Keller is, of course, famous for being both deaf and mute and her journey to find a way to develop and communicate with the world outside her mind. Her first autobiography follows her journey to university. This autobiography finds Keller in mid life, having experienced the world as an adult.
I first became interested in Helen Keller through a couple articles I read in which she, as it turned out, had a lot more opinions than just with respect to her disabilities (shocking, I know). She was a vocal socialist and wrote passionately about the rights of workers in the early 1900’s things that would very easily be dismissed today as “too woke”. I found her first autobiography a little disappointing because I’d hoped to see the embers of that woman, and she was just too damn young. Too inexperienced. Very, ironically given the extraordinary struggles she had faced, ordinary in her views. She was like most young students exposed to a lot of new ideas all at once and very, very confident that she’d picked up enough to hold very strong opinions quickly.
Surely in her sequel, written when she is an established woman who has already written extensively, I would get a better sense of who she was, what she believed, and why. Unfortunately, I was being as naive as she’d seemed in her youth. This is because in mid-life, Helen Keller was not simply a sought after speaker, renowned disability rights activist, and published author. She was also the primary breadwinner for herself, her teacher, and possibly her teacher’s husband? That bit isn’t entirely clear. Keller is in these pages, and you can almost taste the frustration with which she keeps herself in check, trying to write something that is authentically hers but also publishable, because she needs the cash.
While I’d wished for more, I think Keller succeeded, even if the book was not the commercial success of her first autobiography. Sure, there is a lot of what is clearly filler material, but there are some absolute gems of insight that I think would resonate with readers even today.
By necessity and perhaps temperament, Keller had this ability to just take problems on the chin. Here’s how she writes of her attempts to “[conquer] the hostile silence” – “It is not a pleasant voice, I am afraid, but I have clothed its broken wings in the unfading hues of my dreams and my struggle for it has strengthened every fiber of my being and deepened my understanding of all human strivings and disappointed ambition.”
She writes about automation, and her fears that in simplifying tasks to a point where the person is so integrated with the machinery that “their brains [will] have become so mummified that they will prefer to remain parts of the machine?” She writes about the tragedy of her mother’s life. A brilliant woman forced into domestic servitude by a world that sees women as nothing more than breed mares and housewives. “Of course lardmaking hasn’t the charm of sculpture or architecture or poetry; but I suppose it has its importance in the universal scheme of things.” And of the fact that despite this, her mother really struggled with Helen’s shift in political leanings away from conservative values.
And of course, she writes about the struggles of people who are disabled and thus discarded. That to have a disability does not mean one cannot have a use, and that to waste the human potential is a tragedy for all of humanity.
This is not her articles for the Socialist Monthly Review. It is a soft pitch of her ideas, and a testament to her indominable spirit, and it is worth reading. And you can do it for free, right here: https://archive.org/details/midstreammylater017614mbp
