Memoirs of Montparnasse

John Glassco (1909-1981), born in Montreal, attended McGill University without graduating, visited Paris as a sixteen-year-old and two years later, in 1928, accompanied by his friend Graeme Taylor. It was on this more lengthy and eventful stay, in the city he loved, that he based his Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), which was published, and presented by Glassco, as an authentic memoir though it was later discovered to be in many respects a work of fiction. Before publication he had confided to his friend Kay Boyle: "It has the form of fiction—i.e. with lots of dialogue, speed, rearranged and telescoped action; never a dull moment—and is more a montage of those days than literal truth." It is, however, firmly based in reality and felt experience, and probably contains as much fact as fiction. Glassco once remarked that he was "as much a novelist, anthologist, translator and pornographer" as he was a poet or a memoirist. His Selected Poems (1971) won a Governor General's Award, then Canada's leading literary honor. »

Louis Begley is a novelist and retired lawyer. He has written eight novels, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt, and Matters of Honor, which was published in 2007. He is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres of France and served as the president of PEN American Center from 1993 to 1995. He lives in New York with his wife, Anka Muhlstein, an historian of France. »

By John Glassco
Introduction by Louis Begley

Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco's memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.

Reviews

It's wonderful to see John Glassco's charming Memoirs of Montparnasse getting the international recognition it deserves. Like its author—whom I knew quite well in the 1960s—the book is a loveable and eccentric rogue, fond of style and up to mischief. It never fails to entertain.
— Margaret Atwood

Here are the memoirs . . . lively and libidinous, surfacing like some shining tropical fish out of the depths, and with all the elegance of their author's youth . . . It is all there—the twenty-four-hour days, the burning of candles at both ends, the obsessions and compulsions, the strange divorce from what was going on in the world, the crazy parties, the beautiful fool's paradise from which the Depression ultimately awakened us.
— Leon Edel

Memoirs of Montparnasse is one of the most joyous books on youth—the thrill and the gall and the adventure of it. It is also one of the best books on being in literary Paris in the 1920s.
— Michael Ondaatje

[Memoirs of Montparnasse] should be read and at last recognized as the most dramatic of the many narratives dealing with Paris in the 1920's.
— The New York Times

Also see:

Hons and Rebels
By Jessica Mitford
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

In Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford tells about her upbringing, which, she drily remarks, "even for England, in those far-off days of the middle twenties...was not exactly conventional...."

Parisian Life Collection

The Dud Avocado, Memoirs of Montparnasse, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, and Witch Grass

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)

May 29, 2007
264 pages
ISBN: 1590171845
9781590171844
Biography & Memoir
NYRB Classics

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