He gate‐crashed a party at Gertrude Stein's and was rude to the hostess, whom he considered “pretentious and intolerably arch.” He was un impressed by Hemingway: “al most as unattractive as his short stories-those studies in tight‐lipped emotionalism. John never turned down an opportunity to go any place or meet anybody. John Glassco, determined to become a surrealist poet, fled Montreal with a friend and went to Paris-that glamorous, dreamlike Paris the North Americans discovered in the twenties-and plunged into the luxuriant little hothouse world of arts and lechers.įor a time he and his friend shared a studio with Robert Mc Almon, literary chronicler of Paris, who later wrote in “Being Geniuses Together” that John, although by then all of 18, was “much the oldest, most ironic and disillusioned of the three of us.” But there rarely has been more enthusiastic, elegant ly phrased disillusionment. What gives this case special in terest is that it happened in 1927. The revolt of the affluent young against the establish ment isn't news any more. His well‐to‐do parents, who had great dreams, disapproved.Ģ41 pp.

John Glassco quit McGill University in his third year, convinced that the curriculum could only turn him into another college professor and haunted by “the sense of throwing my time and my youth into a void.” He was 17. This is the story of a gifted college dropout.

John glassco memoirs of montparnasse