GG: Review of Ostwald book

[Tim Conway <tpconway@ozemail.com.au>]

G'day to all,

And a belated merry Christmas and JIT happy new year.

The following review by Fiona Maddocks of Peter Ostwald's book 'Glenn Gould: The Ecstacy and Tragedy of Genius' appeared in the Christmas double-issue of The Spectator (20/27-12-97), an English weekly magazine with a distinctly right-wing bent. (I've subscribed to it for years, if that helps you pigeon-hole me.) It is not related to the USA magazine of the same name. I repeat the review here because most f-minor people live in the States and probably wouldn't even know about it. I trust that its repetition here does not infringe on copyright. I have, I hope, reproduced below the review exactly as it was printed, mistakes (very few) and all.

*****

To genius, tragedy and ecstacy, promised in this book's capacious subtitle, add madness, phobia, bedwetting, you know the sort of thing. Umbilical cords and dead muskrats, mother domination and hypochondria, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould specialised in them all. No details are spared. And this man wasn't even the star of _Shine_, though many examples of his playing have survived on film and make riveting viewing. The difference between these two capricious pianists is simple: David Helfgott has respectable but limited talent run wild; Glenn Gould was a genius, in control of his art but not, or perhaps too much, in control of his life.

Gould it was, you will recall, who gave up playing in public early in his career, sang along to his recordings, always wore an overcoat and muffler in the heat of summer and played seated on a sawn-off stool built by his father which made his nose roughly level with the keyboard. He died of a stroke, an illness he had long feared and predicted, at the age of 50. Fifteen years later his Bach recordings, which in their odd combination of idiosyncrasy and impersonality break every rule in the book, remain gramophone classics.

The late Peter Oswald, a psychiatrist as well as an intermittent friend of Gould's for about 18 years, had good credentials to write about this most crazed but brilliant of individuals. An amateur violinist, he occasionally played chamber music with Gould and shows himself to have had a perceptive ear. His long observations on Gould's musicianship -- the pianist's decision to play Chopin this way or Brahms that -- stand up well to scrutiny.

But the book's narrative bumps along with musical and psychological analysis crashing head-on like dodgems. Despite one's best endeavours, it rapidly becomes clear that in this context muskrats make for better reading than Brahms. The details of Gould's eating habits appal and intrigue. Still more compelling are his self-administered hourly blood-pressure charts. Before you know it, you're measuring your own against his and calling the doctor.

The ubiquity of the authorial personal pronoun causes half the difficulties. Phrases such as 'I doubt', 'I thought', 'I can imagine', 'I suggest', clog the page. Each chapter is a bog of rhetorical questions. Whole slabs of conversation, which would read better in reported speech, survive in full ('Next I asked him what he thought.' '"I think," he said,' etc.) Dr Oswald's evidently caring but overbearing reading of his admired friend, at times engaging, often thoughtful, finally maddens.

Assessing his subject's admittedly weird friendships, most of which appear to have taken place on the telephone in the middle of the night, with Gould on a high or low delivering endless monologues, Oswald reaches an earth-shattering conclusion: that Gould might, possibly, could be, surely was more revealing over the telephone than face-to-face. 'Was it perhaps the veil of invisibility afforded by the telephone and the impossibility of any physical contact?' he ponders, as if coming across such a phenomenon for the first time. Well, doctor, yes, quite possibly.

Of the promised ecstasy there's hardly a trace. Three quarters of the way through this overlong book comes virtually the only mention of Gould's women friends, with the tantalising promise of 'more about that shortly'. Very shortly it is, too -- about half a page in total. The gist is that, handsome man that he was, he attracted female admirers and may or may not have died a virgin. He certainly loved his mother above all women. Possibly he was attracted to his own sex, but that too remains shrouded in guesswork.

Should you read this book? Any Glenn Gould addict will benefit from the author's years of painstaking research. On the music, a better start would be Gould's own extensive writings, full of the wit and invention of his playing. A labour of love always has its own justification. As such this stands head and shoulders above the mire, which is more than can be said of the recent biography of a famous blonde cellist by her now nearly as famous brother and sister. At least this book doesn't do its subject any disservice.

*****

(The book about the 'blonde cellist' is the recently-released biography of Jacqueline du Pré.)

So, any reviews of this review? Journalistic but ultimately fair, I thought. Others may disagree. Whatever, it's nice to have GG still in the public mind. I think that 10 years ago not too many people in the UK (or Australia) would have heard of GG, and this book and its review might not have been mentioned in the Spectator. Alun might have a different view. Regards to all,

Tim
<tpconway@ozemail.com.au>