John Kennedy Toole - Early Life

Early Life

John Kennedy Toole was born to John Dewey Toole Jr. and Thelma Ducoing Toole. Kennedy was the name of Thelma's grandmother. The first of the Creole Ducoing family arrived in Louisiana from France in the early 19th century, and the Tooles immigrated to America from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Toole's father worked as a car salesman, and his mother, forced to give up her teaching job when she married (as was the custom), gave private lessons in music, speech, and dramatic expression. Toole was known to friends and family as "Ken" until the final few months of his life, when he insisted on being called John. As a child, Toole had an intense affection for his black nursemaid Beulah Matthews, who cared for him when his parents were both working.

Toole's highly cultured mother was a controlling woman, especially with her son. His father was less involved and sometimes complained of his lack of influence in their child's upbringing. Despite this, he and his father bonded through a mutual interest in baseball and cars. Toole's mother chose the friends he could associate with, and felt his cousins on his father's side were too common for him to be around. Toole received high marks in elementary school, and from a young age expressed a desire to excel academically. He skipped ahead a grade, from first to second, after taking an IQ test at the age of six.

When Toole was ten, his mother gathered a group of child stage entertainers she named the Junior Variety Performers. The troupe, with Toole as its star, consisted of 50 children of varying skills and ages. It was well-received, and he also engaged in other entertainment ventures, such as playing the lead in three productions of the Children's Workshop Theatre of New Orleans, MCing a radio show called Telekids, modeling for newspaper ads, and developing a solo show of comic impersonations entitled Great Lovers of the World.

Although an excellent student, Toole curtailed his stage work when he entered high school (Alcée Fortier High), to concentrate on his academic work. He wrote for the school newspaper Silver and Blue, worked on the yearbook The Tarpon, and won several essay contests on subjects such as the Louisiana Purchase and the American Merchant Marine. He took up debating, a skill his father had won the state championship in during high school. Toole spoke at gatherings of civic organizations such as Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs. Toole's father bought him an Oldsmobile, in which Toole was delivering newspapers at the age of 13, even though the legal driving age was 15. In high school, Toole spent a lot of time at the home of classmate Larry McGee, and dated McGee's sister, Jane. Jane later said that Toole never wanted to go home and would purposefully spend almost all of his free time at the McGees'. With the McGees, Toole would engage in mischievous pranks and go on double dates with Larry and his girlfriend Buzz. The couples often spent their free time at the local pool, or cruising around in Toole's car.

As a teenager in 1954, Toole made his first trip out of Louisiana to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. on a field trip. He especially enjoyed New York and filled a cherished scrapbook with pictures from his visit (which included trips on the New York Subway System, an excursion on a boat in the New York Harbor, visits to the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, Times Square) and with the program from a performance of The Rockettes he had seen.

Toole became the editor of the news section of the school newspaper, and maintained high marks throughout high school. He received many accolades, including winning a National Merit Scholarship, selection to the National Honor Society, and being named the Most Intelligent Senior Boy by the student body. He was one of two New Orleanians voted outstanding citizen at the Pelican (now Louisiana) Boys State convention and he was invited back to serve the following year as a counsellor. He also took part in the Newman Club, a Catholic organization for teenagers, where he won an award for outstanding student in the group. He received a full scholarship to Tulane University at 17.

During his senior year, Toole wrote The Neon Bible, a short novel of Southern Gothic Fiction that has been compared in style to Flannery O'Connor, a favorite author of Toole's. The book's protagonist, a boy named David, had once lived with his family in a "little white house in town that had a real roof you could sleep under when it rained," before his father lost his job forcing them into a small shoddily built home. Set in 1940s Mississippi, the backwoods Baptist community setting is similar to a location where Toole had once traveled to with a high school friend for a literary contest. The novel's sudden outburst of violence at the end has been described as incongruous with what has preceded it.

Toole later described the novel during correspondence with an editor, "In 1954, when I was 16, I wrote a book called The Neon Bible, a grim, adolescent, sociological attack upon the hatreds caused by the various Calvinist religions in the South—and the fundamentalist mentality is one of the roots of what was happening in Alabama, etc. The book, of course, was bad, but I sent it off a couple of times anyway." It failed to attract interest from publishers and was not released until after Toole's death.