Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (15 page)

Balanchine liked to do his own laundry. “
When I’m ironing, that’s when I do most of my work,” he once said. The choreographer rose early, before 6:00
A.M.
, made a pot of tea, and read a little or played a hand of Russian solitaire while he gathered his thoughts. Then he did his ironing for the day (he did his own washing too, in a portable machine in his Manhattan apartment) and, between 7:30 and 8:00, phoned his longtime assistant for a rundown of the day’s schedule. Most weekdays he would make the five-minute walk from his apartment to Lincoln Center, where he kept an office in the State Theater. He often taught a class there at 11:00, then spent the better part of the afternoon in the rehearsal studio, choreographing his latest ballet. The work went slowly; two hours of rehearsal might amount to only two minutes of actual ballet on stage. But Balanchine never lacked for inspiration. “
My muse must come to me on union time,” he said.

The great American caricaturist—who immortalized virtually all of the major Broadway and Hollywood stars of his era—continued to work right up to his death, at age ninety-nine, driving himself from his uptown Manhattan brownstone to the theater district most nights (and finding a parking spot on the street), using a system of personal shorthand to create preliminary sketches in the dark, and turning those sketches into finished drawings in his studio the next day. In 1999, Mel Gussow described Hirschfeld’s habits as a nonagenarian artist:

Al Hirschfeld at home, New York City, 1998
(
photo credit 80.1
)

According to his second wife, Hirschfeld even worked on his drawings in his sleep. “
Very often, when an assignment is difficult, he can’t fall asleep until the artistic problem is solved, or he
dreams
about various ways of designing his drawing,” she wrote in 1999. “Now that’s what I call a hard worker! Even his subconscious doesn’t give him any time off. The next morning, holding onto that dream, he rises at first light and races to his drawing board to jot down all those nocturnal notions. In his youth, he was called ‘the flash,’ which still describes not only his working habits, but how quickly he finds a parking space.”

“I am a completely horizontal author,” Capote told
The Paris Review
in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched out on a couch and with
a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.” Capote typically wrote for four hours during the day, then revised his work in the evenings or the next morning, eventually doing two longhand versions in pencil before typing up a final copy. (Even the typing was done in bed, with the typewriter balanced on his knees.)

Writing in bed was the least of Capote’s superstitions. He couldn’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray at once, and if he was a guest at someone’s house, he would stuff the butts in his pocket rather than overfill the tray. He couldn’t begin or end anything on a Friday. And he compulsively added numbers in his head, refusing to dial a telephone number or accept a hotel room if the digits made a sum he considered unlucky. “It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t,” he said. “But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive concepts.”

Wright wrote the first draft of
Native Son
in 1938, completing 576 pages in a mere five months. Thanks to a program of the New York Writers’ Project, he was getting paid to work on his fiction full-time; he had only to sign in at the Project’s Midtown office once a week to continue collecting his stipend.

At the time, he was living in the Brooklyn apartment of the Newton family, whom he had befriended years earlier in Chicago. Herbert Newton was a prominent black
Communist busy with Party duties; he left the house at about 9:00
A.M.
and did not come home until late. His wife, Jane, stayed home with their three children.
As Hazel Rowley details in her 2001 biography, Wright got up by 6:00
A.M.
and promptly left the house, to avoid the domestic chaos that erupted when the Newton children woke. Carrying his writing supplies—a yellow legal pad, a fountain pen, and a bottle of ink—Wright walked to nearby Fort Greene Park, where he would install himself on a bench at the top of the hill and write for four hours.

He stuck to this routine in all weather, returning to the apartment at 10:00
A.M.
—on rainy days, dripping wet from sitting outside—for breakfast and to read his morning’s work to Jane Newton. With the kids clamoring about them, they would discuss new developments in the plot, sometimes arguing about the direction Wright wanted to take the book. Then Wright would head upstairs to his bedroom to type what he had written in the morning. Afterward he visited the public library or saw friends, sometimes returning to the apartment for a 5:00
P.M.
supper with Jane and the children. When, after six months, the family moved to a new apartment, Wright went with them, holing up in a back bedroom to revise his manuscript, working as many as fifteen hours a day. “
I never intend to work that long and hard again,” he wrote to a friend.

Mencken’s routine was simple: work for twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day, and in the late evening, enjoy a drink and conversation. This was his lifestyle as a young bachelor—when he belonged to a drinking club and often met his fellow members at a saloon after work—and it hardly changed when he got married, at age fifty, to a fellow writer. Then the couple worked for three or four hours in the morning, ate lunch, took naps, worked for another few hours, ate dinner, and returned to work until 10:00, when they would meet in the drawing room to talk and have a drink.

Mencken typically divided his working day as follows: reading manuscripts and answering mail in the morning (he replied to every letter he received on the same day, firing off at least one hundred thousand missives in his life), editorial chores in the afternoon, and concentrated writing in the evening. Unbelievably, he claimed to have a lazy temperament. “
Like most men, I am lazy by nature and seize every opportunity to loaf,” he wrote in a 1932 letter. But this only made him work harder; believing that he was inclined to indolence, Mencken didn’t allow himself the luxury of free time. His compulsiveness meant that he was astonishingly productive throughout his life—and yet, at age sixty-four, he could nevertheless write, “
Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn’t work even harder.”

“
I work all day, and get half drunk at night,” Larkin wrote in his 1977 poem “Aubade.” A few years later he described his real-life (and not so dissimilar) routine to
The Paris Review
:

Larkin worked as a librarian for almost his entire adult life, realizing early on that he would never be able to make a living from his writing alone. “
I was brought up to think you had to have a job, and write in your spare time, like Trollope,” he said. Although he admitted to wondering what would have happened had he been able to write full-time, he also thought that two hours of composition in the evenings, after dinner and the dishes, was plenty: “
After that you’re going round in circles, and it’s much better to leave it for twenty-four hours, by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you’re ready to go on.”

A friend of Wright’s once observed that as long as she had known him, the architect seemed to spend the entire day doing everything but actually working on his building designs. He held meetings, took phone calls, answered letters, supervised students—but was rarely seen at the drafting table. The friend wanted to know: When did Wright conceive the ideas and make the sketches for his buildings? “
Between 4 and 7 o’clock in the morning,” he told her. “I go to sleep promptly when I go to bed. Then I wake up around 4 and can’t sleep. But my mind’s clear, so I get up and work for three or four hours. Then I go to bed for another nap.” During the afternoon he would often take an additional nap, lying down on a thinly padded wooden bench or even a concrete ledge; the uncomfortable perch, he said, prevented him from oversleeping.

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.”

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.”

“
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.”

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.