[citation needed] At the age of 17, Glassco left McGill without graduating to travel to Paris with his friend, Graeme Taylor.
In the notes to the edition republished in 2007, further characters are identified as thinly disguised descriptions of Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim and others.
Glassco was bisexual, and, in the words of Leon Edel, "a bit frightened by certain kinds of women and nearly always delighted if he could establish a triangle.
[6] The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature says of his poetry: Glassco's poems — unlike his prose — are largely concerned with ... life in the Eastern Townships ... full of images of derelict farmhouses and decaying roads that peter out in the bush; but reflections on the human condition are never far away from the descriptions of the countryside, so that the life of the land and the lives of people are woven together....
Some provide a link with his prose by moving into the mythology of literature and history: 'The death of Don Quixote' and 'Brummel at Calais' show Glassco as a master of echoes, and of parody and pastiche in the best sense; they evoke the philosophy of the nineteenth-century dandy and decadent (Brummel, Baudelaire, Wilde) that is also evident in his prose writings.
[7] He also translated the work of three French-Canadian novelists: Monique Bosco (Lot's wife / La femme de Loth, 1975) Jean-Yves Soucy (Creature of the chase / Un dieu chasseur, 1979), and Jean-Charles Harvey (Fear's folly / Les demi-civilisés, 1982).
[9] Glassco's The Temple of Pederasty, on the theme of sado-masochism and male homosexuality, was similarly ascribed to Ihara Saikaku with "translation" by the wholly fictitious "Hideki Okada".