Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow: In two past posts on his writing process, acknowledges alternate personalities—his “prompter” and “unknown masters”

November 15, 2014

Nobel Prize Novelist Saul Bellow credits an alternate personality, who has been “advising” Bellow since his “earliest years,” as his “fastidious” co-writer

“I suppose that all of us have a primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been advising us, telling us what the real world is. There is such a commentator in me. I have to prepare the ground for him. From this source come words, phrases, syllables; sometimes only sounds, which I try to interpret, sometimes whole paragraphs, fully punctuated. When E. M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” he was perhaps referring to his own prompter…

“When I say the commentator is primitive, I don't mean that he's crude; God knows he's often fastidious. But he won't talk until the situation's right. And if you prepare the ground for him with too many difficulties underfoot, he won't say anything. I must be terribly given to fraud and deceit because I sometimes have great difficulty preparing a suitable ground. This is why I've had so much trouble with my last two novels. I appealed directly to my prompter. The prompter, however, has to find the occasion perfect—that is to say, truthful, and necessary. If there is any superfluity or inner falsehood in the preparations, he is aware of it…” (from Bellow’s 1966 Paris Review interview).

The only thing in the above with which I would take issue is Bellow’s assumption that “all of us” have this kind of alternate personality, or have an alternate personality of any kind. My guess is that no more than 30% of the general public has any alternate personalities (in what I call “normal multiple personality”). But if by “all of us” he was referring only to novelists, then I wouldn’t disagree, since most novelists, perhaps 90%, do have a normal version of multiple personality, which is the subject of this blog.

November 29, 2014

Saul Bellow doesn’t understand his own novels, because, when he writes, he is often “deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of” alternate personalities.

“Bellow maintained that his genius didn’t belong to him alone. He was simply the medium. ‘I often feel, when I’m writing, that I’m a composite person” (1, p. 213).

“Bellow professed—indeed, considered it a matter of honor—not to know what his own books were about. [Bellow said,] ‘It’s hard for me to know, because so much of the time I’m deaf, dumb, and blind, the slave of unknown masters.’” (1, p. 269).

If it is permissible to take Bellow at his word, then he is saying that there is more than one writer who writes his books (psychologically speaking), and that he (the host personality, “Bellow”) is, much of the time, no more than a slave of the others (whom Bellow does not know by name).

If there is any metaphor in what he says, then “deaf, dumb, and blind” may mean that, during much of the writing, the regular Bellow personality is not consciously present.

What sense can biographers, professors of literature, and literary critics make of Bellow’s statements? They can’t make any sense of it, because all standard literary theories assume that novelists have one personality, not multiple personality. No standard literary theory considers a novelist to be “a composite person” with “unknown masters.”

What Bellow says makes sense only from the perspective of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography. New York, Random House, 2000.