John Glassco’s Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse by Philip Kokotailo (review)

162 LEITERS IN CANADA 1988 tions with writing and reading. Such a view seems more convincing than York's claim that it would be inappropriate to find such patterns of development in Munro, the first writer she discusses. Munro herselffeels that her style and outlook have altered over the years, and it seems reasonable to suppose that her use of photography has also changed to some degree. The subject of photography in fiction could be approached in terms of specific references to photographs in each literary work, or the focus could be widened to include a broader consideration of the analogies in creative method between photography and fiction. It is a tribute to York's comprehensive and ambitious view of her subject that she undertakes both tasks, but she is sometimes not entirely persuasive in making the latter kind of claim. For example, York demonstrates very convincingly that photographs and photographers matter as' a source of metaphor in Munro's stories, but it is less evident that Munro has an essentially 'photographic vision' (that phrase is used several times). Such reservations as I have just expressed do not detract from the general excellence of York's work. The book is a unified study rather than a succession of discrete chapters: each author is carefully related both to the theoretical context and to the writers who have been previously examined; the introductory sections of each chapter look back as well as forward, and are also strengthened by extensive and effective use of interviews with each writer. York's imaginative ability to draw comparisons between the chosen authors and a remarkable range C?f British and American writers who employ photographic images is a considerable asset in giving her study a broader basis and maintaining reader interest. It is probably no accident that the most extended analyses are devoted to what are commonly regarded as major texts: Lives of Girls and Women, The Wars, Coming Through Slaughter, The Diviners. In reinterpreting such figures as the photographer in the Epilogue to Lives, or Bellocq in Slaughter, York compels us to look at these works in new ways. Thanks to York, we are able to see that the artist with a camera within the text is central to an understanding of the artist with a pen who wrote the text. (THOMAS E. TAUSKY) Philip Kokotailo. John Glassco's Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse . ECW Press. 126. $24.00; $14.00 paper This book shows again the rich yield that is still possible in Canadian research, with fresh subject matter, prime sources as yet untouched, and original finds leading to large implications and conclusions. Several capable scholars have been working on the John Glassco papers, probably knocking their heads together at the National Library in HUMANITIES 163 Ottawa, and their joint findings have contributed something to this lucid, exciting - even shocking - account of the composition of Memoirs of Montparnasse. Philip Kokotailo first brings together all the evidence of Glassco's use of 'subterfuge' in his famous memoirs. Glassco believed in the 'lie direct' as well as the lie by artifice, in accord with the doubtful doctrines of the decadent aesthetes ofthe last century, Oscar Wilde, Frank Harris, George Moore, and others who, cut off from the workaday world of business and politics, actually believed that 'the art of lying' was a lost art. The central lie in Glassco's fabrications is to be found in the prefatory note to the published Memoirs, where he tells us that the first three chapters were written in Paris in 1928 (when he was but eighteen years of age) and the remaining twenty-three chapters at the Royal Victoria Hospital in the winter of 1932-3. As the research amply shows, from many lines of evidence, no part of the finished book was written in those years. It was all composed and revised thirty years later, during the 1960s. The reverberations ofthis falsehood can be traced in two directions: one is moral, the other artistic. On the moral side, which need not detain us, the lie deceived his publishers (Oxford), who allowed the prefatory note to stand in the book; and they deceived Leon Edel and several other critics...