MEMOIRS OF MONTPARNASSE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

John Glassco,Louis Begley | 264 pages | 01 Jul 2007 | The New York Review of Books, Inc | 9781590171844 | English | New York, United States John Glassco - Wikipedia

The real world of Parisian intellectuals and its fictional shadow meet in the memoir's pages. Reporting or lying — it hardly matters when the reader is lost in the book's mischief. Glassco, whose bourgeois parents disapproved of his artistic tendencies, was 18 and beautiful when he arrived in Paris in with his friend Graeme Taylor, both of them determined to be writers. Glassco had a teenager's appetites, a chancer's nose for free booze and the keen eye of an aphorist on the make. Hemingway was "a gutless Prometheus who has tied himself up with string," while Gertrude Stein fared no better: "A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap [who] gave the impression of absolute irrefragability. If Glassco is to be believed and why not , his life in Paris was a parade of gin fizzes, treatments for venereal disease and the search for a new couch to sleep on. He largely avoided writing, save for a smutty pamphlet for a publisher specializing "in books dealing with shoes, fans and ladies' underlinen. Quayle, a "miserable mangeuse d'hommes," but really it was Paris that held his heart. I would pull it down to recite a passage to a new reader or just to remind myself what it is to be so love in with writing. For that, more than anything, is what the book is about: The characters, real and fictional, argue constantly about novels and plays and poetry, usually with more bile than sense, but always with love. They argue about the merits of surrealists, T. Eliot, Thomas Hardy and writers lost to history. They try to write themselves and curse the results. At one point, Glassco was kicked out of a party at Gertrude Stein's for daring to disagree with her about Jane Austen. Later, his friend Robert McAlmon cornered Morley Callaghan and said — drunkenly, I imagine, everything in this book happens drunkenly — "You can't admire Joyce and write like Hemingway. If you do, you're a whore. I must have returned the book to Val at some point, certainly before she died in Strangely, I don't remember giving it back. I went searching for another copy. I think it fell out of print, but it was reissued by the New York Review of Books in Now I have Memoirs of Montparnasse on my Kindle, properly my property, where I can highlight passages to my heart's content and snort out loud at the best bits. All that's missing is my friend to hear them. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Click here to subscribe. If you would like to write a letter to the editor, please forward it to letters globeandmail. Readers can also interact with The Globe on Facebook and Twitter. Read our community guidelines here. When you subscribe to globeandmail. Already a print newspaper subscriber? Get full access to globeandmail. Already subscribed to globeandmail. Log in to keep reading. Customer Help. Contact us. Log in. Log out. Open this photo in gallery:. John Glassco, Canadian poet. Elizabeth Renzetti. Follow Elizabeth. Email Address. Name on card. Username or Email. Your password. Sign in. First time logging in? Forgotten your details? Yes, he says he was in buildings in Paris that were not yet built in when he returned to Montreal. Yes, the year and a half he spent in Montparnasse was only about eight months, the rest passing on the Riviera, in Spain, and a little in Limburg—and the last month in Paris was in the hospital where they were treating him for tuberculosis. And yes, all those wonderful affairs with exciting women are a little suspect since he was certainly homosexual. So what? Later I found that a great many other young writers felt and behaved the same way. Indeed Paris is a very difficult place for anyone to work unless one is dull and serious. Instead, he got the sense of the place and ultimately got it down in black and white, probably thirty years after he left, not the two or three he says in his introduction. This was undoubtedly good luck for the reader. Glassco himself admits that he no longer recognizes Buffy his nickname in those days as himself but as a character in a novel he may have read. And that, I think, is the point. The memoirs would not be nearly as interesting, nor would the adventures and liaisons be as engaging, had he merely kept a diary or just stuck to the truth. Like jesting Pilate, he did not stick around to hear what the truth might be. And within this small city, the expatriates inhabited a kind of floating village or a ring of campfires, so it was possible to meet just about everyone as they cycled through Paris for their chance at the brass ring or just a good time. He pretended to be a writer at nineteen, but he became one, and a good writer at that, years later. Memoirs of Montparnasse – New York Review Books

In , nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. It was on this more lengthy and eventful stay, in the city he loved, that he based his Memoirs of Montparnasse , which was published, and presented by Glassco, as an authentic memoir though it was later discovered to be in many respects a work of fiction. Louis Begley is a novelist and retired lawyer. It should be read at last and recognized as the most dramatic of the many narratives dealing with Paris in the 's. It's wonderful to see John Glassco's charming Memoirs of Montparnasse getting the international recognition it deserves. Like its author—whom I knew quite well in the s—the book is a loveable and eccentric rogue, fond of style and up to mischief. It never fails to entertain. Here are the memoirs It is all there—the twenty-four-hour days, the burning of candles at both ends, the obsessions and compulsions, the strange divorce from what was going on in the world, the crazy parties, the beautiful fool's paradise from which the Depression ultimately awakened us. Memoirs of Montparnasse is one of the most joyous books on youth—the thrill and the gall and the adventure of it. He returned to Montreal, where he spent much of the next three years at Royal Victoria Hospital under the treatment of Edward William Archibald. Though Glassco writes in his Prefatory Note that Memoirs of Montparnasse was composed between and , it was in fact written more than three decades later, in part as a response to an unflattering portrait in Morley Callaghan's That Summer in Paris While Glassco made no attempt to hide the fact from friends, and the memoir contains clues that things aren't quite as claimed, it wasn't until after his death in that the truth of its composition came to light. With the revelation has come a reappraisal; what was once described by literary critic Malcolm Cowley as "fresher and truer to the moment" than any other memoir of expatriate Paris has come to be seen as the vivid recollections of a wiser and older man. They are tinged with the writer's melancholic recognition of the end of his youth. The best selling of Glassco's non-pornographic works, Memoirs of Montparnasse has enjoyed several editions, the most important being one heavily annotated by his friend Michael Gnarowski Toronto, The memoir has been translated into German, Spanish and Japanese, and holds the distinction of being the only English Canadian book to have received two French translations. Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. Remember me. Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco Create Account. Thank you. Your message has been sent. Accessed 21 October In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published June 14, ; Last Edited April 28, The Canadian Encyclopedia , s. Suggest an edit. The Glassco of this 'novel' is a libertine, a sort of bisexual Cassanova his own image. Those interested in Paris in the 's will find much here of interest. This NYRB edition has a very interesting introduction by Louis Begley, and detailed appendices of people and places amounting to small biographical sketches at points , "drawn" from the OUP edition of the memoirs published by Michael Gnarowski. Even Harry Crosby makes an appearance here, the guy whose wife invented the bra Mar 18, Manfred rated it really liked it. A delightful, veneral- disease ridden piece of memoir painting a vibrant picture of Paris in the late 20s, including most of its literary lions. Glassco arrives from Canada to the city of Baudelaire, eager to make his future and "swept by a joy so strong it verged on nausea. More useful even are his attempts to participate in Parisian art and sex and society without the tr A delightful, veneral-disease ridden piece of memoir painting a vibrant picture of Paris in the late 20s, including most of its literary lions. More useful even are his attempts to participate in Parisian art and sex and society without the troublesome meddle of gainful employment. Most of these escapades end in penury, or at the clap doctor, or with a handful of francs to squeeze out another few weeks of chasing his dream. There are a few fitful attempts at writing and publishing but mostly Glassco just bears witness to an era. In the end, Glassco leaves Paris on a much more sour note than that with which he had arrived. Probably, it's just as well. Jun 29, Matthew rated it it was ok. You also have to deal with an amount of self-absorption remarkable even for the solipsistic nature of a memoir, relentless namedropping of the writers, artists, movers and shakes of lates Paris and a stunning lack of awareness of wider events in the world, from his family onwards. View all 3 comments. Jun 05, Thombeau rated it it was amazing Shelves: memoir. One can be forgiven for writing memoirs at the age of twenty- one if the period covered was Paris in the s and one was hob-nobbing with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Lord Alfred Douglas, Man Ray, the legendary Kiki, and the ubiquitous Peggy Guggenheim. John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delightfully delicious romp through a few short years of decadence and debauchery, written in a witty, off-hand manner that is refreshingly candid and often quite thought One can be forgiven for writing memoirs at the age of twenty-one if the period covered was Paris in the s and one was hob-nobbing with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Lord Alfred Douglas, Man Ray, the legendary Kiki, and the ubiquitous Peggy Guggenheim. John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delightfully delicious romp through a few short years of decadence and debauchery, written in a witty, off-hand manner that is refreshingly candid and often quite thoughtful. How much of it is factual is hard to say; it wasn't published until , and Glassco himself admitted to being "an accomplished liar". Yet it's true to the spirit of the times, by someone who was there, and is thoroughly engaging. The exuberance of youth leads from parties, cafes, and freely-flowing champagne to a life of porn and prostitution as so many of us know too well! I absolutely loved this charming book. Having checked it out from the local library, I plan on eventually buying a copy of my own. It's that good. After his Parisian exploits, John Glassco returned to Montreal ill from tuberculosis, and eventually had a lung removed. This did not prevent him from leading a unique and storied life. He also wrote a number of pornographic works, under various pseudonyms, and completed Aubrey Beardsley's unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill. View 1 comment. Jan 05, Geoff rated it liked it. There was a certain balance precariously kept throughout the book by the fact that the memoirs were interrupted from time to time by Glassco's hospital bed reflections on the impending surgery that ended his days of pleasure in Montparnasse and presented the young man with the very real prospect of his own death. If it wasn't for this occasional reminder of the inevitable passing of time and youth, the literary name dropping and sexual braggadocio could become tiresome. However, Glassco came acr There was a certain balance precariously kept throughout the book by the fact that the memoirs were interrupted from time to time by Glassco's hospital bed reflections on the impending surgery that ended his days of pleasure in Montparnasse and presented the young man with the very real prospect of his own death. However, Glassco came across as an unusually bright and sensitive person for his age he was 18 when he expatriated and began these memoirs , well-read, if not really concerned with becoming a writer, and I quickly became genuinely interested in his life and fate. His own philosophic maundering didn't interest me much, but the scenes at the notorious Montparnasse parties and cafes were more than enough to keep me reading. And his portrayal of Robert McAlmon was classic. May 23, Bill rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , biography. Fascinating quasi-memoir of life in Paris in the late 's. As the book was actually written 40 years later and contains many long passages of dialogue, this book is probably closer to fiction than actual biography. Very entertaining, however. Quite candid, as well. Dec 18, Jim rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction , france , biography. There's nothing quite like an unreliable narrator to keep the reader on his toes. John Glassco was one of those North Americans he himself was from Montreal who flocked to Paris in the s. As Michael Gnarowski of Carlton University in Ottawa wrote: It used to be said of one of the painters in Montparnasse that, although he appeared to be well informed about world events, no one had ever caught him reading a newspaper. The same obersvation may be made of the people who inhabit Glassco's Memoi There's nothing quite like an unreliable narrator to keep the reader on his toes. The same obersvation may be made of the people who inhabit Glassco's Memoirs. They seem to be cocooned against the outside world, and Glassco's own narrative is almost totally devoid of references to the times. Despite the fact that the author has no great love of accuracy, Memoirs Of Montparnasse is one of those entertaining reads one could not easily put down. There is a lot of hooking up with persons of all gender combinations going on, yet Glassco does not take the Frank Harris route of describing overt sex acts. And yet Glassco later wrote or "translated" various pornographic works. Even the half-hearted framing story of the Memoirs being written in a Canadian hospital where Glassco is recovering from tuberculosis, is not entirely true. I recall an anecdote about a patient telling his psychoanalyst stories about his life, with the latter nodding sagely and saying, "That's interesting. Without skipping a beat, the analyst says, in the same tone of voice, "That's even more interesting! Think of it as a vaguely reality-based fantasy about a footloose young man and his slightly sexually inverted friends and acquaintances in Montmartre in that short heyday between Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris and the Stock Market Crash of View all 4 comments. Apr 07, Loulou rated it it was amazing. This is the kind of book I dream of: rather formal language, interesting characters reputed to be both real and fictionalized , historic references to literature, clothing, architecture, travel, food, music, sex.. I just couldn't ask much more from a book. I didn't This is the kind of book I dream of: rather formal language, interesting characters reputed to be both real and fictionalized , historic references to literature, clothing, architecture, travel, food, music, sex.. I didn't find the writing filled with disdain as other reviewers seemed to - if I'd read the reviews before purchasing the book, I probably wouldn't have bought it at all. The last two chapters are never 'wrapped up'. And yet that is also part of the charm of the book. I have a feeling of it around me, though I finished it more that two weeks ago. As this was memoirs, I read this very slowly; I wanted complete concentration whenever I opened the book. I plan to take the book with me on my next trip to Paris for reference, as there are many addresses and locations I'd like to see and follow. Mar 18, Vigdis rated it really liked it Shelves: lost- generation , ny-bokhylle , nyrb. Student life at McGill University had depressed me to a point where I could not go on. I was learning nothing; the curriculum was designed at best to equip me as a professor destined to lead others in due course on the same round of lifeless facts. I was only seventeen and had the sense of throwing my time and my youth into a void. Heldigvis liker jeg Montreal bedre enn John gjorde. Kanskje det bare er den jantelov-elskende delen av meg som sier disse tingene, men de dukker likevel opp. Jun 19, Grace rated it really liked it Shelves: nyrb , s , france , writerly. This is what happens when you wait too long to write a review: you spend a lot of time thinking about what you took away from the book, maybe you even take some notes, and then you forget so many of the little details that made you really like the book, making it hard to keep your review from being much more than a book blurb or summary. Having finished this book about ten days ago, it's gonna take some work to make that happen But I'll try. Memoirs of Montparnasse started off slowly for me—may This is what happens when you wait too long to write a review: you spend a lot of time thinking about what you took away from the book, maybe you even take some notes, and then you forget so many of the little details that made you really like the book, making it hard to keep your review from being much more than a book blurb or summary. On the other hand, it was also probably partially because I insisted on starting with the foreword—they are always so tempting in these New York Review of Books editions—and didn't give myself enough time to sit and read when I first started. So a slow first week got me about 30 pages in, and then the reading picked up. It would be difficult, I think, to discuss this book without referencing Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. The similarities are great: both are memoirs about running in the literary circles of Paris in the s, a fabulous time when Americans could go kick it in Paris on an extremely advantageous exchange rate and spend lots of time writing. Or living it up under the pretense of writing John Glassco, I feel you. But Hemingway's memoir which I read last year and really enjoyed becomes somewhat austere and staid and formal when looked at next to Glassco's. How's that for weird—Hemingway? But Glassco went to Paris to party. He told his dad it was to start his literary career, but once he got there, well, his efforts at writing were somewhat half-hearted. For one thing, his primary project was a memoir about his experiences on the trip, and it's hard to write a good memoir without any perspective. For another thing, it's hard to write when there are fabulous parties going on and everyone is drinking brandy and Pernod and there are hip gatherings with artistic types and foxy young ladies on all the corners. For the most part, this book is simply an interesting account of those experiences. But I enjoyed this book not only because I got to go along for a fun ride, but because it led me to think about my own life and to consider the circumstances around the creation of this text. As I was reading I remembered a recent time in my own life, from a slightly different perspective. It is certainly not comparable to Paris in the s, but Portland in the early s was a romantic place. I was a barista in a world with no jobs, when driving a car was expensive and living was relatively cheap, and everyone you worked with was a doer. Everybody had projects and collaborations going on, and slowly but surely your network expanded and you were in touch with all of the other baristas at the other cafes who knew each other and worked on projects together and had successful photography projects and art shows and wrote zines and just plain did things. It wasn't an easy time; everyone my age was restless and undervalued and underemployed. Yet there is a part of me that misses the slowness, the live-for-today aspect of it, the camaraderie that came from all being in the same position and living in a state with an abysmally high unemployment rate, and, last but not least, the circumstances that fostered creative and collaborative lifestyles. Paris in the twenties was not in a great economic recession; indeed, the book ends when the Great Depression hits and everyone goes home because it's becoming to hard to live there. But before the Depression gives everyone a reality check, John Glassco and his friend Graeme are living on the extreme cheap, in shared studios, and off of the kindness of strangers who buy them dinners because they are interested in talking to them about their work. They live in a world where everyone they meet is working on something, where help shows up when your photographer friend needs a subject, where you are motivated to work because of the environment and then, in turn, motivated to cast it aside and focus on living. Another particularly interesting aspect of this book, though, is not so much the content but the circumstances in which it was written. Glassco says in the text that he wrote the first three chapters while in Paris, and the remainder from his hospital bed in Canada when he returned to North America with tuberculosis. In reality he wrote most of this book in the s, when he was in his 50s, and none of it was written in the hospital in Montreal. So how did he accomplish this in a remotely believable way? In the foreword, Louis Begley wonders how he fell for what he calls "Glassco's fib": the year-old Glassco that we are presented with in the book is a man of incredible and I do mean that word quite literally culture, critical opinions, and overall literariness. He is sophisticated and thoughtful beyond his years, despite the youthful mistakes he makes. And yet somehow it is believable. There is a lack of reflective distance or grown-up perspective on the events that Glassco describes, and everything seems so immediate and vivid that it is easy to believe this "fib". Perhaps it is due partially to the fact that Glassco returned to Paris twice in the late 50s and spent time there before he began writing, making it easier to remember the city he had experienced. Or perhaps the wild shenanigans he gets himself into make it easy to suspend disbelief while reading—because the book is full of unlikely incidents in which a young Glassco does things like work for the Dayang Muda of Sarawak a strange and fascinating personality , take entertaining excursions to Luxembourg, and crash a party at Gertrude Stein's -- much more entertaining than Hemingway's discussions with her though perhaps slightly less substantial in content! Or perhaps Glassco's writing simply is convincing. His representation of scene and character invite the reader in, unquestioning. His words are fun and enticing. The overall reading experience is like being taken along for the ride. It's a light-hearted romp through Paris in the 20s, a mystical place, and one which lives so much in the imagination that perhaps we are always suspending belief when we read about it. I will conclude with a word of advice: I read this book in a very linear way. Foreword, narrative, author's notes. Wish I had loosened up and flipped around more: referred back to the foreword frequently and looked at the list of personalities in the back, because Glassco used a lot of pseudonyms and I wish I had looked each new character up as I encountered them. Memoirs of Montparnasse , of which I read a Dutch translation , is a great book. Glassco himself admits that he no longer recognizes Buffy his nickname in those days as himself but as a character in a novel he may have read. And that, I think, is the point. The memoirs would not be nearly as interesting, nor would the adventures and liaisons be as engaging, had he merely kept a diary or just stuck to the truth. Like jesting Pilate, he did not stick around to hear what the truth might be. And within this small city, the expatriates inhabited a kind of floating village or a ring of campfires, so it was possible to meet just about everyone as they cycled through Paris for their chance at the brass ring or just a good time. He pretended to be a writer at nineteen, but he became one, and a good writer at that, years later. That, it seems to me, is the charm and the value of Memoirs of Montparnasse. That it is impossible to conceive of Gertrude Stein lying down tells you more than that she was fat and dumpy and imperiously temperamental. Writing like this is calculated, certainly, and predicated on a belief in his superiority, but that was Buffy back in the day or what Glassco wanted the old Buffy to be. And one of them my guess is Glassco pulls it off so well that I kept reading passages out loud. Buffy paid attention to what was happening to him and around him. They were to Buffy what he, or Glassco, wanted them to be. And we are warned. Keep that in mind as you read and enjoy this book.

Memoirs of Montparnasse | The Canadian Encyclopedia

The two set out to explore all that the city had to offer: the cafes, bars, and brasseries that the Americans of A great memoir of a misspent youth, and of Paris in that wonderful time between the wars, when the city was the world capital of art and sex and adventure. The author fled from Canada to Montmartre in Memoirs of Montparnasse. John Glassco. Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. Barret J. Mandel similarly directs attention to the autobiographer's responsibility, and the reader's expectation:. At every moment of any true autobiography I do not speak of autobiographical novels the author's intention is to convey the sense that "this has happened to me". Despite the autobiographer's use of fiction techniques, the intention itself always speaks through very clearly. Readers turn to autobiography to satisfy a need for verifying a fellow human being's experience of reality. They achieve satisfaction when they feel strongly that the book is true to the experience of the author. The most widely accepted attempt to base a definition of autobiography upon the interaction of author and reader is Philippe Lejeune's postulation of "le pacte autobiographique," a contract established by the author's indication, on the title page or elsewhere, that he is indeed writing an autobiography. Critics who admit that fiction and autobiography have much in common, yet who wish to find a specific place for autobiography, have sometimes been inclined to state that a whole spectrum of possibilities exists, ranging from fact-oriented memoir to the fiction of pure fantasy. This tendency can be traced to Northrop Frye, who observed in The Anatomy of Criticism that "autobiography is another form which merges with the novel by a series of insensible gradations. Yet it is clear to every reader that, however autobiographical a work it may be, Tales's aim is the exercise of the imagination rather than the communication of autobiographical truth. If it were to be discovered that Lawrence Garber did not have the experiences ascribed to "Garber," one's estimate of the book would be unchanged. The falsity contained in Memoirs of Montparnasse does inevitably affect any judgment of Glassco's work, in one way or another. Such is the admirable tolerance of contemporary criticism that revelations of massive fictionalization may actually serve to raise an autobiographer's reputation. William L. Howarth has given the name of "dramatic autobiography" to those works which are "a puzzling mixture of fakery and truth. We may call it fiction or fraud, but its artistic value is real. Avrom Fleishman praises "a wide audience of modern readers" because, unlike literalist critics, "it welcomes displays of fictionality" 43 in autobiography. Perhaps, rather than feeling defensive about his "loose and lying chronicle," 44 Glassco should have courted critical favour by lying all the more. Such a tactic would not, however, have succeeded with every critic. Barrett J. Mandel invokes reader response:. A reader who at first mistakes fiction for autobiography or vice versa feels cheated. One wants to know whether the book is one or the other: it makes a difference in terms of how the book is to be read. In establishing categories of narrative, Philippe Lejeune comes to define the case in which the name of the protagonist is the name of the author:. As a lady not very close to Glassco's heart might put it, a lie is a lie is a lie. Though Lejeune does not specifically relate the issue of mensonge directly to his theory of le pacte autobiographique, it is surely in the context of Lejeune's general principle that Glassco's deviation from truth appears most striking. Many other autobiographers, one is willing to suppose, have altered chronology, re-shaped events or even disguised sexual orientations to the degree that we find in Glassco. There must be a much smaller number of works that involve so elaborate a strategy to mislead the reader. To insist on this point may appear unsophisticated, but the momentous consequences of Glassco's invention need to be realized. The reader's sympathy is falsely enlisted on behalf of an ill-starred youth teetering on the edge of the grave. The lessons Glassco has derived from his experience are given a spurious authority by virtue of the narrator's Death-in-Life condition. Our admiration for the insouciant protagonist is reinforced by and reinforces our regard for the gallant narrator. An attempt to deceive the reader was part of Glassco's plan right from the beginning, though the particular tactic contemplated is not always the same. The first overall plan for the book the page already mentioned in connection with Mrs. A discarded "Foreward" is more like the published "Prefatory Note" in intention. Though the manuscript is not as polished in its use of the hospital patient-narrator as the finished text, it does contain several passages of the young patient's reflections, including a tirade about the Depression that is much longer than the corresponding section p. It is a fascinating sidelight upon Glassco's imagination that even in the act of repudiating the manuscript the "note" of November 16, , already cited , he still distorts the manuscript's process of composition:. It would be both unfortunate and inappropriate, in my judgment, if detailed study of Glassco's manuscript were to produce the result of simply discrediting Memoirs of Montparnasse. I wish to devote the final section of this essay to an examination of some ways, both invalid and valid, in which the Memoirs may be regarded in a more benevolent light. If a letter written by Glassco and included among his papers is to be relied upon, Glassco suffered, not only from the youthful bout with tuberculosis described in the Memoirs, but also from a recurrence of the same condition much closer in time to the writing of the book. Thus, in creating his fictional framework, Glassco might well have drawn upon memories of the emotions induced by his earlier illness even if he made no formal record of his feelings at the time as well as a painful immediate consciousness of the burdens imposed by his lingering disease. He is not, it could be argued, as much of an imposter in emotional terms as a narrowly focused analysis of the manuscript might suggest. It is altogether possible that the accumulation of more biographical evidence, of the sort that is very sketchily reported here, may serve to win much sympathy for Glassco as a troubled human being, and may cast more light on the motives that prompted the writing of the Memoirs. The same consideration must arise if it is argued that the Memoirs can now be regarded as a kind of autobiographical novel, or if it is suggested that autobiographers are all liars anyway. In his dealings with his publisher, as well as the presentation of his work to the public, Glassco chose not to identify the Memoirs as a novel, and it cannot be assigned to that genre retroactively. The constitution of the human mind may dictate that all autobiographers, in their efforts to find within themselves a coherent identity, are involuntary liars. But this self-deception, a necessary illusion if autobiography is to be written at all, cannot be used as a justification for Glassco's very conscious strategy to mislead others. Though the arguments in Glassco's favour, put in the crude form in which I have stated them, cannot be accepted, they can be refined in ways that would make them more persuasive. Georges May has an illuminating passage on the autobiographical lie:. The autobiographical lie, in this view, need not be disguised as fiction; it is a special kind of autobiographical truth. May's generalization lends itself very readily to being applied to Glassco's text. Glassco's admission that "I was always. Any interpretation of the Memoirs must proceed from Glassco's own definition of it as a "loose and lying chronicle. Buck, in an excellent article, "Reading Autobiography. Essentially deconstructive, this method of reading involves in the first phase, a close analysis of the text in an effort to discover those passages where the autobiographer's homogeneous mask of identity is shaken by an eruption of heterogeneity, whether acknowledged by the writer or not. The goal. After giving an example of such a method in practice, Buck then partly repudiates his own procedure, suggesting that it "seems to be guilty of a failure of sympathy and respect for another individual's understanding of his own life. Glassco's conscious fictionalizing complicates but does not preclude an attempt to evaluate the Memoirs in the analytical but sympathetic fashion advocated by Buck. The identities invented by Glassco for himself, self-assured as they sometimes appear, are nevertheless subject to frequent "eruptions of heterogeneity. I have already commented on the vulnerability of the manuscript's Buffy. This side of himself Glassco repressed in the final version, in favour of a Portrait of the Artist as a Bohemian Young Man. Until he is felled by the predatory Mrs. Expatriate Paris has clutched him to her generous if soiled bosom, delighting in his precocity and wit. In fleeing from the Sun Life Company and his father's expectations, Glassco clearly makes a fundamental choice, a choice both the protagonist and the narrator find liberating. Yet within the Quarter, a further choice awaits him. To be a Paris exile could simply involve the pursuit of pleasure in defiance of bourgeois standards, or it could mean the cultivation of artistic aims within a supportive milieu. One could, in short, aspire to be Dr. Maloney, a sensualist who proposes toasts to "celebrate the victory of vice over the grave! Whether to be a carefree hedonist or to be a dedicated artist is a dilemma which presents itself to Glassco throughout the Memoirs. Here we encounter a significant example of what Buck calls heterogeneity. In both versions of the text, Glassco repeatedly asserts his allegiance to the life of the senses rather than to a life spent courting the Muse. In the passage announcing his decision to write his memoirs, he deflates his artistic seriousness by remarking that "literature isn't so important as life" MOM , 4. His purpose in Paris and in life is "to enjoy myself" MOM , 4. When he enters Stanley's orbit in Nice, he explicitly confesses that he has rejected "the toilsome life of art" in order to follow "the primrose path of present enjoyment" MOM , Two pages later, the narrator lends his support to "these arguments in favour of a youth of wine and roses. Reflecting upon life and art while in Luxembourg, he decides that he is not qualified to write because he has not had any painful emotions: "I had, moreover, no experience of anything but ecstasy" MOM , p. We might conclude, therefore, that Glassco's youthful identity is firmly linked to one principle, the enjoyment of the senses, and one mood, unalleviated joy. Yet, as John Lauber has already remarked, "he lives his life in literary terms. Glassco begins his sojourn abroad with an experience of literary ecstasy, the meeting with George Moore. Over half the book later, he can still be "filled with awe" MOM , at the prospect of an encounter with a much dimmer star in the literary firmament, Richard LeGallienne. Purely literary disagreements are said, in the final version, to cause the break-up of a love affair with Diana Tree. In the eyes of others, Glassco's identity is based upon being a literary figure, a writer of memoirs, rather than a sensualist, as we see in the comments by McAlmon 72 , Ethel Moorehead and "Jimmy Carter" [Harry Crosby] The perception of Glassco by others is in response to his own definition of self: "That evening I began the first chapter of this book, and when anyone asked me what I was doing in Paris I was now able to say I was writing my Memoirs" MOM, In the final text, the initiation of the autobiographical project seems associated exclusively with a revulsion against surrealism and a wish to find a novel public image. The manuscript version indicates slightly more thought. Buffy rejects the idea of simply keeping a journal as too undiscriminating: "No, I think I will write my Memoirs. There is no such facetiousness in a much later manuscript passage which offers more substantial evidence that Buffy did not blithely disregard the claims of literary ambition. His discomfiture about being kept by McAlmon, already cited, leads into the following resolve:. It is significant that self-definition through literary ambition is here characterized as "worthy. His contention that he lived life on one emotional note, in accordance with one jejune principle, cannot be taken seriously. Why, then, should he make this claim? A literary reason can provide a partial explanation. The pathos of the final chapters and of the patient's plight is deepened if we believe that for most of his time in Paris, Glassco did nothing but fleet his time carelessly, as they did in the golden world. Yet I believe another, more compelling motive may be suspected. For the author as much as the protagonist, the essence of the private drama being acted out on a public stage is the repudiation of conventional Anglo-Saxon Montreal and unloving, straitlaced parents. A picture of unalloyed bliss serves Glassco as a reinforcement of the decision to choose Paris. The act of filial rebellion appears more resounding if it takes the form of wallowing in open and guilt-free sensuality than if it expresses itself more tamely in literary labours at a desk. After all, Glassco's father is willing to subsidize a "literary career" for some time at the rate of one hundred dollars a month, on condition that Glassco "live more discreetly" MOM , p. The obvious course of action is to live less discreetly, and to pretend even thirty-five years after the event to have had little interest in literary aims. So what seems to be a lie can, as Georges May has said, be a revelation of character. A paragraph which was eventually cut from Glassco's "Prefatory Note" contains a similar, and related, mixture of lying and truth:. In any case the author is not, I think, a subject of the first importance in these memoirs. For he seems to me now to be profitably diminished by two stronger elements in his book: youth and Paris. For in the end he is preserved, if at all, by his detachment, and survives more as the observer of his surroundings and epoch than as his own hero. On the surface, this statement is highly disingenuous. By creating his narrator, by involving the protagonist in unusual and varied escapades, by showing the protagonist conversing with literary celebrities and gaining their attention, Glassco laboured mightily to make his hero the centre of interest. Yet Glassco is justified in saying that youth and Paris are his themes. The point is simply that the protagonist is identified with, not submerged by, these "stronger elements. An early draft of the preface interprets the Memoirs as the record of Glassco's deliverance from the bourgeois spirit: "This Canadian climate was what the all-too-susceptible author of this book had either to escape, succumb to, or go mad. The choice is not underlined, but it was there. But this rejection of my Memoirs has had another and most extraordinary effect on me. It has worked a kind of rebirth. Suddenly, somehow, I feel clean. Once more I am an outsider, an outlaw. I feel alive, quivering, new. The drafts of the preface reveal that at this late date Glassco was still either casting about for a satisfactory disguise with which to present a public attitude towards his protagonist, or genuinely uncertain about his own attitude. The hero is said to display "bumptious and sentimental egoism" we are back to the spirit of the November, repudiation. The same sentence begins, however, with a nautical image of the protagonist's helplessness: he is "like a chip caught in two converging currents" [apparently "youth" and "Paris"]. Conflicting notions of powerlessness and personal responsibility are also to be found in a final example of Glassco's inner truth and outward fiction: the picture of Glassco as sexual victim that comes to dominate the final section of the book. This theme has its foreshadowing early in the book when Glassco is frightened by the "cannibalistic selfishness" MOM , 40 of middle-aged Lesbians, but at that point he is not personally threatened. He rediscovers the same type of personality, however, when he becomes a male prostitute and learns about "woman as a sexual predator" MOM , As we have seen, Glassco's unpaid relations with women also demonstrate their aggressiveness. Ultimately, the most vicious and compelling of these "lovely succubi" MOM , shatters both of the choices Paris offers to Glassco: she destroys his happiness and burns his manuscripts MOM , He comes to interpret his life as a cautionary tale: "Here I should like to warn all young men against nymphomaniac women. Like the speaker of Houseman's poem, "When I Was One-and-Twenty," he has "paid with sighs a plenty" for his foolishness in giving his heart away. Events in the final third of the book after the return to Paris, p. Quayle is preceded by venereal disease, extreme financial difficulties and distasteful expedients to raise cash. These developments force Glassco to admit using the device of a hospital conversation with Graeme that he was "in love with a dream," but he argues that "Montparnasse and its people came very close" to realizing his "dream of excellence and beauty" MOM , At the very moment of its enforced abandonment, therefore, the vision of Paris is defended as at least plausible. Glassco in this scene is associated with his other professed theme, "youth": he is the eternal idealistic young man, doomed to disillusionment. The extreme disillusionment of the s Glassco is itself a strong motive for the equation of Paris and youth with bliss. All the generalizing passages just quoted have in common that they seek to deflect the reader's attention perhaps also Glassco's own attention from any personal responsibility he may have had for his plight. These explanations may not carry much conviction, but if they fail to be persuasive, Glassco has other, contradictory, interpretations to offer. The deviancy related in the manuscript not only emphasizes Buffy's sexual humiliation, but also precipitates a moment of illumination: "It seems I am a masochist" 4, This whole dimension, in its physical manifestations, is missing from the final text, but there is a corresponding, somewhat muted passage. Under the disguise of discovering true love, Glassco really speaks of love in a specifically masochistic way, even bringing in some early enthusiasm for physical punishment:. Perhaps because she used to kick my shins under the table where we used to cut out coloured paper. Why do I love Mrs. Because she has really done the same thing. But still it doesn't make sense. In the first place, she isn't my type at all. Or isn't that the very reason? Don't I love her because she is incapable of loving me? MOM , Glassco has given us two choices of victim: the victim who is simply walking along the street when he is run over by a fatal woman, and the victim who keenly desires his own downfall. In addition, there is the shrewd victim who will benefit from his mistakes by acting with more circumspection MOM , , Glassco also presents the reader with a strategy to be followed: victory can emerge out of defeat through an assertion of will:. In any degrading situation one must refuse to admit the degradation: one is never more ridiculous than one feels. Casanova is the supreme example of a man always rising above his petty misfortunes. Casanova is an appropriate model for Glassco in several respects. He is the hedonist par excellence, and, as Glassco proceeds to tell us, suffered from the kind of ignominy Buffy himself had to endure. Most importantly, he is an autobiographer of the "dramatic" 58 or lying kind with whom Glassco would have the closest affinity. Casanova's name surfaces again in another extremely significant passage:. There are some natural philosophers and wiseacres who affirm that what a man has done he will do again, but I do not think they are right: he will follow the same pattern, perhaps, but not so recklessly. This is shown in the memoirs of all the great sensualists like Pepys and Rousseau, and of all the great scoundrels like Casanova and Frank Harris. It is a pity that more memoirs like theirs are not written. These are the best we know of the life of individual man. Under the guise of objective literary commentary, Glassco is engaged in justifying and praising his own creation. His own work, filled as it is with sensual episodes, qualifies for inclusion in the great tradition of autobiographers who have found their way to the palace of wisdom by taking the road of excess. Yet, if part of the autobiographical truth revealed by this passage and by the Memoirs in general is that Glassco aspired to be a great sensualist, it is also evident, especially if the manuscript is taken into account, that he has stronger claims to be considered a great master of disguise. This is, however, a title Glassco might also have relished, as we can see if we return to the earlier passage nominally about Casanova. Casanova's Memoirs , the manuscript version of the passage informs us, "is one of the greatest books ever written" 5, This judgment gains in interest when read in conjunction with Glassco's statement in the final text that Casanova's "lordly manner" is "one of the few points on which he can be believed" MOM , We end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. In this way we grasp the truth that man is not only a living creature but the person of his own creation. Casanova is to be admired for his capacity to invent selves. If Casanova deserves our respect on those grounds, so does Glassco. What Glassco tells us he was the ecstatic lover of Paris, the victim of fate and fatal women is so thickly applied in the layers of the book that we despair of ever finding out what he really was underneath. Yet, with the aid of the manuscript version, we can at least see him at work applying the layers. This artful concealment of identity is itself a defining feature of his identity. Buffy, the very selective memoir writer of , is the same man as the weaver of multiple identities. He is more like a character in a novel Glassco has written; more accurately, he is one of many assumed identities Glassco invented for himself, idealized as being his real self, or scorned as being his contempible self. It is this underlying passion which links his defiant delight in sensuality with his enthusiasm for disguise. He lies, as he tells us, because his father was so truthful MOM , It is tempting to think that Glassco might take pleasure in the discovery of his manuscript. It reveals so thoroughly that he was "the person of his creation" that it admits him to membership in the club of the "dramatic," fictionalizing autobiographers. That he would be pleased to be in such company is made absolutely clear in a letter Glassco wrote to Boyle:. You see, I look on the real value of memoirs as being not so much a record of "what happened" as a re-creation of the spirit of a period in time. The first approach is so often simply tedious, faded literary gossip, name-dropping, disconnected anecdotes etc. The second approach is that of Rousseau, Casanova and George Moore. None of them felt tied to historical truth; they were all liars and produced works of art by invention. Who cares about their lies now? Who knows, for instance, whether Casanova's "Henriette" even existed? Yet she lives. I don't compare myself to them, naturally, but my book is in their style. An earlier letter to Boyle, part of which I have already quoted, continues in the same vein, and invokes the same models:. The way George Moore and Casanova did it for the world of their youth. Fiction; Paris; me ; youth: these words re-arrange themselves in various combinations as one ponders Glassco's elusive reflection of himself in the Memoirs. Glassco has left it for others to find the inner truth of his outward lies, but, as always, he has left a mocking aphorism to inspire the search: "Everything a man writes about himself is instructive" MOM , Tausky "An accomplished liar": so John Glassco describes himself in an early chapter of Memoirs of Montparnasse. In his accompanying letter, Glassco sought to explain the tricky question of his decision to fictionalize his relations with Boyle: In short, our friendship has been blown up, glamourized and made intensely significant in the framework of the story itself. Boyle reports: During the hours of work Buffy and I at times incorporating suggestions made by McAlmon inserted in the mouths of the long-dead great additional flights of repartee and far more brilliant bon mots than I had managed to invent alone. II In the "Note" just mentioned, Glassco tells himself that "everything related in it [the manuscript] is circumstantially true. Mandel similarly directs attention to the autobiographer's responsibility, and the reader's expectation: At every moment of any true autobiography I do not speak of autobiographical novels the author's intention is to convey the sense that "this has happened to me". Mandel invokes reader response: A reader who at first mistakes fiction for autobiography or vice versa feels cheated. A paragraph which was eventually cut from Glassco's "Prefatory Note" contains a similar, and related, mixture of lying and truth: In any case the author is not, I think, a subject of the first importance in these memoirs. MOM , 80 Glassco has given us two choices of victim: the victim who is simply walking along the street when he is run over by a fatal woman, and the victim who keenly desires his own downfall. Glassco also presents the reader with a strategy to be followed: victory can emerge out of defeat through an assertion of will: In any degrading situation one must refuse to admit the degradation: one is never more ridiculous than one feels. MOM , Casanova is an appropriate model for Glassco in several respects. Glassco continues: We end, in other words, by loving him as much for what he really was as for what he tells us he was, and discover that the two characters complement each other and make an intelligible whole. Press, , p. All further references to the published version of this work identified as MOM will appear in the text. The date of composition of the manuscript was not revealed in print for another ten years, until the publication of the entry on Glassco in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature Press, , pp. An annotated copy of the This Quarter article, the basis of Glassco's revisions, is in the Glassco Papers. All further references to the manuscript version of Memoirs of Montparnasse will appear in the text. Wherever possible, quotations from the manuscript will be identified by scribbler number, followed by the page number within the scribbler. Quotations not identified in this way are from separate sheets of paper. I am grateful to Anne Goddard of Public Archives Canada for her help in providing information and photocopies. By January 29, , he had reached p. After completing the main text he worked on inserts until December a sheet of "Corrections" is dated Dec. This and l two later extracts from this entry are quoted by kind permission of William Toye. No further use of this material for publication can be made without his permission. See the analyses of the poem by Lauber and Scobie. Glassco Papers, vol. All further quotations from Glassco's letters to Boyle are drawn from this source. He had reason to be bitter. Callaghan's cruel story, "Now That April's Here" was, according to one of Glassco's notes, "quite a shock to me. Ford Madox Ford's own memoirs have generally been regarded as completely unreliable, so the treatment Glassco accords him has an element of poetic justice. In a draft of a preface, written in the fall of discussed in more detail later in this essay , Glassco says that in his book the author is "profitably diminished by two stronger elements in his book: youth and Paris. Quoted by kind permission of William Toye. We may ask with McAlmon, "Who in hell is Lenz anyway? There are many German writers named Lenz, but no poet fitting Glassco's description appears in the British Library catalogue, in several dictionaries of German writers, or in standard guidebooks Michelin, Fodor, Blue to Luxembourg. New York: Doubleday, , pp.

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