Ò...11...Ò
The Idea of the Century
(Part One)
So we were brainstorming, churning out crappy ideas and dodgy plans at top speed, when the neighbour, who’s always around when it’s time to poke his big nose into our business, just came out with, “I’ve got it, man: you can fund the trip by writing about it in a newspaper or magazine. Bruno Blanchet’s been travelling the world for ten years, paying for his plane tickets by writing a weekly column in La Presse…”
I didn’t pick up on it right away—we never really listen when the neighbour speaks—but, more out of despair than anything else, I pondered his idea for a few seconds during a brief silence, and I had to admit that it was worth looking into. It killed me to say this unlikely sentence: “Jude, I think this imbecile has said something not entirely stupid.”
Neighbour: Which imbecile?
Jude: What did he say?
Me: This idea of selling the story of our trip to a magazine.
Jude: You think National Geographic is going to roll out the red carpet? You think they might buy a big story on rural Pennsylvania from two nobodies?
Neighbour: But Bruno Blanchet—
Jude: People have heard of Bruno Blanchet.
Neighbour: Not that many.
Jude: We’d have a better chance of writing a book. Publishing houses take on first-time authors.
Me: Well… maybe, but two significant obstacles come to mind.
Jude: And they are?
Me: Well, first of all, I can’t help thinking we’re putting the cart before the horse. To submit the tale of our trip to a publisher, we’ve got to write it first, and for that we need—ideally—to have made the trip. But the whole reason we need the money is to go on the trip.
Jude: We could ask for an advance.
Me: Yes, that’s true—we just show up in the office of the boss of—I don’t know—Québec Amérique, and say, “Hello, we’re Tess and Jude. We’d like to go to Pennsylvania, but we’re completely broke. You seem like a swell guy, salt of the earth, how about giving us a cheque for $15,000 for the rights to the book we plan to write when we get back? Who knows, with a bit of luck you might even sell two hundred copies.”
Jude: Ye-es, when you put it like that… And what’s the second obstacle?
Me: Nobody publishes travel writing anymore.
Ò...12...Ò
A Dying Genre
Back in the day, people didn’t have much leisure time and almost always travelled for a specific purpose, usually commercial or military. Thus, until the Renaissance, travel writing told the stories of military campaigns (Caesar’s Gallic Wars, for example) or “business travel” (Marco Polo and his Book of the Marvels of the World). Petrarch was probably the first, in 1336, to put into a book the story of a purely touristy trip with the tale of his climb of Mount Ventoux. It was only a century later that travel literature really took off, thanks to two unrelated facts: the invention of the printing press, which democratized the book, and the discovery of the New World. Cortés’s Cartas de relación from Mexico, and later the tales told by Cook, Bougainville, and La Pérouse about round-the-world voyages, would become real bestsellers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the biggest authors tackled this multifaceted genre (which could take the form of essay, travel notebook, ethnographic study, autobiography, political analysis, or a simple collection of anecdotes), a sure sign that it had made it big. Among the best known, we could mention Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Diderot’s Journey to Holland, Chateaubriand’s Record of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem, Stendhal’s Memoirs of a Tourist, Over Strand and Field by Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp, as well as the very famous Democracy in America by Tocqueville. There were also a few dazzling successes in the first half of the twentieth century (Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques), but the genre declined rapidly after that. Progress in transportation and communication made travel banal. Today anyone can go anywhere or, failing that, anyone can chat about what’s going on in Rio de Janeiro or Fort Myers, and anyone can learn, should they be interested, that Parrish Jason Casebier, of 2219 Florence Boulevard in Omaha, Nebraska, was convicted of “rape felony” on November 25, 1995.
Ò...13...Ò
The Idea of the Century
(Continued and Concluded)
Jude: In that case, we just need to write “novel” on the cover and everyone will be fooled. People call anything a novel nowadays.
Me: That’s true. But my first objection still stands: no publisher will agree to give a big advance to unknown authors. And we’re not just unknown authors, we’re not authors at all.
Jude: Huh! It’s pretty easy to pick that up quickly, like everything else. But you’re right. Publishers would go bust if they wrote cheques out to everyone who asked them nicely.
Me: Strike that idea then. Too bad. I really liked that one.
Neighbour: You could ask for a grant. The government gives artists tons of money. And then wonders why we’re in the red…
It was at precisely that moment that I stopped thinking of the neighbour as a simple halfwit and saw him rather as one of those holy fools that proliferated in ancient Russia—those village idiots who were blessed once in a while with divine grace and could give great scholars a run for their money. In any case, just like the famous stopped clock, he’d just been right twice in the same day, which must be, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a personal record.
Jude: No, that wouldn’t work.
Me: Why not?
Jude: Because the government only gives grants to established artists.
Me: Are you sure?
Jude: We can check the eligibility criteria to be sure, but I’m pretty much a hundred per cent certain.
Me: Fuck!
Neighbour: If you knew someone who wrote books, you could apply in their name…
Jude: A frontman…
We both caught on at the same instant. I started to protest, but not too strongly, and just for show, to square it with my conscience—which was, happily, not too difficult to satisfy.
Me: No, I can’t ask him that.
Jude: Why not?
Me: He’s trying to forget me. He might have forgotten me already.
Jude: I bet he hasn’t.
Me: And besides…
Jude: Besides what?
Me: Besides, he cares about his reputation as a writer. They’re vain, writers. Even when blinded by love, he’d never allow a book written by two amateurs to appear with his name on it.
Jude: Who’s talking about appearing? That’s the beautiful thing about government grants: you don’t need to produce the final product. I expect we’ll have to prove that we really wrote a book and tried to publish it, but I’d be amazed if they demanded the money back if we failed. We just churn out any old thing at top speed, and then send it to a publisher who doesn’t focus on new talent. Boréal, for example. That way, we’ll have a rejection letter as proof of our good faith.
Me: All right, maybe it does seem doable. In any case, it’s the best thing we’ve come up with.
Jude: Doable? Come on, it’s totally the idea of the century!
Neighbour: I preferred the idea of the massage parlour. Giving hand jobs seems less hassle than writing a book. I’d even advertise for you…
Me: Would you look at that—he’s turned back into the village idiot again.
Ò...14...Ò
The Frontman
The first thing, before I went to talk to Sébastien, was to check that there was no other way of doing it. So I went on the Canada Council for the Arts website and the one for the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the two main governmental organizations to which artists can apply for a handout, so I could look over their eligibility criteria. Jude was right: you needed to be considered an artist before you could receive a s
ingle dollar from either organization. According to CALQ, the term artist is defined by four points. An artist is a person who:
Calls him-/herself a professional artist. (So far so good: “My name is Tess and I am a professional artist.” First condition fulfilled, piece of cake.)
Creates works or practises an art or offers services for payment, as a creator or an interpreter, particularly in the areas under the responsibility of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. (Here, it’s that “or” that saves me, because “practising an art” is basically meaningless. At a push, singing in the shower falls into that category. After two conditions, I’m still in the running, knock on wood.)
Has peer recognition. (Sure, and “peer” is defined as…)
Publicly disseminates or interprets works in places and/or contexts recognized by his/her peers. (Now it’s getting trickier to play with the words. I don’t think I’ve ever publicly disseminated anything. Shoot!)
As for the Canada Council for the Arts, they shut down all hope right from the start, stipulating that to be eligible for a grant you already need to have one published work. They put authors into three categories: emerging, for which you must have published one literary work and for which the maximum grant is $12,000; mid-career (two to five published works, maximum grant $25,000), and established (at least six published works, maximum grant $25,000). They apply the same distinctions to other art forms, even in the Aboriginal Dance Professional grant program. In case you’re interested, a mid-career aboriginal dancer can apply for up to $25,000 for researching or developing a project.
Basically, we really were going to need a frontman. Luckily, I’d kept Sébastien’s letter with his contact details. (It was, after all, the first—and would doubtless be the last—love letter I’d received.) I dithered a bit as to whether I should call or write, and ended up going with the latter. That would give him the option of not replying if he didn’t want anything to do with it.
Sébastien,
I don’t want to tell you how to run your own life, but it seems to me that you’re going about things the wrong way if you want to get over this absurd infatuation with me. By staying away from me, you’ll just start idealizing me, dreaming up a load of nonsense about me, inventing conversations between us before you fall asleep at night. And don’t deny it: you artists are all good at that. If you really want to know, the best way to get sick of me is to see me. Anyway, I think it would be worth a shot. What are you doing tomorrow evening? Do you fancy having a beer with me? Please don’t reply: that way you can change your mind right up to the last minute. I’ll be at Chez Véro from eight o’clock on.
Tess
I headed over to Chez Véro an hour early so I could down a beer before Sébastien turned up. I hadn’t thought too much about how to bring up my request, but I could always start by asking him if he had something on the go. After all, The Death of the Pterodactyl had come out in 2006 (its eight readers would surely be getting impatient), and if he had an ongoing project for which he was intending to apply for a grant, our plan would be wrecked. He arrived right on time, I waved at him, and he came to join me at my table. He seemed flustered, which is probably what always happens when you see someone you’ve written a love letter to. At the best of times he wasn’t exactly a relaxed sort of guy, but now he was completely pathetic. He avoided looking at me and picked at the label on his beer bottle to have something to focus on.
I pretended not to notice his unease, and kept the conversation going as best I could. “Have you been to Chez Véro before?”
“Um… no, I don’t think so.”
“The Vault Café is more your sort of thing…”
“Actually, I don’t go out much. Sometimes I go with the guys from the shop to Chez Tonio.”
“And you chat about the problem of time in Paul Valéry?”
“I can’t say that’s ever come up, no.”
“So, which of our competitors did you betray us for?”
“Huh?”
“Where are you eating now that you’re boycotting Subway?”
“Depends. At Auger most of the time.”
“Good choice, but they don’t serve subs there.”
“This might surprise you, but I don’t just eat subs.”
“I suppose that’s possible, you know, like that big bonehead in those old commercials.”
“Jared?”
“I would never have remembered his name.”
Our conversation struggled on like that for a good hour, neither of us daring to bring up the subject closest to our hearts. But I could see he was gathering up the courage to raise his, with each slug of beer bringing us closer to the moment he’d dare to start talking about his feelings. Wanting to avoid this at all costs, I knocked his legs out from under him by setting my cards out first.
“So, Seb, have you got a project on the go at the moment?”
“On the go?”
“I mean, are you working on a literary project?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I know, authors never like talking about their writing.”
“I’m not writing anything.”
“You’re not writing anymore?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe in it anymore.”
“You don’t believe in it?”
“That’s right.”
“But all that literature study—”
“You don’t learn how to become a writer in a classroom, you know.”
“Neither do you become a doctor of literature to make rowboats for minimum wage.”
“We don’t make rowboats at Doral, we make yachts and cruisers. And I make fifteen bucks an hour.”
“Oh, excuse me… And that was your plan, while you were studying, to come back to Grand-Mère to build cruisers?”
“No, I wanted to be a literature prof.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I don’t believe in that anymore either.”
“You and your beliefs, you are funny. How much does a university prof earn a year?”
“A hundred and twenty thousand at the top of the scale, something like that.”
“So only three or four times what someone who makes rowboats—sorry, cruisers—earns. So do you believe in boats?”
“Yes, boats have a purpose.”
“And literature?”
“Has none.”
He’d stopped fiddling with the label on his Labatt’s 50 and was looking at me defiantly. The conversation was becoming interesting, and in the normal run of things I would really enjoy taking him down a peg or two, but I had to keep my goal in mind, so I went off on a tangent and said to him, “I have a favour to ask you.” He let out a sigh, barely perceptible, just so that I knew he wasn’t surprised, that he hadn’t really thought I was there for his good looks. “What sort of favour?”
“A literary service, naturally.”
“You’ve got a paper to hand in and you want me to knock it into shape.”
“No, nothing like that. It’s ages since I set foot in a school, and anyway, without wanting to insult you, I’d never employ you as a ‘knocker into shape.’ Actually, it’s just your name I need.”
“My name? Why?”
“I think I should start at the beginning. To make a long story short, we want to go to Bird-in-Hand but we’re broke, so we’ve been looking for a way to—”
“‘We’? Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and Jude. As I was saying, we want to go to Bird-in-Hand and—”
“Jude’s your boyfriend?”
“What’s that got to do with the story? Listen, I’ve got three pints in my system. I’m already having trouble collecting my thoughts; I’ll never get to the end if you keep interrupting me every sentence.”
<
br /> “Just explain who Jude is and then I’ll shut up.”
“All right…how should I put this? In your letter you wrote that you were in love with me, right?”
“Um…well…yes…”
“Did you know that the human body is roughly eighty per cent water?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, when we talk about ‘Tess,’ it’s mostly a question of water. If you claim to be in love with me, it’s mainly water that you love.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at things. And rather stupid, if I may say so. But I’m really not following you.”
“Let me spell it out: if you’re in love with someone, you’re in love with the whole person, not just a part of them. If you’re in love with me, you’re in love with my right ear, my chin, my nose. You can’t say, ‘I’m in love with Tess except for her nose.’”
“Obviously not. Anyway, your nose is fantastic.”
“Oh, come off it! What I’m trying to get across is that Jude is just as much a part of me as my right ear, my nose, and my half-dozen gallons of water…”
“So I would be in love with Jude…”
“Um… Well, yes! That’s right. Now can I ask you the favour?”
“Go ahead. I’ve just learned that I’m in love with some guy I didn’t even know existed; after that I’m ready to hear anything.”
“Here we go: Jude and I want to go to Bird-in-Hand—”
“Where’s that?”
“In Pennsylvania, Lancaster County.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
“To be totally honest, we don’t really know why. My personal theory is that people want to get away when they’re unhappy, but Jude claims we’re too unimportant to be unhappy.”
“Rubbish! Even dogs can be unhappy…”
“Well, yeah, but for a guy who promised he wouldn’t interrupt anymore…”
“Sorry. I won’t say another word.”
“Right. Take eight. Jude and I want to go to Bird-in-Hand—for no good reason, we just want to—and, as I was saying, we’re poor: I make subs and he doesn’t do anything. We’ve been racking our brains to find some way of coming up with $15,000, but we’re too lazy to make any great effort, too impatient to save, too cowardly to rob a bank, and too stupid to come up with a scam, so we’ve decided to turn to the government—”
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