Essays in Idleness

One of the best technical methods to detect badness in a person or a cause is to establish whether they are (or it is) lying. The courts often work on this, and over time, they have (arguably) shown a bias against the false, and sometimes against the pathologically false. This introduces a psychological term, I admit, but it is a necessary one. I could instead refer to the philosophers, and make a case from intention, but in that situation, too, the fact that person or cause is consistently lying, delivers to the same conclusion.

There are pathological liars, just as there are pathological perverts. And since I have mentioned psychology, the two pathologies are ultimately the same. They begin with the sin of Adam (and his attempt to conceal it) which proved to be “contagious.” Consult such a psychologist as an intelligent policeman — I’ve met such a gentleman! — and he will tell you that a man who is a specific sort of pervert will often be practicing other perversions as well; but also, different aspects of his original perversion. If he lies, intentionally, on one demonstrable occasion, he may be suspected of lying, intentionally, on others. But it is very likely that lying is not the only thing he does that is “a perversion.”

“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’,” as Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman on the Dick Cavett show.

Miss McCarthy was answering a query about what part of Miss Hellman was dishonest. She added that Hellman was a bad and overrated writer, and several other charges sufficient to invite a lawsuit, which persisted for a few years until Hellman’s death (when her estate quietly dropped it).

What Miss McCarthy meant was that Miss Hellman’s lying was not encyclopaedic, but structural. It did not consist just of “little lies.” For instance, even her depiction of herself in fiction, as an heroic anti-Nazi, was utterly false.