Giving new life to the author of ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’
Miller Beach is a small but spirited community in Indiana. Technically it is a neighborhood of that once-thriving steel city of Gary and close as it is to Chicago, only about 45 miles, it has always attracted interesting people. Among them have been some writers, the most famous being Nelson Algren.
With some of the money he made from selling the movies rights to his novel, “The Man with the Golden Arm” (he hated the film), Algren bought a small cottage that was still standing the last time I drove by a few years ago. Not far away there is a Nelson Algren Museum, which features such items as his typewriter and photos of the French writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who spent plenty of time during the 1950s with her lover-at-the-time Algren in Miller Beach.
Miller Beach has been home to Jodee Blanco for two years and it is here she wrote her first novel, in collaboration with publishing industry veteran Kent Carroll.
“This is a great quiet place to write,” she says. “I haven’t yet had time to visit the Algren museum but I surely would have enjoyed meeting him and especially Simone. I love her.”
The novel Blanco and Carroll have written is about another writer, “I, John Kennedy Toole” (Pegasus Books).
Know that name in the title? You should. Toole was the author of one of the 20th century’s most fascinating literary figures. More than a decade after his death by suicide at 31, the novel that he had written, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” was finally published, became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
“His whole life had been a struggle for recognition,” said Blanco.
Blanco, who was born and raised in Palos Park, spent her early career as a successful publicist (among her clients were football’s Jim Brown, actor/character Mickey Rooney and many authors). Then she bravely bared her own painful past in a New York Times bestseller “Please Stop Laughing at Me,” a 2003 memoir about school bullying that made her an in-demand and admired public speaker on the subject and led to more anti-bullying books.
This novel started with she and Carroll wanting to write a “biography of ‘Confederacy’ and its author, but we discovered only slices of information about Toole’s life — especially his personal life, which he kept from his closest friends. That would cause frustration for any would-be biographer.”
There have been some previous biographies and the novel has sparked a couple of plays and tortured many who have attempted to bring it to movie screens. Director Steven Soderbergh was so exhausted and freaked out by his failed movie attempts that he has called the novel “cursed.”
Blanco and Carroll have a distinct and unique advantage since it was Carroll, as a young editor at Grove Press, who was responsible for the sparking the success of “Confederacy.”
The book was initially rejected by publishers. But in the wake of Toole’s death, his mother Thelma Toole was tirelessly determined to get the novel published and eventually got it into the hands of esteemed novelist Walker Percy (his “The Moviegoer” is a great novel).
He finally agreed to read the manuscript with the intention of blowing her off. But he loved the book, arranged for it to be published by Louisiana State University Press and wrote a thoughtful and explanatory foreword.
The novel is set in Toole’s native New Orleans and features one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction: Ignatius Reilly is a corpulent gent in a green hunting cap who is either wildly creative or certifiably nuts. Sharing some similarities with his author, he was described by Percy in the foreword as “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.” If in your mind now flashes the face of John Belushi, know that Belushi was getting ready to star in a film version before his death.
“Ignatius is a symbol of freedom,” says Blanco.
University press releases don’t ordinarily make big splashes but Carroll got a copy, read it, snapped up the paperback rights and so successfully marketed the novel that it sold and sold and still sells today. There are more than 2 million copies in print.
“Kent has been my mentor for decades,” says Blanco. “And, of course, I was aware of his connection to ‘Confederacy.’ I love that book and I so I started reading everything else that Toole had ever written, from a novel (“Neon Bible”) he wrote at 16, to recipes on the back of plates, to his journal entries.” She spent time with anyone, and there were few, who had known Toole.
Having digested all she could, she started writing and sending chapters to Carroll, who would then, she says, “edit, rework and reshape where necessary.”
Their novel hews very closely to the facts but makes good use of the freedom of fiction, imaginatively creating a character or two to honestly drive the narrative, scenes full of dramatic tension and other successful imaginative leaps.
The pair obviously has a great appreciation, even a fondness, for Toole, who Blanco consistently refers to as “Kenny” in conversation. They grasp the creative forces behind Toole’s writing, capturing the almost eerie relationship between author and character: “It was getting to the point (Kenny) couldn’t tell the two apart. Sometimes he found himself in a situation in which he normally would be cool and calm … and then, Ignatius would pop out like a rotund, black-haired jack-in-the-box, spewing opinions.”
The book and Blanco are blunt about Thelma: “She was clearly mentally ill. She suffocated him during his life but after his death she became a zealous advocate for his novel.”
In this fictional exchange after the book’s success, an enthusiastic publicist says, “I’ve read the book twice. It’s living inside my head,” to which Thelma responds, “It’s a wonder and a mystery. And, of course, it killed my son.”
But he was very much alive in the minds and words of Blanco and Carroll, who believe that there exists, not just in rumor but in manuscript form, Toole’s last work, a novel titled “Humphrey Wildblood.” It is also their feeling that Toole’s suicide was, as she says, “not so much an act of hopelessness and despair but a sacrifice that he made so that his characters could live.”
If that is the case, somewhere both Kenny and Ignatius are perhaps laughing with glee.