Style and Zest: Remembering John Kennedy Toole

Emilie Griffin

IT would be easy to fall in love with a man who could dance like John Kennedy Toole.

Most people are surprised to hear it. On the whole, they suspect that Toole was something like his character, Ignatius Reilly, who surely must have had two left feet. (I’m not aware that the issue of Ignatius’s proficiency on the dance floor was ever raised in Toole’s masterwork A Confederacy of Dunces.)

And Ken (for that’s what I called him) was also fun to hang with.

“Oooh-eee,” he would say suddenly, taking a dive into one of his many impressions. What you see on the page of Confederacy was what you got in knowing Ken: a fast shuffle of dialects from the Ninth Ward to the Irish Channel of New Orleans, with sprinkles of the Bronx thrown in.

It was rather like being on a date with Burma Jones. Remember Jones who lost his job at the Night of Joy? “Everybody fightin and scratchin and screamin and that big fat freak laying in the gutter like he daid.... Ooo-wee! Whoa! I’m gonna be the mos famous vagran in the city....”

With great skill and without warning, Ken would move from being a “colored cat” to being what New Orleans people now call a “yat” (as in “Hey, dawlin’ where yat?”), jumping from one impersonation to another with little explanation. I was expected to follow him. I was supposed to know. Moments later, leaving me in stitches, Ken would return to his own character, asking me if I wanted a Coca-Cola or if I wanted to dance.

That was what it was like to be friends with Ken Toole, especially in New York City, when we were both homesick for New Orleans. I say we were friends because, although we dated, it was never exactly a romance. Yet our friendship had a certain glamour, a lot of the agony of youth, and the pain of high aspiration. All this was overlaid on things we had in common, like knowing how to jitterbug and loving rhythm ‘n’ blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

Many writers—Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among them—have tried to capture the cultural flavor of New Orleans, but no one, in my view, has succeeded better than John Kennedy Toole. His sprawling picaresque novel A Confederacy of Dunces was published in 1980, some eleven years after his suicide. Immediately the book gained a following, and he became something of a cult-figure. In 1981, in a process that some thought had more to do with the book’s myth than its merit, the book won the Pulitzer Prize.

The myth was that Toole had taken his own life just because a New York book editor had strung him along; that is to say, requiring numerous revisions and implying promises of publication, only to reject the work in the end. Depressed and despairing, the myth continues, Toole made a sentimental journey to Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor lived and wrote. The trip is fact. And the ultimate fact? In Biloxi, Mississippi, in March 1969, Toole was found in his automobile. He had taken his own life by asphyxiation.

His grieving mother Thelma Toole then shopped the manuscript to many persons and places without success. Finally, she demanded attention from the National Book Award winner Walker Percy, who not only lived in Louisiana but was teaching a course at Loyola University (New Orleans). Percy reluctantly consented to read it and was surprised to find how much he liked it. Through his efforts, and despite difficulties in gaining permissions from some of Toole’s relatives, the work found its way into print.

But the myth of Toole’s thwarted genius was not convincing to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the The New York Times. “It makes for a powerful Hollywood script synopsis—the story of how John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces got published by Louisiana State University Press and went on to win fame and fortune and the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction: lonely genius writes satirical novel, submits it to crass, commercial New York publisher, who strings lonely genius along for a while, then rejects satirical novel on ground it will never sell. Heartbroken over this rejection, the young novelist ends his life.” Adopting a satirical tone of his own, the critic doubted that the book deserved the Pulitzer Prize. “Even Jonathan Yardley, book editor of the Washington Star...is guilty of serving the myth.” Most suspect of all, in Lehmann-Haupt’s eyes, were the tactics of Toole’s mother and her one-woman assault on the New York publishing community.

Confederacy’s central character—the fat, flatulent, and condescending Ignatius Reilly—has since found a place in the popular consciousness. The book has been translated into twenty languages. Across the United States there are Ignatius Reilly Clubs. Dramatizations have been done as far away as Britain. Tulane University—Toole’s alma mater, and mine—hosted a conference about regional writing called “Confederacy of Authors” (which I co-chaired with my mother, Helen R. Dietrich, who had been tangentially involved in the book’s publication).

Several Louisianians have performed the material, including New Orleans actor John McConnell; he became the model for the life-sized bronze statue of Reilly that now stands on Canal Street in New Orleans, in front of what used to be the D.H. Holmes department store, which was one of the novel’s locales.

Rumor has it that Steven Soderbergh of Sex, Lies and Videotape, as well as other notable films has the screen rights to the novel but is still searching for the right actor to create the role; there’s a good chance he may choose an unknown rather than a bankable star. The New Orleans Times-Picayune remarked not long ago that Ignatius Reilly is taking “his own sweet time” about coming to the screen. The occasion was a New Orleans screening of the film version of Toole’s earlier work, The Neon Bible, written when the novelist was sixteen.

Meanwhile, Reilly spinoffs continue. Recently, during the “Degas in New Orleans” exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center staged a new musical, “Confederacy of Degas,” in which Ignatius Reilly criticized the exhibit in an angry song cycle.

Ken was not shy about mentioning his own brilliance. In a letter home to my mother, whom I called Helen, written and sent Monday, November 21, 1960, I had this to report.

“Last things first: I just had one of the funniest phone calls ever with Ken Toole. I called him—mostly because your letter this morning, Helen, with its reference to his remark about New Orleans, put me in mind of him; also because I broke a date with him on Election Day and hadn’t heard from him since...and I feel that he’s far too delightful a companion, and too scintillating a person, to allow to slide down the drain because of a misunderstanding or hurt feelings. At any rate, the conversation was a panic because Ken talked an absolute blue streak—mostly bubbling over with enthusiasm because he’s doing immensely well both at Hunter (where he’s teaching) and at Columbia (where he’s studying.) He got the word yesterday that Hunter may give him a literature course to teach next semester—an unheard-of honor for a graduate instructor. But this boy is really bright, no joke. Also things are shaping up well at Columbia and he’s liking his course work much better....

“But I still haven’t told you what was funniest about Ken’s conversation: the speed of it. Since his return to New York from Lafayette [Louisiana]...his slow, gentle Southern speech has speeded up to the point where it sounds like a recording tape being played at the wrong speed. He was absolutely babbling with excitement over his progress at Hunter...and I couldn’t help being amused at such tangible evidence of the effect New York has on one.”

I still have a few letters home to remind me of the way I first began going around with Ken in New York City during the fall of 1960. They record that he telephoned me (September 16) and said he hadn’t done so sooner because New Orleans was filled with rumors that I was “fabulously successful” and “living in a posh apartment on the East Side.” In fact, I was a junior copywriter in a large advertising agency on Fifth Avenue specializing in industrial campaigns. My dream was to become a Broadway playwright—a real writer, not an advertising writer—but I was far from realizing it.

Letters home throughout the fall of 1960 remind me that I was seeing Ken, going out to dinner with him, seeing films (a filmed version of She Stoops to Conquer at the Phoenix was one example), and inviting Ken to dinner at the far-from-posh, one-room studio apartment I had moved into at 222 East 50th Street.

What did Ken and I have in common? We were both super-achievers with a clear literary bent. He had been a star English student at Tulane, earning a Woodrow Wilson fellowship for graduate study at Columbia University. I had been one of the top English students at Newcomb College, specializing in seventeenth-century writers. I was a visible student on campus, a columnist, and theater critic for the campus newspaper. At graduation I received an honorable mention on my comprehensives, Phi Beta Kappa, the Tulane Student Activities key, as well as membership in journalism and classics honor societies. I, too, won a scholarship, for graduate study in English at Tulane.

Ambivalent about life in the university, I abandoned the scholarship at the beginning of the first semester, and went to work for the feisty daily newspaper, The New Orleans Item. There, under the by-line Russ Dietrich (my full name was Emilie Russell Dietrich, but I was always called Russell or Russ), I won awards from the newly formed Press Club of New Orleans. Then I moved into advertising where I could learn the new medium of television. By 1959 I was determined to return to New York, where I had been a Mademoiselle magazine guest editor three years before.

My first job was at Fuller & Smith & Ross Advertising. Their offices were on the thirty-seventh floor in the Tishman Building, an aluminum-clad skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue. There I worked on corporate television messages for Alcoa (The Aluminum Company of America) but continued to nourish the dream of becoming a playwright. In New Orleans I had already become a TV writer and producer, but now I wanted to address the medium of film.

Around the corner on Fifty-second Street, at the Donnell Public Library where experimental films were often screened, I was working hard to learn the rules of film and, back at the agency, angling to be taken along for meetings with production, meetings with animators, shoots, edits, and recording sessions. It was a heady time, the fall of 1960. I had my first apartment completely on my own. And New York was an intellectual as well as a cultural feast. I tried to read all the political magazines, all the opinion journals, all the latest books, to visit all the museums and art galleries, to see all the plays and films I could afford.

Ken and I had a certain life-history in common. We were both only children. I was born in July 1936, and Ken in December 1937. We were both thought by our parents to be gifted and precocious. We both had trouble fitting in because of our adult vocabularies; we skipped grades; we were accused by our peers of reading the dictionary for amusement.

I suspect, because of a story he once told me, that on some level we were both romantics. I had known him since he was four and I was five, when he and his mother and father lived next door to my grandmother on Webster Street in New Orleans. He remembered me as a beautiful child coming downstairs with an aureole, a halo of floating, golden curls. I was touched. I was embarrassed. I could hardly believe I would hear something so sentimental from him. It didn’t sound like him. But he did say it. That much is true.

In the 1950s the uptown section of New Orleans had its small-town ways. Ken went to a boys’ public school, Fortier, and I to a girls’ private school, McGehee’s. But I’d see him from time to time at high-school gathering places, like snowball stands. Snowballs are those crushed-ice, flavored-syrup treats that helped New Orleans kids stay cool in the generations before air-conditioning. When we were both on the Tulane campus and contributors to the college newspaper, The Hullabaloo, I saw him now and then; the cafeteria was a typical student and faculty rendezvous.

In the spring of my senior year, 1957, on Mardi Gras Day, I was costumed as Joan of Arc; that is to say, in a sateen tunic, complete with fleur-de-lis, possibly influenced by having done the role in Tulane theater classes that year. Waiting with my date for the parade to begin, I was drinking a Dixie or a Falstaff. Suddenly, Ken was there, and he asked me to dance. It was not a slow dance. It was jitterbug, the way we danced it in the fifties. He was a good dancer. He was funny. It was a brief moment, and he was gone. But in New York the friendship was different. We were no longer college kids. The stakes were higher. The question was, what would we do with the rest of our lives?

My dream, and Ken’s dream, were parallel. We were determined to be writers. But I suspect my ideas about being a writer were impossibly naive. Being a writer I thought just happened because you were in New York or London or Paris at the right time and hung out with a certain coterie. Or I supposed it was like a starlet getting discovered in a Hollywood drugstore. I had not thought it through.

This terrible longing—to write—was not yet harnessed. It did not keep me at the typewriter night in, night out, while other people my age went out to movies or to have dinner or to drink or to dance. I was dreaming, daydreaming. Ken was daydreaming too. We talked about writing, I think, in order to drive ourselves to it. We hardly talked about anything else.

Ken was a Catholic. In those days, I wasn’t. We didn’t talk much about religion, yet I knew being Catholic meant something to him—as a cultural stance if not on the level of belief. When I visited his English class at Hunter (May 22, 1961), he wrote on the blackboard, “Anticatholicism is the antisemitism of the liberal.” The sentiment was not original with him. He and I had experienced something similar in our transfer to New York.

In New Orleans, we had thought of ourselves as liberals, avant-garde. But in New York both of us experienced a certain prejudice and condescension that liberals had for southerners. Ken had had a double dose because he was a Catholic. It was taken for granted among some liberals then that a Catholic couldn’t possibly be intellectual or independent-minded. Ken was fighting back against that.

In fact, he joked about all kinds of hidebound opinions wherever he found them. At Hunter College, liberalism was as much the party line for students as fraternities, sororities, and rush week had been at Newcomb and Tulane. In his politics, I think Ken was himself a liberal. Yet he saw a lot of absurdity in the liberal opinions of Hunter women. “Every time the elevator opens at Hunter,” he told me, “you see forty sets of bangs, forty pairs of burning black eyes, and everybody waiting for somebody to push a Negro.”

When it came to a date, Ken took me to Roseland Dance City; it suited his budget. The place was enormous, with glittering lights and polished hardwood floors, but it was not a glitzy place; it had an authenticity about it. The glamour was in going someplace offbeat. It was fun to dance with him; there was a kind of innocence about it, drinking Cokes and dancing.

Going to the Apollo Theater was in the same spirit, I think. It was adventurous to take the subway up to Harlem, to see “Moms” Mabley on the stage, to be the only white people standing in line or sitting in the audience; to be accepted by that African-American audience with just a few bemused glances; to join them in laughing at a kind of humor that didn’t belong to us ethnically, but that we wanted to care about and enjoy. This authentic culture didn’t match the New York myth we had seen in movies starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

Together we dealt with being southerners in exile. In fact, we had a very particular strain of that disease: we were New Orleanians in exile. For us, homesickness meant more than just cooking red beans and rice. We also had to talk about New Orleans, what it was like and what it meant. Ken thought that no one had written about New Orleans as it really was. Out of the stereotypes, he thought, each writer had created some delusionary myth, missing the genuine texture of the place. Needless to say, he intended to fill the gap.

Ken thought I was too cheerful, too much inclined to look on the bright side. His view of the world was darker and less hopeful than mine. One night—I think it was one of our times at Roseland—he asked me what I wanted to do with my life.

“I want to live with style and zest.”

He thought this response absurd.

“Is that what you want? What do you mean by style? Don’t you have any other values except these idiotic ideas?”

He was speaking out of his own desolation. Even though I knew that, he hurt me all the same. I was not surprised that he was caustic in expressing his opinions about others. But I think this was the first and only time he was so to me. From that moment on the words style and zest were etched into my psyche. Whether I had thought it through or not, it was my code of life, and one that Ken deplored. Maybe until that moment I hadn’t thought hard enough about what I was living for.

Did Ken disbelieve in God? Was he cynical about prayer? A letter I wrote to him in New Orleans in July 1961—over the summer before he went into the military—suggests as much. I told him I was excited to be writing at last. I asked him to pray that my writing would continue, and then said (no doubt reflecting an earlier conversation) that he could say some non-sectarian, non-religious prayer if that was the best he could do.

There was a dark streak in his personality. It was more than just the existentialist attitude that many of us had adopted in our college and post-college days. It was deeper, more persistent, more disabling, I think.

I experienced it most concretely during our last visit. In the fall of 1961 Ken was drafted for military service, did basic training, and by January 1962 was stationed at Fort Buchanan in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In late January I went to Puerto Rico for the shoot of an Alcoa commercial I had written. I wrote to Ken and told him I would be there, that the shoot was not in San Juan but in the countryside, but that after the shoot was over I would have a day in San Juan to spend with him. Sunday, January 28.

I was staying at the Hotel Normandie. Ken met me there, and we walked along the beach to another, I think glitzier, hotel, and had lunch in the hotel restaurant, which had enormous windows that let in the ocean and the sky.

We were not in love, not even romantic. It was friendship, but not affection, at least no open affection. Once in a while we had tried to kiss, but it was only halfway successful. Unlike many men in New York who seemed to regard sex as the appropriate reward for their having picked up the dinner check, Ken was reserved, almost gentlemanly about getting physical. I wondered if his Catholicism had given him a boundary he was unwilling to cross. But in those days I didn’t know how to read his actions any more than I could easily interpret my own.

I knew I was glad to see him. He was attractive; he was witty, and on the whole good company. His thin smile and his way of smoking with the cigarette hidden behind his hand and his way of talking without looking straight at you, but smiling a little superior smile that meant, “I know what is really happening at this moment, but I would prefer to let you guess”—all that was part of Ken, and at that moment it was important to me.

There was some kind of connection, some bond that would make it worth getting together. Maybe it was his spirit of adventure. He was walking insanely along the far edges of experience, not so much wanting to take reckless chances but wanting to confront the universe, to pierce through to the meaning of things. That was also the way I felt. So in that one sense we were soul-mates.

We had very little money between us—I bought the lunch at the hotel—and we looked out over the water in two directions. Puerto Rico is an island surrounded by watery rainbows. The skies are gentle, soft, even poetic. But there was darkness inside of us. We did not know who we were or where we were going. We could not see the way.

In the afternoon we went to a favorite tourist destination, an old fort called El Morro where we looked out over the sea. The beauty of the place was exquisite but not consoling; it even seemed to mock our dreams. “What do you want?” “What do you believe in?” “How are you trying to live?” “Who do you want to be?”

Why, later, when Walker Percy asked me whether I thought Ken was a person of faith, why didn’t I remember to tell him about the rainbows?

Percy’s question had stumped me. I knew Ken cared about being Catholic, enough to get mad when he was patronized for it; enough to defend Catholicism as an intellectual stance; enough to write defensive slogans on the blackboard at Hunter. (Not too different from Ignatius Reilly giving his mother a copy of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy.)

I didn’t tell Percy about the rainbows because they were not evidence. The rainbows were my own construct of existence, my own way of supposing that even in the existential darkness of Ken and me sitting there together in that empty hotel dining room, with hardly enough money to pay the check, still, everything would somehow be all right.

Maybe it was that in the presence of this writer, Walker Percy, himself a convert to Catholicism, I couldn’t remember any substantive discussion about faith that I had ever had with Ken. And I wouldn’t resort to guesswork. Perhaps the only act of faith that Ken was capable of making was to write. I’m sure that writing is an act of faith.

One more small fact is worth recording about Ken’s search for hopefulness, his wanting to come out of darkness. In February 1962 he sent me a Valentine.

On page 109 of my edition of A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius Reilly is recording in his vituperative diary the offensive behavior of individuals and society. Among those who offend him, the socially conscious Myrna Minkoff is preeminent. Reilly is constantly goaded by Myrna’s vigorous call to social action, and finds her social protest strategies pitiable. But at last, while among the oppressed workers at Levy Pants, he decides to take on his own strategy of social reform. Reilly writes:

“We do correspond quite regularly, the usual theme of Myrna’s correspondence tending to urge me to participate in lie-ins and wade-ins and sit-ins and such. Since, however, I do not eat at lunch counters and do not swim, I have ignored her advice. The subsidiary theme in her correspondence is one urging me to come to Manhattan so that she and I may raise our banner of twin confusion in that center of mechanized horrors....

“A recent communication from her was bolder and more offensive than usual. She must be dealt with on her own level. and thus I thought of her as I surveyed the sub-standard conditions in the factory. Too long have I confined myself in Miltonic isolation and meditation. It is clearly time for me to step boldly into our society, not in the boring, passive manner of the Myrna Minkoff school of social action, but with great style and zest [italics mine].”

No, I was not the model for Myrna Minkoff, not even remotely. To Ken I suspect I was an “uptown girl,” a person he saw as coming from affluence and more intrigued with fashion and style than with any kind of social conscience or concern. Myrna exemplified, I suspect, the socially conscious Hunter students he had known and taught, who admired him but challenged his values in certain ways.

But there on the page I saw myself linked somehow with her, knowing how absurd it was; and sad that I could never visit with him again, or tell him (which I know he needed to hear) how gifted and insightful he was.

Was Ken Toole something like Ignatius Reilly? I think so. First of all, I can’t help noticing the high intellectual and literary content of Reilly’s outpourings onto Big Chief writing tablets. Is it logical that a guy in a lumberjack hat who works for Levy Pants and Paradise Vendors would salt his commentary on the modern world with references to Milton, Chaucer, and Dante? No, it’s not logical, but it was typical of Ken.

What about the name itself, Ignatius Reilly? Threatened by a low-down, no-count, pleasure-driven culture, Ignatius withdraws to the high moral ground of his namesake. Reilly is a kind of latter-day Loyola at odds with sinful society. Here Ken is telling us, I think, something about his own religious history and something about his own threatened personality: a sixteenth-century romantic who has been stranded in the twentieth century, caught between the Mediterranean culture of New Orleans and the Marxist high-mindedness of New York.

1962 was a year of decision for Ken. His military service would end the following year. Hunter College wanted him back. But he decided to return to New Orleans, with the manuscript of his brand-new novel in his suitcase, the result of dedicated hours at the typewriter in the tropic heat. At last he had done what he dreamed of doing: capturing New Orleans as it really was.

1962 was the year that things changed radically for me. I had a conversion experience and joined a church. One of my plays was performed in a staged reading at the Circle in the Square Theatre. I met the man I wanted to spend my life with. In 1963 I married him, and forgot about the guys I used to know.

One of those guys, though, was hard to forget, entirely.

John Kennedy Toole.

Visit Emilie Griffin as Image Artist of the Month for July '01

Issue #24 • Fall 1999