TEN

The Habit of Truth

I do not remember anyone instilling in me the importance of telling the truth, although I do recall how I explained it to Adam when he was small. I told him that not only was it the right thing to do but it was also the simplest. I could never understand why people lied. It seemed to me such a complicated way of operating. Once you had told someone something, you had to remember whom you had said what to and hope that this person would never interact with anyone to whom you had told a different tale. Those who lie appear to be setting themselves up for disaster, but perhaps the people who do it are unable to stop themselves.

The first time truthfulness was called into question for me was at boarding school when I was just four years old. After the customary afternoon nap, I had put on clean clothes and gone outside to play. I was watching several of the other girls drawing patterns in the dust with their white-socked feet when suddenly the headmistress appeared, and everyone scuttled to put their sandals back on. She asked the head girl, Georgina, who the culprits were, and I was identified as one of them. To this day I don’t know whether this was because Georgina didn’t like me, she wasn’t sure who had been involved, or she thought that I had participated. Several of us were singled out, and while the rest of the group were sent off on that beautiful sunny afternoon to hunt for hens’ eggs in the fields, we were taken to the gymnasium. There we were informed that because we liked taking our clothes off, we were now to take all of them off. (This was an ingenious form of making the punishment fit the crime.) Once this was done, we would be free to get dressed again and join the others outside. I remember that I was wearing a navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar and rows of little white elephants marching down to the hem. I stood there all afternoon, long after the other little girls had stripped, put their clothes back on, and gone off to play, because I adamantly refused to admit to a wrongdoing I hadn’t committed. Even at that age truthfulness was of vital importance to me.

And in all these years I haven’t shifted my position. My friends and acquaintances are often amused by how much of a stickler for the truth I am, but behind their smiles lurk both respect and relief. In business dealings they can rely on the fact that I will not fudge, that I will go out of my way to provide accurate details and correct any view that may lead to misunderstanding. They can also be sure that I will reveal things that may be to my disadvantage. I want them to have the full picture, believing that they are quite capable of drawing their own conclusions from what I tell them. And this is not something they can be sure of with most people. When I have discussed this with colleagues who also sell subsidiary rights, they give me the impression that they don’t feel it is safe to give out this much information. They believe it will result in a less lucrative deal. I find this puzzling because as far as I can tell, I never got less money for something by doing this. I suspect that sometimes I got even more money than they might have because people find this way of doing business so refreshing.

In her poem “Ladder,” Jane Hirshfield says, “Rarely are what is spoken and what is meant the same.” I was astonished when I came across that line but on reflection realized that, indeed, this is unfortunately the case. Over the last decade there has been a degradation in the value of words. People no longer seem to have faith in the words of others, particularly anyone in public office or the press, and so they don’t give what these people say any credence. And I have come to the reluctant conclusion that many people don’t even understand what they themselves are saying. There is an imprecision that has crept into the language that is a little terrifying.

I try to be meticulous in my speech, in that I say exactly what I mean in the fewest possible words. From time to time I see that other people are taken aback by this forthrightness, because they are not used to it. There are certainly times when it is better to say nothing at all, but if you are going to speak, why not say what you mean? Get right to the point. Avoid the preamble. This doesn’t mean that you have to be brutal. You can cut to the chase and still be gentle, but it is a kindness to others not to hold back if there is really something you want to communicate. When I talk, there is no hidden agenda because nothing is hidden.

It is no secret that many English people find it hard to express a preference and are inclined to defer to the other person, not wishing to upset him or her in any way: “What would you like to do?” “Oh, I don’t mind. What would you like to do?” “It doesn’t matter to me, really. Would you like to go to a movie?” “Would you?” This exchange can go on for some time and even when it is over, neither English person is quite sure whether the final choice is mutually satisfying. Better to be clear in the beginning and get on to the next thing. Someone called today to ask me if I would like to go and see Gladiator, since it had just won an Oscar. I was pleased that I had been invited, but my answer was brief and to the point: “No, thank you. Go with someone else. I saw Quo Vadis when I was a teenager, and that is enough Roman stuff for me.” If you say something this straight, other people know exactly where you stand.

I recall the broadcast that Saddam Hussein made to the American people during the Gulf War. It went on for a very long time, and almost no one could grasp his message because he never seemed to say whatever it was he wanted us all to know. All I took away from listening to it was the phrase “the mother of all battles” and the impression that Arabic was an even more indirect language than I had thought. I couldn’t tell whether his style was more flowery and oblique than other Iraqis’, but I suspect that it was. And this was sad because I think that many of us were curious to understand his point of view.

Telling the truth is completely uncomplicated; you don’t have to work out any strategy. You just tell it like it is. Also, there is no residue. You don’t find yourself wondering if you should or shouldn’t have said something. This saves an inordinate amount of time and energy (two things at a premium these days).

Straight talk is vital when it comes to children. I learned this lesson when I was taking care of Lorraine. I had warned her that if she misbehaved in a certain way again (I no longer recall the circumstances), I would put her across my knee and spank her. When I said this, it was just a threat, and I thought it would be enough to deter her, particularly since she was at that time about seventeen. But then she disobeyed me once more, and I was honor bound to deliver. I applied a hairbrush ten times to her rump. When it was over there were tears in her eyes and I was taken aback, but I thought that perhaps the indignity had upset her. I hadn’t struck her hard at all. About a year later she told me that it was not the punishment itself that had hurt so much but the quality of my attention. She said that anyone else would have brought the brush down in a different spot each time but because I was so careful, I hit her repeatedly in the same place and almost broke the skin. The moral of this story is not that I recommend corporal punishment. I don’t. What is important here is that you shouldn’t tell a child that you will do something (or not do something) unless you mean it, because, if you don’t follow through and it is an empty promise, the child will no longer believe you or have any respect for you. (The same is true for adults, of course.) I know a woman who is always lashing out at her children verbally, but they no longer pay much attention to what she says because they know that she is speaking from anger and that she has no intention of fulfilling her threats.

Intimately connected to this is the practice of asking a child to do something when you yourself act differently. Children learn through mimicry and osmosis. They copy the way you behave. If you are always anxious, the chances are that they will learn to be anxious too. It’s in the air. If you remain calm, then they will not panic. You are the one providing the cues.

It follows that using reverse psychology also sends children a hollow message, and the repercussions later in their lives may be irreversible. And, last, I don’t subscribe to the “If you eat one more mouthful, then you may …” school. Bargaining with children is an unfortunate practice. I admit that I was tempted to use both these methods when Adam was little, but I didn’t succumb. I found that if I spoke with enough authority and really meant what I said, he heard me and would fall into line.

At one time in my life I was put in charge of the advertising for the philosophy school. I was instructed that all I needed to do was present what we were offering accurately and concisely, never promising that any particular result would come from trying it. After all, how could one know what the result might be for other people? The point of advertising is to offer customers goods and services they might need. It is not about tempting them to buy something they might want. There is a vast difference between necessity and desire. I don’t think that anyone remembers this anymore. Copywriters nowadays imagine that their job is to arouse desire. They do this by pinpointing a perceived need, but it is rarely a true need.

The first person we have to tell the truth to is ourselves, If we are not going to be honest with ourselves, there is little possibility that we will treat anyone else differently. This is a thorny issue. I sometimes sweep everything under the rug by saying “Perhaps I am naive …” when I don’t want to admit that I have been foolish enough to hoodwink myself. I pretend that someone else has seduced me into seeing it her or his way, but if I went along with it, then the responsibility was mine just as much as the other person’s. Time and again the evidence is right in front of me, and yet I choose to ignore it. I may call it “giving someone the benefit of the doubt,” but we all know that this is often a reluctance to face the facts. We prefer to believe the illusion we have laid over the situation. We need to look at our relationships with other people as well as our relationship with ourselves. Both are generally a little murky.

Many people felt that my marriage was a mistake (and some were unkind enough to tell me so. Honesty is fine when it is called for, but kindness should temper full disclosure). When our marriage fell apart, these people were quick to blame my husband—which was unfortunate. I don’t believe that he was any more at fault than I was. We both chose not to see certain things in ourselves and in each other. Like many couples, we put on blindfolds when we fell in love. Years later when he was in therapy, he said to me, “I am just coming out of my cave. When we were married, I didn’t even know I was in a cave.” I had never met anyone who lived in a psychological cave. He certainly seemed more private than anyone I had been close to, but I had put it down to shyness. I thought that once we were living together, that would fall away. But people are the way they are, and they don’t change just because they move in together—at least, not in my experience. What you see is what you get. The other person may not be seeing you very clearly, so you need to be certain that you see who he or she is.

While I was typing the last paragraph, I received a call from a man in Florida who had courted me shortly after the breakup of my marriage. He had called me out of the blue two days ago, saying that he had been sorting through some of his papers and had come across my name. It transpired that his own marriage had now fallen apart, and when he saw my name he recalled the feelings he had had for me and felt impelled to get in touch. We talked for a little while, and I was as free and easy with him as I had been all those years ago. When he called just now he told me that he had been thinking of me very warmly for the last two days and he was wondering … You can imagine the rest of the conversation without my filling you in. I told him that I was happy for us to be friends but that it could not go any further than that. I had refused him over twenty years ago (I had told him gently that I could not marry anyone without a sense of humor), and the situation hadn’t changed. He was sad. He had been building up this whole picture in the interval between Monday and Wednesday. All I could do was read him what I had written in the last paragraph and point out that it applied to me, to Neil, but also to him. We have to face the truth.

There are certain sentences and phrases that really hit home when you first hear them, and then continue to reverberate throughout your life. For me, one of the most powerful is the statement in Isaiah 43: “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord.” Witness is a strong word, and nowadays we tend to think of a witness as someone who observes dispassionately. The original meaning of the word is much deeper. The root is the Anglo-Saxon witan, “to know,” from which we get the expression “to have your wits about you.” So witnessing has to do with transparency, seeing through the scrim that generally covers things and looking deeply into them so that we know and understand what they truly are. When God says, “Ye are my witnesses,” it means that the role of human beings is to know divinity and to know it now. The sentence is in the present tense. We are here to see and experience God in all things. Or, as Kabir Helminski describes it in his book A Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path of Transformation: “The true human being embodies the divine presence.”

So often we see only what we want to see. Our desires get in the way of our observation, and we look at part of something rather than all of it or we distort what is right in front of us in other ways. Everyone wears different glasses—metaphorically speaking—and has a different prescription. Some people have an astigmatism (I do). Some like to wear tinted glasses. And then there are those who like to wear dark glasses or shades. Presumably they like to look on the gloomy side.

When I was growing up, history was taught as though the account we were given was the only view. Many years later, when I started working at Knopf, which had a fine American history list, I gradually came to the realization that there could be as many views of what took place at a battle as the number of soldiers who fought in it, not to mention all those who reported from the front or wrote about it later. One of the most honest titles for a memoir I have come across is Nicolas Bentley’s A Version of the Truth. Nick was a cartoonist and also an editor at André Deutsch. He understood that no perspective is complete. So much of the time we see things a certain way because of our background and experience, and we fail to grasp that what we are aware of is only one of a multitude of possibilities. In addition, all of us interpret (or misinterpret) circumstances differently. Each of us focuses on different facets and glosses over what doesn’t interest us or those things we would prefer to avoid (whether this is something we are willing to admit or not). Consequently, everyone formulates an individual picture of what is happening. No two people inhabit precisely the same spot on the planet.

This became even clearer to me when I was attending an art class and the week’s assignment was to draw the same object each day from a different angle. I was astonished to look at the variety that appeared in my sketchbook. The following week we were asked to focus just on the spaces described by the object we had chosen and record them on the paper. I was again fascinated at how different a chair seemed when I drew the gaps between the decorative woodwork slats on the back, then the trapezoid shapes caused by the legs, and finally the edge of the enormous space surrounding the whole chair. The third week we were told to choose a photograph of a familiar object and turn it upside down before we drew it. It is extraordinary how this transforms your view.

These three exercises revolutionized the way I saw the world. As I write this I am sitting outside my friend Lynn’s house in New Jersey, observing the slivers of the next-door garden visible between the trunks of the trees at the edge of her property. Normally, I would focus on the adjacent garden and ignore the trees in the foreground. My mind would fill in what was hidden from view with what could reasonably be expected to be there. The trees themselves would vanish from existence, because subliminally I considered them to be an obstruction. Now that I remember that art class, however, I see the blocks of space between the trunks and branches which all slope in different directions—a geometrical profusion of possibilities. I become aware of the distance between me and the trees, and also of the grass and bushes and wildflowers, the play of sunlight and shadow, the unseen area behind my back, the invisible birds calling to one another in their liquid language, the rustling leaves, and the fading drone of an airplane in the sky. My perspective shifts with each of these acknowledgments, and my appreciation of the garden expands. But, of course, the ant scurrying past my foot is probably unaware of most of this, yet cognizant of a whole universe I shall never know.

It is good to bear all this in mind when you read or listen to other people’s stories. Recognize that while they may believe that what they are telling you are the facts, their “truth” undoubtedly comes from a limited viewpoint.

This is probably as good a place as any to make a disclaimer about the stories I tell in this book: I have not knowingly distorted anything, but as I grow older my memory is increasingly unreliable. If those who appear in my stories remember the circumstances differently, I hope they will forgive me. What I describe here is the way I perceived things at the time they happened, but, of course, I was looking only from my own point of view, and, in addition, much time may have elapsed in the interim.

Here is the way that Jungian analyst Helen Luke describes the process in her book Old Age. She reimagines Hermes speaking to Odysseus on his final journey of “a spirit of discriminating wisdom, separating moment by moment the wheat of life from the chaff, so that you may know in both wheat and chaff their meaning and their value in the pattern of the universe.”

Nowadays many people no longer understand what it means to discriminate. They think that it is choosing one thing over another, but, in fact, discrimination is as Helen Luke describes it: recognizing exactly what’s what; not being confused about the nature of things. Adultery happens not just between consenting adults. To adulterate is to mix things so that they are no longer pure, whether the substance is metal, food, or the present moment. In fact, if you remain in the present and avoid impurity now by not importing the past or the future, then the chances are that nothing will spill over and contaminate other moments.