Glenn Gould (11 page)

Neither view survives the advent of modernity, but traces of both remain, and more than just etymologically. Even when no
longer allied to the specific aims of a church or sect, non-vocal music remains the most ethereal of art forms, the one most immune from the didactic or representational traps that await artists working in other media. Its structural elements are more pliable than the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, weaving tone, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and tempo—together with volume—into an apparently infinite range of possibilities. It is hard to imagine a more infinite game than the one we play at the keyboard, where every beginning and ending marks an episode but not an end, still less a victory or defeat.

Except, of course, that the score stands before us, an already scripted pathway through those possibilities. An interpretation may play with the precise margins and texture of the pathway, but it cannot deviate from it without, in some sense, ceasing to play the piece. This is why some musicians consider that only improvised performances really count as playing music; the rest is recitation. There is courage in this, a striking-off into uncharted—indeed, never to be charted, unless there is a recording—musical territory. The improviser makes it up as he or she goes along, and the basic temporality of music, the structure of anticipation and resolution, is even more firmly than usual placed in the negotiation of the moment, rather than residing—or perhaps hiding?—in the architecture of the score.

Calling other players fearful, the score their crutch, is going too far. But is there not something secure and comforting— something that enwombs the player—in the certainty of even a very difficult score? The piece cradles the player, who, in the playing, is safe from anything outside the score because there
is
nothing outside the score. The way is marked; one need only follow—if one can. And because playing the music exercises in the player, during these moments, the many hours of practice, the highly refined muscle memory of one mind's physical cognition, this play is actually a distillate of repetition. Gould strikes this one key this one time—attack and release—because he has struck that same key, in that same sequence, a thousand times before. This is the ultimate rest for the ultimate control freak, a safe haven of extreme difficulty traversed with calm mastery. Serious play.

It is not possible, now, to confirm the suspicion that Gould had Asperger syndrome, a form of autism that leaves cognitive and linguistic function relatively intact but manifests in anti-social behaviour and, often, distinctive physical tics.

The syndrome itself, first included in the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual in 1994, is far from stable as a medical category: symptoms cover a wide range and often indicate other conditions. More seriously, the claim that Gould had the condition is now beyond the possibility of verification and, hence, is without a truth value. It is neither true nor false, and will remain that way forever. Nevertheless, Glenn Gould as Prize Asperger Exhibit remains a popular theory in efforts to explain—sometimes, indeed, to explain away—his combination of genius and peculiarity. Like many people with Asperger syndrome, but also like most first-rate musicians, Gould excelled at repetitive execution and feats of rote memory. He had limited interests and an intense, even compulsive focus on those few that drove him. He indulged in
social withdrawal both privately and publicly. Certainly he had an eccentric personality. If his lifetime of devotion to his much-renovated Steinway piano, CD 318, is included, he may also have exhibited “idiosyncratic attachment to inanimate objects,” as the diagnostic literature phrases it.
⁶¹

All this proves nothing. Even supposing Gould did have Asperger syndrome, what difference can it make? It does not explain the appeal of his playing any more than a biomechanical, or indeed a sociobiological, account would. The only conceivable value in thinking that Gould was an
aspie
(as those with the condition call themselves) is so that he may join the list of gifted persons likewise thought to inhabit the category—a roster that includes, according to one cheerful source, philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Ludwig Wittgenstein, filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton, mathematician Alan Turing, inventor Nikola Tesla, golfer Moe Norman, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Steve Carlton, new-wave musician Gary Numan, and Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol.
⁶²
Now here is a diverting sort of game to play with the idea of eccentric genius! Another, even more expansive list cites Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Mozart, Beethoven, Isaac Newton, Henry Ford, Kafka, Mahler, Nietzsche, Kandinsky, Alfred Hitchcock, Bobby Fischer, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Al Gore, Keanu Reeves,
and, in a double-play Steve Carlton would have appreciated, both
Peanuts
prime mover Charles Schulz and Muppets mastermind Jim Henson.
⁶³

Well, sure—why not? At this point, Asperger syndrome begins to resemble the proverbial mean-spirited society column, where the only thing worse than being mentioned is not being mentioned. What self-respecting creative person could resist having at least one or two symptoms to get them onto that list? Moreover, even if we assume that these lists enjoy some theoretical clinical validity—a large caveat, since they don't and can't enjoy any such thing—the invocation of Asperger syndrome as an explanatory frame is at this point discredited. No diagnostic category wide enough to capture that many diverse creative individuals, not to mention the many thousands of actually diagnosed but unfamous individuals, is narrow enough to tell us anything interesting about any one of them. For that, we have to look at them in the usual way, which is under the sign of their own achievements. There, and nowhere else, is the game of play played correctly.

Since the early 1950s Gould had been taking prescription drugs of various kinds, mainly for anxiety and associated bodily symptoms. By the end of his life he was also ingesting a varied cocktail of pills for blood pressure, anxiety, sleep
disorder, and general unease. In addition to drugs such as Valium, obtained by prescription from various doctors, sometimes unbeknownst to each other, Gould took all manner of over-the-counter painkillers, sleep aids, vitamins, and dietary supplements. His self-medicating cycles were idiosyncratic and unpredictable, involving drugs taken to offset the effects of other drugs, the addition of new drugs to counter symptoms that emerged from the last drug, and so on. In the recording studio, right from the start, the colour-coded bottles and pills were as much a standard feature of Gould's apparatus of genius as the muffler and gloves, the curious chair, the arrowroot biscuits, and the bottles of mineral water.

This was no mere tic, however. Gould's hypochondria and general anxiety created a spiral of addiction in which symptom became indistinguishable from cure, where all illness was iatrogenic, the medication made into the disease. (Compare Roman poet Martial's ancient wisdom on the issue: “Before you came, a fever I had not. But then you saw me, thanks a lot.”) Certain features of Gould's constitution were evident early, and this pharmacopoeia endgame can obscure the real suffering at its root. An odd incident in 1959 opens a chapter that ends only in the late 1970s and Gould's decline into death.

On December 8 of that year Gould was in New York to visit the technicians at the Steinway company. His beloved CD 318 was in need of an overhaul, one of several virtual rebuildings it would receive over its lifetime of association with Gould, who favoured the light action of its keyboard and the clarity of its sound. He would later joke that critics derided him for playing a piano that was tuned and balanced to sound like a harpsichord, but his reasoning here is very clear and in the service of his general philosophy of music. “I don't happen to like the piano as an instrument,” Gould told an interviewer in 1964. “I prefer the harpsichord.”
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He had earlier said that CD 318 “is quite unlike almost any other in the world, an extremely solicitous piano with a tactile immediacy almost like a harpsichord's. It gives me a sensation of being so close to the strings and so much in control of everything, whereas modern pianos seem to have power steering—they drive you instead of the other way around.”
⁶⁵
On this occasion, speaking to several Steinway employees, Gould was greeted by William Hupfer, the chief technician, with a friendly slap on the back.

Accounts differ on how hard the slap was, whether it was indeed a slap, and so on. What is certain is that Hupfer made contact with Gould, who recoiled and began complaining of severe pain. Much speculation is directed at
whether this renewed an early childhood injury to his back, when he fell in the family boat, or perhaps invoked it in some psychosomatic fashion. In any event, and despite a doctor's report that there was no evidence of injury, Gould began complaining of serious harm, claiming numbness in the fingers of his left hand as well as ache in the shoulder. It's possible the blow, or its imagined effect, aggravated a repetitive strain injury already troubling Gould. For his part, he claimed Hupfer had dislodged his shoulder blade. He began daily orthopedic and chiropractic treatments and cancelled numerous concert appearances even while, in other periods, he went on performing with apparent vigour.

In the spring of 1960 an orthopedic surgeon in Philadelphia, Irwin Stein, agreed to put Gould in an upper-body cast, his left arm elevated over his head. Gould assumed this bizarre hailing posture for a month, a period of discomfort that left him with an irrational dislike of the city of brotherly love, where he would cancel a concert the next year. Indeed, the Hupfer slap now provided Gould with an excuse to cancel or avoid any commitment he did not care for, from shaking hands with strangers to the entirety of his 1960 European tour.

It also gave him sufficient cause to bring suit against Steinway. Just two days short of a year after the slap, on
December 6, 1960, he filed suit against Hupfer and the company, demanding $300,000 in personal damages. The company responded by revoking his status as a Steinway artist and banning him from the Steinway hall. The following summer, in August 1961, the dispute was resolved out of court, with Gould finally agreeing to accept recovery of his legal and medical expenses: $9,372.35. He was restored to good standing as a member of the Steinway stable—but employees were now expressly forbidden to shake his hand. Backslaps are not specified but were, one imagines, suppressed
a fortiori
.

Eighteen years later, in June 1977, Gould began to experience a breakdown of control over his hands, numbness, and dysfunction similar to that resulting from—we cannot fairly say caused by—the Hupfer slap. This time, however, there was no Hupfer, and Gould was unable to externalize his unease, still less to sue anyone. Instead, and now characteristically, Gould internalized it. His diaries from this period show a long series of experiments, reported in pseudoscientific language, attempting to diagnose the flaw in his physical mechanism. Gould dismantled his playing the way a slumping golf professional demolishes and then tries to rebuild his swing, even going so far as to alter his facial expressions as a way of shaking loose his wayward fingers.

The results were predictably unhappy. Despite the fact that some of Gould's most treasured recordings were still to come, notably of course the 1981
Variations,
the diaries indicate that he never resolved the problem to his own satisfaction. The diary entries stop on July 12, 1978. Though he resumed recording in May 1979, and concentrated on radio production, conducting, and published defences of his various ideas, it may be thought that he was never again rationally satisfied with his playing. That he could play at all might be considered a victory. Other masters of repetitive movement often find themselves paralyzed by the press of analysis, such that the most habitual movement in the world becomes itself impossible—one thinks here of the golfer Ian Baker-Finch, whose career exploded when he could no longer execute his easy swing in competitive environments, or the New York Mets catcher Mackey Sasser, who one day found himself unable to toss the baseball back to the pitcher after a ball or strike.

Gould was well aware of this problem. In several interviews and publications throughout his career, he refers to it as “the centipede conundrum,” from the childhood wisdom that a centipede knows perfectly well how to deploy its hundred feet—unless and until it is asked to explain how. “I don't want to think too much about my playing,” he said
when asked about, for example, his humming, “or else I'll get like that centipede who was asked which foot he moved first and became paralyzed, just thinking about it.”
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In repeated invocations of this wisdom, along with increasingly polished anecdotes about performing difficult pieces only with the aid of a nearby vacuum cleaner or radio or television, Gould attempted to defend an idea of music as essentially mental. That is, music's reality is abstract and it is recalled or reconstructed in the mind as the necessary condition of performance—which is now considered at best the smooth and unobtrusive vehicle of music's delivery. Indeed, we can note here how often Gould, the passionate driver, uses vehicular metaphors to discuss music: a good piano is like a car with rack-and-pinion steering; a good performance is like a tight rather than loose car in a competitive race. And in one of the cherished anecdotes—told at least three times in print and dubbed by author Geoffrey Payzant “The Chickering in the Desert”—Gould describes driving his Hertz rental car into the Israeli desert in order to put himself back in touch with a piano action he likes, and so to think his way back into performing comfortably on a slack-action piano he encountered in Tel Aviv during his 1958 tour of Israel.
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When performance becomes conscious of itself as performance, the lucid mediation between thought and
sound is broken, and the tripping begins. Thus the necessary distractions offered by closed eyes, bodily swaying, humming, and even external noise—though with the last we surely approach the margin of unintelligibility, since, as Payzant notes, “Not even Gould's most faithful readers could be expected to agree that music sounds better when it cannot be heard.”
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Even those of us exercising much lesser gifts of physical coordination can appreciate the basic problem, and do so even if we are not persuaded by this version of Gould's musical idealism (which was in any case inconsistently maintained). Thought becomes the enemy of action when action depends on second nature. “Don't think too much out there,” a coach will tell his baseball players, well knowing that a pause for reflection between pitch and swing, or between contact and shortstop, is the recipe for error.