November 12, 1989

O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult!

By DIANE ACKERMAN

ame 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 side shows 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?

Sitwell's coffin trick may sound like a prank, unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. What a strange lot writers are, 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. Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they have sometimes used remarkable tricks.

For example, 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, but the fragrance remained in his head. In 1985 researchers at Yale University found that the smell of spiced apple has a powerful elevating effect on people and can even stave off a panic attack. Schiller sensed this all along. Something in the sweet, rancid mustiness of those apples jolted his brain into activity.

Amy Lowell, like George Sand, liked to smoke cigars while writing, and went so far in 1915 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 mail-box. 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. Balzac drank more than 50 cups of coffee a day, and actually died from caffeine poisoning, although colossal amounts of caffeine don't seem to have bothered W. H. Auden or Dr. Johnson, who was reported to have drunk 25 cups of tea at one sitting. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote while they were 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 ''Bolero,'' 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 grrreatest poem ever written!' '' This is Malcolm Lowry's account, and Lowry 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 pere 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 7 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's actually using 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 Siamese 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 got 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 eloquently as Stephen Spender did in his essay ''The Making of a Poem'': ''There is always a slight tendency of the body to sabotage the attention of the mind by providing some distraction. If this need for distraction can be directed into one channel - such as the odor of rotten apples or the taste of tobacco or tea - then the other distractions outside oneself are put out of the competition. Another possible explanation is that the concentrated effort of writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of the body and mind and for this reason one needs a kind of anchor of sensation with the physical world.''

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 1780's, 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. 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 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana 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 listen to it perhaps a thousand times over the course of a year. While he was writing the novel ''The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests,'' Paul West listened nonstop to one especially melodic sonatina by Ferruccio Busoni. He had no idea why. John Ashbery first takes a walk, then brews himself a cup of French blend Indar tea, then listens to something post-Romantic (''The chamber music of Franz Schmidt has been beneficial,'' he told me). Some writers become obsessed with cheap and tawdry 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 state the writer knows the book to live in. A scan of brain waves would probably show the fetishistic listener to be in the identical state of alert calm each time he hears the music.

When I asked a few friends about their writing habits, I thought for sure they'd make up something offbeat - standing in a ditch and whistling Blake's ''Jerusalem,'' for instance, 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 telephoned 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?'' ''Most days.'' ''And then you write?'' ''Yes.'' ''And you don't think this is unusual?'' ''Not for me.''

A quiet, distinguished scientist, who has published two charming books of essays about the world and how it works, told me that his secret inspiration was ''violent sex.'' I didn't inquire further, but noted that he looked thin. The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from ''the Great Dictator,'' as Mr. Nemerov labels it, then plough through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock. Amy Clampitt, another poet, told me that she searches out a window to perch behind, whether it be in the city or on a train or by the seaside. Something about the petri dish effect of the glass clarifies her thoughts. The novelist Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears. Alphonso Lingis - whose unusual books ''Excesses'' and ''Libido'' consider the realms of human sensuality and kinkiness - travels the world sampling its exotic erotica. Often he primes the pump by writing letters to friends. I possess some extraordinary letters, half poetry, half anthropology, which he sent to me from a Thailand jail (where he took time out from removing vermin to write), a convent in Ecuador, Africa (where he was scuba diving along the coast) and Bali (where he was taking part in fertility rituals).

Such feats of self-rousing are hard to explain to one's parents, who would like to believe that their child does something reasonably normal and hangs out with reasonably normal folk, not people who sniff rotten apples and write in the nude. Best not to tell them how the painter J. M. W. Turner liked to be lashed to the mast of a ship and taken sailing during a real hell-for-leather toad-strangler of a storm so that he could be right in the middle of the tumult.

There are many roads to Rome, as the old maxim goes, and some of them are sinewy and full of fungus and rocks, while others are paved and dull. I think I'll tell my parents that I stare at bouquets of roses before I work. Or that I stare at them until butterflies appear. The truth is that, besides opening and closing mental drawers (which I actually picture in my mind), writing in the bath, beginning each summer day by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so, listening obsessively to music (Alessandro Marcello's oboe concerto in D minor, its adagio, is what's nourishing my senses right now), I go speed walking for an hour every single day. Half of the oxygen in the state of New York has passed through my lungs at one time or another. I don't know whether this helps or not. My muse is male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon and never speaks to me directly. I suspect he's too busy catching his breath.

Adapted from ''A Natural History of the Senses,'' to be published by Random House next year. Diane Ackerman's most recent book is ''On Extended Wings,'' a memoir.