"I walk in the world for my son" (John Kennedy Toole in general)

Member Name: pje

Product:	John Kennedy Toole in general
Date:	26/03/02 (243 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Two wonderful books.

Disadvantages: That's all there is.

There is a tale in the publishing industry (hopefully apocryphal) about an author who took the rather drastic step of killing himself in order to draw attention to his novel. It worked. People rushed to read it - and they all agreed that it was crap.

It's a joke that might have its origins in the tale of John Kennedy Toole - but not the crap bit though, because this guy was a genius...

On March 26th, 1969, John Kennedy Toole drove to a secluded spot near Biloxi, Mississippi, connected a length of garden hose-pipe to the exhaust of his car, and left the world behind. He was thirty-one.

His mother, Thelma, later discovered the manuscript of a book among his possessions. Entitled 'A Confederacy of Dunces', Toole had written it while he was with the army in Puerto Rico, teaching English to new recruits. He'd submitted it to a publisher in 1963, and initially received some encouragement, but, after revising it several times, he lost heart.

Convinced that the rejection of his novel had been the reason her only child took his own life, Mrs. Toole became determined to get it published. Time and time again she submitted it to publishers, and time and time again it was rejected. Until the day in 1976, when she barged into the office of a teacher of creative writing at Loyola University, New Orleans, and gave him the manuscript, saying: "it's a masterpiece." He agreed, and he wasn't the only one either - A Confederacy of Dunces was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction - twelve years after John Kennedy Toole's death.


A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
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"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him
by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
- Jonathan Swift (Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711)

Think of an American version of Alan Bennett, only even more intelligent, less sympathetic to his fellow-man, and
wearing a green hunting cap... Think of a big, fat, obnoxious version of Niles Crane from Frasier, crossed with the pompous Larry Durrell as seen in My Family and Other Animals. Think of Proust sulking in his bedroom, knowing it all, but doing nothing...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, the one, the only: Ignatius J. Reilly. (Note the highly pompous use of the middle initial 'J' - beware of people like that, they're mad.) Ignatius is thirty years old, he doesn't have a job, and he still lives with his mother. He has an enormous vocabulary which he uses incessantly, and has a tendency towards Oblomovism. Hmmmm, I'm sure I can hear a bell ringing somewhere.

' "I dust a bit", he says. "In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labours, I make an occasional cheese dip." '

On page one I thought about giving up on this book and throwing it away, because it seemed so overwritten. But I was very glad I hadn't when I got to page three and a police officer, who has been harrassing our hero, gets whipped round the ear by a lute string, and ends up surrounded by a mob of bystanders and accused of being a communist. Wherever Ignatius goes he leaves a trail of chaos and bickering in his wake y'see.

Like all 'writers', he's a hopelessly idle waster (present company excepted, naturally!) and he drives his poor widowed mother to distraction with his constant moaning. Eventually she insists that he get a job. Which, VERY reluctantly, he does - as a hot dog vendor. It is, of course, a disaster...

This is a riotously funny book. A highbrow farce, full of wise-cracking humour and larger-than-life characters. In fact, you will never find a more larger-than-life character than Ignatius J. Reilly.

¶ Penguin Books ¶ Paperback £6.99 ¶ ISBN: 0141182865 ¶ pp 352 ¶


THE
NEON BIBLE
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Toole wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest when he was sixteen, and after the success of ACOD his mother remembered it and dug it out. At first Mrs. Toole was enthusiastic about having it published, but when she was told that her husband's family were entitled to half the proceeds, she changed her mind, and it was only published after she died in 1984.

The Neon Bible is set in a small town in the Bible Belt during World War II and takes the form of a Catcher In The Rye style first-person reminiscence by a teenager called David, as he sits on a train which is taking him away from it all.

Mostly he tells us about his Auntie Mae, a one-time stage actress, who came to stay with them, and became his friend and playmate. (His father tried to make him play with boys his own age, but they called him a sissy and beat him up.) Auntie Mae has a somewhat dubious reputation around the town, particularly in the eyes of the church deacon and his wife, who's a teacher, and who picks on David in school.

Despite being an embarrassment, Auntie Mae soon becomes the most important person in David's life, as his father is called-up and his mother cracks up. But then one fateful day he has to cope without her...

For a sixteen year-old this is a really impressive novel, because although it's written in a simplistic way, it flows beautifully, and is full of acute observations of smalltown American life and people. It has the same sort of charm as The Wonder Years in the early stages, it made me smile a lot. But it develops into something much more poignant - tragic in fact, and by the end your heart bleeds for David.

¶ Penguin Books ¶ Paperback £5.99 ¶ ISBN: 0140239278 ¶ pp 176 ¶


So that's it. Two novels. That's all we have left of John Kennedy Toole.
Such potential, such talent, such a waste. And to think that if it weren't
for the persistence of his Mu
m, we wouldn't have had anything at all.

(And in case you hadn't worked it out, the title of this op is something
that Mrs. Toole often said in interviews, after ACOD became successful.)

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ There is a biography of John Kennedy Toole, called "Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole" by René Pol Nevils & Deborah George Hardy.

¶ Hardback £21.50 ¶ ISBN: 0807126802 ¶ pp 240 ¶
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