The Din in the Head E-Book

Cynthia Ozick

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 326

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

One of America's foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. In her spirited essay collection The Din in the Head, she focuses on the essential joys of great literature. With razor-sharp wit and an inspiring joie de vivre, Ozick investigates unexpected byways in the works of Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Helen Keller, Isaac Babel, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Henry James, among others. Throughout this bracing collection, she celebrates the curative power of the literary imagination.

Leseprobe

The Din in the Head

Cynthia Ozick is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and, in 2012, her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She was born in 1928 and currently lives in New York.

Novels

Trust (1966)

The Cannibal Galaxy (1983)

The Messiah of Stockholm (1987)

The Puttermesser Papers (1997)

Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)

(published in the United Kingdom in 2005 as The Bear Boy)

Foreign Bodies (2010)

Shorter fiction

The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971)

Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976)

Levitation: Five Fictions (1982)

Envy; or, Yiddish in America (1969)

The Shawl (1989)

Collected Stories (2007)

Dictation: A Quartet (2008)

Essay collections

All the World Wants the Jews Dead (1974)

Art and Ardor (1983)

Metaphor & Memory (1989)

What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers (1993)

Fame & Folly: Essays (1996)

Quarrel & Quandary (2000)

The Din in the Head: Essays (2006)

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016)

Letters of Intent (2016)

Drama

Blue Light (1994)

Miscellaneous

A Cynthia Ozick Reader (1996)

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel (introduction 2001)

Fistfuls of Masterpieces (1982)

First published in the United States in 2006 byHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, Massachusetts.

Published in e-book in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Cynthia Ozick, 2017

The moral right of Cynthia Ozick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 113 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

ForSamuel and Rosie,some day

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the kind attention of the literary editors who welcomed these essays in their first incarnations; and I am especially indebted to Henry Finder, Leon Wieseltier, and Anne Fadiman.

My thanks also to David Levine, whose ingenious drawings punctuate these pages.

Contents

FOREWORDOn Discord and Desire

What Helen Keller Saw

Young Tolstoy: An Apostle of Desire

John Updike: Eros and God

Throwing Away the Clef:Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein

Washington Square: So Many Absent Things

Smoke and Fire: Sylvia Plath’s Journals

Kipling: A Postcolonial Footnote

Delmore Schwartz:The Willed Abortion of the Self

Lionel Trilling and the Buried Life

Tradition and (or versus) the Jewish Writer

Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel

Highbrow Blues

The Din in the Head

The Rule of the Bus

Isaac Babel: “Let Me Finish”

In Research of Lost Time

The Heretical Passions of Gershom Scholem

And God Saw Literature, That It Was Good:Robert Alter’s Version

AFTERWORDAn (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James

The Din inthe Head

FOREWORD

ON DISCORD AND DESIRE

WHEN SUSAN SONTAG DIED in the winter of 2004 — at seventy-one, far too soon for her powers to have been exhausted or her intellect slaked — she left a memorable and mottled trail. Much of her life will endure in photographs — but cameras, she argued, do not so much defeat transience as render it “more acute.” Still, here she is on the back cover of my browning paperback copy of The Benefactor, a first novel published in 1963, when she was thirty: dark-haired, dark-browed, sublimely perfected in her youth. The novel, which reads like an audacious, sly, somewhat stilted translation from the French of a nineteenth-century philosophical memoir, ends with “a photograph of myself” — the self of the old narrator, who is contemplating his death. How distant death must have seemed to the young novelist then! In another photograph, dated 1975, she is lying on her back, hands under her head, with strongly traced Picasso eyelids and serene lips less curled than Mona Lisa’s: beautiful at forty-two. Like any celebrity, she could be watched as she aged. Ultimately there came the signature white slash through the blackened forelock, and the face grew not harder but hardier (despite recurrent illness, throughout which she was inordinately courageous). She had a habit of tossing back her long loose hair when it fell, as it did from moment to moment, over her eyes: the abrupt shake of the head, once girlish, turned incongruous in the sexagenarian. She was tall and big-shouldered. She dominated any room, any platform; her voice was pitched low, mannish, humorous, impassioned, impatient. She was more than a presence: it was as if she had been inscribed in a cartouche — a figure who had, in effect, founded the culture in which she moved. And wherever she moved, the currents flowed with her.

Only her politics could not be said to be mottled: it was all of a piece, early and late, standard-issue and stereotypical: you could find its like in any university or elitist periodical in the Western world. Her politics, to which she gave so much of her vitality, some of it bravely (in Sarajevo), some of it reflexively (almost everywhere else), was, I think, the least interesting because the most commonplace part of her, though it ran deep and she valued it: it contributed to her celebrity and sometimes to her notoriety. But her celebrity was not her fame. Her fame erupted out of the publication in Partisan Review of “Notes on Camp,” the 1965 essay that brought her instant recognition, in which she defined taste as the paramount contemporary aesthetic principle. “Taste,” she wrote, “governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

With this manifesto she nearly single-handedly (though she soon had an army behind her) altered the culture. “The best that has been thought and said”— Matthew Arnold’s exalted old credo, long superannuated — devolved to “Whatever.” If taste governs all, then distinctions melt away, and the jihadist’s “taste in morality” is no worse than mine or yours, and choosing life or choosing death comes down to chacun à son goût.

But set all that aside: it counts as politics, so let it go. The culture of art is where Sontag left her indelible and individual mark; and fame is when the individual becomes the general. As she prophesied in Against Interpretation, published in 1964,

All the conditions of modern life — its material plentitude, its sheer crowdedness — conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, or capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of a critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

This was less a summons to hedonism (though it was that too) than it was a denigration of history. The emphasis on “now,” the quick dismissal of “another age,” the repeated “our,” the ardent call to see, hear, feel, meant that one would be open to seeing and hearing and feeling nearly everything that lay in one’s path. It meant fusion rather than separation, it meant impatience with categories, it meant infinite appetite, it meant the end of the distinction between high and low. And the end of that distinction made a cut in the common understanding, so that Norman Mailer, for instance, could write of rampant subway graffiti by urban vandals as others had written of Bernini and Matisse. And oddly, oddly, oddly! — the newly elitist doctrine of “the condition of our senses” came to resemble the “I know what I like” of the once-upon-a-time philistines and Babbitts.

The cut has been made; there is no going back. Yet Sontag herself did, in her final years, long to go back. At a symposium only months before her death, condemning the prevalence of “the idea that anything is better than anything else,” she announced what amounted to a catchall self-repudiation: “It is the triumph of a pernicious relativism. . . . I am certainly not prepared to say the satisfactions derived by art are no different structurally, in content, or in quality, or in importance, from other kinds of satisfactions. I am not prepared to think that the satisfaction that I might get in front of a Chardin, a Vermeer, or a Vuillard, is in any way similar to the satisfaction I would get watching a beautifully pitched baseball or inspecting a shoe collection.” And she reflected in a late interview that she wished she had written novels instead of the essays that had overturned public sensibility: she had since reawakened to the seductions of the novel in its traditional realist dress. The two novels that were her last were light-years from her first — in tone, in structure, in aspiration. The Benefactor has no beneficiaries, no literary heirs, either in Sontag’s own work or in that of her admirers. But society at large is heir to the cultural rupture, the linked discordances, that she championed.

In Eden, desire came before discord: first the apple, then the expulsion. In earthly life, discord will often precede desire, and chaos may wildly roil before the advent of clarity. In the period of Sontag’s greatest influence, when she had declared realism in contemporary fiction to be passé, when novels were to be lauded for the aridness of a stringent metaphysics, a deep discord descended, a choking chaos suffocated. Or, I should say, this is what happened to me. Perhaps I was too easily swayed, or too readily impressed, or simply too timidly willing to accept what seemed at the time to be an enduring cultural authoritativeness. Or else a prior eternity, what until then had always been seen to be eternity, was now being crushed and thrown all over the horizon in irrelevant shards. That eternity was the belief, now grown useless, in the impermeability of high art; it was whatever principles of discrimination had been esteemed before. And what had been esteemed before was surely not “pop.” All this was noted in the press in the elegiac reports of Sontag’s death. For The New Yorker, Sontag was “a central figure in the aesthetic bouleversement of that period: the absorption of pop culture into high culture, the abandonment of classical form for modernist fracture, the enthronement of the shattered consciousness in place of realism and morals and beginning-middle-end.” The New York Times remarked that Sontag — for all that “the life of the mind was for her something both rigorous and passionate”— could nevertheless link Patti Smith and Nietzsche. Under the old eternity, no one would dream of linking Patti Smith and Nietzsche. Under the new dispensation, the old eternity evaporated, differentiation was dust, high culture was porous and always open to Patti Smith.

I did not know who Patti Smith was; there was much afoot that I did not know as I sat in my room with its yellow wallpaper reading Henry James and volumes of Jewish history and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet here I was, all at once, steeped in discord and chaos: oh, the novel, the novel! Authority was demanding that I cease to trust its familiar form, that its familiar form was broken forever, and that to continue to hope for it in the old way was to be exiled to the writer’s ultima Thule; only the marginal and the mediocre and the weak would fail to recognize this. Authority had wiped me out. And where was I, after all, and what was I, while Authority and its enviable sharers and minions were exulting in the great red-hot Downtown? In my room with the yellow wallpaper, writing, in defeat, a superannuated, superseded, and moribund novel that was already fouled by the stench of its predictable death throes.

So when, years later, Susan Sontag recanted — and who could claim that The Volcano Lover was not a recantation? — I was amazed by my own shallowness. And cowardice. And surrender of conviction. I had been taken in, I had allowed discord to rout desire, and here was Sontag herself, unembarrassed, undisgraced, rising out of calculated and self-made discord to claim the very desire the yellow wallpaper had been witness to: the old eternity: the novel in all its worn human fallible genuineness, unembellished by critical manifestos. As if a movie were being run in reverse: Adam and Eve propelled from east of Eden back into the verdant Garden.

It was the shock of Sontag’s death, of having to speak her name in the past tense — she was the tone of the times, she was the muse of the age, she was one with her century, and look, her century, our century, the terrible twentieth, with all its blood and gas and gulags and crimsonly sordid Riefenstahl aesthetics, has gone into the past tense too — it was her death that pricked these reflections upon long-ago excesses. Excesses of critical pride, excesses of writers’ vulnerability and demoralization: all of it vanished into nullity. My private war with Sontag can hardly count as a war if she had no inkling of the vanquished foot soldier in the yellow room. Yet she was victor only until irony itself won out — after all, she did recant! And it may not be mere sophistry to suggest that irony, and its sardonically grim grin, is the outcome of all wars, big and little. It is still possible, against the grain of Sontag’s torn banner, to read Nietzsche — and Gibbon and Jewish history and George Eliot and E. M. Forster and Chekhov and so much else — without at the same time taking notice of Patti Smith.

And because there is no public punishment for it (except for the with-it ire of this or that hostile periodical), it is still possible to separate high from low, the enduring from the ephemeral; even to aver that intellect itself (and the ethical life as well) requires the making of distinctions — sorting out, acknowledging that one thing is not another thing, facing down blur and fusion and the moral and aesthetic confusion of false equivalence, and, in the name of appetite for life, false worth. Not for nothing does the Bible rule against yoking the heavy ox with the lightweight ass, a nuance that points to cultural seriousness: honor and especially justice to the earth’s plenitude of differences. The ass does not have the force of the ox. And as the ironist Kafka knew, the hunger artist in pursuit of Less does not really practice a superior art.

I cannot say that all the essays in this book are unified by a single theme, though I suppose (like the ass straining to keep up with the ox) I could laboriously invent one for the occasion. On the other hand, most — not all — may be connected by what they are not, what they do not do. By and large, they do not celebrate trivia or hunger after the lesser — not, I hope, out of some monomaniacal purist arrogance to which they are not entitled, but because some matters are, in truth, more urgent, and significant, than others.

Or perhaps there is a unitary wave running through these pages: the notion of desire, ambition’s womb; desire applied to the kind of willed (or dreamed) achievement that outlasts personality; that is the opposite of taste, which is all personality. Or call it by the plain and ultimately discordant name that Henry James, remembering the expulsion from bright-leafed Eden, gave to his own desire: doubt. “We do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest,” he said, “is the madness of art.” What reader, coming upon these reverberating words, whether for the first or the tenth or the hundredth time, will not take them to heart?

WHAT HELEN KELLER SAW

SUSPICION STALKS FAME; incredulity stalks great fame. At least three times — at ages eleven, twenty-three, and fifty-two — Helen Keller was assaulted by accusation, doubt, and overt disbelief. Though her luster had surpassed the stellar figures of generations, she was disparaged nearly as hotly as she was exalted. She was the butt of skeptics and the cynosure of idolators. Mark Twain compared her to Joan of Arc, and pronounced her “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals.” Her renown, he said, would endure a thousand years.

It has, so far, lasted more than a hundred, while steadily dimming. Fifty years ago, even twenty, nearly every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was. The Story of My Life, her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly understood to be, if not the equal of Mark Twain’s lavish exaggerations, a heroine of uncommon grace and courage, a sort of worldly saint. To admire her was an act of piety, and she herself, by virtue of the strenuous conquest of her limitations, was a living temple dedicated to the spirit of resurrection. Much of that worshipfulness has receded. Her name, if not entirely in eclipse, hardly elicits the awed recognition it once held. No one nowadays, without intending satire, would place her alongside Caesar and Napoleon; and in an era of earnest disabilities legislation, with wheelchair ramps on every street corner, who would think to charge a stone-blind, stone-deaf woman with faking her experience?

Yet as a child she was accused of plagiarism, and in maturity of “verbalism,” illicitly substituting parroted words for firsthand perception. All this came about because she was at once liberated by language and in bondage to it, in a way few other human beings, even the blind and the deaf, can fathom. The merely blind have the window of their ears, the merely deaf listen through their eyes. For Helen Keller there was no partially ameliorating “merely.” What she suffered was a totality of exclusion. Her early life was meted out in hints and inferences — she could still touch, taste, smell, and feel vibrations; but these were the very capacities that turned her into a wild creature, a kind of flailing animal in human form.

The illness that annihilated Helen Keller’s sight and hearing, and left her mute, has never been diagnosed. In 1882, when she was four months short of two years, medical knowledge could assert only “acute congestion of the stomach and brain,” though later speculation proposes meningitis or scarlet fever. Whatever the cause, the consequence was ferocity — tantrums, kicking, rages — but also an invented system of sixty simple signs, intimations of intelligence. The child could mimic what she could neither see nor hear: putting on a hat before a mirror, her father reading a newspaper with his glasses on. She could fold laundry and pick out her own things. Such quiet times were few. Frenzied, tempestuous, she was an uncontrollable barbarian. Having discovered the use of a key, she shut up her mother in a closet. She overturned her baby sister’s cradle. Her wants were concrete, physical, impatient, helpless, and nearly always belligerent.

She was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, fifteen years after the Civil War, when Confederate consciousness and mores were still inflamed. Her father, who had fought at Vicksburg, called himself a “gentleman farmer,” and edited a small Democratic weekly until, thanks to political influence, he was appointed a United States marshal. He was a zealous hunter who loved his guns and his dogs. Money was usually short; there were escalating marital angers. His second wife, Helen’s mother, was younger by twenty years, a spirited woman of intellect condemned to farmhouse toil. She had a strong literary side (Edward Everett Hale, the New Englander who wrote “The Man Without a Country,” was a relative) and read seriously and searchingly. In Charles Dickens’s American Notes she learned about Laura Bridgman, a deaf-blind country girl who was being educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, in Boston. Her savior was its director, Samuel Gridley Howe, humanitarian activist and husband of Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: New England idealism at its collective zenith.

Laura Bridgman was thirteen years old when Dickens met her, and was even more circumscribed than Helen Keller — she could neither smell nor taste. She was confined, he said, “in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound.” But Laura Bridgman’s cell could be only partly unlocked. She never mastered language beyond a handful of words unidiomatically strung together. Scientists and psychologists studied her almost zoologically, and her meticulously intricate lacework was widely admired and sold. She lived out her entire life in her room at the Perkins Institution; an 1885 photograph shows her expertly threading a needle with her tongue. She too had been a normal child, until scarlet fever ravaged her senses at the age of two.

News of Laura Bridgman ignited hope — she had been socialized into a semblance of personhood, while Helen remained a small savage — and hope led, eventually, to Alexander Graham Bell. By then the invention of the telephone was well behind him, and he was tenaciously committed to teaching the deaf to speak intelligibly. His wife was deaf; his mother had been deaf. When the six-year-old Helen was brought to him, he took her on his lap and instantly calmed her by letting her feel the vibrations of his pocket watch as it struck the hour. Her responsiveness did not register in her face; he described it as “chillingly empty.” But he judged her educable, and advised her father to apply to Michael Anagnos, Howe’s successor as director of the Perkins Institution, for a teacher to be sent to Tuscumbia.

Anagnos chose Anne Mansfield Sullivan, a former student at Perkins. “Mansfield” was her own embellishment; it had the sound of gentility. If the fabricated name was intended to confer an elevated status, it was because Annie Sullivan, born into penury, had no status at all. At five she contracted trachoma, a disease of the eye. Three years on, her mother died of tuberculosis and was buried in potter’s field — after which her father, a drunkard prone to beating his children, deserted the family. The half-blind Annie and her small brother Jimmie, who had a tubercular hip, were tossed into the poorhouse at Tewksbury, Massachusetts, among syphilitic prostitutes and madmen. Jimmie did not survive the appalling inhumanity of the place, and decades later, recalling its “strangeness, grotesqueness and even terribleness,” Annie Sullivan wrote, “I doubt if life or for that matter eternity is long enough to erase the terrors and ugly blots scored upon my mind during those dismal years from 8 to 14.” She never spoke of them, not even to her intimates.

She was rescued from Tewksbury by a committee investigating its spreading notoriety, and was mercifully transferred to Perkins. There she learned Braille and the manual alphabet and came to know Laura Bridgman. At the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary she underwent two operations, which enabled her to read almost normally, though the condition of her eyes continued fragile and inconsistent over her lifetime. After six years she graduated from Perkins as class valedictorian; Anagnos recognized in her clear traces of “uncommon powers.” His affectionate concern was nearly a flirtation (he had once teasingly caressed her arm), while she, orphaned and alone, had made certain to catch his notice and his love. When her days at Perkins were ended, what was to become of her? How was she to earn a living? Someone suggested that she might wash dishes or peddle needlework. “Sewing and crocheting are inventions of the devil,” she sneered. “I’d rather break stones on the king’s highway than hem a handkerchief.”

She went to Tuscumbia instead. She was twenty years old and had no experience suitable for what she would encounter in the despairs and chaotic defeats of the Keller household. She had attempted to prepare herself by studying Laura Bridgman’s training as it was recorded in the Perkins archives. Apart from this, she had no resources other than the manual alphabet that enlivened her fingers, and the steely history of her own character. The tyrannical child she had come to educate threw cutlery, pinched, grabbed food off dinner plates, sent chairs tumbling, shrieked, struggled. She was strong, beautiful but for one protruding eye, unsmiling, painfully untamed: virtually her first act on meeting the new teacher was to knock out one of her front teeth. The afflictions of the marble cell had become inflictions. Annie demanded that Helen be separated from her family; her father could not bear to see his ruined little daughter disciplined. The teacher and her recalcitrant pupil retreated to a cottage on the grounds of the main house, where Annie was to be sole authority.

What happened then and afterward she chronicled in letter after letter, to Anagnos and, more confidingly, to Mrs. Sophia Hopkins, the Perkins housemother who had given her shelter during school vacations. Mark Twain saw in Annie Sullivan a writer: “How she stands out in her letters!” he exclaimed. “Her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character and the fine literary competencies of her pen — they are all there.” Her observations, both of herself and of the developing child, are kin, in their humanity, particularity, and psychological acumen, to philosophical essays. Jubilantly, and with preternatural awareness, she set down the progress, almost hour by hour, of Helen Keller’s disentombment, an exuberant deliverance far more remarkable than Laura Bridgman’s frail and inarticulate release. Howe had taught the names of things by attaching to them labels written in raised type — but labels on spoons are not the same as self-generated thoughts. Annie Sullivan’s method, insofar as she recognized it formally as a method, was pure freedom. Like any writer, she wrote and wrote and wrote, all day long. She wrote words, phrases, sentences, lines of poetry, descriptions of animals, trees, flowers, weather, skies, clouds, concepts: whatever lay before her or came usefully to mind. She wrote not on paper with a pen, but with her fingers, spelling rapidly into the child’s alert palm. Helen, quick to imitate yet uncomprehending, was under a spell of curiosity (the pun itself reveals the manual alphabet as magical tool). Her teacher spelled into her hand; she spelled the same letters back, mimicking unknowable configurations. But it was not until the connection was effected between finger-wriggling and its referent — the cognitive key, the insight, the crisis of discovery — that what we call mind broke free.

This was, of course, the fabled incident at the well pump, dramatized in film and (by now) collective memory, when Helen suddenly understood that the tactile pattern pecking at her hand was inescapably related to the gush of cold water spilling over it. “Somehow,” the adult Helen Keller recollected, “the mystery of language was revealed to me.” In the course of a single month, from Annie’s arrival to her triumph in forcibly bridling the household despot, Helen had grown docile, eagerly willing, affectionate, and tirelessly intent on learning from moment to moment. Her intellect was fiercely engaged, and when language began to flood it, she rode on a salvational ark of words.

To Mrs. Hopkins Annie wrote ecstatically:

Something within me tells me that I shall succeed beyond my wildest dreams. I know that [Helen] has remarkable powers, and I believe that I shall be able to develop and mould them. I cannot tell how I know these things. I had no idea a short time ago how to go to work; I was feeling about in the dark; but somehow I know now, and I know that I know. I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them; I seem to divine Helen’s peculiar needs. . . .

Already people are taking a deep interest in Helen. No one can see her without being impressed. She is no ordinary child, and people’s interest in her education will be no ordinary interest. Therefore let us be exceedingly careful in what we say and write about her. . . . My beautiful Helen shall not be transformed into a prodigy if I can help it.

At this time Helen was not yet seven years old, and Annie was being paid twenty-five dollars a month.

The fanatical public scrutiny Helen Keller aroused far exceeded Annie’s predictions. It was Michael Anagnos who first proclaimed her to be a miracle child — a young goddess. “History presents no case like hers,” he exulted. “As soon as a slight crevice was opened in the outer wall of their twofold imprisonment, her mental faculties emerged full-armed from their living tomb as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus.” And again: “She is the queen of precocious and brilliant children, Emersonian in temper, most exquisitely organized, with intellectual sight of unsurpassed sharpness and infinite reach, a true daughter of Mnemosyne. It is no exaggeration to say that she is a personification of goodness and happiness.” Annie, the teacher of a fleshand-blood earthly child, protested: “His extravagant way of saying [these things] rubs me the wrong way. The simple facts would be so much more convincing!” But Anagnos’s glorifications caught fire: one year after Annie had begun spelling into her hand, Helen Keller was celebrated in newspapers all over the world. When her dog was inadvertently shot, an avalanche of contributions poured in to replace it; unprompted, she directed that the money be set side for the care of an impoverished deafblind boy at Perkins. At eight she was taken to visit President Cleveland at the White House, and in Boston was introduced to many of the luminaries of the period: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Phillips Brooks (who addressed her puzzlement over the nature of God). At nine, saluting him as “Dear Poet,” she wrote to Whittier:

I thought you would be glad to hear that your beautiful poems make me very happy. Yesterday I read “In School Days” and “My Playmate,” and I enjoyed them greatly. . . . It is very pleasant to live here in our beautiful world. I cannot see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all, and so I am joyful all the day long.

When I walk out in my garden I cannot see the beautiful flowers, but I know that they are all around me; for is not the air sweet with their fragrance? I know too that the tiny lilybells are whispering pretty secrets to their companions else they would not look so happy. I love you very dearly, because you have taught me so many lovely things about flowers, birds, and people.

Her dependence on Annie for the assimilation of her immediate surroundings was nearly total—hands-on, as we would say, and literally so—but through the raised letters of Braille she could be altogether untethered: books coursed through her. In childhood she was captivated by Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story of a sunnily virtuous boy who melts a crusty old man’s heart; it became a secret template of her own character as she hoped she might always manifest it—not sentimentally, but in full awareness of dread. She was not deaf to Caliban’s wounded cry: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse.” Helen Keller’s profit was that she knew how to rejoice. In young adulthood, casting about for a faith bare of exclusiveness or harsh images, and given over to purifying idealism, she seized on Swedenborgian spiritualism. Annie had kept away from teaching any religion at all: she was a down-to-earth agnostic whom Tewksbury had cured of easy belief. When Helen’s responsiveness to bitter social deprivation later took on a worldly strength, leading her to socialism, and even to unpopular Bolshevik sympathies, Annie would have no part of it, and worried that Helen had gone too far. Marx was not in Annie’s canon. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton were: she had Helen reading Paradise Lost at twelve.

But Helen’s formal schooling was widening beyond Annie’s tutelage. With her teacher at her side, Helen spent a year at Perkins, and then entered the Wright-Humason School in New York, a fashionable academy for deaf girls; she was its single deafblind pupil. She also pleaded to be taught to speak like other people, and worked at it determinedly—but apart from Annie and a few others who were accustomed to her efforts, she could not be readily understood. Speech, even if imperfect, was not her only ambition: she intended to go to college. To prepare, she enrolled in the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, where she studied mathematics, German, French, Latin, and Greek and Roman history. In 1900 she was admitted to Radcliffe (then an “annex” to Harvard), still with Annie in attendance. Despite her necessary presence in every class, diligently spelling the lecture into Helen’s hand, and hourly wearing out her troubled eyes as she transcribed text after text into the manual alphabet, no one thought of granting Annie a degree along with Helen. It was not uncommon for Annie Sullivan to play second fiddle to Helen Keller; the radiant miracle outshone the driven miracle worker. Not so for Mark Twain: he saw them as two halves of the same marvel. “It took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole,” he said. Not everyone agreed. Annie was sometimes charged with being Helen’s jailer, or harrier, or ventriloquist. During examinations at Radcliffe, she was not permitted to be in the building. For the rest, Helen relied on her own extraordinary memory and on Annie’s lightning fingers. Luckily, a second helper, adept at the manual alphabet, soon turned up: he was John Macy, a twenty-fiveyear-old English instructor at Harvard, a writer and editor, a fervent socialist, and, eventually, Annie Sullivan’s husband, eleven years her junior.

The money for all this schooling, and for the sustenance of the two young women (both enjoyed fine clothes and vigorous horseback riding), came in spurts from a handful of very rich men —among them John Spaulding, the Sugar King, and Henry Rogers, of Standard Oil. Helen charmed these wealthy eminences as she charmed everyone, while Annie more systematically cultivated their philanthropy. She herself was penniless, and the Kellers of Tuscumbia were financially useless. Shockingly, Helen’s father had once threatened to put his little daughter on exhibit, in order to earn her keep. (Twenty years afterward, Helen took up his idea and went on the vaudeville circuit—she happily, Annie reluctantly—and even to Hollywood, where she starred in a silent movie, with the mythical Ulysses as her ectoplasmic boyfriend.)

At Radcliffe Helen became a writer. She also became a third party to Annie’s difficult romance: whoever wanted Annie inevitably got Helen too. Drawn by twin literary passions like his own, Macy was more than willing, at least at first. Charles Townsend Copeland—Harvard’s illustrious “Copey,” a professor of rhetoric—had encouraged Helen (as she put it to him in a grateful letter) “to make my own observations and describe the experiences peculiarly my own. Henceforth I am resolved to be myself, to live my own life and write my own thoughts.” Out of this came The Story of My Life, the autobiography of a twentyone-year-old, published while she was still an undergraduate. It began as a series of sketches for the Ladies’ Home Journal; the fee was three thousand dollars. John Macy described the laborious process:

When she began work at her story, more than a year ago, she set up on the Braille machine about a hundred pages of what she called “material,” consisting of detached episodes and notes put down as they came to her without definite order or coherent plan. Then came the task where one who has eyes to see must help her. Miss Sullivan and I read the disconnected passages, put them into chronological order, and counted the words to make sure the articles should be the right length. All this work we did with Miss Keller beside us, referring everything, especially matters of phrasing, to her for revision. . . .

Her memory of what she had written was astonishing. She remembered whole passages, some of which she had not seen for many weeks, and could tell, before Miss Sullivan had spelled into her hand a half-dozen words of the paragraph under discussion, where they belonged and what sentences were necessary to make the connection clear.

This method of collaboration, essentially mechanical, continued throughout Helen Keller’s professional writing life; yet within these constraints the design, the sensibility, the cadences were her own. She was a self-conscious stylist. Macy remarked that she had the courage of her metaphors—he meant that she sometimes let them carry her away — and Helen herself worried that her prose could now and then seem “periwigged.” To the contemporary ear, many of her phrases are too much immersed in Victorian lace and striving uplift—but the contemporary ear has no entitlement, simply by being contemporary, to set itself up as judge: every period is marked by a prevailing voice. Helen Keller’s earnestness is a kind of piety; she peers through the lens of a sublimely aspiring poetry. It is as if Tennyson and the Transcendentalists had together got hold of her typewriter. At the same time, she is turbulently embroiled in the whole human enterprise — except, tellingly, for irony. She has no “edge,” and why should she? Irony is a radar that seeks out the dark side; she had darkness enough. Her unfailing intuition was to go after the light. She flew toward it, as she herself said, in the hope of “clear and animated language.” She knew what part of her mind was instinct and what part was information, and she was cautious about the difference; she was even suspicious, as she had good reason to be. “It is certain,” she wrote, “that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read become the very substance and texture of my mind. . . . It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, where we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies.” She, who had once been incarcerated in the id, did not require knowledge of Freud to instruct her in its inchoate presence.

The Story of My Life