On the Technique of Being Deaf

I

THE unwise attempt to keep up with a hearing world gives many deaf people a distracted air. It is, perhaps, unfortunate that we deafened can go so long without detection. The halt and blind are spared the temptation to practise this innocent camouflage. It is no use for them to pretend. But the choice is offered us of the part we will play. We frequently choose foolishly, preferring to pass as slow, thick-headed, stupid persons, rather t lain as t he quickwitted deaf persons we really are.

For the deaf are called on to perform prodigies of deduction. In every communication that goes on between them and their fellows, they are working double, devoting most of their energy to finding out what it is all about, and carrying on the conversation with one hand, as it were. I have frequently reconstructed the whole colloquy from a single chance remark, as a palæontologist restores a dinosaur from a single bone. It is a fine indoor sport, but the waste is enormous.

I have been for fifty years what Mr. Nitchie’s School of Lip-Reading prefers to call ‘deafened’ — to distinguish us from mutes. The census says there are 70,000 deaf in this country; but that count did not include me. On the other hand, specialists say that everyone is deaf; but they merely mean that normal hearing is something too acute for civilized life. There are four million of us — the O. Henry number — who hear with difficulty, but who talk normally — even abnormally at times.

I have become a master of the art of being deaf. It is an acquired art. People are no more born with it than they are born bachelors. A bachelor is something more than a man who has failed of marrying; and the art of being deaf is something more than loss of hearing. Nature has been of great assistance. Few things are more significant than the way living things adapt themselves to hard and unusual conditions. The hermit crab soon fits himself to his borrowed shell. The blind fish in Mammoth Gave have dispensed with a sense they do not need. The printer’s occupation makes his thumb callous; the miller’s thumb becomes sensitive. In the Ethics of the Dust (does anyone read Ruskin now?) the crystals arc shown accepting, with bravery and cheerfulness, impositions that change and alter their natural forms. Who has not seen a tree with a great stone embedded in its trunk? Thus life grows round a hard fact, such as loss of one of the five wits, and shapes itself anew.

In the pursuit of my researches I have made a few discoveries and some inventions, which I am about to share with a deafened world, after the amiable custom of professional men.

The great discovery is that old one with which Brer Æsop’s fox consoled himself about the grapes, succinctly if bluntly paraphrased by the philosophically deaf old lady to whom a friend’s polite, but utterly unimportant, remark was finally communicated: —

‘Umph! Us deaf folks don’t miss much.’

And when I asked Mr. Edison why he of all persons did not avail himself of one of the electrical devices for making hearing less difficult, he said: —

‘Too busy. A lot of time is wasted in listening. If I had one of those things, my wife would want to talk to me all the time.’

Discussing a banquet at which it might be politic for me to be ‘seen,’ I said to a friend: —

‘I’m not going to any more of those dinners. It’s such a bore to sit there and not hear any of the speeches.’

‘Not so much of a bore as if you heard them,’ was his feeling reply.

After all, I thought, are not the deaf rather inclined to overrate the mere accomplishment of hearing? So many people hear to so little purpose. The deaf fondly imagine that hearing itself is the pleasure, without considering that what is an end to them is merely a means to others.

Audition is not without its drawbacks, and deafness is not without its compensations. For us, a noisy world is soft-pedaled. The dog baying the moon, the cock’s shrill clarion, the echoing horn, are all part of vocal nature, as well as the nightingale’s liquid notes. And we evade so many tiresome inflictions with a clear conscience. It only remains to put the time thus salvaged to the best use.

II

I was fourteen years old when I first came face to face with the problem.

I was beginning Latin in high school. My teacher was a woman of rare sympathy and helpfulness. She saw that I liked Latin, but that I would never get anywhere in the classroom. She took me as a private pupil in her own time, after hours, with no other reward than that of helping a discouraged boy keep up with his classes. I owe it to her that I have read more Latin than the average college course requires, and that it was a pleasure. I owe to her the discovery of the priceless refuge there is in books. But I owe her more t ban that. She gave me a point of view that has made even deafness a spice of living. After forty years, I still remember the enthusiasm with which she once said: —

‘Earnest, I want you to succeed, not in spite of your deafness, but on account of it.’

Let me pay her the humble tribute of setting her name here. There are many who owe something to the fact that Ida Miller McCall was their teacher. She gave to each the inspiration he needed. She was a teacher of character as well as of Latin. It is part of the tragic irony of life that this woman, who so intuitively selected and imparted the mental attitude that would make deafness tolerable, should later lose her own hearing. The infliction, peculiarly cruel to one of her temperament, — for she was an artist in conversation, — she bore to the end of her life with the same smiling philosophy that made her the influence she was. She often spoke of her years devoted to teaching me as her apprenticeship.

There ought to be a book of short biographies of the famous deaf, telling how they met their problem. One wonders if they attained success in spite of, or on account of, their deafness. E. S. Martin, who so nobly fills the editorial chair of Life — his work radiates a mellowed and sunny philosophy, as if he had found life good; Thomas Edison, by no means so ‘sweet’ a character, but busy and successful, disdaining annoyances of dulled ears with an impatient gesture; Sir Joshua Reynolds, putting all his great ability into an art where hearing is of slight importance; Ludwig van Beethoven, composing some of his greatest works after losing the faculty that the unthinking would deem absolutely essential.

One of the most successful enterprises of Charles Knight, the publisher, was Kitto’s Pictorial Bible. Kitto was so deaf as to be practically dumb. Curwen gives a pleasant picture of the relations between these two. The publisher kept the writer in work as long as he lived, and profited by it as the doers of good deeds should.

One of the most famous letters in the famous ‘Life’ is the scathing one Dr. Johnson wrote to the Earl of Chesterfield, after an unfruitful attempt to make the peer a patron of the Dictionary. Apparently the Earl had refused to see the Doctor when he called. The sympathies of the deaf will be with Chesterfield, one of whose letters, dated the very year of Johnson’s unsuccessful suit, Croker quotes: —

‘My deafness is extremely increased, and cuts me wholly off from the society of others.’

Dr. Johnson’s conversational methods were not such as would make a deaf man feel easy. Cannot you imagine him thundering: —

‘Sir, I am bound to furnish elevating conversation. I am not bound to furnish ears to understand it!’

Some of us have missed our opportunity of standing godfather to some great dictionary, under similar circumstances, and have been roundly scored into the bargain.

Every deaf person should read Society in America, by Harriet Martineau.¹ The author gathered all the information contained in these two thick volumes by a personal visit, during which she toured the country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and talked with everyone.

‘I labored under only one peculiar disadvantage that I am aware of,’ she says in the Introduction, ‘ but that one is incalculable. I mean my deafness. This does not endanger the accuracy of my information, I believe, as far as it goes, because I carry a trumpet of remarkable fidelity: an instrument, moreover, which seems to exert some winning power, by which I gain more in tête-à-têtes than is given to people who hear general conversation. Probably its charm consists in the new feeling of ease and privacy in conversing with a deaf person.’

I should like to quote the whole brave paragraph.

We cannot draw any consolation from the belief that our condition is tragic. It is n’t. All literature is against us. The hero is never deaf. The deaf man furnishes only the comedy. William De Morgan, called to account by an exasperated deaf lady, for making Aunt Izzy funny, plaintively answers, ‘I did n’t make her funny. She was funny.’ But no one found Blind Jim funny. And literature is right. It is backed up by life. We all smile at the deaf man’s slips, but never at the blind man’s. Pathos is inherent in the one, and not in the other.

These are some of the things life and books have taught me. Out of them and hundreds of other experiences and adventures I have made my little philosophy, which has stood me in good stead, and which I am trying to compress into a brief and handy Manual for the Use of the Deafened.

III

To begin with the first lesson and the hardest, it is imperative to admit that one is deaf—admit it to one’s self, and tell the world, and accept the penalties, as well as the compensations. The compensations outweigh the penalties, as you will see. Deafness of the kind known as ‘hard of hearing’ — and how hard it is! — grades from a defect scarcely noticeable to total eclipse of sound from the outer world. Somewhere along that line one must give up the struggle of trying to pass as a normal-hearing person. Most of us wait too long, buoyed up by the same false pride that makes people wear wigs. When my hair got thin, I was encouraged by my barber to let it grow long on the sides and brush it over the top, in the vain hope that people would think it grew there. I soon found that I was deceiving no one — not even myself.

As some corn-fed philosopher remarked, ‘Old maids is really the happiest— after they quits strugglin’.’ Likewise the deafened are happiest, once they renounce the innocent pose of hearing, and proceed to accept all the drawbacks, but also all the benefits, of being deaf.

And what are those benefits? First, greatly increased leisure. The deaf have all the time saved from not trying to do what they cannot do, to spend in doing better what they can. We all have our twenty-four hours a day, as Arnold Bennett has demonstrated, but we deafened may have a bonus besides.

After all, even the deaf are not deaf all the time. They arc not deaf when there is no occasion to hear. According to the subjective theory, — which I advise all deaf people to adopt,— sound does not exist unless there are ears to hear. As I remember the sentence from my school book, ‘Niagara thundered in silence for thousands of years, until there appeared upon earth a being with ears.’ I find it profitable and amusing to cut down the time when I am unavoidably deaf, and increase that when I am on a par with the acute-eared. It works like the old dial motto, which counted only the hours the sun shone.

I have, thus, not unbroken, unrelieved deafness to deal with, but intermittent deafness — say deafness of two or three hours a day. All human contact, all need of hearing, comes under two heads: the unimportant talk that is necessary, and the important talk that is had for its own sake — conversation, the exchange of thought with our fellow beings. The latter is optional, and depends on temperament, even with the hearing. An unsocial hearing person may have less conversation than a social deaf person.

But the talk that is necessary for the purposes of living cannot be escaped. No deaf person is so primitive that he never goes shopping, or takes a journey.

One afternoon I joined a long line in front of the Pullman window in Philadelphia. As always, I was conscious of my deafness. I rehearsed in my mind the form of application that would produce results as quickly as the time and place imperatively demanded. I decided to use a question which could be answered, ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’

‘Can you give me a seat on the four o’clock train to New York?’

Evidently the answer was ‘Yes,’ but there was a condition.

‘You mean a seat in a sleeping-car?’

No, that was n’t it. The girl behind the grille, with just a touch of impatience, apparently repeated her original statement.

I made one more attempt.

‘You mean on another train.''’

The answer to that was, unmistakably, ‘No.’ I took a sporting chance, laid down my money, and secured the customary folded green slip.

I awaited my train with only a slight misgiving. I had ‘something’ on the four o’clock train. I tendered my slip to the Pullman conductor, who took it and directed me to the club car. Of course. One more question, and I would have completed the circuit.

One who hears as unconsciously as he breathes is amazed at so complex a situation over so simple a transaction. But to the deafened these problems occur with monotonous frequency. It is his life. He must constantly match His wits against his deafness, to extract from the world the information necessary to carry on the business of living. No matter how well he does it, he never gets credit for the real mental agility shown. He is merely thought less deaf than he is.

So the technique begins with what might be called the friction of life, the constant colloquies with salespeople, clerks, ticket-agents, waiters, policemen, car-conductors, and others, who constitute, collectively, the machine of living. As a class, they have one irritating quality. They confuse physical defects with mental. They think that a deaf person is obtuse. With this class, the rule of acknowledging deafness is defaulted to good advantage. Even if time permits the establishing of the new basis, what is the other party, with his limited imagination and resources, going to do? No, it is up to you to take advantage of your position as the provoker of the interview, to make the terms on which it is to be conducted, and to make them as favorable to yourself as possible.

Begin with the selection of the individual to be approached. This is not always possible. People behind grilles in banks, offices, and railway stations are fixtures that must be handled differently; but on the streets you may select the person to whom you put your question with as much care as a professional beggar. People of Latin extraction, for instance, always respond with a gesture. The Italian peanut-vender accompanies his volume of words with a gesture so eloquent that it almost deposits you at the door.

The second rule is to ask questions that can be answered, ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Yes and No are always recognizable. To be sure, the answer is sometimes ‘No,’ followed, of course, with the right information; but as a process of elimination, it works wonders. There are but few directions in which one can go. In a railroad station, pick out the most likely-looking train and say to the man in uniform, ‘Is this the New York train?’ If it isn’t, then your list of trains is reduced by one. I am describing only desperate cases. You average much better than this. Sometimes you pick the right one the first time. Sometimes your informant points to the right one.

Perhaps I would better say right here that the deaf person always prepares for as many emergencies as possible, lie studies the time-table in advance. He reads the signs on the walls and in the train shed. He soon learns (and public-utility servants should bless him for this) never to ask an unnecessary question. I always buy a map of a strange city, in this country as well as in Europe. I learn it by heart. And as I walk proudly down a strange street, in an unfamiliar foreign city, I realize that I get on better than even my most acute-eared compatriots. It sounds like a lot of work, but not more than is necessary to play a good hand at bridge. And it is just as much fun.

I always inquire the price when shopping, for the moral effect on the salesman. In small shops I tender a bill that I know must be larger than the amount named. In big shops I read the sales-slip upside down, as the salesman makes it out. Also, in some stores the price is marked on the goods.

The menu card is now common enough to make ordering a meal comparatively easy. In country hotels, where the card is rattled off by a blonde person just abaft your weaker ear, I generally throw myself on the mercy of the waitress, and ask her to bring me what she thinks is best to-day, adding that I usually take coffee.

Before I cast off from the bell boy who pilots me to my room, I anticipate whatever I am going to want, and order it. The boy is instructed to enter without knocking when he brings it. Of course the night clerk cannot ‘call’ me; but I have learned to ‘set’ myself for any hour — a trick not hard to learn. And the man who awoke several hours too late, and found a paper tucked beneath his door on which a considerate bell boy had written, ‘Sir, it is six o’clock; get up,’was not even deaf.

These arc but some of the shifts and devices with which I get through those hours when it is my destiny to be deaf. Through all the complicated machinery of living, my subconscious mind is functioning in ways like these, automatically, just as you learn not to step on the top stair that is n’t there.

To these few hours I must add the time spent in what the United States Census so delightfully calls a gainful occupation; and then I have all the rest of the day for myself, time off, to be deaf or not, just as I choose.

I have taken the deaf man’s job for granted, as I am talking to those who have found a way to make a living, but are rather at loose ends as to what to do with the living when they have made it. My own job requires a good deal of hearing, but I have built up a machine to take care of it, something like that which mitigates my other contacts. I believe that most men who were not born deaf have got shaken down in some occupation, and have evolved the proper offensive and defensive mimicry, and are more concerned with things outside office-hours.

Nothing has been said so far about aids to hearing. It is just as well for the deaf to arrange their lives without dependence on these substitutes, and then get all the help out of them they can. The various forms of the telephone housed in little black boxes are a great help, especially in those necessary conversations by which t he humbler part of living is carried on. I have one, in fact I have a whole flock of them, and I carry one with me, so far as the exigencies of life permit. I am frequently stopped at the doors of museums and galleries by the custodians, with ‘Here, you gotta check that; photographing ain’t allowed; it’s let to a party.’ But these instruments, while useful, do not take the place of ears, not even to the extent that glasses replace eyes.

Then there is lip-reading — a wonderful art, which some practise with a dexterity that is little short of marvelous, and which all of us utilize to some extent. But it must be admitted that the good Lord has created few people with legible countenances.

What conversation the deaf man gets will be with one of these two substitutes. Only at rare intervals will he know that finest flower of civilization — real talk. He will find that, by a perfectly natural law, his friends are inevitably those who speak distinctly. He will never know the others well, however desirable they may be.

If he has become, by chance, a part of a social group, one of three courses is offered him. He may depend on an interpreter, one of those clear-speaking persons who will give him the leads; or he may interrupt with a topic evolved from his own insides, as the spider spins her web, and catch a few flics until the subject is changed again; or he may break off and segregate a unit of the group for a tête-à-tête, as one does at formal dinners.

It will not matter much. Most people are merely waiting for an opportunity to introduce their own topic, anyway; and a lot of casual conversation is merely amiable noises, greetings, inquiries that demand and expect no answer, obvious remarks about our common weather— the deaf soon learn to discount these. We can make amiable noises ourselves. Relevance and appositeness are not required, even between hearing people.

As you see, the fox makes out a good case for the percentage of acid in the grapes.

IV

And now we come to the most delightful phase of this art of being deaf. All that has gone before is but the dreary practising of scales, preliminary to playing a Hungarian Rhapsody, the reiterated ‘keep your showlder down and yer eye on the ba" of the professional, to be able to send a long drive down the centre of the fairway — tiresome but necessary.

I have found it worth while to make formal lists of the liabilities and assets in the way of recreation, so that I may know just where I stand; to separate those things in which hearing is essential from those where deafness is no bar, and where it may be even an advantage.

On my index expurgatorius are: —

I have left: —

I add these two columns and strike a balance. When mitigations and compensations are added, the assets exceed the liabilities, and I am, from a happiness point of view, solvent.

Nor are all the liabilities total. I have often read a play in advance, and derived some entertainment from seeing it without hearing it. And in France and Italy I have done more. There I have an advantage over the visitor who does not understand the language. I get more out of the acting t hrough my long training in observation, the seeing eye, sharpened beyond anything Sherlock Holmes utilized. I saw A pres l’Opéra at the Grand Guignol, and repeated the plot to my wife afterward. I had not missed an essential detail. This faculty adds immensely to the entertainment furnished by street scenes in continental cities—this ability to see all there is, which many hearing people lack entirely.

Someone has said (Boy, page Mr. Bartlett) that when God closes one window, He opens another a little wider. I have tried to help Him and swing my window altogether open.

Just as soon as I realized that I was dependent entirely on myself for amusement, I took pains to equip myself with a number of self-contained, self-starting recreations. Indeed, every man should do at least one thing as different as possible from what he does for a living. If he has a white-collar, white-paper job, he should have also a hand-dirtying hobby. He shoidd paint, model, carve, fish, dig — do something that will give him the feel of things, — earth or tools, — to make him a complete human being. But what is merely healthy balance for the normal man is essential for the deaf one. He is denied the harmless and amusing timekiller and space-filler that conversation is. He must be prepared w ith a number of things to take its place and give him the sense of a full life.

I have been unusually fortunate in this respect. I learned to play early in life, and I learned to use my imagination as the chief toy. My mother had little money for the ‘boughten ’ kinds; but she had plenty of imagination, and my deafness taught me to depend on myself. (I wonder if even children know how to play nowadays.)

In consequence, I have never been bored, except by one thing. I thought at first that it was my duty to stick around where conversation was being indulged in — before I made my great discovery and took a reprieve for life. It is the proper thing to urge the deaf to mingle with their fellows as much as possible, and try to hear. It is one of the most fatiguing things in the world, effort without result, like foozling one’s drive. I gave it up. The price was too high. I really began to live when I realized this, and gave myself wholly to a deaf man’s recreat ions.

And what are they? Printing is one. I learned the trade as a boy, followed it until I attained the proud eminence of a card in the Typographical Union, and thereby opened my little window a bit wider. I do not now work at it as a trade, having gone into another line (in which printing is a great help); but my knowledge gives me another interest in books, apart from reading them. I can look at a collection of rare books and taste the pleasures of a connoisseur. My name is on several of the committees of the Institute of Graphic Arts — of w hich I am a useless but enthusiastic member — simply as a tribute to my great love.

Some day this hobby will flower into a private press with a fancy name — how would The Upwey Press sound? — and I will play with printing like Horace Walpole and Sir Egerton Brydges.

Meanwhile, I work in wood, with a lathe and carving tools. Woodworking shares with the outside of a horse the quality of being good for the inside of a man. It is a great soother. A woodcarver in Grand Rapids told a reporter who was wondering at the contented state of labor in the woodworking crafts that you had to have a good disposition to work on wood.

I make models of ancient ships. This opens wide a big door. There is the excuse for hunting old books and prints, to learn how they looked and were rigged — books like Captain John Smith’s Sea Grammar (London: John Haviland, 1627), or L’Art de Bâtir les Vaisseaux (Amsterdam: Chez David Mortier, 1719). I am a member of two societies, one in England and one in this country, whose members either collect or make these delightful bits of craftsmanship. The making calls for the exercise of many arts and, like one of De Morgan’s books, it lasts a long time. And, when completed, it becomes, if one has been faithful, not only an historical document, but a bit of decoration as well.

I have a colony of bees, which are sufficiently amiable to permit me to take out the brood combs and find the queen, when there is someone to see me show off and exclaim, ‘Don’t they ever sting you?’ I also battle with beetles and worms, for the satisfaction of raising a few of the varieties of roses.

If I play a rotten game of golf, it is not because I am deaf. There is no reason why a deaf man should not be a very good golfer. With me it is, perhaps, because I enjoy a walk as much with a blackthorn stick in my hand as with a mashie. The city of New York has built me a beautiful walk, running beside my home, and extending many miles both north and south. This is the Ashokan Dam Aqueduct, on whose dorsal vertebrae I am free from the menace of the motor-car.

This list of mine does not represent any unusual ability or training. What little I know I learned from books. There are few things one cannot learn from books, and the learning is part of the game. Books came first on my list, naturally, but little need be said about them here. It has all been said. Everything in the Booklover’s Enchiridion about the value of books should be underscored for the deaf.

You may not care for reading. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed his admiration for one who sweetly and honestly said, ‘I hate books’; but he was n’t deaf. However, a liking for books is not necessary to my scheme of salvation. Turn back to the list of permitted interests, and see how large is the choice.

I have described my own diversions, merely to show that it can be done.

Do not get the idea that all this means dispensing with friends. Friendship is not conversation. The things the deaf can do to reclaim the waste places of his life, and find happiness in doing, have another rare quality. They are a substitute for conversation in a quite different way. They enable him to account for himself to others, to acquire a new interest in the eyes of his friends, to win a consideration that his amateur performance as a listener will not give.

Thus I find myself at fifty-four, busy and happy, with a very satisfactory ‘expectancy’ allowed by my insurance company, with a life packed full of the most exciting and enthralling things to do, and wondering whether I am going to have time — even if I realize that expectancy — to do them all.