Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (12 page)

Picasso would make more of an effort to be sociable if guests were present, as they frequently were. He had mixed feelings about entertaining. He liked to be amused between intense periods of work, but he also hated too much distraction. At Fernande’s suggestion, they designated Sunday as “at-home” day (an idea borrowed from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas), “and in this way managed to dispose of the obligations of friendship in a single afternoon.” Still, Richardson writes, “
the artist veered between anti-social sulking and gregariousness.” Painting, on the other hand, never bored or tired him. Picasso claimed that, even after three or four hours standing in front of a canvas, he did not feel the slightest fatigue.
“
That’s why painters live so long,” he said. “While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Moslems take off their shoes before entering the mosque.”

“
One can be very fertile without having to work too much,” Sartre once said. “Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening. This is my only rule.” If that makes the French philosopher’s life sound relaxed, however, it’s misleading. Sartre lived in a creative frenzy for most of his life, alternating between his daily six hours of work and an intense social life filled with rich meals, heavy drinking, drugs, and tobacco. On a typical day, Sartre worked in his Paris apartment until noon, then went out for an hour of appointments scheduled by his secretary. At 1:30, he joined his companion, Simone de Beauvoir (see
this page
), and their friends for lunch—a two-hour affair, washed down with a quart of red wine. At 3:30 on the dot he pushed away from the table and rushed back to his apartment for his second period of work, this time joined by Beauvoir. At night he slept badly, knocking himself out for a few hours with barbiturates.

By the 1950s, too much work on too little sleep—with too much wine and cigarettes—had left Sartre exhausted and on the verge of collapse. Rather than slow down, however, he turned to Corydrane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin then fashionable among Parisian students, intellectuals, and artists (and legal in France until 1971, when it was declared toxic and taken off the market). The
prescribed dose was one or two tablets in the morning and at noon. Sartre took twenty a day, beginning with his morning coffee and slowly chewing one pill after another as he worked. For each tablet, he could produce a page or two of his second major philosophical work,
The Critique of Dialectical Reason
.

This was hardly his only excess. The biographer Annie Cohen-Solal reports, “
His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol—wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on—two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.” Sartre knew he was wearing himself out, but he was willing to gamble his philosophy against his health. As he said later, “
I thought that in my head—not separated, not analyzed, but in a shape that would become rational—that in my head I possessed all the ideas I was to put down on paper. It was only a question of separating them and writing them on the paper. So to put it briefly, in philosophy writing consisted of analyzing my ideas; and a tube of Corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analyzed in the next two days.’ ”

In 1917, Eliot took a job as a clerk at Lloyds Bank, in London. During his eight years of employment there, the Missouri-born poet assumed the guise of the archetypal English businessman: bowler hat, pin-striped suit,
umbrella rolled carefully under one arm, hair parted severely on the side. Eliot took the train into the city each morning and, from the railroad station, joined the crowd crossing London Bridge (a scene he would draw on for the Unreal City portion of
The Waste Land
). “
I am sojourning among the termites,” he wrote to Lytton Strachey.

The literary critic I. A. Richards later recalled visiting Eliot at the bank; he found

Although Richards paints a depressing picture, Eliot was grateful for the job. Previously, he had been devoting all his energies to writing reviews and essays, teaching school, and delivering an ambitious lecture series—a devouring workload that left him little time for poetry and, worse, barely earned him enough money to scrape by. By contrast, Lloyds was a godsend. Two days after his appointment there, he wrote to his mother, “
I am now earning two pounds ten shillings a week for sitting in an office from 9:15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office.… Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as school teaching, and is more interesting.” He often used his lunch hour to discuss literary projects with friends and
collaborators. In the evening he had time to work on his poetry, or to earn extra money from reviews and criticism.

It was an ideal arrangement, but over time the routine became dulling. At age thirty-four, when he had worked at the bank for five years, Eliot admitted that “
the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me.” Sensing his weariness, some of his literary friends, led by Ezra Pound, invented a scheme to free Eliot from his employment: they would create a £300 annual fund by soliciting £10 a year from thirty subscribers. When Eliot found out about the plan he was appreciative but embarrassed; he preferred the security and independence afforded by Lloyds. He remained there until 1925, when he accepted an editorial position at the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he would stay for the rest of his career.

Shostakovich’s contemporaries do not recall seeing him working, at least not in the traditional sense. The Russian composer was able to conceptualize a new work entirely in his head, and then write it down with extreme rapidity—if uninterrupted, he could average twenty or thirty pages of score a day, making virtually no corrections as he went. “
I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano,” his younger sister recalled. “He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head, and then played it through complete on the piano.” But this feat was apparently preceded by hours or
days of mental composition—during which he “
appeared to be a man of great inner tensions,” the musicologist Alexei Ikonnikov observed, “with his continually moving, ‘speaking’ hands, which were never at rest.”

Mikhail Meyerovich, a fellow composer, had much the same impression. He spent time with Shostakovich in 1945 at an artists’ retreat. “
I discovered him to be a very lively man who was always in motion and could not spend a minute without some occupation,” Meyerovich wrote. It was a mystery how he managed to compose so much music. Intrigued, Meyerovich began to watch him closely:

Dmitry Shostakovich, circa 1930s
(
photo credit 62.1
)

Shostakovich had just completed his Second Quartet. Although his fellow composers were amazed by the speed and sureness with which he conceived new works, Shostakovich himself was afraid that perhaps he worked too fast. “
I worry about the lightning speed with which I compose,” he confessed in a letter to a friend.

Green led a double life. As Henry Yorke—his birth name—he was a wealthy aristocrat who spent his days at the offices of his family’s manufacturing business. (Called Pontifex, its chief product was a high-pressure filling
machine for beer bottling.) As Henry Green, however, he wrote nine utterly original novels, including
Loving, Living
, and
Party Going
. Given his inherited income, one may wonder why Green bothered going in to the office at all—he certainly didn’t need the money. Jeremy Treglown offers an answer in his 2000 biography:

Green’s reliance on the stability of a day job was no doubt helped by the fact that his actual duties were practically zero. According to Treglown, a typical day in the life of Henry Yorke, managing director of Pontifex, looked something like this: He arrived at work at about 10:00
A.M.
, was brought his gin, and spent an hour or two pottering about his office or gossiping with the secretaries. At 11:30, he left to spend the middle part of the workday at a nearby pub, refreshing himself with a couple of pints of beer before returning to gin. A colleague or two would eventually join him there, and they would talk about people at work or the bar regulars, whose
conversation Green would have been eavesdropping on while he was alone. When the managing director finally returned to the office, he repeated his morning routine and then—maybe—wrote a page or two of his novel before catching the bus home.

The remainder of Green’s writing occurred at night. After dinner and any social engagements, he would settle into his armchair with a notebook and a cheap pen wrapped with a bandage (to make it easier to grip) and scribble away until about midnight. When asked, years later, why he had chosen to publish under a pseudonym, Green said that he didn’t want his business associates to know about his novel writing. They eventually found out anyway, much to Green’s distress. An interviewer later asked if this discovery affected his business relationships:

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.”