Now, we are always warned against egotism as something more unforgivable, more unpopularising than vulgar sin. Yet everyone is a mass of egotism. They must be if they are to remain perpendicular. Henry Beauchamp later explained this to me. He says that little Jimmy Dripping is a much more important person to little Jimmy Dripping than the Prince of Wales is. If this were not so he says that the end of little Jimmy Dripping would soon be mud; that each fellow’s self-importance is the only thing that keeps him going. Well then, why make such an unholy fuss about egotism?

Ma despised egotism because she had none herself and happened by an accident to be perfect. Pa and I seemed to have whips and whips, but of the wrong kind. The best kind, the most profitable is like the hippo’s epidermis. Another word for it is hide—HIDE. It works so that you think your own performance of sin or stupidity is quite all right, and only the other fellow’s all quite wrong. Pa said that that kind of egotism was a magnificent battering ram for worldly success, but to have it you must be born without a sense of humour and without the ability to see yourself as others see you. I was beginning to suspect that a sense of humour was more profitable to the other fellow than to the owner.

The business of egotism needs to be regulated by give-and-take in real life or there would be general obstruction of all conversation and social intercourse, but that does not apply to an autobiography, at least not in conjunction with logic. The fact of an autobiography is in itself an egotism. People perpetrate autobiographies for the sole purpose of airing their own exploits. If they go off the track of displaying the writer they likewise cease to be autobiographies. Such documents are usually mawkishly egotistical instead of frankly so because they attempt the scientific impossibility of being unegotistical. Too, in autobiographies, the hero of the narrative tries to deprecate his goodness, while at the same time he often endeavours to depict himself as a saint worthy of wings. If he has a penny-dreadful parent he nevertheless paints himself as adoring him (or her) and by honouring one or both is a contestant for the doubtful prize of long life, which the bible promises people for enduring their immediate progenitors in any circumstances. (And I never could see in strict logic how that works.)

I have examined all available autobiographies since then but not one have I found by woman or man, scientist or simpleton, which did not assume the same pose. So little greatness did I find in the lives of the great as related by themselves that for a time I was diverted from the idea of becoming great myself by the notion of constructing a fictitious autobiography to make hay of the pious affectations of printed autobiographies as I know them.

Who has not read an autobiography beginning thus: “At the risk of being egotistical I must admit,” etc. I determined to flout these pretences with an imitation autobiography that would wade in without apology or fear, biffing convention on the nose.