Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

  Kant’s biography is unusually devoid of external events. The philosopher lived in an isolated Prussian province for his entire life, rarely venturing outside the walls of his native Königsberg and never traveling even so far as the sea, only a few hours away. A lifelong bachelor, he taught the same courses at the local university for more than forty years. His was a life of ordered regularity—which later gave rise to a portrait of the philosopher as a sort of characterless automaton. As Heinrich Heine wrote:

  The history of Kant’s life is difficult to describe. For he neither had a life nor a history. He lived a mechanically ordered, almost abstract, bachelor life in a quiet out-of-the-way lane in Königsberg, an old city at the northeast border of Germany. I do not believe that the large clock of the Cathedral there completed its task with less passion and less regularity than its fellow citizen Immanuel Kant. Getting up, drinking coffee, writing, giving lectures, eating, taking a walk, everything had its set time, and the neighbors knew precisely that the time was 3:30 P.M. when Kant stepped outside his door with his gray coat and the Spanish stick in his hand.

  In actual fact, as Manfred Kuehn argues in his 2001 biography, Kant’s life was not quite as abstract and passionless as Heine and others have supposed. Kant loved to socialize, and he was a gifted conversationalist and a genial host. If he failed to live a more adventurous life, it was largely due to his health: the philosopher had a congenital skeletal defect that caused him to develop an abnormally small chest, which compressed his heart and lungs and contributed to a generally delicate constitution. In order to prolong his life with the condition—and in an effort to quell the mental anguish caused by his lifelong hypochondria—Kant adopted what he called “a certain uniformity in the way of living and in the matters about which I employ my mind.”

  As for the extreme fixity of this regimen, this did not develop until the philosopher reached his fortieth birthday, and then it was an expression of his unique views on human character. Character, for Kant, is a rationally chosen way of organizing one’s life, based on years of varied experience—indeed, he believed that one does not really develop a character until age forty. And at the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims—a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life. Alas, we do not have a written list of Kant’s personal maxims. But it is clear that he resolved to transform the “certain uniformity” of his lifestyle from a mere habit into a moral principle. Thus, before his fortieth birthday, Kant would sometimes stay out until midnight playing cards; after forty, he stuck to his daily routine without exception.

  This routine was as follows: Kant rose at 5:00 A.M., after being woken by his longtime servant, a retired soldier under explicit orders not to let the master oversleep. Then he drank one or two cups of weak tea and smoked his pipe. According to Kuehn, “Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on.” After this period of meditation, Kant prepared his day’s lectures and did some writing. Lectures began at 7:00 A.M. and lasted until 11:00. His academic duties discharged, Kant would go to a restaurant or a pub for lunch, his only real meal of the day. He did not limit his dining company to his fellow academics but enjoyed mixing with townspeople from a variety of backgrounds. As for the meal itself, he preferred simple fare, with the meat well done, accompanied by good wine. Lunch might go until as late as 3:00, after which Kant took his famous walk and visited his closest friend, Joseph Green. They would converse until 7:00 on weekdays (9:00 on weekends, perhaps joined by another friend). Returning home, Kant would do some more work and read before going to bed precisely at 10:00.

  William James (1842–1910)

  In April 1870, a twenty-eight-year-old James made a cautionary note to himself in his diary. “Recollect,” he wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number.” The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In one of the lectures he delivered to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1892—and eventually incorporated into his book Psychology: A Briefer Course—James argued that the “great thing” in education is to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

  The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

  James was writing from personal experience—the hypothetical sufferer is, in fact, a thinly disguised description of himself. For James kept no regular schedule, was chronically indecisive, and lived a disorderly, unsettled life. As Robert D. Richardson wrote in his 2006 biography, “James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits—and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”

  Nevertheless, we can summarize a few of James’s tendencies. He drank moderately and would have a cocktail before dinner. He stopped smoking and drinking coffee in his mid-thirties, although he would cheat with the occasional cigar. He suffered from insomnia, particularly when he was deep into a writing project, and beginning in the 1880s he used chloroform to put himself to sleep. Before bed, if his eyes weren’t too tired, he would sit up and read until 11:00 or midnight, which, he found, “very much enlarges the day.” In his later years, he took a nap every afternoon from 2:00 to 3:00. He procrastinated. As he told one of his classes, “I know a person who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust specks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up a newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests.”

  Henry James (1843–1916)

  Unlike his restless, compulsive older brother, Henry James always maintained regular working habits. He wrote every day, beginning in the morning and usually ending at about lunchtime. In his later years, severe wrist pain forced him to abandon his pen for dictation to a secretary, who would arrive each day at 9:30 A.M. After dictating all morning, James would read in the afternoon, have tea, go for a walk, eat dinner, and spend the evening making notes for the next day’s work. (For a while he asked one of his secretaries to return in the evenings for further dictation; to keep her alert, he would lay bars of chocolate beside her typewriter as she worked.) Like Anthony Trollope (this page), James started a new book the instant the old one was finished. Asked once when he found the time to form the design of a new book, James rolled his eyes, patted the questioner on the knee, and said, “It’s all about, it’s about—it’s in the air—it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.”

  Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

  In 1908, Kafka landed a position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he was fortunate to be on the coveted “single shift” system, which meant office hours from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Although this was a distinct improvement over his previous job at a different insurance firm, which required long hours and frequent overtime, Kafka still felt stymied; he was living with his family in a cramped apartment, where he could muster the concentration to wri
te only late at night, when everyone else was asleep. As Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” In the same letter, he goes on to describe his timetable:

  Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer in Budapest in 1917, near the end of their five-year, mostly epistolary relationship (photo credit 53.1)

  from 8 to 2 or 2:30 in the office, then lunch till 3 or 3:30, after that sleep in bed (usually only attempts; for a whole week I saw nothing but Montenegrins in my sleep, in extremely disagreeable clarity, which gave me headaches, I saw every detail of their complicated dress) till 7:30, then ten minutes of exercises, naked at the open window, then an hour’s walk—alone, with Max [Brod], or with another friend, then dinner with my family (I have three sisters, one married, one engaged; the single one, without prejudicing my affection for the others, is easily my favorite); then at 10:30 (but often not till 11:30) I sit down to write, and I go on, depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until 1, 2, or 3 o’clock, once even till 6 in the morning. Then again exercises, as above, but of course avoiding all exertions, a wash, and then, usually with a slight pain in my heart and twitching stomach muscles, to bed. Then every imaginable effort to get to sleep—i.e., to achieve the impossible, for one cannot sleep (Herr K. even demands dreamless sleep) and at the same time be thinking about one’s work and trying to solve with certainty the one question that certainly is insoluble, namely, whether there will be a letter from you the next day, and at what time. Thus the night consists of two parts: one wakeful, the other sleepless, and if I were to tell you about it at length and you were prepared to listen, I should never finish. So it is hardly surprising if, at the office the next morning, I only just manage to start work with what little strength is left. In one of the corridors along which I always walk to reach my typist, there used to be a coffinlike trolley for the moving of files and documents, and each time I passed it I felt as though it had been made for me, and was waiting for me.

  James Joyce (1882–1941)

  “A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism” is how the Irish novelist once described himself. In his daily habits, at least, he was not given to self-control or even much regularity. Left to his own devices, Joyce would typically rise late in the morning and use the afternoon (when, he said, “the mind is at its best”) to write or to fulfill whatever professional obligations he might be under—often, teaching English or giving piano lessons to pay the bills. His evenings were spent socializing at cafés or restaurants, and they sometimes ended early the next morning with Joyce, who was proud of his tenor singing voice, belting out old Irish songs at the bar.

  A more detailed glimpse of Joyce’s routine comes from 1910, when he was living in Trieste, Italy, with his wife, Nora, their two children, and his more responsible younger brother, Stanislaus, who bailed the family out of financial straits numerous times. Joyce was struggling to find a publisher for Dubliners, and was teaching private piano lessons at home. The biographer Richard Ellmann describes his day:

  He woke about 10 o’clock, an hour or more after Stanislaus had breakfast and left the house. Nora gave him coffee and rolls in bed, and he lay there, as Eileen [his sister] described him, “smothered in his own thoughts” until about 11 o’clock. Sometimes his Polish tailor called, and would sit discoursing on the edge of the bed while Joyce listened and nodded. About eleven he rose, shaved, and sat down at the piano (which he was buying slowly and perilously on the installment plan). As often as not his singing and playing were interrupted by the arrival of a bill collector. Joyce was notified and asked what was to be done. “Let them all come in,” he would say resignedly, as if an army were at the door. The collector would come in, dun him with small success, then be skillfully steered off into a discussion of music or politics. That visit over, Joyce returned to the piano, until Nora interrupted. “Do you know there’s a lesson?” or “You’ve put on a filthy shirt again,” to which he would calmly reply, “I’ll not take it off.”

  There was lunch at 1:00, followed by lessons from 2:00 until 7:00 or later. At the lessons, Joyce smoked long cheroots called Virginias; between pupils, he drank black coffee. About twice a week, Joyce stopped his lessons early so he and Nora could go to an opera or a play. On Sundays, he occasionally attended service at the Greek Orthodox church.

  This description captures Joyce at a low ebb in his writing career. By 1914 he had begun Ulysses, and then he worked indefatigably on the book every day—although he still stuck to his preferred schedule of writing in the afternoons and staying out late drinking with friends. He felt he needed the nightly breaks to clear his head from literary labor that was exacting and exhausting. (Once, after two days of work yielded only two finished sentences, Joyce was asked if he had been seeking the right words. “No,” he replied, “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.”) Joyce finally finished the book in October 1921, after seven years of labor—“diversified,” as he put it, “by eight illnesses and nineteen changes of address, from Austria to Switzerland, to Italy, to France.” All in all, he wrote, “I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses.”

  Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

  “It is truly odious to subordinate the whole of one’s life to the confection of a book,” Proust wrote in 1912. It’s hard to take his complaint entirely seriously. From 1908 until his death, Proust devoted the whole of his life to the writing of his monumental novel of time and memory, Remembrance of Things Past, eventually published in seven volumes, adding up to nearly 1.5 million words. To give his full attention to the work, Proust made a conscious decision in 1910 to withdraw from society, spending almost all his time in the famous cork-lined bedroom of his Paris apartment, sleeping during the day, working at night, and going out only when he needed to gather facts and impressions for his all-consuming work of fiction.

  Upon waking in the late afternoon—typically about 3:00 or 4:00 P.M., although sometimes not until as late as 6:00—Proust first lit a batch of the opium-based Legras powders that he used to relieve his chronic asthma. Sometimes he lit just a few pinches; other times he “smoked” for hours, until the entire bedroom was thick with fumes. Then he would ring for his longtime housekeeper and confidante, Celeste, to serve the coffee. This was an elaborate ritual in its own right. Celeste would bring in a silver coffeepot holding two cups of strong black coffee; a lidded porcelain jug with a large quantity of boiled milk; and a croissant, always from the same bakery, served on its own saucer. Wordlessly, she would place these items on a bedside table and leave Proust alone to prepare his own café au lait. Celeste then waited in the kitchen in case Proust rang a second time, which signaled that he was ready to receive a second croissant (always kept at the ready) and a fresh jug of boiled milk to mix with the remaining coffee.

  This was sometimes Proust’s only sustenance for the entire day. “It isn’t an exaggeration to say that he ate virtually nothing,” Celeste recalled in a memoir of her life with the author. “I’ve never heard of anyone else living off two bowls of café au lait and two croissants a day. And sometimes only one croissant!” (Unbeknownst to Celeste, Proust did sometimes dine at a restaurant on the evenings he went out, and there are reports that he ate huge quantities at these occasions.) Not surprisingly, given his meager diet and sedentary habits, Proust suffered constantly from feeling cold, and he relied on an endless succession of hot water bottles and “woolies”—soft wool jumpers that he draped over his shoulders, one on top of another—to stave off the chills while he worked.

  Along with the first coffee service, Celeste brought Proust his mail on a silver tray. As he dipped his croissant in his coffee, Proust would open the mail and sometimes read choice passages aloud to Celeste. Then he carefully worked his way through several daily newspapers, displaying a keen interes
t not only in literature and the arts but politics and finance as well. Afterward, if Proust had decided to go out that evening, he would begin the many preparations that entailed: making telephone calls, ordering the car, getting dressed. Otherwise, he began work soon after finishing with the newspaper, writing for a few hours at a stretch before ringing for Celeste to bring him something or join him for a chat. Sometimes these chats could go on for hours, particularly if Proust had recently gone out or received an interesting visitor—he seemed to use the chats as a rehearsal ground for his fiction, drawing out the nuances and hidden meaning of a conversation or encounter until he was ready to capture it on the page.

  Proust wrote exclusively in bed, lying with his body almost completely horizontal and his head propped up by two pillows. To reach the exercise book resting on his lap, he had to lean awkwardly on one elbow, and his only working light was a weak, green-shaded bedside lamp. Thus any substantial period of work left his wrist cramped and his eyes exhausted. “After ten pages I am shattered,” he wrote. If he felt too tired to concentrate, Proust would take a caffeine tablet, and when he was finally ready to sleep, he would counteract the caffeine with Veronal, a barbital sedative. “You’re putting your foot on the brakes and the accelerator at the same time,” a friend warned him. Proust didn’t care—if anything, he seemed to need the work to be painful. He thought suffering had value, and that it was the root of great art. As he wrote in the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, “it almost seems as though a writer’s works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his heart.”