Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (22 page)

His first ritual was to light a pipe, and as the day wore on he would surround himself with spent matches. Pritchett wrote longhand on an old pastry board arranged across the arms of his desk chair, his papers held in place by a binder clip. He would write all morning, breaking at about 1:00 for a martini and lunch downstairs. After another look at the crossword, he napped for an hour or so in the library, made more tea, and ran errands in the neighborhood. He could usually fit in two more hours of work before supper at 7:00; and, often, the hours between supper and bed were occupied by another round of work.

According to the biographer Lewis M. Dabney, “
Wilson was the only well-known literary alcoholic of his generation whose work was not compromised by his drinking.” And Wilson could certainly drink. The literary critic and essayist readily imbibed whatever was on offer, including bathtub gin and even pure alcohol, although he preferred Molson beer and Johnnie Walker Red Label. The poet Stephen Spender recalled that “
at the Princeton Club he would order six martinis and drink them one after another.” Nevertheless, Wilson rarely had a hangover, and he could get by on little sleep. He always resumed work at 9:00 in the morning and continued, pausing only to eat lunch at his desk, until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. “
You have to set a goal for each day and stick to it,” he said. “I usually try to do six pages.” (These were legal-sized sheets written in pencil, and he later upped the quota to seven pages.)

The heavy drinking came later in the evening, but Wilson was not against taking an occasional slug of whiskey to help him start or finish a troublesome piece. On top of his daily six or seven pages, he found time to reply to letters and write in his journal, where, in addition to working out ideas for his fiction and essays, he recorded, in clinical detail, blow-by-blow accounts of his sexual relations with the women in his life. (Wilson had four wives and countless affairs, and managed to exert a strong appeal to women despite his pudgy physical unattractiveness.) He refused to spend time writing about things he did not care about—and although he struggled to stay
afloat financially for his entire life, Wilson was proud that he could make a living writing only about that which genuinely interested him. “
To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it,” he noted, “is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity.”

“
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” Updike told
The Paris Review
in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.” For much of his career, Updike rented a small office above a restaurant in downtown Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he would write for three or four hours each morning, netting about three pages per day. “
Around noon the smell of food would start to rise through the floor, but I tried to hold out another hour before I tumbled downstairs, dizzy with cigarettes, to order a sandwich,” Updike later recalled. In a 1978 interview, he described his routine in more detail:

He told another interviewer that he was careful to give at least three hours a day to the writing project at hand; otherwise, he said, there was a risk he might forget what it’s about.
A solid routine, he added, “saves you from giving up.”

Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933, where he held a professorship at Princeton University until his retirement in 1945. His routine there was simple. Between 9:00 and 10:00
A.M.
he ate breakfast and perused the daily papers. At about 10:30 he left for his Princeton office, walking when the weather was nice; otherwise, a station wagon from the university would pick him up. He
worked until 1:00, then returned home for a 1:30 lunch, a nap, and a cup of tea. The rest of the afternoon was spent at home, continuing his work, seeing visitors, and dealing with the correspondence that his secretary had sorted earlier in the day. Supper was at 6:30, followed by more work and more letters.

Despite his humble lifestyle, Einstein was a celebrity in Princeton, famous not only for his scientific accomplishments but also for his absentmindedness and disheveled appearance. (Einstein wore his hair long to avoid visits to the barber and eschewed socks and suspenders, which he considered unnecessary.) Walking to and from work, he was often waylaid by locals who wanted to meet the great physicist. A colleague remembered: “
Einstein would pose with the waylayer’s wife, children, or grandchildren as desired and exchange a few good-humored words. Then he would go on, shaking his head, saying: ‘Well, the old elephant has gone through his tricks again.’ ”

In 1910, the author of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
—as well as an eventual thirteen Oz sequels and dozens of other fantasy stories and novels—moved from Chicago to Hollywood, where he and his wife bought a corner lot and built a large, comfortable house that they dubbed Ozcot. There, Baum divided his time between writing and a new passion, gardening, which he studied carefully, eventually raising a prize-winning assortment of flowers in the backyard.

At Ozcot, Baum would get up at about 8:00 and eat a hearty breakfast, accompanied by four or five cups of strong coffee with cream and sugar. Following breakfast, he would change into his work clothes and devote the remainder of the morning to his flowers. Lunch was at 1:00, and only after that did Baum turn to his writing—and even then, not always for long. He liked to compose in a garden chair, a cigar in his mouth, writing longhand on a clipboard. Often, however, he would end up back in the flower beds, puttering about while he tried to work out ideas for the book. “
My characters just won’t do what I want them to,” he would explain.

In a 1908 letter to a potential translator, the Norwegian author provided a glimpse of his creative process:

As Hamsun grew older and became an increasingly light sleeper, he would often slip into a half-doze for large parts of the day. To compensate for his lack of energy,
he would seize on whatever flashes of inspiration came to him, scribbling them down immediately on scraps of paper. Later, he would spread his slips of paper out on a table, sifting through them for clues to a story or character.

In 1921, an editor of the
Bookman
visited Cather in her Greenwich Village apartment to discuss the author’s recent publications—which included a new collection of short stories and, a few years earlier, the third of her “Prairie Trilogy” novels,
My Ántonia
—as well as her writing routine and habits. “
I work from two and a half to three hours a day,” Cather told him.

In 1942, under pressure to finish what would become her breakthrough novel,
The Fountainhead
, Rand turned to a doctor to help her overcome her chronic fatigue. He prescribed Benzedrine, still a relatively new drug at the time, to boost her energy levels. It did the trick.
According to the biographer Anne C. Heller, Rand had spent years planning and composing the first third of her novel; over the next twelve months, fueled by Benzedrine pills, she averaged a chapter a week. Her writing routine during this period was grueling: she wrote day and night, sometimes neglecting to go to bed for days (she took naps on the couch in her clothes instead). At one point she worked for thirty hours straight, pausing only to eat the meals prepared by her husband or to read him a new passage and discuss bits of dialogue. Even when she got stuck, Rand stayed at her desk. A typist who later worked with Rand recalled her habits:

The Benzedrine helped Rand push through the last stages of
The Fountainhead
, but it soon became a crutch. She would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades, even as her overuse led to mood swings, irritability, emotional outbursts, and paranoia—traits Rand was susceptible to even without drugs.

In 1934, Orwell found himself in a typical bind for an aspiring young writer. Despite having published his first book the year before—the generally well received
Down and Out in Paris and London
—Orwell couldn’t support himself on his writing alone. But the lowly teaching jobs he had been holding left him little time to write and put him on the margins of literary society. Luckily, Orwell’s Aunt Nellie found him an attractive alterative: a part-time assistant job at a London secondhand bookshop.

The post at Booklovers’ Corner proved an ideal fit for the thirty-one-year-old bachelor.
Waking at 7:00, Orwell went to open the shop at 8:45 and stayed there for an hour. Then he had free time until 2:00, when he would
return to the shop and work until 6:30. This left him almost four and a half hours of writing time in the morning and early afternoon, which, conveniently, were the times that he was most mentally alert. And with his writing day behind him, he could happily yawn through the long afternoons in the shop and look forward to free time in the evening—spent sauntering around the neighborhood or, later, hovering over a new purchase: a small gas stove known as the
Bachelor Griller, which could grill, boil, and fry, and that allowed Orwell to modestly entertain guests at his small flat.

By the 1950s, the consensus in the literary world was that Farrell’s best work was behind him; the novelist was revered for the
Studs Lonigan
trilogy, published two decades earlier, but his later works had made little impression. Farrell, however, wasn’t willing to fade into obscurity. In 1958, he embarked on his most ambitious project yet, a multi-novel cycle (he originally estimated it at three to seven books, but in one interview bragged that it would run to at least twenty-five volumes) called
The Universe of Time
. To maintain the prodigious energy required of such a project, Farrell relied on drugs: amphetamines to stay up through the night writing—he sometimes worked twenty to twenty-four hours straight, wearing the same dirty pajamas, the hotel room where he was living strewn with paper—and Valium to bring himself down, relieve his anxieties, and get some sleep.

It was, by all accounts, a frenzied and unhappy existence—until Farrell met Cleo Paturis, a magazine editor who became his partner and caretaker. She told the biographer Robert K. Landers that Farrell “
needed someone to say, ‘This is the time to eat breakfast,’ ‘This is the time to eat lunch,’ … that kind of thing.” And, with her help, Farrell stopped using drugs—at least temporarily; he later went back to taking smaller doses in secret—and settled into a normal routine. On an average day, Paturis would rise at 6:30
A.M.
and fix Farrell’s breakfast: orange juice, corn flakes with sliced banana, and an English muffin. While he ate, she would shower and dress, and then Farrell would walk her to the bus stop. Every time, as it drove off, he would hit the back of the bus, call out her name, and throw kisses to her, which she always returned (to the visible amusement of some of the other riders). Paturis arrived at work at 7:45, and by 8:30 she would already have her first phone call from Farrell—he called her at least six times a day. By 10:00, however, he would have started writing, and he would continue, often skipping lunch, until 5:00. Then Paturis came home, made dinner, and cleaned up the kitchen. In the evening, he answered letters while she read the newspaper.