Tag: Harvard

Nancy Hamilton and Helen Keller

Published on by emmaclairesweeney8 Comments

Helen Keller was propelled to fame at a young age when she became the first ever deafblind person to be awarded a university degree, and she remains a household name to this day: a saintly figure canonized in Sunday school lessons and picture books.

As well as being a disability rights activist, however, she was also an author and outspoken speaker, whose subjects ranged from woman’s suffrage and the necessity of birth control to a brand of socialism considered so radical that she was monitored by the FBI.

Helen Keller. Image used with kind permission of the Perkins Museum.
Helen Keller. Image used with kind permission from the Perkins Museum.

Her best known relationships are those with her family and paid carers. The story of Anne Sullivan holding the young Keller’s hand beneath a water pump and spelling ‘w-a-t-e-r’ onto her palm has truly become the stuff of legend. But the adult Keller enjoyed the company of a wide circle of friends. While she was studying at Harvard, large numbers of fellow intellectuals flocked to her home, keen to engage in political debate, and she later struck up friendships with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mark Twain.

More subversively, she grew close to her neighbour: the actress and scriptwriter Nancy Hamilton, a ‘gay and chatty bachelor girl’, who boasted of drinking beer for breakfast and described herself as ‘the feminine Noël Coward’.

Hamilton was a writer and performer in the thirties and forties New York musical theatre world. Although she spent her professional life very much in the limelight, she had to keep her personal life shrouded in secrecy.

As a lesbian, she infiltrated the underground ‘sewing circle’ scene so that she could forge romances behind the veil of ‘respectability’. After a fling with the screen icon Katharine Hepburn, she later formed a relationship with the first lady of the American stage, Katharine Cornell. Although they would be lifelong partners, they felt forced to hide behind Cornell’s ‘lavender marriage’ with the gay director Gurthrie McClintic.

Nancy Hamilton (Creative Commons License)
Nancy Hamilton (Creative Commons License)

Keller too was no stranger to sexual taboo and clandestine romance. Decidedly heterosexual, she displayed strong preferences for men from an early age and was eager to be found attractive by the opposite sex.

For her family and carers, though, it was unthinkable that a woman with profound disabilities should desire an erotic life. Sullivan was so disapproving of her charge’s love of romantic novels that Keller had to read her Braille copies in secret. And, when Keller’s mother discovered that a handsome young man was due to invigilate one of her daughter’s university exams, she insisted on a female replacement.

But when Keller was in her mid-thirties, Sullivan fell ill and an emergency ensued. Keller’s mother had to agree to a temporary male replacement, and so the socialist Peter Fagan, a twenty-nine year-old journalist, entered Keller’s household as her private secretary – his job to finger-spell the contents of letters, articles and books onto his employer’s open palm.

The pair soon fell in love and embarked on an intimate romance. Aware of the level of prejudice they faced, they got engaged in secret, filed for a marriage license and planned to elope.

But the newspapers got wind of this and Helen’s mother confronted the couple, her distress so great and her threats so strong that the lovers reluctantly parted ways.

Later in life, Keller had offers from filmmakers as famous as Truffaut all eager to make a documentary based on her autobiographical work. But she chose Hamilton, with her shared experience of illicit love, to write, direct and produce the biopic for which Eleanor Roosevelt would stump up much of the funds. Despite never having made a film before, The Unconquered – which wrote out Keller’s romantic history and contributed to the mythology of her as a saint – won Hamilton an academy award.

The nature of Keller’s disability meant that all her writing projects required her to work with others, making her expert in knowing when to step back and when to take the lead. Far from excluding her from intimacy, therefore, Keller’s disability provided her with some of the vital resources for collaboration, romance, friendship, and mutual support.

Activity

Helen Keller gave Nancy Hamilton the chance to try her hand at filmmaking. Inspired by them, this month we will encourage each other to try something new.

 

Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton

Published on by emmaclairesweeney10 Comments

We considered featuring the brief friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, poets who are sadly as famous for their suicides as for the brilliance of their work.

But when we dug deeper, we discovered a longer lasting and more nurturing friendship. At around the same time that Sexton was meeting with Plath for martinis in the Ritz, she joined a local writing group where she got to know another female poet, Maxine Kumin.

When Sexton first set eyes on Kumin, she considered her ‘the most frump of the frumps’. While Kumin admired Sexton, who was ‘a little flower child, the ex-fashion model…totally chic’, she also found her terrifying. Certainly, Sexton’s more flamboyant style was reflective of her fiery nature, while Kumin was far more restrained and stable.

Anne Sexton (left) and Maxine Kumin (right) at a creative writing workshop With kind permission from Nancy K. Miller.
Anne Sexton (left) and Maxine Kumin (right)
at a creative writing workshop. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce this photograph, credited to Doris Holmes Eyges.  

Perhaps because of these dissimilarities, Kumin and Sexton soon found in each other a deep creative support. They started to attend poetry readings together, hearing the likes of Marianne Moore and Robert Frost, and they reassured each other that their own work showed promise. Later, they even came up with titles for each other’s poetry collections.

It would be easy to assume that Kumin was the more nurturing of the pair, especially since she postponed moving to the country because she felt Sexton needed her close by. But Kumin was always keen to emphasise the mutual nature of their support. Sexton dropped everything, for example, to read Kumin’s novel draft when, during a trip to Rome, she received an airmail packet from her friend. Moreover, Kumin claims that Sexton ‘pulled me out of my shell’ and ‘made me see that the cerebral really needed a strong admixture of the visceral’.

As well as meeting up in person at least twice per week, they got into the habit of making regular calls, sometimes talking for hours on end, and even critiquing each other’s drafts over the phone.

During a period when both women had won prestigious fellowships at Harvard, and so were feeling ‘flush and important’, they went so far as to install a secret second phone line. They would sometimes keep their call linked for hours on end, interrupting their poetry discussions to make dinner or hang out the laundry, and then they would whistle into the receiver when they were ready to resume. Their illicit phone line allowed them to work together without having to worry about their husbands’ disapproval.

Indeed, the pair kept their mutually supportive friendship intensely private for many years.

Kumin, whose formal, reticent poetry won her a Pulitzer in 1973, had been represented by critics as the rival of Sexton, whose wild, confessional style had won her the same prize six years earlier.

Curiously, the pair felt so ‘ashamed’ of their friendship that they had allowed this myth of rivalry to continue for years before finally announcing that they were actually the closest of friends.

Their relationship would have felt more legitimate and less clandestine, they felt, if the women’s movement had existed when they first met. They were the women’s movement, they joked, they just hadn’t realised it.

Activity

After Sexton’s death, Kumin reminisced that ‘one of the joys of our relationship was the ease with which we traded dresses back and forth’, admitting that they practically fought over certain outfits, such as a red and white polyester dress that they both adored.

This month, we will follow in their footsteps by choosing outfits from each other’s wardrobes and then we’ll post about our experiences of wearing them.