A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer by Brian Busby

A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer
By Brian Busby
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press

For the Canadian writer John Glassco (1909-81), literary success arrived late in life. Apart from a single contribution to This Quarter, the 1920s Paris-based literary magazine edited by Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorehead, Glassco published almost nothing until he was in his forties. The five dollars he received for a poem read on CBC Radio in 1956 was the first money he had ever made from his writing. During his rather ignominious career as an undergraduate (at McGill University, in the 1920s) he published a few brittle and cranky pieces in the student newspaper, none of which are indicative of his later, mature work.

Glassco quit without graduating in 1927, and with an allowance from his father, headed to the Paris of Joyce, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. There, along with his friend and lover Graeme Taylor, whom he had met at McGill, he quickly became well known among the expatriate set. He and Taylor saw a lot of Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, drank and giggled and postured, and made a little extra money from various underground activities while storing up memories for poems, novels, and memoirs. However, they were too busy living as writers to write much; when Glassco was forced to return to Canada because he contracted tuberculosis from a lover—she also gave him a sexually transmitted disease for good measure—he had little to show for his months in France. Among the many lies told by Glassco during his lifetime, one was the claim that he had a small book of pornographic stories published in Paris (Contes en crinoline, 1929), but no copy has ever been traced by any Glassco scholar, and biographer Brian Busby, like his predecessors, is forced to admit that the book is likely a ghost, or more likely a simple fabrication.

Busby has written the first biography of Glassco—“one” life, he deliberately calls it, although the specificity seems unnecessary to me—and it is solidly researched and mostly well written. He has interviewed many people who knew Glassco (although many of his closest friends had already died when Busby began his project), and he has made good use of archival material, especially Glassco’s so-called Intimate Journal, an unpublished record that, while it needs to be read with a keen and critical eye (as does everything Glassco ever wrote), is of tremendous biographical value. He navigates expertly through Glassco’s pseudonymous writings and inventions, and he has consulted widely in the literary, bookselling, and horsey sets. (Glassco started and ran the Foster Horse Show in his Quebec hometown for several years.) He is sometimes reluctant to share where he found certain supporting evidence (two important copies of Glassco’s book Memoirs of Montparnasse, for instance), and he makes a few mistakes, missing, for example, the fact that Glassco is parodying Keats when he writes about “a season of feasts and hallow frightfulness” (292), and taking “Fecit” as an artist’s surname when it is the standard Latin indication of authorship for painters and engravers (“Leonardo fecit” equals “Leonardo made it”). The painter Marian Scott’s given name is consistently misspelled with an o, and Busby has an odd way of referring to certain editions of books, for example calling one “the 1934 the English house Herbert Joseph edition.” But these are relatively minor flaws.

Glassco is best known to readers for Memoirs of Montparnasse, his startlingly evocative and charming memoir of his Paris experience in the 1920s. It was first published in 1970, and many people think it the best of all the expatriate memoirs from that period, when a number of Canadian and American writers lived in Paris. The poet and critic Louis Dudek, for example, called it “the best book of prose by a Canadian that I have ever read.” Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle, and Morley Callaghan are among those who wrote such memoirs, but none is as compelling as Glassco’s.

After Glassco’s death, Canadian scholars (Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, among them) discovered that his account of the book’s genesis—he said that it was drafted in the early 1930s when he was back in Quebec recovering from TB—was a lie. Many of the incidents in the book were also invented, misdated, massaged to improve the author’s image, or otherwise altered. To my mind, this caused a good deal of unnecessary reevaluation of the Memoirs, as though somehow Glassco’s inventions made the work any less worthy, and as though every memoir other than his were rigorously truthful.

Glassco’s routine exaggerations and distortions of the truth throughout his life are however somewhat troubling. He lied almost as a matter of course, often about trivial matters and for little apparent gain. Busby argues that this character flaw had psychological roots in Glassco’s childhood, for his father routinely beat him and was in every way an unsympathetic character. Busby calls him “a sadist, of the kind that is absolutely unaware of his propensity” (22). He invented two sons from an imagined previous marriage, whom he held up as models of proper behavior. An artistic son was evidently the last thing his father wanted, and from an early age Glassco began keeping things from his parents and transmuting the truth to avoid confrontations.

The physical abuse was also at the etiological core of Glassco’s sex life. He was bisexual and also given to sadomasochism and several fetishistic compulsions. His pornographic books (he wrote many) largely deal with punishment and rubber fetishism and rarely exploit normative sexual pleasure with either sex. On the whole, the texts are tame by today’s standards. Despite Busby’s surprise and disappointment on Glassco’s behalf that none of the books ever had a Canadian edition, even though they were popular elsewhere in the English-speaking world, they have surely all had their day now in the era of Internet pornography.

Lying became rote for Glassco. He once claimed to have been the mayor of his town, although he was only a member of the town council. His self-composed bibliographies are rife with invented entries and pseudonymous items. He stole books from libraries and faked a personal inscription in his copy of Ken Sato’s Quaint Stories of the Samurais to increase the value of the book. He was regularly unfaithful to all of his lovers (some of them his life partners, some not), and he even published stories under his name that had been written by his (then deceased) partner Graeme Taylor. He more or less abandoned both Taylor and his own wife Elma as they lay dying, writing on one occasion: “But oh how I have deserted all those who once loved me—so many.” One understands this kind of emotional infidelity, and in Glassco’s case it is possible to empathize with it, given his childhood experiences. All the same, the man described in detail by Busby seems a rather nasty person. In my opinion, his incurable need and talent to present himself as someone else did not serve his work well, although Busby thinks otherwise. He begins his biography with the statement that these “talents, cultivated at an early age, served well his art and public persona” (3). Glassco’s expert completion of Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished Under the Hill supports this contention, but in general I think those “talents” led him astray more often than they stood him in good stead.

In addition to the pornographic books and the Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco was a well-known poet and translator. The poetry is difficult to characterize and to place. It is not particularly modernist in tone or technique, and its frequent rootedness in a rural setting (Glassco lived much of his life after Paris in the Eastern Townships of Quebec on or near a farm) evokes not so much the tradition of Baudelaire and Huysmans (a tradition he claimed to be part of) as that of poets like John Clare and Francis Jammes. He incorporated pastiche and imitation into his work, and the poetry often bravely indulges in anachronistic stylistic traits that seem very much at odds with his playfully sophisticated spirit. As a translator, Glassco focused on what he would have called French-Canadian literature, and he was an accomplished practitioner in this field, in both poetry and fiction. His versions of the poems and the private journal of Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau, Quebec’s first major modernist poet, are exquisitely done, and his anthology titled The Poetry of French Canada in Translation (1970) was crucial in introducing the francophone poetry of Quebec to English readers. Glassco did not sympathize with the nationalist aspirations of most of the younger Quebec writers, and they for their part were rather contemptuous of his controversial opinion that political posturing made for bad verse.

Glassco characterized himself in 1934 as a “trifler, dilettante, petit-maître,” and although Busby takes issue with that self-appraisal, I think Glassco was essentially right. There is nothing wrong, after all, with being a Kleinmeister. Many writers, painters, and composers whom we value were exactly that. The history of the arts would be much the poorer without the work of Aloysius Bertrand, Ernest Chausson, and Henri Rivière, just to name three of the nineteenth-century French minor masters. By virtue of one imperishable book, some good poetry, and some excellent translations, not to mention his many famous friends and acquaintances, Glassco deserves a biographer as accomplished as Busby and a book as compellingly readable as A Gentleman of Pleasure. This is Busby’s first foray into literary biography, and he has done his homework exceedingly well. He took great pains to trace archival material, not just in the obvious places (the Glassco papers themselves), but also in more obscure corners of the archival world. Pornography is legendarily a complicated bibliographical subject, and Busby has navigated its unsettled waters with aplomb. The portrait he draws, based on solid research, is detailed and lively, even if in the end one feels that his subject is not one with whom someone would ever have wanted to live.