To the Editor:
Johanna Kaplan is eloquent in her distaste for noxious inversions of sickness and health, misery and joy, that flourish under the lay celebration of pronouncements like those of R. D. Laing. As part of the “culture that accepts and applauds” Paul West’s Words for a Deaf Daughter “on its own terms,” however, I must deplore her willful misreading of it [Books in Review, January]. To celebrate a child’s deafness is one thing; to celebrate the uniqueness of a child who happens to be deaf and otherwise disordered, skewed and narrowed though her repertory of verbal acts may be, is certainly another. In her zeal to excoriate what I agree can be a kind of dewy-eyed nastiness, Miss Kaplan affects an insensitivity that hardly dignifies her position.
West’s book is the response—part private, part public as certain lyric and confessional modes can be—of a poet and teacher of language to a situation designed as if for his private hell. A linguistically-crippled daughter to whom he could never explain things, with whom he could never banter, is far more of a trial for an articulate parent, a man whose life is in the world of language, than for some forbearing, perhaps beautifully and silently patient soul whose verbal and intellectual life is conducted at subsistence level. Miss Kaplan’s unawareness of this is perhaps not unrelated to her refusal to allow the super-verbal parent of such a child to play language games with and about her.
For Words for a Deaf Daughter is, indeed, “words”—aside from one more or less narrative and descriptive section, it consists of elaborate imaginative exercises and performances, some of which work, some of which don’t, including a series of improvisations on each of the words in Mandy’s limited vocabulary. (Miss Kaplan makes not the slightest effort to describe the structure of the book, to indicate what it is like in its various parts—but what are minute particulars when one is in pursuit of Error?) By quoting out of all conceivable context, she makes what are some momentary lapses and misfires, some of the failures of nerve which look awkward but to which the author is certainly therapeutically entitled from time to time, appear to be central. I hope that her failure to understand some of the things that West was celebrating—his own world of language, to which, indeed, many normal people are deaf, and the redemption of Mandy’s poverty in, if not from, his own word-hoard—was only a failure of the Imagination and not what, in her review, looked so much like brutality.
John Hollander
New York City
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To the Editor:
As the editor for Paul West’s Words for a Deaf Daughter I am outraged by Johanna Kaplan’s review of the book. Annoyed at the outset that Mr. West does not either feel or admit personal guilt at having produced this extraordinary child (where, for that matter, is his self-pity?), Miss Kaplan proceeds to ignore completely the facts of the matter: that the Wests have done everything possible to help Mandy overcome her handicaps; that her progress in the last few years has been almost astonishing; that she now reads, writes, and speaks (though according to Miss Kaplan she doesn’t even speak); that her father’s greatest hope for her is that eventually she will function normally and happily in a world that is light years away from her own. To suggest that her parents prefer her as damaged as possible is not only untrue but intolererable; that anyone could read this book with any attention at all and come up with that conclusion is incredible, a special kind of deformity all its own.
Frances McCullough
Harper & Row
New York City
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To the Editor:
Johanna Kaplan’s review . . . is an example of the kind of matter-of-factness which lends nothing to an appreciation or an understanding of the human condition. Too often the intuitive, artistic sense of life which is basic to emotional survival is checked at the door to an academic understanding of human behavior. Miss Kaplan has learned that all parents of children with handicaps feel guilty and, therefore, comments on Mr. West’s lack of expressed guilt, ramification of his personal tragedy. She does not pause to consider that perhaps Mr. West has gone beyond self-indulgent guilt and pity, beyond the limitations of the literal interpretation all “normal” people would have of such deficits as Mandy’s. Apparently Miss Kaplan thinks that a parent of a handicapped child could feel true satisfaction in his offspring only through elaborate self-deception.
Having worked with neurologically-damaged children, I know that the degree of emotional disruption in a family with a handicapped child has little relationship to the extent of the child’s handicap. For the emotionally resilient parent, such a child offers satisfactions of an entirely different nature from those which usually accrue to the parents of an unafflicted child. A handicapped child only becomes a life-long emotional burden for those parents who cannot make such a transition.
Although I have not read Mr. West’s book, the very quotations Miss Kaplan gives as examples of his lack of understanding or inconsistency of thought impress me as representing a most unusual awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of his own feelings and an exceptional sensitivity to Mandy’s condition. It seems to me that only a very barren soul (or mind) would not be moved by the poignancy of Mr. West’s wish for Mandy: “Not only do I want you to be the supreme romantic. . . . I want you to be able to go and buy a pound of butter.”
Miss Kaplan is obtuse enough to complain about Mr. West’s revelation of his complete love and acceptance of his child in all her imperfection; she insists instead that he would have benefited his readers more by giving a cold-turkey description of “what life with Mandy is really like.” Mr. West did describe the essence of his life with Mandy and I suggest that this approach has more truth than a play-by-play description of all the practical problems he and Mandy must face. It has been my experience that a parent with this kind of capacity to love rides over such difficulties with an ease born of the wisdom of his love.
Marilyn Bentz
Kirkland, Washington
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To the Editor:
. . . Johanna Kaplan seems to feel that Paul West’s book belongs to the literary genre which sees madness and “tripping” as a special gift to be welcomed for the fascinating visions and perceptions it can provide. As one who is professionally engaged in psychoanalytic therapy with children, I would agree with her in mistrusting and disliking this point of view.
But my reading of the book leads me to feel that Miss Kaplan has done Paul West a considerable injustice. In his book he reveals a much greater complexity of thinking and emotions about this subject, and there is ample evidence of his desperation over what has happened to his daughter, the pain and agony he feels over this, and—far from welcoming it—his longing that it should not be so.
Miss Kaplan infers that West is, as it were, exploiting his daughter’s condition, rather than genuinely trying to help her. But it would seem that he has taken the professional advice given to him, and is trying to provide the best milieu in which to help her. One can raise some questions as to how such a child can best be treated. But this must be a very intricate problem with a child who has this particular combination of disorders, and would be a matter for his professional advisers to decide.
It seemed to me that, faced with this situation, Paul West is trying to understand whatever he can, and since his daughter can explain so little, he can often only, as he puts it himself, borrow “risky analogies,” and use his own imagination and empathy to fill out the silences. As a writer and poet he must employ his own gifts and craft on this voyage, and in its narration. One would think that the writing of this book must have arisen from the inner struggle to come to terms with such a tragedy.
I think it is true that all who live or work with such children do find themselves profoundly moved by the children’s fragility and vulnerability, which touches off deep emotions within themselves. This experience does often change the way one looks at the world, and one’s scale of values. I think it is this kind of experience that Paul West is describing—which is a far cry from saying that he actually welcomes the tragedy for the insights it may bring.
Katharine Rees
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . I want to thank Johanna Kaplan for so eloquently attacking this one example of what is pervasive in the world we live in—the romanticization of the pain of others. Miss Kaplan shows a real instinct for the hurt child (in children and, alas, in all of us). . . . A fine review—it provides a welcome and much needed “minority report.”
Charles W. Patterson
New York City
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To the Editor:
As the father of a “special” child I read Paul West’s Words For a Deaf Daughter with a special interest. Nowhere in it did I note the pattern of sleepless nights (try sleeping while a “special” child performs some of his unique nocturnal aesthetic acts) or the sheer physical and psychological drain (try considering a life of never-ending diaper changes)—not to mention the constant marital strain, the escalating economic burden, the utter lack of the usual range of social freedoms, and all the other special adjustments besetting the members of a family faced with the problem. It is one thing to endure adversity, it is another to contrive saccharine celebration out of it. For life with a “special” child is simply not a bowl of verbal cherries. So my thanks to Johanna Kaplan for insightfully blowing the whistle on the perverse inversion which informs the Paul West book. Indeed, perhaps it is just this kind of “inspirational” inversion which makes it easy for a society to continue blithely to ignore these millions of suffering children by failing to provide them with adequate education and treatment facilities.
Josh Greenfeld
New York City
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Johanna Kaplan writes:
I don’t share Mr. Hollander’s belief that pain is less painful for people who are not publicly articulate. Having a deaf or disabled child is a terrible anguish for any parent, and to suggest that poets, above all other groups of human beings, suffer more over the arbitrary misfortunes of life is an elitism that I cannot sympathize with. Moreover, I must question again, as I did in my review, the impulse behind creating “elaborate imaginative exercises and performances” or “language games” over the person of a hurt child: for me, it bears little relation to compassion.
I’m sure the Wests got their daughter all available help; that is not what my review was about. I would like to thank Mrs. McCullough for letting me know that Mandy has made so much progress.
As for Miss Bentz’s comments, it seems to me that any serious appraisal of the plight of handicapped children and their parents must begin with an unadorned acknowledgment of the difficult truth, particularly because it is difficult: fraught with ambivalence, pain, and downright unpleasantness. I consider that confronting one’s own feelings—hardly academic—far from being self-indulgent or self-pitying, is an essential first step, not one that Mr. West has gone beyond, but rather, as evidenced by his book, one that he has yet to realize. “Elaborate self-deception” is precisely what I found so unfortunate and deplorable in Mr. West’s book, but then, what with the barrenness of my soul (or mind), I admit that I find myself positively awed to be discussing a book with someone who has not read it.
Probably Miss Rees and I are not so far apart in our points of view, though it strikes me that out of her own empathy for the situation, she engaged in a kind of reading between the lines that the lines themselves simply do not bear out. I certainly agree that people who live and work with handicapped children are, in their cores, moved and changed by the children’s extreme distress and groping, and that if Mr. West had, out of inner struggle, genuinely tried to come to terms with his dilemma, he would have written a different book, and I, a different review.
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