To the right of my computer screen there’s an entire shelf devoted to books by and about liars. If you don’t believe me, I’ll send you a picture.
Before I was interested in conspiracy theories, I was fascinated by the tellers of great big public lies. Some of them manufactured fake artefacts that sold for millions of dollars, some of them created paintings by Vermeer, Chagall or Matisse, some manufactured entire fake memoirs or several years’ worth of diaries.
I always wanted to understand what, apart from money, motivated such coiners of fake currency in their often hugely elaborate deceptions. There were common psychological traits in the liars, it seemed to me: a sense of grievance that they had been unfairly treated, a capacity to credit their actions to some unavoidable impulse, a willingness to rationalise their actions as being no more reprehensible than what other people ��� often those in authority — were getting away with.
But one category of liar came very close to home: the journalist who simply makes up stories and passes them off as true.
Cynical readers may not believe this, but for bona fide journalists (ie just about all of us in the so-called “mainstream media”) such people are akin to murderers. They destroy the one thing we rely upon absolutely: our credibility. We can be many bad things — dim, nasty, mistaken, even careless — but we cannot be liars.
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One of the most famous journalist liars of recent times was a young reporter and rising star who worked for the prestigious left-of-centre American magazine The New Republic. In 1998, it was revealed that of 41 pieces Stephen Glass had published in the magazine, 27 were mostly or partly fabricated.
In May that year he had written a much-praised piece about a teenage computer hacker who was using his skills to get money out of corporations. It was entirely fictional but, from Glass’s point of view, attracted attention from the wrong person when a tech writer on an online site took the time to investigate the piece and then debunked it.
Glass was fired, of course. The New Republic was badly scarred; journalism itself was badly scarred. Five years later Glass published The Fabulist, a fictionalisation of his misdeeds which sits on the shelf to my right. In the same year a Hollywood movie of the affair, Shattered Glass, was released.
His erstwhile colleagues at the magazine were unimpressed by his book. It portrayed him, one wrote later, “as humble, contrite and the rest of us came off as shallow jerks barely worth apologising to. Steve sent about 100 handwritten letters of apology that year to people he’d injured, but he was also hawking his book, so we saw the letters as an effort to neutralise us”.
A decade ago it was discovered that a young British journalist who I had done something to help had also been guilty of fabrications, though not quite on the Glass scale. And I found myself utterly discombobulated, while asking the question: what would someone like that have to do to make proper amends and to win back trust?
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As of this week I know. On Saturday the online US magazine Air Mail published a long piece by a professor of journalism and public policy, Bill Adair. Adair, whose concern for truth led him to establish a site called PolitiFact, which checks claims by politicians, has also harboured a fascination with public liars, in particular those who have been journalists. And that led him, over the years, to be in touch with Stephen Glass.
Adair wanted to know how or whether Glass had atoned and whether he had stopped being a liar. And the story is rather remarkable.
After Shattered Glass and The Fabulist, Glass and his wife, Julie Hilden, moved to California. There he began the process of becoming a lawyer. This required him to submit himself to an ethics board in which his past was scrutinised in minute detail and he was required to account for almost every lie he had ever told. It was an utterly humiliating (if deserved) process, from which he emerged to practise the kind of law that doesn’t make you rich.
But, according to Adair, Glass had now become something very rare. He was a painstaking truth-teller. “Interviewing Glass can be frustrating,” writes Adair, “because he frets so much about getting every detail right. He’ll stop mid-sentence to ponder the month or day that something happened. Was that lunch in late 2014 or early 2015? He’ll check. He knows he has a reputation as a liar and that he has already blown a lifetime of credibility.”
So Glass became like the character played by Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, the man forced always to tell the truth. And Adair, as incredulous a man as ever walked, believes that Glass had now become painfully unable to live with lying in a way that very few of us would want to emulate.
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And then it turned out that he had to lie. And that the lie he had to tell was arguably the biggest of his life. His wife Julie’s mother had died of early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 53. Before she and Glass met, Julie had written a book about her inability to cope with her mother’s illness called The Bad Daughter.
But she always feared that the disease was heritable and that she might decline and die in the same way.
A test had shown Julie not to be carrying the gene, but about eight years ago Glass began to notice the first small signs that any optimism might have been misplaced: misfiled accounts, confused dates.
The signs multiplied. Aged 46, Julie Hilden was finally diagnosed but she didn’t want the disease even to be mentioned. Glass was to pretend to her and to their friends that everything was fine.
“I love my life. I’ve never been happier,” she told him. “I want to live in that happiness and be the way I am. We’re just going to live in this way, and we don’t talk about it.”
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And so the repentant liar lied again. Over and over. This time out of love. After a deterioration in 2017, Julie died in March 2018, not long before her 50th birthday.
There are all kinds of reasons why lying can be deeply wrong. It confuses the lied-to, it destabilises the earth under our feet, it dissolves the essential ties of trust.
But there may come a time for all of us — indeed there probably will be a time — when the lie is more virtuous than the starkest truth. Best though to tell the truth until that moment arrives.