Prosaic and Parasitic

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago today in Tuscumbia, Alabama, "more of a village than a town," Helen Keller was born. The neighbors remembered her as a lively infant carried about the house on her mother's hip, raising a fuss like most children.

Less than a year after she entered the world, however, a disease--"they never quite figured out what it was" --injured Helen Keller for life. The story of the little girl from Alabama is one so familiar to most Americans that it does not bear repeating. With the constant aid and attention of Anne Sullivan Macy, the girl who could not see, hear or speak became more than a functioning member of society. When Helen Keller died in 1968 at the age of 87, she was eulogized as a force unto herself, a symbol of womanhood, of struggle, of America in the 20th century.

With Helen and Teacher, Joseph P. Lash introduces the first multi-perspective, carefully-documented and complete book about the life of one of America's genuine heroines. It is definitive; his book recovers old ground, unearths what others left behind and settles the dust on controversies about Helen Keller's life. He brings to his task an enormous talent for research, a kind and penetrating eye and, most importantly, humanity--a feeling for the influence that one person can have upon another.

Helen and Teacher is much more than a work of mammoth scholarship, however. In nearly 800 pages, Lash has written a multitutde of books--biographies, histories, stories of stormy romance and deep poverty. It is the tale, first and foremost, of course, of Helen Keller's life, from her first encounters with the woman who shaped her life to her last breath.

Where others authors and the bulk of Helen's own writings paint pictures of a one-sided woman, Lash struggles to look beneath her physicial impairments. He fails of course, to escape the conclusion that everyone draws about Helen: here was a child, a woman, an actress of sorts who, in the words of one contemporary, knew "absolutely nothing of the unkindness, hostility, narrow-mindedness, hatefulness and wickedness of the world around her." It is the tale of a woman who, as Lash writes, "spoke the language of love. Despite the deprevation of sight and hearing...she was made to love and be loved."

Helen and Teacher traces the scope and course of her life, from her rambunctious childhood--she had an energy for knowledge matched by few--from her days as a heady Radcliffe student to her flirtations with socialism and her voyages and work for the blind. The Helen that emerges from Lash's portrait is a woman with "an inexhuastive capacity for enthusiasm and hope." As he does frequently throughout the book, Lash lets Helen describe herself to the reader. After she read Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Helen wrote a friend that she had found much of the protagonist in herself. Anne of Green Gables is indeed like Helen, Lash writes

now overcome by the 'tragicalness' of it all, tremulously responsive to the world about her, dazzingly tempermental, able to show and give love, yet occasionally a nurser of longtime grudges and maddeningly obstinate: above all, as Helen notes, a romantic lapsing into reverie at the slightest pretext, creating through imagination and fantasy a world more gorgeously hued than the real one, in which good and evil were splendidly arrayed against each other.

Helen and Teacher touches upon the happier parts of Helen's life--her experiences as a writer, her lasting friendships with the great men of the age (Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, and Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, who proclaimed that "Anything Helen Keller is for, I am for.") Yet while doing justice to Helen's great achievements, Lash does not avoid the darker sides of her life--the split with Dr. James Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind; Helen's failure to find gray tones among the blacks and whites of morality; and her eagerness to hit the vaudeville circuit to support herself and her efforts for the American Foundation for the Blind. "Why do you do this," a reporter asked her in the middle of her act one night. "To make money," Helen responded simply.

IF HELEN LIVED largely a charmed life, Annie's story--which makes up the other half of the book--was far from rosy. Raised in the orphans' home at Tewksbury and ashamed to admit it, forever asserting her intelligence and trying to "protect" Helen from other people, Anne Sullivan Macy was at once the driving force behind Helen's life and the eyes that blinded Helen to many things. Annie was not a crusader like Helen; at one point, she felt publicity about the "miracle" would ruin her efforts to hold onto Helen; and she complained bitterly when not given credit for her work. She was, Lash concludes,

a split personality. One one level she overflowed with insight and self-understanding, with love and solicitude and a desire to serve; on another level she was beset with fears and terrors, riven with resentments, hating, as she says, both herself and others. She is afraid her friends will really find her out, and at the same time she is obsessed with the desire to have them see her as she really is.

This combination of Helen's bright side and Annie's dark--of pupil and teacher, optimist and pessimist--makes Lash's study fascinating. "One approached the world with a chip on her shoulder and assumed everyone was ready to knock it off; the other reached out to the world with a heart filled with love and kindness and assumed the world would reciprocate. It was the difference between the manners of Tewksbury and Tuscumbia." Without Annie--or when an outside force, such as John Macy intervened--Helen was at a loss. Without Helen, Annie was angry, vindictive.

"Helen's need of Teacher is obvious," Lash writes of Annie's work, the tireless hours spent spelling whole books into her pupil's hands, the sacrifice of her own impaired eyes. "But equally powerful was Teacher's reliance on Helen to keep her misanthropic impulses under control and to give her a sense of purpose in life." Annie saw and spoke for Helen; Helen loved and protected the woman she called Teacher in return. Their relationship was at once prosaic and parasitic. With Annie's death, Helen wrote a close friend, "For a while, I feel as if I had lost the eyes and ears within my limitations. It is as if all objects dear to my touch and paths familiar to my feet had vanished."

When Lash set out to write Helen and Teacher, few people saw a need for another book on Helen Keller. But his book is likely to remain the last word on the subject for some time--at least until more new evidence is discovered. Lash's story is long and exhausting at times, but it is always enlightening and, above all, heartening. "God gave us life for happiness not misery," Helen Keller told one reporter on her 80th birthday. "I believe that happiness, attained, should be shared."