Glenn Gould (8 page)

Gould was now firmly in the grip of a tightening double-bind of performance. The more successful his concerts, the more pressure to repeat and even extend them. Nor were the concerts allowed to remain merely concerts. The wild displays of adulation grew, ratcheting up a nervous reaction on the part of the performer, second-order anxiety about his own reactions compounding first-order anxiety about specific fears. Parties, meals, travel, public displays of sociability––all these were the unseen external costs of performance.

May 24 to 26, 1957: Gould travelled to Berlin and played with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Performing Beethoven's Concerto no. 3 in C Minor
during a rehearsal, he received an ovation from the orchestra. The concerts were runaway successes. H.H. Stuckenschmidt, a leading European critic, wrote: “His technical ability borders on the fabulous; such a combination of fluency in both hands, of dynamic versatility, and of range in coloring represents a degree of mastery which in my experience has not been seen since the time of Busoni.”
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Gould, by no means above flattery, memorized some lines of the review and later would often quote them to friends and colleagues—even as Stuckenschmidt likely stood as one of the inspirations for Gould's parodic music-critic character, Dr. Herbert von Hochmeister.

June 7, 1957: On his way by train to Vienna, the final stop on this tour, Gould encountered on the platform the conductor Leopold Stokowski, one of his heroes. He was thrilled to hear that Stokowski, a music-world celebrity who had married Gloria Vanderbilt, had an affair with Greta Garbo, and shaken hands on-screen with Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's 1940 film
Fantasia,
had been following the young Canadian's meteoric rise. The two icons shook hands too, though off-screen. Later, at the Vienna Festival, Gould played fifteen Sinfonias by Bach, Beethoven's Sonata no. 30, op. 109, and Webern's
Variations
. The acclaim was universal, and Gould made a now-familiar final bow wearing his flat cap, overcoat, muffler, and gloves. From this point on, the cold-weather uniform was
invariable and much reproduced—the outfit became Gould's favourite image of himself. The image's message extended beyond mere material fact, issues of low body temperature, or fear of infection. The message was this: no matter what the ambient temperature, it was always winter wherever Glenn Gould stood.

When Gould returned to Toronto on June 11, 1957, the Russian tour was already regarded as a triumph. He immediately went to New York to begin recordings of Bach's
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
even as he maintained a punishing concert schedule: twenty-two performances through the fall and winter. By the time he was about to embark on his second European tour, in 1958, he was so exhausted that his playing had noticeably declined, and on occasion, he surprised audiences by substituting pieces at the last minute, saying he had not practised the scheduled work enough.

Now began the steady declension of Gould as performer. Increasingly he cancelled scheduled performances, usually claiming ill health. He complained of sinus and respiratory ailments, colds caught from hotel air conditioning and worsening into tracheitis or even bronchitis. More and more time was spent alone in hotel rooms. Perhaps with good reason. The Toronto pianist Anton Kuerti, dining with Gould in
order to cheer him up, ordered calf brains for dinner, and when they were brought to the table, Gould fled in distress.

Now the playing was suffering badly. On September 21, 1958, playing the Bach D-minor Concerto with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, Gould anticipated his cue by almost a full second, throwing off the rest of the players. In October of that year, he cancelled all performances and confined himself to his room in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg, complaining of focal nephritis, a liver disease. He would later speak of the ensuing “semiquarantined” month as among the happiest times of his life. “Knowing nobody in Hamburg turned out to be the greatest blessing in the world. I guess this was my Hans Castorp period; it really was marvelous.”
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A striking image. Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain
is the most musical of great novels, a sustained meditation on time, disease, and death, all executed by artful deployment of leitmotif. It is also a self-revealing exercise in phenomenology, a reflection on the fact of consciousness. “The book itself is the substance of that which it relates,” Mann said of his work. “Its aim is always and consistently to be that of which it speaks.” What is that? It is consciousness experienced as temporality—as both time and timelessness. The leitmotif, as Maurice Natanson has written, in both music and prose “is
at once a gatherer, a displayer of what has been gathered, and an initiator of what is to come, given a particular complex of movements.” Looking forward and back over theme and variation, working its way on us in time, “it portends and it retains” even as it “
presents
itself in immediacy.” Retention, portent, and presentation: this is what Natanson calls the “triple play” of the experienced moment, the now.
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Castorp himself is a divided figure, a multiplying theme, by turns quixotic, arrogant, naive, sensitive, and shy. Perceived divisibly by the various characters to whom he is drawn, he is forever seeking himself in his symptoms. Perhaps, like Castorp, Gould should have stayed in his chosen sanatorium for an indefinite seven years, smoking cigars and listening to the gramophone, tossed between Settembrini and Naphta, falling for the girl with the Kirghiz eyes, forgetting his age, losing grip on his brilliant theories of time, letting his timepiece fall into disrepair. For when Gould ventured out on November 15 for a concert in Florence, he was booed for the first time in his professional life after playing a Schoenberg Suite. He considered cancelling a raft of performances, including a scheduled three-week tour of Israel—eleven concerts in eighteen days—but Homburger convinced him not to.

Gould returned to Europe just once more, in the summer of 1959. By now critical reception was focusing on his
onstage manner, the late-hour substitutions, and the many cancellations. After his return to Toronto in August 1959, he would never leave North America again. Later that year he also decided, having recently passed his twenty-seventh birthday, to move out of his parents' house in the Beach, that semi-isolated bourgeois suburb of Toronto with its signature boardwalk on Lake Ontario, its open water and closed minds. At first Gould moved into a suite at the Windsor Arms Hotel, the downtown bastion of stylish tea-taking and apartment-dwelling. Designed in neo-Gothic style by Kirk Hyslop, it had opened in 1927 at the corner of St. Thomas and Sultan streets, alongside the University of Toronto's Victoria College, and had quickly become Toronto's favourite chapel of conspicuous conformity. (The hotel's sleek Three Small Rooms restaurant would not open until 1966.)

Gould then considered leasing a large country house, known as Donchery, some fifteen miles outside of Toronto, with two dozen rooms, a swimming pool, and a tennis court, but backed out at the last moment. Instead, early in 1960, he moved into the six-room penthouse of the Park Lane Apartments, a deco-style midrise on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto. He would live here for the rest of his life, the solitude of the Hamburg hotel room now a daily possibility. He continued to book and play concerts but fewer with every year
and with more cancellations. In the 1961–62 season he played eighteen shows, in 1962–63 just nine. In 1962 his fear of flying overcame him: he would never board an airplane again.

Agamben suggested that although in one sense Gould stopped performing, he did not and could not stop
playing
. Now the play was with his potential to play, exercised every day in the act of not-playing. The act of not-playing was distinct from simply failing to play, or happening not to play, or merely doing something else rather than playing. Gould's decision was not really a decision at all; it was instead an exercise of power, over himself and over music, which had to be renewed forever. He enacted not-playing for the remainder of his days, a continually reaffirmed mastery of whatever being. He was quodlibet man, pure potentiality. Playing music hid the silence that made music possible, the nothingness before, after, and between.

Gould played the silence instead. In this view, his not-playing, his playing of silence, may be understood as the greatest work of art he ever created, a life's work.

So Agamben read Gould's silence not as a kind of resistance but of activity beyond hearing. In this view, Gould was comparable to Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and his gnomic utterance: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby, too, may be read initially as resisting, or refusing, the logic of transaction and performance demanded by office life under conditions of capitalism. But his preference is really a kind of stasis, reducing motion and speech by stages to nothingness. Bartleby dies, in a vagrant's prison. He is not Kafka's hunger artist, not quite comprehending his own refusals and withdrawals, seeking an approval and acclaim that has deserted him; Bartleby knows, to the end, where he is—and how he has got there.

With this final knowledge, Bartleby's inaction-as-action becomes an achievement of purity, a violent gesture free of determinant content. His “gesture of subtraction at its purest” (in philosopher Slavoj Žižek's words), where “body and statement are one” (in critic and author Elizabeth
Hardwick's) challenges the very idea of making sense according to the terms of sense that are presumptively accepted.
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Agamben remarked with approval the suspended potentiality of this repeated statement of a
preference not to
. Bartleby's “perfect act of writing,” moving from mechanical perfection to stasis, is a “pure act” of ever potentially not-writing. In the Arab tradition, Agamben noted, Aristotle's notion of agent intellect—thought without determination—“has the form of an angel whose name is
Qalam,
Pen, and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to', is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write.”
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There are many versions of Gould's not-playing just as there are many of Bartleby's not-writing. Gould's own accounts of his concert-giving and its necessary suspension offer a variety of possible narratives. Other storylines emerge to supplement the medical and the philosophical ones suggested in the previous take. For example, he began his interview with the broadcaster John McClure by offering two distinct but not distinguished reasons for his withdrawal. After proclaiming the prospect of a return to performance “not enticing,” he interrupted McClure's next comment, a staged incredulity that began: “The life of a glamorous
concert artist…?” “Is hideous, is dead, is part of the past,” Gould leapt in to say. “I think that that has no relevance to the contemporary musical scene.”
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But hideous, dead, and irrelevant are not all the same thing.

Nevertheless, the key third argument he offered in his own defence was the barbarity of competition and the spectacle of performance more generally. Both competitions and performances are populated by what he called “the apprehensive listener,” a listener who attends upon errors—raggedness in the strings, a muffed transition, an entry off by a fraction of a second. “There's a very curious and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener,” Gould said, a “gladiatorial instinct” that pervades the hall.

At the same time, those present are not qualified to engage in such apprehensive judgment. “Most people who go to concerts are certainly not musicians and care little about music, I think,” he said. They go for some combination of atavistic reassurance—an illicit nostalgia that has nothing to do with music, that is “delusional” in its attempted proximity to music—and a perverse desire to witness imperfection so that the imperfection of their own lives may be negatively ratified. Gould denied contempt for this audience even as his own judgments, the very
words of his articulation, made it obvious. The average concert listener, he said, doesn't know what he wants from a performance, any more than Gould knew whether he was “driving a tight or a loose car as a mechanic might define it.”
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One's initial sympathies are likely to lie with Gould. There is something of the unseemly spectacle about all performance, the audience there to judge and react as the minority talented population—at the limit, a population of one—struts and frets its hour. We attend seeking pleasure or edification. The performer attends in order to provide them. Ideally, this should not be a zero-sum game, a competition; it should be more like an ideal contract, where each party comes away happy because each has attained a desired return on investment. Performers do not merely get paid, or paid merely in money. They derive pleasure from the act of giving the performance, of displaying talent and skill. That performers crave applause as a junkie joneses for his drug is axiomatic in this frame, a thought that assuages any lingering guilt we might feel about subjecting individuals to ruthless assessment and sometimes mockery.

Our sense of inferiority in respect of the displayed talent is structurally enabled by the concert set-up, with the performer elevated on a stage before the audience. But
that inferiority is alleviated, even countermanded, by a second-order superiority inherent in the same set-up: the audience sits in judgment upon the performer. This superiority works along two distinct but related vectors. We disdain performers for the narcissism we assume underwrites their desire for the limelight; then, at the specific dimension, we feel entitled to judge the details of the performance. Thus the competition: even if there is nobody else onstage, the performer is being compared to some absent rival, even if it is one who exists only as part of a notional standard. Or, perhaps worse, sometimes the invisible competitor is the performer himself, invoked from prior performances—or even from no performances at all but instead from an imagined ideal, a reputational spectre.