500 Words.

Graham Greene famously wrote a minimum of 500 words a day, mostly,or so I have read, before any notable amount of alcohol was consumed or love affair begun or ended. It was a self imposed regimen that he held to throughout his life and did not vary due to project, location, war, economic dislocation, travels, residency or any life condition that an educated man of Greene's catholic taste, Socialist views and intellectual abilities encountered. This regimen was held to throughout Greene's prolific career despite suffering through the crashing swings particular to the bi-polar disorder that shadowed his fully lived life The constant demon that clouded a brilliant career and long life. The brilliance of Greene is his use of that cloud  to give depth to the palette of colors that are his best works.

It seems a small task for an author of Greene's abilities to write 500 words daily especially if under contract or when a seed of an idea has germinated and taken root.  Wouldn't it simply be a matter of taking pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to percolate along a thought, develop a line or theme into a full sailed essay, story or entertainment.  So it would seem and so I thought when I first became a follower of Greene's works as a recently graduated University man.

Set free daily from an intellect killing position as a very junior Clerk in a Filipino government owned Commercial Bank for 60 minutes, usually with a brown bag lunch and no chums to pass the hour with, I found the business district of my hometown far from the mysterious one described by Hammett or the raw amusing one described by Twain but an utterly cold boring place indifferent to the individual. It was not  the place of urbanity merrily described in the Thin Man.   In fact the place was filled or so it seemed, with boars of every stripe.  People referred to by me as "those people".  Those people being the barbarians otherwise called auslanders, outsiders who simply didn't get it.  I was sure that meant suburban commuters or tourists. I'd argue that really it meant just about anyone whose grandparents hadn't been resident in the city when it shook and burnt down in 1906.  They were to be engaged with only in business and rarely if ever outside of it.   I'm also certain that to those well heeled business men, the ones from every corner of the world,  the power brokers that ran the district and owned much of the region,  it meant recently graduated University men with low paying jobs who had an hour to kill.
It was a deuce of a chore to keep the hour filled with needed  distraction and be back within the hour. For a  social young man with a large family nearby as well as a robust social network, it was a painfully boring and lonely daily hour.  Luckily one of my noontime strolls was past the windows of the El Dorado Bookstore.

The now long gone historic El Dorado Bookstore on Market Street had more Penguin authors than my University's bookstore and offered an intellectual respite from the drudgery of daily work. My own perch in this lifeboat of culture in the ocean of banal commercial drones were the shelves filled with Greene. My first lunch date with my talented older friend was "the Third Man".  It was the start of the affair.  An affair that I kept alive by weekly visits and bi-monthly purchases timed around my paydays of my new friends works.  I was a thirty man offered a cool glass of fresh water. I drank it gratefully.

I anticipated lunch hours now and found more than a few less traveled quiet places away from the hustle of businessmen hustling each other where I could continue my silent conversation with my friend. I was engaged by everything he wrote. I did struggle with friend Graham's early works, the English seemed far too Ox-Bridge pretentious, often reading as school boy stilted rather than subtle language I'd fallen in love with. Well developed idea's came across as pompous little England burdened by Empire,  rather than witty entertainments and suspense's of his middle-period.  Greene's earliest works, written when he was my age 60 year's before, were disliked by me unknowingly at the time as being far too pretentious for someone our age.  Our friendship had become such that I simply didn't like my new friend's attitude and rushed through those few hours not merrily spent by reading another title in his collective work.  The boar that was the narrator's voice  had a well spoken yet awful in being self important. That voice in those earlier works was a disquieting voice, a mid 20 something burdened with having to rub shoulders with those outsiders from beyond the Pale who simply didn't get it. The burden of youth is learning adaptive skilks in dealing with people who simply don't get it.  The magic of friend Graham is that like a merry great Uncle the difference of 65 years and thousands of miles disappeared so that the young friend Graham  honestly annoyed his young friend Reader.  The young Master that Greene is in Travels without Maps is not as nuanced as the Master Greene in Brighton Rock but the sureness of his strokes are clear in both works and the style, the mark of him is there bountifully in each.

That mastery, part education, experience and a regimen of discipline.  The discipline of writing 500 words daily. Daily. The clarity of tone, an assured masculine voice, a hallmarkof friend Graham was honed by the the mastery of creating art in 500 words daily over decades.  I'm profoundly grateful that he did.