A Dangerous Method -- Film Review Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition -- Book Review The Artist -- movie review Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures -- Book Review
A Dangerous Method
Directed by David Cronenberg
It is unusual to see a movie about ideas and interesting characters. This is an outstanding depiction of the Sigmund Freud -- Carl Jung relationship, with most of the emphasis on Jung and his relationship with Sabina Spielrein. I wasn't aware of Spielrein's role in the complicated Freud-Jung relationship. Ernest Jones, in his massive three volume biography of Freud, mentions her once in volume 2 in relation to the death instinct, and lists a paper of hers as a reference in Volume 3. Paul Roazen, in Freud and His Followers (1974), Frank Sulloway in Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979), and Ronald W. Clark Freud: The Man and the Cause (1980) mention Spielrein once each, always in passing, and always in relation to the death instinct. Sometimes, these mentions are the result of quoting a letter of Freud's in which he mentions her. There is never any discussion of her personal relationship with Jung or how she came to know Freud or be involved in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The Freud/Jung Letters (1974), edited by William McGuire, contains all of the crucial letters upon which the film is based (not counting Spielrein's). However Sabina Spielrein is only mentioned by name for the first time on June 4, 1909, by Jung (144J, p. 228). She is referred to numerous times before that, but anonymously. Simply reading the letters one would not be able to connect all of these mentions to the same person. To the everlasting credit of the editor, William McGuire, the index entry for Sabina Spielrein, lists all of the letters mentioning her, whether explicitly or anonymously. You can put the story together from the index entry in McGuire's edition of the Freud/Jung letters, but you probably wouldn't unless you were looking for it. If the movie depiction of these events is anywhere close to realistic, it is clear how unabashedly Jung lied to Freud about the matter in his letters of March 7 and 11, 1909. (133J, p. 207; 135J, p. 212) His confession letter of June 21, 1909, (148J, p. 236-37) is not a "full disclosure," as I read it, and it seems to me a self-serving attempt to dismiss the matter and tar Spielrein.
McGuire give this footnote to letter 144J (p. 228) where Jung mentions Spielrein by name for the first time.
"Sabina (or Sabine) Spielrein (1886?-1934+), of Russian origin. 1905-11, studied medicine at the University of Zurich; M.D. 1911. Later in 1911 she became a member of the Vienna Society. From 1912, in Berlin. In 1921-23, Dr. Spielrein (then called Spielrein-Scheftel) practiced in Geneva; Jean Piaget underwent his didactic analysis with her. In 1923, she returned to the Soviet Union and taught at the North Caucasus University, Rostov on the Don, and was listed in the International Journal as a member of the Russian Society until 1933, after which year the psychoanalytic movement was officially abolished in the Soviet Union. Grinstein lists 30 publications in French and German, beginning with articles in the Jahrbuch in 1911 and 1912; the last article was listed in 1934."
McGuire does not seem to realize that she was killed by the Nazis in 1942. Incidentally, if there are any graduate students out there who want to do a dissertation translating her papers and publishing them in English, I would be willing to serve on the supervision committee.
The film is beautifully done. The acting is outstanding. I particularly liked Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, and Vincent Kassel as Otto Gross. Keira Knightley, however, was the real powerhouse in the film. She should be nominated for something, or maybe a lot of things. It was her beauty and characterization of Sabina that gives the film its relentless hold on the viewer. I don't know how popular this film will be. The audience is probably going to be educated, Europeanized, and attuned to psychological nuances and subtleties. How many Americans does that describe? But it is a first rate historical dramatization that enhances understanding of the rift between Freud and Jung and enables one to see that it was not only about differences in ideas and the direction for psychoanalytic research, but it carried a strong personal element that was rooted in deep differences in character and culture. Hopefully this film will awaken scholarly interest in Sabina Spielrein and bring to greater light her influence on the development of psychoanalysis.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
By Daniel Okrent. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Schribner. 2010. 468 pp.
This is the political and social story of Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933). It is beautifully written, well researched, thoughtful, analytical, and anecdotal. It is a towering achievement both for its history and its contemporary relevance. It is the kind of book that is a joy to read because it is so good and there is something interesting and important on every page.
Prohibition is central to understanding the cultural history of the United States. The struggle over Prohibition, broadly understood as the application of state power to restrict private behavior, has spanned nearly the entire history of the United States. For a country founded on the ideal of individual freedom with explicit individual rights written into the Constitution, we have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy in vehement conflict within and among ourselves over the meaning and extent of those rights and freedoms. The impact of this conflict has been felt far beyond the mere availability of alcoholic beverages. Okrent lists, international trade, speedboat design, soft drink marketing, the English language, organized crime, home dinner parties, the engagement of women in political issues, and the creation of Las Vegas as just some of its consequences (p. 4). We are still dogged by its legacy today. The ethos that gave birth to Prohibition is still alive in the United States and continues to impact many social and political issues that affect people in their personal lives. The precursors of Prohibition go as far back as the 1820s, if not further. Okrent lifts from the dustbin of history many of the diverse, colorful, and pathetic personalities who furthered the cause of temperance, which eventually became Prohibition: Carry Nation, self-described as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like." (p. 24) Wayne Wheeler, "a locomotive in trousers," (p. 39) Mabel Willebrandt, "Prohibition Portia," Frances Willard, "the Bismarck of the forces of righteousness," Howard Russell, Richmond Hobson, Andrew Volstead, Billy Sunday, among many others.
He also draws the opposing forces and their gallant charioteers in rich detail: Adolphus Busch, Samuel Bronfman, Georges de Latour, Pierre du Pont, Pauline Sabin, and Al Capone.
Politics and alcohol have always been closely linked in the United States. "When twenty-four year old George Washington first ran for a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, he attributed his defeat to his failure to provide enough alcohol for the voters. When he tried again two years later, Washington floated into office partly on the 144 gallons of rum, punch, hard cider, and beer his election agent handed out -- roughly half a gallon for every vote he received." (p. 47) Abraham Lincoln, who in his early days sold liquor in the general store he operated with a partner, was a very light drinker himself, and favored temperance, but opposed Prohibition. (p. 9)
The first question one might raise about Prohibition is why it occurred in the first place? Winston Churchill called Prohibition "at once comic and pathetic," (p. 185) and "an affront to the whole history of mankind." (p. 172) Lord Curzon called it "Puritanism run mad." (p. 172) How is it that this folly became established in the Constitution of the United States? Okrent does an excellent job of explaining this. The story is very interesting and surprising, and I think, not well known.
Prohibition was closely related to two other innovations in the Constitution that occurred around the same time: the Income Tax (1913), and Women's Suffrage (1920). The idea of the income tax was to "pay" for Prohibition. Tax revenue on the sale of alcohol, which would be lost when Prohibition went into effect, would be replaced by the income tax. Women's Suffrage was thought to be instrumental in achieving Prohibition because Prohibition was widely perceived to be a women's issue. As it turned out, Prohibition was achieved without women having the vote, and women played an important role in getting Prohibition repealed. It was also thought by some wealthy Americans that repeal of Prohibition would lead to repeal of the income tax as well. But it didn't happen.
Prohibition was not a totally irrational movement. It was an attempt to address a pervasive, serious problem in American social life, and women were the impetus for it at the outset.
"The most urgent reasons for women to want the vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related. They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote." (p. 15)
"A drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain, but many rural and small-town women also had to endure the associated ravages born of the early saloon: the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as "syphilis of the innocent" -- venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons. Saloons were dark and nasty places, and to the wives of the men inside they were satanic." (p. 16)
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Anti-Saloon League came to the fore of the Prohibition movement. Clergymen occupied at least 75 percent of the seats on the board of each state branch of the Anti-Saloon League, and they were overwhelmingly Methodist and Baptist. The ASL was singlemindedly dedicated to removing alcohol from American life. It became the most powerful pressure group in American history to that time and was able to control politicians from the local to the national level all across the nation. The Prohibition forces were predominantly white, Protestant, and native born. They were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-black. The Ku Klux Klan supported Prohibition as a weapon against immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. (p.86) The alliances that were forged by the Prohibition bandwagon were both strange and interesting. Corporations came to support Prohibition under the idea that workers who did not drink would be more productive and less liable to Workman's Compensation claims. The Prohibition movement was xenophobic, bigoted, hypocritical, intolerant, self-righteous and belligerent. In other words, ugly in many of the same respects that we see playing out in our national politics today.
World War 1 proved decisive for the anti-liquor forces. The Anti-Saloon League skillfully capitalized on the war effort and on anti-German hysteria to turn the legislative tide decisively in favor of Prohibition. The brewers tended to have German names: Busch, Blatz, Miller, Schlitz, Carling, Pabst, and they did not muster themselves well against the onslaught of negative propaganda thrown at them in the midst of the war effort.
"The wartime emergency enabled Wilson, with scant public opposition, to 'sieze railways, requisition factories, take over mines, fix prices, put an embargo on all exports, commandeer all ships, standardize all loaves of bread, punish all careless use of fuel, draft men for an army, and send that army to a war in France.' (quotation from Charles Merz) Compared to all that, closing down distilleries and breweries didn't seem so radical at all." (p. 100)
It recalls the current use made of the "war on terror" by the government to justify a whole range of restrictions on civil liberties and basic constitutional rights in our own time. From 1918 to January, 1919, Prohibition was enacted by wide margins all across America in remarkably short time compared with other constitutional amendments. It went into effect one year from ratification, 1920 -- giving people plenty of time to lay in supplies. Over the next thirteen years subversive drama became a way of life in the United States. It was said that "the drys had their law, and the wets would have their liquor" (p. 114) and "Prohibition was better than no liquor at all." (p. 128)
The last two thirds of the book deal with the new social reality brought about by Prohibition in the United States and its eventual precipitous demise. It is an interesting, deeply tragic, and at the same time, comical story, told with great skill and color by Okrent: smuggling, legal loopholes, official corruption, organized crime, sporadic enforcement, told through countless, interesting anecdotes often with surprising outcomes. Prohibition turned America into a nation of criminals. It created a deep sense of alienation and mistrust of the government across broad sectors of the population, a culture of hypocrisy and corruption in political leaders, and an international network of criminal enterprises well integrated into the legitimate mainstream of society. This criminal underground continues to operate today in the legacy of Prohibition corrupting politicians, the judicial system, and sapping resources from legitimate businesses.
I have come to see Prohibition and legacy movements like it as a low intensity civil war. An organized element within society, whether a majority or a minority, strives through political and legal muscle to impose its conception of appropriate conduct on everyone in the society in matters that intrude on private, personal autonomy: drinking alcohol, recreational drugs, commercial sex, same sex relations, deviant sexual practices or relationships, abortion, gambling, pornography, and shopping on Sunday. To be sure all of these activities, while ostensibly private, have public implications, which may well merit some governmental regulation, but what Okrent effectively documents is that Prohibition is a blunt, overreaching, and ultimately ineffective instrument. It is a lesson we are only slowly learning, and Prohibition battles continue to rage in our public discourse and our political life creating distortions, contradictions, perversities, and injustices throughout society.
There are a number of issues Okrent does not deal with that I wish he had paid some attention to: (1) the relation between drinking and masculinity, and the changing conception of masculinity in American culture in the wake of Prohibition (2) The disappearance of commercial sex throughout the United States by 1920, as well as gambling, which had been widely available everywhere not too long prior and the relation of these developments to the movement to Prohibit alcohol (3) The persecution of same sex relationships, particularly between males, was in ascendance in tandem with the prohibition of alcohol. A sea change occurred during this time from about 1900 to 1930 in men's relations with one another, their relations with women, and their own understanding of themselves. It was closely related to Prohibition, which was spearheaded by men of decidedly ascetic sensibilities: Wayne Wheeler, W.D. Upshaw, Richmond P. Hobson, William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and many less well known. What the experience of Prohibition shows is that these aggressive, self-righteous, demagogues cannot be the definers of public policy. They are misguided, fear mongering, and at the same time ruthless and intolerant. They are among the worst kind of people to have influencing legislative decision making. This is the real value of Last Call, in that it exposes the fatuousness of governmental prohibition in the realm of private conduct and it removes credibility from the ascetic mentality that oversimplifies private and public vice and seeks to squash it with legal proscription. It is a very valuable contribution both to our cultural history and to our present public discourse.
The Artist
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
I know this is popular, but I didn't care for it. It was light entertainment. I didn't find it challenging. It is nostalgic, manipulative and sentimental. A rather shallow love story going on against the background of the Depression and the transition from silent films to talkies. What's good in this film are the dance sequences, especially toward the end. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That showed a lot of skill and was really interesting to watch. Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo are both good looking and have an imposing presence on the screen. Jean Dujardin looks like Clark Gable and has a powerful physical attractiveness which no doubt the filmmakers were hoping to trade on. The physical magnetism of the two lead actors probably accounts for most of the appeal of this film. They've thrown everything in the kitchen sink into this film to make it popular. A scruffy little dog saves a man from a burning building. People love that kind of goofy stuff. They should have made it into a cartoon. And what? A whole movie with no sex? What's this world coming to? In the end the loser man, doomed by his stubborn pride, is saved by the loyal, good hearted woman, who is willing to sacrifice herself to save the miserable wretch, -- although it's hard to tell why -- and she succeeds -- just barely, and just in the nick of time. It is a triumph of market research. I know I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon, but I don't care. I found it tiresome. Sorry, thumbs down.
Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures
Foreword by Yo Yo Ma, Introduction by Tim Page. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books. 2007. 192 pp.
This is an intimate biography of pianist, Glenn Gould (1932-1982), in pictures culled from a wide variety of sources. Published by Glenn Gould's estate, it is touching and highly personal. The photographs are all black and white and span his entire life from earliest infancy to the last days before his stoke in 1982. It is a complimentary, honorific portrait, but the majority of the photographs are informal snapshots and family pictures, rather than professional studio portraits. It is exactly the kind of biography I like. The captions are informative and detailed. Tim Page's introductory summary of Gould's life spans twenty-seven pages. It is a comprehensive, yet concise, overview that retains considerable depth: a very nice job in a relatively short space. This book is full of interesting quotations from Glenn Gould and other commentators, but the pictures are really the soul of the book. There are pictures of his famous chair, which he continued to use even after the seat cushion disintegrated. There are pictures of him playing cross legged, soaking his arms before a performance, pictures of his dogs, his parents, his relatives, performances. It is an incredibly rich source on the life of Glenn Gould. A real treasure.
Growing up I listened to Gould's recordings of Bach and Brahms. Glenn Gould defined Bach for me and his recording of the Brahms Intermezzi remains the standard. I was never a big fan of the Goldberg Variations. This long, challenging piece is not the most accessible music, and I have never warmed up to it, but the Bach Piano Concertos, The Well Tempered Clavier, the English Suites, French Suites, Partitas, and Inventions, in Gould's fingers became classics for me. I later became acquainted with other interpreters of Bach, such as Andras Schiff and Richard Goode -- I especially like Andras Shiff's renditions of the Brandenburg Concertos, but for the piano solo music and the Bach concertos Glenn Gould remains number one in my heart.
Some comments on Glenn Gould's life and ideas.
"The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." (1962) p. 41
This conception fuses art with life. It is one that I wholeheartedly subscribe to, although I differ with Glenn Gould somewhat in that for me the end state that one strives for through art goes far beyond "wonder and serenity." Life is much bigger than just "wonder are serenity," and the human potential and human need is much greater than "wonder and serenity." An art and a life limited to those two objectives creates an art and a life that is exactly that: limited in scope. I agree, indeed, that art and life should be thought of as fused and extensions of one another -- living is itself a creative activity -- but art's potential is to enrich every aspect of life. Because art is fundamentally communication, anything that we are, anything that we can experience, can be communicated and shared artistically. So all of life, is potentially a subject for art. Art enriches every aspect of life because art expands our awareness and enables us to perceive the world and each other in new ways. The breadth and diversity of this potential is literally boundless. Art should never be thought of as confined to circumscribed objectives. People use art in many different ways for an unimaginably broad expanse of purposes. Each individual artist can only carve out a small niche in that vast expanse of possibility. Glenn Gould's quest for wonder and serenity through music is an admirable and worthy purpose. It is not the only or ultimate purpose for art.
"For every hour you spend in the company of other human beings you need X number of hours alone . . . isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness." (p. 6)
"He felt that personal encounters were by and large unnecessary and claimed that he could better understand the essence of a person's thought and personality over the phone. (His monthly phone bill ran to four figures.)" (p. 38)
". . . his fundamental aloneness was overwhelming. He lived by himself, controlled all of his friendships and , so far as can be determined, had only few and fleeting romantic attachments, with women who were ultimately unavailable to him. Indeed, he seemed to have no love life in later years. 'Monastic seclusion works for me,' he said, with no perceptible dismay." (p. 39)
I too find solitude essential. I've come to understand this need in terms of my own background and upbringing, and I see similarities to Glenn Gould's, although Glenn Gould is much more pronounced in his need for isolation than I am. Solitude nourishes creativity. It allows one to listen to one's inner voices, explore one's own inner thoughts and emotions, develop ideas, imagine, fantasize. Isolation enables originality. Being enmeshed in a group fosters a tendency to take on the perceptions, assumptions, prejudices, and behavior norms of the group. Groups by their very nature impose limits on nonconformity. Seclusion reduces those external influences and allows one more control over them. Spending a lot of time alone enables one to see things in radically different ways from most other people. There is an element of danger in this. Glenn Gould's great strength as a musician and as an intellect was his independence and originality, his willingness to make bold departures from accepted norms and assumptions. And yet despite his fondness for isolation, he maintained extensive contacts by telephone. This is another commonality between us. Throughout my adult life I have had many, often intense, personal relationships carried on my telephone that extended sometimes over years. I agree with Gould that the distance of telephone contact does make it possible to explore the inner self of a person in much greater depth than face to face contact ordinarily offers. Page's assumption of Gould's asceticism may be accurate, but it may also be mistaken, and Gould's apparent confirmation may well be a misleading mask. Page did not look closely at Gould's telephone contacts. If he had, he might have found them to be more sexually charged than he realized. He also did not consider the possibility of same sex relationships in Gould's life, which is very common in top level pianists, and Gould appears to have had the classic familial constellation that is very characteristic of exclusively homosexual men: a heavily involved, emotionally dominant mother, and a distant father. Glenn Gould came of age during the height of the persecution of male-male relationships in the English speaking world, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. If he did have same sex inclinations, he was likely conflicted about them and had every reason to keep them discreet (although Gould had a very independent spirit and was not intimidated by conventionality).
Glenn Gould gave his last public performance in April of 1964 to devote the rest of his musical life to recording. He had made some 50 hours of commercial recordings by the time of his death, in addition to films, radio and television programs. He had hated public performance from the beginning.
"It is my firm conviction that the concert experience . . . will not likely outlive the twentieth century . . . It is being cultivated so exclusively for its museum potential that however worthy that may be, one can no longer consider it too seriously in relation to the significant trends of art in our time . . . The relationship between music and the various media of electronic communication is the key to the future not only of the way in which music will appear or be encountered, but also key to the manner in which it will be performed and composed." (p. 134)
"It is interesting to compare Gould's feelings about performing with those of Arthur Rubinstein. In 1970, the two men met, and the resulting dialog was published in Look magazine. Rubinstein spoke excitedly of 'the feeling at the beginning when the audiences arrive -- they come from a dinner, they think about their business, the women observe the dress of other women, young girls look for good-looking young men, or vice versa -- I mean, there is a tremendous disturbance all over, and I feel it, of course. But if you are in a good mood, you have the attention of all of them. You can play one note and hold it for a minute -- they will listen like they are in your hand. Was there never a moment when you felt that very special emanation from an audience?' Rubinstein asked Gould. 'You never felt you had the souls of those people?'
'I didn't really want their souls, you know,' Gould replied. 'Well, that's a silly thing to say. Of course, I wanted to have some influence, I suppose, to shape their lives in some way, to do 'good,' if I can put an old-fashioned word on it, but I didn't want any power over them, you know, and I certainly wasn't stimulated by their presence as such. Matter of fact, I always played less well because of it.'
'Then we are absolute opposites, you know. We are absolute opposites!' Rubinstein said." (p. 30)
This is consistent with Gould's preference for the telephone over personal, face to face contact with people. Gould needed distance, not physical closeness. Music is itself a kind of emotional closeness without physical contact. Music expresses the inner world, both of the composer and the performer. In a musical performance one makes emotional contact with the audience through music, but one does not physically embrace the audience. Gould took one step further back and made that contact through recorded music rather than live performance. It is consistent with the need for originality and independence without regard to the approval or disapproval of the audience. In a performance the feedback from the audience is immediate: whether they show up or not, whether they applaud or hiss. But in a recording you simply put it out there. You don't know if anybody listens to it or not, and if they do, you don't know what their response is. The important thing is putting it out there and making it available. Whether it is loved or hated is less important.
It is very similar to my own attitude toward my creative work and it is exactly the approach I take in these discussions on this website. I put them out with total indifference to whether they will be liked or disliked, agreed with or disagreed with. I don't know if anybody even reads them. I don't concern myself with that. I don't promote them beyond indicating their existence to friends and acquaintances who might want to get to know me. They are fish hooks akin to Friedrich Nietzsche's metaphor in his Prologue to Beyond Good and Evil:
"From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks. Perhaps I am as good a fisherman as any? If nothing is caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish."
Those who find them may come in to my world if they are so inclined. It was the same with Glenn Gould. Gould recorded the music that he loved and believed in. He wanted people to listen to it and appreciate what he had done. But if they didn't, his isolation and diffidence protected him from disapproval and rejection. It was beneath his dignity to play to the crowd. He was not trying to be popular. He felt confident that what he liked would also be liked by others. Whether many or few did not concern him. Rubinstein wanted to please and be loved for it. He wanted to touch a wide swath of humanity. They truly were opposites.
My own tangled relationship with the piano and music over the course of my life resonates with this. In my early years I wanted to perform. I wanted that immediate response of love and adulation for producing something that pleased the audience. Over time I have become indifferent to that response, and I no longer care about pleasing people. I retain a strong need to share my inner self, thus these reviews and other writings that I publish for anonymous audiences. But the need for immediate contact is much reduced and the need for approval and validation much abated.
"The most basic premise of Gould's aesthetic was that music is primarily mental and only secondarily physical . . . For Gould a musical work was an abstract entity that could be fully comprehended in the mind in the absence of performance, without even the recollection of sounds or of physical means of production. -- Kevin Bazzana" (p. 146)
I don't know that Glenn Gould believed this. Bazzana does not support it with any quotations from Gould himself, and further, it doesn't make sense. In fact, it is contradicted by Gould's own behavior.
"When he is in the studio, he likes to play as many as ten or fifteen interpretations of the same piece -- each of them quite different, many of them valid -- as though examining the music from every angle before deciding upon a final performance. . . . One thing is certain: a Glenn Gould performance is unmistakably original and the result of extensive study and consideration, both at and away from the piano." (p. 32)
If it could all be done in the mind, he wouldn't go through all of this and he wouldn't choose one final recording to present to the public. In fact, he made a second recording of the Goldberg Variations that was completed just before his death that was very different in character from his early recording that launched his fame. If music was simply abstraction, this wouldn't be necessary. If you didn't need sounds or pianos to comprehend music, you could just print scores, and people could look at them. Glenn Gould didn't do this. He played the piano and recorded. He still wanted contact. Although solitary, he was not a recluse. He was not solipsistic.
This book is an excellent overview of Glenn Gould's life that includes his discography, a timeline, biographical sources, and the sources of the photos presented. It is an outstanding, very personal biography. Anyone interested in classical piano music should have it.