Mark Twain and Helen Keller

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Helen Keller was born in 1880, and at the age of 19 months, she had an illness that left her unable to see or hear or speak.

And she was given the gift of language later on by the teacher Annie Sullivan, who taught her how to fingerspell, and that just opened all kinds of worlds for her.

And one of the people she became friends with eventually was Mark Twain.

And they had this gorgeous correspondence that I’ve been enjoying reading lately.

And one of the things that they talked about in their correspondence was the fact that she was accused of plagiarism when she was a kid.

You know this story, right?

I remember this story, yeah.

Yeah, she had written this darling story about Jack Frost or King Frost and the origins of the seasons and fairies and why the leaves turn the color they do.

And it was a charming little story.

But what she hadn’t realized at the age of 11 was that somewhere along the way, that story had been told to her by a substitute.

It wasn’t Annie Sullivan, her usual teacher.

And she eventually wrote this story, gave it to the headmaster of her school, and he was so impressed with it that he published it in the alumni magazine.

And what happened was that somebody realized that this story was actually an adaptation of something that had been published before, a very similar story, although I would say Helen Keller’s version of the story was a lot better.

Anyway, at the age of 11, she was accused of plagiarism, and she was just mortified.

Stuck with her her whole life.

But eventually she and Mark Twain became friends and reading their correspondence is a real delight.

They had such affection for each other.

And I wanted to share with you part of the letter that Mark Twain wrote to her when she communicated to him about how painful that experience of being accused of plagiarism was.

She was perfectly innocent.

She had forgotten that somebody had told her this story.

And here’s what Mark Twain said.

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that plagiarism farce.

As if there is much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism.

The kernel, the soul, let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism.

For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer, with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.

Whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

When a great orator makes a great speech, you are listening to 10,000 men.

But we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.

Wow, that’s so true, right?

Yeah.

Particularly in a case like hers where the plagiarism was not intentional.

It’s 100% forgivable.

Oh, yeah.

And yet people, if I remember correctly, were so willing to come down on her and to doubt the whole rest of her personal story.

Right.

And to doubt that she had come from a place of no communication to full communication.

And they couldn’t believe that she was that brilliant.

And the doubters in the world took that as a sign.

Yes.

And doubted everything about her.

Right.

Right.

And it’s heartbreaking.

I mean, she was brilliant.

She learned French and Latin and Greek eventually.

I mean, I’m just fascinated reading about her story.

And I wanted to share one more thing that she wrote about perceiving character through people’s hands because she wrote it about Mark Twain.

She said, Mark Twain’s hand is full of whimsies and the drollest humors.

And while you hold it, the drollery changes to sympathy and championship.

I just love the way that he championed her.

He saw something in her.

And their correspondence is gorgeous.

You can find it online.

Wouldn’t you love to have an epitaph like that that she wrote about Twain?

I got all the ink that has been spilled on him.

That may be the most poignant.

Well, yes.

I think he really valued that friendship above just about every other one.

Yeah, he was a seeker of intellectual minds, and it sounds like he found one.

Yeah, they found each other.

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