It would seem appropriate to recall one of the area’s most creative citizens, John (Buffy) Glassco (1909-1981). Glassco delivered the mail during WWII along RRI just outside Knowlton. What he saw during his rounds became material for the poems which would win him a Governor General’s award in 1971. In the year 2009 it is unlikely that those who deliver the mail by automobile down the back roads have the same opportunities for turning their experience into poetry. But who knows, they might just twitter a haiku…
These days, walking, jogging, cycling or driving along Brill Road which leaves the Village of Foster and crosses through fields of wild flowers, you gradually approach Mont Foster. This is a landscape of marvelous vistas and prosperous looking houses, many of them second homes of Montrealers. When the sun shines and the breeze blows in from the West, this is a road which must have pleased the man after whom it is named, John Brill, formerly of Fishkill, NY who arrived in the Townships in 1800 to make a new life for himself.
The road heads through West Bolton, going East then bearing South as it rises to higher terrain on one of the approaches to Mont Foster. It then stops abruptly without descending into the Glen, a road that looks as if it’s going somewhere, but doesn’t. Towards the end of Brill Road you can discover, nearly opposite each other, a ruined farm set back in the woods and a recently constructed stone mansion of spectacular size and elegance. The farm is straight out of Glassco’s world, a world still evident here and there throughout the region where ruined buildings, teetering barns, and tumbled-down stone walls running inexplicably through forested hillsides stand in contrast to the often luxurious homes of those who have come to the Townships seeking pastoral peace and quiet.
Brill Road was one of the routes John Glassco traveled as a postman during the war and which provides the title for a poem depicting the road as a metaphor for a life moving blindly through a blizzard of anxiety and rising to “impossible heights,” with little chance of reaching a state of peace, at the other side of the mountain. He was not jogging, that’s for sure, but perched on a sleigh behind a reluctant horse who appears to doubt his master’s sanity.
Delivering mail gave Glassco a chance to observe the rural landmarks, recall their stories, and begin to formulate his meditative poems on the ravages of time and circumstance. On one level he was performing a public service by keeping the rural population in touch with the perilous outer world. Patricia Whitney, who studied Glassco’s life and work, says that he not only delivered the mail but also milk from his farm and catalogues for farmer’s wives which he hid in roadside hedges lest their tyrannical husbands would find out what they planned to do with their egg money. On another level, he was transforming what he saw into poems of sad beauty, creating a poetic record of the farms scattered throughout the countryside.
This John Glassco is a far cry from the young man who set out for Paris from Montreal in 1928 where he lived a life he later described as one of “greed, sloth and sensuality.” His adventures among such literary figures as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon would eventually lead him to write his most celebrated, entertaining and controversial book, Memoirs of Montparnasse, part personal memoir, part fiction. It was in Paris that he began his career as a writer of what he came to call “aphrodisiac romances,” stories usually of dominant women and submissive young men.
When he published a series of such narratives in the 1960s and 70s under his own name, his notoriety was established. He was characterized as an “elegant pornographer’ in a Weekend article by David Cobb, accompanied by a full page colour photograph of Glassco in a black smoking jacket, ascot tie, martini glass in hand, regarding the photographer with a sad, worldly gaze. His interest in pornography as creator and collector continued through his years in the Townships and got him into trouble from time to time with Canadian authorities. His attempt to import Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights was refused in 1946 because it was on a list of prohibited books. When he tried to import a book entitled The Temple of Pederasty which pretended to be a translation from the Japanese but which Glassco himself had written and had published in California, the Excise Office in Granby refused to allow it over the border because it deemed the book “immoral.”
Glassco returned to Canada in 1932 suffering from a severe case of tuberculosis. He survived a three stage thoracoplasty and in January of 1937 moved with his close friend Graeme Taylor to a white mansion just outside of Knowlton, an edifice which he personified in a bleak poem as the “scourge of hope,” “the sink of wealth,” and “the tomb of love.” The poem reflects the childhood demons which haunted him for much of his life. His father had beaten and sexually abused him and his brother during their years growing up in Montreal. When his father died in 1945, Glassco went through years of deep psychological distress and removed himself for a while from social contact. His friend Taylor would later drink himself to death in 1957, and the woman Glassco married in 1963, Elma von Colman, a former ballerina with the Estonian National Ballet, would eventually suffer from schizophrenia, starve herself down to 50 pounds and die miserably in a mental hospital.
Not until his marriage to Marion McCormick in 1974 did Glassco’s personal life achieve a degree of equilibrium. In a poem dedicated to her on the occasion of their marriage, Glassco writes of the journey they would now take through a “transfigured landscape…where everything is new.” By this time he had achieved distinction as a translator of Québécois poetry and was hailed by poet Gérald Godin as “ministre plénipotentaire de la poésie québécoise auprès le monde anglophone.” In fact, Glassco was instrumental in helping Quebec emerge from what he describes in an early poem (“Quebec Farmhouse”) as the “airless dark” of a “race so conquered it has made/Perpetual conquest of itself.”
Glassco’s view of Brome County was hardly that of a resident who had found a slice of terrestrial paradise. As Fraser Sutherland remarked in an essay on Glassco, if Paris had been paradise, the Townships were somewhere East of Eden. Everywhere his horse took him, he saw signs of personal tragedy and pain, either narratives which the ruined structures evoke or his own personal troubles imposed subjectively on the passing scene. Like those of us who seek the views afforded by mountain and valley, Glassco too sought the high points in the landscape where he could collect his thoughts and review his life as he does in his meditative and elegiac poem, “Luce’s Notch.”
The poems can be read as the biography of a man wracked by the terrors of having lost his way in life, and that is the way most commentators have approached his work. But they can also be read as something of a documentary on the region during the war and shortly after. There is little evidence that farming in the area suffered during those years or that the landscape was as cluttered with ruins as a reading of Glassco’s poetry might suggest. If anything, the war proved profitable to farmers. It is simply that farms and farm buildings do indeed come and go; houses in the country seem particularly susceptible to the ravages of time and nature. But like so many rural communities, the personal stories of the inhabitants are often ones of frustration and failure. Glassco’s poems record the various rural figures: the stud groom who would be a professional horseman, a screaming child in the arms of its mother, a furtive bearded man glimpsed from the road, Corby the Trader “happy collector of objects,” and the long gone Aaron Luce whose farm is reduced to its stone foundations. When he imagines the voice of a dead farmer in “Needham Cemetery what he hears is the platitudinous communal “wisdom” to be passed on to the young: “All flesh is grass: so keep the meadows up, /The hired man down, the women in their place.” And so the poem goes on for five stanzas.
Caring for horses and delivering milk grounded Glassco in the region and gave him a chance to observe the inexorable action of social and environmental forces on human habitation. When he became a mailman and made his rounds riding on a two-wheeled cart in summer, a cutter in winter (automobiles and gasoline were hard to come by during the war), he observed a rural landscape where decay, ruin, and narrowness of mind prevailed. In “The Rural Mail,” he describes a “slow-motion world” cut off from the “makers and masters of nations” where, as a farmer says, “Far as I’m concerned, the war can go on forever!/A man can make a dollar, with hens.” Ironically, as the poem concludes, the green valleys are also filled with slaughter not only of calves and chickens, but of the farmer’s children. Anything can happen in a world where the weather replaces God in the lives of people.
. Yet Glassco did involve himself in the community. When he was nominated to the Foster Town Council in July of 1949, the minutes identify him simply as “farmer.” He and Taylor had moved to Foster from Knowlton and occupied a stone cottage with enough land for them to keep horses. Glassco recalled how one day in the late forties he, Taylor and a neighbour were exercising their horses in a field beside the Waterloo-Knowlton highway when a group of riders from Waterloo arrived and began to put on a performance which stopped traffic. Donations were offered by the spectators (all of $9.41!) and were turned over to a local church. Thus was born the Foster Horse Show with which Glassco was associated throughout the 1950s.
An authoritative biography of John Glassco has yet to be written, but when it is it will have to take into account the intense and intimate interaction between the rural world and poetic temperament. Like William Wordsworth, Glassco sought meaning and consolation in the world of nature, even though the meaning constantly eluded him. In “Luce’s Notch,” a poem which first appeared in 1964, Glassco recalls a time 15 years past when he walked beside his straining horse up what is now Paramount Road, then over the western shoulder of Foster Mountain and down into St. Etienne de Bolton. From the height of land in the notch above the Glen, he sees that beauty persists, but that he will not, that his life, measured by “old Foster’s blind, tree-sprinkled head,” is “a mere breath, a nothing, an illusion.”
The inexorable action of time, decay were his great poetic subjects and he saw in the Townships landscape abundant evidence to demonstrate how easily human aspirations fall victim to pride, greed, incompetence and misfortune. This is an occasion for sadness, or rage, or even satire, and for wonderment too. Despite the silent ruins of deserted buildings under Shefford Mountain sinking into the soil, tossed “Between God and absurdity,” he loves them anyway, “ragged” though they may be. Nature, for Glassco, did not offer an easy remedy for the pain of living; rather it accentuated his “transient vision” and the frailty of all human endeavor. His sense of place was profound and troubled, and nature resisted his desire to possess it. Yet none of the poems could have been written had Glassco not also been aware of the “mute, breathing beauty of the world.”
Like Brill Road, even now, the other side may not be accessible. There are ruins and there are mansions, “the grandiose design /Must marry the ragged thing,” the ultimate vision follows a wavering line through extremes of creation and destruction.
When he died, his ashes were cast over a stream in Foster. He could never possess nature, but in the end nature possessed him.
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