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.