The Din in the Head Page 3

  The Story of My Life was first published in 1903, with Macy's ample introduction. He was able to write about Helen nearly as authoritatively as Annie, but also—in private—more skeptically: after his marriage to Annie, the three of them set up housekeeping in rural Wrentham, Massachusetts. Possibly not since the Brontës had so feverishly literary a crew lived under a single roof. Of this ultimately inharmonious trio, one, internationally famous for decades, was catapulted now into still greater renown by the recent appearance of her celebrated memoir. Macy, meanwhile, was discovering that he had married not a woman, a moody one at that, but the indispensable infrastructure of a public institution. As Helen's secondary amanuensis, he continued to be of use until the marriage collapsed. It foundered on his profligacy with money, on Annie's irritability—she fought him on his uncompromising socialism, which she disdained—and finally on his accelerating alcoholism.

  Because Macy was known to have assisted Helen in the preparation of The Story of My Life, the insinuations of control that often assailed Annie now also landed on him. Helen's ideas, it was said, were really Macy's; he had transformed her into a "Marxist propagandist." It was true that she sympathized with his political bent, but his views had not shaped hers. As she had come independently to Swedenborgian idealism, so had she come to societal utopianism. The charge of expropriation, of both thought and idiom, was old, and dogged her at intervals during much of her early and middle life: she was a fraud, a puppet, a plagiarist. She was false coin. She was "a living lie."

  She was eleven when these words were first hurled at her, spewed out by a wrathful Anagnos. Not long before, he had spoken of Helen in celestial terms. Now he denounced her as a malignant thief. What brought on this defection was a little story she had written, called "The Frost King," which she sent him as a birthday present. In the voice of a highly literary children's narrative, it recounts how the "frost fairies" cause the season's turning.

  When the children saw the trees all aglow with brilliant colors they clapped their hands and shouted for joy, and immediately began to pick great bunches to take home. "The leaves are as lovely as flowers!" cried they, in their delight.

  Anagnos—doubtless clapping his hands and shouting for joy—immediately began to publicize Helen's newest accomplishment. "The Frost King" appeared both in the Perkins alumni magazine and in another journal for the blind, which, following Anagnos, unhesitatingly named it "without parallel in the history of literature." But more than a parallel was at stake; the story was found to be nearly identical to "The Frost Fairies," by Margaret Canby, a writer of children's books. Anagnos was infuriated, and fled headlong from adulation and hyperbole to humiliation and enmity. Feeling personally betrayed and institutionally discredited, he arranged an inquisition for the terrified Helen, standing her alone in a room before a jury of eight Perkins officials and himself, all mercilessly cross-questioning her. Her mature recollection of Anagnos's "court of investigation" registers as pitiably as the ordeal itself:

  Mr. Anagnos, who loved me tenderly, thinking that he had been deceived, turned a deaf ear to pleadings of love and innocence. He believed, or at least suspected, that Miss Sullivan and I had deliberately stolen the bright thoughts of another and imposed them on him to win his admiration.... As I lay in my bed that night, I wept as I hope few children have wept. I felt so cold, I imagined that I should die before morning, and the thought comforted me. I think if this sorrow had come to me when I was older, it would have broken my spirit beyond repairing.

  She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain, who parodied the whole procedure with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and disgust for the egotism of "these solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they've caught pilfering a chop!" Margaret Canby's tale had been spelled to Helen perhaps three years before, and lay dormant in her prodigiously retentive memory; she was entirely oblivious of reproducing phrases not her own. The scandal Anagnos had precipitated left a lasting bruise. But it was also the beginning of a psychological, even a metaphysical, clarification that Helen refined and ratified as she grew older, when similar, if more subtle, suspicions cropped up in the press, compelling her to interrogate the workings of her mind. The Story of My Life was attacked in the Nation not for plagiarism in the usual sense, but for the purloining of "things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.... One resents the pages of second-hand description of natural objects." The reviewer blamed her for the sin of vicariousness: "all her knowledge," he insisted, "is hearsay knowledge."

  It was almost a reprise of the Perkins tribunal: she was again being confronted with the charge of inauthenticity. Anagnos's rebuke—"Helen Keller is a living lie"—regularly resurfaced, sometimes less harshly, sometimes as acerbically, in the form of a neurologist's or a psychologist's assessment, or in the reservations of reviewers. A French professor of literature, who was himself blind, determined that she was "a dupe of words, and her aesthetic enjoyment of most of the arts is a matter of auto-suggestion rather than perception." A New Yorker interviewer complained, "She talks bookishly.... To express her ideas, she falls back on the phrases she has learned from books, and uses words that sound stilted, poetical metaphors." A professor of neurology at Columbia University, after a series of tests, pooh-poohed the claim that her remaining senses might be in any way extraordinary—the acuity of her touch and smell, he concluded, was no different from that of other mortals. "That's a stab at my vanity," she joked.

  But the cruelest appraisal of all came, in 1933, from Thomas Cutsforth, a blind psychologist. By this time Helen was fifty-three, and had published four additional autobiographical volumes. Cutsforth disparaged everything she had become. The wordless child she once was, he maintained, was closer to reality than what her teacher had made of her through the imposition of "word-mindedness." He objected to her use of images such as "a mist of green," "blue pools of dog violets," "soft clouds tumbling." All that, he protested, was "implied chicanery" and "a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage." He criticized

  the aims of the educational system in which she has been confined during her whole life. Literary expression has been the goal of her formal education. Fine writing, regardless of its meaningful content, has been the end toward which both she and her teacher have striven.... Her own experiential life was rapidly made secondary, and it was regarded as such by the victim.... Her teacher's ideals became her ideals, her teacher's likes became her likes, and whatever emotional activity her teacher experienced she experienced.

  For Cutsforth—and not only for him—Helen Keller was the victim of language rather than its victorious master. She was no better than a copy; whatever was primary, and thereby genuine, had been stamped out. As for Annie, while here she was pilloried as the callous instrument of her pupil's victimization, elsewhere she was pitied as a woman cheated of her own life by having sacrificed it to serve another. Either Helen was Annie's slave, or Annie was Helen's.

  Once again Helen had her faithful defenders. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer reflected that "a human being in the construction of his human world is not dependent upon the quality of his sense material." Even more trenchantly, a New York Times editor quoted Cicero: "When Democritus lost his sight he could not, to be sure, distinguish black from white; but all the same he could distinguish good from bad, just from unjust, honorable from disgraceful, expedient from inexpedient, great from small, and it was permitted him to live happily without seeing changes of color; it was not permissible to do so without true ideas."

  But Helen did not depend on philosophers, ancient or modern, to make her case. She spoke for herself: she was nobody's puppet, her mind was her own, and she knew what she saw. Once, having been taken to the uppermost viewing platform of what was then the tallest building in the world, she defined her condition:

  I will conced
e that my guides saw a thousand things that escaped me from the top of the Empire State Building, but I am not envious. For imagination creates distances that reach to the end of the world.... There was the Hudson—more like the flash of a swordblade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head!

  Her rebuttal to word-mindedness, to vicariousness, to implied chicanery and the living lie, was inscribed deliberately and defiantly in her daring images of swordblade and rainbow waters. That they were derived was no reason for her to be deprived—why should she alone be starved of enchantment? The deaf-blind person, she wrote, "seizes every word of sight and hearing, because his sensations compel it. Light and color, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him." She was not ashamed of talking bookishly: it meant a ready access to the storehouse of history and literature. She disposed of her critics with a dazzling apothegm: "The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction," and went on to contend that history itself "is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth." Those who ridiculed her rapturous rendering of color she dismissed as "spirit-vandals" who would force her "to bite the dust of material things." Her idea of the subjective onlooker was broader than that of physics, and while "red" may denote an explicit and measurable wavelength in the visible spectrum, in the mind it is flittingly fickle (and not only for the blind), varying from the bluster of rage to the reticence of a blush: physics cannot cage metaphor.

  She saw, then, what she wished, or was blessed, to see, and rightly named it imagination. In this she belongs to a wider class than that narrow order of the tragically deaf-blind. Her class, her tribe, hears what no healthy ear can catch, and sees what no eye chart can quantify. Her common language was not with the man who crushed a child for memorizing what the fairies do, or with the carpers who scolded her for the crime of a literary vocabulary. She was a member of the race of poets, the Romantic kind; she was close cousin to those novelists who write not only what they do not know, but what they cannot possibly know.

  And though she was early taken in hand by a writerly intelligence leading her purposefully to literature, it was hardly in the power of the manual alphabet to pry out a writer who was not already there. Laura Bridgman stuck to her lace making, and with all her senses intact might have remained a needlewoman. John Macy believed finally that between Helen and Annie there was only one genius—his wife. Helen's intellect, he asserted, was "stout and energetic, of solid endurance," able to achieve through patience and toil, but void of real brilliance. In the absence of Annie's inventiveness and direction, he implied, Helen's efforts would show up as the lesser gifts they were. This did not happen. Annie died, at seventy, in 1936, four years after Macy; they had long been estranged. By then her always endangered eyesight had deteriorated; depressed, obese, cranky, and inconsolable, she had herself gone blind. Helen came under the care of her secretary, Polly Thomson, a Scotswoman who was both possessively loyal and dryly unliterary: the scenes she spelled into Helen's hand never matched Annie's quicksilver evocations.

  But even as she mourned the loss of her teacher, Helen flourished. Annie was dead; only the near-at-hand are indispensable. With the assistance of Nella Henney, Annie Sullivan's biographer, she continued to publish journals and memoirs. She undertook grueling visits to Japan, India, Israel, Europe, Australia, everywhere championing the blind, the deaf, the dispossessed. She was indefatigable until her very last years, and died in 1968 weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday.

  Yet the story of her life is not the good she did, the panegyrics she inspired, or the disputes (genuine or counterfeit? victim or victimizer?) that stormed around her. The most persuasive story of Helen Keller's life is what she said it was: "I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine."

  She was an artist. She imagined.

  "Blindness has no limiting effect on mental vision. My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide," she was impelled to argue again and again. "The universe it encircles is immeasurable." And like any writer making imagination's mysterious claims before the material-minded, she had cause enough to cry out, "Oh, the supercilious doubters!"

  But it was not herself alone she was shielding from these skirmishes: she was a warrior in a wide and thorny conflict. Helen Keller, if we are presumptuous enough to reduce her so, can be taken to be a laboratory for empirical demonstration. Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Are we more than the sum of our senses? Does a picture—whatever strikes the retina—engender thought, or does thought create the picture? Can there be subjectivity without an object to glance off from? Metaphysicians and other theorists have their differing notions, to which the ungraspable organism that is Helen Keller is a retort. She is not an advocate for one side or the other in the ancient debate concerning the nature of the real. She is not a philosophical or neurological or therapeutic topic. She stands for enigma, and against obtuseness; there lurks in her still the angry child who demanded to be understood, yet could not be deciphered. She refutes those who cannot perceive, or do not care to value, what is hidden from sensation.

  Against whom does she rage, whom does she refute? The mockers of her generation and ours. The psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim, for instance. "By pretending to have a full life," he warned in a 1990 essay, "by pretending that through touch she knew what a piece of sculpture, what flowers, what trees were like, that through the words of others she knew what the sky or clouds looked like, by pretending that she could hear music by feeling the vibrations of musical instruments," she fooled the world into thinking the "terribly handicapped are not suffering deeply every moment of their lives." Pretender, trickster: this is what the notion of therapy makes of "the words of others," which we more commonly term experience; heritage; literature. At best the therapist pities, at worst he sees delusion. Perhaps Helen Keller did suffer deeply. Then all the more honor to the flashing embossments of the artist's mask. Oddly, practitioners of psychology—whom one would least expect to be literalists—have been quickest to blame her for imposture. Let them blame Keats, too, for his delusionary "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter," and for his phantom theme of negative capability, the poet's oarless casting about for the hallucinatory shadows of desire.

  Helen Keller's lot, it turns out, was not unique. "We work in the dark," Henry James affirmed, on behalf of his own art, and so did she. It was the same dark. She knew her Wordsworth: "Visionary power/Attends the motions of the viewless winds/Embodied in the mystery of word:/There, darkness makes abode." She fought the debunkers who, for the sake of a spurious honesty, would denude her of landscape and return her to the marble cell. She fought the iron pragmatists who meant to disinherit her, and everyone, of poetry. She fought the tin ears who took imagining to be mendacity. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind's eye.

  In one respect, though, she was incontrovertibly as fraudulent as the cynics charged. She had always been photographed in profile: this hid her disfigured left eye. In maturity she had both eyes surgically removed and replaced with glass—an expedient known only to those closest to her. Everywhere she went, her sparkling blue prosthetic eyes were admired for their living beauty and humane depth.

  Young Tolstoy: An Apostle of Desire

  CONTEMPLATING THE UNPREDICTABLE trajectory of Tolstoy's life puts one in mind of those quizzical Max Beerbohm caricatures, wherein an old writer confronts—with perplexity, if not with contempt—his young self. So here is Tolstoy at seventy-two, dressed like a muzhik in belted peasant tunic and rough peasant boots, with the long hoary priestly beard of a vagabond pilgrim, traveling third class on a wooden bench in a fetid train carriage crowded with the ragged poor. In the name of the equality of souls he has turned himself into a cobbler; in the name of the pristine Jesus he
is estranged from the rites and beliefs of Russian Orthodoxy; in the name of Christian purity he has abandoned wife and family. He is ascetic, celibate, pacifist. To the multitude of his followers and disciples (Gandhi among them), he is a living saint.

  And over here—in the opposite panel—is Tolstoy at twenty-three: a dandy, a horseman, a soldier, a hunter, a tippler, a gambler, a wastrel, a frequenter of fashionable balls, a carouser among gypsies, a seducer of servant girls; an aristocrat immeasurably wealthy, inheritor of a far-flung estate, master of hundreds of serfs. Merely to settle a debt at cards, he thinks nothing of selling (together with livestock and a parcel of land) several scores of serfs.

  In caricature the two—the old Tolstoy, the young Tolstoy—cannot be reconciled. In conscience, in contriteness, they very nearly can. The young Tolstoy's diaries are self-interrogations that lead to merciless self-indictments, pledges of spiritual regeneration, and Utopian programs for both personal renewal and the amelioration of society at large. But the youthful reformer is also a consistent backslider. At twenty-six he writes scathingly, "I am ugly, awkward, untidy and socially uncouth. I am irritable and tiresome to others; immodest, intolerant and shy as a child. In other words, a boor.... I am excessive, vacillating, unstable, stupidly vain and aggressive, like all weaklings. I am not courageous. I am so lazy that idleness has become an ineradicable habit with me." After admitting nevertheless to a love of virtue, he confesses: "Yet there is one thing I love more than virtue: fame. I am so ambitious, and this craving in me has had so little satisfaction, that if I had to choose between fame and virtue, I am afraid I would very often opt for the former."