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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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| 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
