I was started on this topic in 1980 when I did the technical work and the lighting design for a new play by Marcy Kahan, called White Night, at Dawson Professional Theatre Program in Montreal. As far as I know the play was never published and I took the next year off to work in Toronto and Marcy went to the U.K. where she became a very successful writer, mostly at the BBC. The play was based on the book Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Stinson “Buffy” Glassco, which was, ostensibly, a memoir of the 20’s in Paris with the “Lost Generation” which Glassco said he began in Paris in 1926, and completed in 1931 back in Montreal while lying at death’s door of tuberculosis in the Royal Victoria Hospital and awaiting an operation that would save his life or end it. The play dramatizes the night before that operation as Buffy remembers/hallucinates the memorable characters of that era in Paris.
In fact, only part of the above is true, but the story is so ingrained that it has been reproduced or quietly ignored by critics of considerable stature (Ondaatje, Atwood, Cowley, Edel) even though some of them probably knew – or suspected – the truth.
There are numerous memoirs of that time in Paris when it seems that all of North America’s intelligentsia passed through the cafes there, at one time or another in the decade between the first world war and the depression. Most of them are very interesting, and, with a few exceptions, are full of lies. In fact, as a general rule, I would suggest that autobiography is unusually filled with terminological inexactitudes (Churchill’s term) and that if you want to get the truth, read fiction – or, even better, travelogues.
There are some accurate memoirs; Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company is both essentially true and entertaining, particularly in her account of her role as the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses and nursemaid to the author (for which she got very little appreciation, and no money, particularly from him). When Joyce finally got $45,000 from an American publisher – and he had lived in near poverty for years – he didn’t give her a nickel. It is also great fun to read of her Paris “liberation” by Ernest Hemingway in late 1944. She is always self-effacing and always amusing.
Hemingway, on the other hand, wrote his memoir A Moveable Feast near the end of his life (it was published posthumously) from notes that he made during the twenties but it is as far from the truth as Beach is close to it. Since most memoirs are private accounts of private events it is often hard to know if a particular encounter, conversation, or snub actually took place. And Feast excludes some notes that have been later published to just muddy the waters even further. But Hemingway’s objective was surely to confer hagiography on himself, to immortalize Gertrude Stein (who supported him) and to belittle his rival novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. He does not mention Glassco who mentions him (but, then, Buffy was a nobody) but he also does not mention Canadian Morley Callaghan who was actually promoted as a writer by Hemingway and they worked together on the same newspaper. Maybe because one memoir (Callaghan’s) has Callaghan knocking Hem out in the boxing ring while Fitzgerald referees. Most tellingly, Hemingway paints a self portrait of a young writer with a young wife and newborn son, living in poverty, near starvation, in the streets of Paris, struggling to find time to write. In truth, Hemingway had a well-paid job with the Toronto Star and his wife had a generous yearly stipend from her family. They were a middle-class family in the cheapest city of Europe. “She [his wife] … is always ready to go out and eat oysters at the café and drink a bottle of Pouilly before supper,” says Mary Dearborn, Hemingway’s biographer.
Of all the characters that drift in and out of Buffy’s stories (and Hemingway’s and Cowley’s and Callaghan’s) Robert McAlmon was the biggest loser. Put down by everyone else (Ernest considered him a less than savoury “homosexual” and Buffy thought he was simply pursuing Buffy for sex and had no talent as a writer or publisher (both untrue) while McAlmon was simply a bisexual man of gift and potential with some personal problems. Sylvia Beach thought him an important person: “Somehow, he dominated whatever group he was in. Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronized at the moment was the one where you saw everybody.” In truth, it was McAlmon who first published Hemingway. Most of these memoires, always excepting Beach, seem to have been attempts at self-justification or character assassination – or both.
So, what was the truth about Glassco, or what we can know of it? John Buffy Glassco was born in Montreal on December 15, 1909. His mother’s family were immensely wealthy and left a large estate for her and her children. His father was a middle-class businessman who ended up as the bursar of McGill University. Buffy attended all the best private schools: Selwyn House School, Bishop's College School, Lower Canada Collegeand finally, McGill University. He was a bright but bad student and decided that a year or two at McGill was enough; although he was somewhat involved with the literary fringes of the Montreal Group (F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smitha and Leon Edel) and wrote for the McGill Fortnightly. He and he close friend Graeme Taylor rented an apartment together and then proceeded to sublet it to other McGill males as a place to bring girls to – a kind of student pimpdom.
Of course, when his father found out, there was hell to pay. The father’s position as bursar – an upright member of Montreal’s Upper Middle Class was seriously endangered by his son’s moral turpitude. In the end, Buffy was bundled off to Paris at the age of 17 with a substantial allowance to support him and Graeme. Also, there was more than a whiff of blackmail on Buffy’s part since, according to his biographer, Brian Busby, Buffy never got over his father’s rather savage beatings. Anyway, Buffy and Graeme were off to Paris for 3 years with cash in hand (which soon ran out) and they seem to have occupied their time with drinking, chasing sex, eating prodigiously and mocking every one that they could – many of whom would later turn out to be famous, or talented, or both. Among those mentioned or suggested were Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas, Man Ray and Peggy Guggenheim. Both boys tried to write but soon gave it up as too exhausting and this is where Chapter1 of Montparnasse was born.
After a series of rather tawdry adventures, including a run at male prostitution on Buffy’s part, they returned home and Buffy did end up at the Royal Vic with TB. After his surgery and recovery, they lived in Baie D’Ufe and then on a farm in the Eastern Townships. Buffy, whose sexual preferences were wide-ranging but initially centered on threesomes with Graeme and a woman, eventually (after Graeme’s death) married several times, and became began to write poetry. After a questionable literary start, Glassco published a collection of poetry (Selected Poems which won the Governor Generals award in 1971), some stylish pornography for ready money (Under the Hill, The Fatal Woman, and Harriet Marwood, Governess). He was also a fine translator and perhaps his finest work is his translation of The Complete Poems of Saint-Denys Garneau. He also served for several years as the Mayor of Foster, Quebec.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s a number of things happened that prodded him into revisiting the time he had spent with Graeme in Paris. In 1963, Morley Callaghan published That Summer in Paris, a rather over-long and rambling memoir with a section on Paris 1929 and the famous boxing match. It made some good money for Callaghan and I’m sure that Glassco noticed that. He was particularly sensitive to Callaghan’s career, now largely neglected in his native Canada, because in the early 30’s Morley had written a short story, Now That April is Here, which was a rather unkind (if fairly accurate) portrait of Buffy and Graeme in Montparnasse and it had been reprinted in Callaghan’s anthologies, Now That April is Here and Other Stories (1936) and Morley Callaghan’s Stories (1959). Then, in 1964, Hemingway published his memoir of Paris, A Moveable Feast, and it made a lot of money. Apparently, Buffy decided to cash in and wrote Memoires of Montparnasse ride the wave. And because he was at heart a bit of a trickster who loved to publish under pseudonyms, he decided to tell one and all that the memoir had been written in the 20’s and early 30’s while ‘at death’s door’. As a result, many reviewers were captivated by its “precocious” outrageousness and Buffy did a brisk business at the bookstores.
It wasn’t until after his death in 1981 that suspicions began to arise that there had been a con job perpetrated – or, what one critic politely referred to as a “literary subterfuge.” A great deal of detective work has been undertaken, principally by Phillip Kokotailo and Brian Busby to show that the “memoirs” were written the late 60’s and that much of the material concerning celebrities may have been “imagined.” However, this has become more and more a cultish preoccupation as Glassco, Callaghan and many other important literary figures in this country fade into the obscurity of the past. And I am sure that for Glassco the discovery of his various deceits would not have troubled his rest. He was as he said himself an “accomplished liar.”
