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In praise of those on whom reality has too weak a grasp
There are lies, damn lies and then there are those people who simply have a weak grasp on reality. Lies and bare-faced liars are interesting, of course, and it is quite thrilling, in a prurient way, to watch someone tell shameless lies, as Bill Clinton did.
But there is something even more intriguing, in the human bestiary, about that large group of people who appear to have a weak sense of reality. For them, the boundary between lies and truth, between fact and fantasy, seems to be blurred by the blinding power of their own wishes.
Yet they don't seem irrational, or obviously dotty, or stupid. They always have explanations, often very clever ones. Quite often it is clear that they know they were lying. But what's odd about them is that it seems as though they really believe, some or most of the time, what suits them - they have a weak grasp on reality, or perhaps it is that reality has a weak grasp on them.
There are enormous numbers of people who fall into this group. Included without a doubt must be all unreconstructed socialists, whose lack of understanding of reality is tragic, and several members of the present Cabinet, in whose case it is more often comical.
The same could be said for much of the Conservative Party: this is an affliction to which politicians are particularly prone. But I am trying hard not to think about politics, to avoid weakening my own rather intermittent grasp on reality, and I am now trying to stop thinking about Lord Archer, who inspired these thoughts.
It was a tremendous shock to me, as a child, that there were people who actually believed their own lies. It was an even worse shock to me, as a teenager, to find that I was one of them.
Once, as a student, I borrowed a bicycle from a girl in my college, and promptly forgot where I had left it. A few hours of anxiety were followed by several days of refusing to think about the problem; and, by the time the bicycle must certainly have been stolen, the girl demanded it back.
I had to admit that I hadn't got it, but that I had left it - and then I made up an inexcusable lie - I had left it on King's Parade. Bad enough. Worse still was to find myself soon afterwards on King's Parade, by myself, actually looking for it. As if it ought to have been there. And, for a moment, I was genuinely surprised at not being able to find it.
It is true that, at the time, a lot of students had their fix on reality regularly skewed by drugs, but I had no such excuse in this case. It is also true that the period of late adolescence, like childhood, is often very oddly dreamlike and unreal.
But the truth - the reality - is that there are people who believe what they prefer to believe, and I had just realised that I was one of them, if only briefly and in a moment of madness, to use Ron Davies's deathless cliche. This was a very instructive lesson in the stone-throwing category - I have been amazed and astonished by the great fantasists ever since, like everyone else, but I have never been able to feel very censorious.
My favourite famous fantasist is Sir Edmund Backhouse, the remittance man and so-called Hermit of Peking, who died in Shanghai in 1944 and who was very elegantly exposed by Hugh Trevor Roper in almost my favourite historical biography.
Backhouse spent a great deal of his disreputable and largely imaginary life in China; his best memorials (to my mind) are large tracts of pure make-believe about the Imperial Court in the Times reports from Beijing in the early part of the 20th century, which he fed to hapless and awestruck correspondents, and huge amounts of ancient Chinese calligraphy in the Bodleian, much of it probably fake. He must have had such fun, making it all up and bamboozling all those self-important people who ought to have known better.
I suppose fantasists did have a lot more fun in the days before advanced telecommunications; no one could check anything for months. Today, the great fabulists have to rely on other people's idleness and gullibility, or the corruption of friendship and charm.
Still, that seems to work pretty well, too, if not for quite so long. I find my mind unaccountably drifting to memories of the Prime Minister in his performance as St Tony of Albion, delivering himself to the nation beneath a cross and a stained-glass window, and a clutch of hymn-singing black schoolgirls. To other fabulists, of lesser ability but like mind, such prodigious people are closet heroes.
That is why I think so many journalists - fabulists manques - had a soft spot for Archer and Aitken and indeed Blair; journalists, too, feel reality would be so much better if one could only construct it oneself, if one could edit out those awkward and unaesthetic details that do nothing but spoil the charm of the story.
What journalist has not occasionally felt that facts are nothing but an annoyance? What documentary director has not set and directed a supposedly real-life scene, giving people pretend parts in the drama of their own lives, in the interests of presenting the story as he thinks it ought to appear?
There ought to be a word for this tendency - not Archer, but Sagittarian perhaps, after the desire to aim so singlemindedly at the stars that one is blinded to reality not only by ambition and greed, but also by stardust.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, July 28, 2001
