Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Diamond Life:

Zora Neale Hurston’s

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Originally Published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

Among the most dazzling gems of American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God stands confidently in the company of such tautly shimmering masterpieces as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, each of these novels’ slim volumes serving as the receptacle of entire universes that have been hewn with diamond-tipped virtuosity and forged into eternal works of art.

First published in 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God was a financial success, but it was extremely unpopular among many of Hurston’s African-American peers. Hurston wrote the novel in what today is known as Ebonics, and authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison lambasted it as backwards and Uncle-Tommish, a work that they felt didn’t help African-American writers gain any kind of serious literary voice or stature. Compounding the issue was the fact that Hurston was an anti-integrationist Republican who was lauded by whites who shared her beliefs, much in the same way that some of Malcolm X’s views would later be embraced by White Supremacists. It’s possible that today Hurston would simply be considered Afrocentric, but in her time her keen focus on African-American culture and dialect—she was a highly educated anthropologist and folklorist—caused her to be criticized of “ghettoizing” the literature of a people that was desperately trying to escape marginalization.

Again, today’s perspective might argue that rather than trying to write “protest” novels that exposed wrongs and promoted change, she was simply portraying and celebrating a culture that she felt was as valid and valuable and as worthy of high artistic representation as any other. But she didn’t live in our time, of course, and once her white admirers lost interest in her, she descended into obscurity and eventually died penniless in 1960, to be buried in an unmarked grave and almost totally forgotten.

Her work had been long out of print by the time of her death, but thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker and others in the 1970s, Hurston’s books received a second chance at life, and since then Their Eyes Were Watching God has singled itself out as a particularly astonishing work of art and has finally ascended to its deserved status as one of America’s true literary masterpieces. Recently reading this amazing book for the third time, it struck me as a strong contender for Greatest American Novel, matching Huck Finn’s oscillating complexity and maybe even surpassing The Scarlet Letter’s magical seamlessness.

Written while Hurston was doing field research in Haiti, Their Eyes Were Watching God takes place in Florida and tells the story of Janie Crawford, following her through her childhood and through three very different marriages, from the vantage-point of a forty-something Janie who’s telling her friend Phoeby about her life so that Phoeby can tell the gossiping community the truth about her. Only at times voiced in Janie’s direct speech, with Hurston very sophisticatedly refracting most of the novel through her main character’s unique mind and history to project an inventively original narrative language onto the page, Janie’s singular existence strikes the reader as startlingly unique, her unforgettably distinct personality comparable to that of Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield, and her story is as equally penetrating as the language that tells it.

“Oh to be a Pear Tree,” Ann Tanksley, 2009 

Seeing the young Janie’s budding sexuality beginning to break loose, her grandmother marries her off young in an attempt to give her a stable life, but the girl’s early erotic reveries under a wild pear tree, watching the bees penetrate the calyxes in an orgiastic swarm, permanently orient her personality so that she yearns for both stimulation and satisfaction, leading her to follow a number of forking paths in her attempt to get her adult self back to that wild garden. Simply abandoning her first husband for the more ambitious Joe Starks, the still-young Janie accompanies her second husband as he lights out to found his own mini-universe, an all-Black town called Eatonville, which was a fictionalized version of a real Eatonville in Florida that Hurston cleverly kept the name of because of its serendipitous invocation of an “Eden town.” Setting himself up as a kind of Old Testament creator—note the ceremony that he makes when he installs the town’s first street lamp, letting there be light, as well as his favorite exclamation when agitated: “I god,” rather than “my god,” as if in anger he were merely invoking himself—he also exemplifies all of the Hebrew god’s childish narcissism, jealously demanding more and more devotion from Janie while offering none in return, as if doting attention were his birthright. After twenty miserable, abusive years together, with her pedestalled position as shopgirl in Joe’s store offering her no chance for self-expression or satisfaction, he finally dies—but not before she finally upbraids him for “worshippin’ de works of yo’ own hands”—and Janie suddenly finds herself financially independent and the master of her own world, and consequently in great demand among the entire state’s suitors, who all want to put her back in her place.

Michael Ealy and Halle Berry in the 2005 film
version of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Among her more persistent romantic supplicants, pressing his cause distantly through Janie’s friend Phoeby, is an undertaker from Sanford, but Janie tells Phoeby that she loves her freedom too much to think about anything like that just yet. Only one page later a younger man calling himself Tea Cake comes into her store and wakes up her long-dormant curiosity about life, treating her as the equal she is and rapidly opening up capacities in her that she’d never expected to find in herself. He teaches her to play checkers, which had been something her former husband had excluded her from, and she joyfully reflects to herself that “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play.” He teaches her to shoot a gun, and she quickly becomes a better shot than him. Not patronizing her at all, but rather marveling at how exceptional she is and how well matched they are, Tea Cake draws her out and shows her a new way of life, and a new self in herself that she’d almost stopped thinking she could ever achieve. Finally marrying for love—and also for the wild lust that had lain long dormant inside of her—Janie embarks on a life of her own choosing. Tea Cake is an unreliable drifter, and their relationship is far from perfect, but their love is all the more powerful and true for its flaws and fluctuations, and the couple gets to experience each other to the most profound depths.

As when Huck and Jim’s boat-trip down the Mississippi takes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into the strangest and most relative territory, the overwhelming reality and surreality of nature suddenly heighten Their Eyes Were Watching God to a near-dreamlike state when the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane hits Florida and subjects all living beings to its mindless and merciless power. Janie and Tea Cake survive, but after a biblically freakish series of occurrences leads Tea Cake to be bitten by a rabid dog that he’s trying to protect her from during the hurricane’s hallucinatory aftermath, Janie is forced to use her recently learned handiness with a gun to shoot him in self-defense when he goes mad from contracting the disease and tries to kill her. A subsequent trial acquits her of murder, but afterward Janie is tired of life and wants to recede from it, and so she returns to Eatonville and tells Phoeby her story.

Untitled, Jerry Pinkney, 1991

One of the rarely discussed enigmas of Their Eyes Were Watching God is that after Janie shoots Tea Cake, she holds him in her arms while he madly sinks his teeth into her during his death throes. The novel never again discusses this bite, which may or may not have transmitted the disease to Janie. Hurston cleverly arranges the events between the bite and Janie’s resigned retirement to be almost the exact same amount of time that it took for Tea Cake to develop symptoms, and the fact that the novel very deliberately doesn’t address Janie’s wound anywhere in its final pages leaves a vast ambiguity. Does Janie choose to follow Tea Cake in death? Is this novel, a story told to Phoeby—whose name means “moon” and suggests the reflection of light—her last testament? Or is she perhaps just telling her tale without knowing for sure what kind of life or death awaits her after she survives these crucial events?

Discussed even less often than this question is Hurston’s extraordinarily sly and sophisticated literary program for the novel. Using names and imagery that call up a vivid tapestry of literary and biblical associations, she asserts herself as one of the most cannily allusive of the great modernist masters. Joe Starks’ role as Old Testament deity is fairly overtly laid out, but Tea Cake’s personality and role seem so wholly and vividly original that readers can easily overlook the many layers of symbolism that Hurston builds around him. The reference that’s hiding in the plainest sight is that Tea Cake’s name is an allusion to the most famous tea cake in all of literature: the madeleine in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In Proust’s associative cosmos, an entire 4,000+ page novel arises from the sense memories that spring from a chance combination of dipping a madeleine cookie into a cup of tea, a blend of flavors that his narrator hadn’t tasted in decades and that resurrects in him an entire universe of lost time within his super-sensitive frame. The word “resurrects” is key to the association, because in Proust the madeleine and tea are a kind of secular Eucharist, a bread and wine that reclaim new life within the seemingly dead. With this as part of Tea Cake’s literary baggage, Hurston has him usher in a new dispensation for Janie, figuratively saving her life as he delivers her back to the lost garden and then literally saving it when he takes the dog bite that in the hurricane’s oneiric aftermath seemed to have been destined for her. While Hurston never heavy-handedly makes him into a Christ figure, making sure that he’s his own vividly original entity and that her playful allusions remain mere shading, she nevertheless uses a lot of the same imagery for him that’s typically associated with Jesus. Most notably, Hurston uses a lot of son/sun metaphors to describe him, having Janie lament after his death that “Tea Cake, son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.” On the novel’s final page, after Janie ascends the steps to her old upstairs bedroom in Eatonville, she reflects, “Tea Cake, with the Sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.” This brilliantly subtle sun-shading suggests volumes’ worth of associative links, while still allowing the characters’ original lights to shine for themselves.

“Janie and Tea Cake," relentlesscritic, 2010

The other half of Tea Cake’s literary resonance arises from his other, real, name, Vergible Woods, which he only mentions once, just before he introduces himself to Janie as Tea Cake. Offhandedly tossing this name aside, Hurston allows the inattentive reader to overlook it and move on, but when unpacking this character’s many strata his true name fairly clearly asserts itself as a reference to the beginning of the Divine Comedy, when Vergil/Virgil arrives to help Dante out of the darkened woods, which the pilgrim has lost his way in and is attempting to escape by trying to follow the sun, “the planet/that leads men straight ahead on every road,” but which he’s lost sight of because he’s looked back (as in the stories of the classical Orpheus and the Biblical Lot) and been distracted by a series of simultaneously real and symbolized wild animals. Thus, Tea Cake is both the Virgilian guide out of the woods and the sun toward which the lost pilgrim strives for salvation. Perhaps he’s also even the woods itself. Tying this Dante/Virgil aspect of his name to the Proustian aspect of his name is the scene at the end of Proust’s first volume, Swann’s Way. Prefiguring the fugitive years of the full novel’s subsequent half-dozen volumes, Proust’s narrator as an old man walks through the Bois de Boulogne (the Boulogne Woods), disgusted by the havoc that’s been done to the faces that he knew from the past, lamenting all that’s changed and been forever lost (in Moncrieff’s translation):

Alas! in the acacia-avenue—the myrtle-alley—I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what once they had been, wandering to and fro, in desperate search of heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun’s face was hidden. 

This is not the blissful grove of the blessed from Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid, but rather the sylvan nightmare that the poeticized Virgil finds the medieval Dante in (or it’s perhaps a combination of the two, since Proust never looked anything up and often confused and conflated his remembered references), and so with the sun’s face hidden in these Virgilian woods (dans les bosquets virgiliens, a phrase that Hurston transforms into the name Vergible Woods), Proust and his entire cast of characters are as lost as Dante at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, and by using just a few brilliantly placed words and names, Hurston conjures up all these associations as mere background coloring for a novel that’s as vibrant and complex and original as any of the classics that exist in its wake.

A true master, Hurston also remembers to balance all this gravity with a heaping helping of levity, and as she opens up the novel’s field of play she repeatedly references the greatest comic novel of them all: Don Quixote. One of Hurston’s most inspired bits is the tale of Matt Bonner’s mule, a miniature tragicomedy about a scrawny, abused beast of burden whose shiftless owner is Eatonville’s favorite figure of fun. Describing the mule in much of the same language that Cervantes uses to describe Quixote’s bony nag, Rocinante, Hurston brutalizes this poor creature and his owner with a hilariously inspired cruelty that nearly equals Cervantes’ relentless pummeling of Quixote and his ever-suffering steed. Perhaps, as in the case of Don Quixote, Hurston also draws inspiration from Apuleius’ second-century novel The Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), which follows the travails of a man who’s been transformed into a donkey and endures relentless abuse before finding salvation through the cult of Isis. Perhaps the strangest and most inspired part of the tale of Matt Bonner’s mule comes after the mule’s death, when a council of buzzards convenes to discuss and devour its remains. Holding up the proceedings, the buzzards’ parson asks his congregants about the mule’s death:  “What killed this man,” he intones two times, and the chorus responds each time with the phrase, “Bare, bare fat.” What this means is simply beyond me.

Drawing upon another one of Cervantes’ greatest set-pieces, the brawl at the inn near the end of the first part of Don Quixote, Hurston has Tea Cake raise a similar ruckus at a restaurant owned by a light-skinned black woman named Mrs. Turner, who’s been trying to lead the light-skinned Janie away from the dark-skinned Tea Cake and toward her own brother. Pretending to break up a fight in Mrs. Turner’s restaurant, Tea Cake in fact precipitates a wild melee whose riotous domino effect clearly mimics Cervantes’ brilliantly snowballing free-for-all, leaving the restaurant in a hilarious shambles. His agitation over Mrs. Turner’s brother returns, though, when he’s going mad from rabies and starts to fantasize that the ostensible suitor has returned after the hurricane to lure Janie away from him. His warped mind supposing that Janie’s been visiting Mrs. Turner’s brother when she was in fact out trying to get medical help, he accuses her again and again, and Janie discovers that he’s keeping a loaded pistol under his pillow. When he’s off in the outhouse she checks and sees that three of the six chambers have bullets in them, and so in order to give herself some warning time she spins the cylinder so that the first three attempted shots will be harmless. Finally losing his mind soon afterward, he aims at her and tries to shoot, the three clicks giving her time to grab the rifle that she’d hidden in the kitchen and to shoot him in self-defense, just as his fourth squeeze rings out, “the pistol just enough after the rifle to seem its echo.” Having Janie kill him with this Chekhovian rifle—and with the rising tension at each of the three clicks’ inevitable rush toward death perhaps suggesting the three times that, as per Jesus’ prediction, the Apostle Peter denies his master before the cock crows at dawn—Hurston ties up several of the novel’s interlocking themes in one elegantly bloody swoop.

Burying Tea Cake right before the novel’s end, Janie finally has her date with the undertaker, who in lieu of having become her third husband instead prepares her third husband for burial. It’s probably not the same undertaker as her earlier off-stage suitor, but bringing back this sepulchral theme vividly signals Janie’s full-circle growth between the deaths of her second and third husbands. Ingeniously tying up these remaining thematic loose ends with Tea Cake’s funeral—and with the lunar Phoeby set to reflect the light of the solar Tea Cake into the future—Hurston then opens the novel’s final end completely, leaving Janie’s ultimate fate as suggestively unresolved as any of the plots of the century’s subsequent postmodernist novels—particularly The Crying of Lot 49, which takes this device to its logical/illogical end. Does Tea Cake bring her death as well as life? Do we owe our sacrificing saviors the same price that they paid for us? Is death the full consummation of life? While Janie’s ambiguous resignation after Tea Cake’s death leaves the novel with a universe of echoing questions, its simultaneously succinct and resonant resolution also encloses her life on the page in a diamond-like artistic encapsulation. Hers is a story whose brilliantly hewn facets shine on far afield of the novel’s end, her life beyond this book’s deliberately brief 200 pages constantly bringing us back to marvel at its seemingly miraculously composition. Likewise, Hurston’s masterwork lives on far past the author’s decline and death and nearly complete literary oblivion to rise up and illuminate the generations of readers who will keep this radiant novel alive long past their own short times on Earth, its durable pigments resurrecting itself again and again, Phoenix-like, to live on in permanent literary immortality.

—David Wiley

Helen Keller’s Certain Slant

Helen Keller’s Certain Slant

Originally published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

There are a handful of special writers whose works truly show us what it’s like to be a living, breathing human being. Shakespeare comes most quickly to mind, holding “as ’twere the/mirror up to nature,” and among poets Emily Dickinson may come soon afterward in her ability to make us re-perceive that “certain slant of light” that we all feel so palpably as we turn through the universe. Among prose writers, St. Augustine and Marcel Proust are the two who I’ve always felt to be the most penetrating and thorough in their explications of what it’s like to be us, exploring the vast hall of memory and describing the sensations of human existence on a level that’s almost as profound as existence itself. Freud at his best can also show us what it’s like to feel and to perceive and to be human, his extraordinary prose excavating the disparate strata of the mind to such a degree that, as with Augustine, it transcends whether he’s actually right or wrong about anything. Lately, though, my sense of self-existence has been most deeply illuminated by a writer who is currently much less celebrated—a writer who perhaps surpasses Augustine in her ability to plumb the mind and who even rivals Proust in her ability to describe the deepest and innermost sensations, and who does so with the possession of only three of the five senses: Helen Keller.

Helen Keller with Mark Twain

Keller and her writing have only come into eclipse in the past few decades; in her time, Winston Churchill called her “the greatest woman of our age,” and in a perhaps even more accurate (and less sexist) assessment, Keller’s friend Mark Twain said that she was “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. . . . She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.” In a 2003 essay for The New Yorker, “What Helen Keller Saw” (collected in her 2006 book The Din in the Head), Cynthia Ozick writes that Keller’s current relative obscurity stems from criticism of how “literary” her writing is—“literary” in terms of being influenced by books as ostensibly opposed to being influenced by first-hand experience. Ozick successfully defends Keller’s high literary quality by arguing that almost all writers learn to write best by reading and that all writers go into great detail about things that they’ve never seen or experienced with their own immediate senses. After all, is it in any way probable that Dante really saw anything that he wrote about in his Comedy (a poem whose working title was Vision) or that he learned to write (and imagine) so well without reading deeply in Virgil, Ovid, or Apuleius—or in Biblical literature, whose utterly outlandish and fantastical elements created much of the template for the medieval Florentine’s “high fantasy?” And could he have designed such an elaborately tactile world and universe—especially one that doesn’t correspond very closely to reality—without studying how people described them in all the known scientific and theological texts?

Helen Keller and family at Niagara Falls

What many critics seem to ignore is that Keller probably had more tactile experience with the world than not just the majority of the world’s greatest writers, but than most of the rest of humanity. She loved the outdoors, and she strove to experience it (and to describe it) in ways rarely seen in even the finest naturalists. With the near-constant companionship and assistance of Anne Sullivan, her extraordinary teacher and friend, she rode tandem bikes and horses, rowed boats, explored the woods, climbed trees, went swimming, examined insects, played with animals, and grew to understand the relationships between the earth and sky and trees and rivers and human beings in ways that perhaps few people with sight or hearing have ever known. Through her constant explorations, she developed a profoundly intimate understanding of how the world works, is arranged, and even “looks.” She may not have literally been able to see or hear Niagara Falls, but her descriptions of climbing the stairs down into its tumult and of crossing the bridge that connects the American side to the Canadian side—and especially of her simply astonishing experience of putting her hands to her hotel room’s window and feeling the overwhelming power of the Falls’ vibrations—allow us to see and hear this natural wonder ourselves and become convinced that she experienced them as movingly as did any of her companions.

Helen Keller feeling the vibrations of music

As with her hotel window, she also had literal hands-on experience with much of the culture that we’d think of as closed to her. When she visited museums she was almost always given special permission to examine the sculptures with her hands, and this was one of her greatest pleasures. Her understanding of form and style were suffused with both a sophistication and an unjaded awe that would have made her a first-rate art critic. She couldn’t see paintings, of course, but she delighted in having them described to her in detail, and she took great interest in new exhibitions and in how people received and reacted to them. She was also fascinated with music, and whenever she went to a church the organist would usually give her a private recital and allow her to feel the vibrations encompass her body. As anyone who’s felt a great church organ shake their bones knows, this is literally a moving experience. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that she took singing lessons (to help strengthen her speaking voice, although she predictably became fascinated with the sounds that she was capable of making) and that she even went so far as to take piano lessons—an experiment that didn’t go very far but that she greatly enjoyed.

Helen Keller with Charlie Chaplin

Returning to language (as Keller always did), it’s also important to remember that Keller’s linguistic world was far from a “merely” literary one. She was in constant conversation and correspondence of all forms, and her urge to communicate and be communicated with extended far beyond the realms of gold that lay between the pages of books. She used the manual alphabet to converse with those who knew it (it was an early form of sign-language that used only letters, and she taught it to anyone she could), and with those who didn’t know it, she read their lips with her fingers, and when conversing with her friends she felt for their facial expressions so that she could gauge the full intent and meaning by reading, as she called it, “the twist of the mouth.” She also spent much of her life improving her vocal speech so that she could be understood more fluently and have as an immediate and unmitigated intercourse with reality as words can allow.

Keller’s uncanny ability to perceive often caused people to imagine that she had a kind of “sixth sense,” but in reality this was just her finely attuned sensitivity to the world of communication that surrounds and produces language. In October of 1888, when Keller was just eight years old and had been learning language for about a year and a half, Anne Sullivan reported on her student’s remarkable progress over the previous year:

Her sense of touch has sensibly increased during the year, and has gained in acuteness and delicacy. Indeed, her whole body is so finely organized that she seems to use it as a medium for bringing herself into closer relations with her fellow creatures. She is able not only to distinguish with great accuracy the different undulations of the air and the vibrations of the floor made by various sounds and motions, and to recognize her friends and acquaintances the instant she touches their hands or clothing, but she also perceives the state of mind of those around her. It is impossible for any one with whom Helen is conversing to be particularly happy or sad, and withhold the knowledge of this fact from her.

She observes the slightest emphasis placed upon a word in conversation, and she discovers meaning in every change of position, and in the varied play of the muscles of the hand. She responds quickly to the gentle pressure of affection, the pat of approval, the jerk of impatience, the firm motion of command, and to the many other variations of the almost infinite language of the feelings; and she has become so expert in interpreting this unconscious language of the emotions that she is often able to divine our very thoughts.

Keller’s was a living language, and her experience of the world was clearly as genuine as anybody else’s, and anyone who denies this is simply ignoring the exuberant human being who virtually leaps off the pages of her books to show us the universe’s wonders.

Helen Keller with Anne Sullivan

Another common criticism of Keller is that her self-conception was merely an extension of Sullivan’s and that her entire personality was nothing more than a mimetic fraud. This notion is simply laughable, as anyone who’s read Keller and Sullivan can see that the two women were vastly different in their temperaments, in their ideas, and even (or perhaps most tellingly) in their writing style. While both were extremely intelligent and shared similar kinds of energy and humor and willfulness, Keller was much more enthusiastic and idealistic and optimistic, and her writing was playful and inventive and searching, while Sullivan was pragmatic and sometimes even pessimistic and fatalistic, with a writing style that was much more analytical and deliberate. Sullivan was widely admired and respected, but it was Keller who so charmed and amazed everyone she met, from the most famous intelligentsia of the time to any of the neighborhood children who came her way. Keller’s consciousness and personality were stubbornly original, and her abilities and ideas far exceeded those of Sullivan, at times exhausting and even exasperating her, and if anything, Sullivan had to scramble to keep up with her student’s ever-expanding consciousness. Sullivan also railed against the early exaggerations that sprang up around her progress with Keller, and she would have been embarrassed by the notion of being any kind of “miracle worker.” She was certainly brilliant, and her experience with Keller definitely gives us a sense of divine wonder, but mostly she was just a hardworking teacher, driven by the need to make a living and inspired by the astonishing abilities that she discovered and fostered in the student assigned to her. She was no molder of souls, and no matter how much genius she possessed, she was no creative genius, and she could have created neither Keller’s books nor the genius herself who wrote those books. Sullivan may have set Keller’s living world back into motion, but it’s Keller who shines as the most prime luminary, both in the innumerable testimonies left by those she met and affected and in the body of writing that she left for the rest of us to marvel at.

Aside from her legacy of advocacy and activism (which is remarkable), most of what Keller has left us exists in this body of writing, and perhaps this is why some critics attack her as merely bookish and literary. But even if we set aside the rest of Keller’s enormous existence and just focused on her linguistic, artistic, and intellectual mastery (which would be absurd), we would still be confronted with a literary mind of the very highest order, and this is something to be celebrated and explored rather than dismissed. Her books tell us in great detail about the facts of her life—indeed, her life is as inseparable from her books as books were inseparable from her life—but a quick biographical sketch may help spur the uninitiated to delve into her marvelous life-works:

During a severe illness, Keller lost her sight and hearing at the age of nineteen months, and she lived with her family in Alabama as a kind of domestic savage until, after years of searching for either a teacher or a cure, the Kellers contacted Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who referred them to Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind. Modern science and psychology believe that most of our personality and linguistic capacity are intact (or at least engaged and initiated) before the age of two, and Keller’s case seems to confirm this. As anyone with sight and hearing does when growing up surrounded by other people, the toddler had acquired rudimentary spoken and symbolic language by the time she was stricken with her sickness, and even though it was five years before her family’s efforts resulted in the Perkins Institute sending Anne Sullivan to help her develop her dormant skills, she retained the ability to use simple signs and gestures to indicate her needs. Most interesting—and also oddly literary, in light of the experience that brought language back to life for her—is that she remembered how to make the sound signifying “water” (“wah-wah”) and continued to use this sound during the years before she learned how to spell the word.

Helen Keller with Anne Sullivan

Then came the justifiably famous “miracle at the well” (which was actually in an enclosed cistern-house): On April 5th, 1887, after less than a month of using the manual alphabet to teach Keller words, which the girl somewhat apishly learned and repeated back to her, Sullivan signed the word “water” into Keller’s hand while well-water rushed over her other hand, and suddenly the six-year-old lit up. She’d been having trouble distinguishing between the meanings of the words for “mug” and “water,” which to her mind were the same thing, and when she suddenly realized that “water” was a distinct entity and that “w-a-t-e-r” was its linguistic symbol, it became clear to her that “everything has a name, and that the manual alphabet is the key to everything she wants to know” (Sullivan’s words and italics).

Her progress grew rapidly from this moment. She soon learned how to write with a pencil, and after two and a half months she wrote and mailed her first letter:

helen write anna george will give helen apple simpson will shoot bird jack will give helen stick of candy doctor will give mildred medicine mother will make mildred new dress

She soon learned to write in Braille, and eventually with a typewriter, and the following year she was not only writing in full idiomatic English, but was peppering her letters with the French and Greek phrases that she’d learned from friends, and in one letter she even explained the Latin etymology for the word “astronomer.” At age seven she had an audience with President Grover Cleveland; at age eight she was corresponding with her favorite poets; and soon afterward she was immersed in French, German, Latin, and Greek. She read Paradise Lost on a trainride when she was twelve, and her mastery of language eventually allowed her to graduate cum laude with a B.A. in English from Radcliffe and to write fourteen books throughout her lifetime. She wrote her first book, The Story of My Life, while she was a sophomore at Radcliffe, and it’s this book that contains the best document of the mind that grew so rapidly from the big bang of “w-a-t-e-r” to encompass universal dimensions.

The Story of My Life is in fact three books in one—an autobiography, a collection of Keller’s letters, and a compilation of letters and documents written by Sullivan and Keller, the latter two parts of the book edited and commented upon by their friend (and future husband to Sullivan) John Macy. The book was originally published in 1903, but throughout the twentieth century many editions have comprised just the autobiography or just the autobiography and Keller’s letters, leaving out the valuable documentary evidence that surrounds her brilliant written account of herself. In 2003, two different restored centennial editions were published, once again giving us the fuller volume that the original book contained, but even though Sullivan’s brilliantly illuminating letters (and much of Macy’s commentary) are invaluable to understanding the entire story of Helen Keller, it’s Keller’s writing itself that’s supreme and that stands as one of the greatest records of living human experience.

Written in serial form for magazines and then meticulously revised and woven together into a seamless tapestry, The Story of My Life tells not just the remarkable story of a remarkable young woman in remarkable circumstances; it shows us life on earth as lived by that most remarkable of creatures: human beings. Keller’s supremacy as a writer is in many ways comparable to Vladimir Nabokov’s, and the main similarity between the two writers is that English was always something of a foreign language that they explored from both within and without. Keller became perfectly fluent in all of the nuances of the living language, but she also never stopped seeing it as an object to be manipulated to achieve amazing effects, just the way that Nabokov would do later in the century when he stopped writing in Russian and began writing in English. What makes The Story of My Life even more fascinating is that this linguistic objectivity mirrors the objectivity of Keller’s journey from being a near-savage to becoming one of humanity’s greatest representatives. Just as language was a kind of foreign language to Keller, so was human existence itself (in a later book, The World I Live In, she wrote, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world.”), and her descriptions of the endless discovery of the self’s relationship to the universe astonish us into seeing things that our sight and hearing may never have allowed us to see or hear on our own.

One of the most revelatory scenes in the book is when she describes learning about the existence of fossils and being utterly astonished at the age of the earth. For humanity in general—and for each of us in particular—this kind of vastness has never been easy to comprehend, but for someone who’d only recently existed in a kind of eternal nowness, this experience of suddenly being thrust into the fabric of a fathomless continuum is overwhelming, and her description of how this shift affected her strikes the reader afresh with the utterly inconceivable mystery of time.

Keller’s narrative powers are as dramatic and as highly developed as her intellectual faculties, and one of the most moving scenes in the book—moving at once in an existential sense and in an immediate life-and-death sense—is the scene when she becomes trapped in a cherry tree during a thunderstorm. Keller and Sullivan had been out on a long walk, and they stopped to climb a tree to relax before heading home, and as the day was so pleasant, Sullivan decided to go home to bring back a picnic basket so that they could prolong their enjoyment. A short time after leaving Keller in the tree, however, a violent and unexpected storm moved in. Keller could feel a palpable shift in the atmosphere immediately, and when the storm arrived full force, her terror of aloneness in the face of possible annihilation rose to a histrionic pitch. Keller was only a foot or two from the ground, but she had no idea how to get down safely, and as I read this scene with shaking hands, I thought of Homer (one of Keller’s very favorites) and how his description of Odysseus’ nearly endless battle to survive the waves crashing him up toward and back away from the Scherian shore makes us feel the astonishing power and danger of nature, whose caprices can cut us down even when safety is just a short leap away.

Keller’s full power comes most dramatically alive when describing the scene at the well, of course, because she weaves together almost every aspect of her existential experience on earth into a tour-de-force of self-discovery, the depths of the scene’s sensual and intellectual self-revelation prefiguring (and perhaps even matching) Proust’s celebrated “madeleine” scene in In Search of Lost Time.

Interestingly, one of the two recently restored editions of The Story of My Life was co-edited by Roger Shattuck, the renowned Proust scholar, along with Keller’s most recent biographer, Dorothy Herrmann. As was Proust’s method of revision, Shattuck and Herrmann have extended and rearranged the book, giving us back all the original material and a bit more, but even though the few additions are enlightening and welcome (especially two of Keller’s later recountings of the scene at the well), the re-ordering of the book-sections to suit the editors’ priorities isn’t so welcome. They feel that the brilliant Anne Sullivan gets buried in the third section of the original book, so they take her letters and reports and place them after the autobiography and some of Keller's miscellaneous writings (also extracted from the original third section of the book). This separates Keller’s memoir from her amazing letters, which in this edition are placed at the end of the original book’s material, after even John Macy’s section of writing. The editors’ stress on the profound mutual relationship between Keller and Sullivan is understandable, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of keeping Keller from the literal front and center of the book. Her letters give voice and texture to the bounding girl described in the young woman’s autobiography, and they should be read one after the other. Anyone who’s read the book in its original form will never underestimate Sullivan, because the long and detailed third section gives a deep and lasting portrait that fills out and complements Keller’s sections. Shattuck and Herrmann do excellent editorial work, though, contributing two informative essays by Shattuck, a thorough Index, a good list of additional sources, and very helpful notes to the book by Herrmann. Especially helpful are Herrmann’s elucidation of Keller’s numerous literary allusions, many of which are already clear but some of which are dated and are no longer commonly known (there are occasional lapses here, though, as when for example Herrmann doesn’t know that Old Mortality is a novel by Sir Walter Scott). In all, this is a very useful edition, but I suggest that you play hopscotch with it and read all of Keller’s writing together before delving into Sullivan and Macy.

The other recent edition was edited (and only mostly restored) by the academic critic James Berger, whose process was rather to cut sections that he deemed either redundant within the original text (he even excised fifteen of Keller’s letters!) or redundant because they dealt with things that he’d explained in his preface, an outrageous editorial hubris reminiscent of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire. Berger’s notes are helpful—although much less belletristic than Herrmann’s, as Berger is more literate in a “cultural studies” way than he is in a literary way—but his effrontery in trying to streamline this “restored” edition to fit his own writing and ideas can be maddening.

One of the most illuminating episodes in Keller’s life and mind is the “Frost King” debacle, when at age eleven Keller unconsciously plagiarized Margaret Canby’s story “The Frost Fairies,” which she’d read years earlier, completely forgotten about, and then drawn from her deep reservoir of impressions and rewritten as her own. The original edition of The Story of My Life contains both full stories in section three, but in order to make things ostensibly “easier” for the reader, Berger only juxtaposes short sections of the two stories to show key similarities and differences. It makes clear that Keller was the better and more original writer—a fascinatingly pre-Borgesian concept that even Canby concedes—but the full texture and approach of the stories are missing, actually making things harder for the reader. What’s even worse about this editorial choice is that Keller’s story is pure shimmering gold (as is anything that she wrote) and offers us the rarest glimpse into her creative mind—as well as into the endlessly fascinating process of how memory and creativity can work—and expurgating it cheats the reader of the full insights offered by this intriguing incident. Thankfully, Shattuck and Herrmann leave this section as it is and let us do the thinking for ourselves. I don’t understand why someone can’t simply restore the book to its original form, though, adding only notes, a few other textual aids, and a couple of essays so that new bookbuyers don’t have to consult multiple editions. But again, it’s Keller’s autobiography and letters that are the greatest treasures here, and any reader will be deeply moved by just reading them alone. Your choice of editions, whether full, rearranged, mostly full, or partial, can make a big difference in how far you’re able to descend into Keller’s remarkable life, but it’s her writing itself that’s the most direct gateway into her remarkable mind.

If you just want to read the autobiography and the letters, the current Signet paperback edition contains these two sections of the book in their pristine form, although the book’s introduction by writer Jim Knipfel is at times begrudging and at other times shockingly belligerent. There are many angles and trajectories into Keller’s illuminating writing and life experience, but it’s only Keller herself who can provide that certain slant that allows you the most deep and lasting penetration into her remarkable self. Ephemeral commentators and editors can add and take away, but it’s Keller who will last. As Twain wrote, she is one of the immortals, and even though our current culture may have become temporarily blind and deaf to her singular voice, the centuries will almost certainly choose her to sing our story.

—David Wiley

Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold His Shadow

A Necessary Darkness:

Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel:

The Man Who Sold His Shadow

Originally published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page

In the Jewish tradition a “schlemiel” is someone who attracts endless bad luck. The butt of so many Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks antics, a schlemiel will slip on a banana peel and slide into the cake at his boss’ wedding reception, losing his job, his fiancée, and his toupee at the same time. I first came across the term (aside from hearing it in the Laverne & Shirley theme) in Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., in which one of the main characters, Benny Profane, serves as the universal victim. After devouring and loving V. as a young reader, I soon came across a recently re-translated novel called Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold His Shadow, a slim volume written by an author I’d never heard of: Adelbert von Chamisso.

In his Introduction, translator Peter Wortsman describes Chamisso as a writer trapped between two homelands and languages. Born Louis Charles Adelaïde de Chamisso de Boncourt in France, the author grew up and studied in Berlin, his family having fled the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in 1890 when the boy was just nine years old. In Berlin Chamisso served as a page for Emperor Wilhelm Friederich’s wife and eventually entered the Prussian army, which put him in a dire position when in 1806, during the war between France and Prussia, Napoleon decreed execution for any Frenchman discovered in foreign military service. After the war, Chamisso found himself still stuck between two hostile cultures, and when war broke out between France and Prussia again in 1813, he retreated to a friend’s estate and composed Peter Schlemiel to entertain himself and his friend’s children.

Clearly influenced by Goethe’s Faust and by the ubiquitous German folktales that the Brothers Grimm were just beginning to publish, Peter Schlemiel somehow remains one of the most original and haunting works in Western literature. It prefigures Poe and Kleist and Kafka and Borges and the magical realists of the twentieth century; it’s referenced several times in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and when postmodernist Italo Calvino was asked what work by another author he would most like to claim as his own, he unhesitatingly replied, “Peter Schlemiel.”

The novella begins with the eponymous narrator describing his arrival at an unnamed port-town, his sole prospect and hope being an introduction that he carries in his pocket to a rich and influential landowner named Mr. Thomas John. At Mr. John’s estate Schlemiel is virtually ignored during an afternoon party, and so he mostly stands aside and observes the unusual goings-on. Most remarkable to him is a strange man in gray, whom the party hardly notices but who, when anyone mentions needing anything to make their day more amusing or comfortable, miraculously pulls it from his pocket. He first produces a bandage for a woman’s finger, followed by a large telescope, a luxurious Turkish carpet, a tent to cover the carpet, and finally three beautiful horses. The party pays no attention to the man in gray, and when the narrator makes an inquiry about him, it seems that nobody knows the strange man or even notes his presence.

Fleeing the party in fear and disgust, Schlemiel then finds himself pursued by the man in gray, and when the man overtakes him, he politely allows himself to be drawn into a conversation that leads to a most unusual proposition: The man wants to purchase Schlemiel’s shadow—his “lovely, lovely shadow.” After naming a series of fantastic objects in trade for Schlemiel’s shadow, the man quickly comes to the one item that Schlemiel, in his unfulfilled quest for financial prospects, cannot resist: a purse from which he can draw an endless amount of gold. The deal immediately made, the man in gray rolls up Schlemiel’s shadow from the ground, folds it into his mysterious pocket, and then before leaving says that he’ll return a year later to see if the deal is still satisfactory.

Dazzled by the brightness that he’s traded his shadow for, Schlemiel then very quickly finds himself the object of fear and derision, and he suddenly has to find refuge among shadows, where his strange condition goes unnoticed. He throws gold in every direction in order to buy solitude, secluding himself in the deepest recesses of a series of inns and estates to buffer himself from human notice.

True to his name, nothing goes right for Schlemiel, but none of his problems are comic. By elaborate means of obfuscation, he tries to re-enter human society, but his ruses are constantly discovered. In high German Romantic fashion, he eventually finds true love with an innocent young girl named Mina, from whom he seems to have kept his secret, and just as they’re finalizing their nuptial plans, Schlemiel’s unscrupulous major-domo exposes him. The traitor has hoarded millions in gold and offers himself to Mina as a more suitable husband, but at that point it’s only a few days until the man in gray is due to come back to re-evaluate the deal, and so Schlemiel promises to produce his shadow to Mina’s family so that he can marry their daughter. Otherwise, Mina will immediately be handed over to marry the traitor. When when the man in gray finally arrives, however, with just enough time left to return the shadow to its rightful owner and avert disaster, he has no interest at all in the gold-producing purse. The price for the shadow is now Schlemiel’s soul.

The imminent process of decision-making and subsequent consequences make this book into a profoundly affecting examination of the meanings of light and dark—and of how our every decision both narrows and opens our futures to the possibilities of damnation and redemption. The novel is framed as a letter written by the aging Schlemiel to Chamisso as a kind of last testament, and as we read these marvelous pages, we see in their resigned words to an old friend the varied paths of our own mutable fates.

I recently read the book aloud to a friend, and we both found ourselves entirely rapt by its astonishing progressions—for both similar and different reasons. We both loved the story and the storytelling and the details and the endless levels of meaning that it all encompasses, but my auditor remarked that she found herself having to accept the most fantastic events and progressions and that she never knew where it could all possibly go. The book’s hypnotic momentum and its final totality held it all together for her, though, and she was deeply moved in a way that was similar to my initial reading more than a decade and a half earlier. Nabokov always claimed that there were no good readers, however, only good re-readers, and as I read the book aloud as a somewhat older man, I saw and heard how seamlessly and even inevitably Chamisso’s masterpiece moves through its metamorphoses. It seems at first to take outlandish steps in the most far-flung directions, but as a whole it ultimately takes the spherical form of the Earth that the aging Schlemiel inherits in lieu of his shadow.

Chamisso never fully mastered the German language, and Wortsman’s translation seems to reproduce his idiosyncratic prose in a version as unique as Chamisso’s novel itself. There will be leaps that may jar you—seven-league leaps in fact—but this is a book that’s as unshakable as your own shadow. Read it once to be astonished. Read it a second time to live inside of it. Read it again and again to be repeatedly enraptured by its strange and inevitable totality.

—David Wiley