A reminder of miracles
The Story of My Life
The Restored Classic 1903-2003
Helen Keller
With supplementary accounts by Anne Sullivan,
her teacher, and John Macy
Edited by Roger Shattuck with Dorothy Hermann
W.W. Norton: 352 pp., $24.95
*
Mark Twain, certainly not one to indulge in sugary sentiment, declared that the two most interesting characters of the 19th century were Napoleon Bonaparte and Helen Keller. Keller, of course, lived her adult life in the 20th century, but it says something about the age in which we live that her gentler, less equivocal virtues no longer seem to command the attention, let alone the sheer sense of wonder, they once did.
Everyone knows the story of Helen Keller is a story of a courageous young girl, blind and deaf from the age of 19 months, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds. And almost everyone knows it is also the story of a dedicated and resourceful teacher, the 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, herself partially blind, who miraculously managed to break down the walls of blankness and silence surrounding the willful, confused, seemingly uncontrollable 7-year-old Helen. The drama inherent in this aspect of the story was brilliantly captured by William Gibson in his 1957 televised play “The Miracle Worker,” later adapted for the stage and made into a film. But there’s more to the story, so much more.
The story of Keller’s journey from isolation to understanding is a kind of “Education of Henry Adams” with optimistic progressivism replacing pessimistic disillusion. Born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, a small town in northern Alabama, the indulged daughter of a conventional Southern family, Helen Keller not only learned to overcome her own disabilities but also developed a keen social conscience and fierce sense of justice. Yet her political views, controversial enough in her time to arouse the anxieties of J. Edgar Hoover, are all but forgotten today. Her passionate sympathy for the poor, downtrodden and disadvantaged led her to join the Socialist Party in 1909 and support its distinguished candidate, Eugene V. Debs, in the presidential election of 1912. Keller was a friend of the communist John Reed and the anarchist Emma Goldman, and an ardent supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World, the so-called Wobblies, the radical left-wing labor union.
Not surprisingly, she advocated women’s suffrage. Perhaps a little more surprisingly for a native of Alabama -- and much to the distress of her Southern family -- Keller championed the rights of African Americans and was an early supporter of the NAACP: “The outrages against the coloured people are a denial of Christ,” she declared in a letter printed by W.E.B. DuBois. She publicly criticized discrimination against blacks and Jews at Harvard: “Harvard, in discriminating against the Jew and the Negro on grounds other than intellectual qualifications, has proved unworthy of its traditions and covered itself with shame.”
Keller’s work on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, a cause that was understandably the closest to her heart, put her under pressure to be less controversial. Also, because her family lost its money, she was sometimes unwillingly obliged to depend on the beneficence of wealthy patrons like Andrew Carnegie, who (semi-jocularly, one presumes) threatened to put her over his knee and spank her for espousing socialism. A public accustomed to thinking of Keller as an ethereal figure, safely beyond the controversies of politics, was shocked by the series of essays explaining her commitment to socialism in her 1913 book “Out of the Dark.” Critics claimed that Keller was only aping the leftist views of her mentor and editor John Macy, a charge that distressed her deeply.
Indeed, as one reads “The Story of My Life,” written when Keller was still a Radcliffe College junior, one can see that her ideas about politics and society had their roots in her own sensory impressions of the world in which she lived. As she explains to her readers, you don’t need eyes and ears -- or even books -- to sense what’s wrong:
“People who think that all sensations reach us through the eye and the ear have expressed surprise that I should notice any difference
“In the country one sees only Nature’s fair works, and one’s soul is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that goes on in the crowded city. Several times I have visited the narrow, dirty streets where the poor live, and I grow hot and indignant to think that good people should be content to live in fine houses and become strong and beautiful, while others are condemned to live in hideous, sunless tenements and grow ugly, withered and cringing. The children who crowd these grimy alleys, half-clad and underfed, shrink away from your outstretched hand as if from a blow.... There are men and women, too, all gnarled and bent out of shape. I have felt their hard, rough hands and realized what an endless struggle their existence must be -- no more than a series of scrimmages, thwarted attempts to do something. Their life seems an immense disparity between effort and opportunity. The sun and the air are God’s free gifts to all, we say; but are they so? In yonder city’s dingy alleys the sun shines not, and the air is foul.”
Keller’s vivid account of her early years affords poignant testimony to the power of sensory and sensual experience. Operating in a culture dominated by concepts based on sight and sound, we are apt to forget how much comes to us through the other doors of perception: smell, taste and touch. Keller’s recollection of climbing a tree and being caught in a summer thunderstorm is another passage that brings this home to us:
“Suddenly a change passed over the tree. All the sun’s warmth left the air. I knew the sky was black, because all the heat, which meant light to me, had died out of the atmosphere. A strange odour came up from the earth. I knew it, it was the odour that always precedes a thunderstorm, and a nameless fear clutched at my heart. I felt absolutely alone, cut off from my friends and the firm earth.... There was a moment of sinister silence, then a multitudinous stirring of the leaves....”
“The Story of My Life” was named one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century by the New York Public Library in 1996, and indeed it is as compelling today as it was when it first appeared in 1903. Marking the 100th anniversary of its original publication, editors Roger Shattuck, a distinguished literary critic, and Dorothy Hermann, author of a recent full-scale biography of Keller, offer us a new edition that they call “the restored classic.”
It begins with Keller’s justly renowned firsthand account of her early years. The next section gives us her teacher Anne Sullivan’s version of this same period as recorded in the detailed letters she wrote to friends in Boston describing her work with Helen. A third section contains pieces by John Macy, the bright young editor who helped Keller and Sullivan with the original edition and who later married Sullivan. The fourth section is composed of poignant, increasingly fluent letters written by the young Helen as she mastered the art of communication. And finally, there’s an appendix with more raw material: two articles by Macy and two excerpts from Keller’s later books giving more detailed versions of the famous scene at the water pump.
By including all this material and clearly separating Keller’s, Sullivan’s and Macy’s writings, this new edition helps us to consider and reconsider the phenomenal story from all its perspectives. There is also a graceful afterword by Shattuck, celebrating Keller’s independence of mind and defending her against critics who accused her of being the artificial creation of the people and books that guided her.
To read -- or reread -- “The Story of My Life” is to revisit essential and enduring questions regarding the nature of the human mind, the relationship of feeling to thought, of perception to conception, of consciousness to conscience and of that commonplace yet mysterious process known as education. Sullivan’s letters provide a day-by-day description of her struggle to break through to Helen: “She is very quick-tempered and willful, and nobody, except her brother James, has attempted to control her,” she writes at the outset. “The greatest problem I shall have is how to discipline and control her without breaking her spirit.... Her hands destroy whatever they touch because they do not know what else to do with things.” Within a few weeks, however, Sullivan had not only mastered her pupil by force of sheer physical and emotional stamina, she had also earned her trust.
Only 19 days after the breakthrough at the water pump, when Helen realized that the wet substance flowing from the pump had a name -- the word W-A-T-E-R that her teacher was spelling into her hand -- Sullivan wrote, “Helen knows the meaning of more than a hundred words now, and learns new ones daily without the slightest suspicion that she is performing a most difficult feat. She learns because she can’t help it, just as the bird learns to fly.”
Sullivan had to confront the two central issues of education: the need for discipline and the need for freedom. Her experience taught her that, unless the pupil is able to submit in some measure to the authority of the teacher, the process of education cannot begin. Yet unless the teacher is able to respond directly to the student’s questions and needs, the process will degenerate into rote exercise and boredom.
No sooner had Keller learned to read Braille than she rushed to immerse herself in the world of books. The intense delight she found in this world -- a realm far removed from the immediate pleasures of touch, taste and smell -- is enduring testimony to the power of the human imagination. “If books are not life, I do not know what they are,” she declared. “The eyes of the mind are stronger, more penetrating than our physical eyes.” The story of her awakening and the exponential growth of her mind would certainly have been no mystery to another classic, perennially modern figure of the 19th century, Emily Dickinson, who knew
The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside -- *