing, and now to follow through with the design. He placed his fingers to the keys in the ignition. In New Orleans his mother waited for a sign, the phone to ring, a note in the mail, anything. At Dominican, whispered rumors circled among students as to what had become of Mr. Toole. In New York, Gottlieb had moved on to his new job at Knopf, never hearing again from the young, talented writer from New Orleans. Somewhere over the Gulf, a brown pelican flew low over the water, the tips of its wings nearly grazing the dark, glassy surface. The novelist, the poet, the scholar, the professor, the man who brought so much laughter to his friends, turned his wrist. The engine roared, and the noxious fumes billowed into the cabin. John Kennedy Toole faded from this world, alone in the woods on a balmy spring day, as the Monarch butterflies fluttered across the Gulf of Mexico, dancing on air, returning home.

Hours later, the Biloxi police department received a call about a suspicious car on the side of the road—likely a suicide. They dispatched an officer to the scene. Shortly thereafter, Thelma Toole received the sign she had awaited and most feared. Within twenty-four hours the car was towed, the papers in the passenger seat collected, and his body returned to New Orleans. At 3:30 the next day, services were held at a funeral home on Elysian Fields and a religious service at St. Peter and Paul church a few blocks away. There were only three people in attendance: his mother, his father, and Beulah Mathews, his childhood nanny. It was an unusually quiet end to a life that held such promise, a life that had been tailored for brilliance. In a city that never shied away from death, where people sing dirges to the grave and celebratory songs after burial, where they once held picnics in graveyards and whitewashed family tombs on All Saint’s Day, Toole had no litany of eulogies recalling his better days when his mind was sharp, his smile bright, and his laughter infectious—no such graces for a man who had committed the sinful act of self-destruction. In fact, he was fortunate to have a service at all, considering the stigma the church placed on suicides, even though the second Vatican council softened its stance on the issue. Fortunately, the church that the Ducoings had attended for generations agreed to hold the funeral. Born and baptized in Uptown, his final rites were performed in the church where his parents had married, in that same working-class section of the city they sought to escape, the Faubourg Marigny. And after the service, the elderly parents escorted their son’s body to the Ducoing tomb in Greenwood Cemetery.

Thelma now had years to ponder the haunting questions that remained. She started to piece together where her son had spent the last sixty-four days of his life. She still believed he had gone to Lafayette. And perhaps she was right. But if he had gone to the Rickels house on January 20, he would have found their driveway full with cars; they were hosting a book club party. As his world came undone, he would have found his sanctuary overrun with a convivial sort, strangers talking about literature. In such a fragile state of mind, he likely continued down the road.

From his receipts and remaining belongings, it seemed her son headed west to San Simeon, California, and visited the Hearst Castle, an icon of American excess and the inspiration for Xanadu in Citizen Kane. California was the land of stars, the land of Marilyn Monroe. And Alvin Foote, his mentor from his early college days, who had believed in Toole’s gifts as a writer, had once lived an hour away from San Simeon. But when Toole needed saving from the “bottom of Morro Bay,” as Foote had written to him in 1957, no voice from afar came to save him.

From California it appears he headed east, driving across the country to visit Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor, in Milledgeville, Georgia. In a taped interview, when Thelma was asked how she knew he visited O’Connor’s home, she emphatically responded, “He did . . . we saw the STUB . . . IN . . . HIS . . . POCKET!” It is unclear what ticket stub she references. While O’Connor died in 1964, her home was not open to the public in 1969. He could have made prior arrangements to visit the home, but there was no ticketed entry. Perhaps he just drove by to see the house where the frail Georgian Catholic once fed her brightly colored peafowls when she wasn’t writing her stories of violence and redemption.

Between California and Georgia, he could have visited any number of places. And aside from a possible attempt to visit the Rickelses, it seems he did not attempt to reach out to friends. He knew people in Wisconsin, Chicago, New York, Colorado, and Florida, but perhaps he did not search for company or counsel. While we may never know for sure what route he took, his journey stands as a powerful metaphor for his experience. From the opulence of the west to the tempered graces of the east, he had traveled to the edges and determined he could carry on no longer.

Of course, difficult and haunting questions come with every suicide. Why did he do it? What drove him to follow through with such a heinous act? What was the breaking point that determined his actions? Perhaps the letter he had written to his parents and placed upon the pile of papers contained some insight to his reasons. When asked about its contents, Thelma varied in her responses. Sometimes she would say it was filled with “insane ravings.” Other times she would say that he apologized for what he did and that he loved them. But we will never know for sure. Thelma destroyed the letter. And the other documents found in the car were placed in a box in the Biloxi police department. In August of 1969, five months after Toole committed suicide, Hurricane Camille slammed into the Gulf Coast, and the waters carried away those papers. The beginnings of his third novel, The Conqueror Worm, may have dissolved into the Gulf of Mexico. Much like the details of his journey, the true contents of his suicide note and his other effects with him at the time of his death will remain a mystery.

Regardless of those documents, Thelma supplied an answer to the question of why. She unequivocally blamed Robert Gottlieb. As she saw it, the editor from Simon and Schuster had singlehandedly lifted her son’s hopes to unrivalled heights, only to dash them upon the jagged rocks of his “vitriolic attacks.” She never suggested that her son mentioned Gottlieb in his final letter. Nonetheless, she determined the New York editor had tortured her son into his psychosis. But Gottlieb proved a convenient scapegoat, especially after the publication of the novel.

Perhaps Thelma was unaware, or chose to ignore, the degree to which her son confided in Gottlieb, confessing aspects of his life that he rarely shared with others. In fact, when George Deaux read the letters from Gottlieb to Toole, he observed that the letters “sound more like the responses of a therapist to his patient than an editor to a professional writer.” Deaux found a stark difference between his own interactions with Gottlieb and Toole’s correspondence with him. “I always found him to be kind and supportive, but I would not have expected him to be so indulgent in dealing with a writer’s personal problems and sensibilities.” While Thelma saw Gottlieb as a tyrannous tormenter, his letters demonstrated that he recognized and praised the talents of her son. Ultimately, as an editor, he had to think about the interests of the publishing house and the literary market. Initially, Toole did not weather Gottlieb’s call for revisions well. But to suggest Gottlieb singlehandedly destroyed her son’s otherwise stable mental state may have been a way for her to displace her own feelings of guilt.

Other claims have been made as to the roots of his psychological crisis, some of the most onerous coming from the biography Ignatius Rising . Biographers René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy intended to write a book on the making of the movie A Confederacy of Dunces, but their project became a biography of Toole once the movie deal fell through. Their narrative repeatedly suggests that Toole suffered from latent homosexuality. They interviewed a man who claimed to have had a strictly sexual relationship with Toole in the late 1960s. However, as Fletcher has pointed out, the authors of Ignatius Rising offer this man’s testimony, even as he admits those years in New Orleans were a drunken blur to him.

A tale of conflicted sexuality may have made a scintillating story for Hollywood at one time, as was evident when Fletcher was interviewed by a producer wanting to do a biopic of Toole. Determined to depict the author in the dark corners of French Quarter gay bars, the producer grew frustrated when Fletcher maintained he never thought his friend gay. He always found Toole to be rather asexual. Granted, some of Toole’s friends held suspicions that he harbored unrealized homosexual inclinations. Polites sensed it, especially considering Toole’s awkward reaction at the gay party they went to together. Although, Polites admits his interpretation was not based on a confession or evidence. And Toole’s high school and college friends recall his friendship with the rather attractive and effeminate young man named Doonie Guibet. On one occasion, they went to see Mae West together, delighted by her sexual euphuisms. Cary Laird and his sister, Lynda, knew that Toole was socializing with Guibet. Lynda observes, “I always thought Ken was so interested in people that he wanted to befriend all walks of life.” To the Lairds, Guibet was another color in the spectrum of humanity that Toole sought to understand, not a reflection of an unrealized aspect of his identity. According to Thelma, when Toole paid a visit to Guibet at his New York apartment years later, he found a questionable picture hanging on the wall. He “didn’t like what Doonie was doing with his life, and eventually he broke with him.” Guibet was later accused and arrested for the murder of his roommate in the early 1980s.

The women Toole dated may also contest to suggestions of Toole being latently homosexual as well. Most likely Ruth Lafranz would not have carried on their relationship so long had she thought him gay. The mysterious “Ellen” repeatedly declared her love for him in a letter from New York. And Patricia Rickels, while never dating him, always felt he was attracted to women, especially considering his flirtations with her in front of her husband, as well as flirting with some of the wives of other faculty members. “A lot of people say he was homosexual,” Patricia says, “but I never thought that. He liked women.... He liked me, very much. He took a fancy to me.” And one of his final confidants, Professor Ussery, who was sensitive to Toole’s mental anguish, never detected that his sexuality had any bearing on the illness that consumed him.

It is possible, as it is for any human being, that Toole had desires other than heterosexual ones, but there is no firsthand evidence and no credible testimony to the fact. It is possible that he suffered from a conflicted sense of sexuality. But to date there is no love letter confession or secret declaration scribbled in a journal. And without such evidence, it is unwise to suggest the impact this mere possibility had on him. Delving into such murky waters offers little more than sensationalism to the story of his life. And as discussed later, because it is mere conjecture, the suggestion has no bearing on the merit of his artistic work. In the end, Toole’s sexuality remains his own.

There have also been questions that Toole had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Biographers Nevils and Hardy document several stories of Toole drinking. But he rarely appears drunk in any of these tales. Nonetheless, they suggest when speaking with his family doctor about his headaches that Toole downplayed the “the sexual problems he may have had” and his drinking. But New Orleanians tend to have a more casual relationship with alcohol than much of the country. So infused in the culture, alcohol has a virtually unavoidable presence in the city. Unlike most cities in the United States, the culture of New Orleans was shaped in part by the Catholic Church, an institution that has long celebrated alcohol, not demonized it. After all, wine is sanctified in the Catholic Mass, Trappist monks have perfected beer making, and Benedictine monks discovered how to make champagne. In present day New Orleans, frozen daiquiri stands may be more common than Starbucks. Toole scoffed at the puritanical notions prevalent in the Southern United States that saw devils in the rum bottle. Granted, if he struggled with depression, drinking would have worsened his condition. But from all accounts, he held his composure, never suggesting to anyone on record that drinking hindered his daily life. His behavior at Dominican was odd near the end, but not drunken.

One reviewer of Ignatius Rising praised the work, stating, “The authors present considerable evidence that Toole was alcoholic, gay and closeted.” But the authors don’t offer any substantive evidence to support those conclusions. It is tempting to fit Toole into the trope of the fatally troubled artist, his genius unrecognized, sinking into an abyss of vices. This narrative is so commonplace that we seem willing to overlook a lack of evidence to believe it. After all, we have grown to expect the artistic genius to descend into a dark world of indulgence, perhaps searching for some sensation to once again find himself or seeking a sedative to dull the pain. But such a naïve approach to a man’s crisis tragically oversimplifies the complexity of a mental illness.

Feelings of dejection from the failure to publish his novel, conflicted sexual identity, alcohol addiction, a narcissistic mother, and an insufferable home life, all provide convenient answers to the question of why he committed suicide. And while they may or may not be true, they ultimately fail as reasons for his suicide. When using such measures, the result, as Thelma Toole once said of her son’s final decision to take his own life, appears “insupportable.” Suicide is not simple. Despite our best efforts to understand the ghastly human potential for self-destruction, it cannot be explained by a series of events like some kind of formula. And yet we tend to approach the question of suicide from this insupportable angle, seeking the single, loosened lynchpin that caused a mind to come undone.

Foremost suicidologist Edwin Shneidman described suicide as an incredibly complex event. He coined the term “psychache” to express the intricate and complicated condition leading up to suicide. After years of studying suicides and interviewing people with suicidal tendencies, some of whom ultimately carried out the act despite his efforts to help them, Shneidman determined that suicide is not reactive, but rather “purposive.” In his definition it is a “concatenated, complicated, multidimensional, conscious, and unconscious ‘choice’ of the best possible practical solution to a perceived problem, dilemma, impasse, crisis or desperation.” And before arriving at the decision to kill oneself, Shneidman argues, the person is in excruciating pain; the pain may have no physical manifestation but still relentlessly tortures the subject. To the person suffering from this “psychache,” the pain is just as potent and troubling as the ghost pain riddling the body of an amputee. They cannot point to the wound they feel, but they feel it intensely. In this context, suicide is not a moment of weakness, but rather a final attempt to take control of the pain, regardless of its origin. Understandably, Thelma and many people who have pondered his life want to name a single source of that pain. However, Shneidman’s research indicates that a single event or a single person is rarely the cause of suicide. Gottlieb, his mother, or his sexuality ultimately falter as isolated reasons for his final actions.

Perhaps the most arresting insight into Toole’s mind in regards to suicide comes from his own hand. In his papers at Tulane, there is an undated short story he wrote titled “Disillusionment.” It is an experimental piece, a fairly chaotic story with flashes of characters in New Orleans at different time periods, its earliest moment beginning in 1937, the year of Toole’s birth. In the rough of this story, there are some gems. It opens with a boy, Samuel, looking for a home. We discover that his love died in a boat accident and, determined a coward for not saving her, he was driven from his town in shame. Searching for a place to lay his weary head, he comes to a house on the outskirts of the French Quarter, owned by a lonely woman. Samuel approaches the middle-aged homeowner, and Toole offers his most poetic description of New Orleans that he ever composed. At twilight in the Crescent City,

Someone was calling her child to come for dinner. A dog barked at a moving shadow. A car moved down the street. The city was preparing for night. By this time Canal Street was aglow with flashing lights, people walked its ways. There were no-goods, lost women, dandies, young and old, rich and poor, artists, the strippers from Bourbon Street; they were all part of a last scene. The curtain would never come down on these actors, the scene would never change. Those who were down to their last dime, some who never knew money at all, others who kept trying to get to the top, forever slipping back down. Here was a living panorama. All existing, not really living. The woman took the boy’s hand and led him into the house.

Unlike the absurd carnival of Confederacy, which also begins as day turns into night, here the narrator sees the city filled with the walking dead. And like Poe in “The Conqueror Worm,” Toole uses the theater metaphor, albeit far less emphatic, to approach the existential problem at the heart of the story. The woman realizes that life is “a parade, filled with all the characters in the world. Not one of them caring about the other. Even if you fell out of step it would keep moving.” In response to this dilemma, Samuel offers a solution. At first it seems these two characters of the world, trampled upon by the unstoppable parade, could take solace in each other. But Samuel has another intention. Once alone in his room, he slits his wrists. The description casts the moment of death as a passageway to serenity, where Samuel’s lost love beckons him:

The boy watched as the blood ran down his arm. It didn’t hurt too much, of course the razor felt kind of bad, but that part was over. His bed was sopped with blood, it was making criss-cross pattern [sic] on the sheet, and that somehow added to his fascination. His mind was now spinning, like a deep, dark, whirlpool.

“See Sameul [sic], you and I are together again. I promised you didn’t I? Come with me, hold my hand. You’ll see things that you never dreamed could happen. Of gods and devils, poets and lovers, you and I. Come Sameul [sic], peace at last. Follow me.”

There was his Cathy, running across a field of beautiful flowers. Her blue dress was blowing in the wind, her long black hair streamed behind her. She was smiling, just for him. He had tried, but lost. Life had been a heartache. But he was happy now. After all, all he ever needed was love, and he had now found it.

“Do not be afraid Samuel, do not be afraid.” Samuel closed his eyes and died.

We will never know what Toole experienced in his final moments. Naturally his friends and family wondered if there was something more they could have done for him, if they could have somehow saved him. Cary Laird thought if he had stayed in New Orleans perhaps he could have helped his friend. David Kubach wondered if he should have paid another visit to Toole. And staring out the large windows of her home, looking over the land that her dear friend helped clear, Patricia Rickels wondered if they had just planned the book club meeting for another night, maybe he would have gotten out of his car and knocked on their door, and they could have diverted him from the path he ultimately took. But his friends also recognized with a mind as intense as his that there was little they could do. Perhaps that is what a small group of his confidants realized early on: all they could really do was listen. Toole chose to confide in a select few as he descended into his illness. Despite attempts by critics and scholars to find answers to the questions of Toole’s demise, there are those who promised and kept his secrets. Sister Beatrice at Dominican, his artist friend Angela Gregory, and Tulane professor Huling Ussery, had no connections to his family or other friends, and Toole chose to open up to them. Even Ruth Lafranz Kathmann, the woman he dated at Tulane and Columbia, expressed regret over a single interview she once offered a reporter in 1981. She remarks, “What Ken and I shared was special, and it was between us.” These confidants carry his confessions in their hearts. But they keep them sacred, not out of selfishness, but out of respect, out of honor, out of love for their friend.

Whatever path he took to arrive on that road outside Biloxi, he had determined his own end, likely seeing no other way out. He had mired under the binds of filial duty. He had two failed novels tucked away in his house. In some ways he became what he must have feared most: a so-called scholar who lectured to undergraduates with nothing of note to his name, no legacy to leave behind, and an endless pursuit to keep his parents afloat as they deteriorated into old age. He left New Orleans but seems to have been compelled to return. In the end, like Boethius trapped in a cell, Toole resolved that this earthly prison had just one escape. Fortuna had pushed him to the bottom of his existence, and there she held him down. But just as Boethius learns before his execution, Fortuna only holds physical bonds over a person. The soul is free. In answer to his own existential dilemma, Toole designed a solution and freed himself of his body.

Coincidentally, on the day of Toole’s disappearance, a poet living in New Orleans going by the name Mallord sent Toole a book of self-published poems titled Love Alone Finds Cold. Toole must have left before he had a chance to read it. But perhaps his mother perused the pages as she waited for her son to call or as she tried to make sense of his end. One untitled poem reads

The closet slams shut
filled up with yesterday,
Catching a dandelion
In its hinge.
The dandelion bows,
Having lived in hope of its seed.