HELEN AND TEACHER: The Story, of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy

by Joseph P. Lash ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 1980

Invited by the Radcliffe Foundation to write a new Helen Keller biography and afforded no-strings access to the relevant archives, Lash has come up with a long, slow shrug. In the current pedestal-toppling mode, he takes a dim view of Anne Sullivan's motives; now and again he suggests that Helen was really pretty limited (her writerly writing, her poor speech). But on the whole he appears to have transferred those archives virtually intact to these 935 pages. The persevering reader will, however, find some tantalizing material here. Sullivan's Dickensian childhood in a Massachusetts poorhouse and her miracle-working breakthrough to pampered, imprisoned Helen are inescapably dramatic. The traumatic ""Frost King"" plagiarism episode, recounted in The Story of My Life, is minutely examined--with Lash concluding that Annie had read the story to Helen, but hadn't understood the meaning of plagiarism (and then, taking fright, had denied all). But from this episode came the first of the pair's ruptures with benefactors, which Lash attributes to Annie's domineering, intransigence, and selfish possessiveness. It also planted in Helen's mind--and the public's--the question of her true competence, her true originality. And it raises the crucial question of what a life was like lived most vividly through books, a question which would not even arise had Helen not had an exceptional mind. Lash reports various degrading attempts, later, to test Helen. He reports her own attempts first to get away from writing about herself, then to justify her advocacy of socialism--her right to speak on public issues at all. He notes her dependence on what others (like less sensitive Polly Thompson) transmitted to her, and how. But his failure to get inside Helen's difference--her dependence, also, on touch--undermines the whole enterprise. The questions persist--while one reads a year-by-year chronicle of Helen's famous friendships, Helen on the vaudeville circuit, Helen as a fund- and consciousness-raiser, Helen in Hollywood. . . Helen as a phenomenon. Even this, shaped and trimmed, would be interesting, Lash, instead, gives us everything unsorted. The one recompense, though, is that he also gives us much to think about.

Pub Date: May 30, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION