Patricia Highsmith on Writing: Another Novelist With Multiple Personality in Her Characters, But No Recognition of It in Her Own Literary Analysis

“One must know what these characters look like, how they dress and talk, and one should know even about their childhoods, though their childhoods do not always need to be written into the book. All this is a matter of living with one’s characters and in their setting for some period of time before writing the first word. The setting and the people must be seen as clearly as a photograph…” (1, p. 33).

“…a flexible plot line lets the characters move and make decisions like living people, gives them a chance to debate with themselves, make choices, take them back, make others, as people do in real life” (1, p. 40-41).

“Once when I had everything settled about a new apartment in Manhattan…I was informed that I could not have it because it was a professional apartment. Writers are not professionals, because ‘their clients do not come to them.’ I thought of writing to the Department of Housing or whoever made this law, ‘You have no idea how many characters ring my doorbell and come to me every day…” (1, p. 46).

“…it often happens…that a book changes itself three-quarters of the way through. This can be the result of a character’s not behaving the way you foresaw, a situation that can be good or bad. I do not subscribe to the belief that having a vigorous character who acts for himself is always good. After all, you are the boss, and you don’t want your characters running around all over the place…A recalcitrant character may veer the plot in a better direction than you had thought of at the outset. Or he or she may have to be curbed…” (1, p. 53-54).

“…my main idea…was of two young men with a certain resemblance—not much—one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity…There is nothing spectacular about the plot of Ripley, I think, but it became a popular book because of its frenetic prose, and the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself…Ripley won an award from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and was made into the movie Purple Noon. The Mystery Writers of America award hangs in my bathroom, where I hang awards, as they look less pompous there…I lettered ‘Mr. Ripley and’ before my own name, since I think Ripley himself should have received the award. No book was easier for me to write, and I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing” (1, p. 69).

“It often happens that a writer has a theme or a pattern in his books…Mine is the relationship between two men, usually quite different in make-up, sometimes obviously the good and the evil, sometimes merely ill-matched friends. I might have realized this theme myself at least by the middle of Strangers on a Train, but it was a friend, a newspaperman, who pointed it out to me…The two-men theme turned up…in six books out of ten…certainly in my ‘best’ books in public opinion. Natural themes cannot be sought or strained for; they appear. Unless one is in danger of repeating oneself, they should be used to the fullest, because a writer will write better making use of what is, for some strange reason, innate” (1, p. 144-146).

1. Patricia Highsmith. Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Boston, The Writer, Inc., 1966/1972.

Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train: Its multiple personality theme is mostly missed by Alfred Hitchcock’s movie

In the novel, Charles Bruno kills the wife of Guy Haines, and then Guy reciprocates by killing Bruno’s father. In the movie, Bruno Anthony kills the wife of Guy Haines, but Guy does not reciprocate, so Bruno tries to pin the murder on Guy.

Two other glaring differences between the novel and movie are, first, that the movie renames Charles Bruno to Bruno Anthony, and second, that the movie omits the novel’s explicit theme that creative people have multiple personality.

The movie does have a visual motif of “the double” (literary metaphor for multiple personality)—for example, when Hitchcock does his trademark walk-on, he is carrying a double bass—but that is as far as the movie goes.

Names of Main Characters

Throughout the novel, the two main characters are almost always referred to as Guy and Bruno; that is, Guy Haines’s first name and Charles Bruno’s last name. This is very peculiar and never explained. You would expect them both to be referred to either by their first names or last names, but not one by his first name and the other by his last name.

This peculiar naming of the two main characters cannot be accidental or inadvertent. What does the author mean by it? Well, when you have the first name of one person and the last name of another person, and you put them together, it adds up to one whole person. In other words, the two main characters are the alternate personalities of one person, who has multiple personality.

Explicit Theme of Multiple Personality

“It may interest you to know that Guy Haines […is…] a dual personality” (1, p. 134).

“And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved” (1, p. 180).

[Guy thinks] “It was only a part of himself he had to cope with, not his whole self, not Bruno, or his work. He had merely to crush the other part of himself, and live in the self he was now. But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked and cowed him” (1, pp. 189-190).

“[Guy] felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel in harmony with God when he created [Guy is an architect], and the other who could murder…the man who had glanced into the mirror just last night and had seen for one instant the murderer, like a secret brother” (1, pp. 203-204).

[Guy says,] “Do you know the greatest wisdom in the world, Bruno?…That everything has its opposite close beside it” (1, p. 208).

[Bruno says to Guy’s second wife,] “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything…People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person” (1, p. 251).

Who is Guy? Guy is an architect (not a tennis player as in the movie). An architect symbolizes creative people (such as novelists). So the novel is saying that creative people have multiple personality.

1. Patricia Highsmith. Strangers on a Train [1950]. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Correction: I do know one thing about Gillian Flynn, her admiration for Agatha Christie, whose real-life fugue made her the original “gone girl”

When I said in yesterday’s post that I don’t know anything about Gillian Flynn, I forgot she has said in interviews that Agatha Christie is her favorite mystery novelist. And as others have noted, the connection is significant, because Christie’s famous real-life fugue in 1926 made her, in a sense, the original “gone girl.”

Incidentally, another favorite mentioned by Flynn is Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” whose main character has multiple personality.

I have many past posts about Agatha Christie’s multiple personality. Search “Christie” in this blog to read those posts, including the ones that mention Flynn.

Both editors and novelists—e.g., The Third Man and Gone Girl—may fail to recognize when characters have multiple personality, but for different reasons

In my posts on Graham Greene’s The Third Man and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, I quoted passages from the first half or two-thirds of each novel, which show that the main character has multiple personality. But the issue is dropped later on in these novels, and multiple personality, per se, plays no part in their plots.

That is, judging only by the text, one would think that the author had initially intended to make an issue of multiple personality, then had decided against doing so, but had inadvertently failed to delete it in the rewrite. And the editor had evidently not recognized that the character was portrayed inconsistently, first as having multiple personality, later on as not.

However, I suspect that the editor and the novelist missed the multiple personality for different reasons. I would guess that the editor missed it, because it was the farthest thing from the editor’s mind as to what might be present in that novel. I would guess that the novelist missed the presence of multiple personality, per se, because, in the personal experience of novelists, it is just ordinary psychology.

I could speculate on other reasons that multiple personality might “inadvertently” get into a novel. One possibility is that the novelist has more than one narrative “voice” (alternate identity), and that novels are a cooperative effort, perhaps with one narrator in charge at the beginning, but other narrators having their turn later on. Thus, one narrator’s version of a character may differ from another’s.

But why wouldn’t such inconsistencies be reconciled in the rewrite? One possibility is that the narrators have an understanding not to step on each other’s toes. Another possibility is that one narrator may have a blind spot for what is written by another narrator (with whom they are not co-conscious). In other words, the novelist’s rewriter identity may not have been aware of the narrative inconsistency.

Of course, I do not know, and do not know anything about, either Gillian Flynn or her editors. All I know is that Gone Girl has gratuitous multiple personality in its text, like The Third Man and various other novels discussed in this blog.

Rebranding: Why did the DSM change “multiple personality disorder” to “dissociative identity disorder,” since the condition itself was unchanged?

The name was changed in the psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM, in 1994. The reason that this blog uses the older term, “multiple personality,” is that it is still the most widely understood term among the general public. Each term has its advantages and disadvantages.

“Multiple Personality” Disadvantages

Back in 1994, the old name had become entangled in the controversies over “repressed memory” and “satanic ritual abuse.” Some misguided therapists had been looking for hidden memories of child abuse as an explanation for everything. And some gullible people thought that there was a massive hidden conspiracy of baby-killing satanists.

Linguistically, “multiple personality” is an oxymoron. By definition, a person can have only one personality.

“Multiple personality” makes some people think that there is alleged to be more than one person, or that one person is actually “possessed” by another person or demon. The term never meant any such thing, but some people misread it that way.

“Multiple personality” suggests something dramatic and histrionic to many people, which is misleading. People with multiple personality usually don’t, overtly, look like they have multiple personality. The regular or host personality may not even know that there are other personalities, per se. And the alternate personalities prefer to remain incognito. This is not to say that the dramatics seen in movies is a myth. It can be that dramatic or even more so, but it is usually not.

“Multiple Personality” Advantages

When identities come out, they may behave so differently from each other that they look and seem like they are actually different people. The identities, themselves, believe that they are different people. And observers may have the uncanny experience that it is like meeting different people. The term “multiple personality” conveys this experience.

“Multiple personality” provides an easy way to refer to people who have multiple personality. A person with multiple personality is referred to as “a multiple.”

And as previously mentioned, after all these years (since 1994), the term is still more widely understood among the general public than is “dissociative identity.”

“Dissociative Identity”

This term was conceived to avoid the disadvantages noted above for “multiple personality.” It conveys the idea that the person is divided, not multiplied. The person’s personality is the sum total and combination of all the identities put together. “Dissociative identity” is conceptually correct, but it has never really caught on, because it does not convey the experience in the way “multiple personality” does.

“Multiple Identity”

This is the term that I would prefer, which is why I have called my literary theory, “Multiple Identity Literary Theory” (search it in the blog).

Shyness or Normal Multiple Personality? Hana Schank’s “Writing My Way to a New Self” in today’s New York Times Sunday Review

The writer describes how she had been introverted when meeting people in person, but extroverted when contacting people by letter.

She says, “Of course I’d been a different person in my letter. I’d been writing.”

And when she overcomes her problem, she says, “It was as though my writing self and my public self had begun to merge into one whole person.”

My question is why Hana Schank—author of the forthcoming book “The Edge of Normal”—poses the issue in terms of alternate selves rather than shyness.

I guess she poses the issue that way, because that was her subjective experience. She didn’t feel like one shy person, but rather like two people.

Pseudonyms: Do they always mean that a person has multiple personality? Are they ever used by a person who does not have multiple personality?

When a person has multiple personality, what are the names of the alternate personalities? They are pseudonyms.

The prototypical use of pseudonyms is in multiple personality. And anyone who uses pseudonyms should be suspected of having multiple personality.

The two most obvious exceptions to this rule are spies and criminals, who may use pseudonyms to avoid being detected and caught.

However, it is interesting to note that the most famous fictional spy, James Bond, does not use a pseudonym. And literary confidence men—see posts on Melville’s and Mann’s confidence men—have multiple personality.

For further discussion, search “pseudonyms” in this blog.

The Third Man: In Graham Greene’s novella—on which his screenplay was based—the protagonist is a novelist who has multiple personality

The Third Man

Rollo Martins is a novelist who writes Westerns as Buck Dexter, and writes serious novels as Benjamin Dexter. Rollo writes the Westerns. Benjamin writes the serious novels. Martins has never heard of Benjamin or read his work.

“There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins…Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them for ever” (1, p. 18).

“Rollo wanted to hit out, but Martins was steady, careful. Martins, I began to realize, was dangerous” (1, p. 26).

“Martins at that moment was prepared to agree to anything to get rid of Mr Crabbin and also to secure a week’s free board and lodging; and Rollo…had always been prepared to accept any suggestion — for a drink, for a girl, for a joke, for a new excitement” (1, p. 30).

“Martins…had never read the work of…Benjamin Dexter: he hadn’t even heard of him…[Benjamin] Dexter has been ranked as a stylist with Henry James… ‘Have you ever read a book called The Lone Rider of Santa Fe?’ [Rollo asks Crabbin]. ‘I never imagined you reading Westerns, Mr [Benjamin] Dexter’…and it needed all Martin’s resolution to stop Rollo saying,‘But I write them’“ (1, p. 31).

“He had had time to think: he was calm now, Martins not Rollo was in the ascendant” (1, p. 40).

“Rollo was in control and moved towards the only girl he knew in Vienna… ‘Can I stay a little?’ he asked with a gentleness that was more Martins than Rollo” (1, pp. 60-61).

Gratuitous Multiple Personality

The main character’s multiple personality, so casually and clearly described in the first half of this novella, is not mentioned in the second half. Why? One reason is that it really has nothing to do with either the plot or character development. Its presence in this novella is completely gratuitous. And when multiple personality appears in a literary work for no literary reason, its presence is simply a reflection of the author’s subjective experience. 

I once found the same thing in another novelist’s work—in some ways, it was even more flagrant than in Greene’s novella—but in that case I was able to email the author about it. I asked, “Why does your main character have multiple personality in the first half of your novel, but you don’t mention it in the second half?” The author emailed back that the character did not have multiple personality; it was just ordinary psychology.

Well, to a novelist who had multiple personality, it certainly would seem ordinary.

1. Graham Greene. The Third Man [1950] and The Fallen Idol. New York, Penguin Books, 1976.

Graham Greene’s first novel, The Man Within, involves multiple personality, judging by his biography, Paris Review interview, and the text

As discussed in a previous post, biographers report that Greene had more than one personality, including a named alternate personality, Hilary Trench. This post is about how the author’s multiple personality is reflected in his first novel, The Man Within (1).

In Greene’s 1953 Paris Review interview (available online), he says that his first three novels “were influenced by Stevenson and Conrad.” I assume that he is referring to the Stevenson who wrote Jekyll and Hyde and the Conrad who wrote “The Secret Sharer.” (The latter is discussed in a past post.)

Throughout The Man Within, the protagonist, Francis Andrews, is said to have more than one “self,” and, in that sense, to be more than one “person.”

“But here his other self took a hand. He was, he knew, embarrassingly made up of two persons, the sentimental, bullying, desiring child and another more stern critic…Always while one part of him spoke, another part stood on one side and wondered, ‘Is this I who am speaking? Can I really exist like this? It’s easy for you to laugh,’ he said bitterly. But am I really bitter, the other part wondered. Am I play acting still? And if I am play acting, is it I who act or another who pulls the strings?” (1, p. 16).

He speaks of “his second self” and “that other self” and “his two selves” (1, pp. 72-73).

And he is not just speaking metaphorically, either in terms of the parent-adult-child metaphor of Transactional Analysis or the superego, ego, and id metaphor of Freudian psychoanalysis. No, his subjective experience is much more concrete than that. It is more like being “possessed.” For example, he speaks of “…this other inhabitant of his body…” (1, p. 36).

Indeed, by the end of the novel, the character goes further than Stevenson and Conrad envisioned: He speaks of being inhabited by six personalities:

“It is as though,” Andrews said slowly, “there were about six different people inside me. They all urge different things. I don’t know which is myself” (1, p. 193).

So when you put together Greene’s biography, his interview, and the text, it is clear that multiple personality is a major theme.

1. Graham Greene. The Man Within. New York, Viking Press, 1929/1981.

Patricia Highsmith’s Proclivity for Multiple Personality is Reported in Andrew Wilson’s Biography

“ ‘The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself’—Kierkegaard quoted in Highsmith’s 1949 journal…Highsmith herself, a writer fascinated by the concept of split identity” (1, p. 1).

“…her work explores the motif of the double or splintered self. The changeable nature of identity fascinated her both philosophically and personally” (1, p. 7).

“I am a…boy in a girl’s body” (1, p. 46).

“When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities…” (1, p. 119).

“Highsmith revealed that in order to write she often deliberately thought herself into a different frame of mind, by pretending she was not herself…‘I suppose it’s a measure of how professional one is, how quickly one can do this’" (1, p. 123).

“I am troubled by a sense of being several people…” (1, p. 134).

“The Talented Mr Ripley…was written at speed in 1954, taking only six months. ‘It felt like Ripley was writing it,’ she said later, ‘it just came out’…The story is a dark reworking of Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1, p. 191-192)…‘I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing’”  (1, p. 199).

See the past post in this blog on the multiple personality in Henry James’s The Ambassadors.

1. Andrew Wilson. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. New York, Bloomsbury, 2003

Family Members May Not Mention That They Have Seen Multiple Personality, Because They Assume That the Doctors and Therapists Already Know About It

Although friends and family often don’t know that a novelist (or other loved one) has multiple personality, sometimes they do know, but they don’t tell the doctor or therapist. Why?

There are at least seven possible reasons. First, they may mistakenly assume that the multiple personality is obvious to the doctor or therapist. Second, they may mistakenly assume that the doctor’s diagnosis—e.g., bipolar—includes the multiple personality. (Bipolar does not include multiple personality). Third, they may think of multiple personality as a common, minor, personal quirk that is not worth mentioning. Fourth, they may think of the multiple personality as too crazy and embarrassing to talk about. Fifth, they may think that the doctor or therapist would not be interested in multiple personality. Sixth, they may not be sure about the multiple personality. Seventh, they may have been told not to “interfere” with the treatment.

In today’s New York Times, a novelist describes his mental breakdown: Manic-depression (bipolar disorder)? Multiple personality? Both?

In a personal essay—“A (Manic Depressive) Man’s Best Friend”—published in the Sunday Review section of today’s New York Times, novelist Karim Dimechkie describes his mental breakdown:

“…I graduated, sold my book, and left Austin…for Manhattan…where I would have an inexplicable meltdown. Inexplicable may be the wrong word. There are always explanations. Manic depression for one…But surely the mental downfall had something to do with the void I’d dropped into upon finishing my novel, the end of grad school and that safe identity of ‘student’ it had offered, and the supremacy of New York City over my senses and bank account and of course, the strangers who have always lived inside me, humming threats of destruction, finally making good on their promise to bring the house down. Some combination of these wrapped me in fear, neediness, confusion and anger…

“…I cracked up in the middle of Essex Street, unable to stand, sensory distortions clanging around my head…I barged into a behavioral health clinic…and shrieked for immediate professional supervision, which later led to intensive therapy and medication…I spent the afternoon imploring my brain to switch itself off. Wanting badly to die but unable to kill myself…my delusions made me see my loving partner as a merciless deceiver…four months later…I surfaced from whatever absurd agony I’d been drowning in. Finally able to sleep again. Finally able to trust again…”

Now, he may very well have manic-depression (bipolar disorder), and he may be describing a mixed episode of paranoid mania and suicidal depression. But, inconsistent with that diagnosis, is this: “the strangers who have always lived inside me, humming threats of destruction, finally making good on their promise to bring the house down.” This seems to describe alternate personalities, who have “always lived inside me.”

Manic-depression cannot account for a longstanding, continuous sense of having strangers living inside you. Multiple personality could account for that, but it was never considered.

Any remake of the film, The Maltese Falcon, should reinterpret both Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy as having multiple personality

Throughout the story, the reader is repeatedly told about the two sides of Sam Spade’s personality and the changeability of Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

For example, in a meeting between Spade and Gutman (the fat man, on a quest for the falcon), Spade’s demeanor suddenly changes from calm and civilized to violent and primitive. In the movie with Humphrey Bogart, when Bogart leaves Gutman’s hotel suite, Bogart smiles in a way that suggests he had just been putting on a tough-guy act. But that interpretation is not in the novel.

In the novel, when Spade leaves Gutman’s suite, “His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp” and “he saw his hand trembling” (1, p. 112). Spade, seeing his hand trembling, does grin, but there is nothing in the text to confirm the movie’s interpretation of that grin. My interpretation is different.

Why does the text make a point of saying that Spade grinned, not because he knew that he had just put on a tough-guy act, but upon seeing that his hand was trembling? The text is describing what a person who has multiple personality does in order to figure out what must have happened during a memory gap. He is looking at his trembling hand and thinking that he must have had another of his episodes in which people have told him that he gets violent, but which he never remembers.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s changeability is pervasive in both the novel and the movie. Is it only because she is always, consciously and willingly, putting on an act and lying? Or does she, too, have multiple personality?

I think it is the latter, for two reasons. First, her changeability and lying are patently obvious to anyone who sees her under more than one circumstance. So her changes seem to be more provoked by circumstances (as in multiple personality) than well calculated. Second, her behavior at any one time can be extremely convincing, because people with multiple personality really believe that they are who they purport to be at that moment. This leads Effie, Spade’s secretary, who sees Brigid only in her help-seeking identity, to think that Brigid is trustworthy and worth saving. This leads Spade, who knows Brigid is a liar, to, nevertheless, admire and respond to how how convincing she can be.

Now, I don’t think that the above arguments, by themselves, are conclusive regarding multiple personality. What convinces me is what I discussed in the previous post on Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s fugue. That story is such an odd thing to include in this detective story that it must have special significance.

What is Spade telling Brigid—and the reader—with the Flitcraft story? Not that life is random, but that Spade knows Brigid changes personalities, just like he does. And I think that any remake of the movie should consider this interpretation.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon. New York, Vintage, 1929/1992.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft’s Fugue indicates the Main Theme is Multiple Personality

What is the main theme of The Maltese Falcon? The title—referring to a thing as not being what it seems when perception is distorted by greed—is misleading. No, the main theme is that people may not be who they seem to be, because they have multiple personality.

For example, the novel’s femme fatale has at least three names: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Miss Wonderly, and Miss LeBlanc. Are these just three of the aliases used by a criminal psychopath and pathological liar? Or is she a criminal psychopath and pathological liar who has multiple personality?

The main character, detective Sam Spade, is described in the novel’s first paragraph as looking like “a blond satan” (1), which suggests a person with a combination of good and evil, a Jekyll and Hyde.

The key to the main theme is the story that Sam Spade tells to Brigid O’Shaughnessy about Flitcraft’s fugue (left out of the movie).

Flitcraft’s Fugue

“Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest…

“At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness…but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

“A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon…His wife and children never saw him again…There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going…

“Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season…

“Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him…He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works…Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam…

“He went to Seattle that afternoon…and from there by boat to San Francisco…and settled in Spokane and got married…

“How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said” (1, pp. 61-64).

The Main Theme

A fugue is when a person, often after a traumatic experience, travels to a different location and lives there under a new identity. This was discussed in past posts in regard to Agatha Christie’s real-life fugue. And as with Christie, it often indicates that the person has multiple personality.

So to understand the main theme of The Maltese Falcon, you have to understand the meaning of Sam Spade’s story about Flitcraft. The meaning is not that life is random, but that people switch among multiple identities.

1. Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon [1929]. New York, Vintage, 1992.

Post #2 on the “Hilary Trench” Alternate Personality of Graham Greene, another Great Novelist who had Multiple Personality

“When Vivien [his future wife] first met Greene, three different personalities must have been evident to her: the first what Greene described as ‘the Oxford me’, an undergraduate persona characterized by a devil-may-care, tongue-in-cheek delight in pricking Oxford pomposities, sometimes by the pose of insouciance; the second the richer, more ambiguous person described in this chapter; and the third hinted at in scattered references—the Hilary Trench personality…"

Greene wrote to reassure Vivien that she “need never be afraid of meeting H[ilary] T[rench] in our house. Poor devil, he can never come anywhere near you, even if he is alive, which he isn’t. O it’s no use writing. I’ve got to be with you to convince you that he’s dead. He’s been dying since March 17 [that is, the day they met]…

“But he did not succeed in persuading Vivien that his secret personality would not return, though he deeply regretted the sudden assumption of this secret self…

“…the Hilary Trench personality…usually made its appearance after deep anxiety had been prolonged to a point where Greene could stand it no longer, and this began before he met Vivien…

“On other occasions Greene’s notion of Hilary Trench seems less severe and is more in line with seeking both an escape from intolerable restlessness and also new experiences to use for creative purposes…” (1, pp. 276-277).

1. Norman Sherry. The Life of Graham Greene. Volume I: 1904-1939. New York, Penguin Books, 1989.

Novelist Graham Greene’s Multiple Personality: His Alternate Personality “Hilary Trench” and the Teddy Bear he carried in his luggage

The diagnoses most commonly mentioned in regard to Graham Greene are depression, manic-depression (bipolar disorder), and alcohol abuse. And he certainly did get depressed and drink too much. But it is multiple personality, not depression or alcohol, that helps explain his literary genius.

Teddy Bear

“Greene’s image as a man’s man was simply another cover—perhaps his most convincing one…Anyone could figure that out from Greene’s attachment to his toy bear Ted. In the 1950’s, and later, Ted went to all kinds of fascinating places with Greene. They were even caught up in some shooting between Israeli and Egyptian troops during a visit to the Sinai desert. To comfort Ted in that frightening incident, Greene held him close…

“Long after he had left the nursery, Greene still felt the need to carry around a teddy bear. The tough-talking, hard-drinking adventurer, the expert on opium dens and brothels, had a toy animal in his luggage. Greene’s attachment to the bear is not a complete surprise. True to form, he left clues in his work…An early, obscure story called The Bear Fell Free (1935) is about a doomed young man and his good-luck charm, a teddy bear. In A Burnt-out Case a priest asks Querry whether he has a favorite prayer, and he replies that all his prayers are ‘for a brown teddy bear’ " (1, p. 59).

Of course, the biographer misinterprets the teddy bear. It does not mean that Greene is an unmanly weakling. What it does mean is that Greene has a child-aged alternate personality, which is common in multiple personality.

Hilary Trench

“Hilary Trench was…an imaginary companion who conveniently embodied for Greene all his dark moods. He sometimes used the name as a pseudonym—his poem ‘If You Were Dead’ first appeared under the name. Vivienne [his future wife] was one of the few people to whom he admitted that Hilary was like a second self. Whenever he went into a dark mood, it was Hilary who did the thinking for him. If he pushed things too far with Vivienne, he liked to blame it on Hilary. It was wicked Hilary who planted terrible ideas in his head and made him want to hurt other people. Hilary was his personal devil” (1, p. 95).

This illustrates how easy it is to confuse multiple personality with a mood disorder like depression or even with demon possession. And the biographer accuses Greene of almost everything other than actual demon possession. But he doesn’t recognize Greene’s multiple personality.

[Please search "Graham Greene" in this blog to see all four posts about him.]

1. Michael Sheldon. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York, Random House, 1994.

All literary theories—except Multiple Identity Literary Theory—assume that novelists create what most people can’t create, but do not think differently

Standard literary theories are approaches to the interpretation of literary text. They are not theories about how literature is done. Their tacit assumption is that the novelist’s mind works, basically, the same way that everyone else’s mind does.

Most literary theorists allow that certain proclivities and experiences might inspire, enhance, and influence literary creativity—e.g., trauma, depression, gender, childhood, culture, socio-economic conditions, imagination—but they do not believe that the way novelists think is essentially different.

Do novelists themselves have a theory for their creativity? Henry James spoke of “the madness of art”; Doris Lessing of the “creative trance”; and Margaret Atwood of “duplicity,” a split between the writer’s everyday and writing personalities. All three novelists wrote fiction involving multiple personality, as have other novelists discussed in past posts.

Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog, is the only literary theory that addresses how novelists think (which sometimes helps you to understand what they wrote).

Failure to make the correct diagnosis, far from being unique to psychiatry, is all too common in other medical specialties

I have repeatedly made an issue of how psychiatrists miss the diagnosis of multiple personality, and of how they overdiagnose other mental disorders, which are more vaguely defined than multiple personality.

However, to be fair to psychiatry, it must be said that misdiagnosis is a problem with medical diagnosis in general:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/misdiagnosis-is-more-common-than-drug-errors-or-wrong-site-surgery/2013/05/03/5d71a374-9af4-11e2-a941-a19bce7af755_story.html

And people with multiple personality are not the only ones who don’t tell their therapists the whole truth. It is a common problem, for a number of reasons:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/02/06/10-common-reasons-to-lie-to-your-therapist/

However, there are two additional difficulties in the diagnosis of multiple personality: First, the doctor has probably never learned how to make this diagnosis. Second, the patient is not providing all pertinent information because of the host identity’s amnesia for the comings and goings of the other identities, and the alternate identity’s belief that they are another person and not an alternate identity.