Memoirs of Montparnasse. 2nd ed.

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

When the first edition of this literary sleight-of-hand came out in
1970, the world accepted

it at face value as a contemporary description of life in Paris in 1928
among the literary expatriates of the Left Bank. John Glassco, an
anglo-Quebecker known to friends as “Buffy,” would have been 18 in
summer of 1928; he was tubercular, and anticipated an early death. When
a spate of books on that period were published in the 1950s and 1960s,
Glassco revisited Paris, in 1964, and wrote Memoirs of Montparnasse,
with a prefatory note claiming that parts were written in 1928 “soon
after the events recorded” and the balance in 1932–33 in a Montreal
hospital.

Michael Gnarowski, a professor of English at Carleton University and
the editor of this second edition, shows how Glassco’s “fact” was
fiction: “[In] 1964 Glassco recreated the key ‘moments’ of his
concupiscent coming of age in Paris. To them he joined elements and
occasions taken from the scattered lives of the so-called Lost
Generation in an imaginative borrowing, without much regard for
provenance, of fact and circumstances.” Thanks to Glassco’s vivid
writing and imagination, his “memoir” had the smell of truth and was
received as such, even by those who had been there at the time.

Those who knew better, including Gnarowski, kept silent at first; but
he later labeled it “prose fiction.” The scholarly apparatus of a
long introduction, extensive notes, and an excellent bibliography in
this second edition sets the record straight. The charm of the original
memoir remains, and indeed is enhanced by the framework.