Novelist Philip Roth’s Ex-Wife’s Memoir Describes Behavior Consistent With Multiple Personality

Are posts that allege the multiple personality of great novelists—including the four recent ones on Philip Roth (June 21-27, 2014)—merely idle speculation, with no relation to real life?

The memoir of Philip Roth’s ex-wife—the famous actress, Claire Bloom—describes certain things that an ex-wife would not be likely to make up. Sometime between 1975 and 1978 (way before Roth was on Halcion in 1987, which he blamed for a breakdown), he occasionally became angry in an unusual way…

“…he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent child in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I remember thinking, with total clarity,‘Who is that?’

“That feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face would appear increasingly in our years together, sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of proportion to the events that had given rise to it…

“Just as I feared the appearance of this ‘other’ Philip Roth to such a degree that, in order to avoid him, there was almost nothing I wouldn’t have done to make him disappear, I also feared to lose the Philip who was my dearly loved companion” (1, pp. 158-9).

The key distinction to make here is between childish and childlike. Bloom is not saying that he was childish—immature—or that, in any ordinary sense, he had a bad temper. Rather, she is saying that he occasionally switched personality and was angry in a “strangely childlike” way. (As previously discussed in this blog, child-aged alternate personalities are one of the most common kind.)

In Bloom’s journal of September 27, 1993, she notes:

“I never know which Philip I am going to meet; the removed, brutal antagonist; the concerned, caring…; or the impersonal colleague…with no interest in the woman he’s lived with for almost eighteen years” (1, p. 213). (Thus, he had adult-aged alternate personalities, too.)

In October 1993, they meet, and “He asked me a strange, leading question. ‘How do you feel about the last five months?’” After telling him, she asks him to reciprocate, but he replies…

“I have amnesia about these last months” (1, p. 215).

Since Bloom was not thinking in terms of multiple personality, and did not know that people with multiple personality have memory gaps—because some personalities do not know what has gone on during the time that other personalities have been “out”—she assumed that he was just being nasty. (Maybe he was. But maybe not.)

Now, of course, the only way that anyone could be absolutely sure that all the above was truly indicative of multiple personality would be to have actually been there, and asked the angry, childlike Roth, “How old are you?” (If he answered, in all sincerity, “I’m [some child age],” etc., you would have had your answer.) And you would need to have been there to assess whether he really did have amnesia.

In short, it is my guess that although ex-wives do commonly call their ex-husbands “childish,” they do not commonly call them “strangely childlike.” And it is also my guess that although men do commonly forget things that women think they should remember, men rarely claim “amnesia.” What do you think?

1. Bloom, Claire. Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir. Boston, Little Brown, 1996.