Memoirs of artistic life in Paris thrive on embellishment. Henry Miller exaggerated his sexual conquests; Ernest Hemingway romanticized the experience; Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon, in their co-authored Being Geniuses Together, each tailored reality to promote personal mythmaking; even Morley Callaghan, in That Summer in Paris, has been caught out in a fib or two. The greatest fabricator of all was John Glassco. The dissolute son of a wealthy Montreal family, he arrived in Paris in 1928, at the age of eighteen, in the company of his lover, Graeme Taylor. For nearly three years, Glassco was too busy enjoying life amid the last days of the lost generation to do much writing. He and Taylor explored the cafés, clubs, and brothels of Montparnasse, eavesdropped on the famous, and seduced both women and men to form the ménages à trois in which they were most comfortable. Despite their disregard for artistic self-discipline, both young men published in the legendary literary journals of the day, where their work appeared alongside that of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Callaghan, in turn, wrote a short story satirizing the couple.

Glassco poured his experiences into Memoirs of Montparnasse, the most high-spirited and readable of the lost generation autobiographies. Published in 1970, the book was presented as having been written during the winter of 1932–33 in a Montreal hospital where the author was being treated for tuberculosis. It later emerged that Glassco penned most of Memoirs of Montparnasse in the 1960s, and that he invented many of his sparkling conversations with famous writers. Brian Busby’s new biography, the culmination of years of research, draws on archives as far away as Estonia to separate fact from fiction in the life of a man who disdained truth in favour of a good story. By following Glassco’s career through his later years as a writer, local politician, and gentleman farmer in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, Busby asks implicit questions about the creation of literary reputations in Canada.

Glassco was a prolific author of elegant, sadomasochistic pornography; his internationally bestselling whipping classic, Harriet Marwood, Governess, is stylistically superior to many revered creations of CanLit. Yet in contrast to the reception received by the work of Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, Glassco’s naughty books never attracted an underground following in his own country. Even Memoirs of Montparnasse, praised everywhere, fell into neglect after accusations that it caught the spirit rather than the letter of the lost generation. It took an American publisher, New York Review Books, to bring the memoirs back into print in 2007. As principal translator of the groundbreaking Poetry of French Canada in Translation (1970), Glassco is also a pioneer of Canadian literary translation. A prestigious annual prize bears his name, and his own verse won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1972. Regardless of these successes, this scrupulous and often amusing biography suggests that the best of Glassco’s work, like much of the truth of his life, remained hidden from the public eye.