The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
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The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
I ought to apologize to the reader and to Miss Keller for presuming
to say what her subject matter is worth, but one more explanation is
necessary. In her account of her early education Miss Keller is not
giving a scientifically accurate record of her life, nor even of the
important events. She cannot know in detail how she was taught, and her
memory of her childhood is in some cases an idealized memory of what
she has learned later from her teacher and others. She is less able to
recall events of fifteen years ago than most of us are to recollect our
childhood. That is why her teacher's records may be found to differ in
some particulars from Miss Keller's account.
The way in which Miss Keller wrote her story shows, as nothing else can
show, the difficulties she had to overcome. When we write, we can go
back over our work, shuffle the pages, interline, rearrange, see how
the paragraphs look in proof, and so construct the whole work before
the eye, as an architect constructs his plans. When Miss Keller puts her
work in typewritten form, she cannot refer to it again unless some one
reads it to her by means of the manual alphabet.
This difficulty is in part obviated by the use of her braille machine,
which makes a manuscript that she can read; but as her work must be put
ultimately in typewritten form, and as a braille machine is somewhat
cumbersome, she has got into the habit of writing directly on her
typewriter. She depends so little on her braille manuscript, that, when
she began to write her story more than a year ago and had put in
braille a hundred pages of material and notes, she made the mistake of
destroying these notes before she had finished her manuscript. Thus she
composed much of her story on the typewriter, and in constructing it
as a whole depended on her memory to guide her in putting together the
detached episodes, which Miss Sullivan read over to her.
Last July, when she had finished under great pressure of work her final
chapter, she set to work to rewrite the whole story. Her good friend,
Mr. William Wade, had a complete braille copy made for her from the
magazine proofs. Then for the first time she had her whole manuscript
under her finger at once. She saw imperfections in the arrangement of
paragraphs and the repetition of phrases. She saw, too, that her story
properly fell into short chapters and redivided it.
Partly from temperament, partly from the conditions of her work, she has
written rather a series of brilliant passages than a unified narrative;
in point of fact, several paragraphs of her story are short themes
written in her English courses, and the small unit sometimes shows its
original limits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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