Through the Sound Barrier

By R. Z. Sheppard

WORDS FOR A DEAF DAUGHTER by Paul West. 188 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

The beauty of Words for a Deaf Daughter is the truth of its form. A British-born critic, teacher and novelist, Paul West writes directly and uncondescendingly to his almost totally deaf, eight-year-old daughter Mandy in the hope that she will one day be able to receive and understand his lavish trust of words. His hope is supported by the progress she has made in reading, writing and expanding her spoken vocabulary to nearly 200 words.

The aural world reaches Mandy only faintly with help of a hearing aid. In addition, she has a congenital brain dysfunction. It is the probable cause of the erratic swings in behavior and mood that West writes about so well. As a toddler, she painted walls, desks and her own face with pigments blended from inks, instant coffee and Ajax. She would unexplainably put her head through a windowpane. She also plays rough, suggesting to her father "a commando course supervised by an overwhelming midget," a "Gotterdammerung written in mud, rain, and your own bland wee."

The destructive Mandy is balanced by the Mandy who has an obsession for order and symmetry. A toy out of place, a hair clip without a precisely secured mate on the other side of her head could send her into rages. In quiet moments she rocks herself with a natural sea-born rhythm. But when Mandy dances, it is explosive, "closer to Nijinsky or Zorba the Greek than to Fred Astaire." Her favorite toys are paper cutouts of golliwogs and Draculas and model airplanes that West assembles with her. The glue goes to their heads.

Best of all, there are umbrellas, which the girl collects and cares for by keeping them furled in the rain and open in sunshine. Why is " 'brella" one of the 200 words that come in an unmodulated rush from the cave of her near total silence? West speculates with uncommon insight: "When the 'brella's up you're overjoyed by its capacity for coming down, and when it's rolled and fastened you're overjoyed by what it's just been, what it can again be after a couple of simple shoves. The as is and the can be, you rejoice in simultaneously."

The same two-in-oneness applies to Mandy. West writes joyfully for a can-be Mandy, but obviously adores Mandy as is. Like a gardener trying to force growth from a rare hothouse flower, he regales his daughter with mythology, history, literature, geographical wonders and oddities of nature, "a Nature I never really noticed until it bungled." A lifelong slave of words and reasons, he envies the intensity with which Mandy perceives the world nonverbally through her four acute senses. Fascinated by attentiveness for its own sake, he frees himself for a time by tasting and testing along with her. Ink tastes like "charred toenail," bark is like vulcanized crab meat, and leather, "a taste here not of the meat or the fat next to the hide but of the fur once outside it and of seaweed iodine."

Elsewhere West taps against his daughter's silence with exuberant wordplay. In a dazzling tour de force he compiles a looping, digressionary dictionary of her vocabulary, from "agnoo" (thank you) to "zwingh" (swing). He projects Mandy into the future as a kind of wholesome blonde Barbarella, zipping through time and space on exotic journeys. He creates worlds in which the handicapped seem to resemble Edward Lear's innocent creatures: compassionate Jumblies who set to sea in sieves and return, birds with corkscrew legs, who, like Mandy, are not rejects of nature but unique and puzzling variations of nature's paradoxical energy.

West's playfulness is of the highest order. Like Homo ludens, man the naturally playful animal, he exercises imagination to create something where there was nothing. In doing so, he puts pity to shame and makes empathy seem hermetic and inadequate. Words for a Deaf Daughter is an act of love, not merely its expression. It is also a work of art, the vision of the loved object widening beyond adoration into new ways of seeing the world.

. R. Z. Sheppard

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