Mark Twain: In Public, a Humorous “Liar”; In Private, “Absent-Minded”; The Inconsistencies and Memory Gaps of Multiple Personality 

In the New York Herald, 16 October 1900, Twain jokes about his relationship with the truth:

“Now, I have lied so much, in a genial, good-natured way, of course, that people won’t believe me when I speak the truth. I may add that I have stopped speaking the truth...I have found that when I speak the truth, I am not believed, and that I have never told a lie so big but that some one had sublime confidence in my veracity. I have, therefore, been forced by fate to adopt fiction as a medium of truth. Most liars lie for the love of the lie; I lie for the love of truth. I disseminate my true views by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories. If any man can do that, and finds that he can disseminate facts through the medium of falsehood, he should never speak the truth and I don’t.”

Is that clear?

In his private life, as noted in the post of December 10, 2013, his daughter, Susy, and his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, knew Twain as remarkably “absent-minded.”

In short, his humorous lying was his public cover story for his inconsistencies and memory gaps, signs of multiple personality (see posts of December 6 and 7, 2013).