Celebrating the Foster Horse Show

03 July 2011

Celebrating the Foster Horse Show

Not today, of course, but one of many Sundays past in which thousands would gather at John Glassco's Jamaica Farm. From the same article, published in the 28 July 1966 edition of the Eastern Townships Advertiser:

The Foster Horse Show began sixty year ago as a bit of a lark, but grew to be one of the largest equestrian events in the country. At its height, the show nearly overwhelmed Glassco's grounds. It was estimated that as many as 5000 people attended in 1964, all to the benefit of the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital in nearby Sweetsburg.

Eastern Townships Advertiser, 15 July 1964

Eastern Townships Advertiser, 29 July 1964

Glassco played host to the show for more than two decades, before age and concerns over insurance and liability forced him to give up the role. It was moved nine kilometres down the road to the village of Knowlton, where it lived until 1998, when it was moved to Bromont's Olympic Equestrian Centre.

Saturday, July 16, will see the unveiling of a plaque honouring Glassco, Graeme Taylor and the other founders of the Foster Horse Show: Harry Wallace, Miles Rhicard, Gilbert Rhicard, Ann Johannson and Stan Fewster, along with announcer James Blackwood and ringmaster George Rogerson.

This comes as part of the Knowlton Wordfest – still in its infancy and already one of the very finest Canadian literary festivals. I'll be in the audience... it is not to be missed.

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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