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rfmcdonaldThe essay I'm submitting to McGill and WLU to demonstrate my academic orientation.
“I would like to continue my record of those years – the years in which I really
lived – before the onset of death or the inevitable dullness of a mature outlook:
this is to be the book of my youth, my golden age.”
- John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, 22-23
John Glassco (1909-1981) and his works first received sustained international attention in 1970, upon the publication of his Memoirs of Montparnasse. For most of his life, he had been a relatively obscure literary figure: His poems that were published infrequently from 1928 until the early 1960's received little critical attention (Sutherland 82, 97), and only in the 1960’s did he gain prominence as a translator of French Canadian verse and as a poet in his own right. Glassco’s memoirs quickly achieved renown for their explicit yet elegant depiction of the life of the Anglo-American writers living in Paris in the 1920’s. The Memoirs’ portrayal of a gamut of characters from Hemingway to Man Ray was praised by critics both as an invaluable historical document and as an example of literary brilliance. At the same time that the Memoirs were praised, though, it was also evidently a highly personal document, describing as it did Glassco’s cultural maturation in the city that was then the single most important centre for literature and art in Europe. For Glassco, his stay in Paris not only let him to live in the city that inspired those writers who inspired him, but it also played a crucial role in molding his personality.
The revelations in the 1980’s that Memoirs of Montparnasse was substantially inaccurate, by Tausky and Kokotailo among others, caused some concern among scholars who had praised the Memoirs as an accurate historical document. (Gnarowski xiv) At the same time, though, it also allowed critics to adopt an intriguing new perspective on his work. Researchers have discovered that in propagating a somewhat inaccurate record of his three years in Paris, Glassco hoped to belittle those of his contemporaries in Modernism – particularly American and American-influenced Modernists, but including others – whom he disliked, in order to make his memoirs a controversial yet acceptable mass-literary experience. These changes were made with the ultimate goal of creating a new vision of the Modernist movements of interwar Paris, one that could overwhelm both the dominant vision of American Modernists and the comparable Canadian Modernist vision of Morley Callaghan, as presented in Callaghan’s 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris. Though Glassco identified himself as a modernist, he also was profoundly influenced by many non-romantic authors and literary movements. All these were components of Glassco’s modernism, itself a product of the environment of France.
John Glassco came to Paris in 1928 at the age of 18 from a country that was still uncertain of its new modernity; indeed, John Stanton describes how Canadian institutions were “either non-existent or lack[ing] the resilience to absorb and cushion the onslaught of the forces of modernity.” Yet, by the standards of the major countries of western Europe and particularly the neighbouring United States, Canada was highly conservative. For those who experimented in literature and other arts, that conservatism was a burden: Morley Callaghan – a contemporary of Glassco – wrote that in the 1920’s, “[Toronto] was a very British city. I was intensely North American” (22). Yet even North America was an unsuitable environment for the full development of Modernist literature. Leuchtenberg describes how American intellectuals came to exist in an anonymous and mobile urban environment, as independent agents “indifferent to middle-class opinion and not bound by associations to family or region or class” (142). The American modernist authors were thus free to advocate a radically skeptical perspective, one determined “without regard for the public pieties” (Leuchtenberg 148). Eventually, though, a conservative backlash on the part of rural and conservative Americans against the radical cosmopolitanism of the cities provoked an exodus to Paris in the mid-1920’s.
In many respects, Paris was a more suitable base for North America modernists. Paris was the sophisticated and populous capital of a nation-state of some forty million inhabitants, with a language that remained a major lingua franca, and which controlled not only the single most powerful military in Europe but the second-largest colonial empire in the world (Thomson 164-8, 173, 207). France and French industry prospered throughout the 1920’s, while at the same time that France attracted a highly heterogeneous immigrant population numbering in the millions, including many American expatriates (Thomson 46, 182). This new wealth and the new heterogeneity inspired the Parisian French to embrace an exubertantly Modernist attitude towards life and art, present equally among indigenous French writers and émigrés in Paris.
By the late 1920’s, Paris was enormously attractive, both for its centuries of accumulated cultural traditions and for its status as a centre of continuing artistic innovation. It retained that attraction for Glassco – at the beginning of Memoirs, Glassco writes that he “had only to think that I was now in the city of Baudelaire, Utrillo, and Apollinaire to be swept by a joy so strong it verged on nausea,” and that he had “the warm, prosy, comfortable feeling of having somehow come home.” (11) Paris would remain his primary residence outside of Canada for a total of three years; the city’s stimulating mixture of cultures and genres would influence him his entire life.
At a comparatively early stage in Memoirs of Montparnasse, the narrator Glassco confesses to changing his early artistic ideals. At the beginning of the Memoirs, Glassco states that as a part-time employee of Montreal’s Sun Life Assurance Company, he spent much of his spare time composing surrealist poetry (1). At a party, Glassco met the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who promised to arrange for Glassco an introduction to André Breton. In the week following his meeting with Desnos, Glassco followed Desnos’ advice and read extensively from surrealist literature. Glassco states that:
Thus ended Glassco’s explorations into surrealism, this despite the fact that his desire to become a surrealist poet was the factor that brought himself and Taylor to Paris in the first place. After having let Taylor transform the first lines of Glassco’s surrealistic poems into a Shakespearean sonnet, Glassco announced that very same evening he would begin his memoirs.
Throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, the reader sees Glassco casually reject most of the individual authors and movements working under the modernist aegis. The experimentalist American poet e.e. cummings is publicly criticized by Glassco and Taylor for his poetry’s “hidden sentimentality” (26). The narrator describes Gertrude Stein, doyenne of the Anglo-American literary circles of 1920’s Paris, as “awaken[ing] in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration” (79), and goes on to insult Stein as “one of those silly old women who don’t [like the novels of Jane Austen]” (81). Later, in the course of a plot to leave the French Riviera without their landlord’s suspicion, Glassco suggests that Taylor weight his trunk with Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical book The Making of Americans. (125)
Glassco takes great pains throughout the novel to belittle Ernest Hemingway. In Glassco’s first description of Hemingway, the American author is described as “a burly, moonfaced man, dressed in baggy tweeds and with his necktie clewed by a gold pin, […] grinning and blowing beer breath over the table.” (43) The grossness of Hemingway’s physical description is matched by Hemingway’s behaviour as described by Glassco, as a man whose first words in front of Glassco is a homophobic insinuation made to Glassco’s companion Robert McAlmon. Narrator Glassco states that McAlmon describes Hemingway as “[j]ust a poor bugger from the sticks” (43), while Glassco himself states that he found Hemingway “almost as attractive as his short stories – those studies in tight-lipped emotionalism and volcanic sentimentality that, with their absurd plots and dialogue, give me the effect of a gutless Prometheus who ties himself up with string.” (44) Much later, after passing on Morley Callaghan’s claim that he beat Hemingway in their famous round of boxing, Taylor states that he is glad that Callaghan had beaten Hemingway and goes on to vulgarly argue that “[t]he formula of the Hemingway hero is that […] he pokes and he croaks,” while Glassco agrees and adds that “the process takes so long […] It’s a pity he didn’t get it all into one short story.” (129)
Morley Callaghan is also subjected to similar, though perhaps softer, mockery. Glassco describes Callaghan as “very like Hemingway; he had even the same shrewd politician’s eyes, the same lopsided grin and ingratiating voice.” Brown observes that Glassco takes particular care to make Callaghan “appear less sophisticated and worldly than the younger [Glassco and to] expose Morley as provincial.” The narrator Glassco reveals Callaghan to be, as he says after McAlmon, “a literary rubberneck meeting great men” (75) The narrator Glassco ends by concluding that Callaghan’s many attachments to society bound Callaghan and limited his freedom, transforming literature from a lifestyle into a mere career (Glassco, 83).
In the course of Memoirs of Montparnasse, then, Glassco goes from embracing the icons of cutting-edge American and French modernism to rejecting most of them. In describing his relationship with the character named Diana Tree – actually Kay Boyle, wife of McAlmon – he states that his exclusive preference for the works of “Turgenev, Forster, Firbank, Dreiser, Proust, Eliot, Ransom, and Robert Frost” while Tree herself preferred the works of, among others, Tolstoy, Woolf, Cocteau and Hemingway, played an important role in ending their relationship. (91) Narrator Glassco’s attitude towards the arts is best described in the words of his character of Stanley Dahl, who upon playing a pleasant melody on her ukelele confesses that “It’s classical, I know, but it’s jolly and the way I feel.” (122)
Glassco’s three years of experience in Paris in particular, and France generally, appear to have been highly influential in forming his artistic career. Just as it did for so many other expatriates, Glassco’s existence amidst the Modernist artistic circles of Paris exposed him to new and varied cultural influences, allowed him to make enduring relationships with the likes of Kay Boyle, and initiated for him a singular literary career. Yet on his return to Canada, Glassco only rose to prominence as a writer whose Modernist works were deeply and unconventionally marked by diverse literary influence. These influences were as various as the decadent writers of Paris, the artistic perspective of the Romantic Wordsworth, and Austen’s literary incandescence.
It has been amply demonstrated that the works of the modernist writers – of which perhaps the preeminent example were the works of Hemingway – were concerned with the pursuit of pleasure in the face of a hostile world. As has been demonstrated above, though, Glassco disdained the works of the leading American modernists as turgid. This may have stemmed to a considerable extent from his broad knowledge, which was “neither narrowly traditional nor out of touch (though he may have been out of key) with his time” (Burnett 9), absorbing all sorts of poets in a grand synthetic spirit that includes all European art (Burnett 6). This perspective of Glassco’s continued into his later life: In his poem “Lines,” included in his 1964 book of poems A Point of Sky, he wearily denounces the Canadian poets of his contemporary generation, for their sterile and uninteresting descriptions of “memories of your fornications/Vignettes of your sensitive childhood/Kicks from jazz /And all these poetics about poetics about poetics” (57).
Lauber observes that in the works of Glassco, “joy or ecstasy can be felt only while one is able to ignore the basic truth and its consequence – the transience of everything, particularly of youth,” leading to an inversion of values that results in the enjoyment of pleasure being the paramount task facing human beings (61). Indeed, Murdoch comments upon Glassco’s linkage of action and of death, of “Glassco’s surrender to romantic love [with Mrs. Taylor which] destroyed his youth, and nearly ended his life,” but which Glassco still cherished. Given that pleasure was all-important for Glassco, those factors – and writers, and their works – which he saw as denying pleasure were to be viewed negatively. Glassco’s writing, then, was essentially hedonistic.
The semi-fictional nature of Memoirs of Montparnasse – not, as Kokotailo emphasizes in his monograph, so significant as to make it a completely unreliable historical source (74-77) – creates an unusual situation. As Scobie argues, the reader is able to perceive the adventures of narrator Glassco – the young character of “Buffy” who had fled at a young age from his staid Anglo-Montreal home to live as a decadent Bohemian artist in Paris – through a kind of self-conscious doubling, of an authoritative voice that speaks both with the freshness of Buffy’s youth and with the knowing retrospective analysis available to Glassco only much later in life, allowing a highly productive perspective on the past (Scobie, 53-5). After all, if, as Scobie argues, the inevitable selectiveness of the compositional process of autobiography makes “the whole project of autobiography […] a kind of lie,” then why should not Glassco be consciously selective in order to achieve specific aims? In commenting upon this question, Dolan observes that in order to employ autobiographies as historical evidence they must be read as myths, dealing not only of the individual self or the general era but of the relationship between the two. (Dolan, 39)
Glassco wrote Memoirs after Hemingway and Callaghan had published memoirs of their Parisian years in the same American modernist style that he disliked. Kokotailo rightly observes that this drove Glassco to try to create a countermyth (25), one not owing so much to the staid narratives of either of the two men. In response, throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco specifically tries to promulgate a myth wherein he, as the authoritative narrator, describes how, most unlike himself, his staid American (and Americanized) Modernist contemporaries are simply unable to enjoy the sophisticated literary and other pleasures of Paris.
Throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco consistently employs a strategy of portraying those of his contemporaries who, unlike himself, seemed to reject the sensual pleasures of Paris as people fundamentally unsuited – by temperament as well as by genre – for life there. He sought to prove that his own idiosyncratic and comprehensive brand of modernism, which embraced the past as much as it did the present, was the only one effectively able to cope with the stimulating environment of Paris. The rest, he implies, need not have crossed the Atlantic.
Works Cited
Brown, Russell. “Callaghan, Glassco, and the Canadian Lost Generation.” Academic
Search Elite. Online. 51-52 (1993-1994): 83-113.
Burnett, John. “John Glassco: The Canadian Wordsworth.” Canadian Poetry: Studies,
Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 1-11.
Callaghan, Morley. That Summer in Paris. Toronto: Macmillan, 1963.
Dolan, Marc. “The (Hi)story of their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and The Lost
Generation.” Journal of American Studies 27 (1996): 35-56.
Glassco, John. “Lines, Addressed to a Dozen Young Canadian Poets, After Unwisely Devouring Five Little Magazines At A Sitting.” A Point of Sky. Toronto: Oxford
University, 1964.
Glassco, John. Memoirs of Montparnasse. 1970. Toronto: Oxford, 1995.
Gnarowski, Michael. Introduction. Memoirs of Montparnasse. By John Glassco. 1970.
Toronto: Oxford, 1995.
Kokotailo, Philip. John Glassco’s Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse. Toronto: ECW
Press, 1988.
Leuchtenberg, William E. The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932. 1964. 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1992.
Murdoch, Charles. “Essential Glassco.” Canadian Literature 65 (1975): 28-41.
Scobie, Stephen. “The Mirror on the Brothel Wall: John Glassco Memoirs of
Montparnasse.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 43-58.
Sutherland, Fraser. John Glassco: An Essay and Bibiliography. Downsview, Ontario: ECW
Press, 1984.
Tausky, Thomas E. “Memoirs of Montparnasse: A Reflection of Myself.” Canadian
Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 59-84.
Thomson, David. Democracy in France since 1870. 1946. 4th ed. London, United Kingdom:
Oxford University. 1964.
“I would like to continue my record of those years – the years in which I really
lived – before the onset of death or the inevitable dullness of a mature outlook:
this is to be the book of my youth, my golden age.”
- John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, 22-23
John Glassco (1909-1981) and his works first received sustained international attention in 1970, upon the publication of his Memoirs of Montparnasse. For most of his life, he had been a relatively obscure literary figure: His poems that were published infrequently from 1928 until the early 1960's received little critical attention (Sutherland 82, 97), and only in the 1960’s did he gain prominence as a translator of French Canadian verse and as a poet in his own right. Glassco’s memoirs quickly achieved renown for their explicit yet elegant depiction of the life of the Anglo-American writers living in Paris in the 1920’s. The Memoirs’ portrayal of a gamut of characters from Hemingway to Man Ray was praised by critics both as an invaluable historical document and as an example of literary brilliance. At the same time that the Memoirs were praised, though, it was also evidently a highly personal document, describing as it did Glassco’s cultural maturation in the city that was then the single most important centre for literature and art in Europe. For Glassco, his stay in Paris not only let him to live in the city that inspired those writers who inspired him, but it also played a crucial role in molding his personality.
The revelations in the 1980’s that Memoirs of Montparnasse was substantially inaccurate, by Tausky and Kokotailo among others, caused some concern among scholars who had praised the Memoirs as an accurate historical document. (Gnarowski xiv) At the same time, though, it also allowed critics to adopt an intriguing new perspective on his work. Researchers have discovered that in propagating a somewhat inaccurate record of his three years in Paris, Glassco hoped to belittle those of his contemporaries in Modernism – particularly American and American-influenced Modernists, but including others – whom he disliked, in order to make his memoirs a controversial yet acceptable mass-literary experience. These changes were made with the ultimate goal of creating a new vision of the Modernist movements of interwar Paris, one that could overwhelm both the dominant vision of American Modernists and the comparable Canadian Modernist vision of Morley Callaghan, as presented in Callaghan’s 1963 memoir That Summer in Paris. Though Glassco identified himself as a modernist, he also was profoundly influenced by many non-romantic authors and literary movements. All these were components of Glassco’s modernism, itself a product of the environment of France.
John Glassco came to Paris in 1928 at the age of 18 from a country that was still uncertain of its new modernity; indeed, John Stanton describes how Canadian institutions were “either non-existent or lack[ing] the resilience to absorb and cushion the onslaught of the forces of modernity.” Yet, by the standards of the major countries of western Europe and particularly the neighbouring United States, Canada was highly conservative. For those who experimented in literature and other arts, that conservatism was a burden: Morley Callaghan – a contemporary of Glassco – wrote that in the 1920’s, “[Toronto] was a very British city. I was intensely North American” (22). Yet even North America was an unsuitable environment for the full development of Modernist literature. Leuchtenberg describes how American intellectuals came to exist in an anonymous and mobile urban environment, as independent agents “indifferent to middle-class opinion and not bound by associations to family or region or class” (142). The American modernist authors were thus free to advocate a radically skeptical perspective, one determined “without regard for the public pieties” (Leuchtenberg 148). Eventually, though, a conservative backlash on the part of rural and conservative Americans against the radical cosmopolitanism of the cities provoked an exodus to Paris in the mid-1920’s.
In many respects, Paris was a more suitable base for North America modernists. Paris was the sophisticated and populous capital of a nation-state of some forty million inhabitants, with a language that remained a major lingua franca, and which controlled not only the single most powerful military in Europe but the second-largest colonial empire in the world (Thomson 164-8, 173, 207). France and French industry prospered throughout the 1920’s, while at the same time that France attracted a highly heterogeneous immigrant population numbering in the millions, including many American expatriates (Thomson 46, 182). This new wealth and the new heterogeneity inspired the Parisian French to embrace an exubertantly Modernist attitude towards life and art, present equally among indigenous French writers and émigrés in Paris.
By the late 1920’s, Paris was enormously attractive, both for its centuries of accumulated cultural traditions and for its status as a centre of continuing artistic innovation. It retained that attraction for Glassco – at the beginning of Memoirs, Glassco writes that he “had only to think that I was now in the city of Baudelaire, Utrillo, and Apollinaire to be swept by a joy so strong it verged on nausea,” and that he had “the warm, prosy, comfortable feeling of having somehow come home.” (11) Paris would remain his primary residence outside of Canada for a total of three years; the city’s stimulating mixture of cultures and genres would influence him his entire life.
At a comparatively early stage in Memoirs of Montparnasse, the narrator Glassco confesses to changing his early artistic ideals. At the beginning of the Memoirs, Glassco states that as a part-time employee of Montreal’s Sun Life Assurance Company, he spent much of his spare time composing surrealist poetry (1). At a party, Glassco met the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who promised to arrange for Glassco an introduction to André Breton. In the week following his meeting with Desnos, Glassco followed Desnos’ advice and read extensively from surrealist literature. Glassco states that:
From this study I emerged with my whole purpose altered. I was not only dismayed by the hope and brilliance that the surrealist writers showed and that I could not hope to equal but was also struck, in a contrary way, by a certain sameness and monotony of treatment and even of syntax in their work […]
“I think I’ll go back to prose,” I told Graeme [Taylor, Glassco’s long-time friend and lover], “and drop surrealism.”
“Most of it’s pretty fake, isn’t it? Automatic writing, indeed.” (23)
Thus ended Glassco’s explorations into surrealism, this despite the fact that his desire to become a surrealist poet was the factor that brought himself and Taylor to Paris in the first place. After having let Taylor transform the first lines of Glassco’s surrealistic poems into a Shakespearean sonnet, Glassco announced that very same evening he would begin his memoirs.
Throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, the reader sees Glassco casually reject most of the individual authors and movements working under the modernist aegis. The experimentalist American poet e.e. cummings is publicly criticized by Glassco and Taylor for his poetry’s “hidden sentimentality” (26). The narrator describes Gertrude Stein, doyenne of the Anglo-American literary circles of 1920’s Paris, as “awaken[ing] in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration” (79), and goes on to insult Stein as “one of those silly old women who don’t [like the novels of Jane Austen]” (81). Later, in the course of a plot to leave the French Riviera without their landlord’s suspicion, Glassco suggests that Taylor weight his trunk with Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical book The Making of Americans. (125)
Glassco takes great pains throughout the novel to belittle Ernest Hemingway. In Glassco’s first description of Hemingway, the American author is described as “a burly, moonfaced man, dressed in baggy tweeds and with his necktie clewed by a gold pin, […] grinning and blowing beer breath over the table.” (43) The grossness of Hemingway’s physical description is matched by Hemingway’s behaviour as described by Glassco, as a man whose first words in front of Glassco is a homophobic insinuation made to Glassco’s companion Robert McAlmon. Narrator Glassco states that McAlmon describes Hemingway as “[j]ust a poor bugger from the sticks” (43), while Glassco himself states that he found Hemingway “almost as attractive as his short stories – those studies in tight-lipped emotionalism and volcanic sentimentality that, with their absurd plots and dialogue, give me the effect of a gutless Prometheus who ties himself up with string.” (44) Much later, after passing on Morley Callaghan’s claim that he beat Hemingway in their famous round of boxing, Taylor states that he is glad that Callaghan had beaten Hemingway and goes on to vulgarly argue that “[t]he formula of the Hemingway hero is that […] he pokes and he croaks,” while Glassco agrees and adds that “the process takes so long […] It’s a pity he didn’t get it all into one short story.” (129)
Morley Callaghan is also subjected to similar, though perhaps softer, mockery. Glassco describes Callaghan as “very like Hemingway; he had even the same shrewd politician’s eyes, the same lopsided grin and ingratiating voice.” Brown observes that Glassco takes particular care to make Callaghan “appear less sophisticated and worldly than the younger [Glassco and to] expose Morley as provincial.” The narrator Glassco reveals Callaghan to be, as he says after McAlmon, “a literary rubberneck meeting great men” (75) The narrator Glassco ends by concluding that Callaghan’s many attachments to society bound Callaghan and limited his freedom, transforming literature from a lifestyle into a mere career (Glassco, 83).
In the course of Memoirs of Montparnasse, then, Glassco goes from embracing the icons of cutting-edge American and French modernism to rejecting most of them. In describing his relationship with the character named Diana Tree – actually Kay Boyle, wife of McAlmon – he states that his exclusive preference for the works of “Turgenev, Forster, Firbank, Dreiser, Proust, Eliot, Ransom, and Robert Frost” while Tree herself preferred the works of, among others, Tolstoy, Woolf, Cocteau and Hemingway, played an important role in ending their relationship. (91) Narrator Glassco’s attitude towards the arts is best described in the words of his character of Stanley Dahl, who upon playing a pleasant melody on her ukelele confesses that “It’s classical, I know, but it’s jolly and the way I feel.” (122)
Glassco’s three years of experience in Paris in particular, and France generally, appear to have been highly influential in forming his artistic career. Just as it did for so many other expatriates, Glassco’s existence amidst the Modernist artistic circles of Paris exposed him to new and varied cultural influences, allowed him to make enduring relationships with the likes of Kay Boyle, and initiated for him a singular literary career. Yet on his return to Canada, Glassco only rose to prominence as a writer whose Modernist works were deeply and unconventionally marked by diverse literary influence. These influences were as various as the decadent writers of Paris, the artistic perspective of the Romantic Wordsworth, and Austen’s literary incandescence.
It has been amply demonstrated that the works of the modernist writers – of which perhaps the preeminent example were the works of Hemingway – were concerned with the pursuit of pleasure in the face of a hostile world. As has been demonstrated above, though, Glassco disdained the works of the leading American modernists as turgid. This may have stemmed to a considerable extent from his broad knowledge, which was “neither narrowly traditional nor out of touch (though he may have been out of key) with his time” (Burnett 9), absorbing all sorts of poets in a grand synthetic spirit that includes all European art (Burnett 6). This perspective of Glassco’s continued into his later life: In his poem “Lines,” included in his 1964 book of poems A Point of Sky, he wearily denounces the Canadian poets of his contemporary generation, for their sterile and uninteresting descriptions of “memories of your fornications/Vignettes of your sensitive childhood/Kicks from jazz /And all these poetics about poetics about poetics” (57).
Lauber observes that in the works of Glassco, “joy or ecstasy can be felt only while one is able to ignore the basic truth and its consequence – the transience of everything, particularly of youth,” leading to an inversion of values that results in the enjoyment of pleasure being the paramount task facing human beings (61). Indeed, Murdoch comments upon Glassco’s linkage of action and of death, of “Glassco’s surrender to romantic love [with Mrs. Taylor which] destroyed his youth, and nearly ended his life,” but which Glassco still cherished. Given that pleasure was all-important for Glassco, those factors – and writers, and their works – which he saw as denying pleasure were to be viewed negatively. Glassco’s writing, then, was essentially hedonistic.
The semi-fictional nature of Memoirs of Montparnasse – not, as Kokotailo emphasizes in his monograph, so significant as to make it a completely unreliable historical source (74-77) – creates an unusual situation. As Scobie argues, the reader is able to perceive the adventures of narrator Glassco – the young character of “Buffy” who had fled at a young age from his staid Anglo-Montreal home to live as a decadent Bohemian artist in Paris – through a kind of self-conscious doubling, of an authoritative voice that speaks both with the freshness of Buffy’s youth and with the knowing retrospective analysis available to Glassco only much later in life, allowing a highly productive perspective on the past (Scobie, 53-5). After all, if, as Scobie argues, the inevitable selectiveness of the compositional process of autobiography makes “the whole project of autobiography […] a kind of lie,” then why should not Glassco be consciously selective in order to achieve specific aims? In commenting upon this question, Dolan observes that in order to employ autobiographies as historical evidence they must be read as myths, dealing not only of the individual self or the general era but of the relationship between the two. (Dolan, 39)
Glassco wrote Memoirs after Hemingway and Callaghan had published memoirs of their Parisian years in the same American modernist style that he disliked. Kokotailo rightly observes that this drove Glassco to try to create a countermyth (25), one not owing so much to the staid narratives of either of the two men. In response, throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco specifically tries to promulgate a myth wherein he, as the authoritative narrator, describes how, most unlike himself, his staid American (and Americanized) Modernist contemporaries are simply unable to enjoy the sophisticated literary and other pleasures of Paris.
Throughout Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco consistently employs a strategy of portraying those of his contemporaries who, unlike himself, seemed to reject the sensual pleasures of Paris as people fundamentally unsuited – by temperament as well as by genre – for life there. He sought to prove that his own idiosyncratic and comprehensive brand of modernism, which embraced the past as much as it did the present, was the only one effectively able to cope with the stimulating environment of Paris. The rest, he implies, need not have crossed the Atlantic.
Works Cited
Brown, Russell. “Callaghan, Glassco, and the Canadian Lost Generation.” Academic
Search Elite. Online. 51-52 (1993-1994): 83-113.
Burnett, John. “John Glassco: The Canadian Wordsworth.” Canadian Poetry: Studies,
Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 1-11.
Callaghan, Morley. That Summer in Paris. Toronto: Macmillan, 1963.
Dolan, Marc. “The (Hi)story of their Lives: Mythic Autobiography and The Lost
Generation.” Journal of American Studies 27 (1996): 35-56.
Glassco, John. “Lines, Addressed to a Dozen Young Canadian Poets, After Unwisely Devouring Five Little Magazines At A Sitting.” A Point of Sky. Toronto: Oxford
University, 1964.
Glassco, John. Memoirs of Montparnasse. 1970. Toronto: Oxford, 1995.
Gnarowski, Michael. Introduction. Memoirs of Montparnasse. By John Glassco. 1970.
Toronto: Oxford, 1995.
Kokotailo, Philip. John Glassco’s Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse. Toronto: ECW
Press, 1988.
Leuchtenberg, William E. The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932. 1964. 2nd ed. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1992.
Murdoch, Charles. “Essential Glassco.” Canadian Literature 65 (1975): 28-41.
Scobie, Stephen. “The Mirror on the Brothel Wall: John Glassco Memoirs of
Montparnasse.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 43-58.
Sutherland, Fraser. John Glassco: An Essay and Bibiliography. Downsview, Ontario: ECW
Press, 1984.
Tausky, Thomas E. “Memoirs of Montparnasse: A Reflection of Myself.” Canadian
Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 13 (1983): 59-84.
Thomson, David. Democracy in France since 1870. 1946. 4th ed. London, United Kingdom:
Oxford University. 1964.
