Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (11 page)

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
.”

“
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 interest 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.”

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:

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
)

“
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
)

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.

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.