Mr. Coffee

Honoré  de Balzac, after a couple of espressos,

checking for palpitations

"When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days."

We all know that writers are coffee hounds.  But the grandpére of them all was Honoré de Balzac, whose two-fisted approach to the Drink of the Gods is quoted above.

Given his prodigious output, it's not surprising that Balzac relied on stimulants.  His magnum opus, The Human Comedy, comprises more than ninety novels, novellas, and stories totaling millions of words and featuring hundreds of major characters and thousands of one- or two-scene walk-ons.  There is literally nothing like it in the world; the works are layered over one another, the heroes or heroines of one subordinate (or just glimpsed) in another, the characters rising and falling through all the levels of society, from the fields and huddled houses of small provincial towns to the palaces and grand hôtels of Paris.

The Comedy is studded with individual masterpieces: Pére Goriot (a variation on "King Lear"), Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, Cousin Bette, and others, short and long.  Many of them were published in installments, as he wrote them, meaning that he was pantsing on a grand scale, making it up as he went along, absolutely stuck with what he had already written.  And, of course, "The Human Comedy" itself, written over a remarkably short span of 14 or 15 years, was perhaps literature's supreme feat of pantsing.  He did it all, writing session after writing session, by the seat of his pants.

And on coffee.  Lots of coffee.

Balzac's entire life was arranged to accommodate his writing and his coffee.  He ate dinner in the afternoon and went to bed around 6 PM.  At midnight he was up and knocking back the first in an unending bucket brigade of cups of strong black coffee.  He wrote through the night and into the following day, sometimes  straight through the following day, without going back to bed.  Pounding that caffeine, he occasionally worked for 48 hours uninterrupted, conducting the imaginary orchestra of Paris.

He wrote (probably after a couple of cups) about how it affected him:  "Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink -- for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

This is a serious jones.  But I have to say I'd take coffee intravenously if it would allow me to write like Balzac.  I'd snort instant.  Problem is, for coffee to help you write like Balzac, first you have to be Balzac.

Or maybe I could find a new grind.

Tim - Sundays