Back to the statue for a minute. Each Gould narrative is located where it should be. Abernethy’s statue places Gould’s media being at the CBC, which was home to him — another home. He had a desk at the CBC Radio offices. He sent letters on CBC letterhead, correspondence to fans from Bloomington to Auckland or to Madame Pablo Casals. As a return address he gave CBC Radio’s, 354 Jarvis Street. He kidded with the chatty ladies in the basement cafeteria: they were more likely the reason he was there than the food itself. Some nights when he was working on something, he could be found pacing up and down the CBC corridors, his very own version of Batman, coat flapping. A story I heard during my days there was how Gould, on a whim, intended to fill in for a newsreader when the one on the schedule was late turning up. He understood — he felt — his CBC audience, a crowd already familiar with his lightly mocking tone, his role-playing, his quirks and prejudices and love of words. There’s an intimacy there.
As well, the statue remains resolutely in the present tense through the varied, unpredictable, yet inevitably joyful interactions people have with it, a contrast with the image of him in his final years, with everyone hearing more and more reports of his poor health, torn soul, wrecked body, nighthawk hours, unfulfilled loves, and sunken dreams.
The last time I was passing by the CBC — when music was on my mind and not the Jays’ relief pitching (the building’s nearness to Toronto’s baseball stadium notwithstanding) — what I found myself thinking about wasn’t any of Gould’s iconic recordings — the Brahms Intermezzi, say — but his late-sixties recording of Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This playing could’ve made the rock ’n’ roll charts because it’s soaked in show business swagger and sweat, starting with the motor-rhythmic drive worthy of Oscar Peterson riffing at full throttle right from the signature Da da da — DUM opening. (“You are too dumb,” Beethoven is supposed to have said when asked about the meaning of the opening.) And something more: the Beethoven is another crazily brilliant choice on Gould’s part, a retro choice given that playing transcriptions died out when the arrival of recording gave everyone the chance to hear the real thing. Cheeky, this.
Chilly Gonzales sure understands. The energetic jazz pianist shows his love for Gould in a YouTube tribute for Gould’s birthday. This passion, as Gonzales points out, is a love of caricature and parody, “the superficial aspect” of Gould, who “paved the way” for other generations of eccentric piano geniuses. Gonzales is talking about Gonzales, of course, he of the Gould-like emerging paunch and receding hairline. But he’s also channelling Gould’s own practice of self-parody. In Gould’s liner notes for his recording of the Fifth — written by a Gould seemingly connecting with his inner tweedy Brit music critic — he writes: “Mr. Gould has been absent from British platforms these past few years and if this new CBS release is indicative of his current musical predilections perhaps it is just as well.”
Gonzales’s Gould riff is not isolated either. Young deejays are remixing Gould tracks. YouTube surfers are blown away listening to the relentless, heartbreaking attack of Gould’s strafing technique. Gould’s name pops up in rock star interviews from the likes of Neil Young and producer Bob Ezrin and Patti Smith. The latter claims “a deep, abstract relationship with him. You can feel his mind.”
Discovering Gould is an ongoing adventure on the internet. I came across a posted vignette that sounds so much like Gould. The story came from a piece that appeared originally in the September 1998 issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines’ in-flight magazine. It’s by an American writer, Barbara Abercrombie, and she describes the last months of her mother’s life. When she went into the hospital, Abercrombie says, “I bought her a CD player and she listened to Glenn Gould’s Beethoven piano sonatas over and over. But she wasn’t just listening; she was working — figuring out how to improve her own playing. ‘I play this part too fast,’ she said. ‘Oh, listen to how he does it.’”
CHAPTER TWO
Altered Egos
April 1, 1951, 8:00 p.m. EST
Max Ferguson (the announcer): We hope you enjoy Startime!
Orchestra: THEME UP FULL … FADE … HOLD
Ferguson: Every Sunday evening, the trans-Canada network of the CBC brings you Startime … an hour of entertainment especially designed to please the families of Canada …
Orchestra: THEME UP FULL AND OUT
Ferguson: Tonight Paul Scherman conducts the Startime orchestra and chorus … and our guests are the brilliant young soprano Lois Marshall … the European tenor Joseph Reiner … popular singer Norma Locke … and pianist Glenn Gould. And, as usual, the man who tells you all about the stars and the music is your Startime host, Frank Willis.
Willis: Although Glenn Gould is only eighteen — a fifth-form student at high school — he’s considered one of Canada’s most accomplished concert pianists.... Now, with the Startime orchestra, Glenn Gould plays the third movement — Rondo — from Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto.
Each Gould narrative has its own location. The kid genius is always associated with the cottage, the brilliant piano whiz kid with New York, a city he came to loathe. But Gould the media star will also be associated with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Gould grew up as the CBC grew up, a factor perhaps encouraging in him a greater sense of belonging to the broadcaster. Canada first gave licences for private radio stations in 1922, only to see many of the stations simply rebroadcast American content. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1936 and mandated to develop programming that was distinctly Canadian, a process accelerated in 1943 with the hiring of Andrew Allan as its new Supervisor of Drama.
Drama? Theatre? This while the Corporation had drama enough as part of its Second World War duties of reporting from the front and producing “plucky-us” documentaries?
A Scottish-born actor, director, and sometime radio announcer, Allan could best be described as something of a practical dandy, a charmer at cocktail parties, stylish, urbane, and a good drinker, but with a quiet resolve to make things happen the way he felt they should happen.
He’d already cultivated connections in New York and London, and was close to major Broadway stars such as Judith Evelyn, formerly of Winnipeg and Hollywood. But in following the CBC brass’s wishes to create “definitive” Canadian drama, Allan determinedly surrounded himself with a circle of Canadian writers who would go on to shape the CBC and Canadian culture for decades to come. Fletcher Markle, for one, remained a familiar name to anyone listening to the CBC for the thirty or so years after his 29:40 was first aired on January 23, 1944. This “dramatic essay” by Markle — in fact a radio play about being a radio play — initiated Allan’s Stage 44, the radio drama series that was to last twelve years, deep into the TV era. Then there was the polymath Lister Sinclair, and Len Peterson, whose prolific and provocative drama for Stage 44, They’re All Afraid, rankled CBC brass no end with its gloomy contradiction of the CBC’s aggressively affirmative approach to depicting Canada at war. (The row following the broadcasting of another Peterson play, The Man with a Bucket of Ashes, came close to getting Allan sacked.)
Allan later wrote in his autobiography: “My idea of being ‘definitive’ (which I had been told it must be) was to give writers their head, to let them write