ODD TYPE
WRITERS
ALSO BY CELIA BLUE JOHNSON
Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway:
Stories of the Inspiration Behind Great Works of Literature
100 Great Poems for Girls (editor)
100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits (editor with Leslie Pockell)
ODD TYPE
WRITERS
From Joyce and Dickens
to Wharton and Welty,
the Obsessive Habits
and Quirky Techniques
of Great Authors
Celia Blue Johnson
A PERIGEE BOOK
A PERIGEE BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2013 by Celia Blue Johnson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Celia Blue.
Odd type writers : from Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the obsessive habits
and quirky techniques of great authors / Celia Blue Johnson.
pages cm
“A Perigee book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-62398-5
1. Authorship—Miscellanea. 2. Authorship—Anecdotes. I. Title.
PN165.J64 2013
808’02—dc23 2013002340
First edition: June 2013
Text design by Laura K. Corless
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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FOR IAN
Contents
Introduction
Rotten Ideas: Friedrich Schiller
The Nightlife
By the Cup: Honoré de Balzac
Drinks with Inks
Feeling Blue: Alexandre Dumas, père
The Numbers Game
House Arrest: Victor Hugo
Taking It in Stride
A Mysterious Tail: Edgar Allan Poe
Scrolling
The Traveling Desk: Charles Dickens
Quilled Muses
Paper Topography: Edith Wharton
Bright-Eyed
The Cork Shield: Marcel Proust
Flea Circus: Colette
Paws Between the Pages
Traffic Jamming: Gertrude Stein
On the Move
Tunneling by the Thousands: Jack London
In the Shadow of Masters
A Writer’s Easel: Virginia Woolf
Board Writing
The Full Spectrum
Crayon, Scissors, and Paste: James Joyce
Cigarettes, Twins, and the Evil Eye
Leafing Through the Pages: D. H. Lawrence
When in Doubt…
Puzzling Assembly: Vladimir Nabokov
Bath Time
Outstanding Prose: Ernest Hemingway
Sound Writing: John Steinbeck
Speak Up
Pin It Down: Eudora Welty
Point of View
Don’t Get Up: Truman Capote
Off the Recorder
Early to Write: Flannery O’Connor
Sweet Teeth
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
Introduction
The first time I visited Chumley’s,* I got lost on the way. It was early evening, and it had been snowing all afternoon. By the time I emerged from the Christopher Street subway stop, the sidewalks were covered in a thick layer of white. Streetlights and neon signs illuminated falling snowflakes. Pedestrians strolled and strode, some slipping on patches of slick ground. I turned onto one of the winding streets that led into the heart of Manhattan’s West Village, and suddenly the bustle of Seventh Avenue disappeared. It was still and quiet. I could hear my own muffled footsteps as I trudged through the snow.
Unlike much of Manhattan, the streets in the West Village have no apparent order. They form a confusing maze for anyone who, like me, isn’t familiar with the area. I accordingly took several wrong turns before finally landing on Bedford Street. Then I must have walked past Chumley’s three or four times before I spotted the numbers on the door. The trouble is that the building looked like every other charming brick home in the area. But, then again, that was the point. As a speakeasy during Prohibition, Chumley’s was supposed to blend in. Later, when the ban on alcohol was lifted, the owner of the establishment decided to stick with a nondescript façade.
There was no mistaking the longtime literary hub once I walked inside. People crowded in the entryway, waiting for spots to open up. Waiters bobbed and weaved between tables, carrying pints of beer and hearty fare. Lively conversations, cackles, clinking glasses, and upbeat music all blended into a constant roar. Between the body heat and the flames jumping in an open fireplace, the restaurant was nice and toasty. This was a world apart from the cold, sleepy street beyond the front door.
The walls were filled with photographs of writers who had frequented Chumley’s over the years. Hundreds of book covers wound through the pub below the portraits. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Edna St. Vincent Millay are just a few of the literary legends who sat at the wooden tables and imbibed. The familiar faces in the black-and-white photos smiled mischievously or stared off into the distance. They appeared to be only briefly frozen in time. It was as though they might, at any moment, chime in on a joke or a serious discussion. Imagine catching a witty retort from James Thurber or Dorothy Parker!
Those people are long gone, but the shadows of their lives dip back to this one place. When my name was called and I slid into a booth, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. Voices ebbed and flowed around me. I imagined that a deep laugh burst from Ernest Hemingway rather than a stranger at the next table. From across the room, I could make out an excited voice, talking too rapidly for me to catch exactly what was said. That, I thought, could have been Jack Kerouac. Of course, there’s no way to re-create the banter between the brilliant minds who crowded into Chumley’s. And yet, sitting there, it crossed my mind that this is about as close as it gets.
Walking into a legendary writer’s home has been an altogether different experience for me. There tends to be a hallowed hush within the walls. Important rooms are roped off, understandably to preserve the space. One can peer into an author’s study, but not sit in the same spot where she or he wrote. Geographically, it’s a small difference, standing inside or outside a room. But it’s significant. From the doorway, I f
ind it difficult to conjure anything more than a one-dimensional picture of a writer sitting at a desk. In Chumley’s it felt as though I had been transported to another time. As a literary enthusiast, I seek that immediacy and intimacy. In part, that’s why I wrote this book. I wanted to animate those eerily quiet rooms where famous people composed their groundbreaking works.
If you’re a bookworm, then it’s likely you’ve curled up with a novel by at least one of the authors featured in Odd Type Writers. After opening to page one, hours may have slipped by before you thought to look up. That power to mesmerize has an intangible, almost magical quality, one I wouldn’t dare to try and meddle with by attempting to define it. It was never my goal as I wrote this book to discover what made literary geniuses tick. The nuances of any mind are impossible to pinpoint.
In Odd Type Writers, I simply wanted to envision a study as it was when a writer was in it. I wanted to know: typewriter, pencil, or pen? Desk chair, armchair, or couch? Was the furniture selection based on practical or sentimental reasons? Perhaps a cat purred nearby. Maybe a window was propped open so fresh air could wash into the room. I certainly didn’t expect to find more than small distinctions that set one writer apart from another. I had no idea that I was about to venture into such strange literary territory.
It turns out that writers are a very quirky bunch. As I pored over books and clicked from one website to the next, I stumbled across surprisingly odd facts about renowned authors and their work habits. I was shocked to discover that Friedrich Schiller dipped his feet in cold water to help him stay awake. I found it hard to believe that James Joyce wrote in crayon on pieces of cardboard, and yet that’s how he composed Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. When I discovered that Colette picked fleas from her pets before picking up her pen, I almost dropped my book. These techniques seemed more outlandish than the most far-fetched fiction.
I also discovered unusually obsessive behavior. There were authors who clung to habits that, at first glance, seemed standard. For example, Flannery O’Connor fixed a particular time to write. Jack London set a daily quota of words. It was their steadfast adherence to these practices that set them apart from the norm. O’Connor woke up early to work every morning, even on weekends, without allocating any time off. London wrote a thousand words a day, every day, throughout his entire career. To me, this spirited obsession was just as singular as more immediately shocking practices.
I collected the most interesting quirks and obsessions that I came across, and wrote about them in this book. Many of these oddities are listed anecdotally in articles, but I strove to describe each one in a fuller scope. In each essay about a specific author, I explored the peculiar work habits within the context of his or her career. I wanted to know when quirks originated, how long they lasted, and whether one habit was exchanged for another. I wanted to rustle up authors’ descriptions of their own quirks, whether they were discussed in interviews, mentioned in letters, or referred to in diary entries.
I did not follow a straight line from start to finish as I put together this book. I took detours, stumbling upon one fact that led to a related fact that led to a different author and an altogether different fact. These offshoots inspired me to write the short miscellaneous compilations you’ll find throughout the book. These compilation essays pull together disparate authors beneath the umbrella of a quirk they all shared.
In conducting research for Odd Type Writers, I sifted through letters, memoirs, articles, and biographies. First-and secondhand accounts revealed fascinating details about writers’ habits. Some authors described their work process in letters or conversations. Others were more tight-lipped about their methods. In those cases, I relied on accounts from friends, family members, and colleagues.
One must always keep in mind that these writers and the people around them may have, at some point, embellished the facts. Quirks are great fodder for gossip and can morph into gross exaggeration when passed from one person to the next. There’s also no way to escape self-mythologizing, particularly when dealing with some of the greatest storytellers that ever lived. Yet even when authors stretch the truth, they reveal something about themselves, whether it is the desire to project a certain image or the need to shy away from one. So I proceeded cautiously as I assembled my research, referencing several sources and noting when one account contradicted another.
In Odd Type Writers, you will discover a wide variety of peculiar habits that were adopted by great writers. Edgar Allan Poe balanced a cat on his shoulder while he wrote. Agatha Christie munched on apples in her bathtub while concocting murder plots. Victor Hugo shut himself inside and wore nothing but a long, gray, knitted shawl when he was on a tight deadline. Friedrich Schiller filled his desk drawer with rotten apples, relying on the pungent smell to spark his creativity. You could adopt one of these practices or, more ambitiously, combine several of them, and chances are you still wouldn’t invoke genius. These tales don’t hold a secret formula for writing a great novel. Rather, the authors in this book prove that the path to great literature is paved with one’s own eccentricities rather than someone else’s.
Virginia Woolf once wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction.” I’ve read Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” in which this line appears, many times. But until I embarked on this literary expedition, I didn’t fully realize the significance of a room. Truly a writer needs space. A room is far more than four walls, a ceiling, and a door. It’s is a place where an author can embrace, and even harness, her or his idiosyncrasies. In the solitude of a room, a writer’s creativity manifests not only on the page, but also in unique work habits.
Odd Type Writers leads you through the places where famous authors worked. Many of them contain strange props, like rotten apples, ashtrays with no more than three cigarettes, and bowls of ice cream. You’ll discover that some writers clung to a specific location, a place they could adapt to fit their needs. For other writers, a room was more of a metaphor, something to be carried from one location to the next, or even over a threshold and into the wilderness. In each space, you’ll have a chance to witness an extraordinary writer at work. I’m sure you’ll find that they are an odd, courageous lot. These writers boldly set stories to paper in unique and surprising ways, whether that meant scrawling in crayon, composing in purple ink, or speaking into a Dictaphone.
* Unfortunately, Chumley’s closed after suffering structural damage in 2007. Literary fans still eagerly await the reopening of this historic hot spot.
Rotten Ideas
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
1759–1805
An air beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann
According to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he and Friedrich Schiller were direct opposites, right down to their writing habits. He reminisced about their differences with biographer Johann Peter Eckermann a couple of decades after Schiller’s death. Goethe described a particularly strange incident that reflected how unalike they were. He had dropped by Schiller’s home and, after finding that his friend was out, decided to wait for him to return. Rather than wasting a few spare moments, the productive poet sat down at Schiller’s desk to jot down a few notes. Then a peculiar stench prompted Goethe to pause. Somehow, an oppressive odor had infiltrated the room.
Goethe followed the odor to its origin, which was actually right by where he sat. It was emanating from a drawer in Schiller’s desk. Goethe leaned down, opened the drawer, and found a pile of rotten apples. The smell was so overpowering that he became light-headed. He walked to the window and breathed in a few good doses of fresh air. Goethe was naturally curious about the trove of trash, though Schiller’s wife, Charlotte, could only offer the strange truth: Schiller had deliberately let the apples spoil. The aroma, somehow, inspired him, and according to his spouse, he “could not live or work without it.”
Over the years, Schiller and Goethe had developed
a remarkably close literary relationship. They conversed and corresponded about all sorts of topics, inspired each other, and even collaborated on some works. However, when they first met, Schiller was convinced that they’d never develop a solid rapport. This encounter took place in September 1788. They’d both been invited to attend a party hosted by the Lengefeld family. Schiller was particularly excited about the gathering, because Goethe was also on the guest list. But as the event wore on, Schiller realized that Goethe was only interested in chatting about his recent travels in Italy. Schiller was disappointed at the lack of in-depth conversation. He described the lackluster encounter in a letter to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner, noting, “I doubt whether we shall ever approach very near each other.” But six years later, the two men met again, this time to discuss Schiller’s new journal, The Hours. Their conversation during the second meeting was far more animated. And, eventually, their bond was so tight that Goethe observed, “One [of us] really could not live without the other.”
Since he was a good friend, Goethe was welcome to stop by Schiller’s home for an impromptu visit, as he did in the rotten apple incident. However, surprise guests who were less familiar with Schiller weren’t as likely to receive a warm welcome. Schiller hated interruptions, particularly when he was hard at work. Goethe observed, “On these occasions he could now and then be very impatient, and sometimes even rude.” If a visitor arrived unexpectedly, Schiller did not mask his frustration. His obvious annoyance would prompt a speedy end to the proceedings.
Schiller often wrote at night to ensure that no one descended on his doorstep while his pen flew. He’d work for hours while the stars were up and potential visitors were fast asleep. Schiller’s body protested the night shift with inevitable drowsiness, but pangs of fatigue were no match for the writer. He sipped on strong coffee throughout the night to stay awake. Sometimes, if he was extremely tired, more extreme action was necessary. On these occasions, Schiller would plunge his feet into a tub of cold water to avoid falling asleep at his desk.
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