John Glassco - A Gentleman of Pleasure

01 April 2013

The Heart Accepts It All

The first day of National Poetry Month seems a good time to mention my forthcoming book The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco. I've never been much good when it comes to salesmanship, so will leave the task to publisher Véhicule Press.

From their catalogue:

A brilliant and enigmatic literary figure.

Decades after his death, John Glassco (1909-1981) remains Canada’s most enigmatic literary figure. The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco draws back the curtain on this self-described ‘great practitioner of deceit.’ We see the delight he took in revealing his many literary hoaxes to friends, and the scorn he had for literary fashion. The letters reflect his convictions about literature, other writers and his own talent, while documenting struggles with publishers, pirates and censors.

Born into one of Montreal’s wealthiest families, Glassco turned his back on privilege for a life in letters. At age eighteen, having been published in Paris, his voice suddenly went silent. His unexpected return to the literary scene in 1957 coincided with the great flowering of Canadian literature. In the years that followed, he produced a unique body of work that encompasses poetry, memoir, translation, and several bestselling books of pornography.

Collected here are the few surviving letters from his youthful adventures in France and three previously unpublished poems. Amongst his correspondents were Maurice Girodias, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Ralph Gustafson, Leon Edel and Margaret Atwood.

It's an honour to again find myself associated with this great talent.

Cross-posted at The Dusty Bookcase.

14 January 2013

John Glassco's Personal and Working Library

The new Canadian Notes & Queries – number 86 – features my look at John Glassco: A Personal and Working Library, issued in 1982 by Montreal's Word Bookstore. Compiled by Glassco's bibliographer Fraser Sutherland, this cerlox-bound 47-page catalogue offers the poet and pornographer's library en masse:

The Library occupies approximately 29 feet of shelf-space, and comprises 526 books and 88 periodicals – most of them signed and annotated – as well as hundreds of other printed items, letters, and manuscripts. Editions are usually First. Except for books or periodicals published before 1940, condition is usually Fine. On the rare occasions were pages are missing, these are indicated. The price of JOHN GLASSCO: A PERSONAL AND WORKING LIBRARY is Can$9500.

That's right, $9500. And yet only one institution stepped forward. And it wasn't McGill.

The library was purchased by Queen's University and is now housed at Special Collections at the W.D. Jordan Library. The following catalogue pages provide some indication as to the collection's contents.

Cross-posted, in part, at The Dusty Bookcase.

15 December 2012

John Glassco: 103 Years

John Stinson Glassco
(15 December 1909 - 29 January 1981)

"I believe, actually, that birthdays should be dated from the moment of conception or fertilization, because that was undoubtedly a pleasanter occasion for everyone concerned."

—John Glassco, letter to A.J.M. Smith, 27 Oct 1964

24 September 2012

The First Review of John Glassco's First Book

The Gazette, 13 December 1958

18 September 2012

Dimanche... Sunday... the 2012 John Glassco Prize

(cliquez pour agrandir)

Black-leather dandy, and elegant, martini-sipping beat, John Glassco was a one-man, literary underground. Impeccable in style and provocative in intent, his pornography is poetic, his poetry is arty, but all his writing has the precision and grace of beautiful lies. Yet, his genius has gone too long unheralded and unsung in his native land. Bravo to Brian Busby, then, whose exhaustively researched, exquisitely written, and endlessly interesting biography reveals Glassco's vivid complexity, intricate deceptions, and the convoluted genesis of his deathless triumphs in memoir, translation, lyric, and, yes, his odes to the joys of womanly sadism and boyish masochism. Busby gives us a detailed portrait of a grand bon vivant and a singular intellectual, who was likely English Canada's most gifted, truly radical writer.

– George Elliott Clarke

In his own elegant prose and with a profound appreciation of his subject’s life and work, Brian Busby introduces us to the life, the times, and the writings of a man who was not merely a gentleman of letters and pleasure but also a fabulist of the first order. Busby’s treatment and analysis of Glassco’s best-known work, the controversial Memoirs of Montparnasse, should lay to rest any questions still surrounding its composition. Read this book too for an exceptional and intimate gaze into the life and times of a pioneering translator of Franco-Québécois writers into English; an award-winning poet; and a noteworthy author of literary pornography. All combine quite comfortably to make A Gentleman of Pleasure a tremendously good and satisfying read.

– Sheila Fischman

As this book's subtitle makes clear, Glassco dabbled in many literary forms (with varying degrees of success – the more he wrote about spanking, it seems, the better his sales), but he truly excelled at self-mythology. His Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), much-praised for its truthful evocation of an epoch, is now recognized as a grossly fanciful exaggeration of his youthful European adventures. Brian Busby earns full marks – not just for being crazy enough to play Boswell to a compulsive liar prone to destroying his personal correspondence – but for having the skill (and research chops) to sculpt fibs and embellishments into an eminently readable portrait of a writer whose greatest creation, ultimately, was his own life.

– James Martin, McGill News

I imagine that Busby, like many other literary biographers, ended up with a much different book than the one he had in mind originally. As he gathered more and more detail (he is a master of research), he must have rethought his previous assumptions, coming to see Glassco as a terribly sad figure: someone at odds with his wealthy family, frequently broke or seriously constrained in various ways by what he called 'the two features of my psychosexuality, the fetishistic and the masochistic.' Yet in the process Busby proves himself most sympathetic as he goes about revivifying a complex and (in this instance) highly conflicted individual consciousness, which is what serious biographers aspire to do.
What a yarn…

– George Fetherling, CNQ

It is nothing less than thrilling - if I may use a word not often associated with Canadian literature - to have two excellent works on (and by) John Glassco appearing in the same year. Is this the (or, another) beginning of a Glassco revival? Let’s hope so. Brian Busby’s remarkably complete and very readable biography of a somewhat idiosyncratic man of letters brings to the fore Glassco’s many talents, on display not only in his celebrated (and notorious) Memoirs of Montparnasse but also for his less well-known (but equally important) work in the fields of poetry, translation, and pornography. Alongside Busby’s handsomely presented volume, Carmine Starnino [John Glassco and the Other Montreal] focuses on selections of Glassco’s poetic works, which he prefaces with a brilliant and concise introductory essay. For the reader new to Glassco - and to those unfamiliar with his other work—the two books will definitely reward and delight.

– Andrew Lesk, Malahat Review