Laugh? I nearly did. An Irishman’s Diary about John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’

‘The best things in it are all dialogue’

It won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for its author. It has been described as a “canonical work” of modern US literature. And among its many admirers is the comedian Bill Bailey, who as recently as last month declared it a “modern classic” and said he kept it a “constant companion”.

So when I finally sat down to read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces over Christmas, I expected to love it. I wanted to love it, even – a feeling partly influenced by the book's tragic back-story.

Born in New Orleans in 1937, of Irish and Creole parentage, Kennedy Toole failed to find a publisher in his lifetime, which he ended himself aged 31, whereafter only the doggedness of his mother ensured that the novel saw the light a decade later.

And the poignancy of those origins, combined with the book’s cultish fame, sustained me at least as far as page 28, where a genuinely funny passage about the main protagonist’s sex life – a solo activity, always – promised belated take-off.

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Instead, that proved to be the highpoint. A hundred pages later, it was still hard work trying to care about the misadventures of the preposterous Ignatius J Reilly, a gargantuan latter-day Don Quixote, and his battles with the modern world.

Was it me, I wondered, or was it him? Then, at around the point I would normally have given up asking, and consigned Kennedy Toole's masterpiece to the limbo of never-to-be-finished reading material, I remembered a volume on my shelves called Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor.

This is a compendium of comic writing from the American south, with commentary both incisive and witty by Blount, himself a literary funnyman, from Georgia. He surely would have something to say about Confederacy, good or bad. And as a bonus, it turned out, he had both.

Upon its publication in 1980, Blount said, he had found the book “wonderful in its comic desperation” and thought it richly deserved the Pulitzer. Revisiting it years later, however, he was “astounded to find that much of the afflatus had gone out of it, that it no longer seemed to transcend its source in sexual confusion and mother hatred”.

Still, he had included an extract in the collection anyway, because of its “high moments” and its skilful rendering of a “variety of Newawlins accents”, among other things. And so it was that, in a similar spirit, I returned to the book. Relieved of the pressure to find in it the genius others had, I persisted to the end, enjoying what parts I could.

A Confederacy of Dunces (the title is from Swift) is not the first alleged American classic to have defeated me utterly. Like everybody else, I read Catcher in the Rye once, many years ago, and soon afterwards – never mind now – could remember absolutely nothing about it.

Ignatius J Reilly, for his part, dismisses the writings of Mark Twain, “which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful”. But that, I suspect, is not to be taken seriously, if only because Reilly disapproves of everyone born in the past millennium.

In writing a picaresque novel, set in the south, near the Mississippi, Kennedy Toole must surely have hoped his work would stand alongside another southern classic, Huckleberry Finn. If so, his failure may have been that Reilly, amid all his mad causes, didn't find a serious one, as Huck did almost in spite of his creator.

It's well known that Twain planned Huckleberry Finn as a mere companion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a popular but slight work. And he was still so unsure of what had happened to his character en route down the Mississippi that, infamously, he reimposed Sawyer in the closing chapters for what has been called the worst ending of any great book.

As for Confederacy, the best things in it are all dialogue, occasionally from Reilly, but more often from Burma Jones, a put-upon black man trying to stay a step ahead of arrest for vagrancy. And as such, it underlines a point that Blount makes in the preface to his collection, about the oral nature of southern-states humour, which he thought reflected the Afro-Celtic origins of so many of the people.

“Maybe in some parts of the world, or even of the this country, words are taken as givens or as things that grown naturally in the dictionary,” he wrote. “But to Southerners (as to Africans and Irishmen I have sat at tables with), language is the sound of the tongue and the mind clapping, with an understandable tendency to lose the beat, especially in print.”

@FrankmcnallyIT