The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Sara Wheeler finds the perfect read to celebrate New Orleans and those who walk to the beat of their own drum
A Confederacy of Dunces features one of the greatest comic heroes in American fiction against the background of one of the greatest American cities. In its pages John Kennedy Toole conjures the Night of Joy bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter, the ancient oaks arched over mansion-lined St Charles Avenue “like a canopy”, the fabled “rocking streetcars”, and that accent – Kennedy writes that denizens of the Big Easy speak in a way that “occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico”.
Born in New Orleans in 1937, Toole wrote his novel in the early 1960s. Its protagonist, Ignatius J Reilly, appears in the first line: “A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.” A great lolloping character in a coffee-stained lumber jacket and a Mickey Mouse watch that doesn’t work, Reilly is prone to rages and prolix speechifying. Of his trapped gas, “which had character and being and resented its confinement”, he wondered “whether his pyloric valve might be trying, Cassandra-like, to tell him something”.
He goes to the movies almost every night, often at the red-brick Prytania (the oldest cinema still operational in the New Orleans metropolitan area), arming himself with three Milky Ways and two bags of popcorn. Reilly is a Falstaffian figure, and his mother, who loves him really and drives a Plymouth, says: “He’s got a heart of ice, that boy.”
Reilly gets a job selling hotdogs from a cart for Paradise Vendors, a Poydras Street firm based on the real-life Lucky Dogs, whose carts have been rolling since 1947.
I once picked my way round New Orleans with Toole’s novel in one hand and a map in the other. I snuck into the Lucky Dogs yard to take a selfie with a cart, but now you can download a tremendous (and free) self-guided walking audio tour, “An Ignatian Journey”, which traces both Reilly and his creator (64parishes.org/ignatius). The same site has an interactive story map featuring archival and contemporary photographs of New Orleans.
Five lines of streetcars run still, some of the vehicles vintage green, and there is one called Desire. And you still don’t need an occasion to don fancy dress in party town. “That’s what’s so wonderful about New Orleans,” Toole writes in Confederacy. “You can masquerade and Mardi Gras all year round if you want to.” A bronze statue of Reilly stands outside the DH Holmes department store, where the character first appears as the sun begins to descend over the Mississippi at the foot of Canal Street.
The audio tour takes in the fictitious Mattie’s Ramble Inn in Carrollton, Toole’s last neighbourhood, where St Charles intersects with Old Glory. Now known as the Uptown Triangle, there next to the levee “there is always the heavy, cloying odour of the alcohol distillery on the river”.
Unlike works by the Updikes and Roths of the period, A Confederacy of Dunces is not socially committed to anything. It’s not really about anything, either. It’s a romp with a serio-comic anti-hero, a celebration of those walking to the beat of a different drum.
Reilly only ventured beyond the city limits once, on a calamitous excursion to the state capital, upriver Baton Rouge. But Toole travelled, and so can you. I once drove 150 miles west out of New Orleans to the swamps of southwest Louisiana to find out what “Cajun” means in modern America, beyond a coating of chilli seasoning. (Since Confederacy, Lucky Dogs has added a cajun sausage sandwich to its cart menu.)
The names on the mailboxes on Highway 182 were French: Boudreaux, Thevenet, Broussard, Hebert. The forbears of those residents were poor Poitou farmers who migrated to what is now Maritime Canada in 1604 and named their fledgling settlement Acadia. When the British acquired the region, they rechristened it Nova Scotia. Acadians refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, and in 1755, after years of harassment, George II ordered his colonial administrators to throw them out. At least half the Acadian population died during what they still call Le Grand Dérangement (the Great Exile). But 3,000 made their home in the prairies and wetlands of south-west Louisiana. The clan had adapted once; now they would adapt again. A new Acadia rose from the jungle, and the name of its hardworking people evolved from Acadian, to Cadian, to Cajun.
Toole, who could not get his book published, took his life at the age of 32. Against all the odds, in 1980 his grieving mother Thelma, convinced of her son’s talent, secured publication. Confederacy became an international bestseller, and won a Pulitzer. When I made a pilgrimage to Toole’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery (New Orleans makes a big deal of its cemeteries), a fan had left a beer bottle and a drawing of a hot dog.
The 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.”