A Life of Joy

"It is very pleasant to live here in our beautiful world," she wrote to Poet John Greenleaf Whittier. "I cannot see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all, and so I am joyful all the day long." By the calendar, Helen Keller was nine when she corresponded with Whittier. By Helen's own insistent reckoning, she was not quite three. She considered that her real life, her "soul's birthday," as she put it, began when Anne Sullivan, who herself had been half-blind before surgery, penetrated Helen's limbo of blind, deaf childhood. "Teacher," as the girl was always to call her, not only put her pupil in touch with the world but also began the process of liberation that was to make the child from Tuscumbia, Ala., a world figure.

Instead of being condemned to an imbecile's life in an asylum, Helen Keller learned to read and hear with her fingers, and by touching others' throats and lips, she was eventually able to verbalize the words she visualized in her mind. At eleven, she was raising money for the benefit of other blind children. She traveled. She wrote stories. She maintained an animated correspondence with writers and clerics; Mark Twain named Miss Keller and Napoleon "the two most interesting characters of the 19th century." At the turn of the 20th, Helen Keller went to college at Radcliffe, where she was to graduate cum laude in 1904.

Poetry, essays and autobiography were to roll from her typewriter. Anne Sullivan died in 1936 and Helen went on with Polly Thomson as her companion. Her house burned down and with it the manuscript of her book about Anne. The house was rebuilt, the book rewritten. The travels continued: to Asia, Africa and South America as well as throughout her own country.

She lectured, she carried her word: "I would like to see the day when every blind child has an opportunity of an education and every blind grownup has the chance for training and job placement." The American Foundation for the Blind appointed her counselor on national and international relations, a title that conveyed only a hint of her activities; governments from Washington to Tokyo gave her medals.

The woman behind the name began to grow old. Polly Thomson died. The travels ceased, the books stopped coming, and instead of the aging legend in the newspapers and newsreels, Helen Keller was seen as a young girl again in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, which told of her early days with Teacher when she was rescued from what she called the "no-world." The play and the motion picture brought alive for yet another generation the example of Helen Keller's conquest of adversity. Last week, shortly before her 88th birthday, Helen Keller died in her home at Easton, Conn. Soon after entering college, she wrote: "A potent force within me, stronger than the persuasion of my friends, had impelled me to try my strength by the standards of those who see and hear." Her success in that test is her epitaph.

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