Troubles of Biographers: K is for Haloed Helen Keller

In the episode "Big Shots" from Last Man Standing, Eve and Mandy have an argument. Believing that Kyle let her win a contest to be "nice," Eve demands a rematch. 

Eve: Where is he? 

Mandy: Hmm. I don't know. Probably somewhere losing a seeing contest to Helen Keller. Or a hearing contest to Helen Keller. She was also deaf. 

Eve: And like you, she was also dumb. 

Mandy: Dad! Eve's being mean to Helen Keller!

It's the ultimate criticism! Do not criticize Helen Keller! Which leads to the trouble...

Trouble: How does one write a biography of a saint? 

Interestingly enough, the sainthood of Helen Keller started immediately. Deaf-blind individuals, especially women such as Laura Bridgman, were perceived by Victorians in much the same way as victims of consumption, which disease was not nearly as ethereal an experience as portrayed in Victorian Pre-Raphaelite art. 

That is, Victorians, from Darwin to Dickens, were obsessed with death and potential contact with the "other side." The deaf-blind seemed to bridge that gap. 

From the point of view of the 21st century, the pedestal-placing of people like Helen Keller comes off as irritating and condescending, and not just to us. Neither Helen nor Laura were wilting flowers. They were tough, opinionated young women whose fierce desire to communicate, even to invent methods of communication, prove (yet again) Stephen Pinker's points about language: We come into the world wired to tackle any type of language. 

Seeing the deaf-blind as individuals to be extolled and helped is far, far, far better than exposing them on hillsides and throwing them into rivers, practices that were common up till the modern era. Nevertheless, I began the below biography with some trepidation. Naturally, Keller was a normal, flawed human being. How far would the biographer need to go to make this clear? Would the biographer make it clear? 

Biography: Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller. Knopf, 1998. 

I needn't have worried. Herrmann's biography is not the biography of a saint made human. It is the biography of a human coping with being made into a saint. 

Rather like Burroughs with Tarzan, Helen Keller--and Anne Sullivan beside her--dealt with her legacy from the beginning. The case of "The Frost King" is a case in point. Eleven-year-old Helen was accused of presenting a published story as her own, a story that had been signed to her word by word. 

As many people can report, it was not unusual for a clever child to repeat verbatim a story read to her as if it was her own. In Helen Keller's case especially, all language that Anne Sullivan fed her, especially in those first years (from seven to ten) became her language. I surmise that Helen also had no other cues, as a seeing/hearing child would, to distinguish "that book I was read" from "that story Teacher told to me," not even the changing quality of the voice. On the other hand, Helen was as perceptive as any child regarding people's attitudes or tones, so I will reiterate: it is totally normal for a child to remember a story as coming from an omniscient source. (See Frasier clip below.)

So Helen Keller "plagiarized." Intelligent people, such as Alexander Bell, and people who knew kids shrugged their shoulders. The original author herself was impressed by Helen's retentive memory. But the "users" and "managers"--much like media vultures today--including Anagnos of the Perkins Institute--used the opportunity to criticize Anne Sullivan and even, to an extent, Helen. Anagnos's motivation here seems bizarre: Why wouldn't he want Helen Keller to be what she was: a normal, intelligent young woman who had been restored to a potentially fulfilling life through methods Anne Sullivan learned at Perkins and refined on her own? 

The answer: like many people in her life, Anagnos was more interested in Helen Keller being a perfect, ladylike, saintly example that would reflect glory on him. (Law & Order explores this relationship of benefactor and worshiping beneficiary in the Season 3 episode "Benevolence.")

It is probably for the best that Anagnos became disaffected. Anne Sullivan, who nevertheless had her own agenda with Helen Keller, had one major bonus to everyone else in Helen's life: she honestly saw her charge as a complete child with all the flaws of a child. She once stated, "I shall have cause for gratification if I succeed in convincing you that Helen Keller is neither a 'phenomenal child,' 'an intellectual prodigy,' nor an 'extraordinary genius' but simply a very bright and lovely child" (97).

She bullied Helen, raged at her, demanded much of her, got moody around her, challenged her, and protected her as she would an actual child, not a saint to be unveiled and presented to the world.

It is impossible to tell the story of Helen Keller without discussing Anne Sullivan. Helen was attempting to communicate before Sullivan came along and she was quite energetic and demanding of others. I'm not sure I believe that without Sullivan, Keller would never had progressed to some degree of "normal" interactions. She was not Anne Sullivan's intellectual equal (and after Anne's death, she missed the same quality of interaction with her other guardians), but she had impressive energy and curiosity. She enjoyed horseback riding (as did Anne). She also enjoyed physical activities far more than Anne, such as dancing and fast cars. She liked meeting people. She got a kick out of Hollywood and being on the stage (to earn money, she and Anne Sullivan performed lecture-style vaudeville acts). She remained active and remarkably healthy for most of her life and willingly took multiple trips around the world. 

Helen Keller also had strong socialist beliefs, including the same remarkably dumb awe of the Soviet Union that one discovers in intellectual greats such as a George Bernard Shaw and the Cambridge spies. (Anne Sullivan did not share her opinions but honestly translated them for other people anyway.) Helen was quite egalitarian but did not easily relate to individuals. She spoke quite frankly about sex, even to men, which usually backfired (unfairly) onto Anne Sullivan. She once nearly eloped. 

Readers can know all this now. In her own time, Helen Keller was carefully preserved on her pedestal by family members and many of her helpers. Anne Sullivan was an exception, in part because Anne's outspokenness landed both her and Helen in plenty of hot-water. More importantly, Anne never forgot that Helen was a person, an individual, a "normal" girl. When, at the end of Anne's life, her friends bemoaned that Helen would never be able to go on without her, Anne responded, "Then my life has been wasted" (257). As Herrmann points out in the next chapter, "Far from creating a dependent, helpless woman, [Anne Sullivan] had made a strong, resilient one, who was more than capable of dealing with life's inevitable traumas and losses" (265). 

Herrmann does a solid job dealing with Helen's helpers from Anne Sullivan's death when Helen Keller was 56 to Helen's own death at age 88. Herrmann very gently suggests that Helen may not have cared greatly for either Polly Thomson, who was not anywhere close to Anne Sullivan's intellectual equal and was far more possessive, or for Nell Braddy Henney. Herrmann is quite faithful in providing a narrative of events. My own assessment is that Polly bothered Helen less than Nell. Polly may have been possessive and increasingly odd but she remained one idiosyncratic person coping with another idiosyncratic person. Nell clearly saw herself as heir to Anne Sullivan (as Nell understood the role) and some kind of preserver of Helen Keller the Icon. Helen was a thing to be analyzed and cared for, not enjoyed as an individual. One must protect the poor, disadvantaged lady.

Herrmann, again quite kindly but inexorably, points out, "Nell was one of Helen's keepers, as much her jailer as Annie [and others]...A prim elitist, Nell spent her life in constant dread that someone would say or do something to sully Helen's virtuous public image" (326). 

Helen Keller made her mind known. Nell was dismissed. It is no mistake that Helen's final years were spent with jolly, kindly women who didn't necessarily have the intellectual attainments of her other "keepers" but had, it seems, the same no-holds-barred take on living life to its fullest as both Anne and Helen (see Evelyn Seide with Helen above). 

Herrmann ends her book by pointing out all the advances in teaching and technology that enable deaf-blind people today to live completely independent and communicative lives as full members of society, a lifestyle that Helen Keller would have relished. 

The remarkable story of Helen Keller is that she survived sainthood to enjoy life anyway. 

So what does the "dad" or Mike Baxter from Last Man Standing think about Helen Keller? How would he resolve the daughters' argument (that Helen Keller probably would have laughed about)? He quotes one of her most famous statements: 

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."