March 8, Women's Day

I had forgotten all about it. By 1996, more than 16 years after I had left my country, this kind of holiday had been replaced by others, meaningful in a very different way.

The approaching publication of my first book was an event of extraordinary proportions for the one who had been working on this, originally doctoral thesis, since 1984. I know it sounds unbearable and it is.

People outside the university often think that university jobs are easy. They count the number of hours one is expected to teach every week, they look at summers which appear to be work free, and wonder how such jobs are still possible nowadays, when business people work so hard, with so little security, etc. In fact, the reason I do not like to remember very often how I got that first position is precisely because, when I count the years it took, to put together a curriculum vitae likely be taken into consideration, I shiver. Of course, when one is young, life seems never-ending. It helped, that I liked to read and write. But spend twelve years on a book that nobody, including myself, remembers any longer? A book whose main virtue proved to be, to put me in a position wherefrom I could do the same a second time?

Of course not everybody takes this long. There are, fortunately, people who think fast, write fast, and get things through with ease and successfully. Of course.

That 8 March 1996 was the last of many days I had spent on the phone with the man who was doing the editing of my book. (We did not have email in those days.) This book had been read and proofread many times before, but he did not quite trust those. He was a better editor anyhow.  I too must have sounded somewhat untrustworthy. He had never seen me, I was neither in Montreal, nor from Montreal. He kept sending me back to my text, kept saying, as others were to do after him, that this is not "how you say it in French". The book contained an awful lot of quotations, that is, translations from German, from Spanish, God knows where else, and it certainly sounded very little French-like. It could not have. At some point, the editor himself, embarrassed by his lack of patience with a job he was paid to do, but of which he thought little, excused himself by saying that he regretted to have to do this to me on women's day. Obviously, being a québécois, he had a political conscience. That did not stop him from being rough with my work, with my general contention that I had written something worth publishing, but well, since I had been awarded the necessary grant, he had to do his job. It did not mean that he would do it nicely, of course not. Do it, and in the process spook me away from coming back another time.

From the depths of my embarrassment, I remembered those 8th of March days. I remembered the endless hours children spent making gifts for teachers and mothers. The festive, perfumed feel of it all, the fact that back home, March meant the arrival of spring already, with small delicious bouquets of snowdrops and violets to prove it.

Meanwhile here, when I had reason to rejoice in my accomplishment, it somehow felt riddled with difficulty and closer to rejection than joy.

A few weeks later I drove to Montreal from London, where I lived, to pick up the copies of the book to which I was entitled. I found my editor at the publishing house, in the midst of boxes piled up to the ceiling. All those books now published, which were probably never going to be bought, in spite of having been so thoroughly edited and proofread. I got my box from this very polite man, who in my presence had become almost pleasant. Nothing in him betrayed the grumpy phone demeanour. He had the appearance of the 70s intellectual, long if thinning unkempt hair, complexion fatigued by one too many nights spent drinking and maybe writing. Nothing so boring and thesis-infused like what I had produced. A master of his native tongue, without a doubt.

We had an uneasy lunch in an empty bar and I took off in a rush, impatient to take a closer look at my precious book, which I could not have done in his presence. Stopped on the side of the road, took one of them out, it smelled so good, so fresh, so perfect. I looked at the back cover, the one known to matter to the first time author, the only place where any mention of who she is may be made, if at all. Maybe there was also a small picture of me? I do not remember. But I don't think so. This was a serious, academic press, where they do not indulge in portrait narcissism. My attention on the spot arrested by the typo I could not not notice even before reading. Not a big deal at all, simply a word repeated twice, nothing horrible. The small preposition de. Yet to me, at that time, this was a disaster. After weeks of having had to listen to how poor my written language was, that typo, left to fester in such a noticeable place, loudly spoke about how this chap had not done his job properly. He was very good at telling one what they had done wrong, but not so good at doing things right himself.

As you can see, many years have gone by, yet I still cannot forget that de. It took the shine off the publication of my first book. It should not have done so. In time I learned to rationally submit to the difference between what is important and what is not, and a typo certainly is not. It remains a fact that for years after, that typo came back. Every time I had to subject myself to comments concerning my writing, coming from people who invariably thought they could do better than I did. In a way, that typo on the back cover bio, brought a certain perspective to the act of writing and publishing. Writing was a form of giving, followed by a silence. That silence is sometimes marked by a typo, let us call it an X, the acte manqué by which my poor editor had manifested his disapproval and revolt.

I am tempted to say, let us imagine, on this Women's Day, that the best way to fill that silence would be, instead of the X, the wordless fragrance of a small bouquet of snowdrops, for the dark-haired, of violets, for the blond, and the grey. Let us all go back to our cheerful, communist spring.