The Goldberg Variations
From football hooligan to opera singer, from the Cockney Reds to Catullus, from a hectic household to tranquility of spirit, Mark Glanville has travelled many paths, been many people – this is his remarkable story.The story of Mark Glanville’s journey from violently bullied Jewish boy (Goldberg is the real family name) at Pimlico comprehensive to Principal Bass with the Lisbon Opera via a period travelling the country as a member of the Cockney Reds, the notorious Manchester United-supporting hooligans.Throughout all these vastly opposed phases and worlds, Glanville’s driving force is his search for self-knowledge. His home life is overshadowed by the larger-than-life character of his famous father and his extensive philandering, his mother’s obsession with psychotherapy and hostile relationships with his siblings. He fights to defend his Jewishness at school, only to be told by his father that he has no right to call himself one. A bookish teenager Glanville is obsessed with jazz and opera but he spends his weekends with a group of hooligans who are unsure whether to accept him or beat him up because of his posh accent. Then reading Classics at Oxford (explaining his absence away to the Cockney Reds as a four-year prison sentence for manslaughter) he is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the Oxbridge ‘society set’. The story of his struggle towards equilibrium, to learn from his own and his family’s mistakes, and to find his own identity, eventually re-embracing Judaism and music, is both gripping and inspiring.An impressive new voice, Mark Glanville writes with refreshing honesty, humour and a complete lack of sentimentality. The utterly opposing aspects of his life make for a sometimes controversial but always fascinating read.
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The Goldberg Variations
MARK GLANVILLE
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 2004
Previously published in Great Britain in hardback by Flamingo 2003
Copyright © Mark Glanville 2003
Mark Glanville asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007118427
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007383306 Version: 2016-03-17
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‘Like C4’s ‘Faking It’ makeovers, The Goldberg Variations opposes two purposes seemingly too different for one person to undertake successfully. Glanville’s ongoing battle between football and music fascinates. One facilitates the other – his first trip to OldTrafford was a reward for passing Grade 5 clarinet. One impinges on the other – concerned about protecting his opera voice, Glanville lowers it an octave on the terraces. The emerging dialectic evolves alongside traditional rites-of-passage (first solo trip abroad, first love, etc) and against a backdrop of troubled sexuality – teenage frustrations kindled by his sisters and an inability to climax with girlfriends. Glanville’s openness is seductive and his memoir is disarming.’
Time Out
‘A richly enjoyable and moving memoir.’
Tribune
‘A chilling account of life on the terraces and of the loyalty it engenders. It is also a fascinating description of the long process of having your voice professionally trained for the opera stage.’
Irish Examiner
‘A readable, funny and intelligent story of a man’s struggle to find himself among a confusion of different lives.’
Cork Evening Echo
For Joshua and Arabella
Were the wind to blow even slightly against themMy eyes would refuse to close HITTAAN BIN AL-MU’ALLAA
CONTENTS
VARIATION ONE: The Football Hooligan
VARIATION TWO: The Oxford Classicist
I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is preciscly this that defines my identity.
Les Identites Meurtrieres, Amin Maalouf
Happy the man who can celebrate his diversity. I wonder how long, if at all, it took the author of the above to reconcile the disparate elements of his own personality, to recognise that they could live in harmony, and that his identity was a compound of them. For a large part of my own life the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me. Despairing of any reconciliation, I’ve often wished or plotted for the destruction of all but one of them (which depended on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.
‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’
Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.
‘I vont to buy a suit!’
With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.
‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.
There were certain jokes that bore umpteen retellings. Mum was usually the first to laugh, with a hearty whoop to convince you she’d never heard it before, then we’d come in, each a different note on the xylophone counterpointing the melody of his speech.
‘Here we are. If you don’t mind … slipping it on … that’s right …’
By now he’d be treading the amtico tiles that formed his stage, miming the appropriate movements of his dramatis personae.
