Glenn Gould (12 page)

The curious thing about this danger is how much thought is implicit in the very idea of second nature. Aristotle appreciated the full force of the problem, even as he argued for the rationality of ethical action: in most cases, the desirable action will come as a matter of
phronesis
, practical wisdom or know-how, not extended philosophical reflection. But this know-how—one of the main virtues of thought—is itself the distillate of painstaking thought and
investment of time. You have to do the reflecting first, as well as imitating and practising what is good. Then, and only then, will you be ready to act rather than to think, to act in a sense without thought but really
beyond
thought. In successful performance we become vessels of the desirable, not articulators of it. Articulation would, at that moment, prevent success.

One can speculate endlessly about the causes of Gould's late-career breakdown; everything from the recent death of his perfectionist mother to the routine pressures of middle age has been cited. And it is surely the case that his hypochondria, combined with the cycles of self-medication, anxiety, and (importantly) the means to indulge these, created its own toxic energy. But I think the simplest explanation is both the best and the most frightening. Gould was caught in a control freak's nightmare. Even as he struggled to fix something he felt was broken, he was attacked by new waves of misgiving about whether the steps he was taking to solution were actually making the problem worse. Not only was his playing stalled by thought, in other words—he had become the centipede—but, far worse, the thought itself had become stalled, recursive and self-negating at every moment. This is the energy of consciousness bent back upon its bearer.

There was, and could have been, no resolution to Gould's malady because, by its own definition, resolution could only mean further thought; and thought was itself the malady. There is no cure for that, because, even were he able to frame this last thought, the one concerning thought's self-violence, no escape is thereby made available—except in the obliteration of all thought, of the very fact of consciousness. Until then, there could be only further imprisonment in the labyrinth of reflection.

Music has been thought sacred. It has been thought edifying. It has also been viewed as a site of struggle, an agon both personal and social.

Despite music's allegedly divine provenance, its players have, for most of recorded history, met with indifference or even disdain from their audiences, their abilities even sometimes rated as a form of menial labour. Aristotle considered musicians vulgar and untrustworthy—the ancient sanction for the still-common view of the player as, well, a player. Until very late in the history of the West, music-makers could claim a status no higher than domestic servants. “In the 17th century a prince kept his musicians as he might keep his stable,” Johan Huizinga notes. “Everybody knows that even Haydn still wore livery at the Esterhazys and received his orders daily from the Prince.”
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The silent reverence and programmed applause of the contemporary concert hall is of a very recent vintage, and may with time be regarded as one more blip in the history of music's production
and appreciation. What once was a boisterous and sometimes drunken scene of performance and revelry, the medieval banquet hall, developed into the less lively but still unrapt chamber-music evening at court and, from there, via the long inevitable arc of democratization, into the secular church of the modern symphony orchestra or staged piano recital, with its strict rituals and code of manners.

Beneath the polite surface of the audience, in whose number a cough or sneeze may be considered unacceptable, there runs a deep silent current of confrontation. Those who decry—rightly enough—the pressure-cooker music contests of our era, where besuited youngsters, perspiring over violins or pianos, are set against one another like so many performing animals, might care to remember that head-to-head competition has been a feature of music at least since Apollo stood against Marsyas to see whose lyre skills were superior. Centuries later, in 1709, Cardinal Ottoboni set Handel and Scarlatti against each other, wielding harpsichord and organ respectively. In 1717 Augustus the Strong, king of Saxony and Poland, arranged a contest between J.S. Bach and a non-entity named Marchand, who had the grace, or wisdom, not to show up. London society was abuzz in 1726 because of the struggle between rival Italian singers Faustina and Cuzzoni.

Nor is the competition restricted to individuals and their abilities. Musical taste is a social marker, a sign of position and sophistication. Tiffs between schools or composers dominate the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Gould himself arrived on the mid-twentieth-century music scene amid a lively battle over twelve-tone composition, of which he was an early proponent despite the apparent bias in his recorded work for baroque and classical styles. His half-century lifespan ranged over the massive proliferation of new popular music styles, together with the arguments, put-downs, fashions, and disdain that are so much a part of anyone's engagement with popular music, the stuff of late-night disputation and rude magazine columns.
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While Gould, like most classical musicians, was largely immune to the sort of argument that pits fans of one group against those of another, closely similar group—Freud's narcissism of minor differences crossed with Veblen's insatiable desire for social distinction—even he could not resist the impulse to praise Petula Clark in contrast to the Beatles.
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The gist of his typically puckish and verbose argument, delivered as a 1967 essay for
High Fidelity,
was that Clark's music, especially “Downtown” and “Who Am I?,” was in the post-Mendelssohn tradition, effectively joining downbeat sentiments with upbeat melody, while the Beatles'
quasi-orchestral experiments struck him as meretricious. “They went about sabotaging the seats of tonal power and piety with the same opportunism that, in
Room at the Top,
motivated Laurence Harvey in his seduction of Donald Wolfit's daughter,” he wrote of the Liverpool quartet. “Their career has been one long send-up of the equation: sophistication = chromatic extension. The willful, dominant prolongations and false tonic releases to which they subject us … are merely symptomatic of a cavalier disinclination to observe the psychological properties of tonal background.” If his tendencies were not already clear, Gould went on to note how “coffeehouse intellectuals” had taken up the Beatles in the 1960s just as they “talked themselves into Charlie Parker in the forties and Lennie Tristano in the fifties.”
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It is against this kind of cultural-critical background that we must assess Gould's claim to be “the last puritan.” In 1976 he published in
High Fidelity
—now something of a house organ for Gouldian
pronunciamenti
—an interview with himself. (Part of this interview is dramatized by Colm Feore in one of Girard's
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
.)

This was not the first time Gould had indulged this particular conceit. He had done a shorter self-interview,
in 1972, about Beethoven, in which he (or “he”) analyzed “schizophrenic tendencies” in his playing of the great romantic composer's music, which he did not like, as against Gibbons's, which he emphatically did. The main point is that one may play a disliked composer well, but only apparently at some psychic cost.

The later self-interview was more wide-ranging and expansive, a summing-up of Gould's late-career thoughts about recording, performance, the future, and music. It was filled, perhaps to overflowing, with his particular brand of self-referential wit. The most striking feature of the performance, however, was a sudden veering into moral and political territory just past the two-thirds mark. After explaining that battleship grey was his favourite colour, the interviewed Gould was asked by the interviewing one whether he was in favour of censorship. “You do realize, of course, that you're beginning to talk like a character out of Orwell?” he said. To which the answering Gould responded, “Oh, the Orwellian world holds no particular terrors for me. … It's the post-Renaissance tradition [of individual freedom] that has brought the Western world to the brink of destruction. … It's only in cultures that, by accident or good management, by-passed the Renaissance which see art for the menace it really is.”
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Art is a menace because it separates word from deed, encouraging a perception that there is no harm in words alone, together with a predilection for moral qualification that allows us to minimize our own inherent violence. Thus Gould's claim, made here as a repetition of an earlier assertion, that he, “rather than Mr. Santayana's hero,” was
the last puritan
. It is a peculiar assertion in more than one way. Even his own contemporaries might have found the allusion a bit esoteric, if not precious; later readers would find it baffling. The American philosopher George Santayana, perhaps most famous for saying that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is known for his skill in writing essays but not for writing fiction. His autobiographical 1935 novel,
The Last Puritan,
is now almost forgotten, but it was a resounding success with readers at its time. Indeed, it ranked just behind Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
in the bestseller lists of mid-1930s America. The main character, Oliver Alden, embodies an inner conflict that Santayana believed typical of twentieth-century America. Alden, replicating many of Santayana's own experiences, is torn between a sense of pure duty derived from the Puritan tradition and the desire-machinery of the new materialistic age. In effect, the story is a sustained critique of the tragic incoherence of that ideological bill of goods, the American
Dream. (It is worth noting in passing that Santayana, an able and prolific aphorist, had this to say about music: “Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.” A sentiment with which I agree, even if Gould might not.)

As with most of his provocations, Gould made his assertion more than once. It became part of his personal mythology and his standard self-display. In addition to recurring mentions of puritanism in general, Gould's claim to being the last one was repeated in a film script for a 1979 CBC documentary about Toronto. When made, the film contained a now-celebrated scene of Gould singing Mahler to an elephant at the Toronto Zoo; it also received perhaps the most devastating one-liner review in television history: “Dracula lives as tour guide to Toronto.”
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Gould's youthful good looks, approaching beauty, were in full evidence on early Columbia LP covers; he had by the 1970s unfortunately declined into a ghoulish heaviness, balding and large-spectacled, possibly in part as a result of drug use.

Gould's original script for the film was almost 45,000 words—for reference, about 10,000 words longer than the present book—but was cut down for filming, and an abridged text was published in 1981. “But you have to understand that, as an anti-athletic, non-concertgoing teetotaller, I approve of
all [civic moralistic] restrictions,” Gould said in the film. “So I always felt that ‘Toronto the Good' was a very nice nickname. On the other hand, a lot of my fellow citizens became very upset about it and tried to prove that we could be just as bad as any other place.”
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Like most Torontonians, Gould felt moved to defend his hometown only when those from elsewhere criticized it. A letter (September 18, 1964) from William Wright, then editor of
Holiday
magazine, to Montreal novelist Mordecai Richler made this clear: “I had dinner last night with Glenn Gould,” Wright wrote, “who is full of curiosity about you. He thinks you are a meany and a bully. I assured him you were neither, but just felt Toronto was improvable.”
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In the midst of this Torontocentric meditation, then, the large claim: “I, perhaps, rather than the hero of George Santayana's famous novel, am ‘the last puritan.'” It is not at all obvious what this means, whether Gould was really suggesting kinship with Oliver Alden or merely using a phrase whose general resonance he liked. Whatever his actual knowledge of Santayana's novel, though, I think we can say that Gould sought here to identify with one important strand of the Reformation tradition. He wanted to see all aesthetic judgments as, in fact, moral ones, and regarded the notion of individual freedom, especially as a mere function of desire, with
suspicion. Thus his reported pleasure in eliminating theatrical elements from Mozart's music. Yet Glenn Gould was, surely, in his cloud of hyper-conscious self-presentation, disappearing, and posturing, one of the most theatrical people who ever lived, the Garbo of St. Clair Avenue. Like most puritans, he was a dandy of his own convictions, fussy, precise, and censorious. The reverse relation also holds true: every dandy is a puritan of
his
own aesthetic convictions. From this vantage, Gould's increasingly elaborate image-projection—the habitual clothing, the spectral existence as a nocturnal monk of art, telephoning and recording in solitude—veered close to camp.
⁷⁷

At the same time, Gould was genuinely tortured by a sense of duty to something other than himself, acutely conscious of the duty of genius. These ethico-aesthetic commitments were now deployed as one more variation on his perpetual theme of why he no longer performed. The interview itself, he said, was just such a play of variation upon theme: though we seem to have left the ostensible subject (concert performance) for another one (freedom and censorship), in truth we have been circling back upon it, again and again, all the while.

So what, exactly, is the theme? “It's simply that, as I indicated, I've never understood the preoccupation with freedom as it's reckoned in the Western world. So far as
I can see, freedom of movement usually has to do only with mobility, and freedom of speech most frequently with socially sanctioned verbal aggression, and to be incarcerated would be the perfect test of one's inner mobility and of the strength which would enable one to opt creatively out of the human situation.”
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He would willingly submit to such imprisonment, provided certain conditions were met. The cell would have to be painted battleship grey. And he would have to maintain close control of the humidity and temperature settings, because of his tracheitis.