Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [183]
“The great advantage of being a writer,” Greene told me, staring at Randolph as if he were an animal on display in the zoo, “is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see, every scrap—even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”
His voice dropped to a husky, confidential whisper. “Even Randolph,” he added. “How fortunate for Pamela that she’s never been faithful to him.” He turned toward me with a schoolmasterly look. “There’s always something a writer can use, later on. Nothing is wasted.” (He took his own advice, too—the cruise on Alex’s yacht he turned into a masterful piece of ironic comedy in Loser Takes All.)
I told him that I thought Pamela Churchill was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen—a thought that had occurred, as I was to discover, to a lot of men already.
Graham stared at her. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “one can see that it would be possible for a young man to think that. She looks rather like an expensive tart, and there’s a certain attraction to that. But the main thing is to have a lot of women, then you’ll discover that looks aren’t even the half of it.”
I don’t remember what my ambitions had been before that moment, but I decided on the spot that I wanted to be a writer. Any lingering doubts I might have had were dispelled the next morning, when Graham allowed me to observe at a distance the writer at work. An early riser, he appeared on deck fully dressed at first light, placed himself in the shade of an awning, and took from his pocket a small black leather pocket notebook, of the kind sold in expensive English stationery shops, and a black fountain pen, the top of which he unscrewed carefully. Slowly, word by word, without crossing out anything, and in neat, square handwriting, the letters so tiny and cramped that it looked like an attempt to write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, he wrote over the next hour or so exactly five hundred words.
He counted each word according to some system of his own, and when he reached exactly five hundred, he stopped, screwed the cap back on his pen tightly, stood up, and stretched. “That’s it, then,” he said. “Shall we have breakfast?”
I was later to discover that Graham’s self-discipline was such that he stopped at five hundred words even if that left him in the middle of a sentence—it was as if he brought to writing the skill of a watchmaker or a miniaturist, or perhaps it was that in a life full of moral uncertainties and confusion, Graham simply needed one area in which the rules, even though they were self-imposed, were absolute. Whatever else was going on, his writing, like a daily religious devotional, was at once sacred and completely in his control. Once the daily penance of five hundred words was achieved, he put the notebook away and did not think about it until the next morning. It seemed to me then the ideal way to live, far better than my father’s, which required him to work from dawn until late at night at the studio—and he brought his work home with him as well.
Graham and I breakfasted together companionably at a small café at the far end of the port of Antibes not far from where he would later have a small, spare apartment, almost monastic in its simplicity. From time to time, he would look suspiciously at people who passed us by, or sat down nearby for coffee and a croissant. Spies and informers were on his mind at the time. Much to his annoyance, he had recently been denied a visa to enter the United States, he informed me, because the FBI had revealed the fact that he’d joined the Communist Party briefly while he was an Oxford undergraduate. That he had done so as a student prank cut no ice with the U.S. government. The FBI, he said, had a dossier on him, and were now adding to