Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 4) and Mark Twain: Intermittent, puzzling disorientation or absent-mindedness as clue to multiple personality

As I approach the end of Singer’s memoirs (see prior post), the last section of which is his emigration from Poland to New York, titled “Lost in America,” he gets temporarily lost on the ship crossing the Atlantic, and also when taking a walk in his brother’s Brooklyn neighborhood. At one point he can’t remember the number of his cabin on the ship, but later it suddenly pops into his mind and he easily finds it. And he can’t find his way back to his brother’s house, but then his memory of how it looks suddenly pops back into his mind and he easily finds it.

Singer was neither old nor intoxicated nor a person with a generally bad memory nor suffering any medical or neurological problem. Indeed, the above instances would be too trivial to note if I had not read about a much more dramatic example of this with Mark Twain.

December 10, 2013

Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.