Deaf, but Not Dumb

I

THE number of the hard of hearing is no doubt large — how large no one knows, but certainly larger than is suspected. We get a clue, however, from a recent commendable movement to ascertain the number of the underhearing among the children in our public schools, whose ears are being tested by the audiometer. This is a legal requirement in some cities, but at present is more widely applied through WPA funds and private benevolence.

An earpiece is clamped over one ear, the other ear is stopped up, and the little victim listens to sounds scientifically graduated in loudness, beginning with the faintest peep audible to the normal ear. When he hears he reacts, and a card is marked. He is then tried for the next note or pitch, until the range of the human voice has been covered — from, as the little girl said of the piano, ‘the growly end to the squeaky end.’ When both his ears have been thus tested, the resulting card is a graphic picture of his deafness. The degrees in loudness are designated by the gay word ‘decibel.’ If the test shows a loss of nine decibels within the range of useful speech, the parents of the pupil are advised to give him medical treatment and special teaching.

These efforts provide a new approach for the Society for the Hard of Hearing: audiometer tests for every child, prompt medical treatment for those who need it, and free courses in lip reading in every school. Many a bright child has been classed as backward whose eager mind is masked behind dulled ears.

A loss of nine decibels is not in itself a serious case of deafness, but it is a good point at which to begin preventive measures — which do not, unfortunately, always prevent. The best they can do with the majority of afflicted infants is to check the inexorable progress of the deafness. In view of what has been accomplished against diabetes, diphtheria, malaria, and other ills, with all the wonders of modern surgery, it is dismaying how little progress has been made against deafness. Only the common cold seems to have been more elusive. Nature has set the eye, so vital and delicate an organ, on the outer walls, as it were, where it can be got at; and the miracles of eye surgery, from removing the veil of cataract to planting an entirely new organ, are among the wonders of medical science. But Nature has locked hearing away in the fastnesses of a grotto of solid bone, the most inaccessible spot of the human anatomy.

Figures from audiometer tests — of only a fraction of the country, it is true, but still well scattered, representing thirty states — reveal that on an average 6.1 per cent of children of school age have a loss of nine decibels or more in one or both ears. That is a conservative figure for children, and it becomes even more conservative when applied to adults. For deafness is progressive. Millions of adults grew up before the enlightened days of audiometers, and, starting with nine decibels or more, have carried their deafness, along with their adenoids and unremoved tonsils, into their old age with little relief. And old people live longer now, thanks to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and with the years lose hearing along with hair and teeth. So it can be assumed that the deafness of children continues and is aggravated by time, neglect of colds, and the stridency of modern life, and the nine decibels loss of childhood increases to the twenty or more where real deafness begins.

We are well within probability, then, if we decide that there are more than seven million people — 6 per cent of our population — whose deafness is severe enough to make communication difficult and unreliable, and thus set them apart from their fellow citizens as a class that must at times be handled differently from the normal rank and file. The number is roughly arrived at, but that need not disturb us; a million or so either way would not upset my argument, which is merely that there are enough of us hard of hearing to justify having life shaped a bit more to fit our needs, instead of being forced to do all the adaptation ourselves.

For these figures mean, if they mean anything, that practically everybody has some contact with the hard of hearing. Six per cent is roughly one sixteenth of the population. One out of sixteen is deaf enough to offer obstacles to ordinary intercourse. This means that you who read this, whether or not you yourself are hard of hearing, must meet an underhearing person daily, weekly — often, at any rate.

II

The battle against deafness is to-day being fought on two fronts, by medical research and experiment seeking to discover the causes of loss of hearing and methods of eradicating them, and by electrical science in the bettering of hearing devices and apparatus to aid in teaching speech to those who have never heard it.

One cause of increasing deafness is the gradual closing of the oval window in the bony wall between the middle ear and the inner ear through which the waves of sound reach the auditory nerves and are transmitted to the brain. No one knows what causes this bone growth or what will prevent it. Patient investigation on dogs, whose hearing apparatus most nearly approaches ours, has been going on for some time. Meanwhile sensational operations have been attempted in Sweden and France, such as the insertion of tissue graft against the window opening, and the puncturing of the bony wall to offset the closing of the window. Doctors approach such heroic remedies with caution, and are of the opinion that these operations have not yet proved themselves as to technique or results. About one in four has been successful, and even with these not enough time has elapsed to ascertain the permanency of the cure. The artificial opening also shows a tendency to close with growth of bone. The consensus seems to be that prophylactic or preventive measures offer the greatest promise at present.

Steady improvement is evident in the development of hearing instruments. First the clumsy earpiece was reduced to the diameter of a penny, so small and light it could be held to the ear by a small shape fitting the ear passage, doing away with the headband. The shape is made to fit exactly by taking a small plaster-ofParis cast — the way the dentist makes casts of your mouth — and reproducing it in plastic. Bone conduction, a real discovery, dispenses with the earpiece entirely, and relays the sound through the bones of the head directly to the auditory nerves without using the natural passages of the car. A small oblong is fitted behind the ear, where it is almost invisible, and connected with a receiver. This device has proved useful also in teaching speech, giving deaf children some idea of vibration, pitch, intensity, and the like. For this purpose the oblong is held between the fingers, and the vibrations felt. There is no other way, except the long slow trial-and-error method that has been in use hitherto, to get sound to the mind of a child who has never heard, and does not know how he speaks.

In addition to the audiometer, there has just been invented another instrument for teaching speech to deaf children — the pitch indicator. The inventor, A. E. Coyne, is an engineer at Cape Town, South Africa, where his wife is one of the teachers in the admirable Institute for the Deaf conducted by the Dominican Sisters. Teaching pitch is more difficult than teaching lip reading. The pitch indicator — to describe it briefly and simply — flashes a small bulb, activated by a responsive tuning fork, for each note of the diatonic scale. The student instantly sees when he has sounded the right note, and the pattern of the row of lights follows the pitch of the human voice. With it, says the inventor, is developed in minutes a control of the voice that could not be obtained by other methods in months.

III

The late Edward Sandford Martin, who was for years the genial editor of Life (first incarnation) and who had been deaf most of his life, summed up the ethics of deaf conduct briefly but conclusively: —

‘A deaf man who really wants to be good has it in his favor that there are a number of sinful or inexpedient things that he cannot do to advantage. . . . He cannot play poker to good advantage, though he can buy stocks; he cannot flirt, unless, indeed, he is a resolute adventurer and learns to read the lips; he is so badly handicapped in society that there is little chance that his head will be turned by social success, or his energies wasted in a chase after it. He has even a greater incentive to be temperate than most men have, for carousals are dull sport to a deaf man. . . . But it is unwise for him to be much of a sinner because he is so much exposed to his own society and will be so much inconvenienced by having to associate with an unworthy person whom he cannot respect. He had better be good. He may be virtuous and still not happy — whatever the copybooks declare — but certainly being deaf, he has a great deal better chance to be happy by sticking close to virtue than by trying to be successfully wicked.’

Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, initiator of much of the social work now done for the hard of hearing, was not deaf, but his wife was. He fell in love with her when teaching speech to a group of underhearing pupils. You perhaps know the delightful legend that the invention of the telephone was a by-product of experiments to enable his wife to hear by electricity. Dr. Bell went on with his great invention, but the incidental discovery he made was developed by his assistant, Miller Reese Hutchison, who later, while working for Thomas Edison, — the arch example of triumph over deafness, — produced the first electric hearing instrument. But neither he nor anyone else ever succeeded in making Edison wear one.

The first League for the Hard of Hearing was founded by Edward B. Nitchie, a deaf teacher of lip reading. The members of the American Society for the Hard of Hearing are all deaf, but not all the deaf are members. They should be. Practically all that has been done for the social rehabilitation of the deaf has been done by the deaf. Thus we find a new significance to the old saying about the blind leading the blind.

Organized effort to aid the deaf may be left safely in the capable hands of the Society, where it now so efficiently rests, while we consider the attitude of the individual who must at times, through kinship, friendship, duty, or profit, deal with the underhearing.

Hearing is a sense so taken for granted that its loss disrupts the whole scheme of social relations — and domestic relations likewise — and seriously interferes with the art of living. Life is ordinarily carried on in terms of the spoken word. Without hearing, the simplest and most ordinary details become more difficult and embarrassing than a hearing person can imagine.

The telephone rings. My wife goes to the phone. A pleasant feminine voice says: —

‘Won’t you and Mr. Calkins dine with us Friday night? Just a small dinner — only two other guests.’

My wife explains that I am so deaf that a dinner, even a small dinner, is an ordeal for me, and I fear I shall prove a wet blanket — or at least a muffler. But the would-be hostess insists. She weaves all objections aside. She knows it is hard for me, but won’t I make an exception in her case?

‘I guess we shall have to go,’ says my wife as she hangs up the phone.

On Friday we go to the dinner. It is a charming one, with interesting people among whom I should like to play the part of an acceptable guest. I am seated at my hostess’s right. The table is covered with napery, dishes, and flowers. I look for a place to set the large black box, holding about two gallons of conversation, which I carry around with me to advertise the fact that I am deaf. I set it down and ruin the effect of the beautifully arranged table. I remark humorously that I hope some day to have an instrument like that of the late King Edward, in ivory and gold, which will be an ornament to any table. I pursue the thought, saying that my effect on a dinner party is about as blighting as that of my box on conversation. I hang on for a few rounds, knowing that if I drop the ball I shall be out of the game.

The man opposite is reminded of a story, and tells it. My wife tries to wigwag the point of the story to me by lip reading. I fail to get it, however, because the maid is taking away my soup, which I have barely tasted. I resolve to devote myself to the fish, and let the conversational chips fall where they may. I am interrupted by my hostess, who is telling me something. I say good-bye to the fish, and try to follow her. After she has told the story twice, and held the entire table breathlessly watching to see if I get it, I pretend to have heard her and smile rapturously — deceiving no one, least of all my wife. I hurry in with my stock anecdote before the breach is closed.

This anecdote enables me to link myself up with an illustrious deaf person, showing that our calamity knocks with equal foot at the palace and the hovel. Dr. Horace Howard Furness, I explain, was the famous Shakespeare scholar. Invited by Charles Eliot Norton to stay at his house while in Boston to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, Dr. Furness wrote: ‘It is many, many years since I formed a resolution to eat at no table but my own. I am so deaf that I must either wholly listen or wholly eat, and the attempt to divide the two always causes embarrassment to my host and me, and since Nature has instructed me to remain in the background, I take the hint and obey her behest.’ ¹

I hold my position valiantly a few moments, but soon the conversation veers again. From time to time someone with vast effort explains the point of a story to me. It is practically lost in vain repetition, and I seldom get it anyway, but pretend I do, and smile fatuously. And so the evening wears away.

‘You didn’t get anything that was said to you,’ my wife says to me on the way home. ‘Why do you pretend to hear when you don’t?’

I explain that it was necessary to do so if I was to be able to eat a little.

If it hadn’t been for people trying to tell me things I could have made a good meal. The drawback to dinner parties, I insist, is the conversation. With Thackeray I feel that the talking, like the carving, should be done at a side table. I am hoping for an invitation some day which reads like this: ‘Dinner at seven-thirty. No conversation.’

As a people we are ear-minded rather than eye-minded. We hear more than we see. We let sound pictures drive out the silent films, another grievance to the deaf, the more so because the pictures have steadily lost in graphic presentation in favor of mere speech. Strange, this exaltation of the ear, for nature apparently does not agree. At any rate she gave the eye eighteen times as many nerves as the ear. So the hard of hearing, if their loss is thirty or more decibels, must dispense not only with conversation, but with other amusements as well.

Realizing that moving pictures were the perfect form of dramatic entertainment for the hard of hearing until the introduction of sound, many houses are now equipped with multiple hearing devices, and this is sufficient for a large proportion of the deaf. A microphone is set up near the sound apparatus or speaker, and wires are run to certain seats. The occupant plugs in an earpiece, his own or one furnished by the theatre, and the mechanical chain is complete.

I am one who is too deaf for this bit of enterprise, but I also have my resources. Foreign-language films are run with their original sound effects, but English titles are written on the pictures for the benefit of those who understand only English; and I, who do not understand even English when it is spoken, enjoy such plays as Sacha Guitry’s Story of a Cheat and Erich von Stroheim’s Grand Illusion. Those French films are better than the average Hollywood fare. Then there are the dramatizations of well-known books, — Little Women, David Copperfield, Tom

Sawyer, and Les Miserables, — with which I am so familiar that I can follow every link of the action and scarcely miss the spoken word. I apply this plan to stage plays also, but there is not as much for the eye in a play as in a picture.

The hard of hearing must qualify as best they may to meet the hearing world on its own ground. But what of the other fifteen sixteenths of society? Have they no obligation? I do not mean in the narrow sense of duty, but for their own comfort, convenience, or selfinterest. The deafened feel that reaction to their handicap is too often stage fright or an exaggerated and distorted effort — or, best of all perhaps, complete and stolid indifference.

The desirable thing is communication expressed simply and with natural enunciation. Loudness is seldom as necessary as distinctness, especially for lip readers. Do not talk to your underhearing friend with your back to the light. Let him see your face, so that his eyes may supplement his ears. You should also consider seating arrangements in social groups. A tactless hostess placed Harriet Martineau next to the only other deaf person at a dinner, with a vacant chair on her other side.

Give your friend a chance to use his eyes. Show him things instead of reading them to him. Remember the partially deaf hear better in the street, a railroad train, or a boiler factory, wherever there is a background of noise, the very place where you have most difficulty. The greatest service is the quick and tactful prompting with the key word that gives a deaf person the clue to whatever is being presented.

IV

If more people possessed the sort of imagination that understands and enters into the major problems of hardness of hearing, the lives of the deafened would be made easier. That problem is one of orientation, of getting our bearings in a strange group. Among our friends it is different. They know us, know the best and the worst of us, and have already made up their minds about us. The necessity of testifying in our own behalf is not so insistent. But among strangers we feel we must in some way account for ourselves, give some evidence of intelligence, and we are profoundly grateful to anyone who helps us to a conversational raft upon which we may float for a season at least, if not to a safe harbor.

I once sat for an hour in the dim-lit cocktail room of a restaurant, in a group of twelve men only one of whom I knew

— and he came late. We were whiling away the time until an eight o’clock dinner with drinks and casual conversation. The low lights were supposed to aid such conversation, but for me they had the contrary effect. I was marooned in a vacuum. I did not know who was speaking, or even if anyone was. I did not know for certain which one was our host.

It would be difficult to conceive a more difficult situation for a deaf man. Even in the light and among friends or acquaintances, the hurdles are dismaying, though under such circumstances one can look about and smile knowingly when the others do, or pick up his glass, sit beside someone who looks approachable, and concentrate his attention in a tête-à-tête.

What should I do, I meditated: sit here until my hour was up, or make an effort to break through the deadlock? I took out my first-aid kit, a pad and pencil in a neat leather case, tendered it to the man sitting next, and, explaining my difficulty, asked him to write the names of the group in the order of sitting. I knew them collectively but not as individuals, for we were an art jury, and after dinner we would proceed to a gallery to pick out the winners for prizes. My neighbor looked a bit startled at the

— to him — odd request, but courteously tried to comply. He did not know them all and was forced to ask help, thus drawing the attention of the group to my plight. This was all to the good. Conversation was not apparently absorbing, and even a deaf man’s shifts and devices added a new interest.

No sooner had I read the list of names and identified their owners than another man reached for my book and wrote to remind me of a correspondence we had had some time since. Others followed, for the men were not only idle but goodnatured, possibly a little bored. It was too dark to write easily, and each was forced to twist under the direct ray of the orange-colored slit that was the only illumination of this deaf man’s purgatory. But there in the darkness, without hearing an audible sound, I acquired some preliminary information about my fellow guests, and lost part of my panicstricken strangeness.

By the time we moved into the welllighted private dining room the company was warmed up. My pad was in frequent requisition. They told me the points of their jokes, the topics they discussed, and asked questions the answering of which salved my bruised self-esteem. Up and down the table the pad traveled, until it became a sort of game. One man wanted to know what I did with all the notes I must have accumulated — thought I ought to publish them as a new kind of dinner-table talk. I experienced a mild pride in my accomplishment, like the frog that fell into the cream jug and worked his way out by swimming vigorously until the cream was churned. I acquired also renewed faith in the inherent good will of human nature.

Against that scene wherein a deaf man managed to assert himself and found his fellows willing to meet him halfway let me project the picture of an ideal hostess. I recall with gratitude a woman of rare understanding — it would embarrass her if I gave her name — who once entertained my wife and me at the mountain-top camp where she and her family spent their summers. This camp was aboriginally a haunt of foxes, and its name is without prejudice — Yelping Hill. An artist member of the colony had decorated the road at junctions with running foxes, noses pointing out the right directions. At the gates of the camp the fox was sitting on his haunches, nose in the air, giving the ‘view halloo,’ or whatever foxes do give when run to earth.

It can be inferred from this touch that the colony was one of bright people worth knowing, and that it would be a pity to miss the names and states of the various members we were to encounter at dinner; for, while each family occupied its own bungalow or cabin, meals were taken in a common clubhouse. Except for our hostess and her distinguished husband, all were strangers to us. Before we went to dinner, my hostess handed me a typewritten sheet on which she had set down, as she expressed it, what a normally hearing person would learn in the first half hour about his fellow guests. Here were the names of each family, parents and children, their occupations, — artists, writers, editors, college presidents, — interesting facts about each, and about the origin of the colony itself, how so remote and fascinating a spot had been discovered in the accessible wilds of Connecticut. Never was help more timely. I met each member with sure foreknowledge and was able to muster at least a sentence or two of intelligent apprehension. The multiplication of such foresight would go far to take from a deaf man’s social life the veil of obscurity that hangs over it.

V

Speaking in public presents peculiar problems to a deaf man, and likewise, be it said, to his sponsors. Domiciled in a strange town, I cannot be reached in my hotel room by ordinary means of communication; telephone bell and knocks on my door are unheard and unheeded; no committee can inform me of a lastminute change in the program. I have coached bellhops to enter without rapping, and this works when I am presentable and the door unlocked, unless the boy forgets. Ingenious friends have announced their presence by shoving a sheet of white paper under the door. Both these devices are recommended, but they do not occur to chairmen of program committees. So an elaborate procedure must be arranged in advance, with provision for emergency contacts, like a dash to the pole or an ascent of Mount Kanchanjanga; and if a committee forgets the code there may be an audience in search of a speaker as far removed as John Gilpin from his wife at dinnertime.

On the platform or at the head table, a new set of difficulties confronts me, in addition to all the misgivings every speaker knows. About me are seated officers, committeemen, chairman, toastmaster, and fellow speakers — all two up on me as far as ears are concerned. I am introduced around and am no wiser. Knowing the names is almost the foundation of any social intercourse. Imagine sitting through a long luncheon, as I have, opposite Mrs. Ogden Reid or Henry Luce, and, besides being unable to hear them, not even knowing who they are. The depths of humiliation to which such social dilemmas hurl a deaf man make me long at times to wear a large placard: DEAF, BUT NOT DUMB!

That is why Alfred Harcourt stands out in my memory with something like a halo. He was president when I talked to the Publishers Association. By his advice I arrived at the Yale Club a little early. (I always do when possible, to afford time to take a few observations for latitude and longitude.) Standing beside me, pad and pencil in hand, as each member entered the door he hastily scribbled a name — Jenkins, Scribner, Covici. I needed only the name. By the time the arrival had walked across the room I was fortified with the only information an introduction is supposed to convey — which I otherwise miss fortyfive times out of fifty. (Note to the hearing world: Make your introductions to the hard of hearing emphatic. Pad and pencil are the only foolproof media.) Then, seated at one large table, Mr. Harcourt — as Euclid commands — described a circle, and wrote the names in order of sitting. I was not surprised to learn later that he has an intimate friend who is deaf.

When I rise to speak, like as not nudged by a neighbor at the psychological moment, I am unaware not merely of what preceding speakers have said, but of the words the chairman has used to introduce me —— and, what is worse, of the tone, the spirit of the gathering. I can derive no inspiration from the surroundings. Like the spider I must spin everything from my own insides. Sometimes a thoughtful toastmaster sends the copy of his foreword down the table, and my heart is filled with thankfulness. Once, sitting on a platform through a long program, I blessed the quick-witted publicity manager who had thought to send up to me the press releases of the other speeches, and I followed word for word, my apparent rudeness masked by an accommodating palm of the stage decorations.

Former Governor Charles Whitman is apt to be jocular when introducing one he knows well. I suspected this was the case from the reaction of the hearers when I was introduced, and attempted to get back at him by mentioning my unawareness of what he said, warning the audience that the introducer could get away safely with anything about me. This worked so well I tried it another time, but here, alas, the speaker was very much in earnest, paying me a moving tribute, and my ill-timed levity was a jarring note, as I could read in the faces of my hearers.

Speakers are often expected to answer questions from the floor. My solution is to beg the audience to write them out. That generally puts a damper on spontaneity, but not always. Now and then one meets a delightfully coöperative audience. At the University of Minnesota my stint was to deliver two addresses and conduct a symposium following a dinner of the department of education. The group had been forewarned and forearmed with pads and pencils, and the little squares of white paper fluttered up like a stage snowstorm. I have always hoped that company enjoyed as much as I did those two hours — for it was two hours, I blush to recall, with a small pile of unanswered slips left over. Next morning I received at my hotel one of the most heart-warming and encouraging messages I ever had from a stranger. The writer was the wife of one of the professors, Mrs. Herbert Carroll — widely known as Gladys Hasty Carroll. I thus publicly thank her for one of the most comforting episodes in the life history of a deaf man’s attempts at public speaking.

In complying, then, with the divine injunction to refrain from cursing the deaf, one may be compensated by finding human beings as worth while among the underhearing as among the acute-eared (the ‘angels unaware’ formula), for the number of what are loosely described as distinguished or successful men and women averages as high in the first group as in the second. Among the names that occur offhand are: E. M. Statler, Lord Leverhulme, Alfred Du Pont, Stanley Baldwin, Hiram Bingham, Vice President Garner, Charles R. Crane, Mabel Willebrandt, Senator Arthur Capper, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, William McFee, H. M. Tomlinson, Rupert Hughes, Harold McGrath, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carolyn Wells, Margaret Prescott Montague, as well as Huxley, Edison, General Booth, George Washington, Horace Howard Furness, Beethoven, Dr. Johnson, Chesterfield, Le Sage, Harriet Martineau, Swinburne, Rousseau, George Meredith, Edward S. Martin, Jonathan Swift, Reynolds, Pinturicchio, and Goya.