Literary Criticism now analyzes oeuvre as early, late, comedy, tragedy, etc., but will analyze works as to which of the author’s alternate personalities participated.

In the beginning, The Bible was thought to have been written by one person, but scholars now see it as written by many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible.

Similarly, it was once thought that novelists had one personality, who wrote different ways in different works, according to writing career stage and changes in interests or moods. But since it has become known that writers have multiple personality, a new analysis, as to which of their alternate personalities participated in the writing of a particular work, may be expected. (However, I’m not holding my breath.)

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself” with “unconscious cerebration”  

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens / Mark Twain: Are his diverse signatures typical of a person with a famous pseudonym or indicative of multiple personality?

Here is a link to twenty of his handwritten letters:

http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/sc_as_mt/yrstruly.html

He signed his name in seventeen ways:

 1. Marcus

 2. Mark

 3. Mark Twain

 4. Mark Twain / (SL. Clemens)

 5. Mark Twain / Samuel Langhorne Clemens

 6. Sam

 7. Clemens

 8. SLC

 9. S. L. Clemens

10. Saml. L. C.

11. Saml. L. Clemens

12. Saml. L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”)

13. Saml. L. Clemens (alias) Mark Twain

14. S. L. Clemens Mark Twain

15. Samuel

16. Samuel L. Clemens

17. Y

In multiple personality, handwriting and signatures might vary from one personality to another. Two personalities might use different spellings of the same name. I don’t see anything definitive in the above, but perhaps you are a graphologist or have known famous people with pseudonyms, and are in a better position to judge.

In “Mark Twain’s Notebook,” he says he has an alternate personality whom he knows about indirectly from its different handwriting and mysterious trips.

In this seventeenth post on Samuel Clemens (search “Mark Twain”), I quote from his personal notebook.

He says that he has—and assumes that everyone may have—three kinds of personalities: his regular self, his double, and his spiritualized or dream self.

His regular self and his double have no direct awareness of each other; they are not co-conscious. He evidently knows about his double from writing that nobody else could have written (but he doesn’t remember writing it), which has handwriting different from his own. And he has evidently been told that he makes trips—that is, someone looking exactly like him, his “double,” has been seen at various places—which he does not recall. These mysterious trips are dissociative fugues, a symptom of multiple personality, discussed in previous posts (search “fugue”).

In contrast, his regular self and spiritualized or dream self are directly aware of each other; they are co-conscious and have a common memory.

Mark Twain’s Notebook

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence.

“And so, I was wrong in the beginning; that other person is not one’s conscience…

“I am not acquainted with my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me—and whom I will call Watson, for I don’t know his name, although he most certainly has one, and signs it in a hand which has no resemblance to mine when he takes possession of our partnership body and goes off on mysterious trips—but I am acquainted (dimly) with my spiritualized self and I know that it and I are one, because we have a common memory…my dream self…” (1, pp. 349-350).

1. Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s Notebook. Foreword by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York, Harper and Brothers, 1935.

“Autobiography of Mark Twain,” the Mark Twain Project, University of California Press edition: Psychological Mindedness of the Editor’s Introduction.

Equates Name and Pseudonym

The editor’s Introduction to the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” (the author’s own title), makes no distinction between “Mark Twain” and “Samuel L. Clemens.”

Throughout the Introduction, he is mostly called “Clemens,” but sometimes called “Mark Twain,” and which name is used, at any given point, appears arbitrary.

Indeed, the first sentence of the Introduction refers to the author as “Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens),” suggesting that the names are synonymous and interchangeable.

Alternate Personalities Collaborate

Clemens eventually decided to dictate his autobiography to a stenographer, and to discuss his life in no particular order: whatever happened to interest him at that particular moment. At least, that was his cover story. He was probably allowing various alternate personalities to tell their stories, and he couldn’t control the order in which they came forward or the part of his life they wanted to discuss.

On April 6, 1906, he said, “I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet…I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.”

He is probably describing conflicts among his various personalities: Many of the alternate personalities didn’t want to publish what they knew; some of their memories were true, but too embarrassing to publish; while other alleged memories were not true and were “merely literature.”

This Edition Not Psychologically Minded

Judging by the editor’s Introduction, it appears that this edition of the autobiography is, as it claims, “complete and authoritative,” but is not psychologically minded. It does not address the psychological distinction between the author’s name and pseudonym or wonder why he chose the title that he did. It does not wonder about the psychological implications of the way it was written. If it had wondered about these things, it might have become even more complete and authoritative.

Harriet Elinor Smith et al (Editors). Editor’s Introduction, pp. 1-58, in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2010.

Note: This is the sixteenth post on Samuel Clemens. To read the previous ones, search “Mark Twain.”

The title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” omits Samuel Clemens, because Twain was an alternate personality and not just a pseudonym.

If the name “Samuel Clemens” had been unknown to the public, then it might have made sense to omit it from the title page of his autobiography. But his real name was well known, and he could very easily have used both names, if the title page had said, “Autobiography of Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens.” So why did he omit his real name from the title page of an autobiography, a nonfiction book?

As seen in recent posts on Charles Hamilton’s autobiography, “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” the use of an author’s pseudonym instead of his real name in the title of his autobiography implies that the pseudonym was the name of an alternate personality.

I would also relate the title page of Clemens’s autobiography to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter” (1844), in which a letter is hidden in plain sight. The title page of Clemens’s autobiography is like a letter to the public about his multiple personality, hidden in plain sight.

Am I the only one to see a connection between Samuel Clemens and Edgar Allan Poe? Apparently not, as Alan Gribben makes clear in an essay, which includes the following:

“Several other parallels link the psychological patterns of Poe and Twain even more closely. As Patrick F. Quinn pointed out thirty years ago, “the phenomenon of the Doppelganger is perhaps the most characteristic and persistent of Poe’s obsessive fantasies,” so much so that, “in a real sense, Poe’s heroes are all doubles, one of another.“ Unquestionably Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “Ligeia” (1845), and several other tales with double motifs would have appealed to Twain, a tireless chronicler of twins, disguises, exchanged roles, and contrasting personalities. The mistakenly switched Edward Tudor and Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan and the King (sold as slaves) in A Connecticut Yankee, and Thomas a Beckett Driscoll and Valet de Chambre in Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894) represent only the best known of Twain’s many explorations of alter ego variations. Twain’s modern biographers, like Poe’s, have discovered a divided, tormented personality — in Twain’s case, partly suggested by his adoption of a nom de plume and his affection for pseudonyms (in 1882, for instance, returning to the Mississippi River to gather literary material, he registered at hotels as “Mr. C. L. Samuels”). Mysterious subterfuges involving names and identities had tremendous allure for the imaginations of both writers” (1).

In short, the title page of “Autobiography of Mark Twain” treats Twain like a person in his own right, which is how alternate personalities see themselves. He used that title page to reveal his multiple personality. But his message was hidden in plain sight. Or, as he was wont to say, nobody believed him when he told the truth.

1. Alan Gribben, “ ‘That Pair of Spiritual Derelicts’: The Poe-Twain Relationship,” Poe Studies, December 1985, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, 18:17-20 http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1980/p1985201.htm

Note: This is my fifteenth post on Samuel Clemens. Search “Mark Twain” to read the previous ones.

What’s in a pen name, like Sam Clemens’s “Mark Twain”? Literary criticism should assume that a pseudonym is an alternate personality unless proven otherwise.

Importance of Names and Naming in

Shakespeare, Bible, Multiple Personality

“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet…”

But in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,

names are a matter of life and death.

In The Bible, naming was how God created everything:

God said, “Let there be [name]”; and there was [name].

In a person with multiple personality, the names of alternate personalities are pseudonyms.

Samuel Clemens & Mark Twain

“Mark Twain & Samuel Clemens” is a chapter (pp. 87-99) in Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms (New York, Harper Perennial, 2011):

“How the protean Samuel Clemens became the world’s most famous literary alias will never be known for sure…Clemens liked to explain that his appellation had been swiped from…a well-known steamboat man…There are other stories and legends as to how “Twain” came to be…Some have ascribed to Clemens a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature; some have remarked on pseudonymity as a conventional choice for Victorian humorists…

“Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835…‘Mark Twain’ made his debut on February 3, 1863, launched in an Enterprise column with the line, ‘I feel very much as if I had just awakened out of a long sleep.’ It was signed, ‘Yours, dreamily, Mark Twain’…

“At one point he even joked that an ‘independent Double’ was going around causing the kind of mischief that Sam Clemens wouldn’t dream of attempting…”

On his deathbed, April 21, 1910, “Not long before drifting off to sleep for the last time, he mumbled something about ‘dual personalities.’ ”

Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) owe their literary fame to the same psychological insight: multiple personality.

This is widely recognized about Dostoevsky, but not about Jane Austen.

Let me quote the relevant quotes from past posts.

Dostoevsky

The Double involves “the splitting of Golyadkin’s personality and the appearance of the double: the internal process is simply given dramatic reality”…“Golyadkin’s double represents the…internal split…Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character-type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky’s great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other ‘real’ characters, or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels…”…“The mature Dostoevsky felt that the discovery of this ‘underground’ type, whose first version is Golyadkin, constituted his greatest contribution to Russian literature…its ultimate source lay in Dostoevsky’s own psychology.” [Search “Dostoevsky double” to read the whole post and find the source of this quote.]

Jane Austen

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion.” [Search “Austen Emma” for full past posts.]

As I explain in the past posts, you have to distinguish ambivalence about loving someone from already being truly in love with someone and truly not knowing it. The only way to already be in love with someone and truly not know it is to have one personality who is not in love, and another personality who is, with the former not knowing what the latter is thinking and feeling. In ambivalence, you know you have mixed feelings, you resolve them in favor of love, and you may have some residual ambivalence, which you choose to ignore. But in multiple personality, as soon as circumstances shift the balance of power to the personality who already fully loves, that personality takes right over, and love is full and immediate, because it was there all along.

Why did Samuel Langhorne Clemens use pseudonyms? Does the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” mention his real name on its title page?

The question is not how Samuel Clemens chose Mark Twain as his pen name. The question is why he used any pen name at all, and why he used so many of them. 

The following list of his pen names was found online:

1. Mark Twain

2. Devil

3. Figaro

4. Fred Ballard

5. Grumbler

6. John Snooks

7. Josh

8. Moralist of the Main

9. Ramblr

10. S. Browne Jones

11. Sergeant Fathom

12. Soleather

13. Son of Adam

14. W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab

15. W. Epamondas Adrastus Perkins

16. W.E.A.B

17. William Jones

18. Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass

Quintus Curius Snodgrass (discredited)

19. Carl Byng (possible)

In view of my recent posts, which relate the failure of an autobiography’s title page to mention the person’s real name to the person’s having multiple personality, I wonder whether the Autobiography of Mark Twain mentions Samuel Clemens on its title page.

[Note: Search "Mark Twain" to read a number of previous posts.]

Hypotheses: More childhood trauma, multiple personality, polytheism vs. Less trauma and multiple personality, reflected in monotheism or atheism.

Is there any relationship between the percentage of a population that has multiple personality and whether it is polytheistic, monotheistic, or atheistic?

Would a culture in which most of the people had multiple personality be more likely to be polytheistic? Would a culture in which only a minority of the people had multiple personality be more likely to be monotheistic? Would the population with the lowest percentage of multiple personality have the highest percentage of atheists?

The historical trend from polytheism to monotheism to atheism is usually attributed to the advance of science. But is it also related to a decrease in childhood trauma, leading to a decrease in multiple personality?

Are novelists, a group that has a high percentage of multiple personality (but usually a normal version), more religious—at least more spiritual, mystical, or magical thinking—than the general population?

Note: Search “varieties of religious experience” (title of the book by William James) for related past posts.

Autobiography, Pseudonyms, Multiple Personality: Title pages that omit the author’s real name may be a sign that the author has multiple personality.

When the title page of an autobiography—by a famous author or anyone who is best known by a pen name or pseudonym of any kind—omits the person’s real name, most readers don’t give it a second thought.

But they should, since autobiographies are nonfiction, and when you read nonfiction, the least you have a right to expect is that the title page will give the author’s real name.

For example, the title page of “The Autobiography of Frank Richards” (search recent posts) did not give the author’s real name, Charles Hamilton. Why didn’t it? Because, psychologically speaking, it was not written by Charles Hamilton. It was written by his Frank Richards alternate personality.

In short, whenever the title page of an autobiography omits the author’s real name, it may be a sign of multiple personality. This is not, by itself, proof of multiple personality, but should make you wonder.

Charles Hamilton’s “The Autobiography of Frank Richards” (postscript): Why are most of the author’s twenty-eight pen names never mentioned?

Brevity might explain why most of the pen names are not discussed at any length, but brevity alone cannot explain why most of them are never even mentioned.

It is possible that the Frank Richards personality did not know about many of the other pen-name personalities, or, even if he had heard of them, that he was not very familiar with them.

In multiple personality, alternate personalities tend to be segregated into various groups, rooms, realms, layers, levels, etc. The personalities in any one group or at one level may be acquainted with each other, but may have no awareness of personalities in another group or at a different level.

Frank Richards may have had various degrees of amnesia and memory gaps for many of the other alternate personalities.

Charles Hamilton’s “The Autobiography of Frank Richards” (post 2): Beloved author of children’s literature on his successful multiple personality.

In this book, photographs of the author have the caption, Frank Richards (one of Charles Hamilton’s twenty-eight pseudonyms). This is neither a joke nor mental illness. It is a manifestation of the psychology that helped make him the most prolific fiction writer in the English language.

Did he think that his twenty-eight pen-name narrators were different people? No, by objective standards, but yes, psychologically:

“Charles [Hamilton] and Martin [Clifford] were one and the same person: but Charles did not write quite like Martin” (1, p. 35).

“…when he used the name, he would feel like a different person, and in consequence write from a somewhat different angle. I have been told—by men who do not write—that all this is fanciful: that a man’s work must be the same, whether he be called Cripps or Cholmondeley. This only means that they don’t understand…To relatives and bankers, and the Inspector of Taxes, I am still Charles Hamilton: to everybody else, including myself, Frank Richards” (1, p. 36).

“When Frank wrote ‘Ralph Redway’ on his title page, he became, to all intents and purposes, Ralph Redway, a person quite distinct from Frank Richards or Martin Clifford” (1, p. 176).

The above is a good example of a fiction writer’s normal version of multiple personality. It is normal because it did not cause him distress or dysfunction, but, in fact, was the basis of his successful writing career. The only thing unusual about it is that an alternate personality, Frank Richards, has assumed the role of host personality and admitted who he is publicly.

Did he think of it as multiple personality? That depends on how you interpret his anecdote in Chapter X about an editor whose “life was a queer kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. His two characters ran side by side for years” (1, p. 69). I don’t know if this is truly about someone else or is an indirect way of talking about himself. At the very least, it shows that he thought about “Jekyll-and-Hyde” (a metaphor for multiple personality).

What about the issue I raised in the previous post as to who is narrating this autobiography? It is written mostly in the third person for the alleged reason that Frank Richards is “diffident” and does not like to use the first person.

Sometimes, like in the passage quoted above, concluding “to everybody else, including myself, Frank Richards,” the narrator does, indeed, seem to be the Frank Richards personality.

But at other times, the narrator seems to be someone else, commenting on Frank, for example:

“Characters ‘grew’ in Frank’s hands. They became more and more like themselves, if I may put it so” (1, p. 54).

In these instances, the narrator seems to be some other personality, who prefers to remain incognito, which is quite common in multiple personality.

In conclusion, this appears to be the autobiography of a person with multiple personality. The one thing it lacks to confirm the diagnosis is memory gaps (search “memory gaps”), which is probably because it is written from the point of view of alternate personalities, especially Frank Richards. The Charles Hamilton personality would have been more likely to report memory gaps.

1. [no author specified]. The Autobiography of Frank Richards. London, Charles Skilton Ltd., 1952.

Charles Hamilton’s autobiography, “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” has a third-person narrator, who may not be Charles Hamilton or Frank Richards.

As previously noted, “Frank Richards” was the best-known of Charles Hamilton’s twenty-eight pen names. I have just started to read Hamilton’s autobiography, and so far, it is unclear who the narrator is. He says:

“This is the Autobiography of Frank Richards: ipso facto that of Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest, and Charles Hamilton…Charles became so accustomed to the name of Frank Richards, that it grew to seem to him like his own. Since he has used that name, he has thought of himself more as Frank than as Charles: though undoubtedly he began as Charles in the earlier days…

“My readers will observe that these memoirs are written chiefly in the third person. Frank…dislikes a page spotted about with aggressive personal pronouns…He is still rather a diffident chap” (1, p. 18).

And the first three chapters (pp. 7-23) are, indeed, about Frank Richards, and are mostly in third person. For example, the first two sentences and first page say:

“Frank Richards, at seventeen, was at a loose end. He was in the perplexing state of not knowing what he was going to do…

“He wanted to be…an author…And in fact he did write…dating from the age of seven…” (1, p. 7).

Note: In multiple personality, the first alternate personalities arise to cope with childhood trauma. Here, one of the writing personalities, Frank Richards, appears to have originated when Charles Hamilton was seven, the year his father died of tuberculosis.

Now, although the narration is, as quoted above, “chiefly in the third person,” there are lapses; for example, at the bottom of the first page, referring to the writer’s first publisher: “Mr M. was a publisher and printer — I rather think that he was a big printer and a small publisher” (1, p. 7-8).

And above, in the very explanation quoted about why the third person will be used, there is “My readers.” And on the very next page (1, p. 19), there are one “me,” two “my,” and two “I.”

Why this inconsistency and self-contradiction? If Frank is so “diffident” (an adjective that is repeatedly applied to Frank by the narrator), and, because he is diffident, prefers to avoid “aggressive personal pronouns” like “me,” “my,” and “I,” why does he contradict himself, blatantly?

It appears that although Frank may be “rather a diffident chap,” this narrator, whoever he is, is not. Moreover, as quoted above, this narrator lumps the author’s actual name, Charles Hamilton, together with the pen names; indeed, considers it inferior to the pen names, as a name that has outlived its usefulness and whose time has passed.

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, Mark Twain, was featured in the title of his autobiography, which was written in the first person by Mark Twain. Charles Hamilton’s autobiography goes one step further. Not only is the pen name Frank Richards featured in the title of the autobiography, but it is written in the third person, possibly by some other, unnamed, alternate personality.

1. [no author specified]. The Autobiography of Frank Richards. London, Charles Skilton Ltd, 1952.

Did Charles Hamilton, the most prolific writer in the English language, use twenty-eight pseudonyms (Frank Richards, et al) because of multiple personality?

Pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic here (search pseudonym), because the alternate personalities of a person with multiple personality often have their own names, which, for the person, are pseudonyms.

Of course, not everyone who uses pseudonyms does so because of multiple personality, but persons who use pseudonyms that have not been imposed on them by obvious circumstances should be suspected of having multiple personality until proven otherwise.

Indeed, some “obvious circumstances” for pseudonyms—like an author’s writing novels in more than one genre—may be only a rationalization for alternate personalities who want to publish under their own names.

I wonder if Charles Hamilton had multiple personality, but all I can say from reading a biography is that his personality had puzzling contradictions (which may be a clue to multiple personality) and his writing process was similar to that of other writers previously discussed.

Frank Richards, et al.

“Charles Harold St John Hamilton [1876-1961] used more than twenty pen-names, created almost a hundred fictional schools and published well over 72 million words of fiction, or the equivalent of a thousand novels. He is better known as Frank Richards, the pseudonym he used when writing about Greyfriars School and its imperishable inmates. He created St Jim’s as Martin Clifford and Rookwood School as Owen Conquest, but Frank Richards became more to him than just another pen-name — it was an alter ego…” (1, p. 1).

“Even when Hamilton had become the grand old man of boys’ writers, he retained a curiously Peter Pan-like quality” (1, p. 18). (Due to child-aged alternate personalities?)

“ ‘It was a curious thing that when I wrote I seemed to see it all happening before my eyes, as if I were looking at a picture. I had a sense of writing down actual happenings’ “ (1, p. 24).

“As Frank Richards he would write quite differently from Martin Clifford (and he seemed to feel that the pen-names themselves somehow governed this)” (1, p. 50).

“In some ways Frank Richards has always been an enigma. Apart from the phenomenon of the vastness of his literary output, there are the strange opposites in his nature, each of which seemed to find expression without involving him in the kind of conflict that someone of his sensitivity might be expected to feel. He was a long-term compulsive gambler, yet the code of behaviour he advocated for his readers with, apparently, total sincerity and conviction, was one that would have eschewed and, indeed, condemned gambling. Until he reached his early forties, he was addicted to traveling in Europe, but a decade later was extremely reclusive. With his interest in language and a passion for the classics, he was the antithesis of his most famous character, Bunter, yet breathed life into him in a way that has made him almost as archetypal as Cinderella. His published writings are more prolific than any other author’s in the English language, yet…according to his niece…he ‘always hoped to be able to break away from writing’ ” (1, p. 169).

“I have lived for fifty years by writing stories: but I still have not the remotest idea of how a story comes into existence…somehow or other — I have not the least idea how — the story took shape and form. I never knew what any character was going to say, till he said it: and seldom what he was going to do, till he did it. I suppose this must have been because the characters, to me, seemed to live: and being, for the moment, living people they had wills of their own and did what they liked. It is difficult for me to imagine an author writing in any other way then this: but no doubt different writers have different methods…

“[I] never did dictate…[since I didn’t think] that I could have talked as fast as I could type: fifty words a minute would be rather a strain on the vocal organs. And an author must work fast if his work is going to be any good: slow writing makes heavy reading. James Joyce told a man once that he had made ‘good progress’ one afternoon: he had written one sentence! After that, it hardly needs a glance at his work to see that it is worthless…

“A whole story was always floating in my mind when I began to write. It really is an odd process, which I do not quite understand myself: once you get going the characters seem to walk and talk of their own accord, as if the breath of life had been breathed into their nostrils: the author has little more to do than to record their sayings and doings. Sometimes it almost seems like writing to dictation” (1, pp. 206-207).

Charles Hamilton’s Twenty-Eight Pen-Names: “Michael Blake, Winston Cardew, Martin Clifford, Harry Clifton, Clifford Clive, Sir Alan Cobham, Owen Conquest, Gordon Conway, Frank Drake, Freeman Fox, Hamilton Greening, Cecil Herbert, Robert Jennings, Gillingham Jones, T. Harcourt Llewelyn, Clifford Owen, Ralph Redway, Frank Richards, Hilda Richards, Raleigh Robbins, Robert Rogers, Eric Stanhope, Robert Stanley, Peter Todd, Nigel Wallace, Talbot Wynyard” (1, Appendix Three).

1. Mary Cadogan. Frank Richards: The Chap Behind the Chums. London, Viking Penguin, 1988.

“What is Inspiration?” David Brooks, New York Times, says inspired “often feel that something is working through them,” but what? I say alternate personalities.

Brooks says, “Inspiration is not something you can control. People who are inspired have lost some agency. They often feel that something is working through them…The Greeks said it was the Muses…”

He asks, “What is Inspiration?” But he has no answer, concluding only that “Yes, hard work is really important for achievement. But life is more mysterious that just that.”

In my study of over fifty writers, I have begun to understand that inspiration comes to novelists (and perhaps others) from their alternate personalities.

Basic Kinds of Alternate Personalities; Why People Fail to Recognize Multiple Personality When They See It; and Why People Who Have It, Deny It.

Each person with multiple personality is unique. But here is a brief review and general framework.

Host Personality

This is the regular personality, the one who uses the person’s regular name, and who is out, in control, most of the time. The host is often a single, specific, fairly robust personality. In novelists, this might be the personality who does interviews, but who may have little or nothing to do with the actual writing. Indeed, the host may know little or nothing about the alternate personalities.

(However, in some people, the “host” is a group of personalities who take turns in various social situations. In other people, the host is just facade or puppet, whose strings are pulled by other personalities from behind the scenes. As I said, each person with multiple personality is unique, and there are innumerable possibilities.)

Alternate Personalities (“Alters”)

All the other personalities—who, like characters in novels, may range in number from a few to a cast of thousands—are called “alternate personalities” or “alters.” But the word “alternate” is misleading if it makes you think that only one personality is conscious at a time.

All personalities are conscious, simultaneously. However, only some personalities are conscious of each other. As I said above, the host may not be conscious of the alters, but that does not mean the alters are unconscious. I am not conscious of your thoughts, but that does not make you unconscious.

How do I know that alters, when they are not out and in control, are conscious? Because when I interview the host of a person who has multiple personality, and then the person switches to an alter, the alter may know everything that I was just discussing with the host, and can tell me things that the host had done, which the host had not told me, but which the host later confirms.

And how do I know that the host may not be conscious of the alter? Because when the person switches back from the alter to the host, the host may have no knowledge of the alter or what was said—the host has a memory gap—and the host will insist that the whole idea of their having alters or multiple personality is unbelievable. And if I confront the host with the fact that the clock is a half hour later than it was, to their knowledge, a moment ago, they will reply that they sometimes “lose time,” but it’s nothing new, and in their opinion, proves nothing. [I don't use hypnosis or drugs in any of these interviews.]

Protectors and Persecutors

Many of the alters may be off in their own realms—like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the lost boys who never grow up, who are usually off in Neverland—and they are not aware, or only intermittently aware, of the host and everyday life. But for some alters, it is their business to monitor the host and current situation, because they are protectors or persecutors of the host.

The “Mr Hyde” alter, mentioned in yesterday’s post, would be one type of persecutor. Another type would be one who tries to kill the host, behavior which would outwardly appear to have been an attempted suicide. That’s why you have to ask people who attempt suicide if they actually remember the attempt. If they really don’t remember, it may be because you are speaking to a host, while the suicide attempt was, psychologically speaking, an attempted murder by a persecutor alter.

Protector personalities monitor the host so that they can take over if the host is threatened. When a generally peaceful person has a history of violent episodes, you have to ask if they actually remember the violence.

It may often be the case that persecutor personalties originated as protector personalities, who, over the years, have gotten angry that the host is such a wimp.

Child-aged Personalities

Multiple personality begins in childhood (as a way to cope with traumatic experiences) and some alters never grow up, which is why Peter Pan is so obviously a multiple personality story. Search J. M. Barrie in this blog.

Observing or Supervisory Personalities

There may be a personality who has wide knowledge of the whole system of personalities or who is a sort of guru or muse. These kinds of personalities—sometime called “internal self-helpers” or ISH’s—although wise, often do not have the power to control behavior or boss other alters.

Special Interest Personalities

Most personalities have characteristic emotions or interests. Some alters may always be joking, others tearful. Alters may specialize in marriage and family life, playing the piano, or writing novels.

Names

Personalities may be named or nameless. Some names are quite distinct from each other, while other names may appear to be insignificant variations: Annie and Anne may be two different alters.

Named alters are very attached to their names. The surest way to get an alter’s attention is to address that alter by name. Pseudonyms are an illustration of the importance that alters place on their names. Some writer-alters insist on publishing under their own name (pseudonym). Or the regular writer-alters want to distance themselves from the other alter’s genre.

Mostly Behind the Scenes

The greatest misconception about multiple personality is the expectation that, if a person had multiple personality, it would be obvious, that you would see the person flip from one personality to another, like in the movies or a video.

But all you are likely to see is the host personality, and when alters do come out, they usually do so incognito (answering to the host’s name). They don’t want you to know it is them, raise questions, and interfere. Also, they may not want news of their existence to get back to the host.

Most alters, most of the time, are conscious and aware, but behind the scenes. The only times that a person with multiple personality will obviously flip from one personality to another like you see in a video is when they are either in a crisis or are doing it after being diagnosed, for an educational demonstration.

People with multiple personality frequently deny it…

The host personality may not know that they have alters. All they may know is that they occasionally lose time and have memory gaps, and that things happen which nobody else could have done, but they don’t remember doing it. And because the memory gaps make no sense to them and usually cause no serious problems, they may come to forget that they even have them (“amnesia for their amnesia”).

Meanwhile, the alters, who see themselves as people in their own right, not as alternate personalities, do not agree with a diagnosis of multiple personality. Indeed, persecutor alters may think they are so distinct from the host that they can kill the host and go on living.

It is typical for people with blatant multiple personality—who have just been observed to switch personalities, carry on a conversation under a different name, reveal facts that can be verified, but which the host does not know about, then switch back to the host, who has amnesia for the switch and conversation—to adamantly deny that they have multiple personality.

…or call it something else

People with a normal version of multiple personality often do know, to some extent, that they have alternate personalities, but they usually don’t call them alternate personalities or think of it as multiple personality. Euphemisms include alter ego, muse, shadow, character, pseudonym, voice, narrator, double, double consciousness, imaginary companion, waking dream, and daemon, or, in Henry James’s phrase, “the madness of art.”

The truth about alcohol (or other drugs) and changes in personality: “When he drinks, he becomes a monster” vs. “When he becomes a monster, he drinks”

According to conventional wisdom and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, drugs or alcohol can turn people into monsters, because everyone has a dark side, and the drugs or alcohol bring it out. But everyone does not turn into a monster when drinking or using drugs, because conventional wisdom and Stevenson have it backward. The more likely scenario is that some people switch to a monstrous alternate personality who likes to drink or use drugs.

Postscript (added later the same day): The obnoxious personality may drink or use drugs for one or more of the following reasons. First, the personality may have originated in imitation of someone who drank or used drugs. Second, the personality may genuinely like the alcohol or drugs. Third, the alcohol or drugs may incapacitate the regular personality, helping the obnoxious personality take control.

That third reason may look like Stevenson was right after all. But no, in the Jekyll and Hyde model or Freudian model, Hyde resides in the "unconscious" or is the person's "id"; whereas, in multiple personality, the alternate personalities are always conscious, behind the scenes, often monitoring what is going on with the regular personality, and looking for their chance to take control.

Virginia Woolf (post 8): Bipolar disorder cannot account for having many personalities, including both sexes, which are symptoms of multiple personality.

In my post of February 17, 2014, I quoted scholars Maria DiBattista, Hermione Lee, and Louise DeSalvo on Woolf’s multiple personality issues. I would like to add Harvena Richter, whose book has a chapter, “A Multiplicity of Self,” which discusses Woolf’s various methods in her writing “of showing multiple personality” (1, p. 123).

In contrast, when I google “Virginia Woolf Mental Illness,” the consensus appears to be bipolar disorder (manic-depression), which is discussed at book length by Thomas C. Caramagno (2). But a major flaw in that argument is Woolf’s multiplicity of selves, each of which has a sense of its own personhood, and which come in both sexes. These are not symptoms of bipolar disorder, but of multiple personality.

1. Harvena Richter. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton University Press, 1970.

2. Thomas C. Caramagno. The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. University of California Press, 1992.

The Myth of Experimental Literature: Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters” and Virginia Woolf’s Six “Waves” explained in Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon”

Whether experimental literature is a myth depends on what you mean by experimental. If all you mean is that a writer has done something different, then of course there has been such literature. But if you mean that a writer has deliberately designed a new way of writing, then, in many cases, you are misrepresenting their creative process.

My two recent posts on Pirandello’s Preface and Woolf’s “The Waves” (in the context of prior posts on Woolf) show that the play and novel reflect the authors’ multiple personality, not a desire for experimental technique.

This reminds me of two things: first, the scene in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” when the wizard is discovered behind the curtain; second, a sentence in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” (the book, not the movie), which I quoted in a past post (search Hammett), in the section on Flitcraft’s Fugue: “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

from Preface to “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello (post 2): On Creative Process and Multiple Personality.

“Many years ago…a nimble little handmaid entered the service of my art…Her name is Fantasy. She is a bit of a joker and somewhat malicious and, though she likes to dress in black, it cannot be denied that she is often downright bizarre…And she amuses herself by bringing home the most discontented folk in the world for me to draw stories, novels, and plays out of them…

“Well now, several years ago, this handmaid Fantasy had the unfortunate inspiration or ill-omened whim to bring home a whole family…the six characters who are seen coming onto the stage at the beginning of the play…

“What author can ever say how or why a given character is born in his fantasy?…I can only say that, without having consciously looked for them, I found them there before me, so alive that they could be touched, so alive that I could even hear them breathe…Born alive, they wished to live…So much so that, when I persisted in my determination to drive them from my mind, they continued to live on their own account…like characters from a novel, escaped by some miracle from the pages of the book that contained them. They chose certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study…

“ ‘Now why,’ I said to myself, ‘why don’t I represent this extraordinary situation of an author who refuses to give life to some of his characters, and the situation of those characters who, born of his fantasy and already infused with life, cannot resign themselves to exclusion from the world of art? They have already detached themselves from me, have their own life, have acquired voice and movement; on their own, therefore, in this struggle for life that they have had to wage against me, they have already become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak on their own; they already see themselves as such; they have learned to defend themselves from me; they will also know how to defend themselves from others. Well then, let them go where dramatic characters usually go to have life—on a stage. And let them see how it turns out.’ That is what I did…

“Without wishing it, without knowing it, in the strife of their troubled souls, each one of them defends himself against the accusations of the others by expressing, as his own living passion and torment, the same pangs that I myself have suffered over so many years: the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual…”

Pirandello exaggerates when he says that everyone has multiple personality. About 1.5% of the general public has the mental disorder (according to DSM-5), while about 90% of fiction writers and perhaps 30% of the general public have a normal version (according to this blog).

Luigi Pirandello. “Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1925), pages 186-196, in Luigi Pirandello Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author [1921], Henry IV, The Mountain Giants. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Anthony Mortimer. New York, Oxford University Press, 2014.