With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed, he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog. It is the consciousness of the failure that makes the revision seem endless… the author is trying in vain to adapt the story to his changed personality, as though it were something he had begun in childhood and was finishing now in old age. There are moments of despair when he begins perhaps the fifth revision of Part One, and he sees the multitude of the new corrections. How can he help feeling, 'This will never end. I shall never get this passage right.'? What he ought to be saying is, 'I shall never again be the same man I was when I wrote this months and months ago.' No wonder that under these conditions a novelist often makes a bad husband or an unstable lover. There is something in his character of the actor who continues to play Othello when he is off the stage, but he is an actor who has lived far too many parts during far too many long runs. He is encrusted with characters.
Ways of Escape (1980)
Use the link below to read about the life and work of British novelist GRAHAM GREENE (1904–1991):
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