SECOND SIGHT

A LIFE OF HELEN KELLER SEEKS THE REAL WOMAN INSIDE THE MYTHS

Author: By Mary Loeffelholz

Date: SUNDAY, August 2, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

As Helen Keller in her own lifetime was acutely aware, however, and as Herrmann reminds us, ``the real Helen Keller did grow up and live a life that was more problematic than her inspiring childhood.'' In a long lifetime of remarkable accomplishment, Keller remained a public figure from the world of the late Victorians through that of the Cold War. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904, the first deaf and blind student to attend any institution of higher education, and in 1955 became the first woman of any description to receive an honorary degree from Harvard University. Keller published her first autobiographical book, ``The Story of My Life,'' while still in college, and went on to become the author of several more books; she starred in an early, sensationalized Hollywood film about her life in 1918, as well as in later documentaries; she became a world traveler and activist on behalf of the blind, and a vocal socialist, often to the embarrassment of the wealthy philanthropists who helped support her and her assistants.

Less familiar now than the groping child of screen and stage, this Helen Keller was both idealized and criticized during her lifetime -- indeed, criticized more vigorously than our current norms of decorum around disability might lead us to expect. For her most extravagant admirers, Keller stood at the pinnacle of human virtue: Alexander Graham Bell wrote that ``in this child I have seen more of the Divine than has been manifest in anyone I met before,'' and Mark Twain proclaimed her ``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.''

Keller's contemporary detractors, by contrast, openly suspected her of being at best the overdrilled and over-lauded creature of Annie Sullivan, at worst a ``living lie,'' as she was called by a jealous director of the Perkins Institution of the Blind (where Sullivan had been educated) after she and Sullivan ended their stay there. Radcliffe forced Keller to take her examinations under extraordinary proctoring conditions designed to foil under-the-table assistance from her interpreters. She was accused of plagiarism in her earliest published writings (after one of her stories, intended as a private gift and published by its recipient, was found to echo a children's story a friend had read to her years ago) and of imitative, secondhand wordspinning in almost all her work.

Among her most severe critics in this regard, interestingly, were other deaf and blind men and women. Pointing out how extensively Keller's autobiographical writings drew on sense impressions -- color, light, and sounds -- of which she had no knowledge, Thomas Cutforth, a blind psychologist, complained in 1932 that ``literary expression has been the goal of her formal education. Her own experience and her own world were neglected whenever possible, or, when this could not be done, they were metamorphosed into auditory and visual respectability. . . . It is a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage.'' Another critic, also himself blind, observed in 1930 that ``wordiness, unreal emotion and, in the worst sense of the term, literature occupy a disconcerting place in her writing''; far from putting her on an equal plane with Shakespeare, he thought Keller's education had made her ``the dupe of words.''

These reactions to Keller's writerly persona no doubt partly reflected changing aesthetic tastes: For modernism, literature ``in the worst sense'' meant just those 19th-century literary conventions in which Keller's education had made her facile. But they also, as Herrmann points out, illuminate debates still active today in cognitive research over the relationship between sensory experience and conceptual knowledge transmitted in language, since after all ``sighted people use many words for which they have no direct experience.'' Or as Keller herself put it, in her own forceful rejoinder to her critics, ``The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.''

As a public figure, Keller herself was also a kind of ``imaginary construction,'' aimed at an audience prepared to idolize a handicapped person only on condition that she be ``physically unrepulsive, intellectually and morally superior, and heroic about [her] affliction.'' The great strength of Herrmann's biography lies in its evenhanded acknowledgment of Keller's own investment in this imaginary construction, along with its genuine historical accomplishments on the one hand, and its costs and contradictions on the other. Herrmann's portrait of Keller is both fully embodied and unflinchingly candid about how she and her keepers constructed her disabled body for the public eye, a construction that extended to surgery when Keller embarked upon her career as a lecturer: ``Aware that she would now be exposed to the merciless gaze of the public, she had both eyes surgically removed and replaced with glass ones. . . . She was often described in newspaper interviews as having `big, wide, open, blue eyes,' few reporters realizing that such a luminous countenance came out of a box.''

Keller apparently welcomed, at least for most of her life, confirmation that her decorously embodied presence was reassuring to people fearful of disability; Polly Thompson, who served as Keller's chief companion for some 20 years after Annie Sullivan's death, kept her immaculately turned out into advanced old age. She was less reconciled to late-19th-century expectations -- by no means dead today -- that profoundly disabled persons, especially women, remain asexual. Keller had at least two male suitors in her life, and her loving relationship to Sullivan was complicated by Sullivan's stormy marriage to John Macy, a Harvard English instructor who assisted Keller with her writing and showed a certain erotic interest in her as well as in his wife, who was 11 years his senior.

Keller herself was strikingly candid, both publicly and privately, about her sexual yearnings. Writing in her 1929 autobiography ``Midstream'' about an aborted elopement with her secretary Peter Fagan, Keller acknowledged that she was ``glad that I have had the experience of being loved and desired. The fault was not in the loving, but in the circumstances.'' ``Since my youth,'' she wrote a later suitor, ``I have desired the love of a man. Sometimes I have wondered rebelliously why Fate has trifled with me so strangely, why I was tantalized with bodily capabilities I could not fulfill. . . . Through the wise, loving ministrations of my teacher, Mrs. Macy, who since my earliest childhood has been a light to me in all dark places, I faced consciously the strong sex-urge of my nature and turned the life-energy into channels of satisfying sympathy and work.''

This side of Helen Keller, the longing adult woman who succeeded the eager 7-year-old, is today even less familiar to us than to Keller's contemporaries -- and perhaps more scandalous? After his smash success with ``The Miracle Worker,'' Gibson came back with a second play, ``Monday after the Miracle,'' about the complicated menage a trois later established among Sullivan, Keller, and Macy; the second installment of Keller's story, however, died on Broadway, underlining mid-20th-century popular culture's preference for Helen's childhood drama of redemptory knowledge over the woman's complicated and frustrated relationship to sexual knowledge.

In reviving the rebellious adult Helen Keller, Dorothy Herrmann allows us to speculate on how her life might unfold otherwise were it lived today: Might she, and we, experience the ``fatedness'' of her disabilities differently? Although necessarily surrounded by companions, Keller never enjoyed the kinds of community fostered today among the deaf-blind, some of them fostered by technologies that for the first time permit fully independent communication: ``Today an adaptive device that is attached to a standard computer enables blind and deaf-blind people who read and write Braille to send and receive messages or print in Braille. With such a device Helen would have been able to communicate with anyone in the world in cyberspace, whether or not they knew Braille, without the need of an interpreter, possessive or otherwise.'' No less out of a box than Keller's glass eyes, today's prosthetic technology of the personal computer might have liberated Keller from her paradoxically public isolation and sometime private suffocation. Yet it is hard to imagine a computer-assisted new world in which it will not still remain true, as Keller wrote in her last book, and as Herrmann concludes her biography, that ``We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.''