Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

There is always, for instance, the tender subject of Dr. Wood and the piano. The legend is that after the age of sixty he learned to play the piano and executed the noisy Rachmaninoff Prelude in C sharp minor with such pyrotechnic brilliancy that all and sundry were astounded — and appalled.

“The story”, he said, “is grossly exaggerated — and all wrong anyway. I never played for guests, in Baltimore or here or anywhere”.

“What about your daughter’s version?” I asked.

“It’s utter and absolute nonsense, and the thing isn’t worth so much talk anyway. I don’t see what you want to put it in the biography for at all”.

I said, “What she told me is worth putting in anybody’s biography. If her version is apocryphal, suppose you give me the true version”. (Incidentally, he can’t whistle or hum “Yankee Doodle” to save his life without getting off the key.) He said:

Well, to begin with, I was given music lessons for a year or two when I was about twelve years old — and I hated ’em. The teacher was a maiden lady who came to the house. You know the sort. Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, and sugared tunes ad nauseam. Anyhow, I was taught to read music, in a way, but rarely spent any time at the piano until the end of my second college year. At Kennebunkport where we went in summer, there was a young Miss Banfield in the hotel, who was a wow at the piano. She played the Schumann Grand Sonata brilliantly and frequently (by request). I was captivated, and said to myself, “I’m going to play that." I had a piano in my room at college, mainly for the benefit of visitors, and on my return invested in the score of the sonata. I was taken aback by the price, as I’d never bought a “composition” before. Above the opening bar was printed “So rasch wie möglich" (As fast as possible) and on the third page, “Noch schneller” (Still faster). This was stimulating and quite different from songs without words. I went after it hammer and tongs, and after a year or two could play the whole of the first movement without notes. By the time our second child was born, I was through the second movement. Then my musical, long-suffering, devoted wife had a respite during our two years in Berlin where I could not get at a piano. But I played it through Chicago, Madison, and Baltimore until my children were old enough to join forces with their mother and persuade me to desist — from the Schumann sonata.

What I did in revenge was to buy the score of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, with a red-seal record for a music teacher. This went even faster than the sonata, i.e., “faster than faster than possible”. It suited me exactly, but I was finally silenced for good and all by home influences.

* * *

Dr. Wood’s version, as above, is circumstantial and beguiling, but it doesn’t alter the fact that his daughter Elizabeth, Mrs. Bogert, “the Woodiest of all the Woods”, painted me a different picture of her papa’s ultimate atrocities on the pianoforte. Even if Dr. Wood is telling the partial truth and Elizabeth is embroidering the facts a little, it presents a pretty clear picture of how she felt about it. She says he came home one day in Baltimore with the Prelude under his arm, and began banging it out on the family piano. It was terrible for the family, she says, but in a month or so it rolled out with the inhuman perfection of a speeded-up electrical player piano. She says he became so inhumanly mechanically expert that it was really perfect — but that it was also “perfectly awful”, and that for a period thereafter he drove the family frantic by adopting the following tactics toward occasional guests or innocent strangers. When one would say, “Professor, do you play the piano?” he would smirk deprecatingly and reply, “Well, only a little. I can only play one or two tunes”. He would go to the piano, while the innocent victims would anticipate nothing worse than “Chopsticks” or “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree”. Then, while the family stopped its ears with mutual glances of commiseration, out would come crashing the whole Grand Sonata, or the Prelude, to its bitter end, while the chandeliers and ceilings trembled.

I tried to persuade Gertrude Wood to give me the exact and definitive version of all this, but she said, “There are limits to human endurance. I long ago refused to hear any more of it, and I now refuse to hear anything more about it”. He refused to play for me, so the legend must remain a legend — despite the fact that its central figure is alive, and will doubtless remain so for many a long year. The Woods are tough as the towering oaks of their New England.