Book Review: The Story of My Life

Title: The Story of My Life

Author: Helen Keller

Date: 1902 and many times since

Publisher: Penguin (1988 reprint) and many others

ISBN: 0-451-52447-0

Length: 218 pages

Illustrations: Braille and sign language alphabets are standard; some editions also have photos

Quote: “I like to knit and crochet. I read...I play...checkers or chess.”

Born in 1880, Helen Keller was just learning to talk when fever destroyed her sight and hearing. For a few years adults assumed she couldn’t learn anything and would have to be locked up throughout a lonely, wasted life. Then young Anne Sullivan, whose interest in communicating with the blind probably owed something to the weakness of her own eyes, undertook to try to teach little Helen finger-spelling. It seemed a hopeless task since Helen hadn’t properly learned words, but once Helen figured out that Sullivan was using signs in place of the words Helen had just begun trying to say, her frustrated mind awakened, and her education progressed fast. At twenty-one, despite doubts that she could possibly be answering all the questions and doing all the work herself, Helen Keller had a college degree and had written a book-length memoir about her education.

By the time she died in 1968 I was just beginning to notice the scarcity and poor quality of biographies of interesting women for little girls to read. Bored by Madame Curie and soon to notice the lack of solid facts in a then-popular series of “Childhood of Famous Americans” about whose childhood little was really known, I remember reading half a dozen editions of Helen Keller’s autobiography, each with some “special material”—biography, letters, biography of Anne Sullivan Macy—and finding her story about the most interesting on the “children’s biographies” shelves.

Rereading The Story of My Life as an adult, I find Keller’s Victorian Southern Lady style affected and off-putting—but she was only half grown when she wrote it, so in her memoir as in her early letters, Keller was writing as girl to girl. I didn’t find her affectations nearly as bad as those in some “children’s books” written by people old enough to know better, even when I was twelve or fifteen. Reading the edition that contains her letters, I note that even Keller’s baby sister Mildred complained about her affectations. As a teenager Keller wrote to Mildred “not to blame me for using big words, as you do the same.” Keller’s small words could also sound terribly twee, with lots of belaboring about how good and kind everyone was and what a happy little friend she was to all her correspondents, but she was a late Victorian as well as a child. Allowances must be made.

Helen Keller’s life can be summarized in a sentence, or even a phrase: “deaf-blind pioneer activist.” In a world that takes for granted that all deaf-blind children deserve access to education, Keller no longer seems the heroine she used to be. Do we still need to know the names of all her teachers, tutors, friends, every book she read and place she visited? Is it an unnecessary exercise in embarrassment to realize that, in 1890, many people thought educating any girl beyond the ABC’s and basic arithmetic was a waste of time, many more thought educating children who were either blind or deaf was a waste of time, and most thought educating anyone who was both deaf and blind was simply impossible?

While agreeing that it’s embarrassing, I’ll suggest that children may still enjoy Keller’s account of her own childhood. I know I did. I can’t say exactly why. Adults who used to worry about how to occupy the mind of a child prodigy used to poke the ideas of Braille, finger-spelling, and sign language at my brother and me; we didn’t mind pleasing adults and we enjoyed using finger-spelling as a secret code, but I remember some positive pleasure in little Helen as a storybook character that I don’t feel now. As a child I must have thought she seemed good and kind, which in fact she was. (At one point in childhood she was interested in having a Seeing Eye dog, but postponed that adventure in order for the money to be spent on sharing her dear Teacher with another deaf-blind child.) As an adult I think that, after a miserable embarrassing time of screaming and throwing things in sheer frustration, she overcompensated and became a goody-goody with no noticeable sense of humor—but children will forgive a storybook character for worse shortcomings than that if the character guides them through a good story.

Perhaps, too, my loss of attraction to Helen Keller as storybook character has something to do with having read her obscure adult writings. She grew up to become a writer. She wrote some short pieces, notably the famous “Three Days to See” article, that deserved the success they enjoyed, and some full-length books that deserved the oblivion into which they sank like stones. Her politics were Socialist, her religion was Swedenborgian, and she wrote as if people my parents’ or grandparents’ age took either of those schools of thought seriously. The ones I knew did not. Her other experience was narrowed, hard though she tried to broaden it, not even so much by her being a Victorian Southern Lady as by others seeing her as a freak. She seems always to have accepted that people were likely to buy her books merely because they saw her as a freak, and try very very hard to be a nice, lovable freak.

It remains for today’s more privileged deaf-blind authors to write vividly of their own experience, not just “seeing through friends’ eyes” on a boat ride that the leaves of trees on the riverbank were crimson and gold, but feeling the boat rock slightly when a bird perched on a rail, perhaps, or smelling the fishy mess of the herons’ roost. Helen Keller took the trouble to repeat that the leaves were crimson and gold. (She liked boats; she didn’t try to steer, but as a kid she loved to row.) Nevertheless her autobiography and letters are worth reading once, and probably the earlier in life, the better.

If I were to publish The Story of My Life with “special contents” as a book, I’d want to include “Three Days to See,” which is unfortunately missing from most existing editions. Few things are as likely to stop people taking the pleasure of eyesight for granted as “Three Days to See.”

(One of those things is, however, the subject of this week's post at michellesmirror.com, where the blogger describes how treatment for cancer has caused her vision to come and go. Strictly for brave, non-depressive readers.)