Alexandre Dumas’ Three Writing Personalities, named by Function and Race (Post 15): Poems on Yellow Paper, Articles on Pink Paper, Fiction on Blue Paper

Dumas’ color-coded manuscripts have earned him a place in a book of famous authors who have odd writing habits (1). It is unusual for an author to write manuscripts on a particular color of paper, other than white, depending on whether it is a poem, an article, or fiction.

As an example of Dumas' attitude, it is told how once when traveling, “he had run out of his precious supply of blue paper. For decades Dumas had been using that particular color to pen all of his fiction. He was ultimately forced to settle for a cream stock, though he felt that color change negatively impacted his fiction” (1, p. 21).

It might not have occurred to me that Dumas’ color-coding had anything to do with multiple personality, except that I’ve previously discussed Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Her autobiography (Volume One) makes it clear that she had multiple personality. And her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), features a writer with multiple personality, who has four, different color, notebooks.

The Golden Notebook is divided into five sections, separated by four, different color, Notebooks—Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue—all four written by one character, a novelist. Lessing said that this divided structure represented the “fragmentation” and “compartmentalisation” of identity. 

Furthermore, the novel provides evidence that the notebooks represent four alternate personalities: each Notebook had been written in a different handwriting, even though they were all written by the same person (indicative of different personalities in multiple personality).

I don’t know if there are any handwriting differences in Dumas’ manuscripts, but the color differences suggest that Dumas’ writing was done by three alternate personalities, each represented by its different color.

Perhaps Dumas thought of Poetry, Articles, and Fiction as being persons of different literary races.

1. Celia Blue Johnson. Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors. New York, Perigee/Penguin, 2013.