Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (5 page)

Frédéric Chopin sketched by George Sand, circa 1842
(
photo credit 16.1
)

Sand tried to convince Chopin to trust his initial inspiration, but he was loath to take her advice, and became angry when disturbed. “
I dared not insist,” Sand wrote. “Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.”

Flaubert began writing
Madame Bovary
in September 1851, shortly after returning to his mother’s house in Croisset, France. He had spent the previous two years abroad, traveling through the Mediterranean region, and the long journey seems to have satisfied his youthful yearning for adventure and passion. Now, just shy of his thirtieth birthday—and
already looking middle-aged,
with a large paunch and rapidly thinning hair—Flaubert felt capable of the discipline necessary for writing his new book, which would marry a humble subject matter to a rigorous and exacting prose style.

Gustave Flaubert’s study at Croisset
(
photo credit 17.1
)

The book gave him trouble from the start. “
Last night I began my novel,” he wrote his longtime correspondent and lover, Louise Colet. “Now I foresee terrifying difficulties of style. It’s no easy business to be simple.” In order to concentrate on the task, Flaubert established a strict routine that allowed him to write for several hours each night—he was easily distracted by noises in the daytime—while also fulfilling some basic familial obligations. (At the Croisset house there were, in addition to the author and his doting mother, Flaubert’s precocious five-year-old niece, Caroline; her English governess; and, frequently, Flaubert’s uncle.)

Flaubert woke at 10:00 each morning and rang for the servant, who brought him the newspapers, his mail, a glass of cold water, and his filled pipe. The servant’s bell also served as notice for the rest of the family that they could cease creeping about the house and speaking in low voices in order not to disturb the slumbering author. After Flaubert had opened his letters, drank his water, and taken a few puffs of his pipe, he would pound on the wall above his head, a signal for his mother to come in and sit on the bed beside him for an intimate chat until he decided to get up. Flaubert’s morning toilet, which included a very hot bath and the application of a tonic that was supposed to arrest hair loss, would be completed by 11:00, at which time he would join the family in the dining room for a late-morning meal that served as both his breakfast and his lunch. The author didn’t like to
work on a full stomach, so he ate a relatively light repast, typically consisting of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. Then the family moved outdoors for a stroll, often ascending a hill behind the house to a terrace that overlooked the Seine, where they would gossip, argue, and smoke under a stand of chestnut trees.

At 1:00, Flaubert commenced his daily lesson to Caroline, which took place in his study, a large room with bookcases crammed with books, a sofa, and a white bearskin rug. The governess was in charge of Caroline’s English education, so Flaubert limited his lessons to history and geography, a role that he took very seriously. After an hour of instruction, Flaubert dismissed his pupil and settled into the high-backed armchair in front of his large round table and did some work—mostly reading, it seems—until dinner at 7:00. After a meal, he sat and talked with his mother until 9:00 or 10:00, when she went to bed. Then his real work began. Hunched over his table while the rest of the household slept, the “hermit of Croisset” struggled to forge a new prose style, one stripped of all unnecessary ornament and excessive emotion in favor of merciless realism rendered in precisely the right words. This word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence labor proved almost unbearably difficult:

Often he complained of his slow progress. “
Bovary
is not exactly racing along: two pages in a week! Sometimes I’m so discouraged I could jump out a window.” But, gradually, the pages began to pile up. On Sundays, his good friend Louis Bouilhet would visit and Flaubert would read aloud his week’s progress.
Together they would go over sentences dozens, even hundreds, of times until they were just right. Bouilhet’s suggestions and encouragement bolstered Flaubert’s confidence and helped calm his frazzled nerves for another week of slow, torturous composition. This monotonous daily struggle continued, with few breaks, until June 1856, when, after nearly five years of labor, Flaubert finally mailed the manuscript to his publisher. And yet, as difficult as the writing was, it was in many ways an ideal life for Flaubert. “
After all,” as he wrote years later, “work is still the best way of escaping from life!”

Toulouse-Lautrec did his best creative work at night, sketching at cabarets or setting up his easel in brothels. The resulting depictions of fin de siècle Parisian nightlife made his name, but the cabaret lifestyle proved disastrous to his health: Toulouse-Lautrec drank constantly and slept little. After a long night of drawing and binge-drinking, he would often wake early to print lithographs, then head to a café for lunch and several glasses of wine. Returning
to his studio, he would take a nap to sleep off the wine, then paint until the late afternoon, when it was time for aperitifs. If there were visitors, Toulouse-Lautrec would proudly mix up a few rounds of his infamous cocktails; the artist was smitten with American mixed drinks, which were still a novelty in France at the time, and he liked to invent his own concoctions—assembled not for complementary flavors but for their vivid colors and extreme potency. (
One of his inventions was the Maiden Blush, a combination of absinthe, mandarin, bitters, red wine, and champagne. He wanted the sensation, he said, of “
a peacock’s tail in the mouth.”) Dinner, more wine, and another night of boozy revelry soon followed. “
I expect to burn myself out by the time I’m forty,” Toulouse-Lautrec told an acquaintance. In reality, he only made it to thirty-six.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in his studio in 1894, in front of his painting
In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins.
Mireille (with the spear) is the painting’s main subject, sitting in the foreground with her knee drawn up
. (
photo credit 18.1
)

Mann was always awake by 8:00
A.M.
After getting out of bed, he drank a cup of coffee with his wife, took a bath, and dressed. Breakfast, again with his wife, was at 8:30. Then, at 9:00, Mann closed the door to his study, making himself unavailable for visitors, telephone calls, or family. The children were strictly forbidden to make any noise between 9:00 and noon, Mann’s prime writing hours. It was then that his mind was freshest, and Mann placed tremendous pressure on himself to get things down during that time. “
Every passage becomes a ‘passage,’ ” he wrote, “every adjective a decision.” Anything that didn’t come by noon would have to wait until the next day, so he forced himself to “
clench the teeth and take one slow step at a time.”

Thomas Mann, New York City, 1943
(
photo credit 19.1
)

His morning grind over, Mann had lunch in his studio and enjoyed his first cigar—he smoked while writing, but limited himself to twelve cigarettes and two cigars daily. Then he sat on the sofa and read newspapers, periodicals, and books until 4:00, when he returned to bed for an hour-long nap. (Once again, the children were forbidden to make noise during this sacred hour.) At 5:00, Mann rejoined the family for tea. Then he wrote letters, reviews,
or newspaper articles—work that could be interrupted by telephone calls or visitors—and took a walk before dinner at 7:30 or 8:00. Sometimes the family entertained guests at this time. If not, Mann and his wife would spend the evening reading or playing gramophone records before retiring to their separate bedrooms at midnight.

Marx arrived in London as a political exile in 1849, expecting to stay in the city for a few months at most; instead, he ended up living there until his death in 1883. His first few years in London were marked by dire poverty and personal tragedy—his family was forced to live in squalid conditions, and by 1855 three of his six children had died. Isaiah Berlin describes Marx’s habits during this time:

Marx was, by 1858, already several years into
Das Kapital
, the massive work of political economy that would occupy the rest of his life.
He never had a regular job. “
I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,” he wrote in 1859. (In fact, he later applied for a post as a railway clerk, but was rejected because of his illegible handwriting.) Instead,
Marx relied on his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels to send him regular handouts, which Engels pilfered from the petty-cash box of his father’s textile firm—and which Marx promptly misspent, having no money-management skills whatsoever. “
I don’t suppose anyone has ever written about ‘money’ when so short of the stuff,” he noted. Meanwhile, his boils would get so bad that he “
could neither sit nor walk nor remain upright,” as one biographer put it. In the end, it took Marx two decades of daily suffering to complete the first volume of
Das Kapital
—and he died before he could finish the remaining two volumes. Yet he had only one regret. “
You know that I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle,” he wrote to a fellow political activist in 1866. “I do not regret it. On the contrary. Had I my career to start again, I should do the same. But I would not marry. As far as lies in my power I intend to save my daughter from the reefs on which her mother’s life has been wrecked.”