Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould

ALSO IN THE

EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS

SERIES:

Big Bear
by Rudy Wiebe

Lord Beaverbrook
by David Adams Richards

Norman Bethune
by Adrienne Clarkson

Emily Carr
by Lewis DeSoto

Tommy Douglas
by Vincent Lam

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin

by John Ralston Saul

Wilfrid Laurier
by André Pratte

Stephen Leacock
by Margaret MacMillan

René Lévesque
by Daniel Poliquin

Nellie McClung
by Charlotte Gray

Marshall McLuhan
by Douglas Coupland

L.M. Montgomery
by Jane Urquhart

Lester B. Pearson
by Andrew Cohen

Maurice Richard
by Charles Foran

Mordecai Richler
by M.G. Vassanji

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont
by Joseph Boyden

Pierre Elliott Trudeau
by Nino Ricci

SERIES EDITOR:

John Ralston Saul

Glenn Gould

by
M
ARK
K
INGWELL

With an Introduction by

John Ralston Saul

SERIES EDITOR

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © Mark Kingwell, 2009
Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2009

Quotations from
The Glenn Gould Reader
, edited by Tim Page (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1984), are used by permission of the Publisher and the Glenn Gould Estate. Copyright © 1984 by the Estate of Glenn Gould and Glenn Gould Limited. Quotations from Geoffrey Payzant,
Glenn Gould: Music and Mind
(Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1978 and 1984), are used by permission of the Publisher. Copyright © 1984, 1992, 1997 by Key Porter Books. Quotations from Jeramy Dodds,
Crabwise to the Hounds
(Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008), are used by permission of the Author. Copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2008.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Kingwell, Mark, 1963-
Glenn Gould / Mark Kingwell.

(Extraordinary Canadians)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-670-06850-0

1. Gould, Glenn, 1932–1982. 2. Pianists—Canada—Biography.
I. Title. II. Series: Extraordinary Canadians
ML417.G69K55 2009 786.2092 C2009-902415-2

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This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper  

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHRONOLOGY

John Ralston Saul

How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society's most remarkable figures. I'm not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also
what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed
how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.

The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
. But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.

What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people's lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which
draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

People around the world sensed from the first moment they heard him that Glenn Gould was about much more than playing the piano better or differently. In what can be called chance or destiny, he emerged as part of a creative explosion of ideas and sounds in Toronto. Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Northrop Frye, Glenn Gould. All of them were reflecting and experimenting on what communications would and could become in a very different era, and they were all doing this in the same place at the same time. What the twentieth and now the twenty-first century thought and thinks about how we communicate with each other began in that place with those people.