By John Glassie
(Unpublished)

Q. We were all taught that lying is wrong, but you suggest in The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood that it may not be so bad after all. Will you explain?

A. First, I do not advocate lying. Quite the reverse. I want everybody to tell the truth. But I have to say that, in writing the book, it became clear that lying is to some extent natural. It's not artificial or deviant. It is a feature of life. Many respected philosophers and thinkers have said that falsehood is sometimes on the side of life, and that truth is not. I was quite surprised at how persistent that theme was.

Q. Virtually all of us tell a lie at one time or another, but does that make it natural, or right?

A. Lying is so prevalent. It must be part of life. Darwin was very impressed with the work of an entomologist named Henry Walter Bates, who wrote a paper on the way some insects impersonate others species as a way to avoid being eaten. And since then there has been a lot research on animal mimicry as a means of survival. Some of these creatures are really fiendishly cunning. Some fireflies, for example, have become expert at mimicking the signals of other species of fireflies to lure males on the pretext of offering them a good time, and then they promptly eat them.

Q. So, as humans evolved, we learned to deceive to help us further our genes? An end-justifies-the-means approach to survival of the fittest?

A. It translates in a more sophisticated way. Consider that in studies of autism it has been found that autistic children are unable to lie and pretend and dissemble. And that turns out to be a kind of deficiency. They lack a "theory of mind," an insight into what other people are thinking. An autistic child can't understand that a person may believe something to be true that the child knows to be false. They're not able to grasp that others have false beliefs, and so they can't manipulate those beliefs. You have to say that the inability to lie is a defect. It's part of the human equipment. It can be misused, and it often is. Again, I don't recommend lying. But there are many good motives for it.

Q. Such as?

A. Supposing someone knocks on the door and says, "Where's Anne Frank?" Do you say, "She's upstairs"?

Q. Right. What are some more everyday examples?

A. Well, there are many examples in civil life and in the arts where truth is actually harmful. Ibsen's play "The Wild Duck" is a great example. One of the characters is absolutely consumed with the need to tell somebody else that his wife has been unfaithful to him. And he does, thinking this is all in the cause of truth. And it ruins everyone's life. Someone commits suicide and everyone is miserable.

Q. But, at core, isn't lying -- in our own lives, in politics and in the corporate world -- usually about preserving one's own interests?

A. Absolutely, yes. It's a rather primitive thing that connects with lying in the animal world, where it's survival at any cost. I think some of the theories about why falsehood is not all bad are very sophisticated and well thought out, but to lie just to save your skin, I think, is going way down on the evolutionary ladder.

Q. Lying and politics have been bedfellows for a long time I assume?

A. My book covers about 25 centuries and, especially when there is social turmoil, you go through periods where the people want something more expansive, more inventive, more generous, than truth. In fifth century Greece, you had Socrates, whose complete aim was to uncover the truth underneath the verbal pyrotechnics of the rhetoricians of the day. And then you had the Sophists, who viewed him as almost unmanly, this passive armchair idealist. They wanted to educate people to move audiences, to sway audiences to vote the right way. And I think in this present day there's a trace of the Sophist attitude.

Q. I understand you have had your own experience with deception. You got caught in a pubic lie?

A. Oh, yes. I hasten to stress this was many years ago, when I was a very young and callow reporter. I edited a society column for the Evening Standard, in London, and the job consisted of going to debutante parties and reporting on the witty things that were said. Well, of course, almost no debutantes are witty, so I invented one called Venetia Crust, who said all kinds of amusing things. Unfortunately, someone else caught on to it, and put an ad in the London Times saying that Venetia Crust was giving her coming out party, and giving his own address. And the next day the Daily Mirror ran a huge story with the headline, "Presenting Miss Upper Crust."

Q. And that was the end of Venetia?

A. I almost lost my job, she became pretty well immortal. She later became the heroine of an off-Shaftesbury Avenue musical called "Follow that Girl." She has two columns in "Time Life's book Hoaxes and Deceptions," on the same page as William Buckley Jr., who published a spoof of the Pentagon Papers, highly compromising "documents" which recommended a "demonstration drop" of a nuclear device over North
Vietnam. The whole shameful episode illustrates, of course, that truth is sometimes just too thin, too tepid, too unenlightening, and needs an infusion of life-enhancing falsehood.

Q. Hmmm. Have you embellished the truth in this interview?

A. Well, no. I mean, I don't think so. I've just been trying to be as engaging and hospitable as I can. If so, it's oinly through the altruistic motive of hospitality.