Paris dawns, you are always beautiful, I think, no matter what the weather, but there was never one more beautiful than on that bitter morning in early March in, with a sky of ashes and the tall houses grey and cold, the streets wet and only a few lights showing in the little cafés where the chauffeurs take their breakfasts and brandy.
It was all too soon when I arrived at the JulesCésar and staggered up the stairs to our windowless little room, where I vomited in the bidet and fell into bed with a sensation of pure happiness.
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I was extremely ready not to like this book, An obviously overlyprivileged college student decides he wants to become a poet, so he quits school and has his father cover his trip to Paris to "write poetry" with a friend.
In fact, I expected to read a chapter or two and toss it aside,
I ended up not only reading the whole thing, but spent a lot of time online researching the people and places he mentions.
Glassco fully describes a lost era in Paris, when artists, writers and others mingled together, from royalty to prostitutes, all partying together, drinking too much, mooching off each other, and discussing literature and poetry.
Aside from Hemingway and Joyce, we encounter Man Ray, Kiki, Ford Maddox Ford, Peggy Guggenheim, and many others many with pseudonyms, The conversation is both scintillating and extremely trite, while the author goes around Paris, Luxembourg, Nice and Montecarlo, living both the high life and being homeless and working as a prostitute.
I was somewhat surprised at how little overlap there seemed to be with Giacometti's biography, which I recently finished, He also lived in Paris in thes, and interacted with plenty of artists, like Picasso, Max Ernst, etc, But I guess there were enough famous people for there to be many different circles,
Way the best glimps into the lost generation and Paris of the late ''s, A delight. There's nothing quite like an unreliable narrator to keep the reader on his toes, sitelinkJohn Glassco was one of those North Americans he himself was from Montreal who flocked to Paris in thes, As Michael Gnarowski of Carlton University in Ottawa wrote:
It used to be said of one of the painters in Montparnasse that, although he appeared to be well informed about world events, no one had ever caught him reading a newspaper.Despite the fact that the author has no great love of accuracy, sitelinkMemoirs Of Montparnasse is one of those entertaining reads one could not easily put down.
The same obersvation may be made of the people who inhabit Glassco's Memoirs, They seem to be cocooned against the outside world, and Glassco's own narrative is almost totally devoid of references to the times, If the young generation had come to Paris in search of freedom and pleasure, or some sort of spiritual enlightenment, it was clearly determined not to allow the world, as inhabited by their families, to interfere with their own restricted universe, defined by little magazines, eccentric art, personal relationships, and outré behaviour.
There are numerous encounters with famous writers some of them who have their names slightly altered and artists and not everything said about them, or where they live, or in fact anything is necessarilyaccurate.
There is a lot of hooking up with persons of all gender combinations going on, yet Glassco does not take the Frank Harris route of describing overt sex acts.
And yet Glassco later wrote or "translated" various pornographic works, Even the halfhearted framing story of the Memoirs being written in a Canadian hospital where Glassco is recovering from tuberculosis, is not entirely true.
I recall an anecdote about a patient telling his psychoanalyst stories about his life, with the latter nodding sagely and saying, "That's interesting.
" Exasperated, the patients tells his analyst that everything he has said to date has been a lie, Without skipping a beat, the analyst says, in the same tone of voice, "That's even more interesting!" This is the genre that Glassco's work inhabits.
Think of it as a vaguely realitybased fantasy about a footloose young man and his slightly sexually inverted friends and acquaintances in Montmartre in that short heyday between Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris and the Stock Market Crash of.
This book surprised me, It ended so much better than it started,
Somewhere in the reading I realized this was not a memoir by a writer, although Glassco became a writer somewhere along the way.
It was a memoir about the layabouts of Paris in the Twenties, the majority of the expatriates, people who came there because it was more libertine than back home in Ohio or Texas or Pennsylvania, and because the currency conversation was so deeply in favor of Americans.
The latter is the same reason the writers and painters came, but they also came to work and to find community.
People like Glassco came to play, to be interesting, to find others who were also interesting to be interesting near, When I realized this was in essence reportage on the extras who filled in memoirs like A Moveable Feast and Being Geniuses Together it leapt into focus.
So many of these memoirs have a sadness to them, of departure and the fading to black of a time that for many was the best time.
I had read someone who said Graeme Taylor, Glassco's friend was such an important part of the book, "faded into history, " Good Christ. He may have lived in three dimensions and full color to his friends and family but you really got the sense that some of the people only came into true focus for a while, in Paris.
Fascinating quasimemoir of life in Paris in the late's, As the book was actually writtenyears later and contains many long passages of dialogue, this book is probably closer to fiction than actual biography.
Very entertaining, however. Quite candid, as well. It's pretty hard to warm to the author at the outset of this book due to the many references to his privileged upbringing and the snobbish disdain he displays for anyone who doesnt fit into his artistic/literary elite.
You also have to deal with an amount of selfabsorption remarkable even for the solipsistic nature of a memoir, relentless namedropping of the writers, artists, movers and shakes of lates Paris and a stunning lack of awareness of wider events in the world, from his family onwards.
Its a minor triumph then that despite these shortcomings I made it through to the end, this does have some engaging passages and some leeway has to be made for the natural callowness of youth although Glassco is looking back on his youth from middle age.
Worth reading if youre interested in the time and place which I am but pretty much a minor curio of the genre, For a review in Dutch, see sitelinkNonfiction by foreign authors of the Netherlands amp Flanders group,
Memoirs of Montparnasse, of which I read a sitelinkDutch translation, is a great book, Having said this, I have to add that a reader will need quite a lot of background knowledge to fully appreciate this semiautobiographical novel.
John Glassco mixes his memories with his imagination in this autobiography and in doing so manages to create a truly magnificent book.
While reading these memoirs, one has to bear in mind though that John Glassco was a marvellous trickster, something which he admits to early on in this book.
I couldn't help wondering if his admitting to this so early on in the book was meant as a warning to its readers.
. .
It took me a couple of chapters to really get into this book, but then I was hooked, I loved the style of writing, the atmosphere of Paris in the years after the First World War, the description of authors John Glassco met, and so on.
In all honesty though, it undoubtedly helped that I already knew quite a lot about Paris in the lates as well as about several of the authors who were living there at the time.
This, and reading Brian Busbys sitelinkbiography on John Glassco , helped me appreciate Memoirs of Montparnasse to the fullest, Ingaat een gesjeesde Canadese student met schrijversaspiraties met een vriend naar Parijs, om daar het echte kunstenaarsleven te kunnen leven, Via Londen komen ze aan in Parijs waar ze ruim twee jaar van de hand in de tand leven, Meteen na aankomst begint John zijn memoires te schrijven over wat ze meemaken, maar daar komt al gauw de klad in, Ze leven heel goedkoop, schrijven wat, verkopen wat, en komen in het uitgaansleven veel kunstenaars tegen: echte, zoals Hemingway, Gertrude Stein en Morley Callaghan, maar ook veel mensen die alleen de pretentie hebben kunstenaar te zijn.
Vrouwen nemen een grote plaats in hun leven in, tot John ingaat samenwonen met zijn oudere en zeer jaloerse maîtresse, Deze memoires verschenen oorspronkelijk in, Ze geven een geestig en levendig beeld van het kunstenaarsleven in Parijs in de jaren twintig en dertig, treffen de sfeer goed en krijgen een extra dimensie door de onbevangen en daardoor rake portretten van bekende schrijvers als Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein en James Joyce.
"Un uomo civilizzato deve essere in grado di distribuire le sue energie su tre traguardi la società, l'arte e il sesso, Non resta spazio per un'occupazione remunerativa, e un'occupazione del genere a sua volta non lascia tempo a sufficienza per alcuna delle attività basilari che ho citato.
" I read this book in Canadian lit in second year university, which was the year I was coming out, What I found interesting was that although Glassco apparently removed the material explicitly about homosexuality, I reached that conclusion about his nature before I read essays that mentioned it.
Gaydar for the win.
A delightful book despite the excisions,.stars. A great memoir of a misspent youth, and of Paris in that wonderful time between the wars, when the city was the world capital of art and sex and adventure.
The author fled from Canada to Montmartre in the lates and lived a handtomouth existence, subsisting on bouillon and gin in various lonely tabacs and struggling to write poetry, while he mixes with a crowd of other artists and expatriates including just about everyone that matters.
It's not pulled along by a driving plot or anything, but if you have any interest in the era or the setting, there will be plenty for you here to enjoy.
What makes it particularly valuable is its remarkable honesty the descriptions of Paris brothels in thes are fascinating, and there is the added bonus that he not only visited them as a client, but also, later, worked in one as a gigolo to make ends meet.
During the following month I discovered several curious things about woman as sexual predator, Unlike man, she does not seek sex on a sudden impulse, at any time of the night or day on the contrary she makes an appointment for it as she would with her manicurist or hairdresser.
Moreover, she is much more coldblooded and condescending than man, I never met a woman at Madame Godenot's who showed me the least tenderness or humour in the course of our relations: without exception they were entirely selfish in their lovemaking.
This could have been rather tawdry, but actually he just treats everything in a cheerfully open way, seeing in almost everything that befalls him a chance to gain life experience at the very least.
Basically this is a book infused with that feeling of being young and having the latitude to experiment and make mistakes with your whole life ahead of you.
Of course, a lot of the pleasure is in the chance to eavesdrop on a lot of famous or otherwise interesting people.
James Joyce said what Hemingway did what And the author seems to have known the lot of
them, If you think you throw a mean party, have a look at what happens when John Glassco invites some friends round:
After midnight the crowd increased steadily no one left and the apartment was soon jammed.
I remember the cherubic jowls of Picabia, the swollen forehead of Allan Tate, the prognathous jaw of Cummings, Nancy Cunard's elegant painted mask, the calm monastic skull of Marcel Duchamp.
In a corner Cyril Connolly was quietly entertaining a small group with a parodic imitation of a German describing the charms of the Parisian prostitute.
Kokott he was murmuring, making expressive movements with his hands, unbeschreiblich pikant exotisch, . . By the mantelpiece Foujita, with his sad monkeyface, was holding court with his usual entourage of beautiful women, Soaring effortlessly above the noise was the husky parrotlike scream of Kiki, now very fat but as beautiful as ever she was displaying her thighs and bragging, as usual, that she was the only woman in Paris who had never had any pubic hair.
In the kitchen, where I went to open the bottles, Ford Madox Ford was towering like an elephant, talking almost inaudibly about Thomas Hardy.
Now that's what I call a house party, I live in Montparnasse myself, and God knows it's not much like that nowadays although it's nice to see that all his old drinkingspots like the Dôme and the Sélect are still here.
Next time I'm in one I'll be raising a glass to what went on here back when Paris was still the centre of it all.
If you want to find out, this book is a great place to start,
Dec.