Ananias preferred

CLARE BOOTHE BROKAW

But the pleasure felt in these Is as chalk to cheddar cheese When it comes to a well-made Lie:

To a quite unwreckable Lie,

To a most impeccable Lie!

To a water-tight, fire-proof, Angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock, steel-face Lie!

Killing

Of all the social virtues, the least neglected, the most useful and ornamental, the easiest to practice and the loveliest is lying. In all its delicate shades and gradations, under all its guises,—evasion, exaggeration, understatement, hypocrisy, fiction, romance, tact and diplomacy, it is the constant handmaiden to our thoughts and words. Without it governments would fall, social structures collapse, high finance, dinner parties, marriages and disarmament treaties he scrapped. It is the sine qua non of diplomats, headwaiters, authors, real-estate agents, dressmakers, lovers, stock brokers, politicians and parents. The Bogey-Man and the Eighteenth Amendment, Santa Claus and the League of Nations, the Stork and the Divorce Courts are all taken in its smooth stride. Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts, and cultivates the memory; for without a good memory no man can hope to become an accomplished liar—which is why all successful prevaricators are invariably people of intelligence.

It has been said that one half of the world does not know how the other half lies, and it is this ignorance and intolerance of living falsehood which is responsible for much of the unrest in the world today. (One has only to consider how the whole face of Europe might be changed overnight if, for instance, M. Briand and Signor Mussolini could each be certain to what point the other was telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.)

One should learn early to lie and to let lie.

The trouble arises when the average man who cherishes his own, resents his neighbour's mendacity.

In ordinary society lying may easily be divided into four types—social lying, business lying, domestic or love lying, and creative lying. The latter is known as the Lie for the lie's sake.

Social lying, the best-known form, is universally called tact. It is too familiar to all of us to need much elaboration. Society is a great fabrication, a tangled net which we willingly weave of bright little fibs, white lies, colourful evasions of drab truths. Mark Twain called them half-breed, mulatto, or quadroon truths. The most banal and simple example of this sort of prevarication is when you look your hostess unflinchingly in the eye, after the dreariest of evenings, and say in a firm voice, "Thank you for a delightful time. . . . You entertain charmingly."

How many times a week do you send the maid to the telephone to tell your broker you are "out," when you have just been "in" to your bootlegger! If you are that enviable thing, a "social success," you cozen your hostesses about their clothes, the decorations of their homes, their liqueurs, and how many times you have seen the plays they take you to. You say, "It really doesn't matter" to the partner who takes you down a thousand points at bridge; you brush up your golf score a bit to save your friends the humiliation of playing with a duffer; you politely lie your way in and out of invitations, appointments, flirtations and accusations which may have been rightfully but meanly brought against you. And of course, if you have any rich relatives, you lie in a fashion guaranteed to give them the greatest amount of pleasure and you a comfortable mention in their wills. The truth, then, socially speaking, is something to be reserved for discussing the weather and for the private ears of your doctor, your ex-husband or wife, and in certain unavoidable instances, the income-tax collector. . . .

Of course, business is so bad today that even liars are complaining. Since the recent crash in the stock market, and the resultant industrial depression, it is no longer possible to claim with the gusto necessary to a good, competitive lie, that your particular field of endeavour is entering upon a period of prosperity unprecedented, etc., or that you have augmented your sales-force, etc., or that your stock-market advice has made all your customers so rich that even their wives are satisfied. One is faced with the indecent necessity of telling the naked truth about business to creditors and prospective clients alike. The art of avoiding a "touch," of putting over a big deal with a winning lie as well-timed as a Bobby Jones golf swing has fallen into disuse, because since it is as plain as the nose on a money-lender's face that nobody has much of anything left, there is nothing to lie about —unless it is the amount of one's losses. And even here the average man must compete with such staggering figures among his own associates that all the joy has gone out of it. However, it is to be hoped that prosperous times will return, that the presently silent business man may once again begin the pleasant little game of equivocation, casuistry and guile which has made American business the tremendous thing that it was until yesterday.

Lying to one's sweetheart, husband or wife, and the children, makes up the great body of domestic lying.

No lover was ever successful who did not feed his mistress on the sweet pap of falsehood; and no home was ever kept intact without the aid of good, wholesome doses of mendacity. When you tell the girl of your choice that she has the breast of a dove, the eyes of a doe, the throat of a swan and the disposition of an angel, it is conceivable that you mean every word of it ... it is also barely possible that you are lying, but you instinctively realize that the poetic, if fanciful, means are justified by the delightful ends. Moreover, if your flights of fancy are to achieve noteworthy heights of romanticism, it is important that you should not believe in what you are saying too firmly, for nothing so hampers a man's imaginative faculties as a strict adherence to fact. Casanova and Don Juan wooed and won more women with polished lies than all the simple swains in the world have ever done with unvarnished truths. For truth is flat and unadorned, is salty and hard to swallow even in its mildest forms. Therefore, the ambitious lover is one who fills his inamorata with the veriest nonsense about herself, himself, and everything he hopes to do for her and with her. He swears (all liars habitually hold one hand over the heart) that he is his employer's white hope, that they will spend long vacations every year in foreign lands, that her hair is like ripe corn, and that he is all in all quite an extraordinary fellow.

A woman, on the contrary, never needs to be instructed in the principles of lying, for being of the practical sex, it comes quite naturally to her. She therefore responds that of course he is the finest, noblest, cleverest, and handsomest of God's creatures, which is merely a way of saying that all she wants is a quite ordinary husband and children who will not too closely resemble his side of the family.

Once married, a loving, lying couple will continue, if they are wise, to build their home on this mendacious foundation. It is one of the tragic things about marriage that it so often predisposes two people to tell each other the truth. Flattery, cajolery, all the nice prevarications and euphemisms that make social life endurable are too often discarded in the home. A good wife is one who lies to her husband about the market bills, the clothes bills, her mother's opinion of him, and her own violent reactions to a closer association with his immediate person and personality. And a good husband nobly responds with untruthful statements concerning what he feels about her new hat, his' mother-in-law, his income, and where he was the night before.

Moreover, honest parents lie assiduously and systematically to their offspring. If you doubt this, think back upon your own childhood. The first six or seven years of your life were probably spent in assimilating a ceaseless trickle of disingenuous tales about life from the lips of your father and mother. You were taught that the stork brings babies, and Santa Claus your Christmas presents, that fairies, goblins, bogies, honest policemen and patriotic statesmen were the order of the nursery day; and that your parents were a race apart, a grown-up, infallible people who never told anything but the truth. Tn school your teachers further laid the foundation for your upright and moral citizenship. Here you were informed that the Constitution of the United States is a miraculous and unassailable document handed down, one supposes, by God from Mount Sinai to John Hancock and his noble crew; that America is the cleverest, wisest, most idealistic nation in the world; that all other nations are scheming, avaricious, decadent, and intent upon waging war; that genius is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration; and that honesty is the best policy. And all the while you were being taught that it was wrong, Oh, very wrong, to tell a lie, (for unlike George Washington, who could not tell a lie, the average child finds it unnatural to do anything else). If, with luck, you were not broken by adult lies of your instinctive childish habit of lying, you probably grew into fine, fearless manhood or womanhood, equipped with a glib tongue which has successfully gotten you in and out of drawing-rooms, banks, business houses, and haunts of pleasure with the minimum of personal inconvenience and the maximum of success.

Continued on page 84

Confirmed from page 49

But such lying—social, emotional, domestic and business—is a poor example of what lying may really be. It is utilitarian and practical, an implement of daily toil, with which we till our own individual little green pastures. It is, in fact, the blessed spade which we all untruthfully call the devil's pitchfork. But the spade cannot compare in beauty with the sword; and creative lying, the last type, is just that: the glittering, burning sword of untruth which drives before it all truth-ridden, fact-seeking folk from the garden of Romance and Adventure. Cyrano de Bergerac wielded it—Byron and D'Artagnan, and Baron Munchausen, without whom the annals of literature would be dull indeed. The consummate, magnificent mendacity of Baron Munchausen is hard to duplicate in this modern and increasingly truthful age. In all my experience I have met only one liar who might be ranked as an artist, (omitting, of course, the names of certain prominent politicians whose dry oratory still bears the stigma of utilitarianism). This particular fellow was a weather-beaten top-Sergeant of the United States Marines. I am sure that all the incredible stories which have ever been "told to the Marines" first reached his ears, were devoured by him, passed through the alchemy of his own amazing imagination, and were given back in the guise of personal experiences. Two of these tales in particular are of interest, obeying as they do the laws of a perfect lie, or what is known as a "whopper." They might have happened, and, therefore, might conceivably have happened to him. They incur your doubt, but not your derision, for you will never be able to prove conclusively that the top-Sergeant was really lying.

The first story had to do with an aeroplane which was reconnoitering over Nicaragua in Honduras.

"The pilot was a chap I had first known in the Argonne, when he was attached to the First Flying Corps there," the Sergeant said. (The good liar always dates his stories with astonishing exactitude.)

"We were flying two thousand feet above a 'spic,' that is, to say the native country, when we hit an air pocket and fell with a bump. Now, I had refused to be strapped in my seat, and when the plane suddenly went into a loop, I was hurtled through space, two thousand feet above the ground and death. Owing to the suddenness of my fall, I lost consciousness. You can imagine my surprise when I regained my senses a few minutes later to find myself seated as before in the machine. What had happened was that my friend, the pilot, seeing me diving through the air below him, had swooped down quickly and righted his plane directly under me, so that I had fallen two hundred feet into the cockpit of the plane."

The other story which illustrates this modern Munchausen's personal bravery concerned an altercation which he had in a cafe with two British officers, about the quality of national courage. The Britishers insisted that English courage was the greatest in the world.

"I disagreed with them," said my patriotic Marine. "I told them that American courage was the finest in the world. A quarrel started which was getting pretty heated, when I leaned forward and pulled a pistol from the belt of the Englishman who was yelling the loudest. I opened the barrel, showed that it was loaded with six bullets. Removing every other bullet, I threw them on the floor, spun the barrel three or four times, and snapped it back. Then I said to those sons of John Bull, 'There are three empty and three loaded chambers in this gun. I don't know, and you don't either, if it is cocked on an empty or a loaded chamber.' With that I held it to my head, and fired. It was a fiftyfifty shot, and I won. 'How's that for Yankee courage?' I asked, offering them the gun. 'Let's see you try.' But they just got up silently, paid the bill for nine whiskies and sodas, and walked out."

Now that was a well-made lie, a most impeccable lie, a creative lie, and one which in its way points the moral and proves the worth of all lying: that it is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forebearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that—being what it is—it falls so far short of in fact and in deed.