Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

  L. Frank Baum (1856–1919)

  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.

  Knut Hamsun (1859–1952)

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

  A great deal of what I have written has come in the night, when I have slept for a couple of hours and then woken up. I am clear-headed then, and acutely impressionable. I always have a pencil and paper by my bed, I do not use light, but start writing immediately in the dark if I feel something is streaming through me. It has become a habit and I have no difficulty in deciphering my writing in the morning.

  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.

  Willa Cather (1873–1947)

  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.

  I don’t hold myself to longer hours; if I did, I wouldn’t gain by it. The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I’ve ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning’s work.

  For me the morning is the best time to write. During the other hours of the day I attend to my housekeeping, take walks in Central Park, go to concerts, and see something of my friends. I try to keep myself fit, fresh; one has to be in as good form to write as to sing. When not working, I shut work from my mind.

  Ayn Rand (1905–1982)

  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:

  She was very disciplined. She seldom left her desk. If she had a problem with the writing—if she had what she called the “squirms”—she solved the problem at her desk; she didn’t get up and pace around the apartment, or wait for inspiration, or turn on the radio or television. She wasn’t writing every minute. Once I heard a flapping sound coming from the study—she was playing solitaire. She might read the newspaper. At times, I entered the study to find her sitting with her elbows on the desk and resting her chin on her hands, looking out the window, smoking, thinking.

  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.

  George Orwell (1903–1950)

  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.

  James T. Farrell (1904–1979)

  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 star
ted 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.

  Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)

  In November 1945, Pollock and his wife and fellow painter, Lee Krasner, moved from New York to a small fishing village on eastern Long Island called Springs. Krasner had hoped that getting Pollock out of the city would stymie his drinking, and she was right: Pollock still drank, but without his bar buddies and the constant rounds of parties, he went on fewer binges and began to paint again. Indeed, the next few years in Springs were probably the happiest and most productive of his life—it was during this time that he developed the drip-painting technique for which he became famous.

  Most days Pollock slept until the early afternoon. “I’ve got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked,” he told a visiting reporter in 1950. “So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors.” In fact, Krasner usually woke a few hours earlier, to clean the house, tend the garden, and perhaps work a little on her own paintings while Pollock slept—being careful to take the phone off the hook so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Around 1:00 P.M., Pollock would come downstairs for his usual breakfast of coffee and cigarettes, then head out to the barn that he had converted into his studio. He would stay there until 5:00 or 6:00, then emerge for a beer and a walk to the beach with Krasner. In the evening they would have dinner and often get together with one of the area couples they had befriended (whom Krasner considered “safe company” for their benign influence on her husband). Pollock liked to stay up late, but in the country there wasn’t that much to do; as he drank less he slept more, as much as twelve hours a night.

  Carson McCullers (1917–1967)

  McCullers’s first novel was written thanks to a pact with her husband, Reeves, whom she married in 1937. The young newlyweds—Carson was twenty; Reeves twenty-four—both aspired to be writers, so they struck a deal: one of them would work full-time and earn a living for the couple while the other wrote; after a year, they would switch roles. Since McCullers already had a manuscript in progress, and Reeves had lined up a salaried position in Charlotte, North Carolina, she began her literary endeavors first.

  McCullers wrote every day, sometimes escaping their drafty apartment to work in the local library, taking sips from the Thermos full of sherry that she would sneak inside. She typically worked until the middle of the afternoon, then went for a long walk. Back at the apartment, she might attempt to do some cooking or cleaning, tasks she was unused to, having grown up with servants. (McCullers later recalled trying to roast a chicken, not realizing that she had to clean the bird first. When Reeves came home, he asked her about the awful smell in the house; Carson, absorbed in her writing, hadn’t even noticed.) After dinner, Carson read her day’s work to Reeves, who offered his suggestions. Then the couple ate dinner, read in bed, and listened to the electric phonograph before going to sleep early.

  After a year, Carson had landed a contract for her novel, so Reeves continued to put his own literary aspirations on hold and earn a salary for the both of them. Despite the pact, he would never get to try his luck as the full-time writer in their marriage. When Carson’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, it vaulted her into the literary limelight; after that, there was never any question of her sacrificing her writing for a day job and a steady paycheck.

  Willem de Kooning (1904–1997)

  All his life, de Kooning had a hard time getting up in the morning. He generally rose around 10:00 or 11:00, drank several strong cups of coffee, and painted all day and into the night, breaking only for dinner and the occasional visitor. When a painting was troubling him, sleep was impossible and de Kooning would spend most of the night pacing the dark streets of Manhattan. This routine changed very little after his marriage, in 1942, to Elaine Fried, a fellow artist. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan write:

  Typically, the couple rose late in the morning. Breakfast consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with the milk that they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury. (So was a private phone, which de Kooning would not have until the early sixties.) Then the day’s routine began with de Kooning moving to his end of the studio and Elaine to hers. Work was punctuated by more cups of strong coffee, which de Kooning made by boiling the coffee as he had learned to do in Holland, and by many cigarettes. The two stayed at their easels until fairly late, taking a break only to go out for something to eat or to walk up to Times Square to see a movie. Often, however, de Kooning, who hated to stop working, began again after supper and pushed far into the night, leaving Elaine to go to a party or concert. “I remember very often walking by and seeing the lights on and going up,” said Marjorie Luyckx. “In those studios, the heat used to go off after five o’clock because they were commercial buildings. Bill would be painting with his hat and coat on. Painting away, and whistling.”

  Willem de Kooning, New York, circa 1945 (photo credit 140.1)

  Jean Stafford (1915–1979)

  A few days after learning that she had won the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories in 1970, Stafford received a reporter from the New York Post in her small farmhouse on the East End of Long Island, where she had lived alone since her third husband’s death seven years earlier. Looking “worn, patient, a little sad,” Stafford gave the reporter a tour of the meticulously organized premises—“I’m a compulsive housekeeper,” she said; “I even go into the corners with Q-tips”—and talked a little about her work habits.

  Stafford wrote in her upstairs study each day, she said, from about 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. (“Does she write hard or easy?” the reporter wondered. “Hard!” Stafford replied.) The rest of the day she spent reading or pursuing a range of mild domestic hobbies: gardening, doing needlepoint, assembling potpourris, observing her two cats. Once a week she had guests over for dinner—her specialties were striped-bass chowder and barbecued spare ribs with white beans. Otherwise, she ate little, sometimes just coffee for breakfast and a Hershey bar for lunch.

  At night Stafford battled with insomnia—made worse by her growing alcoholism, although she understandably did not tell the Post about this. Despite her drinking, the mid-1970s were some of Stafford’s most productive writing years; between 1973 and 1975 she published nineteen magazine articles and reviewed a steady stream of books for several periodicals. Yet even as her work enjoyed heightened public exposure, Stafford herself became increasingly withdrawn and reclusive. She eventually called off her weekly dinner parties and began refusing visitors altogether. During the summer tourist season, she wrote in one essay, “I stay in the house with the doors locked and the blinds drawn, snarling.”

  Donald Barthelme (1931–1989)

  While writing the stories for his first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Barthelme lived in Houston with his second wife, Helen, in a one-story house with a screened-in porch that he used as his office. Soon after moving into the house, in 1960, Barthelme left his job as the editor of a university literary journal to concentrate on his fiction full-time; the couple lived on Helen’s two salaries, from teaching and running a small advertising business out of the house. On the first day of Barthelme’s new writing career, they established a schedule that they adhered to seven days a week, and that he would largely stick to for the rest of his life.

  Barthelme spent mornings on the porch, sitting down at his manual Remington typewriter at 8:00 or 9:00 and working there until noon or 1:00, the sound of his typing carrying out into the quiet neighborhood streets. For the task, he always dressed carefully in khaki or corduroy slacks, a button-down shirt, and, in cool weather, a dark gray pullover sweater. At 8:30 or 9:00, Helen brought out his breakfast of bacon or ham with toast and juice (Barthelme disliked eggs) and went to her advertising work in the dining room. Sometimes Barthelme would call to her
with a question about the spelling or connotation of a particular word; and, several times each morning, he would bring her a freshly typed passage or read aloud from a new story for her feedback.

  Barthelme smoked constantly while he wrote and, fearful of starting a fire, ended each session by carefully emptying his ashtray in the kitchen. He was similarly meticulous at the typewriter, reading each new sentence or phrase aloud to himself. If something didn’t sound right, he would pull out the entire page, toss it in the wastebasket, and start over with a fresh sheet of newsprint. (By the end of each morning, the wastebasket would be brimming with thirty to forty discarded pages.) When he got stuck, Barthelme would head out for a twenty- or thirty-minute walk in the neighborhood. He tried not to rush the writing. Some days he would end up with one or two complete pages; other days, just a sentence or even nothing at all. For Barthelme, Helen later wrote, “the process of creativity began with dissatisfaction”; yet she also recalled, “during these first years of writing, he was irresistibly happy.”

  Alice Munro (b. 1931)

  In the 1950s, as a young mother taking care of two small children, Munro wrote in the slivers of time she could find between housekeeping and child-rearing duties. She would often slip away to her bedroom to write in the afternoons, while her elder daughter was at school and the younger one was taking a nap. (Munro has said that she was “very big on naps” in those years.) But balancing this double life was not easy. When neighbors or acquaintances dropped in and interrupted her writing, Munro didn’t feel comfortable telling them that she was trying to work; her fiction was kept secret from all but her family and closest friends. At the beginning of the 1960s, with both children in school, Munro tried renting an office above a drugstore to write a novel but gave it up after four months; even there, the garrulous landlord interrupted her and she hardly got any writing done. While Munro published short stories steadily throughout these years, it ultimately took her almost two decades to put together the material for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, when she was thirty-seven years old.