Gould / Solitude
Like many parents of young children, I find myself in the paradoxical position, in the midst of a shelter-in-place order, of going in search of a sense of solitude. I’ve found brief stretches of it in the radio documentaries Glenn Gould made for the CBC; in particular, three which are sometimes referred to as his “Solitude Trilogy.” Each deal in some way with isolated communities in Canada: “The Idea of North” (1967), about the Canadian far north and the kind of people attracted to it; “The Latecomers” (1969), about Newfoundlanders; and “The Quiet In The Land” (1977), about a remote village of Mennonites. Radio is a public medium that encourages private, inward-looking fantasy—“the inner ear of the imagination is very much more powerful a stimulus than is any amount of outward observation,” wrote Gould—and the fantasy of withdrawal from the world, as presented by a man whose name is a byword for asceticism, is seductive.
Gould was, of course, one of the signature recluses of his time. Finicky, hypochondriac, and eccentric, he abandoned his career as a concert pianist at the age of 31 and retreated to Ontario to compose, record (under tightly controlled conditions), write, and extoll the virtues of solitude: “Isolation,” he said, “is the indispensable component of human happiness.”
The “Solitude Trilogy” shows are meticulously produced, with a depth of detail that anticipates Joe Frank or Radiolab. Gould conceptualized them through the lens of the contrapuntal music—especially Bach—that was his specialty as a performer. He mapped, edited, sometimes literally conducted the recorded voices of his interviewees through the staggered entrances and superimposed stretti of a fugue. He used sounds of the train (in “The Idea of North”) and the sea (in “The Latecomers”)—which he associated with the lowest stops on a pipe organ—as a kind of basso continuo, simmering beneath the entirety of each piece. He wanted, according to biographer Peter Oswald, “to create a new art form—something related to but not quite the same as musical composition, in fact, a way of fusing musical structure with literary expression.” For Gould, the radio montages were his most personal work, a way of exploring his own attraction to solitude: “It’s very much about me…[I]t’s about as close to an autobiographical statement as I am probably going to make at this stage of my life.”
People retreat from society for a variety of reasons, but the anchorite for art—Proust, Pynchon—exerts a particular fascination, especially for fellow artists (who may envy the choice). To name just a few works: Gould, or the idea of Gould, is the subject of Francois Girard’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, gets an uncredited walk-on in Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, haunts the caricature in Christopher Miller’s Simon Silber: Works for Solo Piano; and, as a distorted Trojan horse for the author’s own biography and concerns, animates the bile and awe that drive Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Bernhard’s mythological “Gould,” alone in his house in the woods, “went about perfecting himself…people like Glenn had turned themselves into art machines.”
Even more than usual, the Romantic idea of being an “art machine,” free of the entanglements of domestic labor, society, and history, feels inaccessible, and the legend of Glenn Gould all the more alluring. “There is a sense of exaltation,” Gould wrote in 1974, “that really applies to that particular kind of aloneness.” The Glenn Gould Foundation has even inaugurated a mini-blog, written by executive director Brian Levine, under the title “The Glenn Gould Guide To Social Distancing.” It, indeed, proposes that Gould “may have some lessons for our time.”
A true misanthrope or agoraphobe, though, could hardly have embarked on the series of one-on-one interviews required to make the radio documentaries. Besides, Gould kept up a manic schedule of writing and correspondence, as well as late-night phone calls to friends Levine described to me in an email as “more monologue than dialogue, with Gould, brimming with energy and enthusiasm for his latest project, ideas or readings, giving extended soliloquies.” He maintained a regular bridge game followed by long palavers at Fran’s, a 24-hour Toronto diner. And he playfully populated his writing and media appearances with a host of alter egos—including but hardly limited to the hipster pianist Teddy Slutz, the Stockhausen-esque spiritualist composer Karlheinz Klopweisser, and the British conductor Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite—entertaining himself with costumes and accents, enlisting them to “review” his work and dispute with each other.
Then there is the crowded, contrapuntal humanity on display in the overlapping voices of the radio pieces. To listen to the “Solitude Trilogy,” especially on headphones, is to hear unusually articulate people, opining on isolation, to the accompaniment of rattling trains or crashing waves, circling the stereo field, passing in and out of audibility or comprehension—it can all seem unexpectedly claustrophobic, given the topic. To me, snatching time on the occasional excursion out of the house, it sometimes recalled—with deference to Gould’s careful attention to form—the chaotic gallery-view crosstalk of my preschooler’s Zoom circle time.
But, Levine says, this paradox—solitude within a crowd—is central to the intent of the radio documentaries:
…in one interview, Gould described the experience he had in mind and hoped to convey, and again, it was a solitary one. He talked about being on a busy train at twilight, drifting into that half-sleep/half-awake state of consciousness that we're all familiar with. In that state, he described picking up random bits of conversation from his fellow-travelers arrayed before and aft, picking out phrases and threads of ideas before they were subsumed by the random sounds, while other fragments of conversation came to the fore. Even in such close proximity to humanity, Gould’s listener is a witness but not a participant, standing outside the ebb and flow.
To borrow a phrase from his Mennonite subjects, Gould the documentarian is in the world, but not of the world.
His subjects, too, feel the contradiction. They belong to remote communities, some by birth, some by choice. But, like anyone from a small town—or parent sequestered with small children—knows, the fewer people there are around you, the better they know you, and the less solitude you have. As one character in “The Idea of North” puts it, “You may have gone to the North to get away from society and you find yourself far closer to it than you’ve ever been in your life.” A Mennonite woman in “Quiet In The Land” sums up her morning prayer: “God help me this day, to be kind to the people who annoy me most.”
In one passage in “Latecomers,” Gould stages a debate (forged in the editing room) between a man and a woman, both with slightly Irish-sounding lilts, about the necessity of other people to the making of art:
Male voice: I think there’s too much emphasis placed on this business of mutual stimulation between artists. The artist who’s really worth anything, works best when he’s alone, I think.
Female voice: I can sit in my bedroom alone and be very creative, but creativity is judged to a certain extent by what other people think…By being a total hermit, you can be creative for a while, but after a while you have to get out in public to know whether you’re being creative.
M: You have to write for yourself first of all. And then if it happens to be relevant for other people too, why, that’s wonderful.
F: Art is judged by people. Whether this is right or wrong, I don’t know.
For a man who once wrote an essay entitled “Let’s Ban Applause!,” for whom the true artistic experience—“the sense of exaltation that really applies to that particular kind of aloneness”—was necessarily a radically private one, this incorporeal exchange cuts to the heart of his aesthetic philosophy. It’s striking that here, at least, he gives the public-facing position the last word.
Gould wasn’t a misanthrope; he simply didn’t wish to perform anymore—which, it turns out, is not a desire we share. Unlike Gould, I’m a musician who wants to perform; but the stages are shut down. Like Gould, I value my solitude; which I can find only briefly, late at night, as I—in Bernhard’s words—“let the sound of my exhaustion die out.” (Gould’s trademark repertoire, Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” was composed to soothe an insomniac.) It’s a cascading fountain of paradox: I ascribe an idea of renunciation to a person who maintained a vigorous portfolio of public projects; I extend that idea to radio pieces whose topic is isolation but whose defining characteristic is imbricated voices; I fantasize about solitude in the midst of what has been, for many, an unusually reclusive (if not necessarily inward-looking) time.
Isolation, it appears, is an elusive concept: many of those who are holed up strictly alone must be the ones spending the most time online. Not that that makes them less lonely—quite the opposite, probably—but like Gould dreaming on the train, within a hermetic existence, they are surrounded by the disembodied voices of the human community: of the world, but not in the world.
A Mennonite man in “Quiet in the Land” says, of Christian society: “It would appear to me that the idea of a regulated life grew out of a body of believers gathering together, covenanting with each other that this is what they would do, for a given period of time; after which they would come back again, and in an atmosphere of prayer and sensitivity to each other, and of understanding of the world in which they lived, would then again determine what the covenant would be for the year that would follow.” Would that, when this is all over, if this can be all over, we can gather together; and in the spirit of humanity, and of understanding the world in which we live, make a covenant anew with each other, and renew it again, and again.
Franz Nicolay lives and works in Berkeley
