Byron's Goose: John Glassco's One Great Play

Canadian artistic directors!

A half-century ago, your predecessors received the above. I've taken the liberty of transcribing the text:

BYRON'S GOOSE
(Synopsis)

       Comedy in 3 Acts. 2 sets. Cast of 12 (4 principals). Standard playing time. Scene: Vienna and Ravenna in 1822.

       Byron's final tragicomic relationship with his last mistress 19-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, her eccentric 70-year-old husband, her father and brother (amateur revolutionaries), and his friend Trelawny. His ambitions as lover of Teresa, as would-be liberator of Italy; his involvement in revolutionary, family and social intrigue, climaxed by his cutting himself free of the entanglements of his background and leaving for Greece.

       The play is tightly knit, with rapid action and with dialogue sparkling with Byron's own special brand of wit, overall tone is one of sophisticated comedy relieved by sentiment and action. Gives a new and sympathetic view of Byron as an aging but far from superannuated figure of romance; of Terasa as a blend of charm, devotion and duplicity; of Count Guiccioli as a fantastic and disreputable old man selling his polite consent to adultery; of Trelawny as an ultra-Byronic hero, adventurous, gloomy, dauntless, a little absurd.

       Has great possibilities for eventual adaptation as a musical in the same style as 'Camelot'.

       Complete script will be mailed on request.

John Glassco,
FOSTER,
Que., CANADA

John Glassco considered Byron's Goose his "one great play". Daytime soaps and radio drama aside, I've had no experience writing scripts, so won't presume to judge. That said, I am confident in deeming it superior to The Augean Stable, a very loose adaptation of Harriet Marwood, Governess, the only other work Glassco composed for the stage.

Mr Glassco having passed from this sphere in 1981, requests to Foster will be met with frustration. Interested parties are advised to contact Library and Archives Canada, which holds the script in its John Glassco fonds.

Antoni Cimolino, do not repeat Michael Langham's error!

Cross-posted at The Dusty Bookcase

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.

Harriet Marwood Stories

From time to time I receive correspondence from people seeking further information on John Glassco and his writing. I'm always happy to respond privately, but thought that I might address a recurring query here. The most common comes from those hoping that there might be more Harriet Marwood stories. I have very good news: the beautiful, brunette disciplinarian exists outside the pages of The English Governess and Harriet Marwood, Governess. We find her first in The Augean Stable, a 124-page, three-act play composed in 1954. Unproduced and unpublished, you'll have to consult Glassco's papers at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa in order to read this alternate, rather polite version of her romance with Richard Lovel.

Much more accessible is "The Black Helmet". Published in The Fatal Woman (Anansi, 1974) as one of "Three Tales by John Glassco", this is the novella that he struggled with – forever revisiting and revising – for most of his 71 years. Here Harriet is mentioned frequently, if fleetingly, by her former charge, Philip Mairobert. In this passage, our hero recalls the the arrival of the governess at his family's estate in rural Quebec:

Today I will think of her as the person to whom I owed everything, not as a woman I loved – and think of my life here before she came, with no one but those two old servants in the twilight of dotage who were so terrified of me. I must have been like a wild animal then, with those fits of rage – screaming, biting, breaking things, rolling on the floor. I remember almost nothing of that time: it seemed to be mostly walking through these ruined gardens and in the woods where I set my ineffectual little traps for birds and rabbits, hoping to catch them alive. How desolate and wild a life! Yet when mother left to live in Paris for good, and Miss Marwood came, I was furious. I thought I would lose me freedom. Freedom! As if it ever mattered to me.

Well I lost it certainly – the child's freedom to be lonely, bored, idle, frightened. And I found, quite simply, happiness. A week after she arrived I could sleep without nightmares; and I had stopped stammering: I simply hadn't time! As for my rages, I really think she enjoyed them. as if they offered a challenge to her methods and muscles, to the very strength of her arm.

Though The Fatal Woman enjoyed just a single printing – likely 3000 copies – for a good many years it seemed quite common. No more. I note that only five, one a crummy library discard, are currently being offered by online booksellers.

Fans of the governess are advised not to hesitate.

The author's bio on The Fatal Woman errs in stating that Glassco won "the Governor-General's award [sic] for both poetry and non-fiction." In fact, he received only the former. I'll step out on a limb here and say that Anansi's mistake is borne of a common misconception that Glassco won a Governor General's Award for Memoirs of Montparnasse (his only "non-fiction" book). No Governor General's Award for Non-fiction was awarded for 1970, the year in which it was published.

Incredible, yet oddly appropriate.

Cross-posted in a mildly less mature version at The Dusty Bookcase.

Glassco sans permission

A passing comment concerning piracy made during my McGill lecture - available online - has brought a few queries.

John Glassco's problems with pirates began with the appearance of a cheap, two-volume edition of The English Governess, a product of Taiwanese scoundrels. When exactly this bastard book appeared is lost to history, but evidence indicates that it was very close in following the June 1960 Ophilia Press first edition. While it's likely Glassco never knew of this illegitimate publication, he was very much aware of the one pictured above. Published in 1967 by Collector's Publications of Covina, California, The Governess was a transparent attempt to cash in Grove's newly published Harriet Marwood, Governess, the original version of the romance. Glassco, who was greatly offended by the pirated edition, fought as best he could, but publisher Marvin Miller was an elusive figure, and was far beyond the grasping hands of a poet located in Foster, Quebec.

Not coincidentally, Collector's Publications pirated another Canadian-penned Olympia Press book: Bottoms Up by Jock Carroll. In this case, the claim, "FIRST AMERICAN PRINTING" is not at all true. As The Shy Photographer, the novel had already been published in hardcover by Stein & Day and as a mass market Bantam paperback.

Others have followed the late Mr Miller, the most notable being England's AKS Books, whose catalogue lists Glassco's erotic classic under the confusing catch-all title The English Governess: Harriet Marwood. The publisher also offers his long flagellantine poem Squire Hardman as part of an anthology titled Punitive Poetry.

With the advent of Print On Demand technology and ebooks, piracy has flourished. Kessinger Publishing offers Glassco's completion of Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill, but the most egregious firm has been olympiapress.com. An imprint of appropriately-named Disruptive Publishing, olympiabooks.com is not to be confused with Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press. That said, it does issue works that once found home with the legendary publisher. In Glassco's case, we find Under the Hill. The website misinforms:

Anyway, in '59, Glassco, author of The English Governess, joins Beardsley's illustrations with the deceased author's unfinished manuscripts of the story. Adding in his own bits here and there, voila [sic], we have "Under the Hill," a kind of fairy tale for adults, featuring Tannhauser [sic], a German hero of myth and the Venus, goddess of love, some wild parties, and sex without repercussion.

The most beautiful and elaborate Olympia Press book, olympiapress.com has reduced Under the Hill to this:

Also on offer is Glassco's pseudonymous The English Governess, which Girodias first published under his Ophelia imprint. It can be purchased as a "5 x 8 Perfect Bound" or as a download for your Sony Reader. Cost: US$8.96.

There's more: olympiapress.com lists pornographic works that Glassco published with other houses. Fetish Girl, which which appeared in 1972 as a Venus Library book under the pseudonym Sylvia Bayer, is worthy of note, but the most interesting to me is The Temple of Pederasty (North Hollywood, CA: Hanover House, 1970). In pitching the download (only), the olympiapress.com again misinforms:

Based on source tales from the same Saikaku material that Tuttle Publishing derived its "Comrade Loves of the Samurai" from. This peculiar edition supposedly derives more immediately from a hilariously bad, clandestine publication of a 1928 translation, largely of Saikaku's "Glorious Tales of Pederasty." However, in view of Glassco's unique talents, as poet and author of the Victorian-fake extraordinary The English Governess and Fetish Girl, it's quite likely the book emerged more from the pen of Glassco himself, than from anything Saikaku wrote. Owing to the extreme difficulty people have had in finding the title, the Olympia Press is proud to offer this work of gay erotica for all the scholars out there.

"Banned By Amazon", trumpets olympiapress.com, to which I add that in 1970 The Temple of Pederasty was also banned by Customs and Excise Canada in a decision that would most certainly stand if revisited.

As a completist, sadly, I help support these characters.

Update: A pirate responds!

John Glassco and Writing Pornography for Money

A short clip from the Q&A session that followed my recent lecture at McGill University, this in response to a question about Glassco's own attitude towards his pornography.

Picturing Harriet Marwood

Google Harriet Marwood, the heroine of John Glassco's The English Governess, and you'll find the top site brings this image of a "Professional Disciplinarian and Spankologist" located in New York City. The visitor is told that this "no nonsense lady... takes her inspiration from a renowned, stern English governess of longstanding literary fame and believes in the expert application of all manner of traditional domestic corporal discipline as needed and/or deserved." I'm not so sure this is how the author imagined his creation, though I can say with great certainty that the modern Ms Marwood's clothing isn't at all correct.

Glassco commissioned dozens of illustrations for his erotic works – The Temple of Pederasty (banned), Fetish Girl (rejected), Squire Hardman (unused) and The Jupiter Sonnets (unpublished) – but nothing at all for Harriet, governess to Richard Lovel. The only sense we have of how Glassco saw his creation is found in his writing. Here she is, as first viewed through the eyes of Richard's father:

Mr. Lovel saw before him a tall young woman in her middle twenties, dressed with quiet elegance. A brunette with a very white skin, she wore her dark, almost black hair in a plain style under her small bonnet, parted from forehead to crown and drawn smoothly back to a heavy chignon at the nape of her strong, graceful neck. Her brow was well-shaped and intellectual, the nose was straight, short and full of energy, the mouth rather wide, with full underlie, the chin quite prominent. Everything in her face and pose denoted decision and force; but her glance, reserved, serious, even academic, could not conceal the warm brilliance of her violet-grey eyes.

The first published version of Harriet and Richard's romance, The English Governess (Paris: Ophelia, 1960), had no cover illustration; nor did the reissue Under the Birch (Paris: Ophelia, 1965). It wasn't until the appearance of the more polite telling of this love story, Harriet Marwood, Governess (New York: Grove, 1967), that the heroine was finally depicted.

As with Fetish Girl, Glassco hated the cover. Here he complained that the model, "though well constructed", had "the countenance of a mental defective".

This poor failed Harriet reappears recast on the cover of the 1970 Grove edition of Yvonne; or, The Adventures and Intrigues of a French Governess with Her Pupils, an erotic novel first published in 1899. Of the other depictions of the flagellating governess, Glassco would have only seen the first two. Sadly, his opinions are unrecorded.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid [Harriet Marwood, Governess]

Anonymous [Gerrit Komrij, trans.]

Amsterdam: Uitgeversij de Arbeiderspers, 1969.

Tuchtiging tot Tederheid? Rough translation: Discipline to Tenderness.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

John Glassco

Toronto: General, 1976

The lone Canadian edition of the cleaner version, and the only one to be printed under Glassco's name. It features an intentionally misleading Preface written by the author.

Harriet Marwood, Governess

Anonymous

New York: Grove, 1986.

An edition that perpetuates the misconception that the novel dates from the time of Queen Victoria. From the back cover: "A curious exploration of the private lives of outwardly uptight Victorians... Alongside such classics as My Secret Life, Pleasure Bound, A Man with a Maid, The Pearl, Harriet Marwood, Governess takes its place as one of the outstanding works of erotic fiction produced in the Victorian era."

The English Governess

Anonymous

New York: Masquerade, 1998

Harriet as a poor man's Bettie Page. There is nothing in the packaging to suggest that the book doesn't take place in the 'fifties.

The English Governess

Anonymous

New York: Masquerade, 1998

A second Masquerade cover from the very same year as the first.

The English Governess

John Glassco

Ottawa: Golden Dog, 2000

The sole Canadian edition of The English Governess, and the only one to appear under the author's real name. It has a great advantage over previous editions in that it features a highly informative introduction by Michael Gnarowski.

The English Governess: Harriet Marwood

Miles Underwood

Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex: AKS, 2002

A confusingly titled edition – really The English Governess – with an illustration that has nothing to do with the era in which the novel is set.

The Olympia Glassco - Book the Second

The English Governess

Miles Underwood [pseud. John Glassco]

Paris: Ophelia, 1960 [sic]

In his seventy-one years, John Glassco produced five books of verse, eight volumes of translation, and the prose masterpiece Memoirs of Montparnasse, but not one approached the sales he enjoyed with The English Governess and its sister book Harriet Marwood, Governess. Both stories of flagellantine romance between a boy, Richard Lovel, and his beautiful governess, Harriet Marwood, they're easily confused and are often described as being one and the same.

Though published second, Harriet Marwood, Governess is actually the older of the two. In 1959, it was offered to Maurice Girodias, but the publisher thought it too tame. Glassco then rewrote the novel – perhaps with the help of Elma, his wife – slashing it by more than half and ramping up the sex. Made to order, as The English Governess it was quickly accepted and appeared within ninety days under Olympia's Ophelia Press imprint.

Glassco chose not to be identified as the author, selecting Miles Underwood as a nom de plume. He kept his secret for over a year, and only began to reveal himself when seeking legal advice from F.R. Scott concerning Girodias' non-payment.

The English Governess was a immediate success, a favourite in a market that relied almost exclusively on word of mouth. Reprinted after just three months, on 10 January 1961 it was suppressed by French authorities under a decades-old decree targeting périodiques et ouvrages de provenance étrangère. As was his practice, Girodias reissued the banned novel using a different title: Under the Birch: The Story of an English Governess. Not much of a disguise, but more than enough to baffle the brigade mondaine. The novel has since appeared as The Governess (a pirated edition) and in a bowdlerized edition published under the catch-all title The Authentic Confessions of Harriet Marwood, an English Governess.

Note: My two volume copy, printed by Taiwanese pirates, is a cheap reproduction of the first edition. I'm assuming that these disreputable souls divided the novel in half so as to enable the rusting staple binding.