Arts and Letters

I never knew Helen Keller; I saw her once. Who among the living did know her? She was elected to the Institute in 1933. Of our present enrollment in the Department of Literature, only four of us, and in the other departments, five, have this seniority. She was so nearly matchless in her handicaps, blind, deaf, mute, and transcended all that by strength of character so extreme—to say nothing of her saintly assumption that others were in worse plight than she, which led her to a career of good works—that there must have been blank, unmapped areas in the understanding even of those who taught her and lived with her, even Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.

Van Wyck Brooks knew her well, and in his book-length portrait, fraught with almost mystic insight and sense of her importance, narrates the great episode of her first realization of what speech is. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, with cunning finger tips spelled the word "doll" into the seven-year-old's hand, who in turn spelled it into the paw of her setter dog, unknowingly. The undiscourageable woman then thrust the little hand into the water issuing from a pump, and at the same time touched her with the word "water," letter by letter. Suddenly the child grasped the connection between the silkiness and chill of the liquid and the warm pressures of the manual alphabet; connection, correspondence, significance! And she danced ecstatically, skipped and jumped, and within a few hours learned another thirty words.

In 1947 Helen Keller delivered the Blashfield Foundation Address, and conforming to Mrs. Blashfield's stipulation, entitled what she had to tell us: "Power of the Spoken Word." Hearing it was my own first memorable experience of the peculiar and profound life of the Institute and Academy. No one could have testified more authoritatively to human will-power in this particular, wherein, more than in any other respect, we differ from other animal species; by gradual and instinctive process in the course of our evolution having substituted this ability for instincts that we gradually lost or perhaps never had. Sixty years prior to that May afternoon of our Ceremonial, in a few hours the slow beginning of our entire humanity summed itself up in her subnormality as a little girl, her stillborn senses and dark mind of genius.

As the organ played, while we and the audience were taking our places, I remember her reaching her hand down beside her chair, finding the vibrations in the air, enjoying them with fluttering fingers. Where I sat I could see about a third of her face, the profile turned away; a somewhat Greek-looking face but with mediaeval expressions: self-pity transcended, humility in excelsis. When the prodigy's turn came, her companion, Polly Thomson, stood up behind her, with an arm at her back, with prompting movements like a harpist's up and down her harp. The miraculously learned speech had a strange sound, owl-like, difficult if not impossible to make sense of, and she made strange gestures. The then President of the Academy flushed with mixed emotions, tightened his fists, tapped his foot, and whispered, "I can't stand it, I can't understand a word of it." One of our poets wept softly, without embarrassment.

It might have been argued, in 1933, that Helen Keller was not exactly qualified for election to the Institute. Surely her qualifications were exceptional. Her very life was a collaboration, with Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson especially; her sublimity of soul conjoined with their pedagogic skill and strong devotion. Her production of books must have been collaborative; with an involvement with others at every stage of the work, as if it were a priesthood operating around an oracle.

In the Academy and Institute, it is our duty, with almost competitive intellect, to separate issues of creative authenticity and quality from any and every consideration of morality, sentiment, education, and general culture. But in our little democratic processes we occasionally err on the side of the heart. Impulsively we serve purposes of the spirit greater than the letter of our charter and the importance of our precedents and tradition. In the case of Helen Keller we honored not just the craft of literature but its most ancient subject matter: mythology, hagiography, usable in poetry and drama up ahead.