A Fiction about Glenn Gould: Part II

This is a continuation of yesterday’s short story.

Our next appointment was with Stuart Macdonald, his oldest friend and, during much of his childhood, his next-door neighbour. Stuart worked out of his home, only few a blocks away from Hans, and his room was crowded with books and papers. Stuart was one of Canada’s leading newspaper columnists. He had a lively round face and wore glasses and seemed to be glad to be interrupted. He clearly found Tantyana attractive.

“I wish I had more time at the moment,” he said. “I want to hear about musical politics in the Soviet Union and write a column about it. Maybe tomorrow or the next day?”

Tatyana said would be delighted. Maybe they could talk about it in the car on the way to Glenn’s dacha?

“Maybe,” he laughed. “But I have three deadlines at the moment. Now, what would you like to know about Glenn that you don’t already know? After all, he talks about himself incessantly, with brilliant verbosity, in print, on the radio, on television, enjoys giving abstruse interviews, has breath-taking self-confidence, which often makes him talk about things he knows little about, uses big words and long sentences, which sometimes sound as though they were translated from boring German textbooks, loves clowning around and mimicking people, which he does amazingly well.

“You also probably know that he reads a lot, that he calls himself The Last Puritan, identifying himself with the hero of George Santayana’s story about self-education, that he loves Russian novels and Thomas Mann, that he wants to compose and conduct, is in touch with all the latest recording technologies, is deeply superstitious and talks freely about his dreams, is pathologically picky about his pianos, insists on sitting on a low folding chair when he plays which he usually carries with him – what else? – oh, yes, that he says he loves animals more than human beings, that he often makes friends with people and then drops them for no apparent reason, which is very upsetting to them, that he is very interested in the stock market and keeps on top of the day’s political news and tells the entire world at great length what music he likes and doesn’t like, and why, especially if he can shock people by saying that the trouble with Mozart was that he lived too long.”

“Does he say that?,” Tatyana smiled.

“Yes, he also believes Mozart didn’t know how to write a piano concerto. He says he doesn’t care much for music written between Bach’s Art of the Fugue and Tristan, which then leads to his favourites, Hindemith and Schönberg, Alban Berg and Webern. With the exception of some Haydn, some Beethoven, but not what he calls the heroic and pompous Beethoven of the middle period, a lot of Mendelssohn, strangely enough, and Richard Strauss whom he admired hugely. But that’s not what you want to know.”

“No. I want to know how he pulls himself together after he has been sick.”

“By taking pills. He keeps our entire pharmaceutical industry happy single-handedly. You cannot imagine how many pills he takes. For every occasion. He consults doctors all the time, makes them prescribe pills of every colour and doesn’t listen to them. He tells them what is wrong with him.”

“I see. What about girl friends?”

“He is secretive about them. Nobody knows for sure and I wouldn’t ask. I know he receives a lot of love letters from girls he has not met. I don’t know what he does with them. He likes to gossip about other people’s sex lives but about his own he is very puritanical.”

Tantyana frowned.

“Did you say puritanical?”

“Yes,” Stuart Macdonald laughed, “the Toronto Presbyterian kind, not the Soviet or Russian-Orthodox-Ascetic kind.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I mean other teen-agers of Glenn’s background rebelled against their parents’ Presbyterian horror of sensual pleasures. Which was typical of the Toronto of Glenn’s childhood. When Glenn was thirteen and fourteen he saw nothing incompatible between his parents’ puritanism and his overwhelming urge to make and understand music. He never rebelled. There was no need. I did, but he didn’t. That puritanical tradition shaped his musical tastes. Not right away, but eventually. That is why he dislikes what he thinks of as sensual, self-indulgent, emotional music and prefers rational, abstract, well-structured, cerebral, otherworldly music. He says he believes in Bach’s God and is not interested in music that does not meet his ethical and spiritual standards. When he was a boy he never used four-letter words, unlike the other boys, me included.”

“What kind of words?” Tatyana wondered, turning to me.

While I tried to explain to her what a four-letter word was – not easy for a gentleman like me – the telephone rang reminding Stuart Macdonald of one of his three deadlines. So we took our leave.

The next morning I picked up Tatyana and drove out to the comfortable neigbourhood of the Beaches in the east end of the city, not far from Lake Ontario, to 32 Southwood Drive, the Gould home, to visit Glenn’s mother Florence, whom I never found particularly appealing and who was certainly, compared to Tatyana, decidedly unspectacular. I always found her husband Bert more agreeable but he was dominated by his wife and Glenn, and never quite understood why Nature had given him and his wife such an extraordinary son who never had the slightest inclination to follow him in the fur business.

I repeated to Florence what I had said on the telephone. Was she going to visit Glenn during the next few days?

“I really had no intention,” she said. “I talk to Glenn almost every evening and try to leave him alone. But, of course, if I can be useful, I would like to help. One musician’s mother,” she smiled, “must help another musician’s mother.” I noted that she carefully avoided saying “one genius’s mother,” etc. “It would depend very much on what Glenn would have to say. I will ask him tonight.”

She did, and, to my great surprise, Glenn said Dmitri Yaminsky’s mother and I were more than welcome, as long as we didn’t stay longer than two hours at the most.

We drove up the following day. In the car Florence and Tatyana compared notes. Both mothers had made enormous efforts to make sure their sons had normal childhoods. Neither mother was particular successful. Their sons’ talents set them apart and isolated them. Florence was a piano teacher and taught him herself until he was ten. Both boys detested school, wanted to become professional pianists when they were five. Both strongly disliked competitive sports. Both had remarkable musical memories at an early age. Glenn had memorized all of Bach’s preludes and fugues in the first book of the “Forty-eight” by the time he was ten. When Dmitri was ten he knew the first ten Beethoven sonatas and all seven Scriabin sonatas by heart.

Glenn’s black-and-white shaggy sheep dog Banquo greeted us enthusiastically when we arrived and Glenn welcomed Tatyana with great warmth and charm. It was a lovely, sunny spring day. The dacha, the lake, the landscape generally, she said, reminded her very much of her place near Moscow.

He seated the four of us on deckchairs on the lawn looking out at the lake. “Mother told me you are worried about Dmitri,” he said to Tatyana after we had settled down.

“Yes.” She made a determined effort not to waste time and to come straight to the point. “He has again cancelled all his concerts.”

“Again?” Glenn rubbed his chin.

“Yes, he did it the first time after hearing you play.”

“Surely you don’t believe that?”

“Oh, yes. No question about it.”

“Let me assure you, madame, that was only an excuse. I know how these things work. When you are about to explode, you’ll think of any reason. I cancel concerts when I have a little twitch in my left toe, never mind how many people I upset and much money I lose. Dmitri’s timing was a mere coincidence.”

Tatyana explained the course of events and said that the connection with him, Glenn, was not only Dmitri’s own opinion and also the view of a number of doctors they had consulted. It was one of them who had suggested a word from him, Glenn, might make all the difference.

Florence felt she had to come out on Tatyana’s side.

“Surely you can think of something constructive to say, Glenn,” she said. “Obviously you made a great impression on him.”

Glenn turned to me with a twinkle.

“What do you think I should say to Dmitri Yaminsky?”

“I think you should say what Schopenhauer would say.”

“No,” Glenn beamed. “I will say what the old Tolstoy would say. ‘What took you so long to see the light?,’ he would say. ‘Concert audiences are forces of evil. Get rid of them! They bring about mob rule. Slavery. They are enemies of Truth and Beauty, instruments of the devil. Tell the devil to go to hell where he belongs! Become a free man at last! Throw away the shackles. Become yourself!’”

Tatyana stared at him.

“Concert audiences?” she gasped. “How can Dmitri do without them?”

“Make recordings! Edit the tapes until you are satisfied. Throw out the mistakes. Come as close to perfection as it is possible for a mere mortal. Take your time! Relax! Live up to your own standards and be faithful to what you believe the composer had in mind. Don’t believe the sordid propaganda that says a performer must communicate with a live audience to be at his best. That is a dastardly lie perpetrated by concert managers and people who go to concerts not to hear music but to torture performers, to take sadistic delight in the false notes they play, show off their clothes and pick up the latest gossip in the intermission. After all, people used to love going to executions, too!”

• • • •

As the whole world knows, Dmitri Yaminsky followed Glenn’s advice His latest recording of the Goldberg Variations is outselling Glenn’s two to one.