Free Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell Page A

communication,his belief that solitude nourishes creativity and that colleagual fraternity tends to dissipate it.” 85
    Later in the review, he mentioned in wry tones Payzant’s hint—it is no more—that Gould’s fondness for psychoanalytic imagery might indicate a history of analysis. “Given that Payzant and Gould are both residents of Toronto,” Gould noted, “and that this sort of speculation could presumably have been settled with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, such inconclusive testimony—verging, indeed, on idle musing—can produce a rather comical effect.” Except, one wants to interject, that there is no simple yes or no here. “But its obverse,” Gould went on, “is that quality which lends to Payzant’s book its greatest strength—the author’s obvious determination to prepare his portrait without being interfered with, or influenced by, the conversational connivance and media manipulation at which Gould is allegedly a master.” 86
    Alleged by whom, exactly? By Gould, in a review of a book about himself ? By that book, or by some other, unnamed, book? By some generalized anonymous “they,” Martin Heidegger’s das Man ? In the end, Gould praised Payzant with the full force of his habitual irony of uncertain direction. Any critic could, he said, simply accept “the conventional image of Gould as an eccentric and erratic pianist-pundit.” Payzant had wisely chosen, instead, to “harmonize” Gould’s “musicalpredilections, moral persuasions, and behavioral extravagances,” in the process fashioning “a texture as structurally secure and chromatically complex as the baroque fugues which first awakened Glenn Gould to the wonder of the art of music.” 87
    The review itself surely has fugal elements, even if the book in reality does not. Gould’s play here is multilayered and self-conscious to a degree well beyond the easy use of that solecism of the media age, referring to oneself in the third person. That is merely part of the review’s basic conceit. In addition, he is indulging media images of himself even as he—apparently—ridicules or distances himself from them. The concluding show of praise is itself a fiction of the review’s performance, for at least two obvious reasons. First, there is no clear substantial difference between the so-called conventional view and the one he attributes to Payzant: both work to explain Gould’s eccentricities in the context of his music, explaining one by reference to the other. Thus, Payzant’s view is tarred with the same brush—or, perhaps, accepted as equally valid; it is not easy to say—as the usual ones. Second, even supposing a clear difference, the attribution of structural harmony to Payzant’s view is heavily backhanded, carrying a strong whiff of mockery. Payzant, Gould suggests, has imposed on his life the same sort of “cheating” structural narrativeresolution that Gould brings to a recording, or that a composer brings to a counterpoint composition.
    What is being communicated here, then, beyond Gould’s routine show of cleverness?
    His competitive streak, for one thing. Gould slighted Payzant for mentioning family reminiscences of his childhood will to win at croquet on the cottage lawn in Ontario, his fondness for driving powerful cars aggressively, his penchant for playing the piano with tour-de-force prowess—this despite the repeated claims that competition was anathema to him, and to music. On croquet at least, the critic had a point. Anyone who has played croquet, especially at a summer cottage or in the garden of an Oxford college, knows that it is among the most vindictive of games. Among other things, it is fair play to choose to send your opponent’s ball rocketing into the undergrowth in place of attempting to advance your own. “Payzant seems determined to