A Natural History of the Senses (43 page)

Synesthesia can be hereditary, so it’s not surprising that Nabokov’s mother experienced it, nor that it expressed itself slightly differently in her son. However, it’s odd to think of Nabokov, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Joyce, Dylan Thomas and other notorious synesthetes as being more primitive than most people, but that may indeed be true. Great artists feel at home in the luminous spill of sensation, to which they add their own complex sensory Niagara. It would certainly have amused Nabokov to imagine himself closer than others to his mammalian ancestors, which he would no doubt have depicted in a fictional hall of mirrors with suave, prankish, Nabokovian finesse.

What a strange lot writers are, we questers after the perfect word, the glorious phrase that will somehow make the exquisite avalanche
of consciousness sayable. We who live in mental barrios, where any roustabout idea may turn to honest labor, if only it gets the right incentive—a bit of drink, a light flogging, a delicate seduction. I was going to say that our heads are our offices or charnel houses, as if creativity lived in a small walk-up flat in Soho. We know the mind doesn’t dwell in the brain alone, so the where of it is as much a mystery as the how. Katherine Mansfield once said that it took “terrific hard gardening” to produce inspiration, but I think she meant something more willful than Picasso’s walks in the forests of Fontainebleau, where he got an overwhelming “indigestion of greenness,” which he felt driven to empty onto a canvas. Or maybe that’s exactly what she meant, the hard gardening of knowing where and when and for how long and precisely in what way to walk, and then the will to go out and walk it as often as possible, even when one is tired or isn’t in the mood, or has only just walked it to no avail. Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they’ve sometimes used remarkable tricks of synesthesia.

Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly: “If only someone had thought to shut it.” Picture Dame Edith, rehearsing the posture of the grave as a prelude to the sideshows on paper she liked to stage. The straight and narrow was never her style. Only her much-ridiculed nose was rigid, though she managed to keep it entertainingly out of joint for most of her life. What was it exactly about that dim, contained solitude that spurred her creativity? Was it the idea of the coffin or the feel, smell, foul air of it that made creativity possible?

Edith’s horizontal closet trick may sound like a prank unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, although the fragrance remained in his head. Researchers at Yale University discovered that the smell of spiced apples has a powerful elevating effect on people and can even stave off panic attacks. Schiller may have sensed this all along. Something in the sweet, rancid mustiness of those apples jolted his
brain into activity while steadying his nerves. Amy Lowell, like George Sand, enjoyed smoking cigars while writing, and in 1915 went so far as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled. It was Lowell who said she used to “drop” ideas into her subconscious “much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head.… The words seem to be pronounced in my head, but with nobody speaking them.” Then they took shape in a cloud of smoke. Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W. H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea—Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-five cups at one sitting. Johnson did die of a stroke, but it’s not clear if this was related to his marathon tea drinking. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude. D. H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees—a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.

Colette used to begin her day’s writing by first picking fleas from her cat, and it’s not hard to imagine how the methodical stroking and probing into fur might have focused such a voluptuary’s mind. After all, this was a woman who could never travel light, but insisted on taking a hamper of such essentials as chocolate, cheese, meats, flowers, and a baguette whenever she made even brief sorties. Hart Crane craved boisterous parties, in the middle of which he would disappear, rush to a typewriter, put on a record of a Cuban rumba, then Ravel’s
Boléro
, then a torch song, after which he would return, “his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript.… ‘Read that,’ he would say, ‘isn’t that the
grrrea
test poem ever written!’ ” This is Malcolm Cowley’s account, and Cowley goes on to offer even more examples of how Crane reminded him of “another friend, a famous killer of woodchucks,” when the writer “tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place by drinking and laughing and playing the phonograph.”

Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every
morning before working on
The Charterhouse of Parma
—“in order” he said, “to acquire the correct tone.” Willa Cather read the Bible. Alexandre Dumas
père
wrote his nonfiction on rose-colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow. He was nothing if not orderly, and to cure his insomnia and regularize his habits he went so far as to eat an apple at seven each morning under the Arc de Triomphe. Kipling demanded the blackest ink he could find and fantasized about keeping “an ink-boy to grind me Indian ink,” as if the sheer weight of the blackness would make his words as indelible as his memories.

Alfred de Musset, George Sand’s lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire, who used his lover’s naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself “a completely horizontal writer.” Writing students often hear that Hemingway wrote standing up, but not that he obsessively sharpened pencils first, and, in any case, he wasn’t standing up out of some sense of himself as the sentinel of tough, ramrod prose, but because he had hurt his back in a plane crash. Poe supposedly wrote with his cat sitting on his shoulder. Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were all Standers; and Robert Hendrickson reports in
The Literary Life and Other Curiosities
that Aldous Huxley “often wrote with his nose.” In
The Art of Seeing
, Huxley says that “a little nose writing will result in a perceptible temporary improvement of defective vision.”

Many nonpedestrian writers have gotten their inspiration from walking. Especially poets—there’s a sonneteer in our chests; we walk around to the beat of iambs. Wordsworth, of course, and John Clare, who used to go out looking for the horizon and one day in insanity thought he found it, and A. E. Housman, who, when asked to define poetry, had the good sense to say: “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can a rat, but I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.… If I were obliged … to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it
a secretion.” After drinking a pint of beer at lunch, he would go out for a two- or three-mile walk and then gently secrete.

I guess the goal of all these measures is concentration, that petrified mirage, and few people have written about it as well as Stephen Spender did in his essay “The Making of a Poem”:

This explains, in part, why Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand, and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub. In fact, Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States in the 1780s and he loved a good, long, thoughtful submersion. In water and ideas, I mean. Ancient Romans found it therapeutic to bathe in asses’ milk or even in crushed strawberries. I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, water displaces much of your weight, and you feel light, your blood pressure drops. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself. One summer, lolling in baths, I wrote an entire verse play, which mainly consisted of dramatic monologues spoken by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; her lover, an Italian courtier; and various players in her tumultuous life. I wanted to slide off the centuries as if from a hill of shale. Baths were perfect.

The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium, and Coleridge freely admitted to indulging in two grains of it before working. The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T. S. Eliot’s tonic was viral—he preferred
writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam.

Many writers I know become fixated on a single piece of music when they are writing a book, and play the same piece of music perhaps a thousand times in the course of a year. While he was writing the novel
The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests
, Paul West listened nonstop to sonatinas by Ferruccio Busoni. He had no idea why. John Ashbery first takes a walk, then brews himself a cup of French blend Indar tea, and listens to something post-Romantic (“the chamber music of Franz Schmidt has been beneficial” he told me). Some writers become obsessed with cheap and tawdy country-and-western songs, others with one special prelude or tone poem. I think the music they choose creates a mental frame around the essence of the book. Every time the music plays, it re-creates the emotional terrain the writer knows the book to live in. Acting as a mnemonic of sorts, it guides a fetishistic listener to the identical state of alert calm, which a brain-wave scan would probably show.

When I asked a few friends about their writing habits, I thought for sure they’d fictionalize something offbeat—standing in a ditch and whistling Blake’s “Jerusalem,” perhaps, or playing the call to colors at Santa Anita while stroking the freckled bell of a foxglove. But most swore they had none—no habits, no superstitions, no special routines. I phoned William Gass and pressed him a little.

“You have no unusual work habits?” I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster. We had been colleagues for three years at Washington University, and I knew his quiet professorial patina concealed a truly exotic mental grain.

“No, sorry to be so boring,” he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry. And, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right.

“How does your day begin?”

“Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said.

“What do you photograph?”

“The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city.
Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand.

“You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?”