New York Times Book Review and Wikipedia are unaware of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s self-acknowledged multiple personality
from January 16, 2014
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (the Nobel Prize winner’s best-known novel) is about Multiple Personality, as Indicated by “the shape of the novel” and Different Handwritings
The Golden Notebook [1962] (Perennial Classics, 1999) is six hundred pages of complex literary fiction, but Doris Lessing, herself, gave us the key to what it is about. In her 1971 commentary, now included as an introduction to the novel, she draws our attention, first and foremost, to “the shape of the novel.”
The novel is divided into five sections, separated by four Notebooks (Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue) kept by the central character, Anna Wulf, a novelist. This highly divided structure represents, Lessing says, the “fragmentation” and “compartmentalisation” of identity. Toward the end of the novel, this dividedness reaches a climax of blatant multiple personality in Anna Wulf and Saul Green. But Anna’s “breakdown” remits—and she appears to heal and achieve a greater degree of “unity”—in the “Golden Notebook” and end of the novel.
Lessing says that “the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise.”
“This theme of ‘breakdown,’” says Lessing, “that sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me since then. But this is where…I first wrote about it. Here it is rougher, more close to experience…But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as hostile ones, as being about the sex war…”
However, Lessing, herself, does not fully understand her novel. She makes it sound as though, 1. most of the book does not describe multiple personality, per se, but only a bad habit of compartmentalization, that 2. if you compartmentalize, you run the risk of developing a temporary bout of multiple personality, but that 3. if you realize and decide that you must not compartmentalize, then your split personality may heal, and you can put all that behind you.
But the central character, Anna, who kept the Notebooks, had full-blown multiple personality all along and did not get over it.
The simplest proof that Anna had multiple personality all along is that, according to the novel, her four Notebooks were written in different handwritings. In my post of October 13, 2013, I give a link to a psychiatric journal article that provides objective documentation of 12 cases of multiple personality. One kind of objective documentation was to go back in the person’s life, to years before they ever saw a psychiatrist and before anyone had ever raised the idea of multiple personality, and find things like old diaries in which the person had used several, distinctly different handwritings:
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703
Moreover, as readers of this blog know, multiple personality starts in childhood and it is usually hidden and camouflaged. So, if an adult who was never thought to have multiple personality has an emotional crisis that looks like blatant multiple personality, but then recovers from the crisis and no longer has any obvious alternate personalities, what has really happened is that a person with multiple personality since childhood has had a crisis in which their usually hidden personalities became temporarily overt, but then, after the crisis, the personalities reverted to their usual hiddenness and camouflage.
I recommend The Golden Notebook to readers of this blog, because it has some very realistic descriptions of multiple personality from the perspective of a person who has experienced it. (I don’t know how else Lessing would have known what she knew about it.) And it shows that multiple personality may be present in persons like Lessing who are not mentally ill and who are very high-functioning.
from January 26, 2014
Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s “Hostess personality,” Described in Her Autobiography as the most overt Alternate Personality of her Multiple Personality
I quote from Volume One of Doris Lessing’s autobiography:
“I once thought of writing a book called My Alternate Lives…As in those cases of multiple personalities, where only slowly do the personalities inside a woman or man become aware of each other, the heroine of this book — me for argument’s sake — would slowly come to know that multiples of herself are living these other lives.”
“…the personality I call the Hostess…This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now [1994], when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer…never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.”
At age 7, she adopted the name of the A. A. Milne (search "winnie the pooh") character, Tigger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigger)
, for one aspect of her hostess personality: “I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia…This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess.”
“It was also Tigger who ran away, and joked about it afterwards.”
“How funny that hellfire nun became, when Tigger described her.”
“‘Tigger’ was in control, and I clowned and was pert and ‘clever’…”
“…the sad little girl who lived well hidden by the mask of ‘Tigger’…”
“It was ‘Tigger’ who saw me through…”
“For one term this teacher taught English Literature, and I wrote an essay, or rather ‘Tigger’ I quote from Volume One of Doris Lessing’s autobiography:
“I once thought of writing a book called My Alternate Lives…As in those cases of multiple personalities, where only slowly do the personalities inside a woman or man become aware of each other, the heroine of this book — me for argument’s sake — would slowly come to know that multiples of herself are living these other lives.”
“…the personality I call the Hostess…This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now [1994], when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer…never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.”
At age 7, she adopted the name of the A. A. Milne character, Tigger, for one aspect of her hostess personality: “I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia…This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess.”
“It was also Tigger who ran away, and joked about it afterwards.”
“How funny that hellfire nun became, when Tigger described her.”
“‘Tigger’ was in control, and I clowned and was pert and ‘clever’…”
“…the sad little girl who lived well hidden by the mask of ‘Tigger’…”
“It was ‘Tigger’ who saw me through…”
“For one term this teacher taught English Literature, and I wrote an essay, or rather ‘Tigger’ did — about her methods of teaching.”
“I was so afraid, and oh how Tigger jested.”
“I wrote a poem. [Poem quoted]. These verses are not here for their worth: they interest me. First, the writer was a fourteen year-old girl…but wait, that cannot be true. Some Ancient had moved in, taken temporary possession of that many-tenanted young mind. Then, it is he who takes moonpaths, he goes adventuring…I did not believe in the efficacy of the spell or rune…The poem comes from a different level of knowledge…” [Persons with multiple personality may have personalities who are of a different age or sex than the person.]
“I could truthfully say that I spent my adolescence in a sexual trance…But this is what I say when in that part of my mind marked Love. I could with equal truth say I spent my childhood, girlhood and youth in the world of books. Or, wandering about in the bush [in Africa], listening, and watching what went on. You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.” [In multiple personality, different personalities may have different memory banks, so that what the person remembers depends on which personality is in control and doing the remembering at that moment.]
“That year 1937 is described by me according to what memory-mode I am.”
“Recently I met a woman [who had replaced Lessing at a job when Lessing had left to get married. According to this woman, Lessing had been] a quiet and thoughtful person…I was glad to hear this, for what I remember is the chatty brightness of ‘Tigger’ — who was certainly the person who dealt with the social life that at once swept me away into drinking and dancing.” [This other woman had evidently known Lessing from a situation in which one of Lessing’s introverted personalities, and not her extroverted Tigger personality, was in control.]
“In the wedding photographs I look a jolly young matron. It was ‘Tigger’ who was getting married.”
[Some of Lessing’s other personalities were not cheerful like Tigger.] “This feeling of doom, of fatality, is a theme — perhaps the main one — in [my novel] Martha Quest. It was what had made me, and from my earliest childhood, repeat and repeat, ‘I will not, I simply will not.’"
“There were other activities. One was the sale of the Communist newspaper from Cape Town…At one point I was selling 112 dozen copies every week…Comrade Tigger was after all an attractive young woman.”
NOTE: All the above is from Volume One of Lessing’s autobiography, which was published in 1994 and covered years 1919 to 1949. Volume Two, published in 1997, covered 1949 to 1962, the year she published The Golden Notebook. Lessing (1919—2013) did not publish any further autobiography.
Each of the two volumes is about 400 pages. Why not publish one book of 800 pages? To make more money on two books than one? Because there was a natural division between her African years and her London years? Also because different personalities wrote each volume.
The Hostess personality — whether in its Tigger aspect or another aspect — is not even mentioned in Volume Two. Volume Two discusses The Golden Notebook, but nothing about multiple personality (see previous posts this month) is mentioned. The issue of compartmentalization is barely mentioned.
And we know that multiple personality, by whatever name, was an ongoing issue for Lessing even after she moved to London. As Carole Klein’s biography (2000) of Lessing notes: “In Landlocked [1965], volume four of Children of Violence, Martha Quest, tormented by her feelings of division, thinks of herself as a house with half a dozen rooms, an analogy Lessing has often made about her own personality. Martha saw each room in the house as full of people who did not really connect to the people in the other rooms, but only to her.”
Incidentally, we have evidence that people who knew Lessing well could tell when her Tigger personality was out and in control. As noted in the Klein biography, according to recollections obtained from witnesses by Lessing scholar Dee Seligman: When Lessing’s first son, John, six years old at the time, was visiting Lessing at the office, he headed for his mother’s desk, where she was typing, and said to her, “Hello, Tigger. How are you? I haven’t seen you for a while.”
So how can we account for the fact that this prominent issue in Volume One — which we know from her writing was an ongoing issue for Lessing — was completely ignored in Volume Two of her autobiography. Evidently, the teams of writing personalities who worked on Volume One and Volume Two were not the same. If it were only that she decided it was an embarrassing issue that she did not wish to pursue, she could have brushed it off in Volume Two with some brief mention. But the writing team for Volume Two was apparently unaware of the issue either as the Hostess personality for interviews or as a significant theme in The Golden Notebook.
