PART 151
Author Cory McLauchlin will this morning (October 20) be talking
about his book Butterfly in the
Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story A Confederacy of Dunces”. The talk will take place in Culpeper, Virginia.
McLauchlin himself is a Virginian, having been born in Newport News.
The
event is being held in the Culpeper
County Library at 271 Southgate Shopping Centre.
John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans on December 17, 1937.
A Confederacy of
Dunces
is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J.
Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with
his mother. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects.
Toole began writing A
Confederacy of Dunces while in the Army. He served two years at Fort
Buchanan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, teaching English to Spanish-speaking
recruits. A friend, David Kubach, also an aspiring writer, lent Toole a green
Halda typewriter.
Kubach was later transferred to Madison, Wisconsin, and took his
typewriter with him, so Toole had to buy his own.
After writing A Confederacy
of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster
for two years. Exhausted from Gottlieb’s suggested revisions, Toole declared
the publication of the manuscript a hopeless cause and in 1966 stored it in a
box in his bedroom. Three years later he suffered a mental breakdown, took a
two-month journey across the US, and suicided on a road outside of Biloxi, on
March 27, 1969. Following the funeral, Toole’s mother discovered the
manuscript. After many rejections, in 1976 she cornered Walker Percy, who found
it a brilliant novel and spearheaded its publication.
A Confederacy of
Dunces
was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1980. The first printing
was only 2500 copies, The book has since sold more than 1.5 million copies, in
18 languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, 12 years after Toole’s
suicide.
In Butterfly in the
Typewriter, McLauchlin draws on interviews with Toole’s friends,
family and colleagues, as well as access to the Toole archive at
Tulane University. McLauchlin captures Toole’s upbringing in New Orleans, his
years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his
beloved New Orleans, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
Butterfly in the
Typewriter was released on March 27 this year and critics have called
it “a gripping read”, “haunting” and “one of the most compelling stories in
American literary history”.
The dark humour of A
Confederacy of Dunces falls into context when examined through Toole’s extraordinary life.
The author’s website is here.
3 comments:
John Kennedy O'Toole happens to be one of my very favorite authors -- thanks for posting about him!
His earlier novel, "Neon Bible", written when he was 15, is also an enjoyable read.
What kind of typewriter did he end up buying for himself, after giving back the Halda?
Sorry Cameron, I don't know what JKT bought. It seems to me a wee bit odd that the Halda was identified but the replacement not. Still, I once commented to Richard P that I am constantly amazed by how many literary biographers fail to sate the curiosity of people like me, and name names when it comes to typewriters. I am reading a book about Agatha Christie's trip to Australia and NZ in the 1920s. It is full of typecasts of her typewritten letters. Yet not once it is even mentioned that she took a typewriter around the world with her.
Toole bought an new Underwood-Olivetti. Tootle explained in a letter to his parents that it was a "rather large portable that retailed for something like $139.00", but he paid $69.00 at the Army PX.
The letter was published in Butterfly in the Typewriter
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