Am I the only human on the face of the planet who doesn't appreciate A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole? It's a Pulitzer Prize winner, for heaven's sake!
I read it last year and I can't say I'm very much impressed by it. Sorry?
On the other hand...(which is to say, "calm the fuck down") I am enjoying the chance to learn a bit more about the life of the author, John Kennedy Toole, reading Butterfly in the Typewriter, by Cory MacLauchlin. Perhaps, personally, this isn't much of a surprise, since I find that I've enjoyed reading more about Hunter Thompson than I have enjoyed reading his works. Same goes, in some small way, for Ernest Hemingway. And Capote, come to think of it.
Should it surprise us that oftentimes, the lives of writers, the details of their existence, are more interesting than their actual writing? Even more so if they came to grief in the end? (Toole, Hemingway and Thompson committed suicide). Let's consider the reasons. Obviously if the end is in any way gruesome, then we're interested; that's intuitive. What draws me to the biography more so is the fact that I don't have to dissect or interpret the life of a writer as laid out by a biographer. When I read "Hills Like White Elephants" (Hemingway), there's this inevitable pressure to figure out just what the fuck Papa Hemingway was driving at. I recall from an undergraduate course some literary reference to unplanned pregnancy in "...White Elephants," but then there was always some underlying message. In his "Big Two Hearted River," Hemingway was evidently referring to the stress of a post-war veteran and a form of undiagnosed PTSD in the decades before such a thing existed. We're talking post World War One, before the Great Depression, before World War Two and deep in the "suck it up and move on," world.
So that brings me to John Kennedy Toole and Confederacy of Dunces. There's an obvious, nearly measurable degree of sadness that comes from the notion of knowing that one's literary work hits the big time after we've killed ourself waiting for publication, right? Toole's overbearing mother managed to get Confederacy of Dunces published years after John Kennedy killed himself and, perhaps more tragically, the work earned a Pulitzer Prize in the process.
Reading MacLauchlin's tidy biography, I've come to understand where writing dreams can be born, where they might begin to flourish and where they may be snuffed out. In Toole's case, he borrowed a typewriter from a fellow Army draftee while stationed in Puerto Rico as an English instructor and, there in the solitude of his room, he clacked out the bulk of the effort just prior to the expiration of his enlistment in the early 1960s.
I recall borrowing a giant, heavy IBM Selectric typewriter from the headquarters office of the unit to which I was assigned in about 1986. I know a small thing or two about wiling away the off-duty hours clacking away on a typewriter. In my case, nothing much came of it, but I know where nascent dreams of authorship can expire without one really knowing what's happening. I typed a few witty letters home to friends and family. I jotted a lot of beer addled gibberish that now resides somewhere in a filing cabinet in the closet. In the end, I didn't accomplish a damned thing artistically. I left the army after four years wishing I'd enlisted to be a journalist instead of a cavalry scout.
Toole had an advanced degree before he was drafted into the Army, he went on in the civilian world to pursue a doctorate and he worked hard to mold A Confederacy of Dunces into a marketable commodity. God bless him and his effort.
In the end, he couldn't make the loose ends come together with a large publishing house in New York City. The editor was never quite happy with the product and Toole became discouraged. I haven't finished the biography yet, but I know how it will end: carbon monoxide suicide someplace near Biloxi. Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a book nobody seemed to want, after his mother found the manuscript once he was dead and in the ground.
Perhaps it's best if literary dreams die early, in some barracks room, far from home, but in the end, the life lived will be of interest.
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