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Excerpted from The Globe and Mail article “A legend of his own creation” by Keith Garebian.
In middle age, he was a martini-sipping, balding dandy who was really a self-transforming fabulist with an elegant literary style, an English writer from Quebec who claimed to have written the acclaimed Memoirs of Montparnasse in hospital recovering from tuberculosis, who boasted of youthful adventures with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Robert McAlmon, and affairs with Peggy Guggenheim, Kay Boyle, Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde’s fatal “Bosie”), Jean Cocteau and black poet Claude McKay.
Literary scholars (such as Thomas E. Tausky, Stephen Scobie, Philip Kokotailo and Michael Gnarowski) discovered that he was a sophisticated liar: His memoir had not been composed in the early 1930s, put aside, rediscovered in the 1960s and then published almost without changes. It was written in the 1960s, probably in response to Morley Callaghan’s dismissal of him and his lover Graeme Taylor as vile, childish homosexuals in That Summer in Paris. Glassco’s subterfuge was by no means unique. In Canada, Frederick Philip Grove and Grey Owl had recreated themselves much earlier, so Glassco’s complex deceptions seemed to justify Louis Dudek’s assertion, “The best live among us in disguise.”
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