Partner Graeme Taylor
Queer Places:
52 Rue du Montparnasse, 75014 Paris, France
20358 Rue Lakeshore, Baie-d'Urfé, QC H9X 1P7, Canada
Foster, QC J0E 1R0, Canada
3663 Rue Jeanne-Mance, Montréal, QC H2X 2K4, Canada
John
Glassco (December 15, 1909 – January 29, 1981) was a Canadian poet, memoirist
and novelist. According to Stephen Scobie, "Glassco will be remembered for his
brilliant autobiography, his elegant, classical poems, and for his
translations."[1]
He is also remembered by some for his erotica. Some scholars claim that while
living in Paris in 1929 Claude McKay
had a sexual relationship with Glassco.
Born in Montreal to a monied family, John Glassco (Buffy to his friends) was educated at Selwyn House School, Bishop's College School, Lower Canada College, and finally McGill University.[2] At McGill he moved on the fringes of the Montreal Group of poets centred on that campus, which included F. R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith. Glassco wrote for the McGill Fortnightly Review with Scott, Smith, and Leon Edel.[3]
Glassco left McGill without graduating to go to Paris with his friend, Graeme Taylor, when he was 17 years old. The two settled in the Montparnasse district 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 during the 1920s.[1]
The book is presented as a genuine memoir, although Glassco had lightly fictionalized some aspects of the work.[4] 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 Madox Ford, Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas and others. In the notes to the republished edition in 2007 further characters are identified as thinly disguised descriptions of Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and others.
Glassco, a bisexual, was, in the words of Leon Edel, "a bit frightened by certain kinds of women and nearly always delighted if he could establish a triangle." [5][6]
The Canadian composer John Glassco did meet Lord Alfred Douglas in Paris in the 1920s and later said: ‘Never was there a more sociable man, a man with better manners or more exquisite grace of movement, speech and behaviour.’
In 1931 Glassco contracted tuberculosis. He returned to Canada and was hospitalized. In 1935, after having a lung removed, he retired to the town of Foster in Quebec's Eastern Townships. He served as mayor of Foster from 1952 to 1954.[2]
Glassco completed the unfinished pornographic novel Under the Hill by Aubrey Beardsley,[18] in an edition published by the Olympia Press in 1959.[19]
My published books:
