Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But...

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”

Unable to obtain the original here in Germany, I read Laura Miller's comments about it In Salon published on the web:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/06/huck_finn_is_not_about_race_the_real_subtext_of_twains_masterpiece/

In effect Miller encapsulates levy's thesis as follows:

In researching “Huck Finn’s America,” Levy immersed himself in newspapers and magazines from around the time Twain’s novel was written and published. What he found was that nobody, including Twain himself, considered race to be the primary theme of “Huckleberry Finn.” Rather, the novel emerged from and spoke to a society that was obsessed with wayward children, particularly boys, and most typically lower-class boys spurred to delinquency by the violent stories they read in dime novels

But later she says that levy has been fooling us all along; Huckleberry Finn is really about race. I have never been deceived and I have read the novel countless times since about the age of nine, Huckleberry Finn is about slavery and race relations. The boyhood naïveté of Huckleberry Finn is used as a foil for a certain kind of rationalization for slavery. Tom Sawyer is facile, sophisticated, knowledgeable, and more childish than Huck Finn and he represents a pseudo-sophistication of the culture which is thoroughly punctured.

I do not believe for a minute that the novel is about a boy coasting down a river, that is the excuse for the story. And I admit forthwith that Sam Clemens would be the first to have me indicted, convicted and executed for saying so. After all, anyone attempting to find a moral in the story will be shot.…

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