Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.