What's That Pig Outdoors? (26 page)

When I spoke with Susan Cheever, daughter of the great novelist John Cheever and a competent storyteller in her own right, the locale was the Houghton Mifflin offices in New York City just across from Grand Central Terminal.

“Henry, let's move to another room,” she said before I could ask my first question. On the street a couple of stories below, two powerful jackhammers were singing a duet—not quite loudly enough for me to feel the vibrations, but with enough vigor to blanket a conversation on tape. Susan, a former Newsweek reporter, had sized up the situation quickly— and averted what might have been a disaster.

Only rarely have I mentioned my deafness in the profiles I write—it is usually irrelevant, and for a long time I resisted the idea, not wishing to put my handicap on display—but this particular little incident clearly was worth using in the piece, for it illustrated its subject's caring and observant nature.

In the same way, Edward Hoagland displayed a quick resourcefulness worth noting in the article I wrote about him. The essayist and novelist has a stutter that sometimes can be paralytic. Getting his first word out
often takes a few moments, and at our meeting in his Greenwich Village apartment I think his concern over making himself clearly understood to me caused him to freeze more than usual. Repeatedly he leaned toward me, reddening with the effort, saying, “D-d-d-d-d-d,” unable to get out the rest of the word.

Hoagland, who has written eloquently, if ruefully, about the devilment his affliction can cause, is not the kind who lets frustration defeat him. He stood up, crooked his finger, and led me into his study. Motioning me to stand behind his desk as he sat down, he fed a sheet of paper into his typewriter and tapped out: “Let's do it this way. It'll save time and grief.”

And so, for an hour, we conversed in that manner, I speaking and Hoagland typing, and the piece turned out to be full of lively, crisp, fascinating quotes. It was the only out-of-town interview I've ever conducted without needing a tape recorder—and the only one in which the interviewee provided his own instant transcript.

Another such episode occurred with the novelist Joseph Heller. He's one of my favorite interview subjects, because he is not only easy to lipread but also one of the most voluble and thoughtful people I have ever encountered. He answers one-sentence questions with well-considered oral essays hundreds of words long, covering all possible avenues of digression. The worst difficulty in writing the interview is deciding what to throw out in order to keep the piece to a manageable length.

When I talked with Heller about his novel
God Knows
in 1984, he was just recovering from a long bout with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a mysterious condition that temporarily paralyzes every muscle in the body. Right away I noticed that he was not as easy for me to understand as in our three or four previous meetings, because his upper lip was still paralyzed. A bit more than a year later, just before he and his friend Speed Vogel published their joint book on Heller's hospitalization and recovery, I visited the novelist at his Long Island home. That stiff upper lip gave me an opener I'll wager no other journalist had:

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — The last time I had talked with Joseph Heller, it was the summer of 1984. His upper lip was still partly paralyzed by the mysterious malady that had felled him in late 1981.
He had trouble forming “m” sounds, making it hard for me, a deaf lip-reader, to understand him.

But a year later, riding in his car from the railroad station to his home in this Long Island resort town, I could detect in his speech no remnant of Guillain-Barré syndrome. His step was firm, his gestures controlled, his driving relaxed.

My deafness, of course, gave me an entree to the presence of Walker Percy. Just before his novel
The Second Coming
was published in 1980, I wrote to him asking for an interview. He wasn't going to be at home in Louisiana, he replied, but in Toronto for a conference on semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, which is his avocation. Ordinarily he wouldn't have given an interview there, but he wanted to see what another product of Doris Mirrielees was like.

It was then that I first heard the dramatic story of the Percys' discovery of their daughter's deafness. Ann was just eleven months old when Percy and his wife, Mary Bernice (“Bunt”), took her out into the fields near their home one day. Someone had reported a rattlesnake on the property, and Percy took along a shotgun. They found the reptile and he dispatched it. When Ann, cradled in Bunt's arms, did not react to the blast of the shotgun, the Percys realized that something was amiss with her hearing. A short time later they met Miss Mirrielees.

For our second interview, in 1987 for Percy's
The Thanatos Syndrome
, Debby insisted on flying to Louisiana with me. She wanted to meet the Percys, and, like them, she wanted to see what would happen when two of Miss Mirrielees' pupils met for the first time. Would two deaf people who read lips be able to communicate easily with each other? It turned out that to each other Ann and I were just like hearing neighbors, and our meeting provided some offbeat personal interest to what might have been a routine literary article.

On one occasion deafness provided an underlying theme for an entire interview, one that gave me a great deal of insight into myself as well as the author. The piece follows in its entirety:

NEW YORK
— It is not often that a deaf person learns something from a blind one. But I did from Ved Mehta, a celebrated writer for
The New Yorker.
His fifth volume of autobiography—
Sound-Shadows of the New World
—is to be published next month. It is the fascinating story of Mehta's adolescence at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock after arriving from his native India at age 15 in 1949.

As are all his other memoirs, this one is much more than the history of a person who happens to be physically handicapped. It is also about what it was like for a youngster from another culture to grow up in the United States in a certain time and place, and it resonates with universal experience and shared emotion.

Best of all, it is written in prose as clear and musical as a mountain brook, with a wealth of candid detail only a prodigious memory could provide.

Some particulars of
Sound-Shadows
spoke to me in a way they may not to other readers: they made me relive many special events of my childhood and youth, for Mehta and I have a good deal in common. We share a profession. And meningitis robbed him of his sight at age 4; the same disease took my hearing at age 3.

We both learned to make our other senses compensate for the loss. Early on I developed an acute sensitivity to vibrations and the movement of air. A creak of floorboards and a puff of wind from an opened door often will announce that someone has entered the room behind me.

Likewise, Mehta sharpened his “facial vision,” a kind of blind person's radar. Its precise nature is elusive, but it helps those lucky enough to have it to detect the presence of obstacles without needing artificial aids, such as canes and seeing-eye dogs.

Most important, however, we both learned to be independent. As a young student at an impecunious state school, Mehta may not have received much of an academic education—that would come later, at Pomona College, Oxford and Harvard—but he shunned canes and did everything he could to get rid of “blindisms,” physical idiosyncrasies that signaled sightlessness.

So, also, did I avoid “deafisms” such as sign language. Whether

it was by chance or my parents' design, I grew up entirely among hearing people, speaking and lipreading well enough, however imperfectly, to consider myself a normal person. Sign language was for those unlucky enough to be born deaf or lose their hearing before they had developed speech. Those who needed sign, I thought, were condemned to a narrow, limited world, and I felt sorry for them.

When I met Mehta early one morning in New York, I half-expected an intense fellow, perhaps one constantly on edge, always out to prove himself. But the slim 51-year-old man who greeted me gravely in his living room was relaxed and dignified, with a gentle smile. He gave a fatherly peck and a pat to his 14-month-old daughter, Sage, before sending her off with his wife of three years, Linn.

He hesitated before passing through the doorway to the library where we would talk, as if he knew he was off center, then adjusted his step to enter straight through the middle. “Were you using facial vision for that?” I asked. “What is facial vision, anyway?

“Sometimes my mind isn't on what I'm doing,” he said with a chuckle. “I tend to be a dreamy person, like most writers. If I'm not concentrating, it's quite likely that I'd go off center. Also, you got me in the morning before I had my first cup of coffee.

“As for facial vision, it's not clear that scientists know what it is. There's much misunderstanding about it. I go by sound, echoes, the air pressure around the ears. When I'm in a familiar place, I know where the door is and, as I poetically call it, ‘where the sound-shadows change.' That's an open, more airy place.”

“Can you always depend on facial vision?” I asked, thinking about how my knack for lipreading can desert me at the worst possible moments. The compensations handicapped people can make are remarkable, but they're by no means foolproof.

“It lets me down when there's a pneumatic drill or terrific wind, or at the airport with a lot of planes,” he said. “If there are a lot of blanketing sounds, then my facial vision suffers. A jackhammer almost completely paralyzes me; I can't tell where I am or what I'm doing.”

Ironically, another situation in which Mehta's facial vision falters is in “an absolutely open field without trees. For facial vision to be most effective, there has to be an object to which I can establish some kind
of relationship—and also there has to be a fair degree of quiet so that I can discriminate between different kinds of sound-shadows.”

Facial vision serves Mehta well enough so that he can stand at a busy Manhattan intersection, listening for changes in the thrum of traffic and for the click of crossing signals, and make his way across the street as agilely as any other New Yorker—and without a cane or a guide dog. Facial vision does not, however, guard him from such hazards as two-foot-long standpipes jutting at waist level from the side of a building.

“Do you think a seeing-eye dog could be of some help?” I asked.

“Not to me,” he replied. “As with people who have all their faculties, the abilities of the blind and perhaps the deaf vary a lot. Certain blind people, especially those who lose their eyesight late in life, find a seeing-eye dog very useful. But when I was growing up I didn't even know there was such a thing.”

“Do you use any kind of device to aid you?” I asked. “Not at the moment,” Mehta said, “but as I grow older and injuries take longer to heal, I might well start using a cane. There's a real shift in the way I think about some of these problems. When I was younger, perhaps I had contempt for people who had to rely on the cane. But now I will use whatever helps me to function. If a time should come that I lose my hearing as well, I might use a seeing-eye dog, too.”

“But there are so many ways in which you can be independent. Independence is a matter of the spirit.”

A matter of habit, too, one might add. Mehta prefers a manual typewriter to his electric simply because he learned on a manual and is more comfortable with it. And “since most of my work is in the print media, I don't find much use for my Braille typewriter. But I certainly use it when I need to. For instance, if I'm going to make a speech, I'll make notes in Braille so that I can look them over in the middle of the night.”

Mehta prefers to write by dictation, to an amanuensis who types his texts, then reads them back to him for revision. “My books have all been written, really, to be read aloud, because I write by sound. I think a lot of writers, even those who don't dictate, write by sound.”

He acknowledges that technology has advanced so much that computers and tape recorders could be a boon to him, as they are to
me. “I really think we should be thankful for anything that enhances a person's ability to function better. It probably would improve the speed of certain functions if I mastered computers, but it's just pure laziness that I don't.”

There's no need to learn a new technology to help feed his family, for three years ago he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award of $236,000. For the next few years it will pay the rent and let him get on with the next volume of his memoirs, which will cover his college years at Pomona.

One thing that can't be aided by a cane, guide dog, computer or recorder is Mehta's astonishing memory. How is he able to reconstruct his life, including entire conversations, in such detail?

“I don't understand much about memory—I don't think even psychologists do. But for me it works by a process of free association. When I sat down to write this book I said to myself, ‘What do I remember about arriving in New York City for the first time?' I thought I would remember nothing at all. But when I began writing, I asked myself, ‘Which airport did I come in at? Who received me? How did I spend that first day?' As I wrote, things I didn't know I remembered came to the surface. I sometimes think that a human being forgets nothing. It's all stored there,” he said, tapping his head.