On the Impossibility of Telling the Truth in Rooms Designed for Lying

The room had been booked under a name that didn’t exist, which seemed appropriate. It was a private dining room in a club off St James’s, the kind of place where the carpet absorbs sound and the paintings absorb guilt and the bill arrives on a silver tray with its face turned down, like a diagnosis. Waugh had chosen it. I had arrived early and was sitting in a chair that seemed designed to remind me I hadn’t been to the right school. The wallpaper was the colour of old money — not gold, nothing so vulgar — more the colour that money becomes after it’s been inherited three times and has forgotten what work smells like.

Heller was late. Waugh was not late — Waugh was precisely on time, which is different from being early, because being early suggests anxiety, and Waugh did not do anxiety. He did contempt. He did boredom. He did a kind of arctic politeness that functioned like a moat. He sat across from me in a charcoal suit and examined the room as though auditing it for moral failure.

“They’ve changed the curtains,” he said. “They used to be a rather good Prussian blue. Now they’re this.” He gestured at the curtains, which were green. His tone suggested the curtains had committed a crime against civilisation.

“They’re nice,” I said.

“They are adequate. Which is worse than being terrible. Terrible curtains at least have the courage of their convictions.”

I was about to ask how a curtain could have convictions when the door opened and Heller came in wearing a sport coat that didn’t match his trousers and carrying a copy of the New York Post that he appeared to be reading for recreational outrage.

“I got lost,” he said, sitting down. “Your city is arranged like a sentence diagram by a man having a stroke. Why are there two streets called Jermyn?”

“There are not two streets called Jermyn,” Waugh said.

“Then how did I end up on both of them?”

“You ended up on one of them. Twice.”

Heller grinned. It was the grin of a man who loses arguments on purpose to see what happens. “Fine. So. We’re writing about government honesty.” He said the last two words the way you’d say “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence” — as if the internal contradiction were the only interesting thing about them.

I opened my notebook. “The premise I keep circling is a government department created to make the state honest. An actual bureaucratic apparatus whose job is truth-telling. And the problem —”

“There’s no problem,” Heller said. “That’s the problem. The department would work perfectly. It would function exactly as designed. A government department designed to produce honesty would produce exactly as much honesty as the government wanted produced, which is none, and it would do this with complete efficiency, and everyone involved would be promoted, and the department would expand, and it would hire more people to not produce the honesty it was not designed to produce, and eventually it would be the largest department in the government, and nobody would be able to explain what it did, which would be the proof that it was working.”

He said all of this in one breath, or close enough, the sentences stacking on top of each other like a man building a tower to see if he could make it fall.

Waugh cut his bread roll in half with surgical precision. “You’re describing every department. What makes this one particular?”

“The contradiction is particular. If the department succeeds at making the government honest, it exposes its own uselessness, because an honest government wouldn’t need a Department of Honesty. But if it fails, it can’t admit it’s failed, because admitting failure would be honest, which is the one thing the department cannot be, because being honest about its failure to produce honesty would undermine public confidence in the very concept of honesty, which is the thing the department exists to protect. So the department must be dishonest about its failure to produce honesty, which makes it the most honest representation of the government it serves.”

Waugh set down his knife. “That’s rather good.”

I was trying to keep up. “So the department is a kind of perfect closed loop — a perpetual motion machine of institutional dishonesty.”

“Not dishonesty,” Heller said. “That’s what’s important. Nobody in the department is lying. They’re all following the rules. The rules simply happen to produce the opposite of their stated purpose. Which means the rules are working. Which means the people following the rules are doing their jobs. Which means the department is a success. Which means honesty has been achieved. Do you see?”

“I don’t think I —”

“Nobody sees. That’s why it works.”

Waugh poured himself wine from a decanter that had been placed on the table by a waiter so discreet he appeared to have entered and left the room without using the door. “The difficulty with your recursive loop, entertaining as it is, is that it doesn’t require human beings. You could do it with a chart. What I want to know is who inhabits this machine. What kind of person takes a job at the Department of Honesty?”

“The worst kind,” Heller said. “The idealist.”

“No,” said Waugh. “The idealist would be the obvious choice, and you don’t write stories about obvious choices. You write stories about the man who takes the job because his brother-in-law suggested it at a dinner party. The man who has never had a conviction in his life and has therefore never experienced the inconvenience of acting on one. He takes the job the way one accepts a commission in a regiment one knows nothing about — because it was offered, and refusing would require having an opinion, and opinions are vulgar.”

This was the first moment I felt the two of them genuinely seeing the same thing from different angles. Heller’s version would be a man who believed in the department’s mission and was systematically destroyed by it. Waugh’s version would be a man who never believed in anything and was therefore ideally suited to run an institution that couldn’t believe in itself.

“Both,” I said. “What if you have both? The director who’s an upper-class nothing — no convictions, no particular talent, appointed because knowing the right people is the only qualification that never expires — and then a junior officer. Young. Genuinely believes the department can work. Genuinely believes that regulations can produce honesty if they’re well-drafted enough.”

Waugh raised an eyebrow. It was a very economical eyebrow. It did the work of an entire paragraph. “And you want the young man to be destroyed.”

“I want him to be educated.”

“Same thing,” Waugh said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

Heller leaned back. “Here’s my worry. You set up a satirical premise — government department, absurd regulations, everything contradicts everything — and the danger is it becomes a sketch. A series of gags. Very funny, everyone laughs, nobody remembers it next week. What Catch-22 does — what I spent years figuring out how to make it do — is build the comedy so high that when the horror shows through, you can’t look away. Snowden’s guts. That’s what you need. Not literally. But you need the reader laughing and laughing and laughing and then suddenly aware that they’re laughing at something that is actually happening. Not in the story. In the world. You need the reader to realise they’ve been reading a documentary.”

“Which you would know nothing about,” Waugh said. “Scoop being rather precisely a documentary about Fleet Street, which I wrote from direct observation, and which the people observed did not recognise, because the defining characteristic of people who deserve to be satirised is that they never believe the satire is about them.”

“That’s different. You were satirising incompetence. I’m talking about satirising structure. The Catch-22 isn’t one person being stupid. It’s the system being logical. Every person in the system is rational. Every decision makes sense locally. And the total result is insanity. That’s what this department should be. Not stupid people making stupid decisions. Smart people making smart decisions that add up to something monstrous.”

I wrote that down and underlined it. Smart people, smart decisions, monstrous sum.

Waugh examined his wine. “I disagree with your formulation, though not with your conclusion. The people needn’t be smart. They merely need to be competent at the specific thing they’ve been asked to do, which is administer. The British civil servant is not smart in the way an American imagines smartness — quick, inventive, solving problems. The British civil servant is competent in the way a machine is competent. He does precisely what the machine requires. No more. No less. The horror is not that the machine is run by fools. The horror is that the machine doesn’t need wisdom. It needs compliance. And compliance, in a well-run bureaucracy, looks exactly like intelligence.”

Heller nodded slowly. I could see him turning something over. “So you’d want a Permanent Secretary type. Someone who’s been in government for forty years and understands, perfectly, that the purpose of the machine is the machine.”

“I’d want several. But yes. One in particular. A man who is not villainous — who is, in fact, unfailingly polite, unfailingly correct, and has never in his life done anything that wasn’t precisely what the system required, and has therefore never done anything good and never done anything evil and has simply presided, with the efficiency of a well-made clock, over the slow, irreversible consumption of other people’s energy and hope.”

“That’s Sir Humphrey,” I said, and immediately regretted it, because both of them looked at me as if I’d just compared their work to a television programme.

“I don’t watch television,” Waugh said.

“I watch a lot of television,” Heller said. “That’s not the point. The point is: don’t write a character from a reference. Write a character from the wall. What does the wall of this man’s office look like? What portrait hangs there? What has he been staring at for thirty years while signing documents that do nothing? Start with the wall, and the man grows out of it.”

I thought about that. A portrait. A Victorian gentleman. Someone no one can identify anymore, hanging in a corridor that smells of old paper, gazing down with the permanent expression of a man who invested in something that went wrong but would never admit it.

“There’s something else,” I said, venturing carefully, because I could feel a disagreement forming and I wasn’t sure whose side I was on. “The media. Scoop is about the press. The accidental journalist. The machinery of news-making that has nothing to do with what’s actually happening. I think the department needs to collide with journalists. The moment someone in the department accidentally tells the truth on camera — not as an act of rebellion, but as an act of regulatory compliance — and the entire system convulses.”

“Of course,” Waugh said. “The press exists to demand transparency and then to be appalled when it receives it. A journalist who asks a question and receives an honest answer has no idea what to do with it. The entire apparatus of political journalism — the follow-up, the gotcha, the leaked memo — depends on dishonesty. Remove the dishonesty and you remove the journalist’s reason for existing. Which the journalist would then have to report on. Honestly.”

Heller was grinning again, wider this time. “And the opposition demands a debate about the crisis caused by the minister telling the truth. The opposition is outraged — not that the government was dishonest before, but that it has been honest now, because honesty about a failing policy undermines public confidence, and undermining public confidence is worse than the failing policy, which means the truth is more dangerous than the lie, which means the Department of Honesty is actually a national security threat.”

“Now you’ve got something,” Waugh said, and there was — briefly, unexpectedly — something like pleasure in his voice. Not warmth. Waugh did not do warmth. But recognition. The recognition of a mechanism so perfectly absurd that it was, by his standards, elegant.

I poured myself water because the wine seemed like a decision I should make later. “Can I ask about endings? Not plot — I know we’re not doing that. But tone. What does the last page feel like?”

“Quiet,” Waugh said immediately. “The last page of a satire should be very quiet. The reader has been laughing. They are tired of laughing. They want to rest. And in the quiet, they should feel something settle on them — not a lesson, nothing so coarse — but a weight. The weight of having understood something they cannot un-understand.”

Heller shook his head. “I don’t agree. The last page should be funny. Not the same kind of funny as the beginning — not the escalating, piling-on funny. A single, clean, funny thing that contains the entire story inside it. Like a joke that’s also a coffin. You laugh, and then you realise what you’ve laughed at, and you can’t take the laugh back.”

“Those aren’t as different as you think,” I said.

“They’re completely different,” they both said, simultaneously, and then looked at each other with the mutual annoyance of two people who have just accidentally agreed while trying to disagree.

There was a long pause. Heller folded his newspaper. Waugh ate an olive. A clock somewhere in the building chimed an hour that I hadn’t been counting.

“What worries me,” Heller said, and his voice had dropped into something more careful, “is the thing you’re not seeing. You’re building a comedy about bureaucratic absurdity, and that’s fine, I’ve built several, they sell well enough. But the thing underneath — the thing that makes the comedy necessary — is that the department is the truth. The department that can’t be honest about its dishonesty is the most honest picture of government that has ever been drawn. Not because it fails. Because its failure is the accurate description. The department that cannot tell the truth is telling the truth about why the truth cannot be told. And you can’t write that as a punchline. You can write around it. You can build jokes on top of it. But the thing itself — the real thing — is not funny. It is correct. And correct is worse than funny.”

Waugh dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “It is also not my concern. I write about people, not about systems. Your protagonist — the young man with his regulations and his faith in process — what happens to him? Not structurally. Not as a cog in your beautiful machine. What happens to him as a person? Does he learn something? Does he fail to learn something? Does he become one of them?”

“I think he laughs,” I said. “At the end. Not the kind of laugh you plan. The kind that comes up from your stomach when you finally see the shape of the thing you’ve been living inside.”

“That’s sentimental,” Waugh said.

“It’s human,” Heller said.

“As I said.”

Heller laughed at that — an actual laugh, spontaneous, the kind that catches you off guard. Waugh permitted himself the smallest possible contraction of the mouth, which from him was practically a standing ovation.

I looked at my notebook. I had pages of notes, half of them contradictory, most of them better than anything I’d have come up with alone. What I didn’t have was a plan, which was, I suspected, the point. The story would have to grow from the contradictions: Heller’s recursive systems and Waugh’s precise cruelty, the comedy that goes too far and the understatement that doesn’t go far enough, the idealist who gets ground down and the cynic who was never built up in the first place.

“One more question,” I said. “The department gets dissolved in the end. What happens to the people?”

“They scatter,” Waugh said. “They go where civil servants always go — to other departments, where they will do the same nothing they were doing before, but under different letterhead. The institution vanishes and nothing changes. That is the final joke, if you want one. Nothing happened, and it cost a great deal, and everyone involved was promoted.”

Heller pulled his sport coat tighter, as though preparing to leave, or as though the room had gotten colder. “No. Something happened. The kid understood something. He can’t prove it, he can’t articulate it, and if he tried to write it down the sentence would eat itself, but he understood it. And understanding it is the most useless, valuable thing that will ever happen to him.”

“You can’t have useless and valuable,” I said.

“Watch me,” Heller said.

Waugh stood. He buttoned his jacket with the practiced efficiency of a man who had been leaving rooms all his life. “I have a lunch.”

“It’s three in the afternoon,” I said.

“I have a late lunch. The point is that I’m leaving.” He paused at the door. “One piece of advice, since you seem to want it. Don’t let the paradoxes do the work. Anyone can build a logical trap. The trick is putting a real person inside it and making the reader feel the walls.”

He left. The door closed behind him with the expensive, muffled click of a mechanism that had been designed to avoid making a scene.

Heller watched him go. “He’s good. I don’t like him, but he’s good.”

“You don’t like him?”

“I like his sentences. I don’t like his certainty. He’s never wrong. Or rather, he’s wrong in exactly the same way every time, which is a kind of consistency I find exhausting. But his sentences —” Heller shook his head. “His sentences are like little knives. They go in clean. You don’t know you’ve been cut until you look down.”

He picked up the Post again, folded it under his arm. “Write the story. Make it circular. Make the last line connect to the first line so the reader can go around again and see it differently. And for God’s sake, let the regulations be funny. Every regulation should be individually reasonable and collectively insane. That’s the whole trick. You don’t break the logic. You follow it. You follow it all the way to the cliff and then you keep walking, and the reader looks down and realises there’s nothing underneath except more logic, and more logic under that, all the way down.”

“That’s terrifying,” I said.

“Yes. That’s the comedy.”

He left. I sat in the room alone. The green curtains that Waugh had despised hung perfectly still. The wallpaper held its colour. Somewhere below, someone was probably filing a form, and someone else was probably approving it, and someone else was probably losing the approved form in a system that had been designed, at every stage, to ensure that the form’s approval was both mandatory and meaningless.

I closed my notebook. I hadn’t solved anything. But I had the shape of something — not a story yet, just the negative space where a story might fit. Two kinds of satire, acid and absurd, that didn’t agree on anything except that the truth was the funniest and most dangerous thing a government could accidentally produce.

I left a tip on the table. The waiter appeared from nowhere to collect it. I walked out into St James’s, where the afternoon light fell on old stone and new glass, and somewhere across Whitehall a department existed, or didn’t, or was in the process of deciding whether it existed, which was, I suspected, the same thing.