Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)

  Balzac drove himself relentlessly as a writer, motivated by enormous literary ambition as well as a never-ending string of creditors and endless cups of coffee; as Herbert J. Hunt has written, he engaged in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” When Balzac was working, his writing schedule was brutal: He ate a light dinner at 6:00 P.M., then went to bed. At 1:00 A.M. he rose and sat down at his writing table for a seven-hour stretch of work. At 8:00 A.M. he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap; then, from 9:30 to 4:00, he resumed work, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. (According to one estimate, he drank as many as fifty cups a day.) At 4:00 P.M. Balzac took a walk, had a bath, and received visitors until 6:00, when the cycle started all over again. “The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion—but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”

  Victor Hugo (1802–1885)

  When Napoléon III seized control of France in 1851, Hugo was forced into political exile, eventually settling with his family on Guernsey, a British island off the coast of Normandy. In his fifteen years there Hugo would write some of his best work, including three collections of poetry and the novel Les Misérables. Shortly after arriving on Guernsey, Hugo purchased Hauteville House—locals believed it was haunted by the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide—and set about making several improvements to the property. Chief among them was an all-glass “lookout” on the roof that resembled a small, furnished greenhouse. This was the highest point on the island, with a panoramic view of the English Channel; on clear days, you could see the coast of France. There Hugo wrote each morning, standing at a small desk in front of a mirror.

  He rose at dawn, awakened by the daily gunshot from a nearby fort, and received a pot of freshly brewed coffee and his morning letter from Juliette Drouet, his mistress, whom he had installed on Guernsey just nine doors down from Hauteville House. After reading the passionate words of “Juju” to her “beloved Christ,” Hugo swallowed two raw eggs, enclosed himself in his lookout, and wrote until 11:00 A.M. Then he stepped out onto the rooftop and washed from a tub of water left out overnight, pouring the icy liquid over himself and rubbing his body with a horsehair glove. Townspeople passing by could watch the spectacle from the street—as could Juliette, looking out the window of her room.

  At noon Hugo headed downstairs for lunch. The biographer Graham Robb writes, “these were the days when prominent men were expected to have opening hours like museums. Hugo welcomed almost everyone, writers collecting snippets for their future memoirs, journalists who came to describe M. Hugo’s famous dwelling for their female readers. As the clock struck twelve, he would appear in a grey felt hat and woolen gloves, looking like ‘a well-dressed farmer,’ and conduct his guests to the dining-room.”

  Hugo provided handsomely for his guests but ate little himself. After lunch he embarked on a two-hour walk or performed a series of strenuous exercises on the beach. Later he would make his daily visit to the barber (he insisted on keeping the trimmings in an unexplained act of superstition), go for a carriage ride with Juliette, and do more writing at home, often using the afternoon to answer some of the satchel-loads of letters that arrived each day.

  As the sun set Hugo spent either a boisterous evening at Juliette’s, joined by friends for dinner, conversation, and cards, or a rather gloomy one at home. At family dinners Hugo felt compelled to hold forth on philosophical subjects—pausing only to make sure his wife had not fallen asleep, or to write something down in one of the little notebooks he carried everywhere he went. Hugo’s son Charles—one of the three Hugo children who became writers themselves—described the scene: “As soon as he has uttered the slightest ideas—anything other than ‘I slept well’ or ‘Give me something to drink’—he turns away, takes out his notebook and jots down what he has just said. Nothing is lost. Everything ends up in print. When his sons try to use something they heard their father say, they are always caught out. When one of his books appears, they find that all the notes they took have been published.”

  Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

  Dickens was prolific—he produced fifteen novels, ten of which are longer than eight hundred pages, and numerous stories, essays, letters, and plays—but he could not be productive without certain conditions in place. First, he needed absolute quiet; at one of his houses, an extra door had to be installed to his study to block out noise. And his study had to be precisely arranged, with his writing desk placed in front of a window and, on the desk itself, his writing materials—goose-quill pens and blue ink—laid out alongside several ornaments: a small vase of fresh flowers, a large paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit perched upon it, and two bronze statuettes (one depicting a pair of fat toads dueling, the other a gentleman swarmed with puppies).

  Dickens’s working hours were invariable. His eldest son recalled that “no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.” He rose at 7:00, had breakfast at 8:00, and was in his study by 9:00. He stayed there until 2:00, taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance, eating mechanically and barely speaking a word before hurrying back to his desk. On an ordinary day he could complete about two thousand words in this way, but during a flight of imagination he sometimes managed twice that amount. Other days, however, he would hardly write anything; nevertheless, he stuck to his work hours without fail, doodling and staring out the window to pass the time.

  Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.” Dickens’s nights, however, were relaxed: he dined at 6:00, then spent the evening with family or friends before retiring at midnight.

  Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

  When Darwin moved from London to the English countryside in 1842, he did so not just to escape the bustle of city life and raise a family in more peaceful surroundings. He was also harboring a secret—his theory of evolution, which he had formulated in private over the preceding decade but dared not unleash on the public yet. The idea that mankind was descended from beasts would, he knew, be viewed as heretical and arrogant by Victorian society, and he didn’t want to risk personal disgrace and the widespread dismissal of his work. He decided to bide his time at Down House, a former parsonage in an isolated village in Kent—the “extreme edge of [the] world,” he called it—where he would live and work for the rest of his life.

  An etching of Charles Darwin’s study at Down House (photo credit 110.1)

  From the time he arrived at Down House until 1859, when he finally published On the Origin of Species, Darwin led a double life, keeping his thoughts on evolution and natural selection to himself while bolstering his credentials in the scientific community. He became an expert on barnacles, ultimately producing four monographs on the creatures and earning a Royal Medal for his work in 1853. He also studied bees and flowers and wrote books on coral reefs and South American geology. Meanwhile, he divulged his secret theory to a very few confidants; he told one fellow scientist it was “like confessing a murder.”

  Throughout this time—indeed, for the rest of his life—Darwin’s health was poor. He suffered from stomach pains, heart palpitations, severe boils, headaches, and other symptoms; the cause of his illness is unknown, but it seems to have been brought on by overwork during his London years, and it was clearly exacerbated by stress. As a result, Darwin maintained a quiet, monkish life at Down House, with his day structured around a few co
ncentrated bursts of work, broken up by set periods of walking, napping, reading, and letter writing.

  The first, and best, of his work periods began at 8:00 A.M., after Darwin had taken a short walk and had a solitary breakfast. Following ninety minutes of focused work in his study—disrupted only by occasional trips to the snuff jar that he kept on a table in the hallway—Darwin met his wife, Emma, in the drawing room to receive the day’s post. He read his letters, then lay on the sofa to hear Emma read the family letters aloud. When the letters were done, Emma would continue reading aloud, switching to whatever novel she and her husband were currently working their way through.

  At 10:30 Darwin returned to his study and did more work until noon or a quarter after. He considered this the end of his workday, and would often remark in a satisfied voice, “I’ve done a good day’s work.” Then he took his main walk of the day, accompanied by his beloved fox terrier, Polly. He stopped at the greenhouse first, then made a certain number of laps along the “Sandwalk,” striking his iron-shod walking stick rhythmically against the gravel path as he went. Lunch with the family followed. Darwin usually drank a small amount of wine with the meal, which he enjoyed, but very carefully—he had a fear of drunkenness, and claimed to have only ever once been tipsy in his life, while he was a student at Cambridge.

  After lunch he returned to the drawing-room sofa to read the newspaper (the only nonscientific literature that he read himself; everything else was read aloud to him). Then it was time for his letter writing, which took place by the fire, in a huge horsehair chair with a board placed across its arms. If he had many letters to write, he would dictate them instead, from a rough copy scrawled across the backs of manuscripts or proofs. Darwin made a point of replying to every letter he received, even those from obvious fools or cranks. If he failed to reply to a single letter, it weighed on his conscience and could even keep him up at night. The letter writing took him until about 3:00 in the afternoon, after which he went upstairs to his bedroom to rest, lying on the sofa with a cigarette while Emma continued to read from the novel-in-progress. Often Darwin would fall asleep during this reading and, to his dismay, miss chunks of the story.

  He came back downstairs at 4:00 to embark on his third walk of the day, which lasted for half an hour, and then returned to his study for another hour of work, tying up any loose ends from earlier in the day. At 5:30, a half-hour of idleness in the drawing room preceded another period of rest and novel reading, and another cigarette, upstairs. Then he joined the family for dinner, although he did not join them in eating the meal; instead, he would have tea with an egg or a small piece of meat. If guests were present, he would not linger at the dinner table to converse with the men, as was customary—even a half-hour of conversation wore him out, and could cause him a sleepless night and the loss of his next day’s work. Instead, he joined the ladies in retiring to the drawing room, where he played backgammon with Emma. His son Francis recalls that he “became extremely animated over these games, bitterly lamenting his bad luck and exploding with exaggerated mock-anger at my mother’s good fortune.”

  After two games of backgammon, he would read a scientific book and, just before bed, lie on the sofa and listen to Emma play the piano. He left the drawing room at about 10:00 and was in bed within a half-hour, although he generally had trouble getting to sleep and would often lie awake for hours, his mind working at some problem that he had failed to solve during the day.

  Thus his days went for forty years, with few exceptions. He would join his family on summer holidays, and occasionally make short visits to relatives, but he was always relieved to get home and, otherwise, he refrained from making even the most modest public appearances. Despite his seclusion and constant ill health, however, Darwin was content at Down House, surrounded by his family—he and Emma would eventually have ten children—and his work, which seemed to strip the years away from him even as it frequently brought him to the brink of exhaustion. Francis Darwin recalls that his father’s slow, labored movements about the house stood in stark contrast to his demeanor during an experiment—then his actions became quick and certain, characterized by a “kind of restrained eagerness. He always gave one the impression of working with pleasure, and not with any drag.”

  Herman Melville (1819–1891)

  Only a few records of Melville’s daily routines have survived. Perhaps the best one comes from a December 1850 letter he wrote to a friend shortly after the Melville family moved to Arrowhead, a one-hundred-sixty-acre farm in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. There, the thirty-one-year-old author raised corn, turnips, potatoes, and pumpkins; he enjoyed working in the fields as a way to relieve the stress of writing six to eight hours a day. Melville wrote:

  I rise at eight—thereabouts—& go to my barn—say good-morning to the horse, & give him his breakfast. (It goes to my heart to give him a cold one, but it can’t be helped.) Then, pay a visit to my cow—cut up a pumpkin or two for her, & stand by to see her eat it—for it’s a pleasant sight to see a cow move her jaws—she does it so mildly & with such a sanctity.—My own breakfast over, I go to my work-room & light my fire—then spread my M.S.S. on the table—take one business squint at it, & fall to with a will. At 2½ P.M. I hear a preconcerted knock at my door, which (by request) continues till I rise & go to the door, which serves to wean me effectively from my writing, however interested I may be. My friends the horse & cow now demand their dinner—& I go & give it to them. My own dinner over, I rig my sleigh & with my mother or sisters start off for the village—& if it be a Literary World day, great is the satisfaction thereof. —My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room—not being able to read—only now & then skimming over some large-printed book.

  He was by then a few months into Moby-Dick, for which his Arrowhead workroom proved an ideal setting. “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow,” he wrote. “I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)

  After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, Hawthorne returned home to Salem, Massachusetts, where he embarked on a program of severe literary self-discipline. Shutting himself in his room for most of the day, he read exhaustively and wrote a great deal, although he destroyed much of what he produced. This period from 1825 until 1837, when Hawthorne finally published a collection of short stories, has often been called the “solitary years.” The critic Malcolm Cowley describes the writer’s habits during this time:

  As the years passed he fell into a daily routine that seldom varied during autumn and winter. Each morning he wrote or read until it was time for the midday dinner; each afternoon he read or wrote or dreamed or merely stared at a sunbeam boring in through a hole in the blind and very slowly moving across the opposite wall. At sunset he went for a long walk, from which he returned late in the evening to eat a bowl of chocolate crumbled thick with bread and then talk about books with his two adoring sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa, both of whom were already marked for spinsterhood; these were almost the only household meetings.…

  In summer Hawthorne’s routine was more varied; he went for an early-morning swim among the rocks and often spent the day wandering alone by the shore, so idly that he amused himself by standing on a cliff and throwing stones at his shadow. Once, apparently, he stationed himself on the long toll-bridge north of Salem and watched the procession of travelers from morning to night. He never went to church, but on Sunday mornings he liked to stand behind the curtain of his open window and watch the congregation assemble.

  After his marriage in 1842, Hawthorne’s lifestyle necessarily became less self-centered—although, when he was writing (and he claimed that he could never write during the warm months, only during fal
l and winter), he still needed several hours of solitude a day. In Concord, where the Hawthornes settled after their marriage, he would stay alone in his study until the early afternoon. “I religiously seclude myself every morning (much against my will),” he wrote to his editor, “and remain in retirement till dinner-time, or thereabouts.” Dinner was the midday meal, for which Hawthorne joined his wife at about 2:00. An hour later, he would head into the village to visit the library and the post office. By sunset, he would return home, and his wife would join him for a short walk to the river. They had tea, and then Hawthorne read aloud to her for one or two hours or more.

  Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)

  “I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.” This is Tolstoy in one of the relatively few diary entries he made during the mid-1860s, when he was deep into the writing of War and Peace. Although he does not describe his routine in the diary, his oldest son, Sergei, later recorded the pattern of Tolstoy’s days at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate in the Tula region of Russia.

  From September to May we children and our teachers got up between eight and nine o’clock and went to the hall to have breakfast. After nine, in his dressing-gown, still unwashed and undressed, with a tousled beard, Father came down from his bedroom to the room under the hall where he finished his toilet. If we met him on the way he greeted us hastily and reluctantly. We used to say: “Papa is in a bad temper until he has washed.” Then he, too, came up to have his breakfast, for which he usually ate two boiled eggs in a glass.