Poet Walt Whitman’s novel “Life and Adventures of Jack Engle”: Author inadvertently portrays murderer as having multiple personality’s memory gaps.

Walt Whitman’s recently discovered novel was published anonymously in 1852, just three years before his Leaves of Grass. The two features relevant here are 1. the protagonist’s traumatic childhood, and 2. the inadvertent portrayal of a murderer as possibly having multiple personality.

Traumatic Childhood

The protagonist and first-person narrator, Jack Engle, was orphaned as a young child, and as a child, lived on the streets of New York City as a homeless vagabond. This can be seen as an easy way to gain sympathy for the character. And the way he became an orphan is integral to the plot. Nevertheless, since there are many other ways to gain sympathy and write plots, it suggests that the author had an interest in traumatic childhoods (which may be associated with multiple personality).

Murderer’s Memory

It is eventually discovered that Jack Engle became an orphan, because his father had been murdered. And Chapter XX contains a manuscript written by the murderer while he was in jail awaiting trial.

The murderer and Engle’s father had been childhood friends, and the latter had become the former’s employee when the murder takes place. For whatever reason, Engle’s father has been taunting his employer, who had a history of a nasty temper, and after one final taunt, the employer grabs a mallet from his employee’s hand and hits Engle’s father in the head, which kills him.

According to his manuscript, the murderer knows what he did—and he is not denying his guilt or asking for leniency—but certain things he says suggest that he may have learned the details of what he did from things others have said and not from his own direct memory of it.

For example, he says, “I hardly remember now with sufficient distinctness what passed…The ensuing few hours are like a hateful and confused dream to me. I was neither asleep nor awake…An awful blank seemed to spread through the mental part of me…” (1, pp. 136-137).

This raises the possibility that his history of a nasty temper was a history of times that a violent alternate personality had taken over. And that, in the recent murder, his regular personality had a memory gap for the period of time that his violent personality took over.

The question is why the narrative is raising these issues about memory. He is not denying his guilt or seeking leniency. The plot has nothing to do with multiple personality. The memory issues raised by the text are gratuitous and unwarranted.

Two possible explanations occur to me. Either Whitman was taking these memory issues from murder cases he had reported on or read about. Or memory gaps were something with which he was personally familiar.

1. Walt Whitman. Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography, a story of New York at the present time in which the reader will find some familiar characters [1852]. Introduction by Zachary Turpin. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017.

In New York Times, Peter D. Kramer and Sally L. Satel imply President Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, but it would not explain him.

According to Drs. Kramer and Satel, in any evaluation of Mr. Trump’s fitness for office, “…diagnosis might be the easy part…many experts believe that Mr. Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/opinion/trump-unfit-goldwater-rule.html?ref=opinion

In my opinion, Mr. Trump has narcissistic traits, not narcissistic personality disorder, but it does not matter, because narcissism is not the main issue, which is extraordinary inconsistency and lying. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html?mcubz=0.

If Mr. Trump warrants any psychiatric diagnosis, it must explain his extraordinary inconsistency and lying.

“Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power” by Louisa May Alcott (post 2) writing as A. M. Barnard: Woman, background like Alcott’s, portrayed as psychopath.

The protagonist of this novella is a poor, 19-year-old governess who uses her skills as an actress to trick her rich, elderly employer into marrying her.

Louisa May Alcott, herself, had a background in theater and was once a poor, 19-year-old lady’s companion, who had to flee her position, because her employer, the lady’s elderly brother, made inappropriate advances.

So I would have expected the governess in this story to have been portrayed sympathetically, with her marriage a triumph, if not for feminism, then at least class struggle and social mobility. But the narrative portrays the governess as a triumphant, scheming psychopath.

Another interesting thing about the governess is that she passes herself off as being nineteen, but she is actually thirty. The reader is told that she is thirty and shown her removing her disguise in private. The latter scene made me think of Dr. Jekyll’s turning into Mr. Hyde. Indeed, at another point in the story, she is referred to as a Scottish witch (Robert Louis Stevenson was Scottish).

But the governess’s transformation reverses Stevenson’s scenario. In A. M. Barnard’s story, the bad personality is the real one. Barnard’s story is like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde told from Hyde’s point of view (except that Barnard’s story was written twenty years before Stevenson’s).

Maybe Louisa May Alcott was “Dr. Jekyll” and A. M. Barnard was “Mr. Hyde” in a novelist’s normal version of multiple personality.

1. A. M. Barnard (pseudonym of Louisa May Alcott). “Behind a Mask or A Woman’s Power” (1866), in Louisa May Alcott. Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited and with an Introduction and Afterword by Madeleine Stern. New York, William Morrow and Company, 1975/1995.

Louisa May Alcott: Before “Little Women,” she wrote “blood-and-thunder” stories with femmes fatales, not only for money, but because A. M. Barnard preferred.

“I fancy ‘lurid’ things,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her 1850 journal, “if true and strong also” (1, p. xii). And she said in conversation, “I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style” (1, p. xxvi). So who was this who expressed a preference for the lurid, Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women) or A. M. Barnard (her usual pseudonym) and the writer of works she published anonymously?

Most of her sensational tales, what she called her “blood-and-thunder” works, were published under a pseudonym or anonymously, but “The Mysterious Key has a male hero…and…was published over the name of Louisa May Alcott. The possibility suggests itself that Louisa insisted upon secrecy less for her blood-and-thunder stories in general than for her passionate and angry heroines in particular” (1, p. xvi).

“Her characterizations were natural and subtle and her gallery of femmes fatales forms a suite of flesh-and-blood portraits. Her own anger at an unjust world she transformed into the anger of her heroines, who made of it a powerful weapon with which to challenge fate. The psychological insights of A. M. Barnard [her pseudonymous personality] disclose the darker side of the character of Louisa May Alcott” (1, p. xxviii).

Stephen King infers that there were “two Louisa May Alcotts,” and although the conventional one, the author of Little Women, came to predominate, the sensational tales give us “…a fascinating look into a divided mind that was both attracted to themes of violence and sexuality and ashamed by its own interest” (2).

1. Louisa May Alcott. Behind a Mask: the Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited and with an Introduction and Afterword by Madeleine Stern. New York, William Morrow and Company, 1975/1995.

2. Stephen King. “Blood and Thunder in Concord.” New York Times, September 10, 1995. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/nnp/18425.html?mcubz=0

“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 5): Main theme is the art of the novel, which entails reorganization of the novelist’s alternate personalities.

The end of the novel elaborates the idea discussed in the last post, that a constructive reorganization of one’s multiple personalities is the art of life.

It is a potentially helpful insight for what I would guess to be up to thirty percent of the general public, and what I would estimate to be over ninety percent of novelists, who have a normal version multiple personality; and for the approximately one percent of the public who have the clinical version.

Since Steppenwolf was written by a novelist, and since novelists are so likely to have multiple personality, I interpret the main theme of this novel to be the psychology and creative process of novelists.

Novelists have many people (alternate personalities) inside them, and the art of the novelist’s life—the art of the novel—is the reorganization of the novelist’s alternate personalities.

Do men and women have different brains? Do men and women differ in how frequently they get multiple personality? Sex ratio based on study of novelists.

An item in today’s newspaper about whether men and women have different brains reminds me of the usual statistics on multiple personality, which purport to show that it is much more common in women. 

The usual rebuttal to those statistics is that they come from psychiatric clinics, which biases the sample, because women with multiple personality tend to go to psychiatric clinics, while men with multiple personality tend to go to jail or substance abuse clinics.

I don’t know the latest study of the sex ratio of multiple personality, and I’m not motivated to look it up.

However, based on my study of novelists, it looks to me like men and women are equally likely to develop multiple personality.

As to whether women and men have different brains, I think the question itself is an example of sophistry, a fallacious “straw man” argument. The sexes would not have to have uniformly different brains for whatever differences there are to have practical social significance.

But the issue here is the frequency of multiple personality: I don’t see any significant difference between the sexes.

Latest New York Times Book Review has cover story on John le Carré, but if you want insight on how he thinks and writes, visit here and search “spy"

“Proved: Most Novelists, Many Others, Have Normal Version of Multiple Personality”: Nationality of Visitors to Blog and Study of Literature and Psychology.

Since my blog and study began four years ago, it has been visited from more than fifty nations. The software keeps count of the top ten nations for all time (four years) and the last month:

Four Years

1. USA

2. Pakistan

3. India

4. Philippines

5. Russia

6. China

7. Germany

8. France

9. Ukraine

10. Egypt

Last Month

1. Pakistan

2. India

3. USA

4. Russia

5. Philippines

6. China

7. Portugal

8. Germany

9. Indonesia

10. Vietnam

“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 4): Mirrors in Magic Palace like mirrors in textbook on multiple personality; Hesse on psychiatry and Art of Life.

In the Magic Palace, Harry first sees himself in a mirror as being two personalities, the man, Harry, and the steppenwolf.

“I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the wolf were going through their convulsions” (1, p. 317).

Then Harry sees himself in another mirror as being many people, ranging from childhood to old age. (This is like alternate personalities in multiple personality, which come in different ages, beginning in childhood, when multiple personality starts.)

“I faced the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself…But I had scarcely had time to recognize myself before…A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys…Some of the multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds [Harry’s age] and twenty-year-olds…” (1, pp. 319-320).

“[Multiple Personality] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…They may describe themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking into a mirror (2, p. 62).

Psychiatry

Hesse’s character relates the multiplicity of selves to psychiatry, but gets multiple personality confused with schizophrenia, or as he calls it, “schizomania”: “The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name schizomania for it. Science…is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves…In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses…(1, pp. 342-343).

Hesse’s term “schizomania” reflects a confusion between multiple personality and schizophrenia. Having many selves is not seen in schizophrenia. It is the defining symptom of multiple personality.

Art of Life

One room in the Magic Palace is for reorganizing a person’s multiple selves. And as Harry is told: “This is the art of life. You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy (1, p. 345).

Correcting “schizomania” to “multiple personality,” Hesse’s character is saying that multiple personality is the basis of all art and fantasy. I would not say “all,” but otherwise I agree.

1. Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf [1927]. Translation from the German by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963). New York, Picador Modern Classics/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

“Author Sue Grafton’s Scary Childhood Home”: As a child, she would sit with a butcher knife to protect herself; as adult, writing became her anchor in life.

Since I have discussed Sue Grafton in past posts (search “Grafton”), and since multiple personality originates as a psychological way to cope with a frightening childhood, her new article (Aug. 22, 2017 online; Aug. 25, 2017 print) is of interest:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/author-sue-graftons-scary-childhood-home-1503413068

New York Times says “Different Day…Completely Different Trump…Teleprompter Trump and Unplugged Trump…Split Speaking Personality is Not New”

“President Trump reverted to his script as commander in chief here on Wednesday…It was a day-and-night contrast to Mr. Trump’s performance Tuesday…But such contrasts have become a recurring motif of this presidency: Mr. Trump has toggled between Teleprompter Trump and Unplugged Trump…The split speaking personality is not new” (1).

Unfortunately, articles like the above leave the impression that speeches Trump reads from the teleprompter are imposed on him against his will. But doesn’t he read the speeches in advance, not only to practice them, but to vet them? Doesn’t he take out anything he does not like and add anything he wants to say?

If so, then both teleprompter speeches and extemporaneous speeches have been approved by Trump. Their inconsistencies and contradictions may imply a disagreement between alternate personalities.

1. Mark Landler. “Different Day, Different Audience, and a Completely Different Trump.” New York Times, Aug. 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/us/politics/trump-speech-reno-phoenix.html?mcubz=0

“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 3): As Treatise predicted, Harry finds magic mirror—a female/male, nameless double he names Hermine.

The narrator of “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” had said that Harry “may get hold of one our little mirrors…such possibilities await him…these magic possibilities” (1, pp. 96-97).

And Harry does meets someone who says, “I am a kind of looking glass for you” (1, p. 192), a person whose face, thinks Harry, “was indeed like a magic mirror to me” (1, p. 193). Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for posts on this recurring topic.

“But now I really must know your name,” [says Harry]…

“Perhaps you can guess it…Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that sometimes my face is just like a boy’s? Now, for example.

“Yes”, thinks Harry, “now that I looked at her face carefully, I had to admit that she was right. It was a boy’s face…that reminded me of my own boyhood friend…Hermann. For a moment it seemed that she had turned into this Hermann…

“If you were a boy,” Harry says “in amazement, I should say that your name was Hermann.”

“Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in women’s clothing, she said joking.”

“Is your name Hermine?” Harry guesses. (1, pp. 190-191).

She (or he) nods, in apparent delight with Harry’s guess, and in acceptance of the name “Hermine" (which she is called from then on). But, strictly speaking, this person has not actually said that this had been her name, nor even whether she is definitely female or male; nor, indeed, whether she is one person or more than one person, sometimes a male and sometimes a female. Harry comes to feel that she is “my double, almost” (1, p. 222), which is a literary metaphor for an alternate personality.

In short, more than a hundred pages after Treatise on the Steppenwolf, it is still the novel’s thesis. As Harry recalls:

“In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you about…it is only a fancy…to believe…that he is made up of one or two personalities. Every human being, it says, consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.

“ ‘I like that very much,’ cried Hermine” (1, p. 225).

1. Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf [1927]. Translation from the German by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963). New York, Picador Modern Classics/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

Hermann Hesse’s “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” helps explain why some psychiatrists think diagnosis and treatment of multiple personality is stupid.

Thus far in my reading of Steppenwolf (see previous post), characters who meet Harry Haller are not aware that he has a split personality. Harry, himself, is vaguely aware of having a dual, human/wolf, split personality. But the Treatise explains that Harry has many more than two personalities.

In clinical psychiatry, it sometimes happens that two psychiatrists will have occasion to see the same patient; for example, a covering psychiatrist may see a treating psychiatrist’s patient while the treating psychiatrist is on vacation. The covering psychiatrist, who does not see any alternate personalities in that patient, may be quite surprised to later learn that the treating psychiatrist has diagnosed the patient as having multiple personality.

Moreover, if the covering psychiatrist does see some evidence of an alternate personality—the patient sometimes refers to himself by another name—the covering psychiatrist may view this as hysterical foolishness that needs to be nipped in the bud. So he ignores this behavior and, sure enough, the behavior stops. And when he later hears that the treating psychiatrist has diagnosed multiple personality, he concludes that the treating psychiatrist has made the mistake of reinforcing such behavior, and has made a mountain out of a molehill.

The covering psychiatrist has a misconception about multiple personality. He equates it with its overt manifestation. He thinks that if the patient is no longer calling himself by another name, then the multiple personality is gone. But the usual situation with multiple personality is like that of Harry Haller. The multiple personality is usually covert, not overt. The person himself knows nothing, or has only a vague and oversimplified notion, about it. He usually has more personalities than he suspects.

It is helpful to think of alternate personalities as spies and secret agents. Normally, you are not aware of their presence, because they don’t admit who they really are, but answer to the name of their covering identity. The covering identity is the person’s regular name. For example, all of Harry Haller’s alternate personalities—some of whom will have their own names, others of whom may be nameless—will normally answer to the cover name, Harry Haller. And so nobody realizes what is going on.

If Harry Haller were to see a psychiatrist familiar with multiple personality, and if the diagnosis were made, it would be like blowing the cover of a ring of spies. Once their cover is blown, alternate personalities would be overt (acknowledge who they are as distinct from Harry Haller) with anyone who addresses them by their real name (or, if nameless, their chief characteristic). You know that this is not just a fantasy to the extent that the alternate personalities can provide verifiable information.

“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 2): “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” tells Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, that he has multiple, not dual, personalities.

I have just read “Treatise on the Steppenwolf,” pages 66-116 of this 389-page edition of the novel. It tells the main character—Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf—his true nature.

Harry had considered himself to have two natures, that of a man, Harry Haller, and that of a wolf of the Steppes (the plains): “…the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one…[who were] in continual and deadly enmity [with each other]…and the Steppenwolf brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of others besides himself whenever he came into contact with them…” (1, pp. 68-72).

“There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of this kind…(1, p. 74).

“It is possible that [Harry] will learn one day to know himself. He may get hold of one of our little mirrors. He may encounter the Immortals. He may find in one of our magic theaters the very thing that is needed…(1, p. 96-97).

“…to come to the point…the Steppenwolf is a fiction. When Harry feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological simplification…Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two…(1, pp. 98-100).

In psychological terms, the Treatise divides humanity into two groups: 1. the majority of people, who are multifaceted, but not distinctly self-divided, and 2. a minority of people, who are distinctly self-divided, and who may be aware of a small number of their personalities, but usually have more than they realize. In the second group are “many artists.”

The Treatise posits a spiritual realm, whose beings are the “Immortals,” and whose spokesman is narrating the Treatise. In psychological terms, the Immortals might correspond to the novelist’s muse or spiritual characters. In multiple personality, it is common to have any kind of alternate personality that would be consistent with the person’s art, personal history, religion, and culture.

1. Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf [1927]. Translation from the German by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963). New York, Picador Modern Classics/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.

Maureen Dowd, Pamela Paul, Donald Trump: Three Successful People, Two of Whom are Consistent, and One of Whom is Puzzlingly Inconsistent.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is against neo-nazis and the Klu Klux Klan, and to emphasize how consistent and predictable her attitudes are, she traces them back to her admirable father. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/opinion/sunday/trump-neo-nazis-and-the-klan.html?mcubz=0

New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul accepts the necessity of upgrading to the latest technology at work, but refuses to let unnecessary gadgets intrude on her home life, which is her longstanding, consistent attitude. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/technology-downgrade-sanity.html?mcubz=0&_r=0

In contrast, President Donald Trump is consistently inconsistent, and has even boasted of his unpredictability.

I don’t know Maureen Dowd, Pamela Paul, or Donald Trump. So I don’t know that Dowd and Paul do not have multiple personality or that Trump does. But their comparison does highlight one of the things I look for as a clue to whether a person might have multiple personality (which is notoriously hidden and camouflaged before it is diagnosed). I look for puzzling inconsistency.

People with undiagnosed multiple personality may be puzzlingly inconsistent, because their various alternate personalities, although incognito, may differ from each other in attitude, mood, interests, knowledge, talent, memory, grooming (hair color, etc.), names (nicknames, pseudonyms), and behavior.

George Prochnik’s New York Times Book Review of Frederick Crews’ “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” perpetuates myth of Freud and the unconscious.

Conundrum

“Yet, confoundingly, Freud ‘is destined to remain among us as the most influential of 20th-century sages,’ Crews writes, claiming that the attention bestowed on him by contemporary scholars and commentators ranks with that accorded Shakespeare and Jesus. Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God” (1).

Solution

Freud retains his “cultural capital,” because The New York Times, George Prochnik, and many other writers perpetuate the myth that Freud discovered the unconscious.

The book review’s paragraph on Freud’s allegedly enduring contributions begins with “The idea that large parts of our mental life remain obscure or even entirely mysterious to us” (1); that is, the unconscious.

I easily debunked that myth in my March 31, 2017 post, “The Unconscious: First, Freud did not discover it (it was already well known); Second, it’s a misnomer, since it refers to conscious, alternate personalities.” I simply quoted from Wikipedia’s historical review, which shows widespread appreciation of the unconscious before Freud came along (2).

In short, the main reason that Freud continues to have “cultural capital” is that publications like The New York Times continue to credit him with discovering the unconscious. He did not.

Moreover, as I argued in my March 31, 2017 post, “the unconscious” may be a misnomer for dissociated, multiple consciousness.

1. George Prochnik. “The Curious Conundrum of Freud’s Persistent Influence” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/books/review/freud-biography-frederick-crews.html?mcubz=0

2. Wikipedia. “Unconscious Mind.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind

Pseudonyms of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Nobel Prize Novelist (1946): Were they alternate personalities? Do they imply he had multiple personality?

As discussed in many past posts in regard to various writers (search “pseudonyms”), pseudonyms may be the names of alternate personalities. However, when female authors have used pseudonyms, there has been a tendency to explain it as an avoidance of gender discrimination, even when they continue to use the pseudonym after everyone knows who they are. And when male authors have used pseudonyms, the reason given is sometimes silly; for example, that Samuel Clemens called himself Mark Twain because he liked the steamboat navigational term.

Pseudonyms, in and of themselves, don’t prove anything, but it is reasonable to at least consider multiple personality when you see the following:

“Hinterlassene Schriften und Gedichte von Hermann Lauscher  [Hidden writings and poems by Hermann Lauscher] ostensibly edited by H. Hesse, appeared in December 1900. This was the first of a number of times that Hesse resorted to this type of subterfuge. When he published his Demian in 1919, he used the pseudonym Emil Sinclair. In 1927 he purported to be the editor of Der Steppenwolf, a manuscript left to him by a vagrant Harry Haller. And in 1943 he appeared as the editor of Das Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game] the biography and literary remains of Josef Knecht, another manuscript which had fortuitously fallen into his possession. Hesse’s reasons for this artifice varied from instance to instance” (1, p. 20).

Meng Hsiä was “a kind of pseudonym or Chinese mask Hesse assumed in his later years when he wanted to convey a special message. Meng Hsiä means ‘dream writer’ ” (2, p. 330).

1. Joseph Mileck. Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography, Volume 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1977.

2. Hermann Hesse. Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

New York Times Book Review praises Sue Grafton, but does not mention her past statements that multiple personalities are integral to her writing process.

One of my past posts on Sue Grafton cites a public television interview in which she volunteers the fact that she has multiple personalities. But the interviewer disregards what she says and immediately changes the subject.

Although the New York Times Book Review (1) and other reviewers may praise novelists and love novels, they are not interested in how novelists think and how they write their novels.

Search “Grafton” in this blog to see my past posts.

1. Marilyn Stasio. “Crime Fiction: Sue Grafton Nears the End of Her Alphabet Mysteries.” New York Times, August 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/books/review/crime-sue-grafton-y-is-for-yesterday.html?mcubz=0

Jeanette Winterson (post 5): In award-winning first novel, “Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit,” first-person narrator, Jeanette, speaks with an alternate personality.

According to the author’s memoir (see previous post), her mother and religious community did literally attempt to exorcise demons which they alleged had caused her lesbian relationships. But the memoir did not include Jeanette’s conversation with her demon. The novel does.

Jeanette thinks of this experience in terms of demon possession or nonspecific madness (and not in terms of multiple personality, the psychiatric perspective):

“Everyone has a demon like cats have fleas…

“ ‘If I let them take away my demons [thinks Jeanette, about her pending exorcism], I’ll have to give up what I’ve found’ [love with a woman].

“ ‘You can’t do that,’ said a voice at my elbow.

“ Leaning on the coffee table was the orange demon.

“ ‘I’ve gone mad,’ I thought.

“ ‘That may well be so,’ agreed the demon evenly. ‘So make the most of it.’

“ ‘What do you want?’ [Jeanette asks].

“ ‘I want to help you decide what you want’…Everyone has a demon as you so rightly observed,’ the thing began, ‘but not everyone knows this, and not everyone knows how to make use of it’…

“ ‘But in the Bible you keep getting driven out,’ [says Jeanette].

“ ‘Don’t believe all you read’ [the demon replies]” (1, pp. 108-109).

Jeanette says that everyone has a demon. The demon agrees, adding that many don’t realize it or know how to use it.

Jeanette and her demon are right in regard to novelists, most of whom have multiple personality. And even if novelists don’t know they have it, or don’t think of it in those terms, they know how to make use of it in their writing process.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. New York, Grove Press, 1985.

Jeanette Winterson (post 4): Does she refer to adoptive mother as “Mrs Winterson,” “my mother,” and “Mrs W,” because they both had multiple personality?

In her memoir, Jeanette Winterson refers to her father as “dad,” not as “Mr W” or “Mr Winterson.” Yet she refers to the woman who raised her since infancy as “Mrs Winterson,” “my mother,” and “Mrs W,” in approximately that order of frequency. Sometimes she refers to her in all three ways on the same page (1, pp. 45, 103).

What do the following two passages mean?

“But it was Christmas and the school was lit up and Mrs Winterson was in her fur coat and bird hat and my dad was washed and shaved and I was walking in between them and it felt normal.

“ ‘Is that your mum?’ said somebody.

“ ‘Mostly,’ I said” (1, p. 98).

“Years later, when I came back to Accrington after my first term at Oxford, it was snowing…I looked at her through the window…She was my mother. She wasn’t my mother” (1, p. 99).

These two passages might be thought to refer to the distinction between her adoptive mother and her birth mother (whom she meets at the end of the memoir) or to her ambivalent feelings about her adoptive mother. But the curious multiplicity of the ways that she refers to her adoptive mother throughout the memoir suggests another interpretation.

The author’s alternate personalities may have differed from each other in how they saw their relationship with that woman. For example, one may have viewed her as “my mother,” while another one may not have seen herself as this woman’s daughter, making her “Mrs Winterson.”

Another explanation for Jeanette’s use of multiple names for the woman would be that the woman, herself, had multiple personality, and Jeanette had a different name for each of the woman’s personalities.

It is possible that both women had multiple personality.

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.

Jeanette Winterson (post 3): Does her memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” describe her as having multiple personality since childhood?

Having in a previous post quoted Winterson’s 2016 article, in which she said, “Writing is an act of splitting…Writers are multiple personalities,” I bought her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (2011), and have just read it.

Winterson is adopted as an infant by a disturbed woman and her husband. She leaves home at age 16. She attends Oxford. She becomes a successful novelist. And she eventually meets her birth mother.

Her memoir does not use the term “multiple personality,” but she does describe a time that she goes “mad” (1, p. 161):

“I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’ [Mommy]…often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language” (1, pp. 162-163). [This is the emergence of a very young, child-aged alternate personality.]

“I had a sense of myself as a haunted house” (1, p. 165) [a good metaphor for multiple personality].

“…my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things” (1, p. 168). [Her adoptive mother dressed her as a boy when she was very young, and she probably has both male and female alternate personalities, which is common.]

“I often hear voices…But in the past, voices were respectable — desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wisewoman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing” (1, p. 170). [People with multiple personality may hear the voices of their alternate personalities, just as writers may hear the voices of their characters.]

“There was a person in me — a piece of me — however you want to describe it —so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace [Winterson had attempted suicide]…My violent rages…The furious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette — she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life…It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food…I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking — to the creature…a voice outside my head — not in it — said, ‘Get up and start to work’…Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say…It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up in me had to tell it to her” (1, pp. 171-173).

“Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work…she wouldn’t come with me…She was a toddler, except that she was older ages too…She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen” (1, p. 175). [There were several different alternate personalities, but none of them wanted to come out during therapy, because they felt it was Jeanette’s therapy, not their’s; and the therapist never suspected, or knew how to diagnose, multiple personality; which is why many people think it is rare.]

Multiple Personality Since Childhood

“…I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen…I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike…my mother believed I was demon possessed…” (1, p. 55). [True, her mother is predisposed to satanic interpretations, but Winterson, herself, repeatedly mentions, in passing, that she is a “thug” and capable of committing “murder,” which is so out-of-character for how she generally behaves that it implies the existence of a violent alternate personality.]

“He put his tongue in my mouth…Blackout. I woke up in my own bed…On the inside I would build another self — one that they couldn’t see. Just like [she had done] after the burning of the books” [by her mother] (1, pp. 81-82). [In response to a sexual assault, she has a blackout, which means a memory gap for the time that an alternate personality took the abuse for her. And then she expresses some awareness that she has a way of creating alternate personalities, of which her abusers are not aware.]

So in Winterson’s 2016 article, when she said that writers (which includes herself) have “multiple personalities,” was she expressing insight that what she had described in her memoir was multiple personality since childhood? Or does she dismiss the episode near the end of her memoir as a passing, nonspecific “madness,” and feel she was speaking only metaphorically about writers’ having “splitting and multiple personalities”?

Two Kinds of Writing

“It took me a long time to realize that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look” (1, p. 54). [The writing that writes you is writing controlled by alternate personalities.]

1. Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York, Grove Press, 2011.

Two Persons vs. Two-Faced: New York Times’ Gail Collins says President Trump may be two persons; whereas, Douglas said Lincoln was two-faced.

Two-Faced Lincoln

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being “two-faced,” Lincoln famously replied, “If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”

Lincoln’s humor was based on an acknowledgement of his homely face, and the presumption that any person would want to put his best foot, or in this case, his more handsome face, forward.

Two-Person Trump

“That’s our best hope: That the guy with the nuclear football is not necessarily the same person as the one sending out loopy messages on his smartphone. People who’ve dealt with the private Trump often say they found him less crazy than the public version” —Gail Collins, “Trump Tweets Tough.” New York Times (Op-Ed, August 12, 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/trump-tweets-tough.html?_r=0

Hypocrisy vs. Multiple Personality

Whereas Douglas accused Lincoln of being one hypocritical person, Collins and people who have known Trump privately say that he is “not necessarily the same person” at different times, which implies multiple personality.

Are Collins, and the people who have known Trump privately, right? Are they misinterpreting hypocrisy or does he actually have multiple personality?

Diagnosis

The way you could find out would be to ask Trump questions bearing on the two cardinal signs of multiple personality: memory gaps and separate senses of personhood.

Memory Gaps

When he is behaving one way, you could ask Trump whether he directly remembers having behaved the distinctly different other way (and does not just know about that other behavior from circumstantial evidence or what other people have said). If he acknowledges that he has a memory gap for the other behavior, and has no reason to lie about that, it would imply that he does not remember that other behavior, because it occurred during the time that another personality had been in control.

Separate Senses of Personhood

If he does have direct, first-hand memory of the other behavior, you would ask him if he was the person who had behaved that other way. If he says he was not the person who behaved that other way, and he could describe how he differs from the other person who behaves that other way, then assuming there is no reason for him to lie about this, you would know he has multiple personality.

The problem is, nobody is likely to ask him such questions, and even if they did, he is unlikely to answer truthfully, unless he trusted the person who was asking these questions, and was motivated to understand himself.