And the tortured writer
When these writers, solitary creatures of the night burning the midnight oil, seek to satisfy their nocturnal cravings, what do they seek to fill up—their grumbling stomachs, their hollow minds, their aching hearts, their restless souls?
Hunger is a form of loneliness, or at least a sense of emptiness, which needs to be filled up. Who knows what you’re filling up when you indulge in comfort food, such as chocolates, warm milk and cookies, or a bowl of instant noodles in the dead of the night, when all the world is asleep, dreaming away while you dream awake—maybe your grumbling stomach, maybe your uneasy mind, maybe your aching heart, maybe your restless soul, or maybe the blank page.
The quiet, unholy hours are a writer’s domain, when all is quiet and there are no phones ringing off the hook or unannounced visitors knocking on your door, when the world out there offers no distraction in the absence of light and activity.
But then the unholy hours are also a domain of midnight cravings, a longing to fill up what feels empty—gut, mind, heart, soul, page, or screen. Here are some of those things my favorite writers turn to when emptiness calls, whether in the small hours or at any time of the day.
All-night breakfast for Nabokov
For St. Petersburg-born Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and the leading prose stylist of the 20th century, midnight and the hours after it were a time for breakfast, especially sausages, which he found never enough, unless they came with the rest of a typical full breakfast. As he wrote to his wife Vera while she was recovering from depression in a sanatorium in a letter he addressed “to my little one” on June 30, 1926, “Mustn’t forget two eggs and the oatmeal and the strawberry compote.”
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Whodunthecream, asks Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, British author of some of my favorite whodunits growing up, like And Then There Were None (politically incorrectly titled Ten Little Indians in the ‘80s when I first read it), Murder on the Orient Express, and Death on the Nile, would hire no less than her own fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot or her surprising sleuth, the elderly spinster Miss Maple or Jane Maple, should she find the cream she so loved missing. The novelist, according to a grandson of hers, was insatiable when it came to cream, the heavier, the better, and there was no need to camouflage it in a coffee or tea or with a scone, if she were in the mood for Devonshire cream.
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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. ―Virginia Woolf
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Death by coffee—Honoré de Balzac
I’d say I learned the art of social climbing from French novelist Honore de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, but I didn’t know he was crazy over coffee, drinking up to 50 cups a day, and not just any coffee, nothing sweet and fancy like café au lait, but percolated Turkish coffee, “terrible and cruel,” with very little water to drink down on his empty stomach. He did drink a lot of milk though and subjected himself every now and then to milk-only diets, if only to tame the chronic stomach pains, which proved to be the price he paid for his coffee addiction.
But coffee was what allowed Balzac to stay up from midnight to noon, during which, fueled by lots and lots and lots of his Turkish brew, he saw no one but the characters in his novels, did nothingbut to write, write, write.
No wonder Honore de Balzac was such a prolific writer, with at least 92 novels to his name, not counting his many novellas, other shorter pieces, and analytical essays.
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Cheesecake as brain food for King
And that’s probably why Stephen King is perhaps too prolific for his own good, and less tortured a soul than the other writers on this list. I did enjoy my King phase, when I spent a lot of my teen years trying to find a way out of his horrific and terrifying worlds, such as those in The Stand, It, Misery, and The Shining, or even the collection of four short stories Different Seasons, of which “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” a non-horror story, was my ultimate King favorite. It must be the cheesecake—brain food according to King, who would take at least a slice of creamy, rich cheesecake before working on his stories—that fueled his pursuit of the darkest side of our fears that he brought to life in the 76 novels and over 200 short stories he has written so far. And it must be the aroma of bread baking, cake rising that keeps him safe from the horrors he himself so craftily creates. After all, as researchers at the University of Southern Brittany have found, the smell of freshly baked cake is closely linked to better mood and altruism.
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Proust, madeleine, and memory
French novelist Marcel Proust, in his seminal work, the voluminous À la recherche du temps perdu, now officially translated as In Search of Lost Time, though I prefer the original Remembrance of Things Past, wrote in depth about “those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell.” In his novel, more than a French cookie, the madeleine is a memory trigger, a doorway back to his childhood, in which an aunt gave generously these petites madeleines dipped in tea.
So when looking for a perfect gastronomic pairing in literature, we think of Proust and madeleines, though in earlier versions of In Search of Lost Time, as Proust scholars seem to suggest, it was not a madeleine but a biscotte, a piece of dry, crumbly toast, that sent the narrator down memory lane.
In real life, however, it was croissants and café au lait for Proust, especially on those days he spent mostly in bed writing and nursing the asthma he had been trying to manage since he was nine, only to get worse and worse as he got older.
Prior to the general decline of his health, he was a hearty eater, indulging himself in bouts of gluttony every now and then. In some of the letters he wrote his mother, where he would lament urethral discomfort due to “the oceans of beer” he had been drinking, as well as his insomnia, his difficulty breathing, and the chills he would suffer one afternoon or the other, he also bragged about a series of asthma attacks not being able to “stop me from eating about half-past two a meal consisting of two tournedos steaks—I ate every scrap—a dish—of chips, some cream cheese, some gruyère, two croissants, a bottle of Pousset beer.”