Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Particular Friendship: He Handled Me Not as a Freak, However as a Individual Coping with Nice Difficulties
Someoccasions it will possibly appear as if the extra we expect we all know a historical figure, the much less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or suppose we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, proper?—even when we haven’t actually learn Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can look like an previous family pal. However I discover people are sometimes surprised to be taught that Keller was a radical socialist hearthmodel, in sympathy with workers’ transferments worldvast. In a brief article in reward of Lenin, for examinationple, Keller as soon as wrote, “I cry out in opposition to people who uphold the empire of gold…. I’m perfectly positive that love will convey eachfactor proper ultimately, however I cannot assist sympathizing with the oppressed who really feel driven to make use of pressure to realize the rights that belong to them.”
Twain took a extra pessimistic, ironic method, but he thoroughly opposed religious caninema, slavery, and imperialism. “I’m at all times on the aspect of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “as a result of there never was a revolution except there have been some oppressive and intolerable conditions in opposition to which to revolute.” Whereas a terrific many people develop extra conservative with age, Twain and Keller each grew extra radical, which partially accounts for another little-known truth about these two 9teenth-century American celebrities: they fashioned a really shut and finaling palship that, not less than in Keller’s case, could have been one of the vital important relationships in both determine’s lives.
Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the 2 met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library’s extensive documalestary exhibit, Keller “appeared to really feel extra relaxed with Twain than with any of the other visitors.” She would later write, “He deal withed me not as a freak, however as a handicapped girl searching a method to circumvent furtherordinary difficulties.” Twain was taken as effectively, surprised by “her fastness and intelligence.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “personally took cost of Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his personal means made it possible for her to continue her education and to attain for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.”
Twain wrote to his rich pal, “It received’t do for America to permit this marvelous baby to retire from her studies due to poverty. If she will go on with them she is going to make a fame that can endure in history for centuries.” Thereafter, the 2 would importanttain a “special palship,” sustained not solely by their political sentiments, but in addition by a love of animals, travel, and other personal similarities. Each writers got here to dwell in Truthfulsubject County, Connectiminimize on the finish of their lives, and she or he visited him at his Purpleding house, Stormsubject, in 1909, the yr earlier than his loss of life (see them there on the high of the publish, and extra photos right here). Twain was especially impressed by Keller’s autobiography, writing to her, “I’m charmed together with your ebook—enchanted.” (See his endorsement in a 1903 advertisement, under.)
Twain additionally got here to Keller’s protection, ten years later, after learning in her ebook a few plagiarism scandal that occurred in 1892 when, at solely twelve years previous, she was accused of carrying her brief story “The Frost King” from Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Although a tribunal acquitted Keller of the costs, the incident nonetheless piqued Twain, who referred to as it “unspeakably enjoyableny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque” in a 1903 letter during which he additionally declared: “The kernel, the soul—allow us to go further and say the substance, the majority, the actual and valuready material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.” What differs from work to work, he contends is “the phrasing of a story”; Keller’s accusers, he writes professionaltectively, had been “solemn donkeys breaking a little baby’s coronary heart.”
We even have Twain—not playwright William Gibson—to thank for the “miracle worker” title given to Keller’s instructor, Anne Sullivan. (See Keller, Sullivan, Twain, and Sullivan’s husband John Macy above at Twain’s house). As a tribute to Sullivan for her tiremuch less work with Keller, he predespatcheded her with a publishcard that learn, “To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with heat regard & with limitmuch less admiration of the receivedders she has perfashioned as a ‘miracle-worker.’” In his 1903 letter to Keller, he referred to as Sullivan “your other half… for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect complete.”
Twain praised Sullivan effusively for “her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the high quality literary competencies of her pen.” However he reserved his excessiveest reward for Keller herself. “You’re a receivedderful creature,” he wrote, “Essentially the most receivedderful on this planet.” Keller’s reward of her pal Twain was no much less lofty. “I’ve been in Eden three days and I noticed a King,” she wrote in his visitorebook during her visit to Stormsubject, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him although I had never touched a King earlier than.” The final phrases in Twain’s autobiography, the primary volume anyway—which he solely allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You as soon as advised me you had been a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “however nice males are usually mistaken about themselves. You’re an optimist.”
Related Content:
Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Little onehood Letters
Helen Keller Speaks About Her Niceest Remorse — Never Mastering Speech
Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan Seem Together in Moving 1930 Informationreel
Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
