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 fill entire rooms in Ottawa, but the majority of their contents are clues, not revelations.
This particular Gould, the unfathomable artist, has a particular following. “He is our ideal of the disembodied artist, the pure intellect,” writes Kevin Wood in the liner notes of an early 1990s compilation recording called Glenn Gould’s Greatest Hits: Highlights from the Glenn Gould Collection, produced and marketed by one Kevin Wood. And yes, it’s true: elusiveness is a distinguishing characteristic of many historical classical geniuses. Wood points to Franz Liszt as an earlier example (although I’d hardly describe anyone selling his fans vials of his bath water for them to sip at rapturously, as Liszt did, as “elusive”): “The enigma of Gould is different; for him, there is no historical memory, no mystical tradition.”
Gould knew early on there was something very, very specific about him, something he’d later understand had historical antecedents. Glenn Gould’s many epiphanies — the music of Fartein Valen, the Norwegian Christian mystic, for example — started early on with understanding his own genius. The word genius seems inopportune now, best worked around or avoided because of its overuse in describing middling talents. Gould himself used the word, but almost exclusively to describe others. Yet there it was, this unfathomable talent. And he knew it.
He hated to be described as a prodigy. Gould rejected that designation his entire life. He knew about prodigies, of course. He grew up hearing about and performing Mozart as musical wunderkind. The first concert he was taken to by his parents — he was just six years old — was by Polish-born pianist Josef Hofmann. Hofmann had been acclaimed as a child prodigy, having given his first concert when he was only five.
There was something slick and superficial in the very idea of the prodigy. In an era of kid wonders, perky little simpletons showing off on amateur-hour shows on radio, Glenn was winning kudos playing serious music at serious music festivals. He had raw potential — at least he’d heard his mother brag about this raw potential. She also spoke of his unbelievably retentive memory, about his sense of perfect pitch that allowed him to sing a precise note without hearing it first. So, early on he knew he was part of a serious undertaking. He believed and trusted in his mother when she said he was on his way to something big, but all in due time. But due time was rapid-paced for both of them. The pages in the beginner music books young Glenn Gould was given, typical of the sort all children are given when they’re starting out, are remarkably pristine, as if each page needed to be open for just the shortest time.
With Mozart — the budgie.
Soon enough, Glenn Gould came across the craziest understanding about himself — or rather, about his abilities. Every school everywhere felt it had its own musical genius in its midst. It was the same with every community, every small rural town. And in each and every instance, the belief was that their kid genius was the one and only.
But Glenn Gould knew it was true only of him. He was that kid.
But I am also interested in another sort of epiphany and in a different narrative of Glenn Gould, which, in my estimation, embraces all others: his role in the creation of Glenn Gould, media star, media manipulator, and Canadian intellectual icon.
Not entirely unnoticed by earlier biographers, this instinct of Gould’s has been downplayed for reasons I understand. The motivation for Gould’s media reinvention of himself had been in place since childhood — he had dreams of being a broadcaster well before he achieved international acclaim as a quirky concert star — and this dream shaped many of his crucial decisions. The attention he attracted — and he both wanted and needed it — by way of his piano playing connected him directly to the burgeoning new world of innovative technologies, bringing the wired city together far more so than roads ever did. Gould became the singular source of a singular signal to be found on LPs, or FM radio, or hi-fi.
The piano, for all its polyphonic potential, in his thinking, was nevertheless designed for acoustic spaces, spaces increasingly unused or unwanted — front parlours once meant for entertaining, saloons, silent movie houses, and, yes, concert halls. In these orphaned spaces, he saw that pianos were becoming another form of furniture, needing polishing as much as tuning. But not yet for Glenn Gould. Not quite yet. For him, the piano was an extension of himself, like an artificial organ connecting past practices with the new. He played the piano and played through the piano to reach his true objective — the transference of sound into impulse and back into sound again.
All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form this “intercom” running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.
— Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Media Is the Message
Gould as the consummate media performer/subject/manipulator has not gone unrecognized, but has been downplayed. Gould “The TV Star” is a chapter heading in one book; “Vaudevillian” is the title in another. Lorne Tulk, one of Gould’s friends and technicians over the years, thinks Gould was fascinated by singer Petula Clark due to her ability to market herself. A number of Gould critics, and not a few admirers, have remarked on how adeptly he handled stardom.
“Can you think of another pianist who had such strong contact with contemporary media, who was so able to use them, to control them, and to make them serve his own ends?” asked French journalist and musicologist Jacques Drillon. “In the twentieth century, the artist without
