Toronto

Canadians are the absolute best. In my next life, or perhaps later in this one, I would like to be a Canadian. I’ve said this on occasion to my Canadian friend Kevin Bazzana, and he usually promptly replies with, “We’d love to have you!”

This time, he responded with this: “I’m glad you are finding Canadians pleasant! Aren’t we just adorable?! When the Simpsons first visited Canada, they got off the train in Toronto and Marge exclaimed, ‘It’s so clean and bland! I’m home!’

I landed in Toronto on Sunday and went straight to a 3 p.m. authors’ tea at the King Edward (Torontonians call it The King Eddie) Hotel, where, by remarkable coincidence, Glenn Gould’s father, a furrier, once had his shop.

The tea featured four authors — three Canadians and me — and we each spoke for about 15 minutes.

We sat in a lovely gilded room and were served the customary delicate sandwiches, cakes, biscuits and scones with Devonshire cream. Now, I ask you: How civilized is that?

I asked for coffee, and was chided by a fellow author who sat beside me: “How can you drink coffee at teatime?” I’ll confess to having no good answer for him. Feeling irredeemably American, I switched to tea — with milk, of course.

Verne was there as my guest, and he had brought a guest of his own, Jim Hayward, an audio engineer and longtime friend of Verne’s.

I had been instructed not to read from the book, but with Verne there in the audience, I couldn’t resist reading a few passages about him, and his synesthesia. People seemed to really enjoy it.

On Monday morning I went straight to CBC to tape an interview with Andy Barrie, a Canadian icon whose show, Metro Morning is Toronto’s long-standing #1 morning show. When I entered the recording studio, Barrie greeted me with a huge smile and patted his copy of the book like it was an old friend. “I love your book. Really love it,” he said, and with that my fears of how I might be received by the Canadian media dissolved on the spot. Not only had he read every word, but he reminded me of a few things in the book I had forgotten about. This, I found, was a pattern that would repeat itself with each subsequent interview.

Next came Toronto’s classical music station and, like Andy Barrie, the people who interviewed me, Jean Stilwell and Mike Duncan, were unusually generous with their praise of the book. Stilwell started out by saying that when she first saw the book, she thought to herself, “Oh no, not another Glenn Gould book,” but then when she started reading it, she couldn’t put it down.

Next came a book-signing at the annual BookExpo Canada, which just happened to be taking place this week. The place was crawling with booksellers, and I was one of a few dozen authors who stood at their publisher’s booth, madly signing free copies of books to anyone willing to wait in line. Apparently, it’s a tradition at the BookExpo to do that, and people are said to actually enjoy standing in the long lines. I enjoyed signing the books, and imagined to myself how nice it would be if people were actually buying them.

I had dinner that evening with Verne and his wife, Lillian, and Lorne Tulk (Gould’s sound engineer on many a CBC production) and his wife, Mel. We went to the Mandarin, in the northern reaches of Toronto, near Verne’s house. The Mandarin apparently has the largest buffet in all of North America, offering not just Chinese food, but also every imaginable cuisine under the sun. I, for instance, had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Go figure. We spent much of the meal discussing and dissecting an inscrutable interview that Verne and I had done earlier in the day with the music critic from The Toronto Star.

On Tuesday morning (i.e. today), I had yet another wonderful radio interview, this time with David Peterson, the non-fiction books editor at CIUT, the University of Toronto radio station. We chatted for a good twenty minutes, and once again I was blown away by how closely he had read the book.

Mary Kenedi, the pianist that CD 318 tried to run away from in Ottawa many years ago, then picked me up to meet some folks for lunch. But Mary had an idea: she wanted to take me first to Michael Remenyi’s store, around the corner from our appointed lunch spot. He has the Steinway agency in Toronto. He’s a lovely man, and when we walked in the store and showed him the book, he seemed surprised. “What? A favorite piano?” he asked. “Gould played on junk! He didn’t have a love affair with a piano!”

Oh yes, he did, we assured him. And he started to take a closer look at the book.

The most amazing moment came when Remenyi asked me whether “Muriel” was in the book. I was shocked. “You mean Muriel Mussen?” I asked him, and he said yes, Muriel Mussen. I had tried for years to find Muriel Mussen, had called every Mussen in the phone book during a trip here in 2004. Remenyi, it turns out, knew her well, and had some wonderfully colorful stories to tell me about her. I listened intently, all the while kicking myself for not having found him while researching the book. Miss Mussen would have been a far more three-dimensional character had I spoken with Remenyi. But I decided to chalk it up to the “oh well” category of missed opportunities and try not to obsess. Remenyi asked for 15 books for the bookstore portion of his store, which was an honor, to be sure.

Lunch was at what felt like a real English pub, called the Duke of York. I ordered, appropriately enough, Shepherd’s Pie, and a half-pint of local lager. Besides Mary, the lunchmates included: Faye Perkins, who works for the Glenn Gould Estate, and Brian Levine, with the Glenn Gould Foundation. And Adria Iwasutiak from McClelland & Stewart. The conversation was, surprisingly enough, not too Gould-centric. We did talk about how incredibly receptive the Canadian media have been toward the book, and how relatively disinterested the American media have been, and what we can do to change that.

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