Who loves to lie with me
Ned Sherrin
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF LIES: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Philip Kerr Viking, £15.99, pp.543 Ihave never worried too much about the odd lie and this book furnishes a lot of arguments in favour of keeping at it. Cicero is here to comfort lawyers: 'Counsel . . . may on occasions have to base his advocacy on points which look like the truth, even if they do not correspond with it exactly.' Not corresponding with exactly . . .' sounds suspiciously like a precursor of 'Economical with . . .' which brings this 543 page volume to a close. Quintilian has constructive tips for orators:
Know what you are lying about, don't get caught out, don't contradict yourself, don't forget what the fiction is to which you have committed yourself, since we are apt to forget our falsehoods, and there is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory.
St Augustine is wheeled on to redress the balance, distinguishing between eight kinds of lie and condemning even the white he (my usual line, of course): . . . by the acceptance of sufferings which are borne honourably and courageously, these lies, too, may be avoided by strong, faithful and truthful men and women.
Thomas Aquinas agrees that all lies are sins but not that they are mortal sins. The Talmud takes an altogether easier line with white lies. Sensible.
Before opening Mr Kerr's anthology I had expected a dictionary of quotations — a lie per line — and could not see how he was going to turn it into such a 'damned, thick, square book'; but what the editor has in fact produced is a collection of anecdotes of deception — from Jacob's assumption, at his mother's prompting, of a goat skin to hoodwink Isaac into thinking he was a hairy Esau; through Belisarius refusing to believe the evidence of his own eyes when he catches his wife with her lover, trousers down; right down to Sir Robert (now Lord) Armstrong and his Australian debacle.
My favourites en route were the Prester John Forgeries; Sir John Mandeville's 14th-century inventions for the Nicobar Islands . . Men and women of that isle have heads like dogs, and they are called Cynocephales'; and Lucretia Borgia re- covering her virginity by a Papal dispensa- tion; Sir Henry Wotton lands in hot water with James I for defining an ambassador as 'an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country', only to be rubbished in translations by a wily, trouble-stirring Venetian. On the authority of Phineas T. Barnum — not the most reliable witness — Louis XIV was royally hoaxed by a barker- bandit from Leghorn who pretended to head an embassy from Persia bearing gifts. He escaped with the greedy king's presents lavished in return before the non-arrival of his own pretended largesse. Perversely, I had expected George Washington to figure, but I suppose the whole point of that cherry tree episode is that he could not tell a lie, so he is rightly 'Do you know another word for thesaurus?' relegated to an exchange between Wilde's Cyril and Vivian. Hary Janos is a notable omission, not a sneeze in earshot; but William Henry Ireland's brave attempt to forge Shakespearian documents and fool Boswell and Sheridan with a new Shakespeare play, Vortigern, is enter- tainingly documented right down to its exposure by Malone.
Inevitably the pace quickens when his- tory begins to accelerate into current affairs, and Munich and Haw Haw, Chur- chill and the D-Day deceptions are set beside Orwell on the prevention of litera- ture and Alger Hiss's predicament. Mr Kerr treats us to Bernard Shaw's 'Why we must lie to children'. Nixon, Profumo and Philby crowd the later pages and I found only one grain of sand in the leisurely oil of revelation which lubricates this beguiling collection.
The journalist Henry Porter is honoured with quotation in a piece called 'Close encounters with the truth' — an analysis of tabloid fiction. My own memory of the plausible Mr Porter is of an interview when he did not so much invent as decline to transmit 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.' He once asked me if there was a witty remark of which I was particularly pleased. I said, no, and any- way the only time I thought I had been moderately, if unfairly, witty it had re- bounded on me, so I was not proud of it.
The occasion was the summary replace- ment of Donald Baverstock at the BBC by Huw Wheldon. On the Monday morning I was summoned to Wheldon's office which had been Baverstock's. Overnight the room, walls and all, had been cleared of his effects. VVheldon's had not arrived. It was empty. `Ah! Huw,' I said spitefully, 'Put the stamp of your personality on the office already, I see.' This was rude and also inaccurate. Whatever qualities Wheldon lacked, personality was not among them. However, I foolishly boasted of the remark to David Frost who told a gossip columnist on The Daily Mirror. It appeared in his page the next day. As Wheldon and I had been alone in the office there could be little question of the source. Of course, of this cautionary tale the only part that Porter printed was my ill-judged remark paraded as the piece of wit of which I was most proud.
Mr Kerr's introduction makes much of the seductive quality of a lie. He imagines two dinner tables,
one attended by the great men of truth, Augustine, Knox, Wesley, Kant, Hume and Bentham, and the other by such liars and tellers of tall stories as Machiavelli, Casa- nova, Rousseau, Napoleon, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway,
and does not doubt which he would choose to join. Nor do I. As Browning's Mr Sludge, the Medium had it, 'There's a real love of a lie. Liars find ears ready made for lies they make, as hand for glove, or tongue for sugar-plum.'
Previous page
