John Glassco, Canadian poet.
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe writers share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
There is no stronger bond than that between people who love books, except perhaps the one between people who lend books and those who never return them.
My friend Val Ross never once pestered me to return Memoirs of Montparnasse, the scabrous, deceitful, hilarious reminiscence of 1920s Paris written by Montreal poet John (Buffy) Glassco and published in 1970. I was a young writer and Val was this newspaper's publishing reporter, a peerless stylist and superb journalist, when she lent me the slim memoir. She loved books and wanted to share the pleasure of them, even with friends who had shoddy book-returning habits.
For the next few weeks I annoyed our desk-mates as I screamed choice bits out loud to her, choking with laughter: "Oh my God, listen to this about Kiki of Montparnasse: 'Her face was beautiful from every angle, but I liked it best in full profile, when it had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon.'"
We used to get filthy looks for our laughing fits. Or did we? Perhaps I've created a stage set of my memories. Most of us do; Glassco certainly did. He claimed to have written the Memoirs at the age of 22 in 1932, when he'd returned from Paris and lay recovering from tuberculosis in a Montreal hospital bed. It was a lie, or perhaps jeu d'esprit is a better way of putting it: He actually wrote the book in the 1960s, four decades after the events it describes.
The real world of Parisian intellectuals and its fictional shadow meet in the memoir's pages. Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan and Gertrude Stein appear as themselves, often unflatteringly, while Man Ray and Peggy Guggenheim are lightly camouflaged, as Narwhal and Sally Marr, respectively.
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 1928 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 found work as a gigolo and also as amanuensis to Her Highness, the Dayang Muda of Sarawak. He largely avoided writing, save for a smutty pamphlet for a publisher specializing "in books dealing with shoes, fans and ladies' underlinen." He fell in love with Mrs. Quayle, a "miserable mangeuse d'hommes," but really it was Paris that held his heart. "I felt the city had swallowed me and I now made part of it," he wrote of a walk along the Quai d'Orleans. "It was an experience of possession by something so stately and vivid that I walked along in a dream of absolute subservience to stone and river and sky."
As the years went by, Val's copy of Memoirs of Montparnasse moved with me, sitting on my shelves in Toronto, Los Angeles and London. 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.S. 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 2008. 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 2007. 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.