Lorenzo, all is forgiven

Four chapters in, Sons & Lovers is triumphantly passing the iPod test. The tenderness, observation and psychological insight with which Lawrence creates the Morels' world are matchless.  There's real vitality here, the deep vitality that Lawrence worshipped in human relations, not the puffed-up, strained-for vitality that Women in Love bangs on about so tiresomely. So what went wrong? Is it another case of an author seduced by his own publicity (see our earlier post on Hilary Mantel on this subject), of an author writing more books than he has in him, of an author who knows he has death within him flailing about desperately to hold on to life?

The iPod test

In the course of her travels recently Gert has taken to listening to novels downloaded from the free site LibriVox (LibriVox.org) and has discovered that writer's tics and foibles leap out at her as they don't when she is reading, particularly if the book is one she's read more than once, as is the case with Women in Love.  She was reminded at every turn  of How not to write a novel (Mittelmark & Newman).  DHL needs a stern editor to remove all adverbs, restrict adjectives to one per noun, allow only "said" as a dialogue marker and come down heavily on all scenes involving horses or cattle. The scene in which Gudrun performs Dalcroze movements to a herd of surprised cattle made Gert laugh and laugh, as did Hermione's standing-up orgasm as she bashes Birkin on the head with a lapis lazuli paperweight.
Results of a scientific word-count:
1) loins - the runaway winner, followed by
2) queer ( as part of an adjective chain describing facial expressions or tones of voice)
3) swoon, -ed, -ing
4) inchoate

Loins, queer, swoon, inchoate - there you have the DHL project. A friend has also pointed out his fascination with women's stockings, sashes and hats, while the males are all loins.

Gert does, though, remember Sons & Lovers being rather better, and may subject it to the iPod test.

But how would her own work stand up to the test?

Hilary Mantel, you little ripper

It's hard to say she just gets better and better, because what could be better,  each of its kind, than Eight months on Ghazzah Street, Beyond Black, Fludd, Giving up the ghost? No, the fascinating thing about Hilary Mantel is that she shows no signs of falling for her own publicity. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, gifted writers derailed by their ego. John Banville,  entranced by his reputation for beautiful prose. Even the trucker Ian McEwan wobbles from time to time (Saturday). But good old Hilary's ego is swallowed up in her subject.  She looves it! as an Irish relative of ours would say. Bring on the third volume of the Wolf Hall trilogy.

Gert comes to the end

On Sunday 15th July we achieved the completion of our sixth joint work. We commenced on Monday 18th June and wrote our 1,000+ words a day until now we have 61,391.
But are they good words? Are they elegant and artful? Do they tell a tale like no other? Does the pathos wring our hearts and the humour cause us to fall backwards drunk with laughter? We think not, at this stage.
We have made a start, something has begun. Unlike our previous works which have leapt fully formed from our busy fingers, the as-yet-unnamed work is partial. We see the seeds of something more, the town needs to grow, the planet which guides the destinies of our characters is yet to be chosen. But we are excited. Something new has taken place. For the first time we truly know the meaning of 'first draft,' and see the path leading to 'second draft,' even 'third draft.'
Who can tell what turns we will take. For the moment we lie fallow and wait.

Some serious questions

Some disagreements have arisen as Gert struggles to extricate herself from the tangled web she has created with what has turned out to be a kind of murder mystery. We have had to consider:
does Pourgues want a sex-change operation?
is Gandharva a fraud?
why did Harry lend Alex the black Golf?
would you take a heavily-laden backpack on a romantic stroll in the moonlight?
is the headless body in the Walwa state forest just a red herring?
why, oh why, is Alex so mean?
and, crucially,
can you keep on loving someone who has called you a fat fool?
As we approach the finishing-line we have solved some, but not all, of these dilemmas.
We power on to a conclusion that has at least become vaguely clear with the motto, 'We can fix that up later' .

Gert flounders about

Nearly three weeks in and we are still at sea. The problem is the task we set ourselves of writing more naturalistically than usual. In previous books where everything is slightly (or a lot) larger than life we can indulge our taste for caricature and the bizarre knowing that our readers understand that's what they're going to get, and they'll happily go along with the unlikely logic of the book's world. But this time our setting is the unadorned everyday and our characters, though we're fond of some of them, not particularly memorable. We are about to murder our nasty woman but we're still not sure who did it - many have motives. We're beginning to have great respect for those sturdy writers who construct plots and work to them, rather than just seeing what comes along. Ah well, we're keeping up our 1000-wd-a-day-each regime, the story is moving, here, there and everywhere - and in the end, who knows?

Gert battles on

Two weeks down the track, 28,000 words written, but do we know where we're going? Not really. The saying 'you write to find out what you want to write' never applied more accurately to two writers. Where did we start? We thought we'd try a central character that was never physically described, who had a destructive presence, but not in any specific way, a self made Guru who with a close group of followers who struggle with his gnomic utterances, and a nice put-upon woman who is persuaded she has run over the destructive one. The nice woman is Freddie Todd. One of us found her uninteresting to the point of being annoying, and thought she had too much of a bland influence on the narrative. And where was the narrative? This was the first week. Now somehow we have a policeman with a feisty young daughter who teaches him how to 'do' the computer, and two gay men who have a loving relationship but financial worries made worse by a plague of mice.  Cats feature in the story also. Two men have bonded over weight problems, the destructive woman is spreading rumours and causing trouble in the town. Freddie Todd has attacked the destructive woman and turned into a complete virago. Some time in the coming week we plan to murder the destructive woman, have police come up from Sydney, and who knows what else.
And one of us has discovered an unrealized talent for writing slash fiction. e.g
She ran the knife oh so delicately down from the sweet dip in his throat, along the fluted sternum, plunged it just a little deeper into the yielding skin of his abdomen so that a fine trail of blood sprang up. She thought of the intricate intestines so close below the surface, of plunging the knife suddenly in, in and down, and dipping her hands… 

Aha, that got you in didn't it?