Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  Another reason that Wright was rarely seen working on his designs is that the architect never made so much as a sketch until he had the entire project worked out in his head. Numerous colleagues have reported, with some consternation, his habit of postponing project drawings until right before a crucial client meeting. (For Falling-water, perhaps the most famous residence of the twentieth century, Wright didn’t begin the drawings until the client called to say he was getting in the car and would be arriving for their meeting in a little more than two hours.) Wright did not get frazzled by these forced bursts of last-minute productivity; indeed, colleagues and family reported that he never seemed hurried, and that he seemed to have an almost inexhaustible supply of creative energy.

  Apparently, Wright’s energies were equally prodigious in the bedroom—so much so that the architect’s third wife eventually began to worry about him. Even at age eighty-five, she claimed, Wright could still make love to her two or three times a day. “Perhaps it was a dispensation from heaven,” she wrote. “But his passionate desire became so potent that I even got worried that such a tremendous outpouring of sex energy might be harmful to him.” She sought the advice of a doctor, who suggested giving Wright a dose of “saltpeter,” or potassium nitrate, which was thought to reduce a man’s sex drive. In the end, she couldn’t bring herself to do it: “I could not think of myself dulling or in any way depriving him of that great experience.”

  Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974)

  Like a lot of architects, Kahn worked as a university professor at the same time that he maintained a busy private practice. During his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn would teach during the day, head home in the afternoon, then go into his office at night and begin a new “day” of work at 10:30 P.M. When he got tired, he would sleep on a bench in his office for a few hours before moving back to the drafting table. This was both inspiring and intimidating for his employees, who were expected to put in similarly long hours. One of Kahn’s associates remembered, “Lou had so much energy that it was hard for him to see that other people might not have as much.”

  George Gershwin (1898–1937)

  “To me George was a little sad all the time because he had this compulsion to work,” Ira Gershwin said of his brother. “He never relaxed.” Indeed, Gershwin typically worked for twelve hours or more a day, beginning in the late morning and going until past midnight. He started the day with a breakfast of eggs, toast, coffee, and orange juice, then immediately began composing, sitting at the piano in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. He would take breaks for a mid-afternoon lunch, a late-afternoon walk, and supper at about 8:00. If Gershwin had a party to attend in the evening, it was not unusual for him to return home after midnight and plunge back into work until dawn. He was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. “Like the pugilist,” Gershwin said, “the songwriter must always keep in training.”

  Joseph Heller (1923–1999)

  Heller wrote Catch-22 in the evenings after work, sitting at the kitchen table in his Manhattan apartment. “I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years,” he said. “I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn’t imagine what Americans did at night when they weren’t writing novels.” During the day he worked in the advertising departments of Time, Look, and, finally, McCall’s. Although Catch-22 skewers bureaucracies similar to the ones he worked for, Heller was not miserable at those jobs—he later called his Time colleagues the “most intelligent and well-informed people I worked with in my life,” and said that he put as much creative effort into a McCall’s promotional campaign as he did into his fiction at night.

  Even after the sale of the film rights to Catch-22 enabled Heller to quit advertising and write full-time, he produced books very slowly; his second novel, Something Happened, arrived thirteen years after Catch-22. In a 1975 interview he described his process: “I wrote for two or three hours in the morning, then went to a gym to work out. I’d have lunch alone at a counter, go back to the apartment and work some more. Sometimes I’d lie down and just think about the book all afternoon—daydream, if you will. In the evenings I’d often go out to dinner with friends.”

  Heller wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads and reworked passages carefully, often numerous times—by hand and then on a typewriter—before handing them off to a typist for a final copy. “I am a chronic fiddler,” he said. While working, he liked to listen to classical music, particularly Bach. And if he skipped a day, he didn’t beat himself up. “It’s an everyday thing, but I’m never guilt-ridden if I don’t work,” he said. “I don’t have a compulsion to write, and I never have. I have a wish, an ambition to write, but it’s not one that justifies the word ‘drive.’ ” Neither was he insecure about his pace of production. “I write very slowly, though if I write a page or two a day five days a week, that’s 300 pages a year and it does add up.”

  James Dickey (1923–1997)

  In the late 1950s, Dickey made a brief, reckless foray into the advertising world. He had recently lost a university teaching position and needed a way to make money while he worked on his poetry. With the help of his sister-in-law’s neighbor, an executive at the advertising firm McCann Erickson, Dickey landed a job at the firm’s Atlanta office, writing radio commercials for Coca-Cola bottlers around the country. It was a demanding position, made more so by the fact that Dickey was simultaneously trying to find time for his literary endeavors during the workday. “Every time I had a minute to spare, which was not often, I would stick a poem in the typewriter where I had been typing Coca-Cola ads,” he said. Unlike most of his fellow ad men, Dickey kept his office door shut. If a colleague came knocking, he would quickly clear his desk of poems and poetry books. One colleague remembered Dickey’s constant efforts to outsmart his bosses:

  If they said, “Alright, today we need ten television commercials and five radio commercials and two print ads; this is your assignment for the day,” he’d say, “OK.” He’d shut the door and within an hour he’d have it all done. Then he’d spend the rest of the time working on his own work—his correspondence, his poems. But of course they didn’t know that. They figured: “That’ll keep him busy all day.” But he was so smart and so fast, he could get it all done.

  Dickey eventually worked for three Atlanta ad agencies, seeking more senior positions in the hopes that developing big-picture creative campaigns would be less demanding than churning out a constant stream of radio and television ads. Meanwhile, his poetry career was gaining momentum—he had won several significant prizes, and he was working hard to finish a manuscript for publication. By 1961, however, his boss had caught on to the fact that Dickey was more concerned with literature than with advertising, and fired him. Dickey claimed that he had quit; he wrote to a friend, “After five and a half years of working in these dark Satanic mills of American business I am out at last.”

  Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)

  As a young apprentice in Thomas Edison’s New York office, Tesla regularly worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5:00 the following morning. (“I’ve had many hardworking assistants, but you take the cake,” Edison told him.) Later, after he had started his own company, Tesla arrived at the office at noon. Immediately, his secretary would draw the blinds; Tesla worked best in the dark and would raise the blinds again only in the event of a lightning storm, which he liked to watch flashing above the cityscape from his black mohair sofa. He typically worked at the office until midnight, with a break at 8:00 for dinner in the Palm Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

  These dinners were carefully scripted affairs. Tesla ate alone, and phoned in his instructions for the meal in advance. Upon arriving, he was shown to his regular table, where eighteen clean linen napkins would be stacked at his place. As he waited for his meal, he would polish the already gleaming silver and crystal with these squares of linen,
gradually amassing a heap of discarded napkins on the table. And when his dishes arrived—served to him not by a waiter but by the maître d’hôtel himself—Tesla would mentally calculate their cubic contents before eating, a strange compulsion he had developed in his childhood and without which he could never enjoy his food.

  Glenn Gould (1932–1982)

  Gould once declared that he was Canada’s “most experienced hermit.” He was partly joking—the virtuoso pianist liked to feed his reputation as an eccentric genius living in Howard Hughes–ian seclusion in his Toronto apartment. But there was more than a kernel of truth in this depiction. Gould was a zealous hypochondriac, with a range of real and imaginary ailments and a terror of germs (if you sneezed during a telephone call with Gould, he might hang up out of revulsion), and an intensely private person who avoided emotional entanglements and abruptly ended relationships if they became too intimate. From the time he retired from public performances in 1961, when he was thirty-one years old, Gould devoted himself completely to his work, spending the vast majority of his time thinking about music at home or recording music in the studio. He had no hobbies and only a few close friends and collaborators, with whom he communicated mostly by telephone. “I don’t think that my life style is like most other people’s and I’m rather glad for that,” Gould told an interviewer in 1980. “[T]he two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that’s eccentricity, then I’m eccentric.”

  In another interview, Gould described his preferred schedule:

  I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence, mainly because I don’t much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact, and my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky on any given day. Matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there’s a cloud. So I schedule my errands for as late an hour as possible, and I tend to emerge along with the bats and the raccoons at twilight.

  Glenn Gould, Toronto, the 1970s (photo credit 91.1)

  Sometimes errands forced him to leave the house earlier, but in general Gould slept until the late afternoon, often making a few phone calls to help himself wake up. Then he might head to the Canadian Broadcasting Centre to collect his mail and catch up on the latest gossip; if he was recording, he would arrive at the studio at about 7:00 P.M. and work there until 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. These recording sessions came with an assortment of familiar (and essential) rituals; as his longtime producer at Columbia Records has written, “for Gould, everything had a routine. It was almost as if the constant repetition of certain rituals created a kind of security blanket.” This included periodically soaking his hands in scalding-hot water for twenty minutes, popping the occasional Valium, and sending the piano tuner out for Gould’s requisite late-night “double-doubles” (coffees with two sugars and extra cream).

  If he wasn’t recording, Gould stayed in his apartment as much as possible, to read, make endless to-do lists, study scores, and listen to music. By his own estimate he listened to recordings or the radio for at least six or seven hours a day, and he usually had two radios and the TV all going at the same time, in different rooms. (“I don’t approve of people who watch television,” he said, “but I am one of them.”) His reading habits were similarly voracious: Gould devoured several newspapers a day and a handful of books a week. Surprisingly, he did not spend that much time at the piano—he practiced about an hour a day, sometimes less, and claimed that the “best playing I do is when I haven’t touched the instrument for a month.”

  At 11:00 P.M. Gould began another, longer round of telephone calls, often lasting until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Many of his friends have described the experience of receiving a Gould call: without bothering to ask if it was a good time or making any attempt at preliminary small talk, Gould would launch into whatever was on his mind, chatting away happily for as long as he pleased—sometimes hours—while the receiving party had no choice but to submit to his cheerful, rambling soliloquy. “He was known to read whole essays and books, to sing whole pieces of music over the phone, and several of his musical collaborators have recalled that he even liked to rehearse over the phone, singing through his piano part,” Kevin Bazzana writes in Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould. (Gould’s phone bill, Bazzana adds, “routinely ran to four figures.”) It was almost impossible to get off the phone with him, although if you fell asleep during the call he probably wouldn’t notice.

  His phone calls over, Gould would visit a local all-night diner for his sole meal of the day: scrambled eggs, salad, toast, juice, sherbet, and decaf coffee. Eating more frequently made him feel guilty, he said, although he snacked on arrowroot biscuits, Ritz crackers, tea, water, orange juice, and coffee throughout his waking hours. (On recording days he didn’t eat at all; fasting, he said, makes the mind sharper.) Finally, at 5:00 or 6:00 A.M., just as the sun was starting to rise, Gould would take a sedative and go to bed.

  Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)

  “My life has been regulated by insomnia,” Bourgeois told an interviewer in 1993. “It’s something that I have never been able to understand, but I accept it.” Bourgeois learned to use these sleepless hours productively, propped up in bed with her “drawing diary,” listening to music or the hum of traffic on the streets. “Each day is new, so each drawing—with words written on the back—lets me know how I’m doing,” she said. “I now have 110 drawing-diary pages, but I’ll probably destroy some. I refer to these diaries as ‘tender compulsions.’ ” As for her daylight hours, Bourgeois told another interviewer: “I work like a bee and feel that I accomplish little.”

  Chester Himes (1909–1984)

  “I like to get up early, have a big breakfast, and work at one stretch until it’s time for lunch,” the American crime novelist said in 1983. “If the mail is good, I generally go on with my writing. If it’s bad, my mind is disturbed for the rest of the day. I have nearly always typed my manuscripts, without consulting any reference books or dictionaries. In my hotel room in Paris I only needed cigarettes, a bottle of scotch, and occasionally a good dish of meat and vegetables cooking on the burner behind me. Writing’s always whetted my appetite.”

  Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)

  After being diagnosed with lupus in 1951 and told she would live only another four years, O’Connor returned to her native Georgia and moved in with her mother at the family farm in rural Andalusia. Years earlier, a writing instructor had advised O’Connor to set aside a certain number of hours each day to write, and she had taken his advice to heart; back in Georgia she came to believe, as she wrote to a friend, that “routine is a condition of survival.”

  A devout Catholic, O’Connor began each day at 6:00 A.M. with morning prayers from her copy of A Short Breviary. Then she joined her mother in the kitchen, where they would share a Thermos of coffee while listening to the weather report on the radio. Morning mass was at 7:00, a short drive into town at the Sacred Heart. Her religious obligations fulfilled, O’Connor would turn to her writing, shutting herself away between 9:00 and noon for her daily three hours, which would typically yield three pages—although, she told a reporter, “I may tear it all to pieces the next day.”

  By the afternoon, O’Connor’s energy was spent—the lupus caused her to tire early and experience flulike symptoms and mental fogginess as the day wore on. She passed these hours receiving visitors on the porch and pursuing her hobbies of painting and raising birds—peacocks, which she loved and often incorporated into her stories, as well as ducks, hens, and geese. By sundown she was ready for bed; “I go to bed at nine and am always glad to get there,” she wrote. Before bedtime she might recite another prayer from her Breviary, but her usual nighttime reading was a seven-hundred-page volume of Thomas Aquinas. “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder,” she said.

  William Styron (1925–2006)

  “Let’s face it, writing is hell,” Styron told The Paris Review in 1954. “I get a fine warm feeli
ng when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day.” To minimize the pain, Styron evolved an unusual daily routine: he would sleep until noon, then read and think in bed for another hour or so before lunch with his wife at 1:30. In the early afternoon he ran errands and dealt with the mail, then began the slow process of easing into work mode. Listening to music was a key part of this transition: “I often have to play music for an hour in order to feel exalted enough to face the act of composing,” he said. By 4:00 he was ready to move to his study for his daily four hours, which would typically yield only about two hundred or three hundred words. At 8:00 he would join his family and friends for cocktails and dinner, after which he would drink, smoke, read, and listen to music until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Styron never drank while writing, but he thought that alcohol was a valuable tool for relaxing the mind and inviting “certain visionary moments” when thinking about the work.