Scott, Irving Layton, Malcolm Cowley, and Leon Edel, among others. Glassco’s letters are addressed to a veritable who’s who of Canadian and international literati: the Margarets (Atwood and Laurence), Northrop Frye, F.R. “Dearest, there’s nothing to worry about: I didn’t finish, though I pretended to, with gasps.” Glassco closes the letter with the statement, “Otherwise no news.” Case in point: during a period of hospitalization for TB in 1961, Glassco wrote to Elma Koolmer, a woman he describes as his “one & only love” (they married the following year), about taking the virginity of a 20-year-old student nurse. Taken at face value, the figure that emerges from these missives is alternately playful, belligerent, witty, and ribald he can also appear as a shameless self-promoter and selfish cad.

His life and work were made fuller through deception, fabrication, and fantasy.” This makes reading The Heart Accepts It All, a selection of Glassco’s letters, something of an exercise in literary excavation, a careful sifting through accumulated gossip and personal detritus to try to separate truth from fancy.

“In private, they not only aided his survival but also allowed for the pursuit of relationships and interests not spoken of in polite company. In the introduction to A Gentleman of Pleasure, his 2011 biography of John Glassco, Brian Busby points out that the flamboyant memoirist, pornographer, poet, and flâneur characterized himself as “a great practitioner of deceit.” “Among his greatest powers were those of mimicry and self-transformation,” Busby writes.

A Gentleman of Pleasure by Brian Busby