This week's Sunday Guardian column.
Ah,
the artist’s life. Behold the lonely garret, the pacing of the floor, the
looking up at the heavens for inspiration. And when it does strike, the hours
of blissful creation, after which it’s time again to wait for the Muse.
This
myth of the artist is largely just that – a myth. Overlooked is the role of
discipline, the perseverance needed to drag oneself to the table day after day
and put down the pieces that make the whole. (“Sooner or later,” V.S. Pritchett
wrote, “the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They
never lose a minute. It is very depressing.”)
Rituals
are an indispensible aid to such discipline and artists have depended on
several over the years, from the stimulating to the unhealthy to the bizarre.
William Styron and Gustave Flaubert, among others, knew this well. The former
once tacked on his doorframe a piece of cardboard with a quotation from the
latter: ''Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that
you may be violent and original in your work.''
Then,
there was the beleaguered Franz Kafka, who once wrote to Felice Bauer: “Time is
short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy,
and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to
wriggle through by subtle manoeuvre.” Such manoeuvres are the subject of a
fascinating new book compiled and edited by Mason Currey. Titled Daily Rituals, it started as a blog in
2007, which, with growing popularity, was requisitioned by a canny agent.
Currey's goal is “to show how grand creative visions translate to small daily
increments; how one’s working habits influence the work itself, and vice
versa.”
Culled
from a series of interviews, memoirs, biographies, letters and other sources, Daily Rituals is a window into the
practices of well-known writers, philosophers, architects, mathematicians and
more. An alarming number of people, for instance, confess to arising early in
the morning, from Anthony Trollope to Alaa al Aswany to Emily Dickinson. For
many, this began as nothing more than a practical consideration. As Toni
Morrison has said: “Writing before dawn began as a necessity--I had small
children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they
said, Mama--and that was always around five in the morning”. (James Joyce, that
lucky sod, awoke at 10 in the morning and lay in bed till 11, "smothered
in thoughts".)
Other
rituals are more languid. Truman Capote once proclaimed, “I am a completely
horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or
stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be
puffing and sipping”. For others, puffing and especially sipping were integral
parts of their day. Kingsley Amis and Capote apart, there was Winston
Churchill, who started at 11 a.m. when he “took a weak whisky and soda to his
study”. As for W.H. Auden, “he swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty
years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when
he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he
woke up during the night.)”
Not
all rituals involve the bottle. Dickens was an inveterate walker, as was
Tchaikovsky. Ingmar Bergman was known for afternoon strolls to clear the mind,
and Haruki Murakami has written about his love for running. Similarly, for architect Bernard Tshumi, “I
work best either under pressure or by emptying my brain over the weekend. That
blank state is helpful. It is like an athlete before a competition.”
Healthy
or otherwise, rituals are clearly at the service of talent, not a substitute
for it. This is what Balzac, prodigious coffee-drinker, meant when he noted,
“Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only
makes boring people even more boring.” Perhaps that's a hint to end this piece.
1 comment:
Hey Sippy,
How disarmingly informative, educative, and engaging. Will definitely like to come back and read the rest of your articles rather than skimming through them on a monday morning.
Great.
Regards,
Ravi Deshpande
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