John Glassco

Life

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. 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.

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.

The book is presented as a genuine memoir, although Glassco had lightly fictionalized some aspects of the work. 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.”

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.

Poetry

Glassco went on to earn a strong reputation as a poet. His Selected Poems won Canada's top honor for poetry, the Governor General's Award, in 1971. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature says of his poetry:

Translations

Glassco translated both poetry and fiction from French. He edited the 1970 anthology The Poetry of French Canada in Translation, in which he personally translated texts by 37 different poets. He also translated the work of three French-Canadian novelists: Monique Bosco (Lot's wife / La femme de Loth, 1975) Jean-Yves Soucy (Creature of the chase / Un dieu chasseur, 1979), and Jean-Charles Harvey (Fear's folly / Les demi-civilisés, 1982).

The Canadian Encyclopedia says that Glassco's "translations of French Canadian poetry are, along with F. R. Scott's, the finest yet to appear — his greatest achievement being the Complete Poems of Saint-Denys-Garneau (1975)."

Glassco also edited the 1965 anthology English poetry in Quebec, which originated from a poetry conference held in Foster in 1963.

Erotica

Glassco's long poem Squire Hardman, on the subject of flagellation, was privately printed in 1967. The poem was inspired by The Rodiad (1871), falsely ascribed to George Colman the Younger, and Glassco continued the hoax by claiming that his own poem was a republication of an 18th-century original by Colman. Glassco's The Temple of Pederasty, on the theme of sado-masochism and male homosexuality, was similarly ascribed to Ihara Saikaku with "translation" by the wholly fictitious "Hideki Okada". Glassco also used the pseudonym "Sylvia Bayer" to publish Fetish Girl, on the theme of rubber fetishism. He wrote The English Governess (Ophelia Press, 1960) and Harriet Marwood, Governess (1967) under yet another pseudonym, "Miles Underwood". Glassco completed the unfinished pornographic novel Under the Hill by Aubrey Beardsley, in an edition published by the Olympia Press in 1959.

Poetry

Memoirs

Pornography

Translated

Edited