Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)

  In 1946, Beckett began a period of intense creative activity that he would later refer to as “the siege in the room.” Over the next few years he would produce his finest work—the novels Molloy and Malone Dies, and the play that would make him famous, Waiting for Godot. Paul Strathern describes Beckett’s life during the siege:

  It was spent largely in his room, isolated from the world, coming face to face with his own demons, attempting to explore the workings of his mind. His routine was for the most part simple enough. He would rise around the early hours of the afternoon, make himself scrambled eggs, and retire to his room for as many hours as he could bear. He would then leave for his late-night perambulation of the bars of Montparnasse, drinking copious amounts of cheap red wine, returning before dawn and the long attempt to sleep. His entire life revolved around his almost psychotic obsession to write.

  The siege began with an epiphany. On a late-night walk near Dublin harbor, Beckett found himself standing on the end of a pier in the midst of a winter storm. Amid the howling wind and churning water, he suddenly realized that the “dark he had struggled to keep under” in his life—and in his writing, which had until then failed to find an audience or meet his own aspirations—should, in fact, be the source of his creative inspiration. “I shall always be depressed,” Beckett concluded, “but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”

  Samuel Beckett, 1950, at the end of “the siege in the room” (photo credit 56.1)

  Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

  “I get up at about eight, do physical exercises, then work without a break from nine till one,” Stravinsky told an interviewer in 1924. Generally, three hours of composition were the most he could manage in a day, although he would do less demanding tasks—writing letters, copying scores, practicing the piano—in the afternoon. Unless he was touring, Stravinsky worked on his compositions daily, with or without inspiration, he said. He required solitude for the task, and always closed the windows of his studio before he began: “I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me.” If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”

  Igor Stravinsky, Los Angeles, 1966 (photo credit 57.1)

  Erik Satie (1866–1925)

  In 1898, Satie moved from Paris’s Montmartre district to the working-class suburb of Arcueil, where he would live for the rest of his life. Most mornings, however, the composer returned to the city on foot, walking a distance of about six miles to his former neighborhood, stopping at his favorite cafés along the way. According to one observer, Satie “walked slowly, taking small steps, his umbrella held tight under his arm. When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more, with small deliberate steps.” His dress was also distinctive: the same year that he moved to Arcueil, Satie received a small inheritance, which he used to purchase a dozen identical chestnut-colored velvet suits, with the same number of matching bowler hats. Locals who saw him pass by each day soon began calling him the Velvet Gentleman.

  In Paris, Satie visited friends or arranged to meet them in cafés. He would also work on his compositions in cafés, but never in restaurants—Satie was a gourmet, and he eagerly looked forward to the evening meal. (Although he appreciated fine food and was meticulous in his tastes, Satie could also apparently eat in tremendous quantities; he once consumed a thirty-egg omelet in a single sitting.) When he could, Satie earned some money in the evening playing piano for cabaret singers. Otherwise, he would make another round of the cafés, drinking a good deal. The last train back to Arcueil left at 1:00 A.M., but Satie frequently missed it. Then he would walk the several miles home, sometimes not arriving until the sun was about to rise. Nevertheless, as soon as they next morning dawned, he would set off to Paris once more.

  The scholar Roger Shattuck once proposed that Satie’s unique sense of musical beat, and his appreciation of “the possibility of variation within repetition,” could be traced to this “endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day.” Indeed, Satie was observed stopping to jot down ideas during his walks, pausing under a streetlamp if it was dark. During the war the streetlamps were often extinguished, and rumor had it that Satie’s productivity dropped as a result.

  Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

  In 1911, Picasso moved from the Bateau Lavoir, a conglomeration of low-rent studios in Paris’s Montmartre district, to a much more respectable apartment on the boulevard de Clichy in Montparnasse. The new situation suited his growing fame as a painter, as well as his lifelong bourgeois aspirations. As the biographer John Richardson has written, “After the shabby gentility of his boyhood and the deprivations of his early days in Paris, Picasso wanted a lifestyle which would permit him to work in peace without material worries—‘like a pauper,’ he used to say, ‘but with lots of money.’ ” The Montparnasse apartment was not without its bohemianism, however. Picasso took over its large, airy studio, forbade anyone from entering without his permission, and surrounded himself with his painting supplies, piles of miscellaneous junk, and a menagerie of pets, including a dog, three Siamese cats, and a monkey named Monina.

  Throughout his life, Picasso went to bed late and got up late. At the boulevard de Clichy, he would shut himself in the studio by 2:00 P.M. and work there until at least dusk. Meanwhile, his girlfriend of seven years, Fernande, was left alone to her own devices, hanging around the apartment, waiting for Picasso to finish his work and join her for dinner. When he finally emerged from his studio, however, he was hardly good company. “He rarely spoke during meals; sometimes he would not utter a word from beginning to end,” Fernande recalled. “He seemed to be bored, when he was in fact absorbed.” She blamed his chronic bad mood on diet—the hypochondriacal Picasso had recently resolved to drink nothing but mineral water or milk and eat only vegetables, fish, rice pudding, and grapes.

  Picasso would make more of an effort to be sociable if guests were present, as they frequently were. He had mixed feelings about entertaining. He liked to be amused between intense periods of work, but he also hated too much distraction. At Fernande’s suggestion, they designated Sunday as “at-home” day (an idea borrowed from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas), “and in this way managed to dispose of the obligations of friendship in a single afternoon.” Still, Richardson writes, “the artist veered between anti-social sulking and gregariousness.” Painting, on the other hand, never bored or tired him. Picasso claimed that, even after three or four hours standing in front of a canvas, he did not feel the slightest fatigue. “That’s why painters live so long,” he said. “While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.”

  Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

  “One can be very fertile without having to work too much,” Sartre once said. “Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening. This is my only rule.” If that makes the French philosopher’s life sound relaxed, however, it’s misleading. Sartre lived in a creative frenzy for most of his life, alternating between his daily six hours of work and an intense social life filled with rich meals, heavy drinking, drugs, and tobacco. On a typical day, Sartre worked in his Paris apartment until noon, then went out for an hour of appointments scheduled by his secretary. At 1:30, he joined his companion, Simone de Beauvoir (see this page), and their friends for lunch—a two-hour affair, washed down with a quart of red wine. At 3:30 on the dot he pushed away from the table and rushed back to his apartment for his second period of work, this time joined by Beauvoir. At night he slept badly, knocking himself out for a few hours with barbiturates.

  By the 1950s, too much work on too little sleep—with too much wine and cigarettes—had left Sartre exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Rather
than slow down, however, he turned to Corydrane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin then fashionable among Parisian students, intellectuals, and artists (and legal in France until 1971, when it was declared toxic and taken off the market). The prescribed dose was one or two tablets in the morning and at noon. Sartre took twenty a day, beginning with his morning coffee and slowly chewing one pill after another as he worked. For each tablet, he could produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

  This was hardly his only excess. The biographer Annie Cohen-Solal reports, “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol—wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on—two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” Sartre knew he was wearing himself out, but he was willing to gamble his philosophy against his health. As he said later, “I thought that in my head—not separated, not analyzed, but in a shape that would become rational—that in my head I possessed all the ideas I was to put down on paper. It was only a question of separating them and writing them on the paper. So to put it briefly, in philosophy writing consisted of analyzing my ideas; and a tube of Corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analyzed in the next two days.’ ”

  T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

  In 1917, Eliot took a job as a clerk at Lloyds Bank, in London. During his eight years of employment there, the Missouri-born poet assumed the guise of the archetypal English businessman: bowler hat, pin-striped suit, umbrella rolled carefully under one arm, hair parted severely on the side. Eliot took the train into the city each morning and, from the railroad station, joined the crowd crossing London Bridge (a scene he would draw on for the Unreal City portion of The Waste Land). “I am sojourning among the termites,” he wrote to Lytton Strachey.

  The literary critic I. A. Richards later recalled visiting Eliot at the bank; he found

  a figure stooping, very like a dark bird in a feeder, over a big table covered with all sorts and sizes of foreign correspondence. The big table almost entirely filled a little room under the street. Within a foot of our heads when we stood were the thick, green glass squares of the pavement on which hammered all but incessantly the heels of the passers-by. There was just room for two perches beside the table.

  Although Richards paints a depressing picture, Eliot was grateful for the job. Previously, he had been devoting all his energies to writing reviews and essays, teaching school, and delivering an ambitious lecture series—a devouring workload that left him little time for poetry and, worse, barely earned him enough money to scrape by. By contrast, Lloyds was a godsend. Two days after his appointment there, he wrote to his mother, “I am now earning two pounds ten shillings a week for sitting in an office from 9:15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office.… Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as school teaching, and is more interesting.” He often used his lunch hour to discuss literary projects with friends and collaborators. In the evening he had time to work on his poetry, or to earn extra money from reviews and criticism.

  It was an ideal arrangement, but over time the routine became dulling. At age thirty-four, when he had worked at the bank for five years, Eliot admitted that “the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me.” Sensing his weariness, some of his literary friends, led by Ezra Pound, invented a scheme to free Eliot from his employment: they would create a £300 annual fund by soliciting £10 a year from thirty subscribers. When Eliot found out about the plan he was appreciative but embarrassed; he preferred the security and independence afforded by Lloyds. He remained there until 1925, when he accepted an editorial position at the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he would stay for the rest of his career.

  Dmitry Shostakovich (1906–1975)

  Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went. “I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano,” his younger sister recalled. “He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head, and then played it through complete on the piano.” But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he “appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”

  Mikhail Meyerovich, a fellow composer, had much the same impression. He spent time with Shostakovich in 1945 at an artists’ retreat. “I discovered him to be a very lively man who was always in motion and could not spend a minute without some occupation,” Meyerovich wrote. It was a mystery how he managed to compose so much music. Intrigued, Meyerovich began to watch him closely:

  He would play football and fool around with friends; then he would suddenly disappear. After forty minutes or so he would turn up again. “How are you doing? Let me kick the ball.” Then we would have dinner and drink some wine and take a walk, and he would be the life and soul of the party. Every now and then he would disappear for a while and then join us again. Towards the end of my stay, he disappeared altogether. We didn’t see him for a week. Then he turned up, unshaven and looking exhausted.

  Dmitry Shostakovich, circa 1930s (photo credit 62.1)

  Shostakovich had just completed his Second Quartet. Although his fellow composers were amazed by the speed and sureness with which he conceived new works, Shostakovich himself was afraid that perhaps he worked too fast. “I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose,” he confessed in a letter to a friend.

  Undoubtedly this is bad. One shouldn’t compose as quickly as I do. Composition is a serious process, and in the words of a ballerina friend of mine, “You can’t keep going at a gallop.” I compose with diabolical speed and can’t stop myself.… It is exhausting, rather unpleasant, and at the end of the day you lack any confidence in the result. But I can’t rid myself of the bad habit.

  Henry Green (1905–1973)

  Green led a double life. As Henry Yorke—his birth name—he was a wealthy aristocrat who spent his days at the offices of his family’s manufacturing business. (Called Pontifex, its chief product was a high-pressure filling machine for beer bottling.) As Henry Green, however, he wrote nine utterly original novels, including Loving, Living, and Party Going. Given his inherited income, one may wonder why Green bothered going in to the office at all—he certainly didn’t need the money. Jeremy Treglown offers an answer in his 2000 biography:

  Though he occasionally spoke to his friends about giving up Pontifex and living off his unearned income in order to do nothing but write, he was beginning to find that the office routines of Henry Yorke were useful, even essential, to the imaginative work of Henry Green. He feared his own volatility and often referred to his need for habitual routines to keep him sane. The job gave him day-to-day stability as well as experiences that he could use in his writing. It was also much less demanding than fiction. He told Mary Strickland that writing entries for engineering catalogs was “the greatest fun.”

  Green’s reliance on the stability of a day job was no doubt helped by the fact that his actual duties were practically zero. According to Treglown, a typical day in the life of Henry Yorke, managing director of Pontifex, looked something like this: He arrived at work at about 10:00 A.M., was brought his gin, and spent an hour or two pottering about his office or gossiping with the secretaries. At 11:30, he left to spend the middle part of the workday at a nearby pub, refreshing himself with a couple of pints of beer before returning to gin. A colleague or two would eventually join him there, and they would talk about people at work or the bar regulars, wh
ose conversation Green would have been eavesdropping on while he was alone. When the managing director finally returned to the office, he repeated his morning routine and then—maybe—wrote a page or two of his novel before catching the bus home.

  The remainder of Green’s writing occurred at night. After dinner and any social engagements, he would settle into his armchair with a notebook and a cheap pen wrapped with a bandage (to make it easier to grip) and scribble away until about midnight. When asked, years later, why he had chosen to publish under a pseudonym, Green said that he didn’t want his business associates to know about his novel writing. They eventually found out anyway, much to Green’s distress. An interviewer later asked if this discovery affected his business relationships:

  Yes, yes, oh yes—why, some years ago a group at our Birmingham works put in a penny each and bought a copy of a book of mine, Living. And as I was going round the iron foundry one day, a loam molder said to me, “I read your book, Henry.” “And did you like it?” I asked, rightly apprehensive. He replied, “I didn’t think much of it, Henry.” Too awful.