New biography of Alexander Graham Bell complicates the picture – The Boston Globe

Later in life, the tall, shambling Scotsman (who lived from 1847 to 1922) embraced eugenics, arguing that the deaf should not intermarry lest their offspring make the general population deafer. As Booth writes, He wanted the deaf eradicated, their marriages to each other forbidden, their procreation ceased. Due largely to his faulty (and obtusely inhumane) research, 40 percent of the total German deaf population was sterilized during the Nazi era.

Bell was the nineteenth centurys chief oralist, at war with the manualists. Manualist teachers trusted those who found both comfort and efficiency in sign language. But Bell refused to see deaf people as individuals who could make their own choices. To him they were broken and needed fixing. Heres his beloved wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell: Your deaf mute business is hardly human to you. You are very tender and gentle to the deaf children, but their interest to you lies in their being deaf, not in their humanity.

Booths interest in the subject is intimate. Her grandparents on her mothers side were deaf, and as her grandmother lay in a hospital bed near the end of her life, doctors treated her like she was invisible, or a freak, as Booth looked on in seething rage. They showed no capacity to communicate.

Often they didnt look at her face at all, Booth writes. They avoided her eyes, which were hungry for information and seemed to embarrass them. If they spoke to her, they held their eyes big and moved their mouths in long, round shapes. They seemed to think that their distorted mouths could substitute for a certified interpreter, but my grandmother could make little meaning out of the charade. Like Bell, they could not, or would not, humanize the deaf.

Much of the book takes place in Boston and Cambridge, where Bell did the bulk of his research on making improvements to the telegraph and inventing the telephone. Theres some dramatic tension here, especially as Bell wrestles with patent deadlines in his attempt to be first with the phone (a process during which he seems to have cut in line and bent the rules). During these passages, however, Bell, like the book, is really biding time until he can return to the arena of deaf education.

All kinds of ideas are percolating beneath the surface of The Invention of Miracles. Assimilation is a big one: for Bell, the only worthy goal for the deaf was to meld into the hearing world, to leave their deafness behind, to come as close to being a hearing person as humanly possible. He wanted nothing less than to end deafness. Learn to talk; if you sign, do it in private, or only as a last resort.

But as oralism came to dominate deaf education, largely through Bells reputation, deaf communities responded by further embracing sign. Bell, unwilling to accept that he might be wrong, forever stuck in his own head, barely seemed to hear his opponents. If he had, perhaps he would have recognized the cruel irony that the deaf, to whom he devoted so much of his life (however wrong-headedly), grew to hate him. Today there is a Deaf culture, a Deaf community, and Bell is widely perceived as an enemy. Within the culture, Booth writes, he is sometimes referred to as the father of audism, of discrimination against the deaf.

The concept of language is never far from these pages. As Booth writes, in popularizing the approach of teaching the deaf to speak above all else, Bell helped create a crisis of language deprivation. Bells methods of teaching the deaf to speak were difficult to grasp, and extremely time-consuming. Among the consequences: many students ended up with no language at all. And many were shortchanged on the rest of their education, which went by the wayside as Bell and his adherents fixated on the priority of speech at the expense of all else. Booth saw the consequences in her grandfather, who, discouraged from signing, became functionally illiterate.

In spite of her admitted enmity for Bell, Booth never portrays him as less than human. His mistakes created destructive ripples that hurt those he most wanted to help. This tension fuels the book, as does Booths wonderfully descriptive language and her skill in capturing her characters interior lives. Mabel worked on sketching him, Booth writes, marveling at her husbands mind, moving without a moments notice from torpedoes to telephones, tides to ruins to flying machines.

Despite his more monstrous ideas, Bell was no simple monster; if he were, The Invention of Miracles would be a snooze. Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subjects deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.

The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bells Quest to End Deafness

By Katie Booth

Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30

Chris Vognar, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is a freelance cultural critic.

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New biography of Alexander Graham Bell complicates the picture - The Boston Globe