Born Liars (5 page)

In 1996, during a now-famous libel case, the former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken recounted a tale to court which vividly illustrated the horrors he was having to endure after his name was besmirched by a national newspaper. He told of how, on leaving his home in Lord North Street, Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter Alexandra, he found himself ‘stampeded' by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crew's aggressive behaviour, Alexandra burst into tears. Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car, but as they drove away, he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.

Aitken, a wealthy, handsome, and highly articulate man, had a weakness for melodrama. The year before, at a press conference announcing his intention to sue the
Guardian
newspaper, he declared: ‘If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it.' The case, which stretched on for over two years, involved a series of claims made by the
Guardian
about Aitken's relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them as their guest in the Ritz Hotel in Paris while he was a government minister. As Aitken knew when he delivered this stirring battle-cry, the key allegations made by the
Guardian
were all true. He went on to lose the case, which destroyed his reputation and his career.

As the trial unfolded, what amazed the
Guardian
journalists, who knew he was lying – and what astonished everyone else after his case collapsed – was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it seemed, for the sheer thrill of invention. Like Galloway, Aitken was led further and further into deceit by his own pleasure in confabulating. There was another, subtler aspect to Jonathan Aitken's lies: like a novelist, he used them to illuminate character. The florid rhetoric of his press conference set the tone for his self-presentation at the trial as a man of oak-like virtue, a patriot beset on all sides by frivolous, malign and bitter critics. The story he told of being chased by journalists wasn't necessary to his case, but it had a clear dramatic purpose: to burnish the portrait he was painting of a dashing and gallant hero.

Aitken's case collapsed on 17 June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence that he had lied about his trip to Paris, and presented it to the court. Until then, his charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in the façade of his integrity had been made days before, however, when the unedited rushes of the encounter in Lord North Street were shown to the court. They revealed a very different story. Aitken had indeed been doorstepped that day, but Alexandra Aitken was not with him. The minister walked out of his house alone, got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.

The stories invented by confabulating patients aren't entirely random – like Aitken's lie, they tend to depict an idealised version of the protagonist, who often stands at the centre of a heroic drama. Unable to admit the truth of their condition or its cause, their stories are told to make metaphorical sense of their predicament. Aikaterini Fotopoulou, a psychiatrist at King's College, London, specialises in the theory and treatment of confabulation. She told me about one of her patients, a nineteen-year-old window-fitter known as RM who had been a passenger in a car that crashed at high-speed. He was left with damage to his brain's frontal lobes. Six months later, RM had made a strong physical recovery but was disoriented in time, had severe difficulty planning ahead, and had become, according to his friends and family, a more boastful, irritable and emotional person than he was before the accident. He had also become a chronic confabulator. As far as RM was concerned, he had made a full recovery, and during rehabilitation sessions he invented long and complicated stories to explain why he was in a hospital, being attended to by doctors. He rewrote unpleasant events from his past in ways he would have preferred them to have happened: shortly before the accident he had been greatly upset by his parents' divorce, yet during therapy he would tell and retell the story of how he had persuaded his parents to stay together after they threatened to separate. RM also told tales of implausible derring-do, in which he would respond to a call of distress from a girlfriend or family member under threat from an anonymous attacker. He would race to the scene at impossible speed and be forced to use violence to subdue or even kill the assailant. At the end the police would arrive, survey the bloody aftermath, and praise him for doing what they were not able to do. It became apparent to Fotoupolou that RM's stories of high-velocity heroism were his attempts to assuage deep feelings of powerlessness, by rewriting his memories of the horrific incident in which he had lost part of mind.

Fotopoulou has learned to read between the lines of her patients' confabulations to find the ways in which they are trying to make sense of troubles of which they are only dimly aware. Another of her patients, a wealthy Italian businessman who had suffered a stroke, would constantly fret that he had lost boxes of important files. Fotopoulou took this to be his metaphor for his memory problems. Sigmund Freud would have had no trouble recognising the stories of confabulators as wish-fulfilments that the rest of us work through in dreams and fantasies. He not only looked for hidden psychological meanings in the dreams and speech of his patients, but in works of art. For Freud, dreaming, storytelling and lying are inextricably intertwined, because we can never tell the truth of the unconscious. He noted the prevalence of novels by male authors with a ‘hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means' – by rescuing distressed women, for instance.

* * *

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting to be called
Lying For A Living
(it has never been released). On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic if somewhat bemused Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from Los Angeles and persuaded them to improvise (the footage includes a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). ‘If you can lie, you can act,' Brando told the writer Jod Kaftan, when asked about the title he had chosen for the series. ‘Are you good at lying?' asked Kaftan. ‘Jesus,' replied Brando, ‘I'm fabulous at it.'

Actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive you, because the rules are laid out in advance: you come to the theatre, and we'll lie to you. But as Brando and others have observed, artistic storytelling and lying are very close: both involve making up fictional stories and asking others to believe in them, and the mental processes involved are similar. Having said that, the differences between the artist, the liar and the confabulator are as revealing as the similarities.

Unlike artists, chronic confabulators can't
stop
telling tales. At certain moments, this is also true of artists, who will sometimes describe an act of creativity as being beyond their control – as something happening
to
them. When Dylan is outside the pet shop there's a sense of the words tumbling out of him of their own accord, and he famously scrawled what became the lyrics to ‘Like a Rolling Stone' in one long rush of inspiration (Dylan later referred to his first draft, fondly, as ‘a piece of vomit, twenty pages long'). However, the artist ultimately knows he's engaged in creating a fiction and is able to draw on his subconscious processes at will. Robert Louis Stevenson came to rely on his unusually vivid dreams to provide the basis of his stories;
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
began in a nightmare
from which he awoke screaming. If chronic confabulators are trapped in what Fotopoulou calls ‘a waking dream', artists dip into their confabulatory resources quite deliberately.

Dr Charles Limb, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, is an ear surgeon and a devoted music fan (he is, he told me, obsessed by sound). Limb is an accomplished saxophonist, composer and music historian, and the music he loves most is jazz. He is fascinated by the mental processes that enable jazz musicians to create something new in every moment; that allowed, for instance, his musical hero John Coltrane to improvise instant masterpieces on stage. Limb wanted to see if there was a way of tracking the neural activity of musicians as they improvised, and whether that might allow a glimpse into the processes of creativity in action. Along with his colleague Allen Braun, he designed an experiment to do just that.

Limb and Braun recruited four jazz musicians and asked them to play specially designed keyboards while lying inside a brain scanner. The musicians began by playing a piece that required no imagination; a simple blues melody composed by Limb. Then they were asked to improvise over the top of a recording of a jazz quartet. The musicians displayed a distinctive pattern of brain activity as soon as they started their improvisations. The area of the pre-frontal cortex responsible for self-awareness and introspection – for our sense of who we are – showed high activation. At the same time, the musicians seemed to ‘turn off' activity in those parts of the brain linked to self-control and self-monitoring – the areas that are usually damaged in confabulating patients. As Limb puts it, the improvising musician ‘shuts down his inhibitions and lets his inner voice shine through'.

Paradoxically, artists are able to control the point at which they
relinquish
control. When I asked Will Self if there's anything that marks out artists from the rest of us, he recalled a remark made by the author Flannery O'Connor to the effect that writers have to be ‘calculatedly stupid'. ‘I can think of any number of people who are more perceptive than me, who are more learned and have more know-how,' said Self. ‘But what they aren't is calculatedly stupid, in the sense that they are unable to preserve intact their ability to suspend disbelief. They can't
play
, in the way that a child will make a den and say “This is my castle”. Writers can still do that. Creativity is just an advanced form of play, in which the normal rules of space and time are suspended.'

Freud observed that the child's uninhibited pleasure in play is diminished in adulthood, or marginalised as private ‘day-dreaming' or mere ‘fancy'. Children are magical realists; aware of the difference between reality and fantasy but never less than ready to take unashamed pleasure in the latter. There is now a better understanding of why this is in terms of our neurological development: the parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and fantasy arrive early, while those responsible for self-monitoring and regulation are the last to become fully formed. As we grow older we can still hear the hiss and bubble of what William James called the ‘seething cauldron of ideas', but it tends to recede as reality asserts itself and we address the quotidian tasks of getting jobs and filling out mortgage applications. ‘Every child is an artist,' said Pablo Picasso. ‘The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.'

* * *

In a 1962 study of creativity, a group of high-school students aged between eleven and eighteen were administered a series of verbal and visual exercises, the focus of which was to tease out the difference between being intelligent and being creative; the results of the exercises were compared to scores from IQ tests which the school had already administered. In one exercise the students were shown a picture of a businessman sitting in an aeroplane, reclining in his seat. They were asked to imagine the story behind it. A high-IQ student gave this response:

Mr Smith is on his way home from a successful business trip. He is very happy and he is thinking about his wonderful family and how glad he will be to see them again. He can picture it, about an hour from now, his plane landing at the airport and Mrs Smith and their three children all there welcoming him again.

A high-creativity student gave this response to the same picture:

The man is flying back from Reno where he has just won a divorce from his wife. He couldn't stand to live with her anymore, he told the judge, because she wore so much cold cream on her face at night that her head would skid across the pillow and hit him on the head. He is now contemplating skid-proof face cream.

You can't help but wonder if this anonymous student went on to become a novelist, a screenwriter or a stand-up comedian. His response demonstrates a mind capable of startling associations: the simple line-drawing is linked to the ideas of Reno, divorce, and face cream, and inspires that brilliantly comic description of somebody's face
skidding
across the pillow. In three short sentences, the man on the plane becomes the protagonist of a drama, alive with conflict and uncertainty; one that instantly illuminates a character, a sensibility, an entire social
milieu
.

Perhaps the key way in which artistic ‘lies' differ from normal lies, and from the ‘honest lying' of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. One of the stories for which Will Self first became known is
Cock and Bull
, about a woman who grows a penis and has sex with her careless, constantly drunk husband without him noticing anything different about the experience. The story was born from the jamming together of two distinct concepts – ‘woman' and ‘penis' were Self's equivalent of ‘gold' and ‘mountain', or ‘commission' and ‘bath' – and it would be fair to say that Self's unconscious played a part in making the link; he came up with the basic idea during a drunken riff in the pub with his friends. But in the story that resulted, the juxtaposition is just the starting point for an exploration of a lifeless, loveless marriage.