Clues to multiple personality in “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”: V. S. Naipaul (post 6) is self-contradictory; Paul Theroux (post 2) sees his alternate personality in a mirror.

Theroux is a younger friend and protégé of Nobel novelist Naipaul, whose nickname is Vidia (1). Theroux’s memoir of their decades long friendship is not flattering to either of them.

Inadvertently, the memoir reports two clues to multiple personality: 1. self-contradiction or puzzling inconsistency (the subject of many past posts), and 2. seeing an alternate personality in the mirror, a textbook symptom of multiple personality (also discussed in many past posts: search “mirrors” and “mirror”).

Paul Theroux

“On the train to London, I tried to look out the window, but all I saw was my own reflection, framed by the night, looking in: my other self staring at me for one and a half hours” (1, p. 216).

This reference to his “other self” is apropos of nothing in the text and is not elaborated or remarked upon. Evidently, to Theroux, having a second self is a routine feature of ordinary psychology. Although he apparently feels like it is a another person staring at him, he knows that it is only his reflection, since multiple personality is not a psychosis and he is perfectly in touch with objective reality.

V. S. Naipaul

“He was contradictory” (p. 71). “He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions” (p. 151). “He was his usual paradoxical self” (p. 193). “I was aware of his contradictions” (p. 246). “Vidia’s contradictory crankishness" (p. 260). “contradictory genius” (p. 294). “I did not mind his contradictions” (p. 348).

For example, “Once he had written ‘I happen to like Spanish dancing,’ but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing…‘It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations’ ” (p. 276).

1. Paul Theroux. Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.