Read Online Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin - Free Book Online

Toole asked his friend to pull over. Laird, somewhat confused as to Toole’s intent, did as requested. The New Orleanian who had spent most of his life seeing nights illuminated with street lamps that glowed in the river mist stepped out of the old Studebaker and looked up. He “gasped at the beauty of the millions of stars in the sky” and exclaimed, “‘I didn’t know there were this many stars in the heavens!’” It seemed a revelation had hit him. They all paused to appreciate the twinkling lights. Back in the car, heading south toward New Orleans, Toole told his friend, “I have to write a book.” He started muttering to himself, making mental notes of what he intended to do. Laird encouraged his enthusiasm, although he did not realize the seriousness with which Toole would pursue his idea.
    Back at home, Toole set to work on writing the book, distilling his impressions of Mississippi. The trip to the country sparked his interests in this world of God and land and the small Southern town. And for all the dozens of road signs blazing in his memory from the trip home, New Orleans provided him the central image to his novel, as well as the title. Along Airline Highway in Metairie, in the outskirts of New Orleans, a sign for Mid-City Baptist Church lit up at night. It was a radiant bible with red letters and yellow pages, opened to the passage of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The holy text beamed in commercial illumination like a commodity
sold to customers. It embodied that tension between religion and commercialism. He had found the ironic symbol to place at the center of his book: The Neon Bible .
    In this short novel, Toole drew upon tensions between religious virtue and the sins of the faithful in a small Mississippi town during World War II. Under the veneer of a simple country life, a boy named David is driven to the edge and, in the end, kills a preacher to protect the body of his dead mother. At the heart of the novel is a tent revival that compels the townspeople to “find Jesus.”
    While Toole never attended a revival meeting in Mississippi, at the invitation of his friend Cary Laird, Toole went with his mother to “hear Billy Graham at a revival meeting at the old first Baptist church on St. Charles near the old Touro Infirmary.” He and his mother watched the impassioned evangelical preacher hold sway over the congregation. His mother recalled,
    We were fascinated—professing for Christ—young minister, very handsome, in a beige suit and a salmon tie showed how wicked social dancing was. I said to my son, “This is a fine religious meeting.” And they laughed their heads off. I didn’t think they were funny. My son gained a great deal from that.
    Toole must have appreciated the theatrical quality of the tent revival. And while Billy Graham may disagree that his revivals were “shows,” his organization used the same tactics that stage productions use to generate interest. Before coming to a city, a media blitz preceded him with posters and advertisements. Then for a series of nights, sometimes weeks on end, he preached the gospel. In Los Angeles in 1949, Graham spoke behind a huge stage prop bible opened toward the audience. And several years after his New Orleans “crusade” he would take Manhattan by storm, drawing in thousands upon thousands of audience members, filling Yankee stadium and Madison Square Garden. His preaching always culminated in the “altar call,” which was when members of the congregation would step forward to declare their promise to Jesus. Toole stood on stage as a young boy, but he had never held such power over an audience. And while his Catholic church had the regal and austere theater of ceremony, it was nowhere near as lively as the jam-packed seats of
believers