John Glassco - A Gentleman of Pleasure: May 2012

28 May 2012

Conversing with a Literary Tourist about Montreal

Audio of my recent conversation with Nigel Beale has just been posted here at the Literary Tourist.

Mordecai Richler, A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, the Writers' Chapel, the Seville Theatre and Les Mas des Oliviers figure... as does Fiddler's Green Irish Pub, the establishment that has taken up residence in John Glassco's old Bishop Street pied-à-terre.

Cross-posted at The Dusty Bookcase

13 May 2012

Images of the John Glassco Soirée

A few photographs of the John Glassco Soirée, held late last month at the Writers' Chapel of Montreal's St James the Apostle Anglican Church. All images and captions come courtesy of the fine folks at the Argo Bookshop, sponsors of the event.

Reverend Robert Camara started us off with a few opening remarks.

Michael Gnarowski, a good friend of John Glassco, followed Robert Camara with anecdotes about his old friend. A personal favourite was the recipe for one of Glassco's favoured summer drinks, the 'Glassco special':
1 part gin
1 part sparkling water
1 part orange juice
& sugar to taste

Judy Nesbitt spoke as a direct bloodline connection to Glassco. Before she spoke at the event about her Uncle Buffy, at the bar, she passed around the oldest photographs of the Glassco family.

One of our two featured speakers was Brian Busby, author of A Gentleman of Pleasure, enlightening us with facts and factoids, details and illuminations on Glassco's life and work.

Our other featured speaker was Carmine Starnino, who had edited John Glassco and the Other Montreal, a selection of poems. He had taken the side of interrogator and interviewer for the evening, posing questions to Busby about the contexts and underpinnings of Glassco's work.

Last, but certainly not least, Bryan Sentes would season Carmine and Brian's conversation about Glassco by reading excerpts and poems: specifically, the poems "The Rural Mail" & "Brummel at Calais", with excerpts from The English Governess/Harriet Marwood, Governess, and the first three paragraphs of Memoirs of Montparnasse.

Argo co-owners Jesse Eckerlin and Meaghan Acosta at the book table.

It seems such a cliché, but there truly was something magical about the evening. I offer my thanks, once again, to the Argo Bookshop for sponsoring the event. Anyone looking for copies of A Gentleman of Pleasure, John Glassco and the Other Montreal and Memoirs of Montparnasse need look no further.

Cross-posted at The Dusty Bookcase.

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