Five glimpses of Leonard Cohen's short story "Barbers and Lovers", from the Spring 1971 issue of Ingluvin.
The artwork is by Susan Hales.
Five pages later, John Glassco offers "Saisons de l'avenir" and "The Marital Sex Education Film":
All three published once… and never again.
Irving told me of reading through John Glassco's things while visiting him (and strongly encouraging him to publish what became Memoirs of Montparnasse), and being taken aback at the porn. He was not a little annoyed at how HE is the one who stuck with "dirty old man" next to his name, when others such as Glassco were the real pornsters. PS: Irving could neither remember nor tell a dirty joke. He hated porn and smut, always drawing a distinction between erotica and porn.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this, Anna. Absolutely fascinating. I wonder whether Glassco's low profile might have had something to do with it all. He never gave readings and exercised discretion in his dalliances. The closest I think Glassco ever got to becoming CanLit's "dirty old man" (the title has to go to someone) was a 1976 Canadian article titled "The Elegant Pornographer". Either way, the monicker never stuck.
DeleteI should add that he always preferred the word "pornography" over "erotica", believing the latter to be a bit of a cop out. It was all about degrees, you understand. I side with Layton on this one.
"Barbers and Lovers" would fit in perfectly on my shelf, right next to "The Happy Hairdresser"
ReplyDeleteWell, they are related, I suppose. But, really, it would be like shelving St Urbain's Horseman next to Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street.
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