Word: lashes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LASH WAS HESITANT when President Horner first approached him to write the definitive biography of Helen Keller, Radcliffe '04. But there was something in the Helen Keller story that rung a bell--another relationship worthy of exploration. True, there had been many books before. But no author had the full access to the documents and letters that Lash found...
Each person's life, Lash believes, is in many ways the reflection of another's. "Very few of us grow up like the wild boy of Averon--in isolation," he says laughingly. "There is always an individual," he insists. "The friend--or it may even be the enemy--and we get our own identity in a sense from that person's eyes." What separates Helen and Teacher from the volumes that preceded it, Lash says, is his work on the relationship between the two women...
...Lash, therefore, the balance of the Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy story was more than history. "I guess if I were starting life all over again and realized the pleasure I got out of writing biography," he says, "I would do some very serious work in training myself in psychiatry." Dismissing the idea that psychobiography is junk, Lash believes psychoanalyzing his subjects--something he does occasionally in Helen and Teacher--can be a very helpful tool in unravelling mysteries...
Using evidence available on the surface, Lash says, most of the writers that trod the historical ground before him concluded that Helen was somewhat shallow. They preferred Annie to Helen. The reason is simple, he says. "Helen was almost too good." Her world was one of friends and enemies, black and white; those who cared for her were good; those who slandered her Teacher were not. As Lash quotes Alexander Graham Bell, there was a feeling among those who met her that "if God undertook to be represented on the earth, it would be in the person of someone like...
Annie, on the other hand, was much more complicated. She tempts writers, Lash believes, because "she had so many flaws and they were on the surface where you could get hold of them." Lash says he was "very conscious" of the natural bias toward Annie. Using the psychoanalyst's tools, he concludes in Helen and Teacher that Helen was forced into the position of drawing simple moral lines. "She knew how important Annie was to her," Lash explains. "She determined she would not allow any criticisms of Annie in her thoughts. That was the price she payed...