Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole.(Review)

Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole By Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Handy Louisiana State University Press, 234 pages, $24.95

At Christmas 13 years ago, I gave my wife A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole's hilarious novel of life in a New Orleans populated by hustlers, homosexuals, insular working-class whites, put-upon blacks, ineffectual cops, and hapless office hands, circa 1963. She tried 40 pages of it and gave it back, unimpressed.

But when I read Confederacy myself, I was so taken with its loopy dialogue, especially the utterances of its loftily supercilious main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, that I later added two spoken versions of the book to my collection. I'm not the only one who got hooked: The novel, which Louisiana State University Press had only modest hopes for when it was first published in 1980, has been reprinted many times and translated into 20 languages.

Confederacy is a testament to Americans' schizophrenic attitudes toward stereotypes. If all stereotypes are bad (as one of the reigning dogmas of our day insists), the fact remains that Toole's consummate skill in mining the humor in stereotypes is a large part of the reason why the book has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. The book is very funny. Sad, too. Not because of the daily tribulations the characters bumble through, but because many readers are aware that the author took his own life at 32, 11 years before the novel was published and 12 years before it won the Pulitzer Price for fiction.

In Toole's novel, it's O.K. to have prancing gays cavorting in the French Quarter. It's O.K. to have an uneducated black character, Burma Jones, working as a janitor in the shabby Night of Joy bar, complaining constantly that his $20-a-week pay "ain even startin to be a minimal wage." It's O.K. because the characters are funny, and because Toole was an equal-opportunity parodist (white Protestants are the group most strongly deplored by the Catholic Ignatius). These characters were created in the early 1960s when Americans still believed that "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."

Toole's characters, stereotypes and all, were drawn from real acquaintances. The figure of Ignatius, as reported in this first published biography of Toole, was based on a professor at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, Bob Byrne, who dressed in unruly colors, wore a red deer-stalker cap (Ignatius's cap was green), had weight problems, played the lute, often discussed the medieval philosopher Boethius and the wheel of Fortuna, and "was forever talking about theology, ...