London planned each story carefully before transcribing it onto the page. “Have at least learned to compose first, to the very conclusion, before touching pen to paper,” he wrote to his longtime friend Cloudesley Johns. This method involved few revisions, which enabled London to barrel forward. Yoshimatsu Nakata, London’s servant, recalled that the author used “a blunt fountain pen with a wire tube at the end—a stylograph.” A regular fountain pen would have slowed London down; with this tool he didn’t have to worry about the way the nib faced. With London’s remarkable dedication to high-volume productivity, it’s no wonder he completed more than fifty books in his brief lifetime.
London was described as the “Kipling of the Klondike.” The accolade serves as a fitting end point for the struggling author who sat copying out his hero’s prose. And, to add to the glory, Kipling himself became a fan of London’s work. Scooping through the pages with a tireless hand, London proved his declarations about hard work as a twenty-something. All of that digging clearly worked!
In the Shadow of Masters
Many great writers developed their voices, in part, by tracing the words of their favorite predecessors. While Jack London handwrote Rudyard Kipling’s stories, Ray Bradbury hammered out pieces by authors he admired on a typewriter to help perfect his own prose. In moments of utmost despair, Bradbury dropped entire paragraphs by Tom Wolfe into his drafts. “Because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated!” he proclaimed in an interview for the Paris Review. As a teen, Joan Didion learned to type while copying out Ernest Hemingway’s work. She was particularly impressed by his “perfect sentences.”
Rewriting a favorite novel is one way to absorb the style of a literary master. Other writers chose to read a particular book every day before they set to work. The process of reading helped each of these authors warm up before setting pen to paper. French author Stendhal read a government text every day before composing his novel The Charterhouse of Parma. In a letter to Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal wrote, “In order to acquire the correct tone I read every morning two or three pages of the Civil Code.” Somerset Maugham developed a ritual of reading Voltaire’s Candide before diving into a new novel. “So that I may have in the back of my mind the touchstone of that lucidity, grace and wit,” he noted.
Willa Cather read the Bible before she wrote. According to Thornton Wilder, Cather wanted “to get in touch with fine prose.” He noted that she regretted choosing an archaic text, but the habit had already stuck. Maya Angelou also found inspiration in the Bible, which she kept nearby when she worked. When asked why she used the Bible, Angelou responded, “For melody. For content also. I’m working at trying to be a Christian and that’s serious business.”
A Writer’s Easel
VIRGINIA WOOLF
1882–1941
She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?
—Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf, in her twenties, wrote every morning for two and a half hours. Her desk was three and a half feet tall, with a top that could be angled up so she could view her work up close or at a distance. According to her nephew Quentin Bell, Woolf stood at this desk so that her sister, Vanessa, would not outdo her. Vanessa was an artist who painted while standing. Bell observed, “This led Virginia to feel that her own pursuit might appear less arduous than that of her sister unless she set matters on a footing of equality.” Though she may have developed the habit out of sibling rivalry, she stuck with it. For years, the tall, striking author arrived at her literary easel and wrote.
In 1917 Woolf and her husband, Leonard, founded a small publishing house called Hogarth Press. Woolf was deeply involved with the fledgling company, but she did not give up writing. Every morning, promptly at 9 a.m., Woolf strode past the printing press, which sat in the front room of their basement. She walked straight into the storage room, which was also her writing space. The room was located just beyond the center of operations of the little publishing company, at the back of the house.
By this time, Woolf had transitioned from standing to sitting while she worked. Every morning she would settle into a cozy old armchair, with her writing materials in hand. She used a piece of thin plywood as a writing surface. Hogarth Press was also Woolf’s publisher, which meant that her manuscripts made an exceptionally short journey from point of origin to print. The finished product landed right back in the storage room, shelved alongside books and galleys by other writers, before it was sent out to readers and reviewers.
Years later, Woolf was still using a writing board. In a diary entry from January 1933, she wrote, “I am so delighted with my own ingenuity.” A simple alteration promised to significantly improve her writing process. She had attached a tray for pens and ink to her writing board. Virginia was thrilled at the prospect of having plenty of writing materials nearby. That way, she would no longer risk losing a flash of inspiration in the brief time it took to get up and find the appropriate tools.
Meanwhile, Woolf’s admiration of her sister’s visual talent did not diminish over time. Vanessa’s paintings were used for Woolf’s book covers and, sometimes, interiors. In a letter to her sister, Woolf praised her execution of the cover for Kew Gardens. She wrote, “I think the book will be a great success—owing to you; and my vision comes out much as I had it.”
Woolf, in her own way, painted her own pages of prose. Rather than settling for standard black ink, she filled her pens with purples, greens, and blues. Purple, her favorite color ink, can be found in letters, diary entries, manuscript drafts, and page proofs. When Woolf was twenty-five, she had a book printed in purple ink and bound in the same color leather. The novel, Friendship’s Gallery, was a gift for her friend Violet Dickinson. Woolf’s love letters to Vita Sackville-West were also in purple. Most of Mrs. Dalloway, her most famous work, was composed in purple, too. In October 1938, Woolf wrote in her diary about the sky, which, like so many of her pages, had been painted in a purple hue. She wrote, “A violent storm—purple ink clouds—dissolving like blots of ink in water.”
Board Writing
Roald Dahl, like Virginia Woolf, used a writing board while sitting in an armchair. Dahl’s neighbor Claud Taylor handcrafted the board, repurposing billiard-table material for a soft surface. With a Dixon Ticonderoga pencil in hand and a yellow legal pad on the green board, Dahl was ready to write.
Robert Frost sat in a chair with a large board resting on the arms. The board was propped up by a smaller one, so that it sat at a slight incline. Apparently just about any surface except a table would work for Frost. In an interview for the Paris Review, he proclaimed, “I use all sorts of things. Write on the sole of my shoe.”
The Full Spectrum
It’s not surprising that many great writers, like Virginia Woolf, were very particular about the ink they used. Though ideas spark in the mind, the right tools can facilitate a writer’s creativity. Lewis Carroll shared two quirks with Woolf. He preferred to compose his work while standing at a tall desk and he used purple ink. The color choice, for Carroll, had been made for him, and not for literary purposes. He taught mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford. Beginning in 1870, the teachers were expected to use purple ink on their students’ work. Carroll began using the color to pen his fiction, too.
Langston Hughes wrote many letters to Alice Walker. And, she noted, “to my delight he always used bright-green ink!” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “For my ink I demand the blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as I once was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink.” He could not stand any variation in the color of his ink. It had to be dark black.
In one case, an author attempted to use several colors in the spectrum. William Faulkner knew that the Benjy sections in The Sound and the Fury were difficult to follow. So when he met his editor at a speakeasy in New York, Faulkner proposed a solution: They could use a colored ink! A variety of colors woul
d represent the different time periods in Benjy’s narrative. The costs, however, would have been astronomical, and the idea was quickly dismissed. Faulkner lamented, “I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink.” Bennett Cerf planned a limited color edition of the book, but it was never published. In 2012, eighty-three years after The Sound and the Fury was first published, Faulkner’s wish was finally granted. The Folio Society released a special edition with fourteen different colors of ink.
Crayon, Scissors, and Paste
JAMES JOYCE
1882–1941
It is a genuine example of the art of mosaic. I have seen the drafts.
—Valery Larbaud, on Joyce’s Ulysses
James Joyce lived in Trieste from his mid-twenties to his early thirties. When he was twenty-nine, he recruited his sister Eileen to move from Dublin and help watch over his two young children. Eileen recalled Joyce’s unique habits during her time with him. At night, he would often retreat to bed, though not to sleep. The Irish native would lie on his stomach, armed with a large blue pencil, and write. The most peculiar detail, however, was his nocturnal uniform. Before he began, Joyce donned a white coat. At first glance, this may have seemed like pure eccentricity, but it was a practical choice. Eileen noted, “He always wrote with a white coat on—it gave a kind of white light.” Joyce’s sight was failing. His coat served as a beacon amid blurry surroundings, presumably reflecting extra light onto the paper. The resourceful author established these habits while composing his debut novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyce’s eye problems began in childhood with myopia. But it wasn’t until his twenties that his sight took a severe downward turn. When he was twenty-five, Joyce developed rheumatic fever and, along with it, a painful eye disease called iritis. As the years progressed, he was afflicted with a slew of illnesses that affected his eyes, including glaucoma, cataracts, and conjunctivitis. In 1917, Joyce underwent his first eye surgery. By 1930, there had been twenty-four more operations, and none restored his sight.
Joyce struggled to read and write with poor vision, and was often nearly completely blind. French critic Louis Gillet wrote, “I still see him, in order to decipher a text, placing the paper sideways and bringing it into the narrow angle where a ray of his ruined sight still subsisted.” Joyce forged his way with innovative tools, like the white coat, and sheer determination. He described epic work sessions on Ulysses to his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver: “I write and revise and correct with one or two eyes about twelve hours a day I should say, stopping for intervals of five minutes or so when I can’t see any more.”
A typewriter might have lightened Joyce’s workload, but he flatly rejected the idea. The machine would have inevitably sped up his writing, and he preferred to compose slowly and meticulously. Joyce’s close friend Frank Budgen recalled discussing typewriters with the author in Zurich. Budgen had observed that Joyce was far less prolific than some of his peers. Joyce countered, “But how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what’s the use? It isn’t worth doing.” He had been toiling on Ulysses line by line, word by word. After a productive day Joyce reported to Budgen that he had completed two sentences. He explained, “What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.” Joyce was committed to writing at his own pace and in his own hand, directly on the page, which led to an increasingly difficult predicament as his sight worsened.
One of Joyce’s greatest obstacles was frustratingly simple and nearly impossible to overcome: He needed to see the writing on the page. As Joyce’s sight deteriorated, the thick lenses in his glasses were not strong enough for the task. He used two pairs of glasses and a magnifying glass to review page proofs of Ulysses. Three magnifying glasses were necessary for Finnegans Wake proofs.
In fact, to compose this final book, Joyce magnified the entire production. His most notoriously complex novel unfolded in giant script. In a letter, Joyce informed Weaver that he finished a passage of Finnegans Wake on a large piece of paper with a charcoal pencil that often broke. He added, “I have now covered various large sheets in a handwriting resembling that of the late Napoléon Bonaparte when irritated by reverses.” It seems that crayons were more resilient tools. Padraic Colum, a fellow Irish author, recalled, “The actual writing of the text was done by Joyce on long strips of paper—sometimes cardboard—with different colored crayons.” Joyce used a variety of colors to compose and revise the work, from red and orange to green and blue.
Despite the physical stress of writing, Joyce obsessively revised his work, well into final proof stages, frustrating his printers to no end. He was equally compulsive when it came to jotting down ideas, rarely missing an opportunity to snatch up something that he might later slip into the text. While working on Ulysses, Joyce kept pieces of paper in his waistcoat pocket. “At intervals, alone or in conversation, seated or walking, one of those tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it at lightning speed,” recalled Budgen. Joyce found endless amusement in the world around him. He accumulated a broad array of information, from scientific and historic facts to foreign-language puns. He kept the notes in orange envelopes, transferring them later into notebooks or onto sheets of paper.
It was impossible for Joyce to single-handedly conduct the extensive research in Paris needed for Finnegans Wake. His sight was too poor to scour books and publications for words and facts. But he was not afraid to delegate. Joyce’s wife, Nora, remarked, “If God Almighty came down to earth, you’d have a job for him.” He recruited amanuenses and research assistants, many of whom were family and friends. Colum, who was one of his charges, recalled, “He did not want any of us to brief him, for example, on astronomy or finance. But the name of a star or a term in finance—‘sterling,’ say—would give him what he needed.”
Joyce was, in his words, “a scissors and paste man.” He snipped words and phrases from his surroundings—whether it meant delving into a book or simply observing the world around him—and he distributed them into Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s notebooks stored these concepts, and he used colored pencils and crayons to keep track of what was transferred into manuscripts. Valery Larbaud wrote about Joyce’s Ulysses notebooks: “It makes one think of the boxes of little coloured cubes of the mosaic workers.”
Joyce had no standard approach. A color might represent a section of a book on one notebook page, and elsewhere, it might indicate the date it was transferred. Joyce’s notebook pages are thus stunning and elusive, a medley of color impossible to precisely unravel or trace.
Though his sight paled, Joyce blazed a bright and colorful path—with crayons, pencils, and charcoal—into print. And whether it meant a special coat or sprawling handwriting, the determined author found every way he could to see the page.
Cigarettes, Twins, and the Evil Eye
SUPERSTITION AT THE WRITER’S DESK
After four years of working on Finnegans Wake, James Joyce was exhausted, and it dawned on him that another writer could finish his book. “It would be a great load off my mind,” he confessed to Harriet Shaw Weaver. And he had found an ideal candidate: a Dubliner named James Stephens. He approached Stephens with this idea, and the latter agreed to step in, but only if necessary.
Joyce approved of Stephens’s work, but he also liked that they shared the same first name. Additionally, Stephens was one letter away from Stephen, Joyce’s protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Another binding detail turned out to be false, but Joyce nonetheless believed it at the time. Joyce was under the impression that he and Stephens were born in the same hospital on February 2, 1882. Joyce’s superstitions seemed to have influenced his choice. Even Stephens pondered the issue: “Joyce loved me. Or did he? Or did he only love his birthday, and was I mere coincident to that?”
Joyce got as far as planning a byline for the coauthored book: It would be JJ&S (also, Joyce pointed out, an acronym for John Jameson and Son’s,
the whiskey distillery). However, Joyce ended up laboring through the book to its end. Meanwhile, he remained good friends with his delegated twin.
Many famous authors, like Joyce, followed superstitions with great zeal. Somerset Maugham had an ancient Moorish symbol inscribed onto the gatepost of his villa in the French Riviera. The emblem represents the hand of Fatima warding off the evil eye. It appeared throughout his home, on the fireplace, on cigarette cases, and even on matchboxes. It was printed on the spine, cover, or interior of each of Maugham’s books, beginning with his third novel, The Hero. Maugham picked up the symbol from his father, who stumbled upon it while traveling in Morocco. The writer used it for good luck and once reported to a visitor, “So far, it’s worked.”
Graham Greene had a peculiar obsession with numbers. When Greene visited Evelyn Waugh in the countryside, he would break from writing and spend long periods on the side of a road. Every now and then a car passed, and Greene would take note of the license plate number. In an interview for Harper’s Bazaar, Waugh recalled, “He could not write another word until a certain combination of numbers—I think it was 987, something like that—appeared to him by accident.”
In an interview for McCall’s, Truman Capote confessed, “I used to be fantastically superstitious, I mean to the point of mania.” Though he made up many of these superstitions, Capote found it difficult to abandon them. He wouldn’t begin or end a piece of work on a Friday. He had an aversion to the number 13. He’d trade hotel rooms or avoid making a call if the number 13 was somehow involved. At one point, he would even jump on his thirteenth step. Capote never let the number of cigarette butts in an ashtray exceed three (extra ones were placed in his coat pocket). He also refused to board a plane with more than one nun.
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