An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely. If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, any conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel. Failure too is a kind of death: the furniture sold, the drawers emptied, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane to take one to a less expensive destination. In another sense too a book like this can only be ‘a sort of life,’ for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women. Indeed, though I have been fortunate in the number of my friends, I can remember no anecdotes of the famous or the notorious - the only stories which I faintly remember are the stories I have written.

And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity. We cannot love others, so the theologians teach, unless in some degree we can love ourselves, and curiosity begins at home.

There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defense. ‘Look how absurd I was when I was young’ forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them, without irony.