Graeme Taylor's Grave, Mount Royal Cemetery

Unmarked.

The thirtieth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

'Complete set of Saikaku prints for Ralph'

Ralph Gustafson's copies of the Philip Core illustrations from The Temple of Pederasty. It's likely that Glassco gave these to his fellow poet in 1970.

The twenty-ninth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Tonight in St. Marys

John Glassco, the Gaspé, 1971

Glassco in July 1971, during his self-described "honeymoon" with Marion McCormick.

The image first appeared on this blog in May.

The twenty-eighth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

The Tamarack Review, No. 49 (1969)

Glassco's copy of The Tamarack Review, No. 49, featuring the first excerpts of Memoirs of Montparnasse.

The twenty-seventh of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Memoirs of Montparnasse - Annotated by Glassco

Frank and Marian Scott's copy of Memoirs of Montparnasse. Perhaps the most valuable book in my collection, it was a gift from the late Lawrence P. Nowicki, to whom I dedicated A Gentleman of Pleasure.

For Frank and Marian Scott

with love from

Buffy

and Numerous footnotes in Holograph,

forming a Key to the disguised

Characters in this Work —

Jan. 6, 1970

The twenty-sixth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Poésie 64/Poetry 64 (1965)

John Glassco's heavily annotated copy of Poésie 64/Poetry 64, edited by Jacques Godbout and John Robert Colombo.

Published by Ryerson Press and les Éditions du Jour in 1965, the anthology was one of many volumes Glassco used in translating. This copy holds a slip of paper on which we see his 1966 translation of Françoise Bujold's "Le Semaine". "Cancelled for anthology", Glassco has written – a reference to his monumental The Poetry of French Canada in Translation (Toronto: Oxford, 1970).

The twenty-fifth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Ce soir a Montréal - Tonight in Montreal

7:00 pm, Sunday, September 25

Salle des Jeunesses musicales

305 Mont-Royal Ave. E.

Montreal

Yvette Ledoux, Paris, c. 1927

Yvette Ledoux

28 July 1898, Trois-Rivières, Québec - 9 November 1945, Castle Point, New York

"Angela Martin" in Memoirs of Montparnasse.

The twenty-fourth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Northern Journey, No. 3 (October 1973)

While Glassco submitted nothing to Northern Journey after the little magazine's debut, his name did appear again in its pages. The third issue features a short story, "Slow Burn", in which a character named "Margaret Atwood", "the reigning queen of Canadian literature", rides in a car after a reading:

Ms. Atwood sat up front. She said she was satisfied with the reading but not as pleased as she was in Montreal where John Glassco had paid her a grand compliment. After her performance there, "Buffy" had come up to tell her that she had given him "a great big erection."

The story, by journalist Wil Wigle, prompted a letter from Atwood's lawyer to Northern Journey editor Fraser Sutherland. Demands were made, the Writers Union became involved, resignations followed and unpleasantness spread like spilled paint in kindergarten class.

Glassco hadn't read the story for the simple reason that he had no subscription; an oversight he soon corrected.

A friend of both Atwood and Sutherland, Glassco found himself in a awkward position, and worked behind the scenes to diffuse the situation. In the end, he dismissed the mess as "an erection in a teapot."

Not only did Northern Journey not bend to the demands made by Atwood's lawyer, Rosalie Abella (now a Supreme Court justice), it played up "the offending issue".

The Globe & Mail, 2 November 1974

More, much more, in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The twenty-third of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Northern Journey, No. 1 (1971)

The debut issue of Northern Journey, edited by Fraser Sutherland and Terrance MacCormack. Glassco contributed three pieces: "Euterpe's Honeymoon (Notes on the Poetic Process)", "Onan; or Little by Little (Found Poem)" and the first chapter of Fetish Girl. The last, published under the nom de plume Sylvia Bayer, includes this amusing introduction:

I am delighted to see this opening chapter of my eighth published novel appear in a serious literary magazine in my native land, and only hope this example of a frankly commercial literary genre won't be too out of place there. After all, aphrodisiac writing is genuine "pop" art, isn't it? And this has the distinction of being the first book ever written for rubber fetishists.*

Sylvia Bayer

Montreal, July 15, 1971

The back of the magazine features fourteen Canadian Writers Cards – "Save them, swap them with friends... It's a new and absorbing hobby!!" Glassco's card (CW8) appears bottom left, on the same perforated sheet as Sylvia Bayer (CW4). The photograph he supplied is in fact that of his first wife Elma.

* As I point out in A Gentleman of Pleasure and in this post, Glassco is mistaken in making this claim.

The twenty-second of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

The 2011 John Glassco Prize Gala

This coming Sunday evening, I'll have the honour of speaking at the 2011 John Glassco Prize Gala, sponsored by the Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada/Literary Translators' Association of Canada. Also on the bill: Moe Clark, Patricia Claxton, Sheila Fischman, Paul Gagné, Lazer Lederhendler, Lori Saint-Martin and our M.C. Robert Paquin.

7:00 pm, Sunday, September 25

Salle des Jeunesses musicales

305 Mont-Royal Ave. E.

Montreal

Jamaica Farm, Foster, Quebec

Purchased in 1945, Jamaica Farm was Glassco's second home in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The poet and his friend Graeme Taylor lived alone in its yellow farmhouse (then white) until 1956, when they were joined by 'housekeeper' Elma Koolmer. Taylor died the following year. In 1963, Glassco and Elma were married.

The couple lived in the farmhouse until 1965, when Glassco built a new home for Elma on the land.

The twenty-first of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Aimé van Rod's La Gouvernante (1913)

La Gouvernante

Aimé van Rod

Paris: Librairie Artistique et Litteraire, 1913

The French flagellantine novel Glassco plagiarized in writing The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess.

I was amazed and appalled to see how completely it gave expression to the same erotic situations I had already projected: everything is the same – I might have written it myself in a fit of industry.

— John Glassco, 'Intimate Journal', 22 March 1938

The twentieth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Graeme Taylor, Foster, Quebec, c. 1955

The last known photograph of Graeme Taylor, taken approximately two years before his death.

The nineteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Robert McAlmon's The Nightinghouls of Paris

Three pages from the manuscript of Robert McAlmon's The Nightinghouls of Paris. A roman à clef set in 1929 Montparnasse, it centres largely on Sudge Galbraith and Ross Campion, two Montreal boys modelled after Glassco and Graeme Taylor.

In 1947, McAlmon mailed the manuscript to Glassco. It was returned without comment, bringing their nineteen-year friendship to an abrupt end. Glassco was most disturbed by the frank portrayal of himself and his relationship with Taylor. The novel's publication would have been embarrassing, if not disastrous.

Glassco needn’t have worried about the novel’s appearance. In 1947, McAlmon’s career was already over; he would not live to see another title published. It wasn't until 2007, sixty years later, that The Nightinghouls of Paris was finally published by the University of Illinois Press. Edited with an Introduction by McAlmon's biographer Sanford J. Smoller, it is an invaluable document, and is recommended highly to anyone studying Glassco and his work.

The eighteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

John Glassco and Graeme Taylor, Nice, 1929

Glassco and Graeme Taylor captured strolling along the boardwalk in Nice. It's almost certain that the photographer was Robert McAlmon.

The image first appeared on this blog in April.

The seventeenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Edward Rawlings' Obituary

The obituary for Glassco's maternal grandfather, Edward Rawlings, published in The New York Times on 13 December 1911, the day after his death. The poet was not quite one year old when the old man died. At the age of twenty-five, Glassco inherited a small sliver of Rawlings' estate – more than enough to purchase Windermere, his 'White Mansion' in the Eastern Townships.

The sixteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

First Statement, Vol. 2, No. 12 (April-May 1945)

The "April & May 1945" number of influential Montreal little magazine First Statement. Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, Patrick Anderson, Ralph Gustafson, Miriam Waddington... amongst the lesser-known writers we find Wingate Taylor, "a farmer in the Eastern townships [sic] of Quebec." He's better remembered – though, in truth, he's barely remembered at all – as Graeme Taylor. His contribution, "The Horse-Stall", is taken from Brazenhead, an unpublished lost novel. The story marked Taylor's first appearance in print since his days in Montparnasse. It was also his last.

The same issue features a Glassco review of Gwethelyn Graham's Earth and High Heaven.

The fifteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.
An expanded version of this piece has been cross-posted at The Dusty Bookcase.

'Equisses in [sic] Plein Air' (1958)

From the Spring 1958 number of The Fiddlehead, these Saint-Denys-Garneau poems marked Glassco's debut as a translator. Sadly, the event was marred by a sloppy editor. Glassco tore his pages from the magazine – discarding the rest – and corrected the errors. He also made several revisions, some of which stand in his 1975 Complete Poems of Saint-Denys-Garneau.

The fourteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (n.d.)

John Glassco's well-read copy of Tropic of Capricorn. Such were his reclusive years that it wasn't until 1941 that he first became aware of Miller. Glassco was impressed at first, believing the American's writing, "so very brilliant and fresh, and so dismayingly more striking, more up-to-date and more technically advanced, than the stuff I have been turning out lately."

However, Glassco quickly revised the judgement, writing his friend Robert McAlmon that Miller's writing contained "a lack of directness and simplicity, sensationalism, pretentiousness, wire-drawness and deadly sophistication."

The thirteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Lucy, Knowlton, Quebec, c. 1940

This photograph of Glassco with Elizabeth Wilson ('Sappho') and his horse Peggy appears in A Gentleman of Pleasure, but what I didn't notice until after publication is Lucy, the poet's beloved Dalmation, running beneath the carriage.

Glassco mentions Lucy's death – but only briefly – in a 1948 journal entry:

This is something I can’t write about: it is the first grievous loss by death I have ever had.

The twelfth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

John Glassco Memorial Plaque

One of two copies of the memorial plaque to John Glassco, installed on 26 November 2009 in the chapel of St James the Apostle. The lines of verse are from 'Luce's Notch'.

Yearning and aching always, and so become

Each day more closely bound to what you are.

The eleventh of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

St James the Apostle, Montreal, 1902

The interior of Montreal's St James the Apostle Anglican Church, captured in this 1902 Notman Studio photograph. Beatrice, Glassco's mother, attended this church as a child. In 1905, she walked down its aisle to marry his father, A.P.S. Glassco. John Glassco himself was married twice in the church: in 1963 to Elma Koolmer (1917-1971), and in 1974, to journalist Marion McCormick (1924-2004). Glassco's funeral took place at St James the Apostle on 2 February 1981.

The tenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.

Selwyn House School Gym Class, Montreal, 1917

Seven-year-old Buffy Glassco, as captured in the class photo below.

Then located in a converted house on Mackay Street, Selwyn House School had no gymnasium or grounds of its own, and so made use of facilities offered by the nearby Montreal Amateur Athletic Association.

John Glassco

John Glassco's only brother, David

The ninth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

The entire series can be found here.