As with Abernethy’s sculpture, Gould, the idea, the subject, is always in motion, too. The Gould canon, a sizable enough collection while he was alive, has grown impressively in the years since his death in 1982. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Why, yes, I have a book on Glenn Gould.” It’s always, “I have several — well, quite a few actually.” But as Gould is discovered by a new generation of academics — the majority not around when he rocketed to world fame in the mid-1950s, and unencumbered by any personal contact with him — many are apt to see him in the broader context of popular culture. I’ve seen his name associated with the word hipster on occasion, and I get why, although I’m certain Gould himself would not. How else do you describe a brilliant recluse with shaggy hair who loved to drive big, shiny American cars out in the restless night, his pockets stuffed with uppers and downers, the radio picking up sad songs?
Those who are curious about Glenn Gould and dig deeper might be taken aback by just how many Gould narratives there are. The reason for this, of course, is his protean productivity on so many fronts: his recordings, wide-ranging in content and almost unrivalled in number; his intelligence and restless inquisitiveness, made public via his radio and TV appearances; his written essays and their rococo convolutions; and the logic-defying contradictions of his life. All of these aspects of Gould’s life have given rise to any number of narrative approaches. Hence, the themes-and-variations method for organizing any account of Gould, such as Otto Friedrich’s early biography, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, or Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, François Girard’s episodic film biography, or Georges Leroux’s Partita for Glenn Gould, whose introductory section, “Praeludium,” is followed by a “Toccata” then an “Allemande” and so on in musical fashion.
Ever the control freak, throughout his life Gould allowed the public, friends, and even lovers only glimpses of the private Gould. Over the years he left rooms full of scribbled sheets behind — notes, lists, one revision after another revision, the good revealed here, the bad there, but almost never anything one could consider reflective, overall. On July 30, 1952, when Gould was filling out his biographical data sheet at the CBC, he left answers to many of the questions blank. After What is your favourite amusement? Blank. After What was the most dramatic moment of your career? Blank. Under what circumstances do you like to prepare your program? Blank. What attracted you to radio? Blank. Blank for first audition. Blank for current programs. Blank for current sport. Blank. Blank. Blank.
Goulds Galore
Many believe the Gould enigma is one code that is not likely to be cracked — a view encouraged by Gould himself. It accounts for the paucity of intimate personal detail in his voluminous notes about, say, his love life, for just one instance. Peter F. Ostwald, the German-born American violinist/psychiatrist who counselled Gould as a friend over the years, called this the “diffusion of Gould’s identity” in Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, a startling portrait of the artist in rapid decline. In the womb-like atmosphere of the radio studio, Ostwald says, Gould went through “a certain loss of the primary image of himself as a pianist, an image that had been built up in childhood under his mother’s guidance.”
The narrative of Gould that’s best known focuses on his career highs and lows: the discovery of a brilliant pianist whose 1955 recording of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations may well be the greatest classical recording of all time; then, watching as the freaky artist walks away from a multi-million-dollar career. And, well … that’s it. Well, not entirely. This particular narrative is enriched by circumstances surrounding his 1981 Goldberg recording, its autumnal atmosphere seemingly foreshadowing his death a year later.
The second narrative, Glenn Gould as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists, is of concern to a distressingly diminishing number of classical music cognoscenti. While generally impressed by the volume and scope of Gould’s recording activities, they remain unimpressed by what they feel is the inconsistency of its quality. They will point to senior elite pianists, from Vladimir Ashkenazy to Anton Kuerti, who insist that many of Gould’s performances are flat out wrongheaded. Several composers of works performed by Gould — the Czech-Canadian Oskar Morawetz, for example — have asserted the same thing: that Gould ignored basic musical signage to swerve off-road and do his own thing. Then there are the bootlegs of live concerts, and rumours about tapes of private recordings.
Story three: call it “Glenn Gould: YouTube Star.” Watching Gould live, still exhilarating, leaves still more unanswered questions. The narrative of Gould’s brief, incendiary, fretful, problematic, erratic, and eventually discontinued concert career — I mean the story of the concerts themselves before and after his dramatic early visit to the Soviet Union — may well constitute the greatest Glenn Gould unknown of them all, one that transcended his growing awareness of discomfort — psychological, physical, and aesthetic — with the process.
The fourth story (major film potential here) concerns the private, sexual Glenn Gould. This topic has seemingly lost its intrigue, having been exposed to some degree by Michael Clarkson, a journalist (and one-time Toronto Star colleague of mine) who established that Cornelia Foss, even while married to composer Lukas Foss, remained Gould’s mistress until his idiosyncrasies drove her back to her composer husband. Gould’s earlier historians tended to turn a blind eye to Gould’s sex life — well, some of them peeped, but only a little — even though Gould didn’t avoid discussing sex in his writing and thinking and yearning for Petula Clark and Barbra Streisand. That Gould might be gay has gained even less traction, although throughout his life he liked to have a guy pal, a buddy, close at his side, whether it was Ray Roberts, his hired factotum or Lorne Tulk, whom Gould considered a brother. As with some other artists — Goya, Mozart, Miles Davis, Dylan — turbulence in Gould’s private life seems to have energized his imagination. It was against the background of the disintegration of his life with Cornelia and her two children that Gould was at his most productive and, in public, his most upbeat.
Moody blue.
Story five explores Gould and Peter Pan, or more so Gould as Peter Pan. Gould didn’t cling to his childhood as much as it clung to him. He lived with his parents in their city home into his thirties, and he would repeatedly over the years retreat to the family cottage and memories from his childhood. He was close with his cousin, Jessie Greig, seven years older, who lived with the Goulds in Toronto while she went to teacher’s college. But the chilling of his friendship with Robert Fulford, his next door neighbour as a kid, left something missing in his later life, although that happened when they were both older, as Fulford points out, and were living radically different lives: Fulford by then was married with children, Gould an international music superstar.
Then there are the animals in his life. The first major news stories about him show him surrounded by his menagerie of pets. His last letter is about his abiding love of animals. One of his legacies is his gift to the Humane Society in Toronto. And the most beautifully lunatic moment — one I love him for more than any other — is when he tried to get a pack of watchful pachyderms to sing in German at the Toronto Zoo in 1978, in a scene appearing in the documentary film Glenn Gould’s Toronto.
Anyone writing about Gould needs to understand that whatever direction he or she takes, it is likely to lead to Gould having been there first. Once you’ve rounded this or that corner in some narrative, have solved this or that puzzle — or not — you’ll likely find he’s been there to elucidate in his words what you have just discovered. But not always. Because sometimes Gould buried the truth, unconsciously or deliberately, or somewhere in between; Gould’s archived scribbles and notes