Did I lie to Mrs. Goforth? Or did I tell a “harmless untruth,” a statement that falls between lie—intended to deceive, and so, contra the conscience—and untruth—saying something false without knowing it’s false? (This nice distinction between lie and untruth is Montaigne’s.) In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut calls harmless untruth foma, the essential idea of Bokononism, a religion composed solely of lies, but lies that “make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.” Vonnegut seemingly intends Bokononism to satirize real religion, suggesting that it, too, is a system of lies that we believe in so that we can feel better.
Foma. That’s what I laid on Mrs. Goforth. The white lie abuts this category: knowingly mixing the untrue with the true (perceived) in a way that generally isn’t harmful and is sometimes helpful.
One of my babysitters, Wendy, upright and Christian, was, out of affection for me, a practitioner of the fib blanc. When I was ten, a boy whom I loathed, name of Dwayne, knocked on the door. Before Wendy could open it, I saw who it was through the window. I whispered, “I don’t wanna play with him.”
She said, “Go out on the back deck,” reasoning that if I were on the deck, I would not be in the house and so, in a way, not at home.
I did, and she told poor Dwayne, “Eric’s not home right now,” and he left.
There are white lies, and then there are superfluous lies, serving no purpose other than to be lies. Remember Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s hero who revels in this sort of fibbing: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.” Throughout The Catcher in the Rye, Holden often lies for no reason, telling complete strangers made-up details about his life that serve no other purpose than to deceive people who have no stake in the deception.
I do it, too.
“Hey man, you run today?” a close friend asks.
“Yep,” I reply.
“How far?”
“About six and a half miles.”
“Cool.”
I really ran eight.
“Hey man, what’d you have for breakfast?”
“Bagel.”
Granola.
“Hey man, what’d you do last night?”
“I don’t know. Just hung out.”
Drank two martinis, a beer, a glass of wine, watched The Awful Truth for like the five hundredth time, called police on loud renters in house next door.
T. S. Eliot wrote: “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” I can’t, reality being what you can’t do, or the fall, as in “of mankind,” which imposes—I’m treating the myth as true here just to make a point—one limit after another on all of us dwelling to Eden’s east, ranging from gravity, to the necessity of getting a job for which you don’t get paid what you deserve, to having to consume prunes in the morning, to death. To the earth’s locked-in no-ness, the lie, gratuitous or not, asserts, “Whatever,” and conjures the “yes, yes, yes!” that suits the present fancy, and in so doing quests westward, hoping to sneak by the covering cherubs and reenter the Garden, where possibility burgeons beyond time and space. Holden and Wilson crave innocence: living in potential, eluding the actual. You might grow up to be anything when you’re still unspoiled: tinker, tailor, soldier, professor. I have grown up, I am heavy corrupted, and I am a fucking English professor.
But maybe I don’t lie gratuitously in a quest for innocence. Perhaps I do it because I do find myself, and life, boring, boring, boring, one trillion channels and nothing on, and I’ll do most anything to distract myself just a little bit, to surprise myself, with the pitiful drama of … what deceit will I blurt next?
White lies, gratuitous lies. And then lies sinister. Deliberate put-ons that either harm others or help you or both together. Now we intrude into the lurid: cheating, stealing, swindling, conning, killing. I, as Poe’s protagonist in “Ligeia,” poison my wife, Rowena, while I sit by her sickbed, imbibing laudanum. I try to convince myself that I didn’t do it, that the drug did. I lie to the constables outright, claiming that she died of a mysterious illness, knowing that, this being the early nineteenth century, forensic medicine, if such a thing even exists, has no way of proving otherwise.
I’ve mentioned only three kinds of lying. I’ve done all three. There are so many more types, more than I imagined. Go to Wikipedia, check out “Lie.” Find “bad faith,” or “lying to oneself” (Sartrean): “failing to acknowledge one’s own ability to act and determine one’s possibilities, falling back on the determinations of the various historical and current totalisations [sic, for an American] which have produced one as if they relieved one of one’s freedom to do so.” Bluffing, “to pretend to have a capability or intention” you really don’t. Bullshitting, pretending to know much more about something than you really do. Emergency lie, employed to protect “a third party.” Haystack answer: when you plant a lie amid other truths. Jocose lie, for comedy. Lie to children: “euphemism” land, or toeing tooth-fairy-might-exist line. Puffery. Bold-faced lie. Noble lie. Perjury. “View from Nowhere.” Half-truth. And the Big Lie, one so extreme that no one would believe that anyone would have the gall to state it if it weren’t true.