When the last t of your novel has been piously crossed, you experience a major bliss of authorship: the interval of intellectual torpor that succeeds the creative act. Months later, in a new mood, perhaps in a different land, you reread your story which has, in the interval, gone to school, graduated, and come home a book—with a jacket and a price. The experience is not unlike playing for the first time a piano transcription of a familiar symphony. It sounds thin; you miss a dozen orchestral colours, despite the exciting gain in clarity and the alien timbre.
Suddenly the thought comes to you: but the public may not suspect that it is symphonic! For them it will be a sonata—and an unwieldy one. And a major chagrin of authorship is that you can't sit on the arm of your reader's chair and score in for him the parts between the lines. In the heat of writing you had taken it for granted that he was hearing what you heard, for was he not merely thousands of yous! He, you assumed, knew your people beforehand; that they were "born on Sunday, christened on Monday, married on Tuesday" and so on to the Saturday burial, because long before your day writers of fiction had recorded all the possible externals. But in this new mood, as you read impersonally what you had so personally set down, you are no longer the composer, and you see how absurd it was to think of the public as thousands of yous, when it is only a thousandth of you, just as you are a thousandth of it.
Whereupon another revelation comes to you: your story is "modern." That is only another way of saying that it has tacitly eliminated factors common to all the novels you had been brought up on—novels you had assumed your readers had been brought up on. Readers who have read many novels may catch factors in your story that you failed to "cancel out," and they will think you old-fashioned. Readers who have read few novels may not recognize your two-thirds as their four-sixths! They may consequently doubt your final product and think you over-modern. Readers who have read no novels to speak of may think you mad and your hero madder. They may not even be aware that "heroes" were cancelled out years ago and that death is not necessarily a tragedy. They may see darkness where you saw dawn, futility where you saw hope, despair where you saw transfiguration. And you can't hum in for them the subsidiary voices; the best you can do is to attempt a preface to the new edition, and you abhor prefaces.
New York, 1924.