Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  An interviewer once asked Styron if he found that his comfortable, upper-middle-class lifestyle—he lived with his wife and their four children in a pair of large houses in Connecticut and on Martha’s Vineyard—had been helpful to his writing, or if it had been confining in some ways. “I think it’s been a stabilizing and important influence,” Styron replied.

  I could not have lived in Bohemia or lived the life of a renegade or a pariah, but I think my works have been nonetheless revolutionary in their own way and certainly anti-establishment. I have had in my little study in Connecticut all these years that famous line from Flaubert tacked to my wall: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I believe it.

  Philip Roth (b. 1933)

  “Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987.

  Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare.… There’s a tremendous uncertainty that’s built into the profession, a sustained level of doubt that supports you in some way. A good doctor isn’t in a battle with his work; a good writer is locked in a battle with his work. In most professions there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. With writing, it’s always beginning again. Temperamentally, we need that newness. There is a lot of repetition in the work. In fact, one skill that every writer needs is the ability to sit still in this deeply uneventful business.

  Roth has cultivated that ability with gusto since at least 1972, when he moved to an austere eighteenth-century house on sixty acres in rural northwest Connecticut. A two-room former guest cottage serves as his studio. He goes there to work each morning after breakfast and exercise. “I write from about 10 till six every day, with an hour out for lunch and the newspaper,” he has said. “In the evenings I usually read. That’s pretty much it.”

  For many years he had his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, as a companion, but since their separation in 1994 he has lived by himself, a condition that seems to suit him. “I live alone, there’s no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with,” he told David Remnick in 2000.

  My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don’t have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning—this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens—and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.

  P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975)

  Wodehouse wrote more than ninety books in his career, continuing to work daily even in his last decade. By then he was living full-time at Remsenburg, the summer retreat on Long Island that he shared with his wife, Ethel, their servants, five cats, and four dogs. In 1971, The New Yorker’s Herbert Warren Wind visited Wodehouse at Remsenburg, and noted that the author’s two outstanding traits were his industry and his basic cheerfulness. “I seem to be rather good at adjusting to things,” Wodehouse said.

  The eighty-nine-year-old author rose each day at 7:30 sharp and stepped out onto the back porch for the “daily dozen” series of calisthenic exercises, which he had performed every day since they were introduced in the United States in 1919. Then, his wife still asleep upstairs, Wodehouse fixed himself toast, coffee cake, and tea and, as he ate, read what he called a “breakfast book”—a mystery novel by someone like Ngaio Marsh or Rex Stout, or a light, humorous book. Afterward, he smoked a pipe, took a short walk with the dogs, and, by 9:00, settled down to work. Wind writes:

  Wodehouse does his writing in his study—a fairly large, pine-walled room on the ground floor, overlooking the back garden. The principal pieces of furniture are a leather armchair (for lounging and thinking) and a plain wooden desk about three feet by five. On top of the desk are a dictionary, a knife for cleaning out pipes, and a bulky Royal typewriter, which Wodehouse has used since 1934. His method of composition has remained virtually unchanged through the years. He does the first draft in longhand, in pencil. Then he sits down at the Royal and does a moderate amount of revising and polishing as he types. At present, his average output on a good working day is about a thousand words, but when he was younger it was closer to twenty-five hundred. He had his most productive day in 1933, when, to his own astonishment, he knocked off the last eight thousand words of “Thank You, Jeeves.” Once, when he was beginning a Wooster-Jeeves novel, he experimented with using a Dictaphone. After he had dictated the equivalent of a page, he played it back to check it over. What he heard sounded so terribly unfunny that he immediately turned off the machine and went back to his pad and pencil.

  Lunch at home was followed, at about 2:00, with another walk—Wodehouse’s neighbor and longtime friend Guy Bolton would pick him up and they would take an hour’s constitutional, with the dogs in tow. Wodehouse had to be back in his study by 3:30 for the soap opera The Edge of Night, which he never missed. Then he had a traditional English tea with his wife. After this, according to the biographer Robert McCrum, “he might snooze a bit in his armchair, have a bath, and do some more work, before the evening cocktail (sherry for her, a lethal martini for him) at six, which they took in the sun parlour, overlooking the garden. This was followed by dinner, alone with Ethel, and eaten early to allow the cook to get home to her family. After dinner, Wodehouse would usually read, but occasionally he would play two-handed bridge with Ethel, a habit, he joked, that doubtlessly suggested he was senile.”

  Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)

  Literary legend has it that Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s work; this foretaste of the grave was supposed to inspire her macabre fiction and poetry. The tale is probably false. What is certain is that Sitwell liked to write in bed, beginning at 5:30 or 6:00 A.M., this being “the only time when I can be sure of quiet.” “All women should have a day a week in bed,” Sitwell also remarked, and when she was engrossed in a writing project she would sometimes stay there all morning and through the afternoon—until finally, she said, “I am honestly so tired that all I can do is to lie on my bed with my mouth open.”

  Edith Sitwell, 1962 (photo credit 98.1)

  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

  Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but the English philosopher’s own experience was very nearly the opposite: he lived a long, productive, and mostly peaceful life, dying in bed at age ninety-one. He rose each day at about 7:00 A.M., ate a breakfast of bread and butter, and took his morning walk, meditating as he walked, until 10:00. Then, returning to his chamber, he would record the minutes of his thoughts on a sheet of paper pasted to an inch-thick square lapboard. Dinner was served precisely at 11:00 A.M. (In his old age, Hobbes gave up wine and meat, and ate fish daily.) Afterward, he smoked a pipe and, according to his friend and biographer John Aubrey, “threw himself immediately on his bed” to nap for half an hour. In the afternoon, Hobbes wrote in his chamber again, fleshing out his morning notes. In the evening he would sing a few popular songs in bed before going to sleep—not because he had a good voice but because, Aubrey notes, “he did believe it did his lungs good, and conduced much to prolong his life.”

  John Milton (1608–1674)

  Milton was totally blind for the last twenty years of his life, yet he managed to produce a steady stream of writing, including his magnum opus, the ten-thousand-line epic poem Paradise Lost, composed between 1658 and 1664. Milton devoted the morning to solitary contemplation in bed, beginning at 4:00 A.M. (5:00 A.M. in the winter). First he had an aide read to him from the Bible for half an hour. Then Milton was left alone to compose as many lines as
his memory could retain. At 7:00, Milton’s aide returned to take dictation—and if the aide happened to be running late, one early biographer noted, Milton “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked.” After dictation, the aide would read to him until lunch was served at noon. Then Milton walked up and down his garden for three or four hours. In the late afternoon and evening he received visitors, ate a light supper, smoked a pipe, and went to bed at about 9:00.

  René Descartes (1596–1650)

  Descartes was a late riser. The French philosopher liked to sleep until mid-morning, then linger in bed, thinking and writing, until 11:00 or so. “Here I sleep ten hours every night without being disturbed by any care,” Descartes wrote from the Netherlands, where he lived from 1629 until the last few months of his life. “And after my mind has wandered in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where I experience every pleasure imaginable, I awake to mingle the reveries of the night with those of the day.” These late-morning hours of meditation constituted his only concentrated intellectual effort for the day; Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself. After an early lunch, he would take a walk or meet friends for conversation; after supper, he dealt with his correspondence.

  This comfortable bachelor’s life ended abruptly in late 1649, when Descartes accepted a position in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden, who, at twenty-two, was one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe. It’s not entirely clear why he agreed to the appointment. He may have been motivated by a desire for greater recognition and prestige, or by a real interest in shaping the thinking of a young ruler. In any case, it proved a disastrous decision. Arriving in Sweden, in time for one of the coldest winters in memory, Descartes was notified that his lessons to Queen Christina would take place in the mornings—beginning at 5:00 A.M. He had no choice but to obey. But the early hours and bitter cold were too much for him. After only a month on the new schedule, Descartes fell ill, apparently of pneumonia; ten days later he was dead.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)

  As a young man Goethe could write all day long, but as he grew older he found that he could muster the necessary creative energy only in the mornings. “At one time in my life I could make myself write a printed sheet every day, and I found this quite easy,” he said in 1828. “[N]ow I can only work at the second part of my Faust in the early hours of the day, when I am feeling revived and strengthened by sleep and not yet harassed by the absurd trivialities of everyday life. And even so, what does this work amount to? If I am very lucky indeed I can manage one page, but as a rule only a hand’s-breadth of writing, and often even less if I am in an unproductive mood.” These moods were the bane of Goethe’s later existence; he thought it futile to try to work without the spark of inspiration. He said, “My advice therefore is that one should not force anything; it is better to fritter away one’s unproductive days and hours, or sleep through them, than to try at such times to write something which will give one no satisfaction later on.”

  Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

  The German poet, historian, philosopher, and playwright kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom; he said that he needed their decaying smell in order to feel the urge to write. Intolerant of interruptions, Schiller also wrote almost exclusively at night. In the summer he preferred to work outdoors, beside his small garden house in the suburbs of Jena, Germany. An early biographer noted the details of Schiller’s nocturnal work periods:

  On his sitting down to his desk at night, he was wont to keep some strong coffee, or wine-chocolate, but more frequently a flask of old Rhenish, or Champagne, standing by him, that he might from time to time repair the exhaustion of nature. Often the neighbours used to hear him earnestly declaiming, in the silence of the night: and whoever had an opportunity of watching him on such occasions, a thing very easy to be done from the heights lying opposite his little garden-house, on the other side of the dell, might see him now speaking aloud and walking swiftly to and fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself down into his chair and writing; and drinking the while, sometimes more than once, from the glass standing near him. In winter he was to be found at his desk till four, or even five o’clock in the morning; in summer, till towards three. He then went to bed, from which he seldom rose till nine or ten.

  These long hours of nighttime composition—fueled not only by coffee, wine, chocolate, and the smell of rotting apples but by Schiller’s constant smoking and snuff-taking—probably contributed to his sickly constitution and constant physical maladies. Yet Schiller could not abandon the habit; it was the only reliable method to guarantee himself the long, uninterrupted stretches of time he needed to be productive. He wrote to a friend, “We have failed to recognize our great asset: time. A conscientious use of it could make us into something quite amazing.”

  Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

  According to a childhood friend, Schubert “used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Meanwhile many a pipe was smoked.” The Austrian composer’s afternoons were less rigorous; his friend noted, “Schubert never composed in the afternoon; after the midday meal he went to a coffee-house, drank a small portion of black coffee, smoked for an hour or two and read the newspapers at the same time.” On summer afternoons, he often went for long walks in the countryside surrounding Vienna, then enjoyed a glass of beer or wine with friends. He avoided giving piano lessons, even though he always needed the money and frequently had to rely on friends for financial support. As one member of his circle remembered, “Schubert was extraordinarily fertile and industrious in composing. For everything else that goes by the name of work he had no use.”

  Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

  The Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist slept little, went to church daily, and smoked and drank constantly. One of his pupils described Liszt’s routine:

  He rose at four every morning, even when he had been invited out the previous evening, had drunk a good deal of wine and not got to bed until very late. Soon after rising, and without breakfasting, he went to church. At five he took coffee with me, and with it a couple of dry rolls. Then work began: letters were written or read through, music tried out, and much else. At eight came the post, always bringing a huge pile of items. These were then looked through, personal letters read and answered, or music tried out.…

  At one o’clock, lunch was brought from the court kitchen when Liszt had not been invited out, which happened very frequently. I often ate with him. The meal was good and substantial, but simple. With it a glass of wine would be drunk, or water and brandy in the French manner, which he liked very much. Then he would smoke—indeed he smoked all the time when not eating or sleeping. Last of all there was the coffee machine. The coffee was burnt freshly every day, something on which Liszt placed great emphasis.

  Later in the afternoon, Liszt took a long nap of two hours or more—to make up, in part, for his sleepless nights, which he spent pacing his room and sitting at the piano or writing. Although he drank sparingly at lunch, he continued to drink steadily throughout the afternoon and evening; by his last years he was imbibing one or two bottles of cognac and two or three bottles of wine a day, as well as the occasional glass of absinthe. His contemporaries remember him as having a cheerful disposition, but Liszt obviously had his share of demons. A younger colleague once asked Liszt why he didn’t keep a diary. “To live one’s life is hard enough,” he replied. “Why write down all the misery? It would resemble nothing more than the inventory of a torture chamber.”

  George Sand (1804–1876)

  Sand produced a minimum of twenty manuscript pages nearly every night of her adult life. She always worked late at night, a habit she picked up as a teenager caring for her ailing grandmother, when the nighttime hours were her only chance to be alone and think. As an adult, it was not unusual for her to slip out of a sleeping lover�
�s bed to begin a new novel in the middle of the night. In the mornings, Sand often couldn’t remember what she had written during these somnambulant writing sessions. “If I did not have my works on a shelf, I would even forget their titles,” she claimed.

  Sand’s persona was larger than life—there’s the famous cross-dressing, the assumption of a male pen name, her numerous affairs with both men and women—but her work habits were fairly austere. She liked to nibble on chunks of chocolate at her desk, and she required regular doses of tobacco (cigars or hand-rolled cigarettes) to stay alert. But she did not subscribe to the idea of the drug-addled artist. She wrote in her autobiography:

  It is said that some artists abuse their need for coffee, alcohol, or opium. I do not really believe that, and if it sometimes amuses them to create under the influence of substances other than their own intoxicating thoughts, I doubt that they kept up such lubrications or showed them off. The work of the imagination is exciting enough, and I confess I have only been able to enhance it with a dash of milk or lemonade, which would hardly qualify me as Byronic. Honestly, I do not believe in a drunk Byron writing beautiful verses. Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.