Helen Keller: The great made her their heroine

When the seven-year-old Helen realized that Annie’s hand movements had a meaning – that here was a way she could talk – she was taking the first step on a long, hard but triumphant road.

Helen Keller, who was born at Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880 and died only 12 years ago, was all her life a centre of interest, not only for the general public but for people who were celebrities in their own right.

Among the many famous people who insisted on meeting her were the millionaire Andrew Carnegie (who become a close friend), the writers H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton; President Coolidge and the First President Roosevelt; the inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison; Henry Ford – the list is endless.

Some of these people became real friends and by learning the manual alphabet – and growing used to Helen’s strange, guttural voice – they were able to talk to her directly instead of through Annie.

One of these friends was Charlie Chaplin whom she met in Hollywood in 1918 when she was there to act in a film based on her own book The Story of My Life. (The film was completed and released but it was not a success.) She taught Chaplin the alphabet, and he responded by letting her touch his “Tramp” clothes, boots and moustache, so that she would be able to visualize his appearance on the screen.

This was at the height of Chaplin’s fame, and she was delighted by his modesty and diffidence. He invited her to visit his studio, and when she said she would come “he seemed pleased as if I were doing him a favour.”

Long before this Helen had been friends with another great humourist, Mark Twain, the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Twain pleased her by refusing to pity her. Someone else remarked that she must have a dull life, being blind, and Twain told him off: “You’re very wrong there,” he said, “blindness is an exciting business, I tell you; if you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try and find the door.”

Among the many people who played their part in Helen’s life one occupied a very special place – although he was not famous and his name is not given in her own account of the affair. He was the young man who fell in love with her and proposed marriage.

It was at a time when she was feeling despondent and lonely, because of money worries and because Annie was ill. Helen had developed from a graceful, pretty girl into a plump but beautiful woman. The young man was her secretary and companion, and was of course able to “speak” on her hands.

But the young man insisted on secrecy, which was alien to Helen’s nature and made her unhappy. Then a local paper somehow got wind of the affair, and there was a day of high drama.

In Helen’s words, “My mother entered my room in great distress. With a shaking hand she demanded, “What have you been doing with that creature? The papers are full of a dreadful story about you and him. What does it mean? Tell me!”

Terrified and utterly confused, Helen simply denied everything, even to Annie. “My mother ordered the young man out of the house that very day. She would not even let him speak to me…”

They corresponded for several months, but her bright dream was shattered. The secrecy had spoilt it for Helen almost from the beginning, but when it was all over she treasured the memory.

Her mother’s actions seem harsh and cruel to us today, especially in view of the fact that Helen was then a woman of 36. She might have welcomed the young man as a natural protector for Helen, but instead she assumed that he was the worst kind of adventurer. Helen was a paradox – a celebrity whose intelligence could not be denied, she was at the same time as helpless as a child, almost totally dependent on those who lived closest to her.

Annie, if she had not been ill, might have handled matters better. “I am sure,” Helen wrote, “that if Mrs Macy had been there, she would have understood, and sympathized with us both. The most cruel sorrows in life are not its losses and misfortunes, but its frustrations and betrayals.”

Annie Sullivan had her own romance, which also ended sadly. She married John Macy in 1905, the year after Helen graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College. Annie, who had worked with her through the college studies and examinations, realized better than anyone Helen’s need for a companion who would be much more than an interpreter — one who would be her eyes and ears at all times, and she had no intention of deserting her.

The Macy marriage had to include Helen, and John Macy played his part so well in this strange situation that Helen was ideally happy. “Next to my teacher,” she wrote, “he was the friend who discovered most ways to give me pleasure and gratify my intellectual curiousity. There are no words to tell how dear he was to me or how much I loved him.”

But by 1913 it was all too much for him, and he left them. “He had wearied of the struggle. He had many reasons for wishing to go…”

Annie remained by Helen’s side – in spite of her own poor health and failing eyesight – through many active, difficult years. Together they travelled all over the United States working for the welfare and education of the blind and the deaf, and also appearing in vaudeville to earn money. Their “turn” was a demonstration of Helen’s ability to understand and answer questions including questions from the audience – and very crude and stupid some of the questions were…but Helen loved the bustle, travel and life of vaudeville.

She was also constantly under pressure to write letters, articles and books. Because she was blind all her material, notes and drafts had to be in Braille, or else read to her by means of the manual alphabet. All conversations with her had to be carried on in the alphabet and her imperfect speech.

In spite of these enormous practical difficulties, she was more than a figurehead or a symbol – she did work of immediate value. One of her achievements was to persuade a newspaper editor to let her write an article describing the cause and treatment of blindness in the newborn (opthalmia neonatorum) – a disease connected with VD which was the cause of two-thirds of infant blindness at that time.

Annie died when Helen was 56. Polly Thompson, who had been with them for some years, became Helen’s companion, although no one could take the place of her beloved “Teacher”. She continued to travel — to places as far apart as England, Japan and New Zealand (in August 1948) with public acclaim everywhere she went — and to write and work for other disabled people.

Because she had the rare double disability of blind-deafness, and because her achievements were so dazzling, Helen seems unique – her life does not seem to be related to the quiet struggles, frustrations and successes of ordinary blind or deaf people.

But there is one plain lesson to be learned from her early years, which has somehow been ignored. It is this — she learned first to speak with her hands, then to read and write, and finally to speak with her mouth. The method succeeded. She had a marvellous command of language, and although her speech was not perfect, it could be understood.

Helen Keller knew at first hand what blindness is and what deafness is. Deafness – “the invisible handicap” – is much harder to imagine than blindness. Too often it has the effect of seeming like slowness, hostility or stupidity.

Helen wrote: “Perhaps it is impossible for one who hears to realize what it means to be deaf…Ours is not the stillness which soothes the weary senses; it is an inhuman silence which severs and estranges. It is a silence which isolates cruelly, completely. Yet hearing is the most humanizing sense man possesses.”

Deaf people do not see themselves in this tragic light. They rub along like other disabled people, making the best of things. If ordinary people with all their senses could understand that helping a deaf person through a conversation is as kind – and often as necessary – as helping a blind person cross the road, the burden of deafness would be lightened.