Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (18 page)

These long hours of nighttime composition—fueled not only by coffee, wine, chocolate, and the smell of rotting apples but by Schiller’s constant smoking and snuff-taking—probably contributed to his sickly constitution and constant physical maladies. Yet Schiller could not abandon the habit; it was the only reliable method to guarantee himself the long, uninterrupted stretches of time he needed to be productive. He wrote to a friend, “
We have failed to recognize our great asset: time. A conscientious use of it could make us into something quite amazing.”

According to a childhood friend, Schubert “
used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Meanwhile many a pipe was smoked.” The Austrian composer’s afternoons were less rigorous; his friend noted, “
Schubert never composed in the afternoon; after the midday meal he went to a coffee-house, drank a small portion of black coffee, smoked for an hour or two and read the newspapers at the same time.” On summer afternoons, he often went for long walks in the countryside surrounding Vienna, then enjoyed a glass of beer or wine with friends. He avoided giving piano lessons, even though he always needed the money and frequently had to rely on friends for financial support. As one member of his circle remembered, “
Schubert was extraordinarily fertile and industrious in composing. For everything else that goes by the name of
work
he had no use.”

The Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist slept little, went to church daily, and smoked and drank constantly. One of his pupils described Liszt’s routine:

Later in the afternoon, Liszt took a long nap of two hours or more—to make up, in part, for his sleepless
nights, which he spent pacing his room and sitting at the piano or writing. Although he drank sparingly at lunch, he continued to drink steadily throughout the afternoon and evening; by his last years he was imbibing one or two bottles of cognac and two or three bottles of wine a day, as well as the occasional glass of absinthe. His contemporaries remember him as having a cheerful disposition, but Liszt obviously had his share of demons. A younger colleague once asked Liszt why he didn’t keep a diary. “
To live one’s life is hard enough,” he replied. “Why write down all the misery? It would resemble nothing more than the inventory of a torture chamber.”

Sand produced a minimum of twenty manuscript pages nearly every night of her adult life. She always worked late at night, a habit she picked up as a teenager caring for her ailing grandmother, when the nighttime hours were her only chance to be alone and think. As an adult, it was not unusual for her to slip out of a sleeping lover’s bed to begin a new novel in the middle of the night. In the mornings, Sand often couldn’t remember what she had written during these somnambulant writing sessions. “
If I did not have my works on a shelf, I would even forget their titles,” she claimed.

Sand’s persona was larger than life—there’s the famous cross-dressing, the assumption of a male pen name, her numerous affairs with both men and women—but her work habits were fairly austere. She liked to nibble on
chunks of chocolate at her desk, and she required regular doses of tobacco (cigars or hand-rolled cigarettes) to stay alert. But she did not subscribe to the idea of the drug-addled artist. She wrote in her autobiography:

Balzac drove himself relentlessly as a writer, motivated by enormous literary ambition as well as a never-ending string of creditors and endless cups of coffee; as Herbert J. Hunt has written, he engaged in “
orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” When Balzac
was working, his writing schedule was brutal: He ate a light dinner at 6:00
P.M.
, then went to bed. At 1:00
A.M.
he rose and sat down at his writing table for a seven-hour stretch of work. At 8:00
A.M.
he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap; then, from 9:30 to 4:00, he resumed work, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. (According to one estimate, he drank as many as fifty cups a day.) At 4:00
P.M.
Balzac took a walk, had a bath, and received visitors until 6:00, when the cycle started all over again. “
The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion—but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”

When Napoléon III seized control of France in 1851, Hugo was forced into political exile, eventually settling with his family on Guernsey, a British island off the coast of Normandy. In his fifteen years there Hugo would write some of his best work, including three collections of poetry and the novel
Les Misérables
. Shortly after arriving on Guernsey, Hugo purchased Hauteville House—locals believed it was haunted by the ghost of a woman who had committed suicide—and set about making several improvements to the property. Chief among them was an all-glass “lookout” on the roof that resembled a small, furnished greenhouse. This was the highest point on the island, with a panoramic view of the English Channel; on clear days,
you could see the coast of France. There Hugo wrote each morning, standing at a small desk in front of a mirror.

He rose at dawn, awakened by the daily gunshot from a nearby fort, and received a pot of freshly brewed coffee and his morning letter from Juliette Drouet, his mistress, whom he had installed on Guernsey just nine doors down from Hauteville House. After reading the passionate words of “Juju” to her “beloved Christ,” Hugo swallowed two raw eggs, enclosed himself in his lookout, and wrote until 11:00
A.M.
Then he stepped out onto the rooftop and washed from a tub of water left out overnight, pouring the icy liquid over himself and rubbing his body with a horsehair glove. Townspeople passing by could watch the spectacle from the street—as could Juliette, looking out the window of her room.

At noon Hugo headed downstairs for lunch. The biographer Graham Robb writes, “
these were the days when prominent men were expected to have opening hours like museums. Hugo welcomed almost everyone, writers collecting snippets for their future memoirs, journalists who came to describe M. Hugo’s famous dwelling for their female readers. As the clock struck twelve, he would appear in a grey felt hat and woolen gloves, looking like ‘a well-dressed farmer,’ and conduct his guests to the dining-room.”

Hugo provided handsomely for his guests but ate little himself. After lunch he embarked on a two-hour walk or performed a series of strenuous exercises on the beach. Later he would make his daily visit to the barber (he insisted on keeping the trimmings in an unexplained act of superstition), go for a carriage ride with Juliette, and
do more writing at home, often using the afternoon to answer some of the satchel-loads of letters that arrived each day.

As the sun set Hugo spent either a boisterous evening at Juliette’s, joined by friends for dinner, conversation, and cards, or a rather gloomy one at home. At family dinners Hugo felt compelled to hold forth on philosophical subjects—pausing only to make sure his wife had not fallen asleep, or to write something down in one of the little notebooks he carried everywhere he went. Hugo’s son Charles—one of the three Hugo children who became writers themselves—described the scene: “
As soon as he has uttered the slightest ideas—anything other than ‘I slept well’ or ‘Give me something to drink’—he turns away, takes out his notebook and jots down what he has just said. Nothing is lost. Everything ends up in print. When his sons try to use something they heard their father say, they are always caught out. When one of his books appears, they find that all the notes they took have been published.”

Dickens was prolific—he produced fifteen novels, ten of which are longer than eight hundred pages, and numerous stories, essays, letters, and plays—but he could not be productive
without certain conditions in place. First, he needed absolute quiet; at one of his houses, an extra door had to be installed to his study to block out noise.
And his study had to be precisely arranged, with his writing desk placed in front of a window and, on the desk itself, his writing materials—goose-quill pens and blue ink—laid out alongside several ornaments: a small vase of fresh flowers, a large paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit perched upon it, and two bronze statuettes (one depicting a pair of fat toads dueling, the other a gentleman swarmed with puppies).

Dickens’s working hours were invariable. His eldest son recalled that “
no city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business-like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.” He rose at 7:00, had breakfast at 8:00, and was in his study by 9:00. He stayed there until 2:00, taking a brief break for lunch with his family, during which he often seemed to be in a trance, eating mechanically and barely speaking a word before hurrying back to his desk. On an ordinary day he could complete about two thousand words in this way, but during a flight of imagination he sometimes managed twice that amount. Other days, however, he would hardly write anything; nevertheless, he stuck to his work hours without fail, doodling and staring out the window to pass the time.

Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “
searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “
he looked the personification of energy, which
seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.” Dickens’s nights, however, were relaxed: he dined at 6:00, then spent the evening with family or friends before retiring at midnight.

When Darwin moved from London to the English countryside in 1842, he did so not just to escape the bustle of city life and raise a family in more peaceful surroundings. He was also harboring a secret—his theory of evolution, which he had formulated in private over the preceding decade but dared not unleash on the public yet. The idea that mankind was descended from beasts would, he knew, be viewed as heretical and arrogant by Victorian society,
and he didn’t want to risk personal disgrace and the widespread dismissal of his work. He decided to bide his time at Down House, a former parsonage in an isolated village in Kent—
the “extreme edge of [the] world,” he called it—where he would live and work for the rest of his life.

An etching of Charles Darwin’s study at Down House
(
photo credit 110.1
)

From the time he arrived at Down House until 1859, when he finally published
On the Origin of Species
, Darwin led a double life, keeping his thoughts on evolution and natural selection to himself while bolstering his credentials in the scientific community. He became an expert on barnacles, ultimately producing four monographs on the creatures and earning a Royal Medal for his work in 1853. He also studied bees and flowers and wrote books on coral reefs and South American geology. Meanwhile, he divulged his secret theory to a very few confidants; he told one fellow scientist it was “
like confessing a murder.”