Mark Kingwell has taken on the difficult task of saying something new – and necessary – about Glenn Gould. Difficult because so many have used Gould as a subject or character: from the great Austrian playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard to the countless Canadian poets who have explored Gould's life and legacy.
More difficult still: Kingwell's Glenn Gould is part of Penguin's series called Extraordinary Canadians, but it comes after Kevin Bazzana's Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould and Otto Friedrich's Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, both of them superior biographies.
Glenn Gould, by Mark Kingwell, Penguin Canada, 237 pages, $26
In fact, it's probably important to say, from the beginning, that Kingwell's book is not what is commonly taken for biography. It does not follow its subject from birth to grave, giving off anecdotes, like sparks, to illuminate the subject's character. Kingwell has something entirely different in mind. His Glenn Gould is an effort to take Gould's ideas seriously, to illuminate the man's thinking, rather than the life he lived. Here is a portion of Kingwell's mission statement:
“In fashioning a philosophical biography, I have abandoned standard narrative form and instead adopted a kaleidoscopic frame. Each of my takes is a version of Gould, always partial, always unfinished. ... Gould is here the subject of a sort of bio-philosophical recording session.”
It's an unusual tack, one that allows Kingwell to mimic the “contradictory, paradoxical, mischievous and deliberately provocative” character of Gould's own thinking – though, curiously, the fractured Gould who emerges from Kingwell's kaleidoscope is one we know from elsewhere: thoughtful, shy, possessed of multiple selves, possessed of a near eidetic memory for music, a prodigy, paranoid, solitary, competitive, a man who couldn't stand cruelty to animals, a man obsessed with architectonics, a man with a brilliant if eccentric mind.
Glenn Gould as a young man
Each of Kingwell's 21 chapters deals with ideas Gould himself dealt with or adumbrated: Time, Silence, Architecture, Memory, Play, North, Genius etc. The chapters follow one another not logically but organically, one suggestively leading to the next. A number of the chapters deal with Gould himself only tangentially, but over all, it is an inventive and at times amusing book that manages to highlight some of the deeper implications of Gould's thought. It's also a book that has “prickles” (flaws or virtues, depending) in its conception and execution.
To speak of conceptual matters first: If you take a look at his “mission statement” again, you'll notice Kingwell's insistence on his methods, the admission that this book is composed of his takes on Glenn Gould. In other words, he treats Gould the way Gould treated Bach's work, bending Gould's life and thought to his (Kingwell's) needs, as Gould bent the score of the Goldberg Variations to his own.
[The book] provokes thought about the nature of biography and the relationship of biographer to subject
In both cases, the idea is to create a work tied to the sensibility of the interpretive artist. And, as it is with Gould's Goldberg (s), so it is here: There are times when I feel this is a book about Mark Kingwell, his thoughts, his philosophical speculations, and that the book is less “Gould by Kingwell” than “Kingwell through Gould.” How you feel about this will have to do with many things, but if you're looking for a work that brings Gould forward, keeps him there and articulates, in another key so to speak, Gould's mind, you're likely to be disappointed.
