And he followed up this string of successes the following year by publishing his Selected Poems, which beat out the collected poems of the much better-known Irving Layton for the Governor General’s Award. What’s more, he met and fell in love with the woman who would become his second wife. In a single year, 1970, he published a bestselling memoir and an anthology of French-Canadian poetry in translation, not to mention another volume of pornography. Several literary projects that had been simmering for years reached a boil at the same time. So deep was his despair that he was making plans to commit suicide once she had died.

His wife was violently ill with schizophrenia and was starving herself to death. Living in isolation on a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, he was unknown outside a small circle of Montreal poets. He was a writer who had published almost nothing but two thin volumes of poetry and a couple of books of pseudonymous pornography. The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.Īs he approached his sixtieth birthday John Glassco might reasonably have thought that his life was a complete failure. Double Life feature Photo: John Glassco, by Gordon Beck

John glassco memoirs of montparnasse