Dead Men Do Tell Tales : A New Book Continues an Old Controversy Over an Acclaimed Novelist and His Mother

With his new novel, “The Neon Bible,” scheduled to hit bookstores this spring, John Kennedy Toole would appear to be at a promotional disadvantage.

He’s dead.

But then he was dead long before his first novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” was published in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize. There are even those who contend that the best seller owed its phenomenal success less to literary merit than to the story of Toole’s suicide at 31 and his eccentric mother’s 10-year struggle to find a publisher for the manuscript he left behind.

Now “Neon Bible,” which Toole wrote at 16, comes along with a peculiar publication story of its own.

A Perch in Folklore

As usually happens when a second book follows a hugely successful first effort, Toole’s reputation will again be tossed into the gyre of literary criticism. But Toole and his mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole, seem guaranteed a high perch in the hierarchy of American literary folklore.

“My darling’s Mt. Parnassus brain and multiplicity of talents forced him to endure many obstacles and trials,” Thelma Toole wrote before her own death. “But he lives on, and the wonder of him still lingers in the world and will continue to live!”

The only question is, which version of Toole’s life will continue to be retold?

There are at least two biographies of Toole in the works, the working titles of which hint at their disparate views. One is “Genius Among the Dunces.” The other is “Momma’s Boy.”

“The beauteous babe, John Kennedy Toole, was born Dec. 7, 1937 in the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans,” Thelma Toole wrote in a brief memoir of her son that was published in 1981 by the University of Southwestern Louisiana. “. . . He had the alertness of a six-month-old infant, and an aura of distinction which I didn’t label as genius, but the years proved so.”

Jane Stickney, a New Orleans resident who attended McDonough-14 grade school and Fortier High School with Toole, remembers “Kenny” as a chubby kid “with a good sense of humor that made you like him even though you resented him for being so smart.”

Toole entered Tulane University at 16 and earned his masters at Columbia University. In 1961, about the time of the Berlin airlift, the sweep of the military draft widened and Toole wound up in a typing pool stationed in Puerto Rico.

“We had a wonderful little artists’ colony down there,” recalled James Alsop, now an English professor at the University of Nebraska who had also been assigned to the typing pool. Toole had a quick-fire wit and a Swiftian perspective of things, Alsop recalls. “He was quick to laugh, very engaging and sophisticated, but not forthcoming or warm.”

About halfway through their stay in Puerto Rico, the other typists noticed that Toole was withdrawing into his quarters early, often clutching a bottle of bourbon. It wasn’t till 17 years later that Alsop realized Toole had been writing “Confederacy.”

After the Army, Toole taught literature at a number of universities and tried unsuccessfully to get “Confederacy” published. “During the 1968 fall semester, colleagues noticed a growing paranoia,” according to what Kenneth Holditch, a professor at The University of New Orleans and author of the half-completed “Genius Among Dunces” biography, writes in his introduction to “Neon Bible.”

In January of 1969, Toole disappeared. The evidence shows that he packed his car and headed for California, then drove back to the South, making a pilgrimage to author Flannery O’Connor’s home. On March 26, Toole drove to the outskirts of Biloxi, Miss., ran a piece of hose from his car’s exhaust pipe into the window, turned on the motor and died.

“Inexpressible tragedy!” Thelma Toole wrote. “An overwhelming loss to the scholarly and literary world, and a despairing loss to his parents!”

Five years after Toole’s death, Thelma Toole came across the typescript of “Confederacy” “and found a new purpose,” Holditch writes.

A burlesque of life in New Orleans and America in general, “Confederacy” focuses on the misadventures of Ignatius J. Reilly, a monstrously arrogant medievalist who prefers lying about in his flannel nightshirt sucking the filling out of jelly doughnuts to the jobs he takes--and loses--to humor his doting mother.

The book’s title comes from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Thelma Toole immediately knew her son’s creation was a masterpiece. But in the next five years, at least eight publishers rejected the manuscript she peddled with the tenacity of a door-to-door saleswoman.

Then she heard that novelist Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola university in New Orleans.

The last thing Percy wanted to do was “deal with the mother of a dead novelist,” he writes in the introduction to the paperback edition of “Confederacy.” But Thelma Toole would have none of Percy’s objections. Eventually, she slipped past the secretaries at Loyola and handed Percy a “badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon” of the book.

‘Extraordinary Novel’

“It was the most extraordinary novel I’ve ever read in manuscript form,” he told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans at the time the book was published. “It has an amazing combination of wild humor and tragedy.”

With a nudge from Percy, Louisiana State University published the book in 1980. Critical and commercial success followed, and, to date, the book has sold more than 600,000 copies.

Thelma Toole, who lived in her brother’s modest home, across the street from a supermarket and next door to a funeral home, became her son’s literary surrogate, a guest of honor at performances and parties where she would act out scenes from the book, play piano and sing “Sunny Side of the Street” and other standbys.

And “inevitably at some point in the program she would announce in carefully enunciated English: ‘I walk the world for my son,’ ” Holditch writes.

“She’d go into an almost altered state,” recalled Rhoda Faust, a New Orleans bookseller who met her through Walker Percy before “Confederacy” was published, and maintained an on-again-off-again friendship as the book’s cult following grew.

‘Neon Bible’ Delayed

Thelma Toole had always known her son completed another manuscript, but resisted having “Neon Bible” published until “Confederacy” had “it’s full share of glory,” Holditch said.

Narrated in the voice of a boy as he grows into adolescence, “Neon” bears little resemblance to “Confederacy.” The small Southern town in which the book is set has its share of dunces, but their foolishness is merely reported, rather than embellished with satire.

Only Aunt Mae, a bleached-blonde free spirit in her 60s, understands the boy. The power-hungry preacher, the cruelly insensitive school teacher, the boy’s ineffectual father and frail mother who is driven to insanity, all fail to notice or care much what affect they have on the sensitive child observing them with such acuity.

Rhoda Faust was “mesmerized by the poignancy” of the manuscript and says that Thelma Toole told her she could publish it when the time came. But before any contracts for “Neon” were signed, Thelma Toole learned that Louisiana’s legal system dictates that the rights to a dead author’s work be split down the middle between the mother’s and father’s side of the family. Toole’s father’s relatives had written off the rights to “Confederacy,” but weren’t about to do the same with “Neon Bible.”

Faust said Thelma Toole withheld publication to spite them. Holditch, who had become good friends with Thelma Toole, said that she was so upset by the illogic of the law that she launched a legal crusade to have it changed. When that failed, “she made the painfully paradoxical decision to prevent publication of what she considered another masterpiece created by her darling.”

Shortly before she died in 1984, she named Holditch guardian of the manuscript, and soon the professor found himself battling both the Toole heirs and Rhoda Faust over the right to see the book in print. Last year a judge ruled in favor of publication but against Faust’s claim that she was entitled to print it.

“I tried desperately to follow Thelma’s wishes,” Holditch said. “When I finally lost, I felt a sense not that I’d betrayed her, but that I’d failed her. But what could I do?”

When he killed himself, Toole left a sealed envelope addressed, “To My Parents” on the seat of the car. His mother read the note and destroyed it, Holditch reports. So much about his suicide will never be known.

Thelma Toole viewed her son’s posthumous Pulitzer as final vindication, a symbol to flaunt before the real confederacy of dunces that had conspired against her young genius. Chief among the villains against whom she publicly railed was an editor at Simon & Schuster, whom she was convinced had led her son to suicide by rejecting his manuscript.

But there are plenty of people who think that Toole’s mother had as much to do with his despair as did the rejection of his novel.

With her “excessive, ludicrous makeup” and a diet consisting mainly of Hostess Twinkies, Thelma Toole became increasingly “grotesque,” Faust recalled. And increasingly ugly in her vindictiveness, she added, offering letters Thelma Toole had written as evidence.

‘Ignorant No-Necks’

“She’d call the Toole heirs, ‘the ignorant no-necks,’ ” Faust recalled. “I was sympathetic to her plight until I realized what a horrible individual she was--that she added to (John Kennedy Toole’s) wanting to escape this Earth.”

Barbara McIntosh, whose proposal for the “Momma’s Boy” biography is now circulating among publishers, comes down in between.

“I’m writing the biography to find out who John Kennedy Toole is,” she said, “But as I work on the proposal and now the manuscript, I find that Thelma keeps trying to take over.

“Thelma clearly obsessed on her son. But when Toole became an adult, part of the responsibility was his,” she said. “The big question is, ‘Why was it that he could not cope with the rejection of ‘Confederacy?’ ”

“I don’t think it was out of hate for his mother, which people will tell you, but because he felt emotionally burdened by his parents,” whom he’d supported both financially and psychologically since he was a boy, McIntosh said. “He felt trapped.”

In New Orleans literary circles, where the Toole story is very much alive and where Toole has been embraced as a local hero, some people paint a relationship of deep Freudian sickness between the mother and her son.

Mother a Victim

“People make her out as a she-devil,” said McIntosh. “I see her as a victim of her own times.”

She had ambitions of own, McIntosh added, but because of societal restrictions against women, she wound up living vicariously through the men in her life.

And Holditch, who has written biographies of Tennessee Williams and Lillian Hellman, discounts those who see Thelma Toole as a cause of her son’s death.

“I do not think he felt repressed by her, any more than any only child may feel very much attached to his mother, and therefore feel a certain amount of pressure to please her,” Holditch said. “They were always very close. He chose to continue that closeness.”

However confusing the controversies, there’s no doubt that the legend of Toole’s life and death became intertwined with “Confederacy,” in some people’s minds.

Judging the book by the blurbs on its cover, reviewers greeted “Confederacy’s” release by abandoning all reserve: “A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book”; “A masterwork of comedy”; “radiant with intelligence”; “An astonishingly original and assured comic spree.”

“ ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ has been reviewed almost everywhere,” Rolling Stone wrote. “and every reviewer has loved it.”

Some Novel Reservations

But that wasn’t entirely true.

“I read it with the idea of reviewing it and didn’t think it was worth the review,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times Book Review said last week. “I found it extremely irritating. Heavy-handed.”

When the book won the Pulitzer, Lehmann-Haupt wrote a “‘Critics Notebook” column--and as a result received more mail than for anything he’s written, about two thirds of it against him, he said.

In that column, Lehmann-Haupt criticized Toole for what he perceived as racial and religious biases and noted that the critics who had praised the book so roundly had usually described numerous flaws as well. He also pointed out that most of the ecstatic reviewers began by retelling “the myth” behind the book’s publication, a tale so intriguingly romantic, he suggests, that it propelled “Confederacy” to an undeserved Pulitzer Prize.

“It’s unfortunate when personal myth becomes confused with literary accomplishment,” said Johnathan Yardley, a Washington Post book critic who gave “Confederacy” a rave review. But Yardley served on the Pulitzer recommendation committee that year, and he denies that the myth had anything to do with the prize.

“It was immediate and unanimous that ‘Confederacy’ was far and away our first choice,” he said. “I’ve done a fair amount of Pulitzer judging, and this is one of the awards I’m proud to be associated with. All too often, American prizes don’t go to books that are a little daring, a little off the beaten track. But this is one of those books. . . . This is a book of real literary distinction.”

It is also, Yardley believes, the only work for which Toole will be remembered.

“He’ll be a one-book writer,” Yardley said. “I’ll be very, very surprised if this newly published piece of juvenile work is of anything more than passing interest.”

Whatever its literary merits, “Neon Bible” is already open to exegesis, as scholars and Toole cultists search for clues to the dead novelist’s life.

McIntosh looks into the book and sees the “raw, young John Kennedy Toole,” a brilliant but sensitive boy suffering the slings and arrows of a world that is ignorant and cruel beyond his comprehension. In “Confederacy,” she sees “a more mature man who has built up his ego defenses and uses wit to cope with the world.”

She speculates that his suicide stemmed from an inability to reconcile the vulnerable child with the toughened adult.

James Alsop has a similar view: “If John Kennedy Toole had exercised the humor about himself he exercised about everyone else, he’d be alive today.”