by Mason Currey
Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
In her autobiography, Christie admitted that even after she had written ten books, she didn’t really consider herself a “bona fide author.” When filling out forms that asked for her occupation, it never occurred to her to put down anything other than “married woman.” “The funny thing is that I have little memory of the books I wrote just after my marriage,” she added. “I suppose I was enjoying myself so much in ordinary living that writing was a task which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write.”
This caused her endless trouble with journalists, who inevitably wanted to photograph the author at her desk. But there was no such place. “All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter,” she wrote. “A marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place to write; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.”
Many friends have said to me, “I never know when you write your books, because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.” I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same. I felt slightly embarrassed if I was going to write. Once I could get away, however, shut the door and get people not to interrupt me, then I was able to go full speed ahead, completely lost in what I was doing.
Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“Maugham thought that writing, like drinking, was an easy habit to form and a difficult one to break,” Jeffrey Meyers noted in his 2004 biography of the British writer. “It was more an addiction than a vocation.” The addiction served him well; in his nearly ninety-two years, Maugham published seventy-eight books. He wrote for three or four hours every morning, setting himself a daily requirement of one thousand to one thousand five hundred words. He would get a start on the day’s work before he even sat down at his desk, thinking of the first two sentences he wanted to write while soaking in the bath. Then, once at work, there was little to distract him—Maugham believed that it was impossible to write while looking at a view, so his desk always faced a blank wall. When he wrapped up his morning’s work at about noon, Maugham often felt impatient to begin again. “When you’re writing, when you’re creating a character, it’s with you constantly, you’re preoccupied with it, it’s alive,” he said—adding that when you “cut that out of your life, it’s a rather lonely life.”
Graham Greene (1904–1991)
In 1939, with World War II fast approaching, Greene began to worry that he would die before he could complete what he was certain would be his greatest novel, The Power and the Glory, and that his wife and children would be left in poverty. So he set out to write another of his “entertainments”—melodramatic thrillers that lacked artistry but that he knew would make money—while continuing to grind away at his masterpiece. To escape the distractions of home life, Greene rented a private studio whose address and telephone number he kept secret from everyone but his wife. There he maintained regular office hours, devoting his mornings to the thriller The Confidential Agent and his afternoons to The Power and the Glory. To manage the pressure of writing two books at once, he took Benzedrine tablets twice daily, one upon waking and the other at midday. As a result he was able to write two thousand words in the morning alone, as opposed to his usual five hundred. After only six weeks, The Confidential Agent was completed and on its way to being published. (The Power and the Glory took another four months.)
Greene did not keep up this kind of productivity (or the drug use) throughout his career. By his sixties he admitted that, where he once required five hundred words of himself each day, he was now setting the bar as low as two hundred words. In 1968, an interviewer asked if he was “a nine-till-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heavens, I would say I was a nine-till-a-quarter-past-ten man.”
Joseph Cornell (1903–1972)
Cornell made his first shadow box in 1934, not long after securing a nine-to-five job in the home-furnishings division of a Manhattan textile studio. It was tedious and low-paying work, but Cornell stayed there for six years. He felt obligated to be the wage earner for his household—he lived with his mother and handicapped brother in a small house in Flushing, Queens—and he was still a relative unknown in the art world.
Joseph Cornell’s basement workroom in Queens, 1969. Photograph by Hans Namuth. (photo credit 67.1)
That would change over the next several years as Cornell worked nights at the kitchen table, sorting and assembling materials for his boxes. It was not easy going. Some nights he felt too fatigued from his day job to concentrate on his art and would sit up reading instead, switching on the oven for warmth. In the mornings, his quarrelsome mother would scold him about the mess he’d left at the kitchen table; without a proper workroom, Cornell was forced to store his growing collection of magazine clippings and dime-store baubles out in the garage.
It wasn’t until 1940 that Cornell finally mustered the courage to quit his job and pursue his art full-time—and even then his habits changed little. He still worked nights at the kitchen table, while his mother and brother slept upstairs. In the late morning he would head downtown for breakfast at his local Bickford’s restaurant, often satisfying his sweet tooth with a Danish or a slice of pie (and lovingly cataloging these indulgences in his diary). Afternoons were spent on the freelance commercial work that paid the bills and helped Cornell justify his lack of a day job to his mother. Still, as much as he had hated working, Cornell found that he hated not working too. During the 1940s, he returned to the workforce twice, happy at first to resume the reassuring nine-to-five routine. Then, after a period of months, he would grow frustrated and quit. Eventually he reconciled himself to the solitary artist’s life. The addition of a basement workroom made it possible for Cornell to work on his boxes during the day, and his frequent and wide-ranging correspondence—not to mention the steady stream of artists, curators, and collectors that began making the pilgrimage out to Flushing—kept him connected to the world outside his mother’s house.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
Plath’s journal, which she kept from age eleven until her suicide at age thirty, records a near-constant struggle to find and stick to a productive writing schedule. “From now on: see if this is possible: set alarm for 7:30 and get up then, tired or not,” she wrote in one example, from January 1959. “Rip through breakfast and housecleaning (bed and dishes, mopping or whatever) by 8:30.… Be writing before 9 (nine), that takes the curse off it.” But the curse was never off it for long, despite Plath’s frequent attempts to carve out a chunk of inviolable writing time each day. Only near the end of her life, living separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and taking care of their two small children alone, did Plath find a routine that worked for her. She was using sedatives to get to sleep, and when they wore off at about 5:00 A.M. she would get up and write until the children awoke. Working like this for two months in the autumn of 1962, she produced nearly all the poems of Ariel, the posthumously published collection that finally established her as a major and searingly original new voice in poetry. For once Plath felt possessed by her work, triumphant in the creative act. She wrote to her mother in October 1962, four months before she would take her own life, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”
John Cheever (1912–1982)
“When I was younger,” Cheever recalled in 1978, “I used to wake up at eight, work until noon, and then break, hollering with pleasure; then I’d go back to work through to five, get pissed, get laid, go to bed, and do the same thing again the next day.” In the summer of 1945, when he moved with his wife and young daughter to a ninth-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East Side, the thirty-three-year-old Cheever adopted a somewhat more businesslike routine. As Blake Bailey writes in his 2009 biography, “Almost every morning for the
next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.” After that he had the rest of the day free, and he would often take his young daughter on long walks around the city, bringing her along to the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street if he felt like a drink on the way home.
Cheever continued to write pretty much every morning for the rest of his life—but as his career progressed, the writing sessions grew shorter and shorter, while cocktail hour began earlier and earlier. By the 1960s, Cheever’s working day was usually over by 10:30 A.M., after which he would lurk about the house (the family had since moved to the suburbs), pretending to read while waiting for an opportunity to slip unnoticed into the pantry and pour himself a few “scoops” of gin. His journals, begun in the late 1940s and continued for the ensuing three decades, record his constant struggle with alcoholism and his attempts to “achieve some equilibrium between writing and living.” The following entry, from 1971, describes a typical day:
The hour between five and six is my best. It is dark. A few birds sing. I feel contented and loving. My discontents begin at seven, when light fills the room. I am unready for the day—unready to face it soberly, that is. Some days I would like to streak down to the pantry and pour a drink. I recite the incantations I recorded three years ago, and it was three years ago that I described the man who thought continuously of bottles. The situation is, among other things, repetitious. The hours between seven and ten, when I begin to drink, are the worst. I could take a Miltown [a tranquilizer], but I do not.… I would like to pray, but to whom—some God of the Sunday school classroom, some provincial king whose prerogatives and rites remain unclear? I am afraid of cars, planes, boats, snakes, stray dogs, falling leaves, extension ladders, and the sound of the wind in the chimney; Dr. Gespaden, I am afraid of the wind in the chimney. I sleep off my hooch after lunch and very often awake feeling content once more, and loving, although I do not work. Swimming is the apex of the day, its heart, and after this—night is falling—I am stoned but serene. So I sleep and dream until five.
The journals also chart Cheever’s anxiety about his complicated sexuality. Cheever stayed married for more than forty years, and he slept with other women, but he also struggled with homosexual longings and had several affairs with men. To make matters worse, he had what appears to have been an unusually robust sex drive (the actress Hope Lange, who had a brief affair with Cheever, said that he was “the horniest man [she] ever met”) combined with frequent bouts of impotence, probably brought on by his alcoholism but no doubt made worse by his sexual guilt and a frequently rocky marriage. All of this was distracting from his work, especially since Cheever placed a high value on the salutary effects of erotic release. He thought that his constitution required at least “two or three orgasms a week” and he believed that sexual stimulation improved his concentration and even his eyesight: “With a stiff prick I can read the small print in prayer books but with a limp prick I can barely read newspaper headlines.”
Cheever occasionally grew weary of his oversize appetites, but he also seemed to think that his inner turmoil was somehow tied to his imaginative faculties—that he possessed a wellspring of innate vitality that fed his fiction but also overflowed into recklessness and addiction. Sometimes he couldn’t decide if the writing was a valuable outlet for his energies or if indulging his imagination in fiction actually made things worse. “I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation,” he wrote in his journal in 1968. “I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure.”
Louis Armstrong (1901–1971)
The greater part of Armstrong’s adult life was spent on the road, traveling from one gig to another, sleeping in a succession of anonymous hotel rooms. To manage the stress and boredom of this lifestyle, Armstrong evolved an elaborate pre- and post-show ritual, described by Terry Teachout in his 2009 biography. He took pains to arrive at any engagement two hours before starting time, already bathed and dressed, so that he could hole up in his dressing room, dosing himself with the home remedies he always swore by: swigs of glycerin and honey to “wash out the pipes,” Maalox for occasional stomach pains, and, for his chronic lip problems, a special salve made by a trombone player in Germany. When the show was over, he returned to the dressing room to greet friends and fans, sitting in his undershirt with a handkerchief tied on his head, fiddling with his trumpet. Armstrong never ate dinner before a show, but he would sometimes go out for a late supper afterward or, more often, retreat to his hotel room for a room-service meal or take-out Chinese food, his second-favorite cuisine (after red beans and rice). Then he would roll a joint—Armstrong openly smoked pot, or “gage,” as he called it, nearly every day, believing it to be far superior to alcohol—catch up on his voluminous correspondence, and listen to music on the two reel-to-reel tape recorders that followed him wherever he went.
A lifelong insomniac, Armstrong relied on music to lull himself to sleep. Before he could get into bed, however, he had to administer the last of his daily home remedies, Swiss Kriss, a potent herbal laxative invented by the nutritionist Gayelord Hauser in 1922 (and still on the market today). Armstrong believed so strongly in its curative powers that he recommended it to all his friends, and even had a card printed up with a photo of himself sitting on the toilet, above the caption “Leave It All Behind Ya.” His doctors were horrified by his daily self-medication, but the routine seemed to work for him; night after night, he continued to perform at a remarkably high level despite the wearying tour schedule. As he told an interviewer in 1969, “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.… I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)
In 1912, Yeats described his routine in a letter to his fellow poet Edwin Ellis: “I read from 10 to 11. I write from 11 till 2, then after lunch I read till 3:30. Then I go into the woods or fish in the lake till 5. Then I write letters or work a little till 7 when I go out for an hour before dinner.” According to another literary friend, Yeats always made sure to write for at least two hours every day, whether he felt inclined to it or not. This daily discipline was crucial for Yeats both because his concentration faltered without a regular schedule—“Every change upsets my never very resolute habits of work”—and because he worked at a snail’s pace. “I am a very slow writer,” he noted in 1899. “I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” This meant that a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
In 1916, when he was thirty-six years old, Stevens accepted a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed as an insurance lawyer until his death. Far from stifling his creativity, the job seemed to suit Stevens’s temperament and even encourage his poetry. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he once said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about about money.”
Stevens was an early riser—he woke at 6:00 every morning to read for two hours—and unfailingly punctual in his work habits. He arrived at the office at 9:00 A.M. sharp and left at 4:30. Between work and home he walked, a distance of three or four miles each way. Most days, he took an additional hour-long walk on his lunch break. It was on these walks that he compos
ed his poetry, stopping now and then to scribble lines on one of the half-dozen or so envelopes he always had stuffed in his pocket. At work, too, he would occasionally pause to write down fragments of poems, which he kept filed in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, and he would routinely hand his secretary these various scraps of verse for typing. Although his colleagues were aware of his poetry, Stevens assiduously avoided talking about it, preferring to maintain the face of a mild-mannered, somewhat aloof businessman in all his public dealings with the world.
Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)
“Do you have a daily routine?” an interviewer asked Amis in 1975.
Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”
