Truman Capote (post 2) in “Tiny Terror” by William Todd Schultz: Capote called himself “consistently inconsistent” and felt like more than one person

Prof. William Todd Schultz, an academic psychologist and editor of a book about writing psychobiographies, is not a clinician and has little or no experience with diagnosis. His psychobiography of Truman Capote, Tiny Terror, never mentions multiple personality, but makes a case for it, inadvertently:

“ ‘Consistently inconsistent’ is what Truman Capote liked to call himself” (1, p. 3).

“ ‘She [his mother] was Jekyll and Hyde,’ Capote said” (1, p. 22). Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational.

“Maybe, as Capote explained, there were always two people inside him—one intelligent, imaginative, mature; the other a fourteen-year-old. In some situations the adult was in control, in others, the adolescent” (1, p. 94). Since multiple personality begins in childhood, child-aged alternate personalities are the most common kind.

“Capote declared: ‘…I have a way of blocking things completely out of my mind and I have had since I was a child, because I’ve had a lot of things to block out of my mind” (1, p. 121). This may refer to his using a dissociative psychological defense, the principal psychological defense used in multiple personality, which, as already mentioned, starts in childhood.

“And what about Capote’s ‘consistent inconsistency,’ his sense, of a sort many people have—for instance the writer Patricia Highsmith [search her in this blog], a friend of Capote’s—that he was not just one, but a handful of persons, more plurality than unity?… [In multiple personality, there are usually more than two personalities, but not all of them are prominent and conspicuous.]

“These were Capote’s most prominent dual personalities: neurotic Capote, fear-filled and injury-prone; and Capote the disagreeable destroyer, emotionally bulletproof. They fluctuated, and they lent his life a quality of dividedness” (1, p. 154).

Puzzling Inconsistency

As discussed in many past posts, the two most common clues to the presence of undiagnosed multiple personality are a puzzling inconsistency and memory gaps (search them in this blog).

People with multiple personality may be consistently inconsistent, because they switch from one alternate personality to another. But you don’t know why the person is inconsistent, because, before diagnosis has blown their cover, alternate personalities usually answer to the person’s regular name and remain incognito.

Truman Capote was aware of his consistent inconsistency, and of its basis in his feeling like more than one person. But since he did not call it “multiple personality,” he may not have thought about it in precisely those terms.

1. William Todd Schultz. Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote ‘Answered Prayers.’  New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.