Covering <i>Memoirs of Montparnasse</i>

01 August 2011

Covering Memoirs of Montparnasse

For far too many years, I've been complaining much too much about the cover treatments that have been accorded Memoirs of Montparnasse. All this clamouring has been based on the tired observation that not one image of John Glassco, who was photographed frequently during his Montparnassean adventures, has been used on the cover of this, his finest work of prose. In doing so, I was perhaps being just a bit unfair to Hosei University Press, which in 2007 published a translation, モンパルナスの思い出 [Memories of Montparnasse]. Their cover features Adolf Dehn's 1929 sketch of Glassco. Not a photograph, but an image nevertheless.

To be completely fair, this same sketch appears on the back cover of the first edition.

Memoirs of Montparnasse

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970

The front cover illustration for the first edition is by Blair Drawson.

Memoirs of Montparnasse

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973

The cover used for both the first Canadian paperback edition and the first American edition in any format (published by Viking). Dehn and Drawson have disappeared, replaced by an André Kertész photograph.

Souvenirs de Montparnasse

Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 1983

The first French language translation, by Jean-Yves Soucy, published two years after Glassco's death. The mysterious cover art is by Robert Théroux.

Memoirs of Montparnasse

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995

Oxford's second edition, with a critical introduction and notes by Glassco's friend Michael Gnarowski. The final Canadian edition, this is is the one to buy.

Memoirs of Montparnasse

New York: New York Review Books, 2007

The only English language edition currently available, NYRB's features a Man Ray photograph of Kiki, a woman who features only fleetingly in the book (and who, evidence suggests, Glassco did not know). "In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse", says the back cover. In fact, Glassco was eighteen. More misinformation can be found in Louis Begley's Introduction.

Memorias de Montparnasse

Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008

The first Spanish language edition... again with Kiki, again with Louis Begley.

Die verrückten Jahre: Abenteuer eines jungen Mannes in Paris

Munich: Hanser, 2010

Translated by Matthias Fienbork as The Crazy Years: Adventures of a Young Man in Paris, the German language edition features a photograph by Brassai of a lesbian bar. Go figure. Also included: a translation of the NYRB Introduction.

Mémoires de Montparnasse

Paris: Éditions Viviane Hamy, 2010

Daniel Bismuth's translation – historic in that with it Memoirs of Montparnasse becomes the first book of Canadian prose to have been twice translated into the French. I have no idea who graces the cover, but I can say with certainty that it isn't John Glassco.

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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