Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (19 page)

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 concentrated 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.”

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:

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.”

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:

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 fall 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.

“
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.

According to Sergei, Tolstoy worked in isolation—no one was allowed to enter his study, and the doors to the adjoining rooms were locked to ensure that he would not be interrupted. (An
account by Tolstoy’s daughter Tatyana disagrees on this point—she remembers that their mother was allowed in the study; she would sit on the divan sewing quietly while her husband wrote.) Before dinner, Tolstoy would go for a walk or a ride, often to
supervise some work on the estate grounds. Afterward he rejoined the family in a much more sociable mood. Sergei writes:

In 1885, Tchaikovsky rented a dacha in Maidanovo, a small village in the district of Klin, some fifty miles northwest of Moscow. After years of restless wandering through Russia and Europe, the forty-five-year-old composer found his new living arrangement a wonderful relief. “
What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.” He would live in or near Klin for the rest of his life.

Soon after arriving, Tchaikovsky established a daily routine that he followed whenever he was home. He woke early, between 7:00 and 8:00, and gave himself an hour
to drink his tea, smoke, and read, first from the Bible, then from some other volume that, his brother, Modest, writes, “
was not only pleasure but also work”—a book in English, perhaps, or the philosophy of Spinoza or Schopenhauer. Then he took his first walk of the day, lasting no more than forty-five minutes. At 9:30, Tchaikovsky set to work—composing at the piano only after he had dealt with any proofs or his correspondence, chores that he disliked. “
Before setting about the pleasant task,” his brother noted, “Pyotr Ilich always hastened to get rid of the unpleasant.”

At noon precisely he broke for lunch, which he always enjoyed—the composer was not picky about his food and found virtually every dish excellently prepared, often conveying his compliments to the chef. After lunch he went for a long walk, regardless of the weather. His brother writes, “
Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”

Tchaikovsky’s superstition may have been justified—his walks were essential to his creativity, and he often stopped to jot down ideas that he would later flesh out at the piano. In a letter to von Meck, Tchaikovsky provided a valuable glimpse of his process.