Novelist Saul Bellow: Doppelgänger Pseudonym and Paradoxical Memory

I just started reading a highly respected biography of Saul Bellow, but, judging by its index, if I find anything in it relevant to this blog, it will probably mention it only in passing. Here is what I have found so far:

Doppelgänger Pseudonym

“Bellow’s contribution to the December 1936 issue of Soapbox, under the pseudonym John Paul—a misspelling of Jean Paul, the pen name of the nineteenth-century German satirical novelist Johann Paul Friedrich Richter—provided a lively polemical account of the Evanston zeitgeist” (1, p. 48).

The biographer does not pause to wonder what Bellow and Jean Paul (1763-1825) might have had in common. Why would Bellow have considered Jean Paul to be an inspiration or kindred spirit?

Jean Paul was the writer who coined the word “doppelgänger,” a literary metaphor for multiple personality.

Paradoxical Memory

“What was Bellow writing [in his early years]? He later claimed that he couldn’t remember, though ‘it must have been terrible.’ A strange notion: He prided himself on the acuteness of his memory and enjoyed dazzling his brothers with his vivid recollections of long-forgotten details from their Chicago childhood. But when it came to his apprentice work, he didn’t want to remember; it seemed to him, if not shameful, at the very least embarrassing. There are few early manuscripts in Bellow’s archive. The literal evidence has been destroyed” (1, p. 60).

Well, I can see that the biographer has not read my posts on Mark Twain, who had a reputation for having an extraordinarily excellent memory, but who also had a reputation for being extraordinarily “absent-minded.” For example, in one post I told of the incident in which Twain could not remember the location of the house—not far from his own house—of one of his best friends (Twain wasn’t drunk or senile).

The only psychological condition in which you see the paradox of a person’s having both an extraordinarily good memory and—on occasion or regarding certain things—a surprisingly bad memory, is multiple personality. They have a surprisingly poor memory if you happen to be talking to a personality who had nothing to do with what you are asking about.

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.