IMAGINING GLENN GOULD
A Radio Drama by Bruce Charlton - Copyright 1995
Comprising 10 imaginary letters from the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould to
an imaginary friend - as if Gould had not died shortly after his
fiftieth birthday - interwoven with music from JS Bach.
Words by Bruce Charlton
Music by JS Bach - From the fifteen Two-part Inventions BWV 772-786 and
the fifteen Three-part Sinfonias (inventions) BWV 787- 801.
(From the recording Fantasia, inventions, chromatic fantasia and fugue, by Angela Hewitt. HYPERION CDA 66746)
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 40 mins approx. (never broadcast)
***
IMAGINING GLENN GOULD
TWO PART INVENTION 13 IN A MINOR TRACK 14: 1.10 MINS.
LETTER 1.
Dear Scott,
Today I turned fifty and I'm feeling just fine - one of my good days. As of now, everything in my life is under control.
Even better, I've had a commission from the Canadian Broadcasting
Company to compose a piano sonata. Big bucks; but the project must be
completed within the year. The idea is that they will broadcast my first
performance while I am still fifty. This would consist of a documentary
movie of me miming to a studio recording.
It seems a tall order, but it happens that a big sonata is just exactly
what I have been wanting to do for some years; only I have not been sure
that any work of mine would be recorded - the sales guys at the record
company tell me that the public will buy anything I perform, however
weird, but this charity would not extend to my compositions.
Anyway, here goes with my magnum opus. I feel as if my life so far has
been a study for this one. For once, I can hardly wait to get at the
piano and try it out.
TWO PART INVENTION 8 IN F MAJOR TRACK 9: 0.44
LETTER 2.
Dear Scott,
I've started my preparation by playing through Bach's two and three part
inventions. You remember I recorded them a few years back just after my
Steinway had been dropped and mangled. It's still one of my favourite
performances despite - or is it because of ? - residual unrepaired
mechanical problems which led leading to CD 318 sounding 'like a bar
room piano' as one critic put it!
The inventions were meant to be harpsichord tuition pieces designed to
polish up contrapuntal technique. This makes them particularly rewarding
to play, quite apart from their wonderful musicality.
Which brings me to Gould's first piano sonata... I have never really got
to grips with the piano as a creative object; and just now I am torn
between composing at the instrument or in my head. The answer should be
blazingly obvious, given everything I have written against the piano.
But, then again, I do keep coming back to the unwieldy beast, don't I?
Today was particularly fine: it isn't the playing fast that I enjoy so
much as the elation of discrimination between note and note. I despise
staccato machine-gun rapidity, the blasting out of identical and equally
spaced bullets. I think of myself rather as firing something like a
fast action pea shooter: each individual note is organically grown,
related to its neighbour, yet slightly different. But the sheer
exhilaration of this at speed, when aural discontinuity is magically
transformed into singing line, when each moment is eternal yet suspended
between the dying tone and the tone being born...
Maybe, after all, its just a more constipated version of good old,
two-fisted, three pedalled, knock 'em down and kill 'em, barnstorming
virtuosity. It doesn't feel like it, though. At such moments of solitary
ecstasy I would not swap the piano stool for anything I know of -
certainly not the composers study.
TWO PART INVENTION 10 IN G MAJOR TRACK 11: 0.46
LETTER 3
Dear Scott,
Yes, I will gladly see your PhD student, or at least speak to her on the
telephone: it's always a pleasure to assist the pursuit of scholarship,
and only reasonable that I repay the University of Toronto for the
honorary doctorate. Ask her to call me between midnight and four am. on
any weekday and we'll take it from there.
In fact I'd be glad of some diversion. The sonata is not going well: in
fact it is not really going at all. I have this absurd notion of writing
something that encapsulates the twentieth century zeitgeist, and its
tyrannical power; and putting this into contrast with the world
according to Gould - the non-competitive creating of a moral life
through the narcissistic contemplation of art - you know the kind of
thing.
I also want the music to comment - implicitly, I hasten to add - upon
the charity of technology and the possibilities it open out for truly
creative solitude. And finally I also want the thing to be unplayable by
anybody else except me! So I am planning that it should be the most
through-going, sustained, integrated, archingly-structured and difficult
piece of true counterpoint ever devised for the piano.
Contemporary life is so full of bombast; I daresay this applies even for
Professors of philosophy. And yet we are the lucky ones. In the light
of all the public expectation fostered by the CBC (did you see the press
coverage!) and of my own outrageous over-ambition, it has become a case
of me and Steinway CD 318 against the world.
All of which explains why I have spent days avoiding the sonata and
playing the simplest and sweetest of the two-part inventions. Their pure
lines seem, in their brevity and lucidity, to show up the bogus
emptiness of my own rhetoric. They imply everything, and declare
nothing.
TWO PART INVENTION 14 IN BB MAJOR TRACK 15: 1.12
LETTER 4
Dear Scott,
You breed a high quality product at the University if Lin Po is anything
to go by. I have been very taken by her, I must admit. Indeed, after
only a matter of - say- fifteen hours of nocturnal telephone
conversation I have already consented to meet her 'in the flesh' - as
the horrible expression puts it.
I know, such unseemly haste lays me open to the possibility that I may
be stripped of my status as the hermit of Toronto, but it's too late.
The deed is done, and we met for a drink (soft drink, needless to say)
at my favourite out-of-town cafe, and were driven around the city in the
limo' for a couple of hours.
She is a very interesting young woman - not least because of her
encyclopaedic knowledge of, and intelligence concerning, my recordings -
the Bach in particular. Plays nicely too, and doesn't touch the loud
pedal, I'm delighted to say! But I was particularly fascinated by the
topic of her PhD thesis. Did you suggest it to her? Or was it perhaps
derived from one of my magazine articles?
I have promised to look up some references from my files, and the
conversation has led me to do some more thinking on the theme. I guess,
that I, of all people, should know something about the interface between
individual subjectivity and the objectivity of communications media. I
invented the interface, for Chris’sake!
No progress on the sonata, I'm afraid. The whole idea is beginning to
seem nauseatingly grandiose. Where have we gone wrong that it isn't?
P.S. The most interesting thing about meeting Lin Po was that I
accidentally let her shake my hand when we parted. I completely forgot
my phobia of having my bones crushed.
It didn't hurt. Actually, I am forced to admit it was nice to have
touched someone again. I had forgotten how warm and smooth, and gentle, a
hand can be.
TWO PART INVENTION 2 IN C MINOR TRACK 3: 1.27
LETTER 5
Dear Scott,
Thank you for your note. I will ignore all innuendo as beneath contempt,
but you are correct in your surmise - I have indeed been 'seeing a lot'
of Lin Po. I make no apology for the fact; indeed I would say that
meeting her has been the most profoundly ... well, challenging event of recent years.
This is partly intellectual, no doubt - or at least that is how it
began. But, I must admit that there is something altogether more
personal about things. the whole business intrigues me - I have spent
many hours brooding on the phenomenon.
It is worrying too. Particularly worrying is the thought that the basis
may be nothing more than lust - the physical desire of an old man (well
old-ish man) for a young and attractive woman. I say 'attractive' but I
am not really sure. She has what I consider to be a typically serene
Oriental face. But what sticks in my mind, however, is her quality of
attentiveness. That, and the subtle unpredictability of her opinions and
behaviours. I hate inconsistency and shallow moodiness; but it is not
that - more as if the thought processes themselves were subtly different
from my own so that the same input leads to a different output but in
ways I do not fully understand.
All this means that I have set aside the damned sonata for the moment,
while I seek refreshment of the spirit. It should not take long to
compose, if I can attain the necessary condition of detachment. The
thing is written in my head, and merely need noting down...
At least I think it is in my head. To be quite candid, I am not absolutely sure.
TWO PART INVENTION 9 IN F MINOR TRACK 10: 1.49
LETTER 6
Dear Scott,
Things are tough. Just now Lin Po is away back home, visiting her folks.
The deadline for the sonata is getting very close - the recording
studio is booked for next week and I have not had the guts to tell CBC
that nothing is yet on paper.
Even worse, and please keep this strictly to yourself, I am having some
technical problems with my playing. Not just the odd finger slips - a
real problem which I can only describe as loss of control. I have always
valued control above all else - over-valued it, perhaps. It was one of
the main reasons why I quit giving live concerts more than eighteen
years ago; I could keep strict command over the recording process. But
there it is - when playing anything of length I can't seem to keep the
'overarching structure' in my mind. There is a kind of dissipation, I
end up pointing in a slightly different direction from the one I set out
on.
All of which is pretty subtle, and I daresay might not be noticeable to
the average listener - but things are worse. There is a difficulty with
the phrases, in particular shaping the contrapuntal voice leading. This
was always the thing that I did better than anyone - or so I have
believed. But the ability seems to be going. So even the miniatures are
flawed.
I can only assume that I have some sort of illness, something I have not
previously experienced, and that it is undermining me in ways that I do
not understand.
I have stopped playing the inventions for myself, but I have been
listening. Lin Po recorded a few for me on good old Steinway CD 318
before she went away. They have that serenity I associate with her and,
while I am listening, I can lose myself in the music.
TWO PART INVENTION 7 IN E MINOR TRACK 8: 1.07
LETTER 7
Dear Scott,
You will have heard the news, I have no doubt. Yep, I failed to deliver -
the sonata was not written. Everyone at CBC was disappointed, the
public was disappointed, and me? Well, you can imagine how pleased I
was.
This is not the place for breast beating, nor are public apologies
appropriate. The announcement said I was sick, but the truth is I didn't
write the piece because I couldn't. I couldn't do it - that's the
thing.
And neither could I give them a new recording of something else to fill
the TV slot. I wanted to do some my own versions of some Richard Strauss
songs, but the technical problems meant I just couldn't do that either.
I didn't even try. So, they just re-ran an old program from the
archives.
Since a kid I always wanted to be a composer, always assumed that was
where I would end up, eventually; but I guess that my talents are
interpretative rather than creative - transcriptions and sound collages
are the best I can manage.
And now that the easy pianistic technique has gone out the window at
exactly the same time as I have realised my creative limitations, I am
faced with some kind of crisis. This is a real problem, Scott, the worst
I have faced. Just as I got my life under control, the way I wanted it.
Things fall apart. I wish I had someone that I could talk with. I wish
Lin Po was back.
SINFONIA 9 IN F MINOR TRACK 25: 3.57
LETTER 8
Dear Scott,
At last - Lin Po is back. She has been around my place for hours, through the night hours - talking, talking.
It has been a great help to me. So far we do not appear to have
exhausted the subject of my 'artistic problems', but I must admit that
they have rather lost their sting. But one thing I must tell you about
is the poetry, the Chinese poetry.
Lin Po brought round a calligraphy set and a book of poems. What she
does is to copy the poem, actually paint the symbols for me there and
then, then she translates it. Or rather she discourses on it. She will
maybe do a short literal translation, describing the meanings of the
symbols, then she free-associates about the background, the metaphors,
the poetic conventions and all that stuff. Really, its incredible.
I realise that the Chinese poets were trying to do the same thing as I
was. To capture a hard, impersonal essence of crystalline moral beauty.
So hard and uncompromising and pared down that each poem attained an
apparent objectivity - nothing sloppy or confessional or sentimental:
the artist was lost in the work.
It is quite wonderful. But did you notice the past tense above? That is
significant. For all its wonder, the approach of Chinese poetry is
incomplete. And it is not really objective, or else Lin Po would not
need to give me so much background. The poetry was, after all, embedded
in its culture, only the culture was so stable and permanent that nobody
realised.
What I get from all this is hard to express. I don't regret the way I've
done things in the past, or my so called uncompromising integrity over
performance styles, the dry piano tone, the purity of the recording
studio compared with the gladiatorial display of the concert hall.
All that was true - is true. It just seems to me, now, to be incomplete.
It's not the whole story. There must be room for mess, for vulgarity.
Sometimes, we have to touch people.
SINFONIA 15 IN B MINOR TRACK 31: 1.38
LETTER 9
Dear Scott,
I wanted to be the first to tell you: I am going to do a live concert, and I want you to be in the audience.
Of course the whole thing is going to be very hush hush, and given that I
don't need the money there will be no tickets on sale and the venue
will be small. In a way, I want the occasion to be taken very casually,
despite its momentous significance for me. I certainly don't want some
kind of big deal of the Glenn Gould's Triumphant Return to the Platform
headline kind; never mind a Gould Concert Debacle. But, of course it
does represent a major shift for me.
There is one very important thing. The recital must NOT be recorded.
Personally, I would like to have all the audience searched for concealed
microphones - body searched if necessary, but Lin Po has persuaded me
that this would be impolite. So instead I am only inviting people who I
can trust not to lay any bugging devices.
Why not record it, you will ask? The real reason is not the most obvious
one, which is that my technique is unreliable. My technique is
unreliable compared with what it used to be, but I am fully recovered
from that loss of focus I was suffering some time back. The phrasing and
architecture are just how I want them - but the detail is imperfect and
I can guarantee there will be finger slips - quite a few.
But that is not why I am forbidding recording. It is that I want the
concert to be here and now, shared by the people present and them only,
evanescent - and more beautiful because of the fact. Like the fall of a
petal of cherry blossom. The memory will be shared as memory, and the
validity of the experience will not be diluted or undermined by any
false sense that it can be repeated.
My hope is that this will be a 'Zen' concert, if you know what I meant;
as far away as possible from the usual heroic performer and passive
audience, block-busting piano concerto followed by virtuoso encore. You
will be my guests and equally I will be yours. More importantly we will
be there, myself and the listeners, at the same time and once only; a
smallish group of people, contemplating a small world of music which we
shall create together.
SINFONIA 2 IN C MINOR TRACK 18: 1.43
LETTER 10
Dear Scott,
Thanks for understanding. I know it may seem bizarre for Lin Po and I to
get married. Bizarre from so many viewpoints: my solitude and self-
absorption, my dread of physical contact. And then from her viewpoint
too - the age difference, the likelihood of unpleasant comment in the
press, the cultural differences...
But Scott, what can I say? All this can change! It's like re- inventing
my life. No it isn't, I'm sick of inventing things for myself with only
the piano as a companion. I've been playing Bach inventions again. They
feel different now. And I've stopped humming along - I only noticed
yesterday. Somehow my vocalisations have gotten into my fingers, into
the music itself.
But music is not everything - I see that now. Creativity sometimes needs
to spring from roots in human society. From now there will be another
factor, another party - one that engages me in dialogue, trialogue, even
- because the Steinway remains a vital partner.
Lin Po influences me and behaves in ways that are out of my control.
That is the key to my change of heart - I have given up the need for
total control in life and music. I have embraced un- predictability, the
introduction of another voice.
Life has become a counterpoint in three parts.
SINFONIA 3 IN D MAJOR TRACK 19: 1.05
END
SOLITUDE, EXILE AND ECSTASY
THEME AND VARIATIONS IN WORDS AND MUSIC
A radio music-drama devised by Bruce Charlton
Copyright 1987
THE BROADCAST AUDIO VERSION CAN BE HEARD AT THIS LINK:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3-9JKn2PJz3R2c4azJGRGdjcFU/view?usp=sharing
Directed by Philip Martin
Broadcast BBC Radio 3 31 March 1991 (repeated 20 December 1991)
Words:
Henry David THOREAU: - Ed Bishop
Hugh MacDiarmid - Ian Cuthbertson
Glenn Gould - Peter Marinker
Music: J.S. Bach - 'Goldberg Variations' BWV 988 recorded 1981 - Glenn Gould CBS D37779
***
SOLITUDE, EXILE AND ECSTASY
[GOLDBERG VARIATIONS (GV); ARIA]
THOREAU: [woodland sounds throughout] When I wrote the following words I
lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I
had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my hands only. I
lived there two years and two months.
Near the end of March 1845, I borrowed an ax and went down to the woods
by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began
to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for
timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is
the most generous course thus to permit your fellow men to have an
interest in your enterprise.
I built thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet, wide by
fifteen long, and eight feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large
window on either side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick
fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house was twenty eight dollars,
twelve and a half cents!
[GV; VARIATION 1]
MACDIARMID: [seashore sounds throughout] I came to Whalsay, this little
north Isle of the Shetland Group, in 1933. I was absolutely down-and-out
at the time - with no money behind me at all, broken down in health,
unable to secure remunerative employment of any kind, and wholly
concentrated on projects in poetry and other literary fields which could
bring me no momentary return whatever.
My work involved continuous intense effort ridiculously out of
proportion to my strengthWhat I missed most was human intercourse - the
friction of mind upon mind, since isolation and a too complete
self-centredness were definitely dangerous, not only to the qualities of
the work to be produced but to my own mental stability. If I had been
capable of developing any form of insanity, I would certainly have
carried myself irrevocably over the border line long ago.
We - that is to say, my wife, our son (now going on five, and so a baby
then of little more than eighteen months), and I - are now 'marooned' on
Whalsay, and seem likely to remain so.
[GV; VARIATION 7]
GOULD: [Low murmur of city traffic throughout] The north has fascinated
me since childhood. In my school days, I used to pore over whichever
maps of that region I could get my hands on, though I found it
exceedingly difficult to remember whether Great Bear or Great Slave was
farther north. The idea of the country intrigued me, but my notion of
what it looked like was pretty much restricted to the romanticized,
art-nouveau-tinged, Group of Seven paintings which, in my day, adorned
virtually every second schoolroom, and which probably served as a
pictorial introduction to the north for a great many people of my
generation.
A bit later on, I made a few tentative forays into the north and began
to make use of it, metaphorically, in my writing. When I went to the
north, I had no intention of writing about it, or of referring to it,
even parenthetically, in anything that I wrote. And yet, almost despite
myself, I began to draw all sorts of metaphorical allusions based on
what was really a very limited knowledge of the country and a very
casual exposure to it. I found myself writing musical critiques, for
instance, in which the north - the idea of the north - began to serve as
a foil for other ideas and values that seemed to me depressingly
urban-oriented and spiritually limited thereby.
Now of course, such metaphorical manipulation of the north is a bit.
suspect, not to say romantic, because there are very few places today
which are out of reach by, and out of touch with, the style and
pace-setting attitudes and techniques of Madison Avenue. Time, Newsweek,
Life, Look and The Saturday Review, can be airlifted into Frobisher Bay
or Inuvik, just about as easily as a local contractor can deliver them
to the neighborhood news-stand, and there are probably people living in
the heart of Manhattan who can manage every bit as independent and
hermit-like an existence as a prospector tramping the sort of
lichen-covered tundra that A.Y. Jackson was so fond of painting north of
Great Bear Lake.
Admittedly, it's a question of attitude, and I'm not at all sure that my
own quasi-allegorical attitude toward the north is the proper way to
make use of it or even an accurate way in which to define it.
Nevertheless, I'm by no means alone in this reaction to the North; there
are very few people who make contact with it and emerge entirely
unscathed. Something really does happen to most people who go into the
north - they became at least aware of the creative opportunity which the
physical fact of the country represents and, quite often I think, come
to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering
creative possibility - they become, in effect, philosophers.
MACDIARMID: To mention Karel Capek. I found that we had a great deal in
common. Our talk was mainly of matters which were the themes of his last
book - Travels in the North - a few years later. When Karel Capek was a
little boy he dreamed of discovering a marvellous island above the
Arctic Circle, where mangoes would be growing on the slopes of a
volcano, amid the eternal ice. Later there was his mind's lifelong
journey to the North, on the wings of the great literature of
Scandinavia. And always he cherished the thought of an actual pilgrimage
to 'just the North'; the North of birch trees and forests, and
sparkling water, and dewy mists and silver coolness,' and altogether a
beauty that is more tender and severe than any other'. So at last he
made his Northern journey; across the neat fairy-tale landscapes of
Denmark, among the lakes and islands and granite boulders and red plank
farmhouses of Sweden, up through Norway and the great Northern forests,
and beyond the Arctic Circle into that unreal world where one may see
'midnight rainbows hanging from one shore to the other, a mild and
golden sunset mirrored in the sea before a frosty morning dawn'; so to
the 'end of Europe' at the North Cape.
[GV; VARIATION 13]
THOREAU: Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in
the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as
well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when
an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had
time to take root and unfold themselves.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite
at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but
somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and
fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what reason have I
this vast range and circuit, some square miles of unfrequented forest,
for my privacy, abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile
distant, and no house is visible from any place but the hill-tops within
half a mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by woods all to
myself; a distant view, of the railroad where it touches the pond on the
one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other.
But for the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the
prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New Eng1and.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world
all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed by house, or
knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it
were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village
to fish for pouts - they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of
their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness - but they soon
retreated, usually with light baskets and left "the world to darkness
and to me", and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any
human neighborhood.
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark,
though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been
introduced.
GOULD: Solitude is the pre-requisite for ecstatic experience, especially
the experience most valued by the post-Wagnerian artist - the condition
of heroism. One can't feel oneself heroic without having first been
cast-off by the world, or perhaps by having done the casting off
oneself.
[GV; VARIATION 16]
GOULD: I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always
had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company
of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x"
represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or
seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.
THOREAU: I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude.
We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than
when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone,
let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of
space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent
student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary
as a dervish in the desert. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at
very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for
each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a
new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a
certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this
frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.
We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside
every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over
one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one
another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and
hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory - never alone,
hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one
inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live.
MACDIARMID: As the years of my exile on this little Shetland island
stretch out, it becomes increasingly strange to have my rare interludes
back in Edinburgh or Glasgow or Manchester among civilised people. They
are to me like sparkling water in a thirsty land, these comings into
relationship again with minds keen, alert, attuned to beauty. I realize
that I had almost forgotten that there were people who had thoughts and
could clothe them in words not only worthy of rational beings, but even
make such words interesting, eloquent. (I do not want to be unfair to
Shetland in the least. If there are no such people in Shetland, there
are exceedingly few in Scotland or England either - nor more than one
per 100,000.)
Except for these brief visits in Scotland and England, and the rare
occasions in the summertime when I have friends - authors, artists, and
students - to stay with me in Shetland, I see nobody who has read widely
enough to possess grounds on which to base, if not opinions, at least
reasonable speculations. I hear nothing but the inane phrases of women.
'It's all in the Bible, you know.... Moore, you know, Old Moore. He
knew, and they do say that the Queen had a dream... And you remember
what Churchill said...?'
And the men are as ignorant and incoherent as the women, even the young
men, sailors who have been all over the world and soldiers in the
present War and the previous war, with their easy laughs and childish
pronouncements upon the development of the awful dramas in which they
have taken part. They have read nothing - never open a newspaper, even.
What in Heavens name have I to do with such people? Why, how, have I made such an association possible?
[GV; VARIATION 20]
MACDIARMID This is not a restful place in which to write. The cottage is
rattling like a 'tin lizzie' in a 90-miles-per-hour wind, and every now
and again there is a terrific rattling of hail. We have had well nigh
continuous gales, with heavy snow-storms and great downpours of rain,
for the last two months - the worst winter the Shetlands have had within
living memory.
But I could not have lived anywhere else that is known to me these last
four years without recourse to the poorhouse. We were not only penniless
when we arrived in Whalsay - I was in and exceedingly bad state,
psychologically and physically. I am always least able to 'put my best
foot forward' and do anything that brings in money when I am hardest up.
I do my best work when I have most irons in the fire, and the fact that
here I had all my time to myself and had 'nothing to do but write' for a
long time made it almost impossible for me to do anything at all and
is, recurrently, a drawback still. Besides, I was 'out of touch with
things' - I had not the advantage of being 'on the spot' where 'anything
might be going' - and worst of all I had no books.
[GV; VARIATION 21]
GOULD: I don't think that one can benefit from isolation in whatever
form, whether it's in an arctic outpost, or in a Newfoundland village
with no road to the outside world, or in a religious community - which
are the main metaphors I have used - I don't think one could benefit
from that without first coming to terms with the Zeitgeist, without
deciding that its tremendously tyrannical force has to be overthrown in
one's own life before one can really learn from such an experience.
THOREAU: The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in
my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be
my good behaviour. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You
may say the wisest thing you can, old man - you who have lived seventy
years, nor without honour of a kind - I hear an irresistible voice which
invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises
of another like stranded vessels. A man’s life should be a stately march
to a sweet but unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem
irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to a livelier
measure!
[GV; VARIATION 28]
GOULD: Most people I have met who actually did immerse themselves in the
north seemed to end up, in whatever disorganised fashion, being
philosophers. Whatever the motive in moving north may have been, each
individual seemed to go through a particular process which greatly
altered his life. At first, most of these people resisted the change.
But after a while they usually reached a point when they said to
themselves: "No, that's not what I came up here to do." In general, I
found that the characters who had stuck out long enough and removed
themselves from the sense of curiosity about what their colleagues were
thinking, or how the world reacted to what they had done, developed in
an extraordinary way and underwent an extreme metamorphosis.
MACDIARMID: These are the thoughts running in my mind as I sit by my
Shetland window completing the writing of my autobiography. Somehow or
another - in the face of all likelihood - we have flourished, although
never sufficiently, of course, to be secure at any time for more than a
week ahead. Tonight as I sit writing, the cottage is amply and
comfortably furnished, though I have never succeeded in securing again
many of the books which were the background of my earlier books and
which were and remain so vital to my creative processes. Nevertheless
many hundreds of books have accumulated about me again. All my principal
intellectual interests are well represented and catered for - geology,
biochemistry, plant ecology, physiology, psychology and philosophy - and
I have a fine array of the works of my favourite writers: Rainer Maria
Rilke, Charles Doughty, Stefan George and Paul Valery in poetry; Leo
Chestov in philosophy; Pavlov's lectures on conditioned reflexes; and
Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, Adoratsky and many other dialectical
materialist writers!
[GV; VARIATION 29]
THOREAU: If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life
in years past, it would probably surprise those people who are somewhat
acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those
who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises
which I have cherished. In any weather, at any hour of the day or night,
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it, on my
stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and
future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You
will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade
than in most men's, yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its
very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never
paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on
their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken to concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one
or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
MACDIARMID:
[SITTING ON A RAISED BEACH, ABOVE THE SEA. BACKGROUND SOUND EFFECTS OF SURF ON PEBBLES AND SEA BIRDS. THE FOLLOWING IS A POEM]
We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that these stones are at one with the stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace, or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.
No visitor comes from the stars
But is the same as they are.
-Nay, it is easy to find a spontaneity here,
An adjustment to life, an ability
To ride it easily, akin to 'the buoyant
Prelapserian naturalness of a country girl
Laughing in the sun, not passion rent,
But sensing in the bound of her breasts vigours to come
Power to make her one with the stream of earth life round her'.
But not yet as my Muse is, with this ampler scope,
This more divine rhythm, wholly at one
With the earth, riding with it, as the stones do
And all soon must.
I am enamoured of the desert at last,
The abode of supreme serenity is necessarily a desert,
My disposition is towards spiritual issues
Made inhumanly clear; I will have nothing interposed
Between my sensitiveness and the barren but beautiful reality;
The deadly clarity of this 'seeing of a hungry man'
Only traces of a fever passing over my vision
Will vary, troubling it indeed, but troubling it only
In such a way that it becomes for a moment
Superhumanly, menacingly clear - the reflection
Of a brightness through a burning crystal.
A culture demands leisure and leisure presupposes
A self-determined rhythm of life; the capacity for solitude
Is its test; by that the desert knows us.
It is not a question of escaping from life
But the reverse - a question of acquiring the power
To exercise the loneliness, the independence, of stones.
I remember how Thoreau wrote:
'I have a commonplace book for facts
And another for poetry,
But I find it difficult always
To preserve the vague distinctions I had in mind
- for the most interesting and beautiful facts
Are so much the more poetry,
And that is their success.
- I see that if my facts
Were sufficiently vital and significant,
Perhaps transmuted more
Into the substance of the human mind,
I should need but one book of poetry
To contain them all!’
[GV; ARIA DA CAPO]
THE END
