Full of beans and a variety of narcotics
A literary biography loaded with banalities delights Toby Lichtig
THE great paradox of literary biography is that its subjects tend not to do much at all, except spending their lives holed up in studies. And yet we remain fascinated by the processes of authors and artists.
Perhaps there is a vanity to this: we like to identify with our heroes, and there is a comfort in the ineffable and mysterious being reduced to the level of the domestic.
Even geniuses have to eat and sleep and pace about.
Daily Rituals is literary biography at its most banal — and no less diverting for it.
Mason Currey’s collection of bite-sized entries on the routines of the great and good meanders amiably from architect to artist, poet to composer. If there is an overriding theme, it is that commitment to one’s art requires a high degree of peculiarity.
Novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe began work at midnight and took motivation from fondling his genitals; German poet Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer of rotting apples because he was stimulated by “their decaying smell”; Stravinsky liked to stand on his head.
Voltaire was a divan-bound scribbler, as was Edith Sitwell. Boswell was so attached to his mattress that he considered rigging up an anti-oversleeping mechanism to tip him on to the floor. The late risers in the collection include Flaubert (pipe and newspapers at 10am), Joyce ( up at 11am), Beckett (“the early hours of the afternoon”) and F Scott Fitzgerald (“who tried to start writing at 5pm”).
When not carousing, Jackson Pollock liked to sleep “as much as 12 hours a night” and Descartes was so traumatised by the cold, early starts in his new role as tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden that he promptly contracted pneumonia and died.
Such layabout behaviour would no doubt have appalled the punctiliously punctual Auden (up at 5.30am), the ascetic Kant (5am) and prodigious Anthony Trollope (“250 words every quarter of an hour . . . I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast”).
Marilynne Robinson has benefited from “benevolent insomnia” whereas ToulouseLautrec barely slept at all, preferring to split his time — with some degree of overlap — between painting and bingedrinking.
We are reminded throughout this collection of quite how many narcotics have gone into keeping the great minds of our world alert (or rested).
Along with the heavyweight drinkers, such as Francis Bacon, we find a host of addicts on uppers and downers including amphetamines (Auden, Paul Erdos); barbiturates (Jean-Paul Sartre); Benzedrine (Graham Greene, Ayn Rand); opium (Proust); and even laxatives (Louis Armstrong). Balzac is said to have relied on 50 cups of coffee a day; Beethoven measured out exactly 50 beans a cup.
Kierkegaard heaped his with a mound of sugar and required his servant to “justify” the choice of vessel.
Food faddism is a recurring theme, from Ingmar Bergman, who dined daily on “a kind of baby food” of whipped sour milk and jam to the eggobsessed Erik Satie (“he once consumed a 30-egg omelette in a single sitting”).
Currey introduces us to the pre-eminent walkers (Mahler, Beckett); joggers (Murakami, Miró); bathers (Beethoven, Kierkegaard); primpers (Mozart, Flaubert); and shaggers (John Cheever, Frank Lloyd Wright and four-times-aday Georges Simenon).
He also demonstrates that slow and dogged (Gertrude Stein wrote for “half an hour a day”) can be as effective as prodigious and obsessive (William Faulkner set a “personal record” of 10 000 words in a single sitting).
Budding authors might, however, prefer the enviable routine of V S Pritchett: a mixture of breakfast, crosswords, soaking, writing, napping and sipping on martinis.