Stendhal used over 100 pseudonyms, more than Fernando Pessoa, the writer most suspected of multiple personality because of many pseudonyms.

A few years ago, when I told a literature professor of my theory that most novelists had multiple personality, the only writer the professor thought might have had multiple personality was Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher who had used eighty-one pseudonyms (which he called “heteronyms”) (1).

So today I was surprised to learn that French writer Stendhal (a pseudonym) had previously published under many other names, and had continued to use more than a hundred pseudonyms in his autobiographical writings and correspondence. To quote Wikipedia:

“Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer, best known for his novels The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). He is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism.

“Before settling on the pen name Stendhal, he published under many pen names, including ‘Louis Alexandre Bombet’ and ‘Anastasius Serpière.’ The only book that Stendhal published under his own name was The History of Painting (1817). From the publication of Rome, Naples, Florence (1817) onwards, he published his works under the pseudonym ‘M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie.’ He borrowed this nom de plume from the German city of Stendhal, birthplace of Johann Joachim Winckelman, an art historian and archaeologist famous at the time.

“Stendhal used many aliases in his autobiographical writings and correspondence, and often assigned pseudonyms to friends, some of whom adopted the names for themselves. Stendhal used more than a hundred pseudonyms, which were astonishingly diverse. Some he used no more than once, while others he returned to throughout his life. ‘Dominique’ and ‘Salviati’ served as intimate pet names. He coins comic names ‘that make him even more bourgeois than he really is: Cotonnet, Bombet, Chamier.’ He uses many ridiculous names: ‘Don phlegm,’ ‘Giorgio Vasan,’ ‘William Crocodile,’ ‘Poverino,’ ‘Baron de Cutendre.’ One of his correspondents, Prosper Mérimée, said: ‘He never wrote a letter without signing a false name.’

“Stendhal's Journal and autobiographical writings include many comments on masks and the pleasures of ‘feeling alive in many versions.’ ‘Look upon life as a masked ball,’ is the advice that Stendhal gives himself in his diary for 1814. In Memoirs of an Egotist he writes: ‘Will I be believed if I say I'd wear a mask with pleasure and be delighted to change my name?...for me the supreme happiness would be to change into a lanky, blonde German and to walk about like that in Paris’ ” (2).

I may read Stendhal later this year.

1. Wikipedia. “Fernando Pessoa.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

2. Wikipedia. “Stendhal.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal