The Planet of the Blind, by Stephen Kuusisto, Faber & Faber, 194pp, £9.99 in UK
Stephen Kuusisto, a 42-year-old Finnish-American poet, has been almost totally blind since birth, but it took him thirty-nine years to face the fact. Because of his mother's "complex bravery and denial", he was taught to disavow his condition. The words blind and blindness were taboo at home during his childhood. This honest and vivid memoir is a case history of gradual acceptance of reality.
Stephen was born in a small-town hospital in New Hampshire three months immature. His twin brother died the next day. Final development of the retinas occurs during the last three months of pregnancy. Stephen suffered from the retinopathy of immaturity. With scarred retinas, he seemed to be peering through broken glass.
Through his left eye he was able to see at twenty feet what people with normal eyesight can see at two hundred. In the United States, 20/200 vision or less is the legal definition of blindness. His eyes were crossed. His right eye was out of control, hopping about "like a starling in a hedge", perceiving some interesting colour-effects but serving no practical purpose. He was photophobic: daylight hurt unless he wore very dark glasses. His eyes were surgically uncrossed, improving his appearance after years of embarrassment, but affording no reliable depth perception, as the right eye continued spasmodically to wander.
Stephen's affectionate but neurotic mother, herself accident-prone, insisted on sending him to a state school, rather than a special school for the blind - and gave him a bicycle. Of course, he often fell off. And at school he was tormented in the usual way by normal bullies.
By the age of nine, in the privacy of his room he was "eating like Elvis Presley". "With no exercise plan, I've ballooned . . . I am buried in my girth, fat with anguish and defeat." His schoolmates made him feel, "Here come the villagers with their blazing torches, pursuing the Frankenstein monster to the ruined castle."
He disgusted himself. He regarded himself as "blind Portnoy", as Quasimodo, as the "fat Dowager Empress of China". After the childhood years of escapist gluttony, he over-corrected with teenage anorexia, reducing his weight to about seven stone. Even so, with some sympathetic, extracurricular help, he did well in higher education.
"College is brutally difficult for me," he writes, yet he somehow managed to graduate cum laude from a liberal arts college in Geneva, New York, to go on to the University of Iowa for two years in its celebrated Writers' Workshop, and to progress further (or so it seemed at first), on a Fulbright grant, to Helsinki, to translate Finnish poetry into American.
Finland was not a success, in spite of an on-and-off love affair with a graduate student from a Finnish-American family who shared his interest in literature. In his stressful last semester in Geneva he had "taken up hard liquor", and in Helsinki he spent more time than was good for him in the company of drunken poets.
In the United States, according to Kuusisto, seventy per cent of the blind are unemployed. When he returned, he could not get a job. At last, at the age of thirty-nine, he acknowledged that he needed help.
Help was available. He got a white stick to announce blindness. "Today," he writes, "we have a marvellous world of adaptive technologies for the blind: Kurzweil reading machines, talking computers, braille, and terminals connecting to the Internet."
Most helpful of all was Corky, a female Labrador retriever, obtained through Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a guide dog school in Yorktown Heights, New York, where Stephen Kuusisto is now employed as the Director of Student Services.
The most impressive thing about this wonderful book is that he writes about the misery of half a lifetime without wallowing in self-pity. When he was an insomniac, he created a fantasy about a "Planet of the Blind", where "no one needs to be cured. Blindness is another form of music, like the solo clarinet in the mind of Bartok. On the planet of the blind, the citizens live in the susurrus of cricket wings twinkling in inner space."
Reconciled to life on earth, with Corky, Kuusisto has relinquished the planet of his fantasy, but kept the poetry.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic