The Neon Bible
John Kenndy Toole
JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE -- who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces -- wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.
The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole.
The Neon Bible
by John Kennedy Toole
Introduction
The novel you hold in your hands represents the culmination of a strange and ironic chain of events. Almost twenty years to the day before its publication, John Kennedy Toole parked his car in a secluded spot near the Gulf Coast town of Biloxi, Mississippi, ran a length of garden hose from the exhaust pipe into the rear window, locked himself inside, and closed his eyes upon a world to which he had been acutely perceptive and sensitive but in which he was apparently unable to survive. It was March 26, 1969, and the New Orleans native was only thirty-one.
The circumstances and coincidences that have led to The Neon Bible's being in print at all partake of the very substance of Victorian romance: the tragic death of a promising young writer; the implacable determination of a grief-stricken mother whose faith and devotion were finally justified when her beloved lost son achieved posthumous fame; and a subsequent tangle of lawsuits involving legacies and publication rights.
Following John Toole's death, his estate was appraised at $8,000 by a lawyer's inventory that made no mention of the typescripts of two novels. His mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole -- product of a typical New Orleans ethnic potpourri, original Creole French settlers and nineteenth-century Irish immigrants -- found herself at sixty-seven managing a household, caring for an invalid husband, and enduring an immeasurable share of grief. The loss of any child is agonizing for a caring parent, but the suicide of an only child made her suffering all the more intense.
"The darling," as Thelma referred to him, born when she was thirty-seven and had been assured by doctors that she would never have a child, was from the beginning exceptional. Bright, creative, talented in music and art, John skipped two grammar school grades and later attended Tulane University and Columbia graduate school on scholarships. During two years in the army in Puerto Rico, he completed A Confederacy of Dunces, a boisterous, picaresque novel about his New Orleans, a uniquely diverse city more Mediterranean than American, more Latin than Southern. In 1963 he submitted the work to Simon and Schuster, where it came to the attention of editor Robert Gottlieb. For two years, encouraged by Gottlieb, John made revisions, gradually growing more and more depressed, until he finally abandoned hope.
Meantime he was teaching at a New Orleans college, pursuing a Ph.D. in English, and living at home, where his salary relieved strained financial circumstances. His father was incapacitated by deafness, and the private elocution lessons with which Thelma had for years supplemented their income were no longer fashionable. Always rather reserved, even secretive, despite his marked skill at mimicry and his wry comments on people and events around him, John revealed little of his personal life to anyone. Only a few friends even knew that he was a writer, much less that he had submitted a novel to a publisher. During the 1968 fall semester, colleagues noticed a growing paranoia, and in January 1969 John disappeared from the college and his home. His family heard no more of him until that fateful March day when policemen came to tell them their son was dead by his own hand. He had left a note addressed "To my parents," which his mother read and then destroyed.
For Thelma the weeks of agonizing over John's whereabouts now stretched into years of unrelenting maternal sorrow over his suicide. She felt abandoned, even betrayed, the son to whom she had devoted the past three decades dead, her husband isolated in his deafness. Life seemed to stand still, mired in a swamp of despair, until one day she came across the typescript of A Confederacy of Dunces and found a new purpose. There followed five more years of frustrating grief during which her husband died, her own health declined, and eight publishers rejected the novel. "Every time it came back, I died a little," she was later to recall. Whatever message John's suicide note had contained, she convinced herself that it was the rejection of the novel that had made life unbearable for her darling.
In 1976, through a happy circumstance, she learned that Walker Percy was teaching a creative writing course at Loyola University. One day she appeared in his office, thrust the novel into his hands, and dramatically announced, "It's a masterpiece." Though understandably reluctant at first, Percy was so impressed by her adamant determination that he agreed to read it. Pleased and amazed by what he found in those worn and battered pages, he convinced Louisiana State University Press to publish A Confederacy of Dunces. In 1981 the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and to date has been translated into more than ten foreign languages.
Fame came too late for John Kennedy Toole, but with the genius of her son officially certified, his mother began to see people again and to grant interviews. In public performances she dramatized scenes from the novel, discussed her son, played the piano, and sang old songs such as "Sunny Side of the Street," "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans," and "Sometimes I'm Happy." Inevitably at some point in the program she would announce in carefully enunciated English, a result of all those years of studying and teaching elocution, "I walk in the world for my son." It became her signature, her justification for whatever pleasure and satisfaction she derived from her long-delayed moment in the spotlight.
It was at the time of the publication of Confederacy that, through another sequence of the coincidences with which the story of John Kennedy Toole abounds, I became a friend of Thelma's. As a student in Walker Percy's 1976 creative writing class, I heard firsthand his initial impressions of that remarkable woman and her son's remarkable novel. After my early review of Confederacy was published, Thelma called to thank me for my praise of the novel and to invite me to visit. We discovered that we lived only three blocks apart, and during the period when she emerged from the shadow of heavy grief that had shrouded her for a decade, we met once or twice a week to discuss literature, theater, opera, the life and career of her son, and her hopes for a movie based on the novel. In cramped, old-fashioned script she composed numerous letters and a memoir of John, which I typed. Though she rarely left home, since any movement required her to use a walker, one memorable evening a group of us escorted her to Baton Rouge for the premiere of a musical based on Confederacy. She was ecstatic over the performance and the attention she received from the director, actors, and audience.
During these years she recalled the existence of an earlier novel and located among John's effects a typescript entitled The Neon Bible. When he was fifteen and had just learned to drive, he had invited her to ride with him to Airline Highway to see something amusing. He parked in front of a monolithic concrete building and pointed to an enormous neon sign shaped like an open book, with the words "Holy Bible" on one page and "Midcity Baptist Church" on the other. Together they laughed at its tacky ostentation, but she did not know then that he had
found the title and inspiration for his first sustained creative effort. About the same time he spent a few days with a classmate visiting relatives in rural Mississippi, the setting for The Neon Bible.
When Thelma suggested publishing The Neon Bible-- "after Confederacy has had its share of glory" -- lawyers reminded her that under Louisiana law (that same Napoleonic Code in which Stanley Kowalski instructs Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire), half the rights belonged to her husband's brother and his children. They had surrendered their share in Confederacy prior to publication, but it seemed unlikely that they would do the same for another potential best seller. Her letters of protest to the governor, the state supreme court, and Louisiana congressmen were ignored, and finally, unable to circumvent the antiquated and illogical inheritance law, her strength depleted by fatal illness, she made the painfully paradoxical decision to prevent publication of what she considered another masterpiece created by her darling. When she pleaded with me to see that her wishes were not violated after her death, her intense emotional commitment so moved me that I agreed to be the novel's "guardian," to use her term. Shortly before she died in August 1984, she altered her will to that effect.
When her lawyer called to inform me that Thelma had died, he also notified me that she had bequeathed The Neon Bible to me "in trust." Having promised to abide by her wishes, however imperious and uncompromising they might appear to others, I was for the next three years involved in various lawsuits brought against her estate. The final outcome, of course, was the defeat of Thelma Toole's attempt to control the fate of her son's first novel from beyond the grave. In 1987 a New Orleans judge ruled for partition of the novel, which in effect would have put it up for public auction if the litigants could not reach some settlement. Rather than allow such a spectacle, I conceded the defeat of Thelma's wishes and my desire to respect them, and The Neon Bible was freed for publication.
The novel you are about to read is the extraordinary creation of a teenage author whose life, which should have been full and rich, ended by his own choice, for reasons none of us perhaps will ever know, fifteen years after The Neon Bible was written. His story naturally promotes speculation and nagging questions. Were there other works by John Kennedy Toole? What might he have accomplished had he only lived longer? The question of his unfulfilled promise remains unanswered, of course, as the cause or causes of his wasteful suicide remain unknown. As to the existence of other written works, when we went through Thelma's effects -- her papers, the cherished foreign editions of Confederacy, the gifts and mementos from more than eight decades of life, and, most important of all to her, the carefully treasured possessions of her son and his letters to her -- no manuscripts were found save for an unimpressive poem written during his army days and numerous essays and examination papers from his college career. Whatever fiction John may have written in the decade between The Neon Bible and A Confederacy of Dunces he must himself have destroyed, since it is unthinkable that his mother, given her conviction of his genius and her devotion to his every word and deed, could have disposed of or lost any document.
Thus the legacy of John Kennedy Toole is confined to his two brilliant novels, one a broad satirical view of the modern world, the other, this sensitive and remarkable portrait by a very young author of a small, claustrophobic world oppressed by narrow religious bigotry. The Neon Bible, written thirty-five years ago, is powerfully relevant to a world in which such bigotry has not been frustrated by reason and tolerance but rather seems to have grown stronger. Only two novels, but in their breadth and depth, they constitute testament to a genius.
W. KENNETH HOLDITCH
New Orleans, Louisiana
One
This is the first time I've been on a train. I've sat in this seat here for about two or three hours now. I can't see what's passing by. It's dark now, but when the train left, the sun was just beginning to set, and I could see the red and brown leaves and the tanning grass all along the hillside.
I feel a little better the further the train gets from the house. The tingling that has been running up and down the inside of my legs is stopping, and my feet feel like they're really there now, and not like two cold things that don't really belong to the rest of my body. I'm not as scared anymore.
There's a colored fellow coming through between the seats. He's snapped off every one of the lights over the seats. There's just a tiny red one glowing at the end of the coach, and I'm sorry it isn't bright here anymore by my seat, because I start to think too much in the dark about what's back in the house. They must have turned the heat off too. It's cold in here. I wish I had a blanket to throw over my knees and something to put over this seat so the plush wouldn't scratch the back of my neck.
If it was day outside, I could see where I was. I've never been this far from home in my life. We must be almost two hundred miles away now. With nothing to see, you have to listen to the click-click-click of the train. Sometimes I hear the whistle sounding far ahead. I've heard it plenty times, but I never thought I'd be riding with it. And I don't mind the clicking. It sounds like the rain on a tin roof at night when it's quiet and still and the only thing you can hear is the rain and the thunder.
But I had a train of my own. It was a toy one I got for Christmas when I was three. That was when Poppa was working at the factory and we lived in the little white house in town that had a real roof you could sleep under when it rained, and not a tin one like the place on the hill had that leaked through the nail holes too.
People came to see us that Christmas. We always had some people in the house, coming in blowing and rubbing their hands together and shaking out their coats like it was snowing outside. But there was no snow. Not that year. But they were nice, and brought me things. I remember the preacher gave me a book of Bible stories. But that was most likely because my mother and father were paying church members then, with their names on the rolls and both of them in the Adult Study Class that met every Sunday at nine and Wednesday night at seven for a social. I was in the Pre-School Play section, but we never played like the name said. We had to listen to stories some old woman read to us out of a grownup book that we didn't understand.
Mother was very hospitable that year I got the train. Everybody got some of her fruitcake that she was proud of. She said it was from an old family recipe, but I found out later she got the cake through a mail order from some company in Wisconsin called the Olde English Baking Company, Limited. I found that out when I learned to read and saw it in the mail a few Christmases later when we didn't have any people over and we had to eat it ourselves. No one ever knew, though, that she didn't make it, except me and Mother and maybe the man at the post office, but he was a deaf mute and couldn't tell anybody.
I don't remember any children my age coming around that Christmas. As a matter of fact, there weren't any children my age living around us at all. After Christmas was over, I stayed in the house and played with my train. It was too cold outside, and about January it began to snow. Heavy snows that year, although everyone thought they'd never come.
It was that spring that Mother's Aunt Mae came to live with us. She was heavy but not fat, and about sixty, and came from out of state somewhere where they had nightclubs. I asked Mother why her hair wasn't shiny and yellow like Aunt Mae's, and she said some people were just lucky, and I felt sorry for her.
Next to the train, I remember Aunt Mae most. She smelled so strong of perfume that sometimes you couldn't get near her without your nose stinging and having a hard time getting air. I never saw anybody with hair and clothes like that, and I sat and just looked at her sometimes.
When I was four Mother gave a party for some of the wives of the factory workers, and Aunt Mae came into the living room in the middle of the party wearing a dress that showed almost all her front, except for the nipples, which I knew you never could show. The party ended soon after that, and as I was sitting on the porch, I heard the women talking to each other as they left. And they were calling Aunt Mae all sorts of
names like I had never heard before and really didn't know the meaning of until I was almost ten years old.
"You had no right to dress that way," Mother told her later when they were sitting in the kitchen. "You've deliberately hurt me and all of Frank's friends. If I knew you were going to act this way, I would never have let you come to live with us."
Aunt Mae ran her finger over the button of the robe Mother had put on her. "But Sarah, I didn't know they'd take on that way. Why, I've worn that gown before audiences from Charleston to New Orleans. I forgot to show you my clippings, didn't I? The notices, the notices! They were superb, particularly about that gown."
"Look, dear" -- Mother was pouring some of the special sherry in Aunt Mae's glass to humor her -- "on the stage that gown may have been quite successful, but you don't know what it's like to live in a small town like this. If Frank hears about things like that, he won't let you stay here. Now, don't ever do that to me again."
The sherry made Aunt Mae quiet, but I knew that she hadn't paid any attention to what Mother had said. It surprised me, though, to hear that Aunt Mae had been "on the stage." I had seen the stage at the Town Hall, but the only things I had seen there were men making speeches, and I wondered just what Aunt Mae had done "on the stage." I couldn't see her as a speechmaker, so one day I asked her what she had done, and she pulled a big black scrapbook out of her trunk and showed it to me.
On the first page there was a picture from a newspaper of a slender young girl with black hair and a feather in it. She looked cross-eyed to me, but Aunt Mae said that was only where the paper had touched up the picture wrong. She read me what it said under the picture: "Mae Morgan, popular singer at the Rivoli." Then she said that the picture was a picture of her, and I said it couldn't be because she didn't have black hair, and besides, her name was Gebler, not Morgan. But she told me that both of these had been changed for "theatrical purposes," so we turned the page. The rest of the book was the same, except that in every picture Aunt Mae got fatter, and near the middle of it, her hair turned blonde. Toward the end there were fewer pictures, and they were so small that the only way I could tell it was Aunt Mae was by her hair.