John Glassco
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John Glassco, poet, memoirist, novelist (1909-1981).
Born in Montreal, where he attended McGill University without graduating, Glassco left for Paris in February 1928, when he was nineteen years old, with his friend, Graeme Taylor. The two settled in the Montparnasse region of Paris which was then extremely popular amongst the literary intelligentsia. Their three-year stay formed the basis of Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), a description of expatriate life in Paris in the 1920s. The book is presented as a genuine memoir, although Glassco had lightly fictionalized some aspects of the work. [1] In it, he describes meeting various celebrities who were living in or passing through Paris at the time, such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ford Maddox Ford, Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas and others. In the notes to the republished edition released by New York Review of Books in 2007 further characters are identified as thinly disguised descriptions of Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and others.
Glassco went on to earn a strong reputation as a poet. His Selected Poems (1971) won the Canadian Governor General's Award for Literature.[2]
[edit] Selected Works
The Deficit Made Flesh: Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1958.
A Point of Sky. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Montreal. Montreal: DC Books, 1973.
Selected Poems with Three Notes on the Poetic Process. Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1997.
Memoirs of Montparnasse, introduction by Louis Begley. 1970; New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2007 ISBN 978-1-59017-184-4
[edit] References
- ^ A full discussion of the relationship between fact and fiction in the book is offered by Louis Begley in his introduction to the 2007 NYRB edition.
- ^ The Canada Council for the Arts - Governor General's Literary Awards
