GG: Ecstacy & Tragedy

[vxavier@sfsu.edu (Veronica Xavier)]

Hi everyone!

What a nice surprise to find a heartwarming and reassuring 10
messages from the f_minor mailing list today! I was starting to wonder if I
should attach jumper cables to my modem.  Bri, I also joined the NLC GG
mailing list a couple days ago, to see if anything drastically interesting
was going on there, and I had the same experience you did--nobody home.  If
you post something to it now, there will be ONE person who will answer
you... but I think their list maybe 'broken' in some way.  Anyone else
know?

I feel like I'd like to give you my two cents' on the Ostwald book as well.
 I'm about halfway through it, and I find myself enjoying it, and I think I
would tell any other Gould fan that it is a worthwhile purchase and read. 
What I like about it is that it is written from a point of view that I feel
has been missing from the other books written about Gould--that of someone
who knew him and liked him, and yet was confronted with all of the other
strange and occasionally disturbing facts that his biographers have handled
rather coldly and even harshly before. 

 I think that James Rhem is right, there is not a whole lot of new
information in Ostwald's book.  But certainly the perspective from which it
is written is new, I think--one of respect and familiarity.  It is true
that much of the information in Friedrich's book is repeated in Ostwald's
(although there ARE some facts in that book I've never run across before)
but Ostwald's relationship with Gould seems to give the reporting of those
facts a personal warmth that certainly will be felt in those of us who
admire him and want to put all of that information into a positive context.
The story that opens the book, about Ostwald's first meeting with Gould, is
a short but effective illustration of the way a person's oddities can be
overlooked and/or reconciled with a growing affection for him or her. 
Perhaps when confronted with the fact that the most widely available
biographies of Gould are Payzant's (rather academic) and Friedrich's
(rather tabloid-ish) or even Andrew Kadzin's (very mean) Ostwald felt it
incumbent upon himself to give us his experience:  that all those strange
and even incriminating facts can add up to a real and even likable person,
and perhaps that is the point.

Also, I do believe there is a certain amount of interpretation of those
facts in Ostwald's book.  He doesn't present pat solutions to all the
mysteries of Gould's life, and as James pointed out, never attempts to
offer us an alternative to 'eccentric'.  But at several places in the book
(so far) Ostwald does introduce information with the purpose of adding
pieces to some of the larger puzzles (his unusual sexuality, his dislike of
'audiences' and live performance) and the Gould fan who runs across this
information for the first time will no doubt find them an aid to
understanding.  

I believe the criticisms that were levelled at the book by James are
justified, and if you are looking for what he felt was missing, you will no
doubt also be dissatisfied.  But I believe Ostwald's purpose in writing the
book was not to break a lot of new ground, divulge old secrets, or draw any
conclusions that Gould himself did not put into words.  The book seems to
me to try to cover two points of view:  the objective reporting that the
psychiatrist and musician was capable of, and the personal impression that
a longtime friend would have been exposed to.  If the combination of those
points of view is something you'd find interesting or valuable, I'd say you
should definitely check out the book.

Veronica Xavier
vxavier@sfsu.edu