In The Critic, Alexander Larman writes about his love of A Confederacy of Dunces, the (failed) attempt to make the novel into a film, and the Britishness of John Kennedy Toole’s sensibility:

It was originally supposed to be made with John Belushi as Ignatius and Harold ‘Groundhog Day’ Ramis as its director, but Belushi died of a drug overdose just before a contract was signed. Other rotund actors such as John Candy and the comedian Jonathan Winters were considered, and a truly off-the-wall suggestion was that John Waters, the so-called ‘Pope of Trash’ would direct and cast his regular lead Divine. After this failed, Waters said ‘It’ll never happen. How can a movie ever live up to that book? So many people have tried to do it. Some of the top directors in the world have tried to make that movie, and I don’t know if it’ll ever happen.’ He then struck a cautionary note, saying in a later interview, ‘maybe it shouldn’t.’

The producers who owned the rights then turned to Stephen Fry in the early Nineties. As Fry told me in a recent interview, ‘The difficulties I faced with my adaptation were the picaresque and often almost surreal nature of the story, the deeply unusual and often so apparently aggressively belligerent, intractable and ornery character of Ignatius – and the lack of a tidy narrative resolution. Ignatius is somehow lovable when you read the book, but can easily come across as what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “motiveless malignancy” in the bare frame of a screenplay.’

Nonetheless, he embraced the challenge. Believing that his Britishness didn’t disqualify him from adapting this quintessentially American story – ‘I think in a sense I’m no more of a foreigner to John Kennedy Toole’s New Orleans and his very particular worldview than any given modern American might be. We’re all foreigners in his world’ – he was flown by Paramount Pictures to New Orleans for a week to get to know the city; something of a necessity as, as he puts it, ‘New Orleans is –after Ignatius (and his mother perhaps) – the biggest character of the novel.’

This proved similarly unsuccessful, and despite interest from the eclectic likes of Steven Soderbergh, Pedro Almodóvar and Will Ferrell, the novel remains unfilmed. Fry believes, however, that its time may yet come. As he said, ‘Many might think that a character like Ignatius railing against TV, pop music and contemporary culture is sorely needed to countervail the infantilism that has washed over us all since the book’s publication. One lone, loud, roaring, eructing voice against the tsunami of comic book heroes and “live action” movies may not do anything to stem the tide, as indeed Ignatius and Toole didn’t in their own time, but it would be a noble endeavour. It may be that longer form TV is the only way to cope with the structural problems that have obviated a traditional feature film version.’

And if it never comes to Netflix or the BBC, there are still other ways of enjoying the strange world that Toole has created. The ever-excellent Folio Society recently produced their own edition of the book to tie in with the 40^th anniversary of its publication, with a perceptive preface by the comedian Bill Bailey and suitably bizarre and colourful illustrations by the BAFTA-award winning animator and illustrator Johnny Hannah, which brings the novel’s more colourful and grotesque aspects vividly to life. And this year a novel was published, I, John Kennedy Toole, written by Kent Carroll and Jodee Blanco, which tells the lightly fictionalised story of the novel’s creation and publication, using a mixture of speculation and biographical fact to bring the tragic yet hopeful saga to life.

I will never tire of reading or re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces. It is both an all-American narrative and yet has a distinctly British sensibility to it.

Read the rest, though he does refer to Walker Percy as an “academic.” It’s hard to think of word that captures Percy less than that one.

In other news: Monica Jones’s letters to Philip Larkin have been opened. They “reveal the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership” with the poet.

Take a look at these illustrations hidden in Swiss maps: “The job of a cartographer leaves little room for creativity, as maps are expected to provide an accurate representation of a location. For several decades, however, mapmakers working for the Swiss Federal Office of Topography have subtly defied their role by secretly inserting hidden illustrations into official maps of Switzerland. From a marmot hiding among the contour lines of the Swiss Alps to a fish blending into the grooves of a French nature preserve, it’s hard to believe these drawings went unnoticed for so many years.”

The English towers and places that inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “‘We have a good idea of when Tolkien was writing each bit, but he kept his cards pretty close to his chest when it comes to his creative process. I think it has been misleading just to visit places he went to and draw simple conclusions,’ said Garth. He is unconvinced by a prior claim that The Two Towers in the title of the second book of Lord of the Rings were influenced by buildings in Birmingham, including Perrotts Folly in Edgbaston. One of Garth’s key discoveries concerns an ancient battlescape that reappears across Tolkien’s writing. It has its basis in the large earthworks at Maiden Castle in Dorset, he now believes, and is best known to readers in the shape of the contours of the atmospheric Barrow-downs in Lord of the Rings.”

Lance Morrow revisits Rudyard Kipling’s The Irish Guards in the Great War: “His only son John, barely 18 years old, had joined the Guards in the summer of 1915—and died a few weeks later in the Battle of Loos. They didn’t even know which corpse was his: in death the boy was anonymous—‘Known to God,’ in the phrase that his father coined. In the regimental history, Kipling refers to his son only twice, in passing, as ‘Lieutenant J. Kipling,’ who went missing in action and was presumed to be dead. It would have been bad taste for Kipling to make more of it than that. The author subsumed his family’s affliction in the larger sacrifice of the regiment. Kipling wrote the book (a fine example of regimental history, as you would expect—a brisk, vivid tick-tock of life in the trenches on the Western Front) as a memorial to his son and a tribute to the men with whom he served. It was Kipling’s way of coping with his grief—and with the guilt that he must have felt for having pulled strings to get his much-too-young and near-sighted boy into the Irish Guards in the first place.”

Photos: Idaho

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