William Olaf Stapledon

Odd John William Olaf Stapledon

WHEN I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. "My dear man!" he said, "But of course it was inevitable." The word "man" on John's lips was often equivalent to "fool.""Well," I protested, "a cat may look at a king."He replied, "Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?"This from a queer child to a full-grown man. John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his followers died. Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other of the six Great Powers, I shall tell the world all that I can remember.