Why is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Writers aren’t people…they’re a whole lot of people…” used as epigraph for biography of spy novelist John le Carré?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person” (1, p. 12).

The above is one way to describe multiple personality. That is, objectively, there is one person, but, psychologically, it is like there is more than one person, in some cases a whole lot of people, who usually try to present themselves as one person behind the mask of the host personality.

Another Fitzgerald quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” —from The Crack-up [1936]

Self-contradiction is an ability for which a person with multiple personality is specially qualified, since it is relatively easy for two personalities to hold contradictory views. Indeed, one clue that a person might secretly have multiple personality would be puzzling contradictions.

John le Carré

John le Carré’s biographer never directly explains his choice of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote as his epigraph, but he does address one of the favorite subjects of this blog, an author’s use of pseudonyms:

“ ‘People who have had very unhappy childhoods’, John le Carré once wrote, ‘are pretty good at inventing themselves.’…As a boy he learned to invent…adopting one persona to conceal another…‘I’m a liar,’ he explains…Of course, ‘John le Carré’ does not exist. The name is a mask, for somebody called David Cornwell…Over the years he has provided several explanations for it, but has subsequently admitted that none of them is true” (2, p. xiv).

I have argued that authors make bogus excuses for their use of pseudonyms, when the true explanation relates to their multiple personalities. (Search “pseudonyms” to see past posts.)

Other comments by John le Carré:

“I’ve often tried to draw this parallel between the writer and the spy” (3, p. 14). “When, as a writer, I spied on myself, I often invented characters that represented the other half of me…But the greatest magic of writing lies in the fact that one actually does not know oneself as long as things have not been put on paper. That is what renews the urge to write. It is a journey of discovery into the self” (3, pp. 113-114).

INTERVIEWER: Your characters always seem to be searching for their own identities.

Le CARRÉ: Yes, that’s true, but it’s part of the golden center that one can never touch. I’m looking for mine, they’re looking for theirs (3, p. 158).

Alternate Personalities as Spies

To understand multiple personality, it is useful to think of alternate personalities as secret agents. As discussed in past posts, alternate personalities usually stay behind the scenes, while the regular, host personality deals with the public. And when any alternate personality does come out (in a person whose multiple personality has not been diagnosed or recognized), it usually does so incognito, answering to the regular name, like a spy hiding behind an assumed identity. Alternate personalities, like spies, usually don’t acknowledge their identity unless and until their cover is blown.

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western [1941]. Edited with Preface and Notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York, Scribner, 2003.

2. Adam Sisman. John le Carré: The Biography. New York, Harper, 2015.

3. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Judith S. Baughman (Editors). Conversations with John le Carré. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2004.