Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity), Say His Pen Name, Deathbed Confession, Van Wyck Brooks, and Twain’s Last Novel [this is the first of a series of posts on Mark Twain; to see them all, search Twain in this blog]

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, Mark Twain, proclaims his duality.

When he was near death, and literally on his deathbed, which made anything he spoke about a sort of deathbed confession, Twain spoke about “dual personalities” (1, p. 626).

Van Wyck Brooks—who, in the 1930s, won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in history—was the first to say that Twain had multiple personality. In his 1920 book, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks said the following:

“…He never knew what to think of himself, he was of two minds all the time…He seems to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains…

“…It is perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment [at age twelve, when his father died]: he became, and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism [sleepwalking] is the proof of it, a dual personality…The subject of dual personality was always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation of consciousness…” (2, pp. 35-61).

So people have long suspected that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And, contributing to that speculation, Twain did the same thing that Dickens had done with his last, posthumous novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (see June 2013 post): Twain wrote his own, last, posthumous, novel—No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (3)—about the same issue, multiple personality.

The story of the novel takes place in the year 1490, in Austria, where it is still the Middle Ages. A printing company—Twain worked as a printer before he became a writer—has its offices in a large castle. “One cold day…a most forlorn looking youth…appeared in the door…timid and humble…his clothes were coarse and old, ragged…lightly powdered with snow…the apparition” was seeking work. “What is your name?” they ask. He answers, “Number 44, New Series 864,962,” which is mysterious and strange.

So 44 is put to work. He learns printing surprisingly fast, at least in part because he can read the mind of the equally youthful printer who befriends him and who is the narrator of the story. But the other printers are offended by the way a vagabond has been allowed to join their profession. So they bully 44 and then go on strike to protest his employment. The strike threatens to bring the business to ruin.

To save the day, 44 creates living, breathing Duplicates of the striking printers. He explains to the narrator why this is possible:

“You know, of course, that you are not one person, but two. One is your Workaday-Self…the other is your Dream-Self…”

“But 44, these Duplicates are solid enough!”

“…we pulled them out of the Originals and gave them independent life.”

However, the duplicates—doubles, secret sharers, alternate personalities, call them what you will—are not happy about being incarnated and having to come out from the interior, hidden, dream-world, where they usually reside. They feel that their lives had been much better on the inside. They would have preferred to go back inside to the dream-world, where they had no constraints, and where the only limit to reality was their imagination.

The moral of the story is that Mark Twain agreed with Margaret Atwood when she said that writers have multiple personality (Oct. 27, 2013 post).

1. Powers, Ron: Mark Twain: A Life. New York, Free Press, 2005.

2. Leary, Lewis (ed.): A Casebook on Mark Twain’s Wound. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1962.

3. Twain, Mark: No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969/1982. (This edition of the novel is the approved, authenticated text, according to the Center for Editions of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America.)