Free Born Liars by Ian Leslie Page A

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.
    Freud’s rather clumsy attempts to psychoanalyse authors via their work neglected the extent to which good writers are able to shape their own material, whatever its source. Stevenson’s nightmare was just the raw material; the story was shaped and written ‘awake, and consciously’. If writers are compelled to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights, not just about their own lives but about our shared experience. Outside the pet shop, Dylan was practising a skill he used over and over again to ignite his grander creations – songs like ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, in which he takes us to a place where ‘memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves’.
    The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa writes that fictions ‘express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised as something it is not’. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
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    People who can’t stop telling tales, and who know they are lying, suffer from a different kind of madness to chronic confabulators, and a different kind of lack.
    Joe Galloway and Jonathan Aitken would not be considered pathological liars in the clinical sense. Though they seem to have got carried away with their own lies, and clearly lacked scruples, they exerted a significant degree of control over their lying behaviour (which only makes their behaviour more reprehensible). Such liars can be considered distinct from compulsive liars who become addicted to frequent self-glorifying fibs, often because they are socially insecure, and whose lies usually harm nobody but themselves. Pathological liars are a different category again. Manipulative, cunning and egotistical, they lie compulsively but with specific, self-serving goals in mind. They can be charming and credible in pursuit of their goals, and wreak great damage on those unfortunate enough to cross their paths, who often find it hard to rebuild their trust in people in the wake of