PART FIVE

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Gould at Caledon, Ontario, January 1970. Another photograph from the same session graced his 1970 album of three sonatas by Beethoven, and Gould came to think of it as his favourite picture of himself. (Photograph by Don Hunstein. Sony Classical.)

 

“I don’t think I’m at all eccentric.”

That is a hallmark of a true eccentric–not thinking you’re at all eccentric, even when your every thought, word, and deed seems to set you apart from the rest of the world. From the start of his career Gould was pinned with the label “eccentric,” and he was usually good-natured about it, realizing its publicity value, though he became petulant if too much attention was paid to his personality at the expense of his music. It was true; he was a queer duck. His eccentricity was real, even predictable given his extraordinary talent. (As Sir Francis Bacon said, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”) But Glenn Gould was perhaps no more eccentric than, say, Vladimir de Pachmann, Percy Grainger, Ervin Nyiregyházi, or Vladimir Horowitz, to name just a few pianists who lived in his century. In some respects he was standard-issue as eccentric artists go, and in some respects he was downright normal. This has not stopped writers from offering dark interpretations of his personality and lifestyle. Newsweek once called him “a musical Howard Hughes”–he was interested in Hughes, by the way–and the image of Gould as a misanthropic, paranoid hermit, perhaps autistic or mentally ill, is remarkably widespread. Many writers likely judge him by their own standards or by those of some putatively normal person–i.e., If I lived like Gould, I’d be miserable. But Joseph Roddy was right when he wrote, near the end of Gould’s life, that “it would be a mistake to categorize Gould as a lonely Phantom of the Concert Hall. His world is rich, if hidden.”

The clichés about Gould have always leaned heavily on the voluminous and colourful publicity generated while he was on the international concert circuit, yet these were precisely the years when the lifestyle he was forced to lead was most at war with his temperament. Many of the Gould legends are exaggerations or misinterpretations of mundane facts, though admittedly he sometimes abetted the legend-making by selectively overstating or suppressing aspects of his real personality for public consumption. Consider his refusal to shake hands–even leaving aside the whole idea that a professional pianist who is unusually fussy about his hands may not necessarily be a lunatic. It is true that he usually refused a proffered hand, and posted notices about his reluctance to shake hands outside his dressing room, but he had experience on his side: early in his career he had found that his hand was likely to be crushed by at least one fan in five; the worst, he said, were short men and college boys. Once even a doctor had “squeezed my hand like a vice–darn near broke it.” But he worried only where he was confronted with unfamiliar hands; privately, he often shook hands, sometimes on his own initiative, with people he trusted to be gentle. Kerstin Meyer remembered shaking his hand: “It was like…a lump of jelly.”

The friends and colleagues who knew Gould best, who saw him at close quarters, privately, in relaxed and congenial settings like the CBC, Eaton Auditorium, or his own apartment and studio, saw a less caricatured, more balanced personality. It is clear from speaking to them that many of his legendary eccentricities represented default positions to which he cautiously deferred in situations he could not fully control or with people he did not know well. He readily modulated or abandoned these behaviours in the right circumstances, which makes one wonder if they should really be called eccentricities at all. Often his behaviour, though unconventional, was logical, where it served to maintain the specific conditions and environments and schedule he needed to function contentedly and productively. Through the last twenty years of his life, he increased his direct control over every aspect of his life and work by narrowing his sphere of operations, demanding that the world come to him: he stopped travelling overseas, then stopped flying altogether, then quit the concert circuit, then moved his recording operations from New York to Toronto, then took over his editing work in his own studio. The lifestyle he cultivated was all about eliminating contingencies and distractions, maximizing opportunities, relating to the outside world on his own carefully controlled terms. To the outside world he became more eccentric with age, but he was really living precisely the way he wanted and needed to live, which is why he didn’t think he was at all eccentric–and why, perhaps, he was right. The truth about Glenn Gould is at once more surprising and more banal than the legend: for all the personal demons with which he wrestled, he was, in the end, a mostly fulfilled and liberated person. If he was eccentric his was the brand of eccentricity John Stuart Mill described as coming from “strength of character” as well as “genius, mental vigour and moral courage.”

Gould had no hobbies: his life was his work. “I don’t think that my life style is like most other people’s and I’m rather glad for that,” he told an interviewer in 1980. “[T]he two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that’s eccentricity, then I’m eccentric.” He did not ply a typical middle-class trade but was still a workaholic in the Scotch-Presbyterian tradition. Geoffrey Payzant was correct when he wrote that “his private life is in fact austere and unremarkable,”^*83 and a private diary Gould kept for three months in 1980 reveals that his life was just as dull as it seemed: writing and editing, some practising, various errands, a modest amount of human contact for professional and personal reasons. This apostle of the electronic age was a classic Old Torontonian, a confirmed homebody whose idea of a good time was to stay in alone, or meet with at best one or two friends. As an artist he had a reputation as a radical, yet in many ways his temperament was that of a banker, not a bohemian. His monastic lifestyle, like his fondness for the recording studio, was tied up with his ethics. Pascal famously wrote, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room,” but Gould did know, and the result, for him, was a relatively happy life, and a good one.

He was not tempted to lead a splashy celebrity life, and considered fame to be mostly inconvenient. He was frightened when mobbed by fans in public, and took pains to avoid such situations. He did not use his wealth for the sake of status or personal display or creature comfort. He employed secretaries and housekeepers and technicians as needed, and had a personal assistant in his last decade, but had no entourage, and lived as modestly and self-sufficiently as possible. He read and answered his mail personally, did many of his own mundane daily chores, dealt with the minutiae of his business affairs.

Always fragile and fussy, Gould was unusually vulnerable to the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Not surprisingly, he was drawn to the comfort of the familiar and found change traumatic. He spent his whole life in his hometown. He lived with his parents for almost thirty years, then lived in the same apartment on St. Clair Avenue for more than twenty. He worked for the same broadcaster for more than thirty years, for the same record label for more than twenty-five. He had the same accountant, the same stockbrokers, the same doctors and chiropractors for years, and his posthumous affairs are still directed by the law firm he was with in the mid-1950s. He remained loyal where possible to old friends and colleagues, and had only two managers in thirty-five years. He had his one favourite piano, his one favourite chair. In his 1980 diary he left an account of a working trip to New York in which he reported endless problems finding a hotel room that suited him–problems with room service that shut down at night, with bad mattresses and air conditioning, with traffic noise and new-paint smells. It was a short trip, but it was an ordeal, because he found it almost impossible to compromise. As he confided to the diary, “I’m not cut out for traveling, strange mattresses, or meeting a hectic itinerary.”

Before that same trip he fretted about all the people he would have to “meet with and/or entertain,” for he found socializing onerous. He lived alone and guarded his privacy jealously, giving out his unlisted address and telephone number only to a trusted few. He was a classic introvert, drained rather than energized by prolonged contact with others, especially crowds, and he discovered early that isolating himself from society was essential to his happiness and security, and to his art. “Solitude nourishes creativity,” he wrote, and “colleagual fraternity tends to dissipate it.” Physical isolation helped protect the intellectual isolation he cultivated. “I need spinal resilience when I’m confronted with opinions not my own,” he said. “I separate myself from conflicting and contrasting notions. Monastic seclusion works for me.” Gould’s ego was as fragile as it was strong; his isolation made him appear at once like an insecure provincial and like one of those heroic loners among Canada’s legendary explorers.

“I’m a very private person,” he said, and it was true, but when he declared on various occasions that he was Canada’s “most experienced hermit,” that “my fantasy is to develop to the fullest extent a kind of Howard Hughesian secrecy,” that “I just don’t like seeing people,” he was feeding his own legend. He was not immune to loneliness; he accepted it as a necessary cost of the kind of work he wanted to do. And he was never alone for long; he sought out company frequently, not only for professional purposes though always on his own terms. He needed human contact, and, privately, did not pretend otherwise. Often he made the CBC his first stop of the day, not necessarily because he had work to do there but just to hang around, collect his mail, see what was going on, catch up on gossip. (He enjoyed gossip, as long as it was not malicious.) Legends notwithstanding, his apartment and studios were not off limits the way Howard Hughes’s hotel suite was, as long as the people and the conditions were “safe.” Many friends and even a fair number of acquaintances, as well as secretaries and others who worked for him, visited him on his home turf, as did musical collaborators with whom he had to practise.

“Technology,” Max Frisch wrote, “is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it,” and for Gould that was technology’s blessing, not its curse. When he was not seeing people in person he was plugged in by telephone, and on this instrument, too, he was a virtuoso. To befriend him was to become part of a wide international circle of friends and acquaintances to whom he devoted much time on the telephone and with whom he would often chat more openly than he did in person. (His letters are frequently friendly, funny, and informative, sometimes revealing, but rarely intimate.) He called when it suited him, and if you called him you got an answering machine or service, even when he was in. He would place calls to help himself wake up in the afternoon, but also called very late at night, and some of his friends have reported falling asleep while he chatted happily away. Even his long-distance calls could be hours long, and he seemed unaware of the concept of the time zone. He was known to read whole essays and books, to sing whole pieces of music over the phone, and several of his musical collaborators have recalled that he even liked to rehearse over the phone, singing through his piano part. He became adept at exploiting the CBC’s free tie-line, which linked the Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal stations, and as soon as the technology was available he had a phone in his car. His phone bills routinely ran to four figures; from January through September of 1982, his last year, his phone bill ran to nearly thirteen thousand dollars. That he owned stock in Bell Canada is nicely appropriate.

Gould poked fun at his obsession with the telephone in a mock personal ad that he scribbled down toward the end of 1977 but presumably never published:

Wanted: Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unjealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic, loon seeks moth or moths with similar qualities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristanesque trip-taking and permanent flame-fluttering. No photos required, financial status immaterial, all ages and non-competitive vocations considered. Applicants should furnish cassette of sample conversation, notarized certification of marital disinclination, references re low-decibel vocal consistency, itineraries and sample receipts from previous, successfully completed out-of-town (moth) flights. All submissions treated confidentially, no paws [?] need apply. Auditions for (all) promising candidates will be conducted to, and on, Avalon Peninsula, Nfld.

Gould spent most of his time holed up in his apartment or studio, in an artificial environment that was hardly healthy but offered him the cocoon he needed. “I don’t approve of people who watch television,” he told an interviewer in 1959, “but I am one of them.” He called himself a “vidiot,” and watched a lot of TV for relaxation. (He was a big fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and his videotapes of various episodes are soberly catalogued among his papers in the National Library of Canada.) He listened to recordings and CBC radio, at least six or seven hours a day, by his own estimate. Often he would have, say, a TV and two different radio stations (news and music) playing in different rooms of his apartment, and he would keep them on while working or talking, reading or practising. (He read several newspapers a day and a handful of books a week.) He used heavy drapes to keep the sun out. His sleeping schedule was not set in stone–he occasionally had to deal with the outside world during working hours–but he generally went to bed at five or six in the morning, around dawn, sometimes catching the headlines on The Today Show just before turning in. He started his day in the early afternoon, and for a Torontonian in the winter months that meant seeing no more than an hour or two of the sun, assuming one stepped outside at all. Sometimes he would not emerge until dusk, “with the bats and the raccoons” when he went out earlier, he wore dark glasses. The apartment and studio were heated to at least 80°F, and his windows were permanently sealed against fresh air. He had an aversion to “pushed air,” whether it was heating or air conditioning; he preferred radiators and electric heaters. He would walk into a restaurant and raise an arm to test for drafts; if there was one and it could not be quelled, he ate elsewhere–yet he apparently had no problem being outside in the dead of winter. He would change hotel rooms or even taxicabs several times if the air was not right, and he would do no TV interviews in air-conditioned studios.

He cared nothing for status or beauty when it came to his surroundings, which were Spartan and utilitarian. His living quarters sufficed as long as they met his needs in terms of size, heat, light, and quiet. He had mostly ordinary furnishings, some of which came with his apartment, and these were shabby by the end of his life. He decorated or designed only to the extent of ensuring that nothing imposed itself on his eye: he wanted no bright colours or sensuous trappings. His brain was orderly, but his apartment, studio, and car were a mess, as was his desk at the CBC and any other space into which he moved more than briefly. He described one of his hotel rooms in his concert days as “the workroom of the Marquis de Sade.” Friends could find no surface on which to sit down in his apartment, and his own housekeeping consisted of little more than straightening up the less stable piles, though he claimed to know where everything was. He hired housekeepers who fought vainly against the clutter–some of them, middle-aged immigrant women who did not know who he was, thought him odd and even frightening–and he sent his laundry out. In domestic matters he could be forgetful and disorganized; to lend him a book or record was to say goodbye to it forever. And he was no host. Friends might spend the better part of a day with him without being offered so much as a glass of water. He occasionally stocked some favourite beverage for a particular person, but his larder was usually bare. The lunch he served Harvey Rempel consisted of arrowroot biscuits and instant coffee made with hot water from the kitchen tap.

He was often oblivious to niceties like holidays. He thought nothing of asking, say, a recording technician to work on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and this has sometimes been interpreted as an assertion of personal power. More likely, he simply neglected to notice the comings and goings of holidays, or assumed that everyone was as oblivious to them as he was. When he received the inevitable reply–“Er, Glenn, tomorrow is Thanksgiving”–he would merely apologize and reschedule. He forgot birthdays. Walter Homburger had to send flowers to Florence Gould on her birthday and sign her son’s name to them. Sometimes he forgot to make a Christmas-card list until after Christmas, and some friends recall cards arriving in February. (Was the insecure Gould first waiting to see who sent cards to him?) Some of his friends, though, did receive thoughtful gifts from time to time.

Gould gave little thought to his personal appearance. He was nattily attired only as long as his mother was dressing him; as a child, in photos taken in school or in public or at the piano, he is usually wearing a tie with a sweater or jacket. As an adult he insisted on drab, dark colours. His clothing might be expensive and of high quality, but it was usually baggy, mismatched, or old-fashioned, and he would heap it on the floor. It often looked slept-in, shabby, and soiled. Shirts and socks might be full of holes, pants split up the seat, shoes held intact by a rubber band.^*84 His socks were often mismatched, his shoes untied. Always cold, he dressed in many layers. Reporters occasionally compared him to a Gypsy, a clochard, a hobo; it did not help that he was sometimes unshaven and liked to carry his belongings around in a garbage bag. In Florida, in 1957, he was picked up by police in a park on suspicion of being a vagabond, and he was sometimes refused entry to hotels until his identity was made clear.

Calvin Trillin observed that concert pianists “are as a group undoubtedly the most devout searchers-out of quality restaurants.” Not Glenn Gould, whose life was ascetic and abstemious, and who seems to have felt that there was something sinful about bodily needs like eating. He did not smoke and drank nothing stronger than coffee. He told friends that when he once drank a little alcohol at a party at Leonard Bernstein’s, he felt ill, and found his thinking, co-ordination, and piano technique affected; that sufficed to make him a teetotaller for life. His insistence on drinking only spring water (especially Poland Water) had nothing to do with refinement of taste: he was afraid of germs in tap water. He confessed to being “almost totally indifferent to food,” and considered eating and drinking to be duties rather than joys. He did not even like candy as a child, and once expressed amazement that other people could tell different foods apart. Raised on the drab English fare typical of Old Toronto, he stuck to it, and doused his meals with ketchup as though to kill what taste they had. He did not cook and relied on restaurants and room service. By his own admission he could barely open a can, and he once started a fire at the cottage when he tried to use the stove. On his drives he sometimes stopped at all-night truck stops to drink coffee, eat, and chat. He was a frequent customer at Fran’s, a local chain of friendly diners open twenty-four hours a day; there was one down the street from his apartment, where he would eat in a back booth in the wee hours of the morning.

“Gould eats only once a day and confesses that if he eats more often he feels guilty,” an interviewer wrote in 1964. That one meal, eaten sometime in the early-morning hours, would be supplemented only by arrowroot biscuits and Ritz crackers, as well as tea, coffee, milk, juice, or bouillon. “On the day of a recording he wouldn’t eat at all,” his producer Andrew Kazdin recalled. “He claimed fasting sharpened the mind.” In his later years he professed to have become a vegetarian out of respect for animals (the idea of abattoirs horrified him), yet several of the private notepads from his last years have lists of foods that seem to represent meals he actually ate, and they include roast beef, veal, chicken, and Dover sole, in meals that usually included soup, salad, potato, vegetables, and sometimes melba toast and ice cream. A typical meal at Fran’s consisted of scrambled eggs, salad, toast, juice, sherbet, and decaf, and an employee at the Inn on the Park hotel recalled that Gould’s after-midnight meal, in his last years, was often nothing more than scrambled eggs and orange juice, though he sometimes visited the hotel’s Vintage Room restaurant for a steak. His pallid diet may have had more to do with native squeamishness about food than with animal rights. The pianist Anton Kuerti, who met him from time to time on the concert circuit, saw Gould flee in horror from a restaurant in Salzburg after the waiter brought the local delicacy Kuerti had ordered: Hirn mit Ei, calf’s brains with scrambled eggs. Gary Graffman witnessed a similar disgust at escargots.

Gould’s pianistic lifestyle, too, was Spartan. He went days, even weeks, without playing, and claimed that the “best playing I do is when I haven’t touched the instrument for a month.” He was not a slave to the piano, though he became insecure if he was away from it too long. He practised less than most virtuosos during his concert years, and after 1964 needed an even smaller amount of time at the piano; he could not understand why most of his colleagues practised so much. In his last interview, in 1982, he said that he did not know Brahms’s Ballades, Op. 10, at all before he prepared to record them that year. His two months’ preparation consisted of studying the score for six weeks, then practising in the two weeks before the recording, usually no more than an hour a day. For him, getting the interpretation right, a mostly mental process, was more a concern than actually rendering the music on the piano. “Do you realize that this sounds quite unbelievable?” his interviewer, David Dubal, asked. Yet Gould’s private notepads suggest that it was true. From the mid-seventies, he was practising, when at all, as little as half an hour a day, usually about one hour, never more than two. He devoted the same or more time to reading, studying scores, writing, dictating, editing, even to his mail.

Though by the 1970s he was no longer using the Lake Simcoe cottage, Gould tried to get out of the city for an extended period at least once or twice a year, most often in the late summer, albeit for working holidays, for he was not the type to play volleyball on the beach. The 1962 holiday in the Bahamas was a fluke: his destinations of choice were almost always north, and included Manitoulin Island, in Georgian Bay, as well as Sault Ste. Marie, Wawa, Marathon, Thunder Bay, and other towns along the rugged, lonely north shore of Lake Superior, where he admired the “Group of Seven woebegoneness” of the countryside. “As you know, I have a special fondness for your town,” he wrote to a high-school principal in Terrace Bay in 1965, “since I find it an ideal place in which to catch up on some writing and score studying and most of all, thinking. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether those of you, who have the opportunity to live in what can only seem to an urban southerner as blessed isolation, do in fact appreciate the wonderful advantages that that isolation offers.” He spent some time in Quebec and the Maritimes, too, and in the last few years of his life, he took to visiting certain remote islands off Georgia and the Carolinas, which he had discovered on tour in 1959. Yet he could be lonely when vacationing by himself, for all his talk about the glories of solitude. Jessie Greig recalled that he invariably returned from his American holidays earlier than anticipated.

He usually drove himself when he left town: he was one of those North Americans who are in love with their cars. For someone who liked to be in the world but not of the world the automobile was a perfect metaphor, a travelling apartment from which he could see the world at arm’s length. Beginning with the brand-new Plymouth Plaza he bought in 1956, for a little over two thousand dollars, his preferred cars were big and American, and he bought or leased a whole succession of different makes and models; in his last years he had a Chevrolet Monte Carlo that he named Lance, and a Lincoln Town Car named Longfellow. On cars he willingly lavished a good deal of money and attention, though his driving, by all accounts, could be appalling: All of his friends tell stories about their terror at occupying what one of them dubbed the “suicide seat” in his car. He learned to drive on his father’s knee at the cottage, and hinted at his future driving career by steering the family car into Lake Simcoe. (He drove boats no more safely.) For someone so anxious about so many things, Gould apparently felt invulnerable in a car, but then in most situations he felt comfortable and safe as long as he was in control. Not even a long record of accidents and traffic violations could rid him of the idea that all was well when he was behind the wheel. Yet he could not keep his mind on the road, particularly when someone else was in the car. He would talk volubly as he drove, and had the disturbing habit of turning to a passenger while addressing him. Even alone, he would become wrapped up in music on the radio, singing and conducting, and sometimes kept a score open by his side. He often drove with his legs crossed, with his left foot working the pedals, sometimes with one finger on the wheel, at high speeds regardless of the visibility or the road conditions, always with the windows and vents closed and the heater turned up. The only good thing about his driving was that he did not tailgate: he was afraid of inhaling fumes from other vehicles.

He was involved in many fender-benders and other minor accidents, even in his own parking lot, though miraculously never a major crash. He would spin out of control on slippery roads, plough into snow banks, run into guard posts on the highway, and drive up onto the sidewalk, endangering trees and parked cars. Jessie Greig recalled an occasion when he hit a truck in a snowstorm and ended up in the river. John Roberts remembers the passenger door flying open on one occasion as Gould’s car spun out of control on black ice, and only Gould’s quick, strong hand keeping him from falling out.

Gould’s driving put him constantly in trouble with the authorities. Speeding, running stop signs and red lights, making U-turns downtown during rush hour, veering between lanes, driving the wrong way up a one-way street–he repeatedly made every sort of violation. He was forever paying fines, receiving demerit points on his licence, and getting warning letters from Ontario’s Driver Control Branch. He had to appear in court from time to time, or report to the Branch for an interview or re-examination; at least once, in 1963, he had his licence temporarily suspended, a fate that loomed on other occasions. In the summer of 1979, the police investigated him for “leaving the scene of an accident.” On one occasion he got into trouble while a reporter was in the car, and in fact his driving was fodder for the newspapers from at least the summer of 1958, when the headline “Gould Freed in 4th Crash” appeared in a local paper after he skidded forty feet into a truck. He was hauled into court in Beaverton, Ontario, but the judge, who said he was a music fan, merely praised the honesty of his testimony, dismissed the careless-driving charge, and sent him to a safe-driving clinic. “He was a very nice man,” Gould said. “I didn’t have to say a thing. We obviously understood each other.” (It was not the last time he would benefit from sympathetic judges, attorneys, or policemen.) “He just couldn’t seem to comprehend that he drove like an idiot teenager,” one of his passengers recalled, but Gould was incorrigible. “I suppose it can be said that I’m an absent-minded driver,” he once said. “It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.”

“I think one really has to live one’s life with a spiritual direction in mind.”

Going up a mountain track, I fell to thinking.

Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.

Those are the opening sentences of Natsume Soseki’s 1906 novel The Three-Cornered World. A fan Gould met on a train in 1967 introduced him to the novel, which he came to consider one of the greatest of the twentieth century. The book tells of a painter and poet who, tired of the mundane world, goes on a spiritual journey in which he attempts “to rise above emotions, and to view things dispassionately,” though the “sublime detachment from the world” he desires proves difficult to achieve, and he must struggle to come to terms with challenging sensory experiences. As Gould wrote in 1981, The Three-Cornered World “is, among other things, about meditation versus action, detachment versus duty, about western versus eastern value systems, about the perceived perils of ‘modernism’”–all issues he himself struggled with. The opening sentences of the novel could stand as a motto for Gould, encapsulating as they do an essential dilemma of his life: how to balance reason and emotion. He was certainly not comfortable poling along in the stream of emotions. “There is a Sicilian strain in the people of Toronto, ready at any moment to shatter their exterior of blancmange-like calm,” Robertson Davies wrote, and while no one could mistake Gould for a Sicilian (“I’m not a southerner; there’s not a drop of Latin in me”), he was a man of great passion who was never happier than when he was controlling his emotions beneath an exterior of blancmange-like calm. “I rather approve of restraint,” he told a reporter in 1962, with perfect restraint. He might have cited Pascal again: “When the passions become masters, they are vices.”

Intense, overt emotions, his own or someone else’s, disturbed and embarrassed him, and he avoided situations in which they might arise. In extraordinary cases, with close friends, he could be frank, and he would not flee a room if a friend was in tears; on the contrary, he could be solicitous and consoling. But wherever possible he preferred to keep things light. The prospect of losing control of his emotions filled him with anxiety, and when an unavoidable emotional confrontation with another person loomed, he needed more than spinal resilience to deal with it; he needed Valium. Even small confrontations disturbed him. Otto Joachim, remembering some musical disagreements that arose when Gould performed with the Montreal String Quartet, said, “Whenever Glenn defended his opinion, he closed his eyes and began to stutter.” On other occasions when, say, a professional situation was slipping away from his control–Yehudi Menuhin’s refusal to stick to the script, for instance–he got a nervous tic around his right eye, clearly visible in some of his television programs. The soprano Joan Maxwell once telephoned Gould and, disguising her voice, pretended to be a small-town piano student and fan. She strung him along until she realized he was genuinely upset at the thought that his personal security had been breached. She apologized profusely but he felt angry and betrayed, though he often played precisely this sort of gag on others. Andrew Kazdin saw him develop elaborate strategies for avoiding unwanted meetings or phone calls. Gould tried to control social situations in advance. If someone was to visit his apartment or studio, he would often carefully prepare the visit, cueing up recordings and videotapes, preparing his comments–in effect, planning a program. He sometimes prepared for face-to-face conversations or telephone calls with written notes, followed by a tranquilizer. Yet once a meeting was underway he could be open to spontaneity, depending on how things went. He needed the rituals of preparation to calm him and give him confidence, but the anxiety, while real, was not necessarily overwhelming.

Gould saw moral issues everywhere, and saw them in black and white–another legacy of his puritan heritage. Musically and personally he tended to view options in terms of opposing extremes. Curiously, though, he apparently had no fixed views on politics or religion. In his youth he was already fascinated by Canadian and American politics, and in later years he eagerly followed the Watergate scandal, the Quebec referendum, and so on; his surviving videotapes show that he was a news junkie whose television was often tuned to political events. Sheltered and privileged all his life, he had no first-hand experience of poverty or intolerance, and his native reticence did not dispose him to public activism even on behalf of issues he held dear, like pacifism and animal rights. Though some of his favourite musicians–Strauss, Furtwängler, Karajan, Schwarzkopf–had been tainted by association with the Nazi regime, Gould never made this a bar to appreciating them; he seems never to have discussed the issue, except, once, to describe Strauss as “apolitical” and “naïve” in the 1930s. In his personal conduct he was deeply conservative, a “square,” and he poked (gentle) fun at Beats, hippies, and the like, but politically he was neither a reactionary nor a leftist. He never advocated a system that trampled on individual rights; when he told one of his radio technicians, Donald Logan, that life would be much better in a benevolent dictatorship in which he was the dictator, it was with a twinkle in his eye. He claimed to hold vaguely socialist views that are not necessarily contradicted by his individualism and fondness for the stock market, and he would berate the capitalist system even as he admitted his dependence on it. He seems to have picked up some of the liberal social conscience typical of the United Church and, earlier, Methodism. His family, through their church, had worked on behalf of social causes. As he noted in his eulogy, his mother, near the end of her life, was devoted to a group of underprivileged mothers in a large downtown church “where, weekly, she tried, through music and inspiration, to make their lives a little more meaningful.” He believed in social justice and racial equality and in caring for the poor, and approved of policies that supported “the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada,” to cite the famous phrase of the country’s original constitution.

When it came to contemporary politics, Gould’s views had more to do with personalities than with policy. He disapproved of flamboyant politicians. He was put off by the glamour, the “Camelot” mystique, around John F. Kennedy, preferring the awkward, insecure Nixon (though he once claimed to be “in love with Jacqueline Kennedy”), and he deplored the cult of personality around Pierre Elliott Trudeau during the “Trudeaumania” of the late sixties. When, near the end of Gould’s life, Trudeau notoriously made an obscene gesture to some protesters outside his train in British Columbia, Gould was disgusted. The Beach, Robert Fulford recalled, invariably elected some Tory “nonentity,” and Gould seems to have inherited a fondness for dour, conservative politicians whom he admired as ethical men. He was a fan of Robert Stanfield, the sober head of the Progressive Conservative Party and leader of the Opposition during the early Trudeau years, and he admired the young Joe Clark, who succeeded Stanfield in 1976. Gould offered to write a profile of Clark for the Canadian Magazine that year, for which purpose he contacted Clark’s press officer about an interview, collected clippings, and jotted down notes, but in the end he never did make a foray into political commentary.

Just as he had no party-political affiliations, Gould had no denominational or even well-defined religious beliefs, though he was fascinated by religion and indeed by all sorts of otherworldly phenomena. He believed in ESP and telepathy, took omens and “coincidences” seriously, was frightened by ghosts and the occult. A mind-reading game once so disturbed him he abruptly quit playing. He believed in the significance of dreams, too, and eagerly discussed his dreams with many friends and occasionally interviewers.^*85 He was deeply superstitious. He would cancel a concert or airplane flight if he believed it would turn out to be “unlucky,” and he panicked when friends ignored his dire warnings about their own flights. He would sometimes rewrite a cheque over and over because he considered the signature to be somehow “unlucky,” though his friends never figured out what his criteria were. (This is one reason he hated to give out autographs.) Among his notepads is a page from 1978 on which he obsessively practised his signature–always with one n in “Glenn”–and in other notepads he used up five or six pages just to write a one-sentence note to his assistant or make a list of “accounts due,” restarting over and over, sometimes writing no more than part of the first word on a page, because something about the note was not quite right. This is not necessarily surprising in someone who prided himself on his reason: to a rational man the irrational is bound to hold a morbid fascination. Phenomena he could not explain were phenomena he could not control, so perhaps his fascination with them was in part an effort to control them by figuring them out.

Though he had no definite theology, Gould had religious tendencies. Different people remember his religious persuasion differently, and his own comments were contradictory. To Donald Logan he described himself as “agnostic going on atheist,” but others recall that he definitely believed in God, if not necessarily a fixed or conventional notion of God. To the interviewer Elyse Mach, in 1980, he set out some of his beliefs with surprising frankness:

I can only say that I was brought up as a Presbyterian; I stopped being a church-goer at the age of about eighteen, but I have had all my life a tremendously strong sense that, indeed, there is a hereafter, and the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which, indeed, one must attempt to live one’s life. As a consequence, I find all here-and-now philosophies repellent. On the other hand, I don’t have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter, and I recognize that it’s a great temptation to formulate a comforting theory of eternal life, so as to reconcile one’s self to the inevitability of death. But I’d like to think that’s not what I’m doing; I’d like to think that I’m not employing it as a deliberate self-reassuring process. For me, it intuitively seems right; I’ve never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter. It is simply something that appears to me infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be oblivion.

But he believed that the afterlife had to be earned, through an honourable life and good works.

Gould read a great deal of theology–books by Jacques Maritain, Jean Le Moyne, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, and many others–and some of the philosophers whose work he read (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer) dealt with religious matters. Jessie Greig remembered having many discussions about religion with Gould in his later years, and said that he “was full of humility” when it came to matters of faith. He knew the Bible well, and was particularly fond of the New Testament, especially Revelation. His appreciation of the Bible seems to have been more ethical and even aesthetic than doctrinal, but he took comfort from certain Biblical texts. One favourite was “Lord, grant us the peace the earth cannot give,” another was “Let your light shine before men that they might see your good works.” He was familiar with many hymns and other traditional religious music, and was genuinely moved by the spirituality he perceived in composers like Gibbons, Bach, Mendelssohn, and Bruckner. He once said, “I believe in God–Bach’s God.” For all his apparent structuralism, he believed that art and artists should ultimately seek transcendent experiences. “Art is not created by rational animals,” he wrote, rather surprisingly, in 1964, “and in the long run is better for not being so created.” He said he disliked the label “intellectual” because he was “primarily interested in art that communicates spiritually” and was only interested in music that met his ethical and spiritual standards.

To work out one’s own answers to religious questions without relying on inherited dogma is characteristic of mysticism, and various strains of mystical thought had made significant inroads even in staid Ontario in the generations before Gould was born: Christian Science, theosophy, Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, and perhaps most significantly the transcendentalism associated with R. M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness of 1901. Mystical ideas were still in the air when Gould was young–they had motivated many Canadian artists, for instance–and even the United Church had some ministers who held liberal views on matters like mysticism. An Uxbridge woman who worked for the Goulds as a nanny recalls (admittedly vaguely) that Florence Gould had some mystical-sounding religious ideas that were unusual for her milieu. For instance, she apparently believed that her son was the reincarnation of one of the great composers–a Russian, possibly Tchaikovsky–and told him so.

It is not absurd to posit a strain of mysticism in Gould’s thinking, for Gouldian idealism and individualism and rejection of dogmas are all typical of mystical faiths. Gould’s God was not the fire-breathing law-giver of the Old Testament, but something more akin to the transcendentalist or pantheist or Spinozist God, a timeless spiritual ideal, and like many mystics he worshipped, in some ways, the centrality and restorative power of nature. His notion of “ecstasy”–of art transporting the perceiver so that he stands outside himself and outside time, caught up in an ideal realm–recalls mystical notions about transcending individuality and communion with the eternal, joining the “great soul of mankind.” His favourite “Lord, grant us the peace the earth cannot give” is practically a definition of the theosophical concept of Nirvana. Northrop Frye considered the painters of the Group of Seven–still influential in Canada in Gould’s youth–to be theosophical given their “commitment to painting as a way of life, or, perhaps better, as a sacramental activity expressing a faith, and so analogous to the practising of a religion.” For all its Wordsworthian Romanticism, this sounds like Gould, too, for whom everything from choice of repertoire to rendering of trills was a statement of a larger world view with ethical implications. Even his views on technology were ultimately spiritual. Like Jean Le Moyne, he believed in “the charity of the machine,” the idea that technology is benevolent, as when, for instance, recording removes music from the “gladiatorial” realm of the concert hall. And like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom he read prolifically, he considered the growing integration of technology with human life to be a positive force in the ethical and spiritual evolution of mankind. Teilhard’s Utopian notion of a “noösphere”–of a sort of envelope of thought surrounding the globe, born of the “unified consciousness” and knowledge of all mankind–was supported by his observation of the growing worldwide network of machines and technology; such ideas, Marshall McLuhan’s and Gould’s among them, have new resonance in the age of digital technology and the Internet.

Gould viewed art as ultimately an instrument of salvation, and he must have appreciated reading, in The Three-Cornered World, of Soseki’s belief that artists “can obtain salvation, and be delivered from earthly desires and passions,” and so “enter at will a world of undefiled purity.” Western mysticism in fact overlaps in many ways with Eastern religion and philosophy. (Emerson, for instance, was a fan of Asian literature.) Gould sometimes poked fun at the fashion for Eastern thought in the sixties and seventies and its musical manifestations in, for instance, the work of John Cage, but while hardly a dharma bum he was not immune to this particular trend: he read authors like Kahlil Gibran and Alan Watts, and books about Japan and China. In Eastern cultures he admired a lifestyle, an ethic, and an aesthetic devoted to order, restraint, contemplation, tranquility, and the pursuit of repose,^*86 the latter a concept of great importance in Soseki’s novel. “The purpose of art,” Gould wrote in 1962, “is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” The Japanese writer Kobo Abé, whose novel The Woman in the Dunes Gould greatly admired,^†87 told a CBC radio interviewer that Gould would have made a good Zen Buddhist monk, and his friends recall that he took an interest in Zen Buddhism in his later years. His views on ethical and spiritual matters often had an Eastern and anti-Western flavour–for instance, his distrust of the egotism, worldliness, and competitive instincts implicit in capitalism. Of course, Western mystics and Eastern philosophers also praised intuition rather than reason as the key to understanding, questioned the validity of logic and analysis, and tended to prefer the simple to the complex, all of which was anathema to Gould. “An artist,” Soseki wrote, “is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.” Much as he wanted to be a perfect spiritual creature, Gould knew he could not fully succeed. He could not quite do without that fourth corner.

“You know what an uncurable romantic I am anyway.”

Gould had great anxiety about his body, and in his later years rationed his physical contact with others to a manageable degree. He shied away from contact with unfamiliar people, and usually even with friends: it is not only Steinway and Sons employees who say, “You never touched Glenn.” A lot of it was concern for his physical health, not merely fear of intimacy. He was not as averse to physical contact as most people assume, and was known to embrace or physically comfort people he knew well. Once again, it depended on the person and the situation; the no-touching rule was another default position that he willingly surrendered in the right circumstances. He almost certainly desired more physical contact than his anxiety permitted him to enjoy.

Gould guarded no aspect of his life more jealously than his sexuality, about which there has been much mystery and speculation. All but his closest friends risked immediate and permanent banishment if they inquired into his love life, and for the most part his friends have kept his secrets. He never married, was never linked publicly with a woman, seemed indifferent to the attentions of female fans, and in interviews refused to answer prurient questions about his private life (his definition of “prurient” was strict). He deplored “the repetitive, tasteless, and ultimately unproductive inquiries into Boulez’s sexual proclivities” in Joan Peyser’s biography of that composer, which he reviewed in 1976, and he admired Liberace for successfully suing an English journalist who had implied that he was homosexual–clearly, Gould believed that a public figure had the right to keep his private life private.

Not surprisingly, many people assumed, and still assume, that he harboured some secret vice he was keen to hide, presumably homosexuality. Rumours that he was gay were fed by the androgyny of his appearance–so striking in many early photographs–and by his superficial sexlessness, which could be interpreted either way; it probably did not help that on concert tours he sometimes travelled with a male massage therapist. He was not uncomfortable or disapproving around homosexual friends, and had a significant following among gay men who considered him “one of us.” In Kevin Kopelson’s odd little book Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire, published in 1996, Gould’s homosexuality is a donnée not requiring proof, and he is discussed, alongside Horowitz, Cliburn, Pogorelich, and others, as a closeted gay pianist–as, indeed, “a touchstone of queer pianism.”

His piano style fed such assumptions, to judge from the reviews. In concertos by Beethoven and Brahms, for instance, he was praised for introspection and poetry but criticized for lacking power and “virility,” and over the years some of his detractors used words like “frail,” “lightfingered,” “swooning,” “effeminate,” and “mincing” to describe performances low in bravura, with which he was never comfortable. (“Mincing” is one of the very words that sent Liberace to court.) George Szell criticized Gould to his face for using the soft pedal pervasively in a Beethoven concerto, because “It makes a very feminine sound.” Gould said years later, “I had the feeling that he intended a sexual connotation to this whole matter, but I pretended I didn’t notice.” Robert Sabin, reviewing the 1960 album that included Gould’s gorgeous recording of Bach’s B-flat-major partita, compared him favourably with the “over-trained young keyboard athletes” of his day, admiring his “exquisite tactile sense,” his “gentleness,” “grace,” and “charm.” Gould, he wrote, “is a poet, a seeker of beauty in hidden places,” and he concluded that “sensitivity” was the keynote of his playing. Meant as high praise, this sort of thing was also fodder for those who considered Gould’s playing insufficiently masculine, and some of his critics drew on notions of decadence, exoticism, and femininity that have long been used as code for homosexuality.

Admittedly, Glenn Gould was no one’s idea of a powerful argument for heterosexuality, or any other sexuality: he did not ooze sex. And his private sexual thoughts were doubtless no less ambiguous than the average nominally heterosexual man’s. But no evidence suggests that he was privately homosexual or had or desired homosexual experiences. Not even his gay friends claim that: one of them recalls that when they were students he made a pass at Gould, who “practically fell out of the window.” Gould was not oblivious to the rumours, and was upset when they were aired publicly, though he could be good-humoured on the subject in private. Ben Sonnenberg asked him what he said when people asked if he was gay, and he replied, “I always quote Horowitz, that there are three kinds of pianists: homosexual pianists, Jewish pianists, and bad pianists. And I add, pianists who play better than Horowitz.”^*88

Ravel, an apparently asexual composer widely assumed to have been homosexual, once said, “The only love affair I ever had was with my music,” and Gould liked to make similar claims: “Music is my ecstasy,” he told Nicholas Kilburn. This was his party line with the press. A 1959 interview in the Toronto Daily Star included this priceless exchange:

 

Dennis Braithwaite: Are you engaged, or do you have a steady girl friend?

Glenn Gould: I am not engaged.

Dennis Braithwaite: Getting back to your music…

 

Gould reportedly had dates with women when he was a teenager and young man, though they were, by all accounts, friendly, chaste meetings with much talk of books and music.

Andrew Kazdin believed that Gould lacked experience with women. “In many ways, Gould displayed a kind of arrested development,” he wrote, “certainly in his emotional behavior. From a social standpoint, it seemed clear to me that Glenn viewed women with a kind of prepubescent naïveté.” As Kazdin recalled, Gould once decided that Stereo Review was giving him bad reviews because the magazine’s classical-music editor was jealous that Gould had been friendly with, and perhaps attracted to, his wife, who had worked for Columbia Masterworks. “The whole episode,” Kazdin wrote, “appeared to me like something one could unearth from a teenager’s diary.” Gould’s naïveté showed in his puritanical streak, too: he strongly disapproved of Kazdin’s wife’s reading Cosmopolitan, and professed to be “absolutely shocked” that there was such a thing as pornography. We can imagine his embarrassment when Leonard Bernstein, at a party after their first performance together, told him, “You played so beautifully in the cadenza that I almost came in my pants.” Yet despite his prudishness he was fascinated by tales of the sexual exploits of friends, and Paul Myers recalls that Gould liked to go to risqué movies and would watch sex scenes with boyish wonder.

Gould couldn’t help but attract women, who responded to his physical beauty (as a young man, at least), his talent and intelligence, his charm and wit, his celebrity. He told friends of uncomfortable occasions on his concert tours when he had to fend off unwelcome advances from women, including the wife of a diplomat in Russia. “No wonder the pianist Glenn Gould needs the Chevrolet he is driving in Tel-Aviv,” wrote a journalist in Israel in 1958. “Gould, a bachelor of 25, is simply ‘chased’ by the beautiful ladies of Tel-Aviv, and apparently he has no other way of escaping them than by dashing away in his car. From a reliable source it was disclosed that Gould cares nothing for all those pretty admirers, and he spends almost every free minute playing the piano.”

His standoffishness seemed only to make him more desirable. He was more frightened than flattered by groupies, though he often had to deal with them. A note from Walter Homburger among his papers reads, “Watch yourself–I think that she’ll be poison. She is a piano teacher and obviously is trying to obtain publicity for herself.” One young woman, from the CBC, would come to the house and, to his mother’s consternation, literally sit at Gould’s feet while he practised. A woman wrote to him in 1961 asking if he was married or engaged, and if she could come to Toronto to see him; “my future,” she wrote, “depends entirely upon your answers.” Gould felt pity for such women, though he was rattled by more persistent and perhaps dangerous fans. Ray Roberts, Gould’s assistant in the 1970s, got a call from him one night because some woman was pounding on his door. “And then,” recalled Roberts, “there was that crazy woman from Texas who kept writing him letters. She wrote him every day. She said she was going to come up and start shooting people on the corner of Bloor and Yonge unless he agreed to marry her.” A Swedish woman claims that he wanted to marry her, and that he visited Sweden secretly, shortly before his death, to see her and receive medical treatments for his back, but evidence contradicts her story, which is as plausible as a lost Gould recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto.^*89

Gould seemed to get along better with women than with men, and had warm friendships with many women over the years. There was Deborah Ishlon, who was working in the publicity department at Columbia when Gould first signed with the company, and the journalist Gladys Shenner, who was close to him throughout his international concert career. There was Verna Sandercock, Walter Homburger’s secretary, and Susan Koscis, who was director of publicity at CBS Masterworks during the last years of Gould’s life. He relished such relationships, though sometimes, perhaps unintentionally, they threatened to become more serious, more intimate, a prospect that apparently made him anxious even where he seemingly desired it.

Evidence points to a number of relationships with women that may or may not have been platonic and ultimately became complicated and were ended. Gould found the most intimate sort of relationship difficult to sustain, for he feared that too close an emotional bond would engulf his life and thoughts, undermining him and ultimately his art. When conflicts invariably arose with the women he got close to, he had difficulty confronting them, preferring to cut the relationship off with at best some written explanation. Among his papers is, for instance, a handwritten note to a woman, from the early sixties, that begins, “Of course, we parted friends. Why shouldn’t we? However much I may have upset you it was, at worst, the result of a thoughtlessness sometimes characteristic of me but never the intent of deliberate malice. So you must believe that I could not but think of you kindly.” Another document from the same period, presumably a draft of a letter, implies a relationship that, in his opinion, was becoming too intense or demanding:

 

I gather you tried to call me yesterday, so this letter–though difficult–is necessary.

You are as well aware as anyone by what intuition I am sometimes governed, upon what “unreason” my decisions are sometimes based. And this intuition in the business of human relations is a force which I serve quite without question; and when it seems to demand isolation from one person or from everyone–that too is obeyed. However illogical and unpredictable, and infuriating this may be to others, I have found in this obedience–however arbitrarily I may have used it–a source of immense strength.

And I can only ask you to be charitable and forgive me, and believe me when I tell you that you are in no way responsible for this–except in the sense that we are all of us responsible for the world’s becoming–to try to understand when I say that the one thing I will not do is to analyze–to explain my reactions–except to myself, and once again to believe me when I tell you that I hold you in as much affection as ever.

Such situations genuinely distressed him, and though his stated explanations sound contrived–“the world’s becoming”?–he seems to have been at once anxious not to hurt the other party and determined to make the necessary break.

Gould had an intimate relationship, in the early and mid-1950s, with a woman somewhat older than he whose letters to him were addressed from “Faun” to “Spaniel,” and Gladys Riskind remembers seeing Gould with a woman friend around this time–the same woman?–lying with his head in her lap as she stroked his hair in a manner that was more than friendly. In both cases, he assumes the role of beloved pet, as he had with his mother, and his close bond with his mother surely influenced his later relationships with women, with whom he was generally gallant and considerate. He brought out the mother in some women; he needed nurturing, praise, pats. Sometimes it is unclear what he was looking for in a particular relationship–a friend? an intellectual companion? a lover? a mother? Sometimes, it seems, neither he nor the woman in question was certain. He revered certain women from a distance, including those artists whose work particularly affected him: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Barbra Streisand, Petula Clark. (And Mary Tyler Moore?) He seems even to have fallen in love with the occasional fictional woman, including the mysterious Nami in The Three-Cornered World, perhaps “the woman in the dunes,” and, near the end of his life, the disabled Rowena in the film version of Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars.

As to whether Gould had a real sexual life, some of the evidence is admittedly ambiguous. The former manager of the Wawa Motor Inn, for instance, recalls that Gould did not always check in alone, but was sometimes with a woman (“some CBC woman” was his not entirely confident memory). On the other hand, they took adjoining rooms (the two at the end, farthest from the office), which merely raises the question: Was she a secretary? A colleague? A friend? A lover? Other evidence of his travels with female companions is equally ambiguous. Among his papers is a fragmentary text, to (or about) someone named Dell, that has been much discussed by his fans, for some of whom it is a smoking gun analogous to the mysterious “Immortal Beloved” letters of Beethoven. Here is the text in its entirety:

You know, I am deeply in love with a certain beaut[iful] girl[.] I asked her to marry me but she turned me down but I still love her more than anything in the world and every min[ute] I can spend with her is pure heaven; but I don’t want to be a bore and if I could only get her to tell me when I could see her, it would help. She has a standing invit[ation] to let me take her anywhere she’d like to go any time but it seems to me she never has time for me. Please if you see her, ask her to let me know when I can see her and when I can–

There was, according to all available evidence, no one named Dell in Gould’s life. The page on which the letter appears offers few clues, except as to the date. At the top of the page is a sequence of keys relating to the editing of his album of preludes, fugues, and fughettas by Bach, released in the late summer of 1980; in the middle of the page is a bordered phrase that apparently reads, “Chopin’s block plump and silvery,” whatever that means; the letter follows. At the head of the text Gould wrote “–love letters to Dell–” (the letter is written to a third party about the woman in question). Of great significance is a harmless-looking emendation near the bottom of the letter, in the clause “She has a standing invit[ation] to let me take her anywhere she’d like to go.” Instead of “to let” Gould had originally written “and let” later, with a different pen, he struck out “and” and replaced it with “to,” correcting an obvious error, but at that same time he also put a question mark in the margin. This is a telling detail, for there is no reason for him to have questioned a perfectly reasonable correction in something he himself was writing; the question mark makes sense only if he was presuming to correct something that someone else had written. In other words, Gould did not write the Dell letter; he copied it, as he often copied out quotations and bits of text that struck him in some way. (The use of the plural in the heading–“love letters”–suggests that the letter is one of a collection.) Mysteries still remain: Why did he copy this letter? From what source? But the text cannot simply be interpreted as a “love letter” in the usual sense of the term, and does not seem to refer to real people and situations in Gould’s later life.

It is tempting to assume that Gould was asexual, an image that certainly fits his aesthetic and the persona he sought to convey, and one can read the whole Gould literature and be convinced that he died a virgin. As he liked to say, he, rather than the hero of George Santayana’s novel, was “the Last Puritan.” (He was a great fan of that novel.) Sex was not discussed in his family when he was growing up: his house seems to have been one of those in which sensuality was equated with a want of virtue. But while it is easy to believe that such an environment must breed fear or guilt about sex, we should not assume that Gould lacked normal sexual feelings, was riven with guilt and shame on the subject, and was incapable of sexual intimacy given the right circumstances. (Even puritans manage to procreate.) One well-known Toronto musician, who knew Gould in the early fifties, had the privilege of walking unannounced through an unlocked door, in a house he owned, to discover Gould in flagrante delicto with a female friend. Gould himself told Ray Roberts that he had had “a torrid affair” in his twenties, on tour in the United States, and there were rumours of girlfriends in Montreal, in New York, in California. A woman who knew him well in the late fifties recalls that they “flirted like a couple of teenagers” and that he unequivocally sought to initiate a sexual relationship. (She declined, he was respectful and gentlemanly about it, and their friendship continued.) Reliable sources supply further plausible second-hand testimony suggesting that other of his later relationships became sexual, though one does not get the sense that there were many such affairs. In any event, let there be no more talk of Saint Glenn never sullied by the touch of Woman.

The most serious romantic relationship of Gould’s life was with an American woman who was married and had children. They met not long after the release of his first Columbia recording, and presumably their relationship blossomed over time. Around 1967, she left her husband and moved, with her children, to Toronto. She stayed first with one of Gould’s friends, then in a hotel, before taking her own apartment in the Deer Park neighbourhood not far from Gould, and she lived there for four years. The woman was herself an artist with a lively mind, and by all accounts Gould adored her. He spent a lot of time at her apartment,^*90 and they spent hours talking on the telephone, sometimes until they fell asleep; he was also fond of her children. The two sometimes socialized with friends like John Roberts and Paul Myers, and Gould talked about her to his friends. Kazdin saw them together in November 1967, in New York, at a private screening of one of Gould’s television programs for NET (Herbert von Karajan was also present). “It was a different Glenn Gould that I saw during that day,” Kazdin wrote. “Instead of the self-absorbed center of attention, I witnessed an attentive escort to [the woman]. Was she comfortable? Could he get her anything? My current mental image of them during the actual showing of the tape is of [her] sitting in a large lounge chair and Glenn perching on the arm of same, sort of draped over the back of it. Throughout this period, there was no doubt that [she] held a special place in his life.” They were a couple, their relationship (according to one of the woman’s friends) was “very passionate and very physical,” and their life was as close to domestic as Gould’s ever got. According to Otto Friedrich, who interviewed the woman, Gould wanted to marry her; it was she who refused, and, around 1971, moved back to her husband. “Gould telephoned her every night for two years, she says, until she finally persuaded him to stop. They never saw each other again.”

Gould admitted to thinking a lot about marriage, and at some level yearned for domesticity. He was intently interested in other people’s families, and often grew close to the wives and children (and pets) of his friends and colleagues. He was eager to hear news of the families he knew, and seemed to enjoy visiting people at home, as though he took vicarious pleasure from being in the presence of domestic harmony. He loved children all his life. Jessie Greig, who was a teacher, said, “Glenn had a deep interest in my work and about how I was trying to challenge the children. Often he proffered advice and suggestions.” He was friendly with children who lived around his family’s cottage, taking them along on his walks, joining in their games, sometimes inviting them and their mothers into the cottage to have a little fun with his tape recorder, and he never talked patronizingly to them. “I can still see him bounding up the stairs of our house in Toronto to tell bedtime stories to our children, stories which flowed spontaneously from his imagination,” John Roberts recalled. (The only problem was stopping him and getting the children to sleep.) With the children of other friends he played table hockey and other games, or showed them how to splice tapes, and the closest he ever came to giving a piano lesson was to provide a little encouragement or advice to a young pianist within his circle.

It seems that Gould would have liked a domestic life himself but knew it was impossible, partly of course because he was an odd, difficult, high-maintenance personality, but mostly because marriage was incompatible with the solitude demanded by his art. Angela Addison remembers him sitting in her practice room at the Royal Conservatory, in the early fifties, in tears, pouring out his frustration over a relationship with a woman. The problem was not that he was incapable of or did not want a real relationship or marriage, but that he could not reconcile it with his artistic needs. It is a dilemma familiar among creative artists; Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon called it a “conflict between a defensive narcissism and a wild, thrusting desire to break out of a painful isolation.” Brahms put it more pithily when he said, “Unfortunately I never married and am, thank God!, still single.”

If Gould worried that a wife might overwhelm him and his art, it is probably because he himself was prone to obsession and jealousy in a romantic relationship. “Those who have had little opportunity of expressing or sharing sexual feelings tend to alternate between suppressing or repressing sexuality and overvaluing it to the point of idiocy,” Anthony Storr wrote in The Dynamics of Creation. “It is those who have had little practice in handling their own sexuality who are likely to ‘fall in love’ in a devastating manner; and who treat the whole matter of love in an all-or-nothing fashion.” That sounds remarkably like Gould. To relationships, as to work, he brought an exhausting intensity, and great anxiety. He was indeed like a teenager: many of his relationships read like infatuations, or crushes. In one of his notepads, he makes an anagram from the letters of a woman friend’s name, as a teenager might carve initials on a tree. His devotion was intense but always on his own terms, his own schedule, and his romantic feelings, though powerful, could be ambiguous, not always clearly readable. Greta Kraus told Peter Ostwald of one affair in which Gould “was possessed with absolute jealousy,” constantly talking about the woman in question, longing to see her, but ultimately overwhelming her. A woman with whom he had an intimate relationship when he was in his early twenties was in part relieved when she eventually lost touch with him, for his emotional needs and his demands on her time–keeping her up all night on the phone, and so on–had become too much to handle. There are similar tales involving other women later in his life, sexual relationships as well as close platonic friendships. And when a passionate relationship inevitably ended, his pain was such that he would eliminate the woman from his life with an “all-or-nothing” ruthlessness.

The relationship with the married woman may have been a watershed for Gould, proof that he was not going to achieve a lasting domestic union. He continued to have at least a few romantic relationships in the last decade of his life, including at least two that overlapped for a time in the later seventies, both of which seem to have ended (poorly) around 1980, and Susan Koscis says she wondered, on the basis of some of Gould’s comments and behaviour, if and how her relationship with him might have developed had he lived longer. But Ray Roberts observed that Gould “was much less involved with women” in his later years, and the evidence bears this out. It appears that Gould sought, in his forties, to avoid the problems that had doomed his earlier attempts at long-term relationships. This, at least, is the conclusion that comes to mind from a long handwritten text in one of his notepads from 1980, the same year as the Dell letter:

 

How good is our friendship?

In my opinion, so good that it has created an almost tensionless atmosphere.

Because; we met and dev[eloped] it when we were seemingly of one mind: one purpose; we both fell in love talking about tranquillity of spirit and we reinforced each other’s determination to find that quality and bring it into our lives.

= I talked about hierarchies of friendship i.e. that I didn’t believe in them. I said that there are moments of intensity which have nothing to do with longev[ity], intimacy, proximity etc. We, in my opinion, reached that plateau. very quickly and till now have maintained ourselves there in a miraculous fashion

= We’ve also reached that plateau because, like all good Navajo café customers, it hasn’t made any sense to play games, to employ strategies of any kind; we’ve behaved, I think, as though we really might never see each other again and have therefore between [= “been”] completely honest.

= Which, however, doesn’t necc[essarily] mean we’ve made ourselves as clear to each other as we’d like to think.

Last w[ee]k, we had the first (and, I hope, last) mini-fallout from unclearness. I took a little too much for granted; I just assumed that my prevailing interest in a reclusive life style was understood. and I didn’t realize how ready you were to interpret that as rejection

= But I think now we reach a larger problem, and a more urgent need for clarif[ication].

Because our rel[ationship] has, no doubt about it, escalated; there’s a psychic intensity which is really quite extraordinary–it’s also imm[ensely] prod[uctive] and comforting and reassuring. But it can resemble–if one wants to let it–a physical intensity; or, if not that, one can easily convince oneself that its natural course is in the direction of physical intensity.

And that isn’t necc[essarily] so, in my opinion,

[in margin:] most people do try to make it so: some succeed, most fail

and if there is a confusion of purpose between us and a corres[ponding] need for clarif[ication], that’s where it’s going to arise. Because nothing that’s happened, or could foreseeably happen in our relationship, is going to change or begin [?] to change the way of life that I decided many y[ea]rs ago to lead.

= Flashback if absol[utely] necc[essary]

A B A

A1 insuff[icient] clarity in the psychic exam. [?]

A2 " " resulted in jealously etc

[struck out:] Therefore, so as to ensure that we

= Theories of physical relations = psychic deterioration.

Years of prep[aration] for this way of life. Change would be destructive and produce the kind of resentment that would rather quickly cause our relationship to flounder.

Therefore: no change is contemplated.

can you live with that? i.e. is psychic energy per se [read “alone”?] hard for you to deal with?

I tell you this now only to avoid the kind of confusion that could add even a moment’s uneasiness to what is a really remarkable relationship.

I intend that, if you are willing to continue, we will bring each other such peace as “passeth understanding”

 

This reads like notes for a letter or conversation, and there is no reason to take it as anything other than what it appears to be: a draft of a communication to a woman with whom Gould has shared a quickly growing emotional bond that has threatened to become sexual, resulting in a tension he felt needed to be cleared up in a characteristically detached and logical way. That most Gould fans will be surprised to find Gould in this intimate, confessional mode shows how the legends about him have obscured his very real relations with the opposite sex. The phrase “fell in love” is hardly ambiguous, and his equation of “physical relations” with “psychic deterioration” implies that he knew whereof he spoke, that he had suffered experiences he did not want to repeat. This communication does suggest that late in his life Gould had made a definite decision to lead (or try to lead) a more literally monastic life, though it also reveals that he was by no means seeking to live without close relations with other people.

As his friend Margaret Pacsu said, “Glenn was one of those people who take vows,” which certainly seems true of his later years. But he did not necessarily “take vows” for moral reasons, to remain pure in an impure world; more likely he meant to avoid the problems he seemed unable to avoid in sexual relationships. Given his inflexibility and self-involvement, but also his genuine desire not to hurt others, the demands of his art, and his one, failed long-term relationship, he must have been tempted, in his forties, to leave behind the whole business of romance. His friend Carl Little once asked him what advice he would give to a young artist who aspired to a professional career. Gould replied, “You must give up everything else.”

“They say I’m a hypochondriac, and, of course, I am.”

Gould is talking to a friend on the telephone when the friend happens to sneeze, or cough, or say that he might be coming down with a cold, and Gould, in a hypochondriacal panic, hangs up. It is the classic Gould anecdote, and a surprising number of people insist they witnessed it at first hand. One aspect of the Gould legend that has never been exaggerated is his all-consuming hypochondria. He was one of those intellectuals for whom the body was an inconvenient but necessary vehicle for carrying around the head (and hands), and he longed to keep his body, like his emotions, at a distance. At the same time, he was obsessed with it, fixated on the minutiae of its functions to the same degree that he fussed over his pianos and his editing. As he sought to control everything in his life, he sought to control his body, as though it were a machine rather than an unpredictable organism. From that day when he watched a classmate throw up in school, he feared losing control of his body. He brooded over it, studied it, tried to fix it, yet no amount of attention sufficed to convince him that it was under control. On the contrary, the more he fussed and fretted over his body the more helpless he seemed, for he appeared only to discover problems, never solutions.

Gould was not a small man. He stood just an inch shy of six feet, and in his younger days his weight fluctuated between about 150 and 180 pounds, making him lean but not emaciated. (And for the record: light brown hair, blue eyes.) Nevertheless, to many he appeared gaunt, like someone who did not look after himself, and he never lost his constitutional fragility and extreme sensitivity. His mother worried constantly that he was making himself sick, and continued to minister to him when he was an adult. She wrote helpful notes to him: “Keep lemon in refrigator [sic]–you can take a dessert spoon to make a cup of hot-lemonade should you get a cold.” He was a rather angelic-looking child but an awkward-looking teenager, and he never grew out of his adolescent body. All his life he had a teenager’s slouch and a hunched, loping, splay-footed gait, and he was physically clumsy: John Roberts has said that Gould could not carry a cup of coffee across a room without spilling it.

To be sure, he had genuine medical problems. His whole musculoskeletal system was a constant source of concern, not only in his concert days when he was playing often and under stressful conditions. When he was ten years old he suffered a serious back injury at the cottage: he fell out of a boat as it was being hauled down a rail into the lake, and landed hard on the ground. “He was in great pain,” his father said, and over the next few years he was taken to many doctors, though only his neighbourhood chiropractor, Dr. Arthur Bennett, helped. As an adult Gould gave every evidence of being a typical sufferer of chronic back pain, and Bennett had no doubt that Gould’s persistent later musculoskeletal complaints stemmed from his childhood injury. Dr. Herbert J. Vear, the Toronto chiropractor who inherited Gould when Bennett retired, and treated him from 1957 to 1977, says unequivocally that Gould’s “observed spinal problems were real and clinical.” There was, Vear says, “early cervical disc degeneration observed on cervical x-rays” and “functional biomechanical stress to other areas, in particular the upper and mid thoracic spine.” His main complaints were in his neck, shoulders, and arms, including the hands–particularly the left arm and hand–but Vear also recalls that “he had mild thoracic pain and discomfort which often affected the lumbar spine as well.” His anxiety about physical contact was particularly acute when someone touched or leaned on his shoulders. He frequently complained of swelling, stiffness, and pain in his joints, and apparently feared that he was genetically predisposed to arthritis. Some of his musculoskeletal complaints were strange. He told Peter Ostwald, for instance, that “the bones of my back easily get out of alignment with my ribs,” and in his last years he recorded some bizarre symptoms in his notepads–for instance, in 1978, unusual arm pains and pressures after “sub[stantial] juice or tea intake,” and “extreme neck tension” triggered by long conversation or laughter.

Vear places most of the blame for Gould’s musculoskeletal problems on his chronically poor, unstable posture, made worse by the hunching keyboard posture he acquired under Alberto Guerrero, though Gould was forever seeking more “scientific” diagnoses, or at least terminology, to explain his problems. For instance, from at least the mid-fifties he claimed that stiffness in his fingers was caused by “fibrositis,” which is allied to rheumatism, and thought the condition dated from early 1950 when he fell through the ice on Lake Simcoe and was badly chilled. After his bout with nephritis–the kidney infection–in 1958, he frequently returned to that diagnosis, to the end of his life, to explain back pains that seemed to emanate from the area of the kidneys. In the late seventies he frequently referred to “sub-clinical polio,” a mild, transient form of polio infection that can cause various forms of discomfort and malaise as well as stiff and aching muscles (he said he first experienced it in 1958). Even after 1964, when he was playing the piano less and less, he complained of persistent muscle, nerve, and joint pain throughout his upper body. His notepads from the last decade of his life include references to severe tension and pain throughout the upper body, which sometimes made straightening up difficult and interfered with his sleep. A note in one of his private papers alludes to a “1966 fall and subsequent brace-experience” (back brace, presumably), and his chronic problems were certainly inflamed on other occasions. It was almost impossible to find a mattress that suited him, and when considering a new car he would take it out for a “seat trial” rather than a road test, always searching, usually in vain, for a car in which he could sit comfortably on a long journey.

Chiropractors, physiotherapists, masseurs, and radiologists were a regular part of Gould’s life. He depended on therapy during his concert years, especially after the Steinway injury. Cornelius Dees, a Dutch masseur, treated Gould for many years in his apartment, where he had his own massage table, and joined him on some of his concert tours. From Dr. Vear he received conventional chiropractic manipulations and some “trigger point therapy” of the sort pioneered by Dr. Janet Travell. (Dr. Bennett had advised Vear that Gould needed “patience and understanding, as well as treatments which were not painful.”) After the Steinway injury Gould continued to see Dr. Irwin Stein, in Philadelphia, off and on for treatments and injections; the last visit was in December 1981, when he received X-rays of the hands, lumbar spine and pelvis, and cervical spine. He tried mechanical aids. Around the time of the Steinway injury he acquired his own Siemens diathermy unit, which used a high-frequency electric current to produce heat, as well as a locally manufactured ultrasound unit that emitted high-frequency sound waves to stop pain and tension (they cost about five hundred dollars each); Dr. Vear sometimes used such machines to treat him, too. In the mid-seventies he began to consult Dr. Dale McCarthy, an orthopaedist, who found no explanation for Gould’s continuing musculoskeletal complaints beyond poor posture at and away from the piano. He prescribed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like Indocid, Naprosyn, and phenylbutazone, usually given to arthritics; Gould was also prescribed analgesics like Fiorinal, which has sedative properties and is generally prescribed for headaches. In short, he tried everything to ease his pains–everything, that is, but sitting up straight and getting a little exercise.

Gould’s sleeping habits were never good, and it did not help that he sometimes had to reconcile normal working hours with his preference for an upside-down schedule; one may assume that he often suffered from sleep deprivation, particularly during his concert years. From early adulthood he took sleeping pills of various kinds for his chronic insomnia, including Placidyl and Dalmane as well as the barbiturates Nembutal and Luminal. He was a long-standing user of Valium, which he took sometimes to sleep as well as to relieve stress and anxiety. In the mid-sixties Dr. Stein at least once prescribed Stelazine, an anti-psychotic medication sometimes used to treat anxiety, and in 1976 John A. Percival, Gould’s regular G.P. from February 1971 until the end of his life, prescribed the sedative Librax after he complained of stomach cramps that were presumably anxiety-related. For most of 1978 he tracked his sleep in detail. He averaged around six-and-a-half to seven hours per night, sometimes more, sometimes less, which for most people would be less than refreshing but not quite alarming, though his sleep was generally interrupted and inconsistent; a block of six or seven hours’ uninterrupted sleep was rare enough to warrant special note, as was sound sleep without medication. He was sometimes sleepy during the waking hours, to judge from the amount of napping he recorded–snatches of sleep here and there, fully dressed, in a chair or on a chesterfield, even in the bathtub. He almost always slept with the TV on; “television,” he once said, “is one of the greatest sedatives in the world.”

From at least as early as 1976 until the end of his life, Gould was tested and received treatment for elevated levels of uric acid in the blood, which may account for some of the swelling and pain he felt in his joints, as he noted in some of his private papers. He worried about kidney stones, and was reluctant to believe negative tests for them. He was prescribed medications of the sort used to treat gout and prevent uric acid and kidney stones, like allopurinol.

Of Gould’s genuine medical problems the most significant was high blood pressure. Dr. Percival first diagnosed him as borderline hypertensive in March 1976, and though Percival was not unduly concerned Gould took the diagnosis very seriously. He had a particular fear of hypertension, which ran in his family: Bert Gould and Jessie Greig both suffered from it, and his mother had died of a stroke less than a year earlier. He at once began to consult other doctors, including Alexander G. Logan, a kidney specialist. Logan found no internal problems, but put Gould on a low and later moderate dose of the anti-hypertensive Aldomet, and shortly afterward on a low dose of the beta-blocker Inderal, which is used to treat anxiety, tension, panic attacks, phobias, some types of pain, and other symptoms, as well as high blood pressure. He received other such drugs over the years–clonidine, HydroDiuril–and it is not unusual for hypertension patients to use several drugs in combination.

Gould purchased several different kits to measure blood pressure, and in his notepads duly recorded his readings (and sometimes pulse rate) at intervals throughout the day, sometimes hourly or even more often, especially after meals, trips to the bathroom, doses of medication, or even just an animated conversation. His blood-pressure readings reveal low and moderate levels of hypertension at different times, but also many normal readings. Generally only the diastolic reading (the number to the right of the slash) was high; the systolic reading was usually normal. The drugs apparently worked, keeping his blood pressure mostly within acceptable parameters in the later 1970s, though friends have testified that it could rise alarmingly when he did not take his medication, as once happened after a mixup at the pharmacy. Still, Gould fretted about his blood pressure, and it is even possible his own anxiety on the subject, coupled with his tight control on his emotions, could have exacerbated the problem. The highest reading among his papers is a very high 180/118, which he recorded in his diary, in 1980, after getting angry over a family matter–that says much about the source of the problem.

So musculoskeletal pains, insomnia, uric acid levels, and hypertension were all real problems for which Gould received appropriate medical treatment. But his health concerns did not end there, not in his own mind at least: his fear of getting sick never abated. In fact, his hypochondria only worsened with age, and he never stopped imagining that his body was perennially under siege and claiming medical problems for which the evidence was questionable. He always insisted, for instance, that he had poor blood circulation, an idea planted in his head by his first family doctor, Colin A. McRae, and one he could never shake: “Circulation pills,” he remarked to a reporter in 1955; “if I don’t take them, well, I don’t circulate.” He seemed to feel cold, or at least to act cold, much of the time.^*91 Some of Gould’s friends have said he was cold to the touch, yet Morris Herman, his G.P. in the fifties and early sixties, denied that he had a real circulatory problem, and found that his skin was warm and moist–that he was in fact sweating beneath all those layers of clothes. In 1956, Gould told Jock Carroll that he was suffering from “a spastic stomach, diarrhea, and tightening of the throat. I’ve got three doctors treating me for it now.” Peter Ostwald thought Gould might have had a psychosomatic disorder, and Gould was always sensitive where the gut was concerned. “What did you eat that disagreed with you, Glenn?” a friend once asked. “Food?”

From childhood Gould dreaded germs, and his mother’s concerns about the Canadian National Exhibition apparently resurfaced in his mind after he signed a lucrative contract to play at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1957. According to Peter Yazbeck, Gould had not realized that the Bowl was an outdoor amphitheatre, and when Yazbeck told him he panicked and cancelled the concert. He feared germs in tap water, in groups of people, in hospitals–even when greatly concerned about a sick friend he could not bring himself to visit a hospital and would instead keep in contact by phone. He had cans of Lysol disinfectant spray around his apartment and packed disinfectants whenever he travelled. He avoided the company of anyone who seemed the slightest bit ill; he would not even enter a room or car or elevator a sick person had recently occupied. June Faulkner, a theatre-company manager who worked on the television program Glenn Gould’s Toronto in 1978, recalled seeing him roll around on the floor with her hacking, wheezing dog. “But I gave a tiny sneeze and he was out the front door like a shot and bolted into his car, which had a telephone. He sat there in front of my house and we conducted our business by telephone.” When Ray Roberts came down with a bad cold just before they were to travel to New York, in 1980, Gould insisted they take separate cars, and so Lance and Longfellow made the trip in convoy.

Gould knew he was a hypochondriac, and often seemed to treat the matter lightly with friends, doctors, and the press. And he knew it was part of a very profitable public persona. In 1958, a reporter saw him stop in the middle of a recording session, groan, and announce, “I think I have appendicitis.” It turned out to be a minor cramp–he had been sitting too long–and he joined everyone else in laughing about it. “I am sure you look forward to the interesting symptoms that I shall dig up for you in the future,” he once wrote to Dr. Herman. The French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon recalled that, during their first filming session in 1974, Gould “very, very gently” bumped his head on a microphone, collapsed in a chair, and cried out, “My God, a concussion!” He listed the symptoms that were bound to follow over the next few hours, then finally admitted, “Well, I know, I know, once I let my imagination go, I’m lost.” On June 12, 1980, he noted in his diary “some odd spots…on my abdomen–right of the navel, and in the area where the hiatus hernia is often knotted up–and, indeed, has been so for the last couple of days.” At the end of that entry there is a P.S.: “Have taken bath; spots have disappeared.” They were marks from a pen. Some dialogue from the film Hannah and Her Sisters comes irresistibly to mind:

 

Julie Kavner: Two months ago you thought you had a malignant melanoma.

Woody Allen: Naturally–the sudden appearance of a black spot on my back!

Julie Kavner: It was on your shirt.

 

We ought not to laugh, though: the anxiety required to fuel this level of hypochondria cannot have made life easy for Gould.

He required a stable of doctors to meet his needs. He saw a doctor at least every few weeks in the latter part of his life; it was simply a part of his routine, like a weekly squash game. He probably chose his family doctor for his convenience: Dr. Percival’s office was at 262 St. Clair Avenue West, not far from Gould’s apartment building. He saw dozens of doctors, often several at the same time, and he could be crafty in dealing with them, sometimes receiving prescriptions for the same medication from different ones (he would not necessarily tell one doctor that he was seeing others). His doctors were rarely as impressed with his symptoms as he was, and his doctor-shopping was often motivated by his dissatisfaction at not getting the answers he wanted to hear. He demanded many tests, which his doctors often felt compelled to conduct if only to set his mind at ease (there was little chance of that, alas). He frequently had X-rays, internal as well as skeletal; the radiologist Dr. A. A. Epstein recalled that “Glenn worried constantly about his chest and having pneumonia all the time,” and worried about having cancer. From his later years there are many records of hospital appointments for assessments of various musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, and neurological complaints, and for all sorts of tests: liver and spleen and kidney function, blood chemistry, glucose tolerance, potassium levels, cholesterol, uric acid. He would also request urine tests, rectal and prostate exams, and barium enemas. These are intimate procedures for someone normally shy about his body, but he was so anxious about his health and had so much experience with doctors that he apparently overcame his natural reticence in a medical (read: safely rationalized?) setting. In any event, all his tests usually showed that nothing medical was wrong. This merely caused him more anxiety, because it meant only that the real problem had yet to be found, and so it was on to the next round of theories, doctors, and tests. Gould could not interpret the lack of evidence as the absence of a problem–a good definition of a hypochondriac.

He was convinced that he was the master of anything he put his mind to, and just as he told his record producers and lawyers and accountants and stockbrokers how to do their jobs, he presumed to instruct his doctors, who knew that he had very little insight into the body–just enough to be dangerous to himself–and that his long-winded medical explanations were mostly rubbish. Dr. Vear recalls that Gould would normally describe his symptoms, offer a diagnosis, and suggest a treatment, co-operating only with treatments that concurred with his diagnoses. He fancied himself an informed armchair doctor. He had reference volumes on drugs and diagnostics on his bookshelf and tried to keep up with medical and pharmacological developments in the news, occasionally asking his doctors for some new drug he had read about. (He was known to actually take other people’s medication just to study its effects.) His notepads are full of bits of medical data, often tips that he wanted to follow up. More alarmingly, he enjoyed playing the doctor with his friends, as early as the 1950s. In one letter from 1957, from “GOULD’S CLINIC FOR PSYCHO-PSEUMATIC [sic] THERAPY,” he casually dispensed advice to a friend about barbiturates that he confidently described as “perfectly harmless.” Gladys Riskind remembers feeling unwell and seeing Gould open up a black bag lined with shelves full of pills and ask, “What would you like?”

Gould’s was a “technological” approach to the body and to medicine. He could not see his problems as symptomatic of an unhealthy lifestyle, and doctors who took this line with him he dismissed as “nature-boy” types. He saw only problems that needed to be fixed, preferably through machines and other tools of modern Western medicine–especially pills. There are medical records and prescription receipts for Gould dating back to the early fifties, and, though what survives is presumably only the tip of the iceberg, especially in the early years, they point to a pattern of dependence on pills to cure every ill. It is likely, though not certain, that at some points Gould became addicted to medications–barbiturate sleeping pills and Valium, for instance, are known to be habit-forming. He worried about addiction (he dropped Nembutal for that reason) and as an opponent of the drug culture of the sixties he dreaded acquiring a reputation as a “drug addict”–which, alas, he did. His luggage and pockets bulged with pills in his concert days, and his bathroom was always littered with them. He was often prescribed antibiotics, for it was in his nature to prefer this route to his mother’s hot lemonade when he had a cold. His notepads show a reliance on over-the-counter products: painkillers (with or without codeine), laxatives, lozenges, vitamins, as well as dietary supplements like magnesium and potassium, presumably necessitated by his poor diet and side effects of other medications. He tried the ancient folk remedy belladonna, too, a narcotic pain reliever and antispasmodic extracted from the leaves of deadly nightshade. Keith MacMillan saw him take Aspirins to warm up in a poorly heated CBC studio before performing the Goldberg Variations for the first time, in 1954. During the broadcast the studio began to warm up and he became overheated; by about Variation 15 his palms were sweaty, and by the end his hands were slithering on wet keys. (“I messed up a whole run completely.”) He later said he would have been in real trouble had Bach written more than thirty variations.

With age, Gould was taking more and more prescription and over-the-counter medications, often in dosages of his own choosing, and in combinations at best unpredictable and sometimes known to cause adverse reactions. He was also taking pills to counteract the side effects of other pills, creating a cycle of dependency. From 1963 his regular drug store was Bowles Pharmacy on Kingston Road–close to Southwood Drive, in the Beach–and his many surviving receipts reveal the vast quantity of his intake. His pharmacy bills were among his largest expenses. Here, for instance, is one typical list of a month’s expenses he jotted down in a notepad on September 10, 1979:

 

Apartment rent: 503.50

Studio rent: 375.00

Studio room service: 441.71

Telephones (apartment, studio, car): 504.44

Bowles Pharmacy: 503.56

 

Some of Gould’s recurring minor medical complaints, such as dizziness and blurred vision, gastrointestinal discomfort, and weight gain, were possibly side effects of medication. And at a certain level of intake it becomes impossible to tell what is a primary symptom and what is a side effect, and the act of juggling medications becomes exponentially more dangerous with each new pill added to the mix. Gould occasionally realized that some particular symptom might be associated with his drug intake, but his solution, unfortunately, was to treat that symptom as yet one more illness requiring yet one more pill. Considering that Gould would, for instance, regularly take Valium or other sedatives before a concert or recording session, it is surprising that only one writer, Richard Kostelanetz, has raised the perfectly reasonable issue of what impact Gould’s drug intake might have had on his art. It is doubtful that a pharmacological rationale is needed to justify, say, his rapid tempos or baroque prose style, and anyway it would be impossible to determine exactly what medication Gould was taking when, but the notion of a connection is hardly absurd and merits some consideration: what might all that medication have done to his thinking and his playing?

Given his genuine medical problems, hypochondriacal assumptions, and pharmaceutical intake, it is hardly surprising that Gould’s notepads from the mid-seventies forward include seemingly endless medical documentation: lists of symptoms and self-diagnoses, lists of questions prepared in advance of appointments with doctors, lists of medications, records of blood pressure, pulse rate, and sleeping patterns, and more, most of it couched in detached, pseudo-scientific language. We may as well work through this data from the head down–and what follows does not include problems already discussed or indicate the many times specific symptoms were reiterated over a period of years in changing combinations.

Gould reported two unexplained problems in the fall of 1976: what he called “back of head” phenomenon and “pressure-point awareness”–the latter (whatever it was) being “sensit[ive] to hand-washing, walking, driving,” and having “reached point of relatively sharp pain when sitting down or walking; in any case, is precursor and accomp[animent] to light vertigo.” He told a friend in the mid-seventies that an inner-ear infection had left him with balance problems that affected him after prolonged work sessions or even after laughing or talking animatedly, and he took to reporting this as “labyrinthitis,” an inflammation or dysfunction within the cavities and canals of the inner ear that is defined by the acute onset of vertigo commonly associated with head or body movement, sometimes leading to nausea, vomiting, or malaise. He later reported “pressure at left temple” and “decided unsteadiness” when rising from a seated position, bad enough at time to make “even brief city trips hazardous. Piano-playing impossible” he cancelled at least one CBC recording session because of “inner-ear troubles.” He was seen to stumble in his later years, and noted in his diary in 1980 that he “fell en route to the bathroom in mid-sleep this a.m.” and hurt his left knee. (Or was his intake of pills to blame?)

A page typical of the medical documents among Gould’s private papers. Dated just before Christmas, 1977, it is a list of symptoms he jotted down in preparation for a visit to Alexander G. Logan, a Toronto kidney specialist and one of his regular doctors in his later years. He reports (1) escalating blood pressure, (1A) chills and shivering, (2) plugged nostrils and some difficulty in breathing, (3) gastro-intestinal troubles that he associates with a hiatal hernia, and (4) several months in which he was sleeping only three to four hours at a stretch. The list also refers to a “Barium meal test” and, in the margin, mysteriously, to “Sea Salts.” (Estate of Glenn Gould.)

His eyes worried him. In the spring of 1976 he noted concern about a possible infection (“l. eye being ‘glued’ shut upon waking”), and that fall noted, “Left eye is constantly bloodshot.” In later years he reported a “sty-like sensation” and “puffiness in eyes,” and this from around 1980: “Eye dry sore (after rubbing etc.) and/or teary, filmy, vision less sharp, ‘speck of sand’ syn[drome] = bloodshot, gen[era]l darkening in eye-tone esp. left side.” In the fall of 1976 he also reported that “Ringing in ears continues,” along with this more cryptic note: “Pulse-sync in ears (crickets in summer, sleet in fall).” In the later seventies he reported on several occasions “General stuffiness and at times, inhalation insufficiency,” as well as nasal blockage, sore throats, difficulty breathing after animated conversation, and “snorting while inhaling.” There are hints of dental problems around the fall of 1978, references to sensitivity of the teeth and pain that sometimes radiates into the face and head, as well as “locked muscles” in the mouth, and unexplained references to esophageal problems. In late December 1977 he noted, “Throat-Neck: myalgia, etc., as background[.] greatly increased jerks, spasms, stiffness in past w[ee]k. Does it rep[resent] gland problem?” And around 1980 he noted, “Tongue evidences black markings for w[ee]ks.”

That was just from the neck up. In the mid-seventies he noted “burning in upper chest [and] throat,” “curious sore and/or weak spot…on r. side [of chest],” and, in late December 1977, “Chest–periodic lightness and pain–quasi muscular, on occ[asion]–ribs sore from time to time–no known on-setting incident.” He also reported incidents of breathlessness and fatigue. In the early eighties he made notes about “palpitations” and “arm-heat,” and about waking up with a rapid and irregular heartbeat. Strange abdominal pains persisted through his last years, yielding notations like this: “tight, gas-pocket sensation” “frequently bloated at base of rib-cage–temporarily relieved by release of gas which happens freq[uently] esp[ecially] on rising, etc” “spasm in left upper abdomen” “lower abdomen ache after eating (sometimes) or even drinking, gas-like, penetrates to back when esp[ecially] severe” “indigestion-like pains reaching into throat” “Recent month’s lower abdomen problem–liquid consumption triggers pockets of ‘ulcer-like’–pain through to back (–congestive sensation re bending over).” In April 1977 he reported “excruciating” pain in his torso when lying down or getting into his car; his sleep was affected, and he noted an intense “spasm effect on waking,” especially on his right side. He diagnosed a “hiatal hernia” at least as early as the spring of 1976, and took antacids regularly: “Phillips [Milk of Magnesia] a staple of the diet.”

Around the time his uric acid level was being treated, Gould complained of frequent and sometimes painful urination, of bladder pressure that interfered with sleep, and, in fall 1978, of awakening sometimes to find his clothing damp from urine, “unprecedented since childhood.” In the late seventies he reported “pulsating or throbbing” aches and sometimes intense pain in the genital area, “typically in penis and/or left side of testes,” when sitting down or crossing his legs, and this was sometimes referred down one leg to create a “throbbing toe sensation.” By about 1980, he was noticing “nodules” on the left side of the scrotum. He asked, “Could there be some purely local inflammation–poss[ibly] set off orig[inally] by the excess diathermy applied to the lower back–which has triggered chain reaction”–this from a pianist who sat on a chair with no seat and a support bar that ran front to back along his crotch. He reported hemorrhoids, abdominal cramps and gas, “rectal pressure” and allied discomfort when sitting, and “irregular bowel mov[emen]ts generally…primarily loose as opposed to formed bowel mov[emen]ts.” Dr. Philip Klotz, a urologist Gould consulted twice in 1978, told Ostwald that “Glenn was very, very worried about his prostate.” He confided these worries to his notepads, even when medical tests revealed nothing; around 1980 he reported with grim triumph that his doctors “observed ‘puffy’ prostate” that “seemed larger than recollected.”

Finally, there were problems with his skin and extremities in his last years, including a “psoriasis episode” and concerns about “discoloration re fingers,” “circulation re fingers,” and “some finger pains.”^*92 He worried about “‘sleep’-sensation in left foot and (either) hand,” about “ankle-foot phenomenon” and “flat-footed-like sensations,” about “hot-flash sensation, prim[arily] in right foot but, as of yesterday also left wrist,” and “neural sensation, hyper-activity-like, radiates down leg (usually left) to toe” while lying down.

The volume of these complaints is astonishing, especially as they are in addition to the very real problems, like hypertension, for which Gould was being treated at the same time. And no complaint ever appeared in isolation. In a “symptomology” that he jotted down sometime around February 1980, he reported all of the following problems in a single day: “Slight Rib Cage syndrome,” especially while laughing; “immense fullness in upper abdomen,” along with the release of gas; “some neuralgic reference in right toes” “feet flatness and back of leg syndrome” “chest-throat indigestion discomfort” “air-pocket, right abdomen” “some minor discomfort in right side” and finally, “burning sensation during urination (restricted flow) upon wake-up [at one p.m.]…also, some pressure in rectum upon returning to bed.” Small wonder that Gould was convinced he was constantly ravaged by disease.

In a notepad a few years earlier he had wondered if he could find “anyone who might evaluate all the disparate evidence and formulate a theory accordingly.” But everyone had the same theory: he was a hypochondriac who pathologized every trivial, passing creak, ache, and twinge that the middle-aged male body is prone to, especially a body that has for years been poorly fed, inadequately exercised, denied fresh air and sun, over-medicated, and subjected to considerable physical and emotional stress at home and on the job.

Gould knew, at least theoretically, that the mind could make a hell of heaven where the body was concerned. Andrew Kazdin heard him talk openly about his fears that emotional stress would yield physical symptoms–he knew all about this from his illness-plagued concert days–and he was aware and afraid of the potentially destructive power of repressed emotions like anger. Yet he often could not see the mind-body connection in his own case. The filmmaker John McGreevy remembered him calling, before a filming session, to announce that he had five of six symptoms of sub-clinical polio, and would call back if the sixth and deciding symptom appeared. In the end, however, he simply showed up as planned. “It was pre-concert nerves,” McGreevy concluded, “exaggerated in the most baroque way.” In any event, Gould’s claims that he “scarcely had so much as a sniffle” after 1964 and that “my hypochondria pretty well ended with the last of my live concerts” were plainly absurd. He continued to get sick, and to think he was sick even when he wasn’t. We can only imagine the torment he might have endured had he lived to old age; we might almost be glad that he was spared it.

“You see what kind of neurotic you’re dealing with.”

On the basis of his hypochondria some people have questioned Gould’s mental health. He had at least one passing episode of real mental illness according to Peter Ostwald, who saw it at first hand. In late December 1959, Gould called Ostwald to report that “people were spying on him from the roof of an adjacent building, shining lights into his windows, making strange noises, and sending him coded messages. He said he could hear them talking about him and wondered if this was part of a plot involving an illegal business deal.” Around the same time, John Roberts recalled, Gould reported hearing voices talking to him, and had a particular cabinet moved out of a room because, he said, “I didn’t like it, it was looking at me, it was staring at me.” Ostwald concluded that he “was probably suffering from a brief paranoid delusional episode,” and if so it was likely caused by excess intake or improper combination of drugs. (This was just after the initial Steinway injury, when he was perhaps over-medicating himself.) In any case, the episode stands out, because nothing resembling mental illness of this order was ever regularly a part of Gould’s life.

He acknowledged that he was neurotic, and he certainly had a healthy share of demons and the elevated sensitivities one would expect in an artist. Some of his doctors and friends suggested that he might benefit from psychiatric counselling, and while he did not take offence at the idea he never really accepted it. Ostwald found that Gould did consult a psychiatrist, Dr. Albert E. Moll, at McGill University in Montreal, apparently around August 1955, shortly after his recording of the Goldberg Variations–a period in his life when he was under an unusual amount of pressure. Moll recommended four psychiatrists in Toronto, and Gould, according to some lighthearted comments he made to Jock Carroll in 1956, visited one of them. The psychiatrist, he recalled, found nothing physically, sexually, or environmentally wrong, “so it was just a question of tranquilizers–bigger and better pills.” This sounds like a tall tale. Gould never did enter therapy; the closest he came to it was seeking out psychological insights through conversations with friends like Dr. Joseph Stephens, a psychiatrist and harpsichordist who spoke to Gould regularly for seventeen years. Some of his doctors believed that he would have benefited from psychiatric treatment for hypochondria, but it is difficult to imagine him being a successful patient, talking frankly about personal problems and accepting advice; presumably he would have treated a psychiatrist like all the other professionals to whom he felt confident dictating terms. In later life he poked fun at psychiatry and its jargon through fictitious characters like Dr. S. F. Lemming and Dr. Wolfgang von Krankmeister.

Gould lived permanently with a great deal of generalized anxiety, and he admitted to suffering bouts of depression during his concert years. Aspects of the classical definitions of the saturnine or melancholic temperament can certainly be seen in his personality: a need for solitude alongside a resentment of loneliness; a passionate insistence on a life of the mind, even if “inwardness” sometimes acts as a drag on one’s life; total immersion in work and a compulsion to chronicle that work, as well as a capacity for juggling minutiae; a self-consciousness that is vigilant and unforgiving, always worried about real or perceived weaknesses of the will; complex relations with other people marked by secretiveness, caution, and manipulativeness, and the masking of negative feelings (like hostility or superiority) with outward geniality; difficulty forming intimate personal bonds and a tendency to connect better with things rather than people, including a tendency to revere certain privileged objects; an obsession with death; stubbornness; a certain physical “slowness” and blundering; avoidance of eye contact. Hypochondria, too–“melancholics make the best addicts,” as Susan Sontag wrote. Gould’s fear of losing control of his emotions, and his repression of powerful emotions like anger, could be linked to a depressive temperament–one definition of depression is indeed “anger turned inward”–as could his insomnia, chronic tension, and poor eating habits.

Gould manifested a variety of obsessional, schizoid, and narcissistic traits, too, hardly surprising given his fragility, sensitivity, and advanced intellect–and these are in addition to his hypochondria. The obsessional traits are plain to see. He sought to control every aspect of his mind, body, and environment, and was a perfectionist in every aspect of his work. He was inhibited emotionally and exalted intellect at the expense of instinct, tending to rationalize and overintellectualize and to be rigid and uncompromising in his thinking. Fearing the unexpected, he was cautious and punctual, valued precision in all things, always planned and prepared. He found it difficult to “let go,” a personality trait that became an aesthetic position–witness his distrust of improvisation and “chance music,” for instance. He needed the security of ritual and routine in order to function productively. A case in point: his famous chair, the familiarity of which obviously gave him comfort and confidence.

We can include “numeromania” among his obsessional traits, the tendency to count things and record the results, in an effort to deal with the stress of multiplicity and disorder, to give oneself the illusion of controlling the world by keeping accounts of it. His papers reveal a lifelong cataloguing instinct, of which his hypochondriacal note-taking was but one example. In 1959 the journalist Pierre Berton wrote that Gould would literally count the seconds until lunch hour when he was in public school; he also liked to track his class’s highest and average marks on tests and assignments. In high school he began to keep track of the word count as he wrote an essay (still a habit at the end of his life), and he numbered and dated the bars as he composed his score of his String Quartet. In his last years, he would not only track his blood pressure and pulse rate and sleeping patterns in detail, but calculate three-and five-and seven-and ten-day averages and sometimes plot his findings on graphs. Sometimes he would track and graph weather statistics in different Canadian cities throughout a day–keeping records of his environment seemed to bring him some comfort.

Gould loved making lists. Often he would write out lists of daily, weekly, and seasonal tasks, crossing them off when completed, and in some of these lists he included even the trivialities of his day, allotting five minutes for shaving, five minutes for brushing his teeth, fifteen minutes for taking laundry to the cleaners, and so on. He might even break down a half-hour practising session into segments of twelve, ten, or eight minutes. He made lists of people to be called, in numbered order, sometimes noting how long each call should take. He made lists of letters to be written and checked them off as they were done, then made lists of the finished letters and checked them off as they were mailed; he did likewise with his bills. When he travelled he drew up detailed packing lists (admittedly he required a lot of gear) and duly checked off each item. He made long lists of his accounts and of the performance of various stocks in his portfolio. When he stopped keeping his diary in 1980, he made an index of it and placed it at the front.

Gould also manifested traits of a schizoid nature. He was solitary and shy, and found intimacy difficult. To many people he seemed detached and withdrawn emotionally, sometimes cold and inaccessible. He feared confrontation because to confront someone is to bring out emotions on both sides, the prospect of which often embarrassed and frightened him; he preferred to keep some distance between himself and the outside world, including other people. “For me the presence of people is a distraction,” he said, explaining his preference for contact by telephone. He was reluctant to look people in the eye more than glancingly, even when regaling someone with an anecdote: to do so is, of course, to confront that person’s personality and feelings directly. Even on television, when speaking unscripted about something personal, he sometimes had trouble looking right at the camera. In the CBC documentary Variations on Glenn Gould, while talking about the origins of radio, he notes “that incredible, spine-tingling sense of awareness of some other human voice and persona,” and while uttering these emotional words he keeps averting his eyes.

Like the typical schizoid person, Gould tended to find satisfaction and meaning more in his inner reality than in the outside world (though hardly to the extent that would define schizophrenia). But his preference for solitude was coupled with an urgent, barely containable desire to communicate unilaterally. In his tendency to launch into long, torrential, self-centred monologues, some friends and acquaintances detected at once a desire to express and a desire to throw up a protective layer–of words in this case–to keep the other person at a distance. Peter Ostwald saw a combination of two impulses in Gould: “stay with me” and “keep your distance,” a nice summary of an essential schizoid dilemma. As we have already seen, Gould was in the classic predicament of people of this temperament in that he feared love and closeness not because he did not desire them but because they contained the risk of being swallowed up. Gould also had the schizoid’s paradoxical combination of vulnerability with superiority in his relations with others–a certain helplessness but also the feeling of being the centre of the universe. Gould was out of touch with his body–another schizoid trait–even though he was constantly examining it; he agreed with Proust that the possession of a body is a great danger to the mind. He was reflective and drawn to abstract thinking, which requires a certain detachment from ordinary feeling and permits emotional expression and communication in a removed, impersonal way–and it is no coincidence that he was attracted to the electronic media. Schizoids also have a propensity to create their own idiosyncratic and rigid images of what the world should be like, and Gould’s world view, formed in adolescence and little changed thereafter, certainly fit this profile.

That Gould had narcissistic traits, too, is hardly in doubt. He was self-absorbed and stubbornly independent. Though not as immune to the feelings of others as legend would have it, he did put his own needs first most of the time, and could be dictatorial: he thought that his needs should be your needs, too. His intellect and aesthetic were powerfully self-referential and he found it almost impossibly difficult to accept or even to understand contrasting opinions. “I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies,” he said. “It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.” When offered advice, he would simply shrug and say, “You can’t fight City Hall!” When he sought feedback it was for validation, not correction; he had an enormous need for approval and praise–for those pats on the head from his mother. When treating a friend to a recording or videotape, or at a playback in the recording studio, he would conduct and grimace and sing along and provide a running commentary sometimes filled with praise for his own achievement. “As you listened his eyes seldom left your face,” Geoffrey Payzant recalled. “He would have positioned you and himself so as not to miss any detail of your spontaneous reaction.” And he wanted only one kind of spontaneous reaction: unalloyed praise, to which he might respond with vociferous agreement. He believed the flattery, because his faith in his own productions was absolute.

Gould often demonstrated a failure of empathy, a difficulty appreciating what others were feeling, particularly when it was not a feeling he shared. As a lecturer, for instance, he was a poor judge of his audiences, seemingly unable to detect when he was boring or confusing them with dense, technical prose or trying their patience with heavy-handed attempts at humour. In private, his jokes and anecdotes were sometimes so long and tortuous that he lost his listeners, and the more he became caught up in his own invention the funnier he seemed to find them. Certainly his phone calls at all hours suggest that he was oblivious to his listener’s schedule. He apparently felt certain that the person on the other end of the line wanted to do nothing more at midnight than listen for an hour or two while he read a new essay or played alternative takes from a new recording session or rattled on about some new enthusiasm. The CBC producer Mario Prizek remembered Gould singing him a complete one-act opera over the phone. He had high expectations of others, a sense of entitlement, and he was not above taking advantage of a friendship or working relationship in order to get help with, say, one of those quotidian errands at which he was so hopeless–asking one of his secretaries to pick up laundry, for instance–and some of his friends felt manipulated.

There was a (mild) paranoid component in Gould’s psychology, an oversensitivity to the potentially destructive influence of other people and ideas; hence his desire for solitude and self-sufficiency. He could seem paranoid in situations where he did not feel in control. When he came upon a group of people who were laughing, for instance, he might wonder if they were laughing at him, and he fired a cleaning woman whom he suspected of gossiping about him. He was concerned about his personal security, especially where over-ardent fans were concerned. Andrew Kazdin wrote of one young female fan who, in the late sixties, wrote letters to Gould and sought to meet him. She showed up at the offices of Columbia Records, in New York, when Gould happened to be there, and Kazdin recalled seeing him “cowering in a crouched position behind the door” when the woman’s presence was announced. An unexpected knock on his door might provoke a worried phone call to the building manager, and one Halloween, when some trick-or-treaters threw milk at the CBC building, Gould was so upset that he cancelled a taping session.

Like many schizoid people, he was empathetic and benevolent in the abstract, as his political and social views reveal. He had difficulty reading the feelings of individuals, yet he had a real social conscience, loved animals, was deeply disturbed by troubles around the world that he saw on the evening news. But this same abstract thinking led to some disturbing claims. He wrote, for instance, in a 1974 self-interview, that a war “engaged in by computer-aimed missiles is a slightly better, slightly less objectionable war than one fought by clubs or spears,” because “the adrenal response of the participants” is less involved, and he told Andrew Kazdin that, while he could not imagine himself picking up a weapon and engaging in hand-to-hand combat, he could imagine himself in a deep bunker masterminding a war from behind a console of machines. He even said that “the Orwellian world holds no particular terrors for me,” and his ethical approach to art led him to take seriously the potential menace that certain kinds of art could pose–hence the puritanical censoriousness of his aesthetic. “The Soviets are a bit roughhewn as to method, I’ll admit,” he wrote, “but their concerns are absolutely justified.” Only a sheltered aesthete with a detached and abstracted view of the world could fail to realize the frightening implications of such remarks.

Gould sometimes compartmentalized his relationships in order to control them. Some have suggested that he made lists of what information he shared with different people in order to keep account of his relationships and track down any leaks or betrayals. He seems, in his own mind, to have slotted people into the categories that best suited him. Though he worked for a decade on films with Bruno Monsaingeon, who is a professional violinist, he never heard him play the violin, except once by accident, and he took no interest in Joseph Stephens’s harpsichord playing, though Stephens was accomplished enough to give a cycle of concerts featuring all of Bach’s keyboard works. When his relationship with the record producer Paul Myers became close in the mid-sixties, he decided to work with another producer in order to keep the friendship out of the workplace. He worked well with his subsequent producer, Andrew Kazdin, for fifteen years, probably because, as friends recall, he had him pigeon-holed as a producer. Kazdin’s own memoirs do not suggest that they ever had a warm friendship: he never once visited Gould’s apartment, for instance, and (wrongly) assumed that no one else did either.

It is a commonplace of the Gould literature that he used people and then dropped them when they were no longer useful to him, but the truth was hardly as brutal as that. Some relationships did end abruptly. Sometimes close friends of long standing found themselves suddenly shut out of Gould’s life, for reasons he would not share. Gladys Riskind says that after more than six years of close friendship Gould simply stopped contacting her, without explanation, and hid behind an answering service. He and Morry Kernerman “parted in a strange and bitter way,” Kernerman recalls, after a decade of friendship and musical collaboration, and even after confronting a visibly uncomfortable Gould at a rehearsal Kernerman could get no answer as to why he severed the relationship. His relationship with Greta Kraus ended in a similarly unclear way, and Verna Post, Walter Homburger’s former secretary, thinks her own friendship with Gould ended perhaps because she “said something, moved into his personal territory, or embarrassed him somehow.” In some such cases Gould left considerable bitterness in his wake, though often the pain of the severed relationship was mutual, suggesting he had been (or thought he had been) somehow betrayed or hurt.

Sometimes, where an argument or misunderstanding or humiliation, or some real or perceived slight (usually magnified in his own mind), had introduced a note of awkwardness or embarrassment into a relationship, Gould preferred to withdraw than to confront the situation directly. Incidents of this sort apparently contributed to the cooling of his relationship with his childhood friend Robert Fulford, in his twenties, and the upsetting telephone gag seems to have been a primary motive for his finally ending a decades-long friendship with Joan Maxwell. Most who knew him felt that they had to tread carefully, because he could easily take something innocent the wrong way, and because he was acutely sensitive to criticism about some aspects of his work. Harvey Olnick, for instance, saw little of Gould after criticizing his interpretations of late Beethoven in the mid-fifties, and John Beckwith offended him with some of his published criticism, particularly on the subject of Richard Strauss. Anton Kuerti visited him backstage after the Brahms concerto with Bernstein in 1962, and joked, “After what we heard tonight, maybe it is time to retire.” Gould shot him a look that said “Et tu, Brute?” and never spoke to him again. He stopped corresponding with the critic B. H. Haggin, one of his biggest supporters, after Haggin began to critique his Mozart recordings in the mid-sixties. He stopped seeing Vincent Tovell, whom he had known since 1959, after the 1964 CBC television recital An Anthology of Variation, which Tovell directed. Tovell had had to confront Gould about the length and verbosity of his spoken commentary, and though Gould agreed to cuts and revisions, he was so sensitive to criticism of his writing he terminated the relationship. A few years later, when he mentioned his latest writings to Keith MacMillan, MacMillan teased him by expressing the hope that they would be “in English.” Offended, Gould quickly ended the conversation and a few days later sent MacMillan a curt note stating that in future he should be contacted through his manager. He ended years of contact with Peter Ostwald and Joseph Stephens in 1977, apparently after detecting their lack of enthusiasm for his recent projects when they visited him in Toronto.

Gould’s supposed ruthlessness about relationships has been exaggerated, however, for like everyone else he had relationships that ran a logical course and ended naturally and amicably, and like everyone else he had colleagues and acquaintances and friends of varying degrees of closeness and did not welcome every person he knew into his circle of intimates. There were many perfectly innocuous cases in which he stopped seeing someone after a project they had been involved in ended and there was no basis for continued contact–hardly cases of people being “dropped” after being “used.” In the early sixties, as his concert career was winding down, and especially after 1964, when he was definitively shedding one life for another, Gould narrowed his circle of acquaintances considerably, and many people who had known him up to that time, in either a personal or professional capacity, found that they stopped seeing or hearing from him. Some resented his withdrawal, especially as there were no formal farewells, but in many cases the relationships ended naturally once he stopped travelling widely and appearing in public, and anyway his truly close friends and professional colleagues were not a part of this process.

In some cases the end of a relationship with Gould was a relief, for he could be engulfing and controlling as a boss or friend. As Ray Roberts put it, “he would sort of burn people up.” His single-minded commitment to his work, and his intense, seemingly boundless concentration on whatever task was at hand, could exhaust his colleagues. Tom Shipton, one of his editors in the later seventies, says that Gould expected others to keep up with his own furious pace. But Shipton, like some others, did not resent Gould’s demands; rather, he felt bad at the thought of letting Gould down. Shipton sometimes reluctantly feigned illness in order to take a day off, knowing that Gould would not want a sick person anywhere near his studio, and he was not the only overworked technician to resort to that ruse so as not to disappoint the boss, for Gould did feel let down at the thought that someone might not live for his art to the degree he did.

Given that Gould was hypochondriacal, and had melancholic, obsessional, schizoid, and narcissistic traits, is a diagnosis of personality disorder or mental illness, of real psychological damage, warranted? Some, like Peter Ostwald, have concluded that he was tormented by terrible psychological problems: “While onlookers were satisfied to conclude tolerantly that Glenn’s style of life was just another way of being human, Glenn–we now understand–often experienced it as a nightmare.” But Gould’s neuroses, though potent, do not tell the whole story.

Yes, he had melancholic traits–he was introverted, a brooder. But he cannot be considered chronically, clinically depressed. When he became depressed it was in response to some circumstance that was depressing, like his long immobilization in a body cast in 1960, and the depression would lift when circumstances improved. His private papers and the testimony of those who knew him most intimately do not suggest that he fought depression as a daily fact of life; he functioned at a very high level and was immensely productive, even while dealing with anxieties and physical problems. He was not gloomy or embittered or malicious, or prone to feelings of misery or hopelessness, he did not lack self-esteem or live with self-reproach, he did not indulge in black humour or caustic irony; in fact, he was usually upbeat, often excited and joyous, even during periods of tribulation and stress. For all his problems he remained a focused and optimistic person who worked confidently and with considerable success toward his stated artistic and personal and moral goals.

Yes, he had obsessional traits, but not to the extent that one should question his sanity. Some consider his arm-soaking to have been a neurotic, obsessional ritual, but it was merely functional: he soaked his arms because he had a great deal of work-related musculoskeletal tension, and he was not the only musician to use this therapy; he can hardly be compared with the obsessive-compulsive who washes his hands fifty times a day for no good reason. He was not necessarily ruled by his obsessional tendencies. It gave him a sense of comfort and control to plan out in detail the activities of his day, for instance, but he was not fixated on keeping to his schedule. Moreover, his obsessiveness was channelled in productive, artistic ways, and was responsible for much of what was most impressive and characteristic in his work–the fantastic, almost superhuman precision of his piano technique, for instance, or his fussiness about the action of his piano, or his analytical grasp of the music he played, or his meticulousness as an editor of recordings and radio documentaries. In this sense, his obsessional traits were adaptive as much as neurotic. Gould was a Vermeer, a Stravinsky, a Beckett, a Kubrick–an artist for whom obsessiveness was a crucial tool.

Yes, he had schizoid traits, but we have already seen that while he found intimacy difficult he did not find it impossible and managed to have genuinely close relationships, though often with precisely those people most reluctant to talk openly to biographers. He was isolated, but only to the degree he considered necessary to his creative work, and under the right circumstances, with the right people, he enjoyed nothing more than hanging around and shooting the breeze. He abhorred large groups of people–“I’m rather alarmed when I don’t know what will happen,” he told an interviewer in 1964, “as in a crowd, for example”–yet he dealt successfully, if reluctantly, with public situations when he had to; this was a man, after all, who played the piano, lectured, and hammed it up in front of thousands of people for more than fifteen years. That he quitted the concert circuit in order to cultivate a life that kept him away from crowds does not necessarily indicate that he was agoraphobic or a victim of “social phobia,” merely that, unlike most of us, he had the will and the resources to live without compromising his preferences.

Yes, he had narcissistic traits, but he was also widely perceived as warm and considerate, could be an extraordinarily loyal and supportive friend, and was thoughtful and kind on countless occasions. Sometimes shyness made him seem narcissistic. Bruno Monsaingeon recalled that Gould could not face the farewell party his crew had organized after their filming sessions in 1974, but not because he did not appreciate their work: he was simply too shy, and wrote them warm personal letters instead. The technicians and others who worked for him recall that Gould almost never expressed praise or thanks, yet his 1980 diary reveals that he greatly appreciated his colleagues, even if he was embarrassed to say so to their faces. On May 27, 1980, he wrote that Lorne Tulk’s editing “is as fluent as ever,” that “he’s an immensely gifted editor,” that he wished he could work with him more often. On June 7 he wrote that “[Tom] Shipton’s [editing] work is absolutely marvelous,” and on August 21 that Jean Sarrazin was “unquest[ionably] one of the finest editors I’ve ever encountered.” Moreover, far from taking their work for granted, he wrote admiringly, albeit to himself, of their willingness to work long hours with real dedication despite other commitments. The 1980 diary also reveals that when he did feel the need to replace someone whose work was not satisfactory, he did so with regret, not merely ruthlessly.

How selfish Gould was depends on whom you talk to. Andrew Kazdin and Joseph Stephens, for instance, have both recalled that Gould’s late-night phone calls never began with him wondering if it was a convenient time to talk, yet others have recalled that his every call began with precisely this question (was it merely rhetorical?). Much writing about Gould has leaned heavily on recollections from people who were not among his closest friends even though they may have spent a great deal of time with him, in person or on the phone, over many years. Some such sources remember only a narcissist whose conversation consisted of interminable monologues about himself, his ideas, and his activities, and who seemed to take no real interest in the person on the other end of the line except as a sounding-board. That was certainly the reality for one class of Gould’s friends. But he had other, closer relationships, with people in whom he took a genuine interest, that endured for many years with give and take on both sides–ordinary friendships, in other words, which did not necessarily come to an abrupt end whenever some conflict or tension arose. To the extent compatible with his shyness and the necessary degree of solitude, he was a good and real friend who valued close emotional bonds. Lorne Tulk decided, after ten years of working on radio documentaries and recordings, that he needed to take a sabbatical from Gould’s intensity and perfectionism, and so he worked for him only sporadically in Gould’s last five years. Gould regretted the loss, but did not, as legend demands, cut Tulk out of his life. Their close friendship continued as before–indeed, Gould came to speak of him as the brother he never had. They spoke almost daily, and Gould confided in him about the most sensitive aspects of his private life in his last years. John Roberts admits that it was “a whole career” being Gould’s friend, but adds, “when I needed him he was there.”

Gould could not escape his neuroses, to be sure, but he was at least aware of them and able to laugh at them, which gave him some measure of control over them, and they were balanced by many compensatory features of his personality. Many gifted artists and intellectuals are rendered creatively impotent, severely damaged if not ultimately destroyed, by their eccentricities and demons, but Gould does not belong in this company or qualify as self-destructive. Even when it comes to the hypochondria that undoubtedly contributed to his premature death, his motivations must be taken into account: significantly, he medicated himself only in response to perceived medical problems, however misguided his diagnoses may have been; he never, as far as can be determined, took drugs to get high, to dull his senses, to lose himself. His psyche was not simply a matrix of torments that he sought to escape; he fought his psychological issues to a draw. For all his anxieties and neuroses, his personal limitations and failures, Gould coped, he got things done, he led a professional life of astonishing productivity and success and a private life that afforded him more satisfaction than is usually recognized.

“All good Canadians would rise with irate displeasure at the slighting inference that I was anything other than the archetype of the well scrubbed, gentlemanly boy next door.”

His eccentricities have stood out in much writing about him because they are colourful, newsworthy, yet the Gould that most people remember was also very much his parents’ son: the quintessential Nice Canadian Boy, at heart a man of decency and integrity. For every person who suffered at the hand of his neuroses there was one who found him warm, sweet, and lovable, much as people remember him as a child. Paul Myers wrote that in person Gould was “quietly spoken and with almost old-fashioned good manners,” and his Toronto piano tuner, Verne Edquist, whom he would give several months’ notice where possible about an upcoming job, called him “a real gentleman–polite, considerate.” He was unfailingly polite, and like his parents observed simple courtesies–for instance, sending a donation to All Saints’ Church (Kingsway) after making a recording on the church’s organ. Considering his workload and his professional status, he was remarkably generous with his time when it came to answering fan mail and doing favours for friends and even strangers, and he often returned small acts of kindness: he treated Dr. Stanley E. Greben, a Toronto psychiatrist, and his wife to what Greben recalls as a very pleasant dinner at a good local restaurant, simply because he had spent five minutes on the phone with Gould recommending an ear, nose, and throat specialist. He once granted a dreaded face-to-face interview simply because he could not refuse the interviewer, who had travelled all the way from London to see him. He was gracious and solicitous with women; if taking a young woman out for dinner, he would arrive punctually at her house, come to the door, chat with her mother. For a loner he was surprisingly friendly. “He was really jolly,” Tim Page recalled, “and a really damned good companion.”

Gould did not play the prima donna, a fact that is reiterated again and again by those who knew him; rather, he usually came across as modest, unpretentious. He was “Glenn” to just about everyone who exchanged more than a few sentences with him, “Dr. Gould” to no one. (Many of his posthumous fans call him “Glenn,” apparently reflexively.) Though he could be “difficult” where his idiosyncratic needs proved hard to accommodate–with Steinway and Sons, for instance–one searches in vain for, say, the loftiness of Stokowski, the cruelty of Bernstein, the arrogance of Rubinstein, the waspishness of Stravinsky. He was disgusted by uppity behaviour in others, by the “opera capes and temper tantrums” of Toscanini, for instance, and seems to have been determined not to behave like a typical world-class artist. He demanded respect, to be sure, and was disappointed or petulant or angry when things went wrong, but he did not indulge in tantrums in order to reinforce his celebrity stature. In private, he enjoyed the company of people who were not artists or intellectuals, whom he sought out for genuine companionship, not as an audience to sit at his feet; he enjoyed talking to them about everything except his own work. One of his neighbours in his apartment building remembered him as funny, talkative, and surprisingly gregarious. In his later years he would visit Jessie at her home in Oshawa, where, she recalled, “he would curl up on the chesterfield in his stocking feet and while I served five or so pots of tea he would relate numerous anecdotes, play guessing games, catch up on family news and through his word pictures draw me into a world of minds far beyond my comprehension. During these times he accepted me as an equal, never demeaning or holier than thou.” Lorne Tulk wrote that his first meeting with Gould included a lot of friendly getting-to-know-you conversation: “Here was this person with a huge international reputation and a staff technician who had just met, and we were talking as if we’d always known each other.” Gould, he realized, “had an incredible ability to make people immediately feel at ease.”

Gould knew he was a superior person in many ways, but tried not to behave as such. He did not make racial or economic or class distinctions between people, had no snobbery about wealth or status, and did not condescend to “ordinary” people. Those who served him in restaurants and hotels, for instance, remember a pleasant man who did not want to be fussed over and gave no hint of being a famous artist. Geoffrey Payzant recounted an occasion in the late seventies when a CBC technician innocently asked Gould–asked Glenn Gould–if he could recommend a good model of apartment-size upright piano. “And I thought, Oh my God, what can Glenn Gould say in reply to that? Well, what he said was as respectful and as kind and considerate as anything you could imagine. He took this as a serious request and gave serious, useful information in reply. Now, I was just impressed out of my boots–I thought this was marvellous.”

Andrew Kazdin recalled that when the baritone Cornelis Opthof became exhausted while recording some Schoenberg songs, and asked if they could “rest for a minute,” Gould immediately and courteously replied, “Why, of course,” waited precisely sixty seconds, then announced that work would resume. But for the most part, those who worked with Gould, even those who found the work itself exhausting, found him a personable and accommodating boss. “He was the soul of patience in the studio and in the editing room,” says the CBC producer James Kent. “There was no display of ‘temperament.’” Even Kazdin noted that when he conveyed to Gould in writing that he was feeling overworked, in their first years recording in Toronto, Gould at once hired an assistant and “was somewhat hurt and saddened that this matter had to take the form of a letter.” Many of his technicians and secretaries recall their time with him as enjoyable and remember his idiosyncrasies as more lovable than oppressive. There was often an atmosphere of high spirits when he was recording or filming, and where the work was gruelling he was usually alert to the need periodically to relax the crew with rest breaks, games, jokes, or his own improvisations or renderings of show tunes on the piano. A camera assistant was moved to write to him in 1978, after a film project, simply to tell him how much the crew had enjoyed the project, and CBC staffers sometimes wrote to him just to say that it had been a pleasure to work with him.

As a young man Gould occasionally performed for charitable purposes, and over the years he quietly donated money to many musical and charitable organizations. Privately he helped many people. The pianist Antonin Kubalek emigrated from Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, and for several years found his new life in Canada a struggle. Gould heard him play on CBC radio in 1969, heard of his plight, and the following year sent him a substantial cheque; later he wrote on Kubalek’s behalf to the Royal Conservatory of Music and advised him on concert management–all of this before meeting him in person.

He could be open and solicitous with his friends. Jessie Greig found him “tender and kind and gentle,” and he was actively involved in her life and interested in her teaching. She remembered him once running his hand down her arm and saying, after a beloved aunt had died, “Jessie, I’ll always be good to you.” Despite his feelings about public situations, he was an eager witness at John Roberts’s wedding, in 1962, for which he insisted on donning a morning suit, and he was godfather to several of his friends’ children. He was loyal about following and supporting his friends’ careers, even those friends who played Liszt and Rachmaninov. Whenever Ray Dudley appeared live on the radio, for instance, Gould, as Dudley wrote, “would telephone the minute the performance was finished.” (Surprisingly, he was often full of praise for others’ performances of music he hated.) Gould wrote warm letters of reference for musician friends, former secretaries, and others, and was not standoffish toward the former schoolmates and old family friends and Uptergrove neighbours who wrote to him from time to time.

He was supportive of friends who were in mourning, experiencing marital strains, or otherwise in difficult straits. “I will never forget his solicitude,” Vincent Tovell said, recalling the time of his mother’s sudden death. When a close friend was attacked on the street and badly injured in the late fifties, Gould wrote reassuringly to his parents, who lived overseas, and sent them some autographed albums. (He was always generous in making gifts of his albums.) Though he feared sick people and hospitals he did not neglect friends who were ill. In 1963, when Lois Marshall had a throat infection and was ordered not to sing or even speak for a month, Gould called her up often to keep her company, gently telling her not to say anything and then proceeding to entertain her with news and stories; he cheered Joan Maxwell, too, with daily phone calls when she was hospitalized after back surgery. When Barbara Little was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1978, Gould had several high-profile friends who had lived through a similar diagnosis–including Marshall McLuhan–call her and offer their reassurance, and after she had an operation he was among the first friends to call. Some personal gestures were perhaps difficult for him, given his emotional reticence, but for every story of the detached and self-absorbed Gould there is one that has him tenderly wiping tears from the eyes of a distraught friend, or at least doing what he could. Gladys Riskind remembers “one particular time appearing on his doorstep in despair, and the only way he knew to comfort me was to play for me.” (As a child he was observed improvising for his mother as a way of apologizing for misbehaving.) Compassion–a crucial theme of The Three-Cornered World, incidentally–was a feeling he greatly prized.

There are stories of personality clashes when Gould played concertos and chamber music–with the Juilliard String Quartet, for instance. He seems actually to have been a less flexible collaborator as a young man; he could be “a little dictator” at times, said Otto Joachim. (Recall the frequent criticism about his “overwhelming” his partners in chamber music at Stratford.) In 1954, Alexander Schneider and Zara Nelsova were annoyed at their young colleague’s precocious confidence when it came to Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio, which he was playing for the first time but about which he already had many strange but firm ideas. When Schneider said that he had played the trio at least four or five hundred times, Gould replied loftily, “My position has always been that quality is more important than quantity.”^*93 Eventually, Nelsova recalled, she and Schneider managed to talk him out of most of his ideas.

Mostly, however, his fellow-musicians marvelled at his open-mindedness, sensitivity, and spirit of co-operation in collaborations, especially in his later years, and in spite of his strong and idiosyncratic musical personality. Most of the singers he worked with, as well as instrumentalists of the status of Yehudi Menuhin, Leonard Rose, and Jaime Laredo, reported smooth, rewarding collaborations, with Gould willing to try new things whether they were his ideas or not. Some have recalled capitulating to his interpretation of a piece, though not because he pulled rank, using his talent and status to bully, but because they found his ideas too musically compelling to resist. Kerstin Meyer told an interviewer that “it felt completely natural,” was “a pure joy,” to sing with Gould. She was surprised, in fact, that he was such a good accompanist and was so willing to subordinate his ego; many first-rank pianists are not. “He knew what he wanted, but I never felt pressured–the operative word was collaboration,” said the Canadian soprano Roxolana Roslak, who worked with Gould in the later 1970s. “His musical influence was, of course, enormous, but curiously it did not stifle my own expression. Quite the contrary, he had the ability to create such an atmosphere of enthusiasm and discovery, that one felt that anything was possible, and more important–attainable.” In 1973 he asked the Canadian clarinetist James Campbell to participate in a CBC television program in which Gould was to perform, for the first time in his career, a piece by Debussy, the Première rapsodie. Campbell remembers that, to his surprise, Gould treated him as an equal throughout the collaboration, asking for and deferring to his opinions on interpretation on many occasions, though at the time Campbell was in his early twenties and still a student.

An anecdote related by Morry Kernerman says a great deal about Gould’s basic decency, even at the height of his international fame. The Toronto Bach Society found it was having financial trouble in its first season, so Kernerman asked Gould, on short notice, to help out by appearing in their season-end concert in May 1958. Gould agreed, ensuring that Eaton Auditorium was full, and he played his best in Bach’s Partitas Nos. 1 and 6. He refused to accept a fee, and at the end of the concert his father presented the society with a donation. The society’s debt was wiped out, and when its chairman sent Gould a small honorarium as a token of appreciation he returned the cheque. “I said no fee and I meant it!” he wrote. “Please use this to buy epaulettes for the choristers or some suitable and significant embroidery.” If the musicians’ union protested, he was willing, grudgingly, to accept a payment of union scale–“but not one cent more.” The society gave him an inscribed book, Early Russian Icons, as gift, and it was still in his possession when he died.

Stories like this can easily be multiplied. Many people, by their own reports, felt not just entertained but nourished by contact with Gould, for all his evident faults. “Being with him I rose above myself,” says Gladys Riskind, who is not a musician but found that she could talk to Gould for hours at a time, even for the better part of a day, and never run out of things to say. “When I left him I always felt like a better person. I could pull out the best that was in myself.”

“Well, I’m a ham, as you know…”

The Scottish, Stephen Leacock wrote, “always seem to me to prefer adversity to sunshine,” and Gould liked to claim a “dour hieland heart.” Yet he had an uproarious sense of humour–and not a subtle, sophisticated humour, but an innocent, childlike playfulness, a healthy sense of the absurd, and a fondness for sheer silliness, make-believe, and dress-up. A thread of humour ran throughout his personality and relationships and work, even his performing. Few in the grimly serious, conservative world of classical music have ever acted the little boy and had as much fun in public as did Glenn Gould. He had a sharp intellect and a quick wit, but his humour, unlike that of many intelligent and witty people, was without cruelty or spite; he used it to relax, occasionally to provoke, never to wound. And he liked to have it run both ways. He enjoyed being the butt as well as the source of a joke, as long the intent was not malicious. Kazdin wrote that Gould could “freeze the air” in a jocular situation by suddenly not getting the joke, or perceiving some troubling subtext. Playing practical jokes on him was not a good idea, either: the loss of control in such situations upset him. Nevertheless, humour was one more default position of Gould’s personality, and for his friends and colleagues as well as his fans it was one of his most endearing and refreshing traits.

In conversation, in meetings, in interviews, in the studio–in most interpersonal situations he liked to keep the atmosphere light, filled with his trademark cackling laugh. He seemed to be always “on” to take his phone call was to be entertained for an hour or two. Everyone in his circle–record producers and musical collaborators, accountants and lawyers, assistants and secretaries–got drawn into his whimsies and usually learned to respond in kind. It was difficult to be in his circle if you had no sense of humour. In 1958 he and some friends formed the Lower Rosedale Shakespeare Reading Society, which would meet in John Roberts’s apartment and elsewhere to read plays, play games, chat. Gould joined in enthusiastically, and was able to lose himself in comic shenanigans for surprisingly long periods of time; they offered him needed respite from his work and his anxieties. He had outrageous pet names for some of his friends, and loved to puncture pretension and pomposity. Robert Fulford recalled the teenage Gould’s pleasure at a local funeral home’s daily “death notices” on the radio–the lugubrious organ music, the earnest announcer. He was particularly delighted when it was solemnly intoned, “There are no death notices today.”

His surviving papers include many, sometimes remarkably involved, specimens of private humour that he worked up for himself and friends–joke memos, stories set in verse, monologues and scripts, little songs. There was, for instance, a two-page draft of an interview with “the eminent musicologist and opera buff, Boris Gouldowsky,” and, in April 1977, some strange made-up dialogue between Roxolana Roslak and the CBC producer James Kent, who, Kent says, barely knew each other. (The dialogue ends with this stage direction: “The sound of heavy breathing is heard.”) Even his notes to his assistant might take the form of elaborate lists of “Robertsiana” in which the most trivial errands were described in highfalutin language. He loved to write long, verbose, mock-pompous letters. A friend’s engagement in 1957 yielded a long formal letter from the “HERBERT GOULD AGENCY: Escort Services, marriage counseling, Divorce attorney. Our motto: ‘low fidelity and high frequency.’” Another of his letterheads was “GOULD PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT AND INVESTMENT COUNSELLING SERVICES, INC.” To Paul Myers he wrote a three-page introduction to a fictitious record company, “Notmuch Records Inc. (A Voice of the Turtle Execusound Company)”–a dig at the esoteric Nonesuch label. When the daughter of his secretary Jill R. Cobb drew him a little picture, in 1975, he responded with a formal lawyer’s letter of thanks signed “G. Lenherb.” He wrote poems for Cobb’s children, too, and for (or about) the children and pets of other friends. Joan Maxwell, whose married name was Rempel, merited a longer poem, beginning:

 

There once was a singer named Rempel,

Who regarded all art as a Tempel,

i.e. Rock she abhorred

but Aida adored

And preached opera as would Aimee Semple.

 

He drafted a long twelve-tone song in 1980 involving Menuhin (who was a practitioner of yoga), Menuhin’s wife Diana, and the composers Bruch and Mahler, which began: “While standing on his head, one morning in Gstaad/Yehudi said: ‘For me, the works of Mahler count for naught.’” Perhaps the two had debated about Mahler and the song was Gould’s reply. Amid the most serious work on A Letter from Stalingrad he made a vocal sketch on a text, presumably culled from a newspaper, that begins, “Sex Cited in Chicken Seizures,” not a phrase one expects to read in a biography of Glenn Gould.

All of this spilled into the workplace, where Gould could be riotous fun. There was a persistent, often infectious–occasionally tiresome–streak of joshing and good humour in his interactions with his colleagues, which can be seen in outtakes and other bits of audio and video never intended to be seen in public and in fly-on-the-wall documents like the NFB films. His producers and technicians and collaborators speak of recording sessions filled with laughter even where the work was serious and demanding–“We were down on the floor doing animal noises,” Margaret Pacsu told a CBC interviewer. Otto Joachim recalled rehearsing at Stratford with Oscar Shumsky and Leonard Rose “when Glenn Gould walked in, with ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor!’–that was about all he could say in German,” and from that moment the rehearsal degenerated into horseplay. “We never played another note. End of rehearsal.” When he was recording Brahms’s F-minor piano quintet with the Montreal String Quartet in 1957, the twelve-hour session was, in Joachim’s words, “a free-for-all circus” that included impromptu parody-performances of Wagner, complete with vocals and staging. In a letter to one of his former secretaries, Avril Rustage-Johnston, in 1979, Gould recalled that their work together “consisted of two-thirds anecdotal material and one-third work”–all of which he, of course, paid for.

A note of humour, or at least lightness, was always part of Gould’s public persona, in his onstage lectures, in his liner notes and other writings, in his broadcasts, in such compositional confections as So You Want to Write a Fugue? and the Lieberson Madrigal. After retiring from concert life, however, he increasingly liberated his humorous side. In 1965, he wrote three witty articles for High Fidelity/Musical America under the pseudonym of the conductor Dr. Herbert von Hochmeister (loosely based on Karajan), and in later years he published seriously intended though lighthearted articles and reviews with titles like “‘Oh, for Heaven’s Sake, Cynthia, There Must Be Something Else On!’” “Liszt’s Lament? Beethoven’s Bagatelle? Or Rosemary’s Babies?” “Data Bank on the Upward-Scuttling Mahler” “The Future and ‘Flat-Foot Floogie’” “A Festschrift for ‘Ernst Who???’” “The Grass Is Always Greener in the Outtakes” “Back to Bach (and Belly to Belly)” and “A Hawk, a Dove, and a Rabbit Called Franz Joseph.” His first sustained piece of written humour was “The Aftermath of Breton,” which was begun in 1966 and went through several versions. The centrepiece of the article is a report on controversies surrounding the publication of a (fictitious) book on music, The Consonant Choirloft, by a certain “Lapierre Breton.” It was a parody of Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew, which was a frank and controversial critique of religion in Canada published in 1965, and which gave Gould a pretext for a tongue-in-cheek look at Canadian music and criticism. The whole exercise was very convoluted and “inside,” which is probably why he never saw it published. A spoof for radio followed in 1967 and was later published: “Conference at Port Chillkoot” was a parody of a music critics’ conference, set in Alaska and featured thinly disguised portraits of real Canadian and American critics. It included a choral number the text of which (“From Chillkoot’s icy glacier,/O’er Chillkoot’s lowering fjord…”) parodied a famous nineteenth-century missionary hymn (“From Greenland’s icy mountains,/From India’s coral strand…”).

More humour writing soon followed. His liner notes for his 1967 album of the Beethoven-Liszt Fifth Symphony consisted of four imaginary reviews by fictitious critics of various nationalities (British, German, American, Hungarian) and persuasions (historical, analytical, psychiatric, socio-political). His liner notes for his 1973 Grieg-Bizet album closed with “A CONFIDENTIAL CAUTION TO CRITICS” in which he noted his genealogical connection to Grieg so as to guide those critics who might otherwise miss the “unquestionable authority” and “incontrovertible authenticity” of his interpretation of Grieg’s piano sonata. He published two amusingly self-deprecating interviews with himself, one on his ambivalent views of Beethoven, in 1970, the other on the moral underpinnings of his aesthetic, in 1974. And he wrote book reviews in the 1970s that, while insightful, have a charming lightness of touch. His humour writing, like his writing generally, greatly improved with time.

As a child Gould enjoyed playing make-believe and putting on funny voices, sometimes mimicking (never maliciously) his friends and neighbours and teachers. (He was a fan of Rich Little.) Around 1950 he, John Beckwith, and Ray Dudley made a private recording of a three-hand, prestissimo reading of Chopin’s Étude in A Minor, Op. 10/No. 2, preceded by a little skit in which Gould, for once, played straight man, interviewing Beckwith who, in dialect, played Vladimir Horowitz. (The recording survives.) As an adult he made all sorts of private recordings, some alone, some with friends, in which he documented the sort of play-acting he liked to indulge in privately, and by the early sixties it was clear that he would be incapable of keeping his fondness for hamming at bay forever in public–recall the “Piano Lesson with Glenn Gould” in Vancouver, and the “Panorama of Music of the 20’s” at Stratford. In the later sixties he sometimes played fictitious characters in promotional recordings requested by Columbia Records, and in the early seventies he got up the nerve to appear on CBC radio and television in character, occasionally in what were intended to be serious statements of his ideas (presumably he subscribed to the spoonful-of-sugar theory).

He developed several recurring characters based on broad ethnic stereotypes, and from the mid-sixties they increasingly infiltrated his CBC broadcasts. There was a silly-ass, imperviously Edwardian British conductor, originally named Sir Humphrey Price-Davies and later incarnated as Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, based on models like Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Adrian Boult, undoubtedly also on some of the transplanted British musicians Gould encountered growing up in Toronto, and on a pompous musicologist once played by Peter Ustinov. He trotted out a few other variations on the same theme over the years–for instance, Jonathan Wynan, a BBC producer and athlete. There was a series of intellectual Germans and Austrians: the conductor Hochmeister, the arrogant psychiatrist Dr. Wolfgang von Krankmeister, and the avant-garde composer and musicologist Dr. Karlheinz Klopweisser, whose interests included “the resonance of silence,” specifically “German silence, which is of course organic, as opposed to French silence, which is ornamental.” (Klopweisser was partly based on Stockhausen.) There was a New York cabby, an early-Brando-type mumbler with a “dese-dem-dose” accent, whom Gould encountered in 1966 and immediately added to his dramatic arsenal in various forms, usually dressed in a leather jacket and sometimes of a beatnik disposition–the boxer Dominico Pastrano, the actor Myron Chianti, and Theodore Slutz, a downtown New York critic with a taste for the avant-garde. And there was a gruff, inscrutable Scot with an impenetrable brogue, who turned up as the athlete Duncan Haig-Guinness and later as a radio technician of the same name.

Gould’s humour, like so much about him, was identifiably Canadian, particularly in his writings. As a schoolboy he became familiar with the works of Stephen Leacock and with Paul Hiebert’s fictional poetess Sarah Binks, “The Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan,”^*94 and he was likely familiar with Robertson Davies and other Canadian humorists. Certain recurring features of his humour fall entirely within this tradition: his fondness for tackling sophisticated themes in rural (often Arctic) settings; his tendency to convey innocuous circumstances in the tones of high drama, blowing up the mundane and banal to mock-heroic stature; his witty use of euphemism and under-statement, and fondness for undercutting what he purported soberly to be elevating; his use of thinly disguised parody; and a knowing corniness of a sort that can still be seen in comedy on Canadian radio and television. Even the details are distinctively Canadian, including his fondness for colourful, self-parodying names and titles. Hiebert had “The Claim Jumper, the official organ of the Quagmire Bureau of Mines,” and Davies had “the Skunk’s Misery Trombone, a lively little paper with a rather limited circulation.” Gould had “Insight, Digest of the North Dakota Psychiatrists Association,” “Rhapsodya, Journal of the All-Union Musical Workers of Budapest,” “Field and Theme–The Country Gentleman’s Guide to Music and the Garden,” “The Village Grass Is Greener,” and “The Great Slave Smelt,” as well as the “Port Chillkoot Packet,” an obvious nod to Orillia’s real-life newspaper, the Packet and Times. Here is Leacock, in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town:

Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself–either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.

Here is Hiebert, analyzing Sarah Binks’s early poem “The Parson’s Patch”:

Here we have already the Sarah we have learned to love, sweetly lyrical, deeply moralizing. But her touch is unsure. “A onion, a lettuce” is weak, some of the lines do not quite scan, and her rhyming of “visible” with “contemplation” is not in the best traditions of Saskatchewan literature.

And here is Gould:

I had scarcely begun the first supper show of my gala season at the Maude Harbour Festival when, as was my habit, I glanced toward the boxes. And there, seated on one marked “Live Bait–Do Not Refrigerate,” was a vision of such loveliness that it instantly erased from my mind the memory of all four amorous adventures which had befallen me between lunch and five o’clock tea. Delightful as the company of those ladies may have been, I realized at once that my future, my fate, my destiny, belonged to the dazzling enchantress who now, with such demure grace, hid her bubble gum beneath the crate of worms on which she sat and attempted to come to terms with the ardor of my gaze. I resolved to address every note of my performance to her and her alone and to inquire into the county’s statutory-rape provisions at intermission.

That is the opening paragraph of “Memories of Maude Harbour, or, Variations on a Theme of Arthur Rubinstein,” published in 1980, a spot-on parody of Rubinstein’s self-congratulatory autobiography, My Young Years, and perhaps Gould’s masterpiece in the comic vein.

 

Gould, naturally, thought all his humour was brilliantly funny, though much of it is as awful as it sounds, particularly the ethnic humour. His English accents, for instance, call to mind one of Robertson Davies’ quips about amateur theatricals: “Their English accents were not very well assumed, their English slang was derived from hearing people who had read Wodehouse talk about him.” (Ironically, Gould’s Scottish accent was his least convincing.) His comedy could be heavy-handed, and was often laboured and attenuated; he got so caught up in laughing at himself that he did not know when to stop. “Glenn was not an actor,” Robert Silverman said. “He was a college-variety ham.” And that is precisely right. Yet even when his writing or play-acting was at its most awful–and sometimes especially then–there is something charming and refreshing and satisfying about the spectacle of one of the world’s premier classical musicians lost in comic reverie in public. It is difficult to imagine, say, Pollini or Karajan or Schwarzkopf onstage with kooky hat and funny accent, and this is surely one reason why Gould has proved attractive to the general public. He takes some of the stuffing out of a pretentious and poker-faced field, without undercutting his eminent qualifications in that field.

Gould’s humour might be interpreted as a mask behind which he hid in order to protect his true feelings and avoid real interaction and intimacy, and on many occasions he turned to humour when compelled to confront someone. When Columbia Records owed him money in 1965, he wrote to them, in his best fractured English, in the guise of Herbert von Hochmeister: “HAVING NOT PLEASURE KNOWING YOU WHILE HOPING SUCH FOR COMING SOON? FINDING COURAGE BREAK IN YOUR PEACE ASKING MONEY PLEASE. ON BEHALF CLIENT MR. GLENN GOULD DO SO? SINCE CLIENT NOT TOO QUICK WHERE MONEY MATTERS AND ALSO SHY.” Mostly, though, Gould was simply in love with play. Light badinage and playacting relaxed and reassured him, made private situations more enjoyable and public situations more tolerable, but never precluded intimacy with close friends.

That humour, moreover, is strikingly apparent throughout the Gould discography–no performer has ever explored the possibilities for wit and parody in the classical repertoire to the degree Gould did. In his high-comic cycle of Mozart’s sonatas, and some of Beethoven’s early piano pieces, he indulged in all sorts of quirky ornaments and cheeky turns of phrase, in up-and-down arpeggios that come off like vaudeville crosstalk. He brought out the parodistic qualities of works like Mozart’s famous “Turkish Rondo” and Schoenberg’s neo-Baroque Suite, Op. 25, and liked to poke fun at commonplaces of interpretation. His fast, clipped reading of the popular first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is a studied refusal to offer the expected “poetic” reading, and his reading of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata parodies just those rhetorical aspects of the “heroic” middle-period Beethoven that he most despised. There is even a hint of self-parody in such projects as his recording of the Beethoven-Liszt Fifth Symphony, his busy, over-dubbed recording of Wagner’s Meistersinger Prelude, and his solo-piano version of Ravel’s La Valse–projects in which he seems knowingly, with a wink, to step outside the repertoire characteristic of him, as though to confront his detractors head-on. Gould was a nose-thumber as well as a serious artist, and his contrarian stance relative to hallowed classical-music canons and conventions was in many ways profoundly subversive, not just fun.

“I was good at fughettas–it was like solving a puzzle.”

Gould loved games. As a child he competed passionately, and John Roberts recalls that even as an adult “he would shriek with glee” if he was winning at Monopoly–and he usually was. He enjoyed mixing his conversations and work sessions with parlour games of all sorts: association games (If you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be? If you were a key, what key would you be?),^*95 role-playing games (I’ll be Mozart, you be Beethoven, let’s have a conversation), mental-telepathy games, musical games, novelties like the Lüscher Color Test, which purports to assess your personality according to your colour preferences, even little quizzes in popular magazines. Guessing games were his favourites, especially Twenty Questions, which everyone who knew him recalls as an unavoidable, occasionally exhausting part of the Gould Experience. There were also guessing games of his own devising. The notepads from his last decade include notes relating to musical guessing games that he was either posing or answering, and one of them includes this revealing answer: “Unfortunately, I can’t remember a note of Musorgsky.” (He could often be tripped up with the most popular Romantic warhorses of the repertoire.) He loved guessing even outside the formality of a game. Many of his phone calls, even long-distance, began with, “Guess what happened to me today?”–and he really meant it. One friend recalls sitting in Gould’s cubicle at the CBC when they heard approaching footsteps; Gould would not even allow her to see who was coming until they first had guessed. As a child, on the streetcar, he used to guess what other passengers did for a living. Games have long been viewed as harmless ways of getting rid of aggressive and competitive impulses, which Gould undoubtedly had, and some, like Andrew Kazdin, believe that Gould’s fondness for guessing games reflected a delight in exercising power–I know something you don’t. But his enjoyment of games seems to have been mostly innocent, and besides, he enjoyed being the one who guessed, at which task he was never known to give up or lose patience.

The pervasiveness of guessing and game playing in Gould’s life suggests that these were not merely relaxing pastimes for him but processes hard-wired into his brain. Games have also long been viewed as manifestations of the impulse to order, and are consistent with an obsessional temperament; Gould’s own obsessive tendency was often channelled in ways that suggest game playing. The stock market could well have been a game to him as much as it was a source of income and security–it was fun. (One of his first acts on a typical day was to call his broker.) He enjoyed trying to outwit the experts, often succeeding, and tracked the progress of his stock portfolio in loving detail. He seemed to relish real-life opportunities to exercise his obsessiveness. He would pore over his contracts and royalty statements with fanatical precision. Among his papers is a truly virtuosic seventeen-page letter that he wrote to Kazdin, in 1977, which includes thirty-four separate reports of questionable royalty calculations for various albums in countries all over the world. Of course he took his business affairs seriously, but when he began to compare unit-royalty rates and reporting dates in Chile with those in New Zealand, or to fuss over his participation in “greatest hits” packages in Norway and South Africa, his tongue was surely edging toward his cheek. In such documents–and there are many of them–he was obviously ferreting out trivial discrepancies as much pour le sport as for the income involved, which was often trivial, and he loved to boast of his findings in his replies to Columbia Records, whose accountants must have dreaded sending out his semi-annual statements.

Obsessional traits like game playing were symptomatic of a fantastically busy brain that never shut off. Gould was McLuhan’s “oral-aural man,” unable to be silent, totally involved mentally with whatever he was doing. No wonder he had trouble sleeping. (What is more, many of his dreams had to do with work, as though his brain kept working while he slept.) He always had to be doing something with his brain, the way a person with too much physical energy, forced to sit still, will tap a foot or twirl a pencil. When there was no work being done, he had to find other outlets–hence the persistent doodling (a habit from childhood),^*96 the obsessive list-making, the games and puzzles. When he tried his hand at verse it was always in rhyming couplets, limericks, haikus, and other set forms: fitting new ideas into a given pattern was just the sort of puzzle-solving challenge he craved. The music he loved most was contrapuntal–music, as he told Tim Page in 1982, “with an explosion of simultaneous ideas.” Music, in other words, that was most like a puzzle. His brain was attuned to counterpoint even in day-today life. He was fond of eavesdropping on several conversations at once in restaurants and other public places, and he was able to talk on the phone while drafting an article and listening to music, and to keep track of all three streams of input. In ordinary conversation, the unusual organizing power of his mind was apparent. “His was the most brilliant mind I have ever encountered,” Avril Rustage-Johnston wrote. “No matter how intricate a path he wove in his discussions, with parentheses inside parentheses, I never heard him lose his way, or stop for a moment to say, ‘Where was I?’ Having rerouted a story in the interests of clarification or enlargement, he was able to return to the precise word at which he had left off, perhaps after five minutes of non-stop talking, without a moment’s hesitation.”

Fugues and twelve-tone works gave pleasure to Gould’s puzzle-solving brain because they need to be analyzed, figured out, to be fully appreciated, while more intuitive types of music–fantasias, aleatory pieces, jazz improvisations–disturbed him the way an unmade bed disturbs a neat freak. You can’t wing it when you’re making a puzzle; you have to put every piece in its rightful place in order to succeed. Gould’s seemingly paradoxical love for the most Romantic music of all–Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, and their contemporaries–derived from the density of texture in this music, and he said as much when he praised late-Romantic counterpoint. This was music that, like the largest works of Bach, was so contrapuntally rich that one got lost in it: to hear everything that was in it stretched the analytical capacities of the ear and brain to their limits. And what is Gould’s fondness, at the piano, for revealing (or inventing) strands of counterpoint if not a delight in figuring out a puzzle and making the solution clearly perceptible to his listeners? The transparency of Gould’s piano style was all about opening up the music, setting out the constituent parts of its structure for the listener’s delectation; one critic compared his playing to a chess master who could see many moves ahead. And he looked always for new unifying elements to add to the puzzle. For instance, he grew increasingly fond of exploring proportional tempos in the music he played–that is, creating mathematically precise rhythmic relationships between different movements or parts of a piece. His 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations is the best-known case, though the practice pervades his later recordings. And when he played continuo, he was not content simply to strum chords; he might add new counterpoints, or play a kind of piano reduction of the full score.

It was this same puzzle-solving brain that drew Gould to recording and editing. His producers have testified that he had an uncanny knack for keeping track of the characteristics of different takes in his mind and for knowing in advance which splices would work where. He was a true, ideal recording artist who did not need the continuity of the concert setting in order to craft a unified performance of a work. “At a certain point in his life, montage became to him second nature, in order to separate the moment of the physical act (playing) from the artistic decision,” wrote Bruno Monsaingeon. “Very few people are able to work in segments and still give a unity to all these segments. Gould could keep a complete view of the total work and an abstract one, very coherent from the first to the last note, and still do one segment at a time.” For Gould it was a pity that the fad for quadraphonic technology in the early seventies passed quickly, for he was naturally drawn to its possibilities and complexities; it would have allowed him, in effect, to juggle both horizontal and vertical dimensions of the editing process at the same time, a complexity he finally did encounter, in a different way, in the recordings he made using “acoustic orchestration”–a three-rather than two-dimensional puzzle. He admired the synthesizer artist’s ability to build up a performance section by section, line by line, or literally note by note, and he likely would have loved this ultimate puzzle-solving challenge himself, had he been able to craft a piano performance this way without musically inferior results.

No wonder he loved movies so much and spoke of recording by analogy with filmmaking: a film is a great puzzle, built up out of bits and pieces of material created out of sequence. He dreamed of directing a film, and though he admitted having not much visual sense–in public school he got Cs and Ds in art–he was in some ways a natural for the film medium. He might have made a great documentary filmmaker, and it is a pity he never had an opportunity to try his hand at the visual counterpart of “contrapuntal radio.” He jumped at whatever chance to direct came his way. In 1975 he was asked to contribute to World Music Week, and in lieu of giving a paper he created a half-hour videotape on the subject of “contrapuntal radio,” for which he reused the title Radio as Music. It purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at Gould in a studio at work on The Quiet in the Land, but in fact he scripted the whole thing, even the mundane chit-chat. Outtakes from the program show him enjoying the whole process immensely, though his “co-stars,” who were not actors or even hams, were obviously rattled. His technician, Donald Logan, was unable even to ask if anyone wanted coffee without being compelled to do multiple takes of precisely scripted lines. Much of Radio as Music looks posed and stilted as a result, but Gould was having too much fun making his movie to notice.

His composing, too, tended to resemble puzzle-solving, and that is why as a serious composer he did not succeed. What he possessed as a composer was a capacity for the ingenious development of germinal musical ideas, precisely the facility he exercised so obsessively in the String Quartet. In that work Gould concocted a great puzzle for himself to solve, but he was less successful in writing great melodies, contriving colourful and idiomatic string textures, crafting a compelling large-scale drama. What he lacked as a composer, in short, was inspiration, that special spark that animates a piece of music into something other than a technical exercise, and what ended his composing career may have been his realization of this. The only later works he completed were humorous pastiches: exercises, once again. In his subsequent development of “contrapuntal radio,” though, Gould created a new genre of “musical composition” of precisely the sort that best suited him. In his radio style the crucial gift required was not inspiration–say, plucking a great tune out of thin air–but the ability to forge resonant new syntheses out of “found footage.” “Contrapuntal radio” requires not a composer so much as a great and imaginative editor, someone with a native gift for solving puzzles, and in this congenial medium Gould did his greatest, most original composing. For the creative work demanded by broadcasting and recording, he had not just skill but positive genius.