Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (23 page)

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.

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.

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:

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

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.”

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.”

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.

“
When he was a schoolboy, George Levanter had learned a convenient routine: a four-hour sleep in the afternoon enabled him to remain mentally and physically active
until the early dawn, when he would again go to sleep for four hours and wake ready for the day.” This is the first sentence of Kosinski’s 1977 novel,
Blind Date
, and what the Polish-American author wrote of his protagonist was apparently true of himself, as well. In 1972, an interviewer asked Kosinski if he was “Protestant and disciplined, or European and dissolute” in his writing habits. “
I guess both,” Kosinski replied.

“
The overriding factor in my life between the ages of six and twenty-two was my father’s candy store,” Asimov wrote in his posthumously published memoir. His father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn, which he opened at 6:00
A.M.
and closed at 1:00
A.M.
, seven days a week. Meanwhile, Young Asimov woke at 6:00 to deliver the newspaper, and rushed home from school in the afternoons to help at the store. He wrote: