Butterfly in the Typewriter

While the weight of unknowing had been lifted from the Toole home, it was replaced by the terrifying silence of solitude. As the news of Toole’s demise sent a shockwave through the lives of his friends and family, the closed doors of the Hampson Street house concealed two aging parents who suffered the wrenching heartache of their son’s damnable death. One by one, his friends, students, and classmates received word, and the awkwardness of the death made it difficult for people to know how to respond. The obligatory sympathy cards must have come in the mail. But just as Thelma destroyed the suicide note, she also must have discarded such expressions of condolence. In the Toole Papers—a collection that holds everything from letters to financial statements—the absence of these initial reactions to his death creates an eerie silence, as if his end, and in part his life, could be edited somehow.

Thelma kept only one letter of condolence sent a few weeks after the suicide. His devoted student, Joan Trader Bowen, aimed to honor him. In 1969 she writes,

Dear Mrs. Toole,

As all of Dominican feels, I am very saddened by the death of your son, who was not only my teacher but someone whom I respected and liked a great deal. His death has left an emptiness on our campus which will not easily be filled.

We the students of Dominican, would like Mr. Toole to be remembered by future students in a tangible way. Therefore we want to start a scholarship fund in Mr. Toole’s name. I hope you will recognize this gesture as a manifestation of the love we all had for Mr. Toole. We hope it will be a perpetual memorial to a good person and a dedicated teacher.

Bowen felt that she had come to know Toole “as a person, more than just a teacher.” She counted herself “fortunate to have been his student.” So impacted by his teaching, for decades she cherished her notes she took in his classes, which she would occasionally consult in developing her own lessons during her career as a high school English teacher in Alabama. Despite her best intentions in 1969, there was never a Toole scholarship established at Dominican.

The college did, however, hold a memorial service for him. Thelma served as the sole representative for the family. Her husband’s physical and mental health had so declined that he rarely left the house. The students also dedicated a memorial page to Toole in their yearbook. Therein, he appears professorial in his academic robes at the 1968 graduation ceremony. In their tribute, the yearbook staff writes,

All of Mr. Toole’s students will remember his barbed wit and his daily commentaries on modern society as well as his knowledge of all facets of English. But more important than the knowledge of the subject he taught, was the fine example he set as a mature, responsible, conscientious adult for both his fellow faculty members and his students. Mr. Toole will always be remembered fondly by all who knew him. . . .

Once the belated eulogies were made, the pragmatic consequences of his absence had to be addressed. As the breadwinner in the home, Toole’s death created momentary financial turbulence for his parents. Fortunately, he had a life insurance policy. And with that payment, Thelma invested in bonds, aiming to derive some interest income. By 1971 their financial affairs settled into a position comfortable enough that they decided to contribute fifty dollars to the Columbia University capital campaign. In a reply letter addressed to John Toole, Columbia acknowledged the generosity of their charitable alumnus. Clearly, they were unaware their high honors graduate was dead.

Several years passed, during which his parents seemed to live a quiet existence in their home on Hampson Street. But inside the home, John Toole was suffering from his own health complications, both mental and physical. As such, Thelma tended to his needs, keeping him inside the house as much as possible. The shame she suffered from her son’s suicide was enough; a senile husband need not add insult to injury. Harold Toole recalls his father, who was the brother of John Toole, one day going to the house on Hampson Street and demanding entry into the back room to see his ailing brother. By then the relationship between Thelma and the Tooles was deeply embittered for reasons that remain unclear other than a long-standing disdain for each other. Harold’s father nearly broke down the door to find his brother diminished by the cruelty of dementia. “Near the end,” Harold Toole recalls, “he didn’t even recognize anyone.” While his son was a flash of brilliance gone too soon, John Toole eroded slowly. On December 28, 1972, having lived a life that seemed a colossal disappointment to his wife, having suffered from an illness that estranged him from everyone he knew, and having buried his “Kenny boy,” John Toole died of a stroke and heart attack.

Thelma was now alone in the house on Hampson Street. She had a modest income from investments, life insurance, and her husband’s veteran’s benefits. She had stayed busy all her life, taking on project after project. But her days of directing variety shows were long gone, and her decreased mobility made teaching classes difficult. One day she opened the box on top of the cedar armoire that contained her son’s manuscript. It occurred to her that there might be hope for him, yet. She held in her hand the testimony of his genius. He had submitted it to only one publisher. Certainly someone else out there would recognize the brilliance of her son’s novel.

In March of 1973 she sent the manuscript to Knopf, perhaps unaware that Gottlieb, whom she blamed for her son’s death, presided as editor-in-chief there. She would find Knopf’s seeming indifference toward Confederacy just as intolerable as Simon and Schuster’s response years prior. Indignant when they failed to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript or respond with a decision after a month had passed, she wrote Knopf requesting that they send the manuscript back if they had no intention of publishing it. By May she still had received no word. Who knew where the manuscript was sitting or if anyone had read it? So Thelma tried another angle. She contacted literary agents M. P. Matson and Harold Matson to act on her behalf and inquire if Knopf would publish the novel. She requested the agency provide her an account of how much such a service would cost. Rarely do literary agencies have an à la carte menu of services, not to mention they had no idea if this novel was worth representing. A week later she wrote to Knopf again expressing frustration that they had not even the decency to send her a receipt of the manuscript. She informed them of their responsibilities:

With the lack of a response from you I have come to the conclusion you are not interested. If such is the case this will be your authority to place subject manuscript in the custody of Random House, Inc.

She then sent the manuscript to W. W. Norton. They acknowledged the merits of the novel, but declined in straightforward language. Norton’s response burned into Thelma’s memory, words she would frequently recall years later. “It has literary style, but comic novels don’t sell.” It struck Thelma as odd. She could name many comic novels that had sold very well. But the comment rang true to some of the remarks Gottlieb articulated to Toole in 1965, regarding the difficulty of placing his novel.

Perhaps feeling rebuffed from the New York publishing world, she turned to Pelican Publishing, based in Louisiana, which also declined. In July she sent it back to New York to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. They were kind enough to send an acknowledgment, explaining the industry standard of six to eight weeks for a reply (a standard that Knopf had upheld). They ultimately declined the novel.

Thelma grew frustrated. It seemed the novel’s prospect of publication had worsened over the years. In 1964 her son was revising it for a New York editor, and in 1973 she could barely find a publisher with an interest in it. “Each time I sent it off first class and it came back bulk rate,” she remembered bitterly. From New York to Louisiana, it seemed to her the whole publishing industry was populated by dunces set on muting her son’s last letter to the world. When asked why she thought so many publishers rejected it, she answered, “Stupidity.”

To make matters worse, her health started to decline, forcing her to take a break from submitting the manuscript. Her weakened state rendered her situation in Uptown impossible. Reluctantly, she made the decision to move back to Elysian Fields with her brother, Arthur. They had a strained relationship at times, although he seems to have been the closest uncle to her son. She referred to him as “the poet laureate of the Standard Fruit Company,” a sneering chide for the poor verse he would occasionally write for coworkers and friends. But there was nowhere else for her to go. Thelma and Arthur were the only living Ducoing siblings, and he was alone in his house. She packed up her belongings, all the memorabilia of her son and family history—from his birth certificate to his high school math homework—and left behind their Uptown home. By August of 1975 Thelma was living with her meager but devoted brother in the small house on Elysian Fields, the same house in which her brother George went certifiably insane. It was a few doors down from the much larger house in which she grew up.

She spent much of her time indoors, claiming in 1976 that she was a “shut-in” with “failing health.” Her brother did her errands around town and helped her with her finances. And despite health complications, she became determined to go through another round of submissions. She made an odd choice in sending it to the Third Press, a small house in New York that primarily published books with a specific African American interest, although in 1971 the owner of the press declared he had no “ideological axe to grind.” The Third Press released a few titles that veered from its original focus on racial issues, but they were popularly billed as a black publisher. Perhaps Thelma thought the justice that Confederacy offers Burma Jones might be attractive to them. They declined.

Thelma sent the manuscript to eight publishers; she received eight rejections. And like her son, she took the responses to heart. With each rejection, she “died a little,” she said. But she showed initiative and endurance in submitting the manuscript. From Thelma’s perspective she offered a publisher a rare gem. From a publisher’s perspective, Thelma was trying to sell a one-hit wonder. She presented a high-risk investment from a publishing standpoint. First novels that reach only moderate success could usually be followed up by a second novel. She chose not to tell them about his other novel that she had found, The Neon Bible. And then there was the question of how to edit such a manuscript, especially if it needed substantial revision. In addition to all of these challenges, Thelma’s posturing and outright demands likely deterred publishers. In New Orleans her vibrato might be heard, but through letters sent to New York she was easily dismissed, drowned out by the thousands of other represented writers vying for publication.

Regardless, Thelma was not one to take “no” for an answer. One day in the fall of 1976 she read in the Times Picayune that Walker Percy, whose first novel, the Moviegoer, which had won the National Book Award, was teaching a writing seminar at Loyola University. Thelma saw an opportunity. If letters and a manuscript could not entice publishers, then perhaps she could gain a champion with connections in the publishing world. She first reached out to Percy by phone, making calls to his office at Loyola. Percy resisted her with gentlemanly manners, which was more than what some editors offered her. So she decided the days of patient letter writing and polite phone calls were over. With sixteen years of training in the dramatic arts, certainly she could persuade a fellow artist to consider her son’s novel. It was time for some theater.

She told Arthur to prepare himself for a drive to Loyola. He obediently put on his suit and cap. Thelma dressed in her finest attire, dousing herself in talcum powder as a finishing touch. She grabbed the box containing the manuscript, determined this would be the day her son would be recognized. As the elderly brother and sister made their way Uptown, Walker Percy had no idea that he would stand as an audience to Thelma Ducoing Toole.

Percy’s class concluded around five o’clock, after which he would make his drive out of New Orleans, across Lake Pontchartrain, to Covington, where he and his family lived. As he left his office one fall day, an old woman in a fine dress, a pillbox hat, and lace with white gloves holding a white box tied with a string approached him. Clearly this was some aged daisy of an old Southern line, somehow still benefitting from profits made in the family business of cotton or coffee or some other commodity traded at the port of New Orleans. Her driver in the suit and cap maintained a respectful distance. The old lady told Percy of her son, how he had committed suicide but left behind a novel. She wanted him to read it. “But you are biased,” he said. She explained that she was an avid reader, and what she offered him was a great novel. As a Southern gentleman, he could not in good conscience reject the pleas of a mother who endured the grief of her son’s suicide. He was cornered. He took the box from her and offered his condolences.

Driving across the twenty-three-mile bridge to the Northshore, the skyline of New Orleans silently sank into the horizon behind him. The manuscript that Toole had labored over for months in Puerto Rico and sent back and forth to New York City, lay in the passenger seat of Walker Percy’s car. Like most novelists, the idea of peddling a manuscript not his own, in essence becoming a pro bono literary agent, was the farthest thing from his mind. He had a class to teach and his own writing to do. He walked into his home holding the white box in his hand and greeted his wife, Bunt Percy. He told her of the Uptown lady with the driver and the tragic story. But he was hungry and tired and had no energy to read a questionable manuscript unfairly thrust upon him. He said to Bunt, “You read it. Tell me what to do with it.” She agreed to take a look at it later, and the two sat down for a late dinner.

Originally from a small town in Mississippi and now living in a small town in Louisiana, Bunt was intrigued by the ways of New Orleans. That city across the lake that rises out of the water like an island metropolis held a mysterious lore, a place and people of vast eccentricities. She was “eager to hear how they talked” and eager to understand their customs. So the next day she untied the string, removed the loose leaf, unedited manuscript and entered into Toole’s New Orleans, which some would argue is the most accurate portrayal of the Crescent City ever cast into fiction.

A few days later, Walker asked Bunt what she thought of the novel. She understood the fate of the book largely lay in her hands. If she deemed it unworthy, then he could simply return the manuscript and be relieved of the burden of an unpublished novel from a dead writer. “It’s ready for you,” Bunt replied. “I think you should read it.” He knew that she approved of the book. Holding respect for her judgment, he was obliged to give Toole a chance.

Walker sat down to read the tattered pages. He prided himself on being able to determine the quality of writing after reading only the first paragraph. Immediately, he recognized Toole’s keen talent for observation. In a single paragraph through setting, character, and description, he masterfully captured that ineffable texture of New Orleans. Walker was hooked. In December of 1976 he wrote to Thelma with a positive response, but he also saw some problems in the novel. He suggested the dialogue was too long in places. But it was too early to discuss editorial decisions in detail. Percy was unsure if a publisher would accept it. So he began asking people around town to read it. They came back with mixed reviews. Some people liked it; others did not. He lent a copy to Garic Barranger, who was enthusiastic, but also felt the manuscript needed to be trimmed. Percy read a few chapters to his class at Loyola, and they recognized Toole’s unprecedented and accurate portrayal of New Orleans. But when he asked his own publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to consider the manuscript, they declined. The Chicago Tribune later reported they “seemed to applaud its quality but turned it down nonetheless because its author being deceased could neither help to promote it or help to follow it up with another book.” At the very least, Percy knew he had a work that elicited response. No one seemed indifferent to the novel.

It just needed some traction, a way for publishers to see the vision of its publication and readers’ reactions. Percy sent the manuscript to Marcus Smith, a professor of English at Loyola and editor of the New Orleans Review. In spring of 1978 the first two chapters of Confederacy were published in the review, followed by several favorable critiques that acknowledged the brilliance of the book and Thelma’s challenges in getting the novel published.

Although the New Orleans Review was far from Simon and Schuster or Random House, Thelma was pleased. In March she requested several copies of the periodical be sent to select faculty members at University of Southwestern Louisiana, including Pat Rickels. And she instructed one copy should be sent to John Wieler, her son’s helpful professor at Columbia and department chair at Hunter College. The New Orleans Review was the first step in garnering public recognition, providing the footholds to capture the interest of a publisher.

Percy was determined to see the manuscript through to full publication, even as he worked on his novel The Second Coming. He recognized the humor and the tragedy in Confederacy. And as someone who suffered with depression throughout his life, Percy must have sympathized with Toole as a writer. In one of his last notes to Thelma, he referred to himself as an “admirer” of her son. But Thelma, for all her admirable tenacity, could be a nuisance. He wanted the novel to succeed, but after two years of promoting it, Percy was eager to put the project to rest. He saw an opportunity in Rhoda Faust, a family friend who owned Maple Street Books, a small bookstore in Uptown.

After being in the bookselling business for years, and at the encouragement of several local writers, Faust aimed to establish a publishing house in New Orleans. One afternoon she called Percy to ask if he had any unpublished writings lying around that she could use to jumpstart her company. He suggested she read the recent edition of the New Orleans Review to see what she thought about the beginning of Confederacy . After acquiring a copy and reading the chapters, Faust found it breathtakingly brilliant. She immediately contacted Thelma to meet with her. Thelma, of course, was thrilled to have someone interested in the novel and more so when Faust told her she wanted to publish the book. Even the daunting pragmatic details of starting a publishing house could not quell the excitement Faust and Thelma felt about the future of Toole’s novel.

Meanwhile, Percy got word that a friend in Covington knew an editor at Louisiana State University Press. At that time it was unusual for a university press to publish novels. However, LSU Press had recently started a fiction program, intended to nab talented writers who had been cast to the margins of the megalithic publishing industry. The manuscript made its way west to Baton Rouge and landed on the desk of editor Martha Hall. Like Bunt Percy, Hall immediately loved Confederacy . She encouraged Les Phillabaum, the director of LSU Press, to publish it. Phillabaum later claimed that he never doubted they would publish the book. However, Bunt recalls that Martha had to repeatedly prod Phillabaum to go through with it. The novel was sure to lose money, but eventually the risk Phillabaum took on Confederacy paid off more than he ever imagined.

Still, Phillabaum took six months to make the decision—a review time common among academic presses. Thelma had grown impatient with New York publishers when they did not respond in a few weeks; six months must have seemed unending. Yet LSU Press was really the end of the road, and a longshot at that. If they declined the novel, Thelma had few options left. Rhoda Faust remained dedicated to publishing it, although ahead of her still lay the long process of establishing a publishing house, which could take more time than Thelma had left to live. Thelma entertained self-publication, but that lacked credibility and required more money than she had. So she urged Percy to contact Phillabaum and ask for his intentions. On April 19, 1979, just over ten years after her son’s death, Phillabaum wrote to Thelma,

We have at long last completed our review of “A Confederacy of Dunces,” and our reading has been favorable in the extreme. The novel has been approved for publication.... We are very surprised that the book has not long since been published, but we are indeed pleased that we will be the ones able to do it.

Respectfully, Thelma called Faust to see where she stood with the upstart publishing house. Faust could not offer what LSU offered. So she called Percy to ask his advice. “Don’t make the Pullman wait any longer,” he responded. Not wanting to stand in the way of the novel, Faust encouraged Thelma to accept the contract—a decision Thelma had likely already made.

Perhaps feeling some pangs of guilt and wanting to reward Faust for her dedication, Thelma later gave Faust her son’s collection of books to sell in her store and to collectors. Faust cataloged each one—from The Poetical Works by Geoffrey Chaucer to a first edition of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The books that he studied, enjoyed, and used in the creation of his own novel were sold in the little store on Maple Street in Uptown after the publication of Confederacy. The gift certainly helped Faust’s cash-strapped store. But then, according to Faust, Thelma offered a prize of far greater value than Toole’s old books; she promised her the rights to publish her son’s first novel, The Neon Bible.

While Thelma possessed the manuscript and held the copyright to the novel, she did not hold exclusive rights to the work. Both her son and her husband died without a will. And under Louisiana law, based on the Napoleonic Code, her husband’s surviving relatives had claim to a portion of the rights to Confederacy, as lawful heirs to John Dewey Toole’s estate. Thelma was outraged. At first, she maintained a degree of decorum, but for some reason she abandoned diplomacy. The thought of the Tooles profiting from her son’s work incensed her. She claimed the Tooles had a long history of exploiting her for money—something she called “The Old Toole money squeeze.” While Thelma had two lawyers to work on the case, Faust found herself going back and forth between Thelma’s rants and Marion Toole Hosli—Thelma’s niece to whom she taught piano as a young girl—trying to figure out a way for them to agree. The Tooles wanted to read the manuscript to ensure that it did not reflect poorly on the family. But Thelma refused to give them a copy of it. Recognizing a stalemate was forming that would prevent the publication of the book, Faust went against the wishes of Thelma and lent the Tooles her copy. Once ensured it would have no impact on them, the Tooles signed over their rights to Confederacy. They had no way of knowing the value that those rights would carry.

At that point LSU Press took Confederacy fully under its wing, from resetting the type to the cover design. Walker Percy authored the foreword to the novel. Thelma sent a picture of her beloved son, with the anticipation that it might adorn the dustcover. She selected a photo from his senior year of high school, sixteen years old, casting him in his infinite youth.

It was a project more than twenty years in the making, and it passed through countless hands before reaching publication. And history, as it so often does, has tended to shine a light on the integral male figures in this saga. Aside from Thelma, people like Robert Gottlieb, Walker Percy, and Les Phillabaum are the ones seen shaping the story. And while these figures performed major roles, they tended to overshadow the women that recognized Toole’s talent before their male counterparts did. Jean Ann Jollett was the first to see the novel’s greatness and suggested Gottlieb read it. Bunt Percy gave it her approval before passing it along to her husband. Martha Hall championed the book at LSU, pressing Phillabaum to publish it. And Rhoda Faust eased the concerns of the Toole family, which helped clear the legal pathway for its publication. From his honor’s thesis to his lectures on “The Mother,” Toole had spent many hours pondering the female role in literature and life. It is fitting then that at every major impasse there was a woman who proclaimed faith in his work and encouraged its progression. And yet these women would recede to the backstage, as Thelma prepared for her debut.

With her son’s novel passing through copy editors and running through presses, Thelma frequently invited the Percys to her home in New Orleans. It was upon their first visit to the modest house on Elysian Fields that it became quite clear Thelma was no Uptown daisy with a personal driver. They saw the working-class neighborhood, and Walker recognized the individual he had originally thought to be her driver: her brother, Arthur. Thelma preferred to keep her guests to herself, so Arthur knew to keep his distance. And she also preferred Walker visit without his wife, confessing years later how she had an innocent crush on him—“the guardian spirit” of her son’s novel.

Before the release of the book, Thelma arranged her finances for the change she anticipated. She removed Arthur from all of her accounts, requesting that he sign an agreement to “no longer associate . . . with Mrs. Thelma D. Toole in money matters of any kind.” It was perhaps for the best, considering the financial boon she was about to receive.

LSU Press printed three thousand copies of the first edition. And as it circulated among reviewers, it quickly gained attention, in part because of its merits as a novel, but also because of the remarkable story of its publication. From its first moments in the public, the novel became indelibly linked to the story of Toole’s death and the resilience of his mother to ensure his dream came true. In March 1980, Kirkus Reviews, a first-stop reviewer for book critics, billed it as “a masterpiece of character comedy” with its “mix of high and low comedy,” making it “almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.” But the review ended with regret that having committed suicide, Toole left “only one astounding book.” A month later Publisher’s Weekly released a glowing review, claiming of the author, “The way he crams invention and exuberance into a perversely logical plot and molds his Pandora’s box of ills into a comic novel which rings with laughter is something of a miracle.” LSU Press had added a “classic” and a “miracle” of fiction to its list. But it was quickly apparent the small academic press would never be able to meet public demand for the book. In April, Grove Press bought subsidiary rights to publish Confederacy in paperback, which would allow it to meet the market demand. It had taken fifteen years for the manuscript to find its way to publication, but the success that followed happened at breakneck speed. Editions of Confederacy flew off the shelves. And as a Cinderella story of the publishing world, large newspapers and magazines took interest in both the novel and the tale of its publication.

In the summer and fall of 1980, reviews came in overwhelmingly positive. From small town papers to big-city book reviews, from novelists to professional critics, it seemed almost every week somewhere in the country a paper published a review of A Confederacy of Dunces. Several of these echoed Kirkus, claiming it an immediate classic, an original masterpiece, and one of the few books that made austere reviewers laugh until tears welled in their eyes and their bellies hurt. They compared the novel to the works of Dickens, Joyce, Rabelais, Waugh, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. It seemed every reviewer strived to compare Toole’s sense of comedy, his use of plot, and his characters to one of his literary predecessors. But they still acknowledged that Toole was no mimic of other novelists. Most agreed, his work was highly original.

As reviewers celebrated the achievement of the novel, they were bound to discuss its remarkable path to publication. Prior to the commercial success of the book, they knew far less about Toole than most readers do today. Initially limited to Percy’s foreword, the unanswered questions surrounding Toole’s tragic end haunts these reviews. Desperate to understand the author, at times reviewers had difficulty distinguishing Toole from Ignatius. In 1980 in the Bloomsbury Review, Michael O’Connel merges the author and protagonist into a single entity, claiming, “Toole-Ignatius despises living in the world, inveighs and scolds; Ignatius in his Big Chief diary and Toole in his fiction.” Even the Chicago Tribune Review of Books, after declaring the novel was not a good book, suggested that it was “an exorcism, a cry nobody heard.” Seeing his novel as a call for help offers a poignant and rich answer to the mysteries surrounding Toole. But such an interpretation served the reader’s curiosity about the author at a time when little was known, more so than offering insight into his life. From the earliest discussions of his life, there have been misgivings in approach, people looking for answers in places without considering who he was or from what circumstances he had come.

Gradually, interviews and reporters discovered more information about Toole’s sense of dejection. Writers sympathized with his struggle with the publishing industry, expressing heartfelt indignation as they imagined Toole suffering rejection after rejection. But this sympathy seems to veil their own incredulity. David Shields barely restrained himself from a tirade against the monstrosity of New York publishing when he wrote, “One has to believe there was a deliberate effort somewhere in those ivory towers along the northeastern seaboard to keep this book from the reading public. Why? Well, the answer to that would overrun this space and wouldn’t be very pretty to boot.” His suspicions seem to stem from his own frustration with publishers.

Jonathan Yardley, in a review reprinted in several papers across the country, proclaimed the utter fallibility of New York editors, and in doing so expressed the underlying issue that threads many of the positive reviews: the system of book publishing may serve the interests of a company more so than the interests of readers and the art of literature. The meeting point between art and business has never been easy. Writers such as Toole watched, in the late 1960s, as publishers grew into multimillion-dollar corporations and agents became facilitators between writers and editors. And while the filtering process became more rigorous, there emerged an uneasy sense that it didn’t produce higher-quality work. Writers and readers grumbled that the publishing industry, in its shift toward big business, might be rejecting works that deserved publication as a valuable, cultural product, not just a sellable item created to attract the whims of the mass market. Yes, Confederacy had its problems, reviewers admitted, but so did the last five books from Random House or Knopf or Simon and Schuster. And those books, they seemed to say, didn’t give me half the enjoyment Confederacy did.

This silencing is part of why the story of its publication held such interest to readers. It suggests that the presumed cultural role of publishers to deliver quality literature may be compromised by motives of profit and marketability. Ironically, as this story validates a critique of the commercialism of the publishing industry, it simultaneously made the novel more marketable. Toole didn’t have this story to reference in 1963. A solitary writer complaining about publishers, convinced no one appreciates his genius, has few sympathizers. Toole’s heartbreaking life story disables dismissal of those complaints, allowing many readers and writers to feel vindicated in their frustrations and suspicions of the publishing world.

Of course, the history of Toole that emerged in the popular media did not take into full context his circumstances. Thelma did not want to talk about her son’s death, especially the notion that he suffered from mental illness. She all but rejected that possibility by blaming Gottlieb. And Toole’s struggle and his mystery spurred reviewers to engage in mythmaking. Anthony Burgess imagined Toole “hawking [the manuscript] around the publishing houses of New York” and after receiving the final rejection from “the biggest of the publishing mavens” committed suicide. And one reviewer in the San Francisco Review of Books imagined that Toole likely killed himself directly following his completion of the final page of the novel, as if the labor pains of his glorious creation were so taxing he could live no longer. The critics were unaware that Toole sent it to only one editor, an editor that sustained a lengthy correspondence for more than two years and never closed off the possibility of publication to him. He could have sought publication through another press, perhaps a smaller one. And reviewers seem to overlook the risky territory of publishing a manuscript of a dead, unknown writer. After all, if the novel had been poorly received by readers and reviewers, the question would have gone the other way: Why would they publish a dead author’s work when there were plenty of talented writers still living?

A few reviews maintained sympathy for the tragic end of the writer but were not ready to offer the book accolades that pervaded media discussion. Negative reviews tended to fault Toole for not following the rule of creating a dynamic main character. They argue that no one changes in the book. Such reviewers saw no hope in this world that Toole created and therefore despaired in the creation of it. And the most damning reviews cast doubt on the novel’s ability to stand had the author not committed suicide. Such sharply critical responses mostly came from media venues with small, local readerships, not a national audience.

By and large reviewers acknowledged some faults of the novel. Granted, had Simon and Schuster published Confederacy it would have been a very different book. Toole made changes, but Thelma destroyed the “Gottlieb revisions.” She instructed LSU Press not to edit a word, “not even a preposition.” So it appears the version of Confederacy we have today is the first version, the one that Thelma deemed pure, even though Toole may have believed that the novel was getting better with those edits. There was another version of Confederacy in the making, but Thelma determined that anything to do with Gottlieb would taint the genius of her son. And while critics identified technical flaws in the novel, most reviewers resisted literary pretentiousness. They recognized that the joy to be garnered from the reading of the book might be as valuable a literary contribution as a political or social message.

But perhaps such issues stem from our awkward cultural relationship with comedy, especially when it strives to be high art. America has long seen comedy as a genre for the masses, unsophisticated and often adolescent. It is a sideshow to more serious endeavors, like tragedies or histories. But Toole did not see comedy as an afterthought. The humor in a story, ironies, and contradictions were emblematic of real life. David Evanier, fiction editor of the Paris Review, may have offered the most perceptive comment regarding the way to understand the humor of this novel when he wrote, “A Confederacy of Dunces transcends the suffering of life through laughter.” Evanier echoes literary critic, historicist, and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who, in analyzing Rabelais, recognizes that in the culture of carnival, the culture from which Confederacy springs, laughter is not a veiled cry for help or a reminder of tragedy, but rather the sound of victory.

Indeed, the triumph of Toole’s novel seemed unstoppable. It was one of five books nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award in 1981. It made best-seller lists in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Translated versions of the book were printed in nearly every European country. But the greatest recognition came when a select group of representatives from the publishing world gathered together at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Inside the same brick building that Toole had passed by every day during his first year at Columbia, the Pulitzer Board reviewed the submissions for fiction writing. After deliberations, the announcement came. In April of 1981 John Kennedy Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces. It was only the second time the board had awarded a posthumous prize and the first to a writer who was previously unknown. And to date Confederacy is the only novel published at a university press to be awarded a Pulitzer.

While reviewers despaired over some aesthetic issues, and some cynics suspected the story of Toole’s death a grand hoax to boost sales, in winning the Pulitzer Prize he gained official recognition for the literary merit of his work. Thereafter, a tide of interest in finding out more about this author and his mother swelled from the media. Newspapers and journals ran exposés on Thelma Toole. She was invited to dinners and conferences. She was interviewed on Canada A. M., a national television show broadcast from Toronto. And a few weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she received a request to appear on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder in New York. While she had spent her youth dreaming of stardom on the stage and her adulthood preparing her students for performances, claiming only the edge of the spotlight for herself, in her final years Thelma was the star. She rose to the occasion. She was the keeper of her son’s story, the hero of the tale. And as she took her place on her throne as the Queen Mother of the literati, people came to her doorstep to pay tribute, offering praise and tokens of gratitude for her accomplishment. She received them graciously.