Читать книгу Marshall McLuhan - Judith Fitzgerald - Страница 15
ОглавлениеRadio was inseparable from the rise of jazz culture as TV has been inseparable from the rise of rock culture.
– Marshall McLuhan
Across the river, the lanky boy, all spindleshanked and elbows akimbo, sees the clearing below the massive maple where he and Red built that disaster of a tree fort, that rather ram-shackly effort that collapsed when the winds from the north blustered through Winnipeg last fall. He finds the view restful, calming, an antidote to the rages, knots, and tangles of angry voices ricocheting around the walls back at the house. The Assiniboine flows peacefully, predictably, snaking gracefully into the haze of the sun’s brilliant afternoon light further upstream, right next to where the boat he’s building with Red is cradled on its sawhorses in Mr. Levin’s garage.
Mars dreams the boat’s finished and he and Red are rowing together, steering the little vessel into the future, away from the insanity, arguments, and hysterical catastrophes back at the house. No doubt, thinks he, remembering his only brother, Red’s cowering beneath the back stairs, quietly crying, per usual. Red doesn’t mind the noise the way his older brother minds it. Mars minds it terribly; the shrieks and screechings rip his guts out. Red’s got more tolerance. He’s got a much better attitude about all of it.
As for Mars? He hates it. He simply hates it. Why can’t people just get along, be happy with each other, understand that nobody’s perfect (or everybody is, since that’s God’s will)? If everybody were perfect, why, we’d bore each other to death, sighs he, audibly perplexed, kicking the root of the elm exposed by the river’s erosion.
Well, even though he’s only nine, he reasons, he’s not too young to promise himself he’ll marry an agreeable woman, a peace-loving woman who doesn’t have to scream and yell and pick fights to make her points, an order-craving woman who understands the meaning of “compromise.” Someone with sparkling eyes, a sweet smile, and a forgiving nature, someone who doesn’t have to be right 100 per cent of the time. Yep. That’s the best he can do. Swear he’ll never marry a screamer. Sheesh.
By the time Mars reaches the garage, he’s already feeling a little better. A lark perches on the roof, laughingly hopping from foot to foot, happily mocking the long-faced kid. Mars examines the tiny bird closely, thinking it’s not a big fancy thing but – its up there on the roof of the Levins’ garage strutting and mimicking Mars to beat the band. Sassy little devil. Sort of like the boat he’s building with Red. It’ll float, thinks Mars, squaring his lantern jaw. It’ll float. He’ll make it float. All the doubters will eat their words. If he has to bail water till the cows keel over, that boat will float.
The lark on the Levins’ roof, perfectly on cue, whistles in affirmation. Mars swears it. And, that’s what he’ll call the boat, too. The Lark. For a lark on the river with Red in the boat that will most definitely float.
Count on it.
Almost a decade into the twentieth century, highly intelligent and ambitious nineteen-year-old Elsie Naomi Hall, in possession of a freshly minted teacher’s certificate from Acadia, Nova Scotia’s then-Baptist university, joins her family in Mannville, Alberta; within weeks, she’s handily secured a position in one of the area’s better schools. It is there, at a Sunday picnic, the delicate and doe-eyed beauty proudly announces she’s met and plans to marry the tall, handsome, and charming Herbert McLuhan on 31 December 1909.
A year later, the adventurous newlyweds relocate a hundred miles due west to Edmonton to begin their life together. While the amiable Herb forms a promising real-estate company – McLuhan, Sullivan & McDonald – with his trio of partners, Elsie prepares for the 21 July 1911 arrival of the first of their two sons, Herbert Marshall, just before the couple takes up permanent residence in their spacious two-storey custom-built home in Edmonton’s well-to-do Highlands district. Then, following the birth of Marshall’s younger brother, Maurice Raymond, on 9 August 1913 (and the addition of Rags, the family’s beloved Airedale collie), Elsie declares the clan complete.
On 28 June 1914, as tensions escalate in the Balkans, an assassin’s bullet fells Austria-Hungary’s heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, signalling the symbolic beginning of the First World War.
Herb enlists. He gallantly insists Elsie and the boys return to her family in Middleton, Nova Scotia, near the Bay of Fundy; but, for reasons of either flu or flat feet, Herb’s army days are numbered. Instead of returning to Edmonton, however, the couple reasons the family will probably fare better in the flourishing railroad city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, the financial capital of Canada’s West (as well as the home of the Alice Leone Mitchell School of Expression where Elsie elects to pursue her elocutionary studies and hone her oratorical skills training in the “principles of public reading” and dramatic performance).
Herb enters the life-insurance business (and is soon demoted from manager to salesman); Elsie becomes the School of Expression’s top student. In 1921, the McLuhans finally settle into a suitable rental dwelling among the Scots and Irish in Winnipeg’s Fort-Rouge residential district.
Marshall – “Mars” to his copper-topped brother, Maurice (“Red”); “Marsh” or “Mac” to everyone else – is hurting. Elsies disciplined him yet again with the razor strop. Maurice knows the feeling; but, if he doesn’t mind his Ps and Qs, Marshall could well turn on him; so, he keeps his mouth shut and makes himself as inconspicuous as possible. For a minute or two. Then, well, Maurice being Maurice (and almost eight years old), he tries to make the best of things.
“Mars? Marsy?”
“Yeah? What, Red?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll live. Don’t worry. I’ll live.”
“Mars?”
“Yeah, Red?”
“Do you want me to help you work on The Lark tomorrow?”
“No, I don’t think so, not tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mars. Okay.”
“Maybe on Sunday, though?”
“Really?”
“Sure. Right after Sunday school. Okay, Red?”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, it’s okay, Red, it’s really okay. See? Nothing’s broken.”
Through the most wonderful as well as the worst years of their young lives, the curious and adventurous McLuhan boys enjoy (or endure) an up-and-down existence in the lively McLuhan household at 507 Gertrude Avenue, passing the days hiking with Herb, looking up and memorizing difficult words in the dictionary, skiing in winter and, during the languid summer hiatus, carousing on the banks of the Assiniboine at one end of Gertrude or swimming in the Red at the other; but, once Mars finishes building The Lark, the inseparable pair spends long hours sailing and rowing on both rivers.
As highly motivated as Elsie is (and Herb is not), the boys’ mother strives to improve her family’s fortunes and offers elocution lessons, a not-uncommon practice at the time. In the years following the First World War, prior to the proliferation of radio, youngsters regularly study public-speaking and dramatic recitation.
Pupils flock to the house on Gertrude, eager to learn proper breathing, enunciation, memorization, articulation, and performance techniques. Elsie doesn’t provide her sons with formal training in elocution, but both pick up plenty by osmosis and remain excellent speakers for the duration (despite Maurice’s feeling he spent much of his early life trying to keep up with his brother).
Maurice, who speaks frequently to church groups, will grow up to become a man of the cloth for several years (before committing himself to the teaching profession). His older brother will grow up to become a man on a mission with a message concerning media in the future, in some far-off time and unimaginable place all will come to call the global village.
Glimmers of McLuhan’s love of devices and machines capable of transmitting words, music, and messages surface. One of the biggest thrills of his adolescent years, in fact, is fiddling with gadgets and such, especially new-fangled gadgets that allow him to tune into the world of radio late at night, picking up stations from as far away as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds of miles southeast of the Manitoba border.
Pittsburgh’s out there, a vibrant metropolis in a huge world just waiting to be investigated, a world filled with wonders as plentiful as stars, a huge and noisy world far beyond Gertrude Avenue except when – with the cooperation of the northern lights – the reception is brilliant and Pittsburgh’s KDKA comes through clean, clear, and wholly spellbinding.
McLuhan spends his after-school hours attending classes to earn his crystal-set operator’s licence. To celebrate his success, he builds a state-of-the-art radio with double sets of earplugs so both he and Red can listen to KDKA before they drift off to sleep but, naturally, not before Mars and Red trade facts they’d studied at school that day:
“The telegraph, invented in 1844, transmits information at five bits per second.”
“Oh, yeah? Poet John Milton lost his eyesight in February 1652, most likely because of glaucoma.”
“Pfft! Because of heavy traffic congestion, Julius Caesar banned all wheeled vehicles from Rome during daylight hours.…”
Facts, figures, fictions, flights of fancy. Throughout these impressionable years, McLuhan despairs of ever learning everything he believes he really needs to know. He studies long hours and spends countless more memorizing long passages of poetry and dramatic prose.
Elsie, similarly motivated (but more concerned with method, performance, and delivery), even practises Browning poems and Shakespearean sonnets in tones both spirited and mesmerizing while doing the housework, running the carpet-sweeper over the Persian rug she’s finally acquired or replacing the slab of ice in the bottom tray of the brand-new icebox she’s recently purchased.
By the time McLuhan enters university, he’s read, heard, memorized, and consumed almost everything of value and interest written in the English language with the notable exception of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem. (He considers it beyond his comprehension at his inexperienced age.) In his zeal to “own literature,” McLuhan handily (if not unconsciously) prepares himself for the very (ivory) towers (of Babel) he’ll eventually topple. After all, he’s strangely convinced he’s on his way to becoming the man with the message for the human race poised, then, as now, on the brink of one complicated yet potentially beautiful new world.
McLuhan’s immediate world, once he comes to understand it better, begins to reveal its own set of complications. For one thing, his parents, slowly drifting apart as his mother’s on-stage ventures take off and his father’s career never does, quarrel fiercely, frequently, all too often forgetting the stress and anguish they’re rather selfishly inflicting upon their captive audience.
Elsie is extremely ambitious; Herb is not. Elsie wants to beautify the Gertrude Street dwelling; Herb is content to live within its walls exactly as it is. Elsie wants to be the first on the block to own a car; Herb never owns one in his life. The stylish Elsie is, in short, a woman; the casual Herb, as she tells the boys in mean-spirited disgust for her husband’s disinterest in all things fashionable, is not a man.
Herb, a maddeningly mild-mannered and agreeable man, is happy to sit back and shoot the breeze. He loves his sons very much and spends long hours with them, delighting in their intellectual progress and generally staying out of harm’s way. One game the trio particularly enjoys involves finding, learning, and memorizing the meanings of the most difficult words in the dictionary, a daily habit his firstborn, now a self-described “intellectual thug,” adopts for life.
Despite the fact Maurice is more his father’s top banana and strong-willed Marshall tends to be the apple of Elsie’s eye, the boys are close, probably because their mother’s “boundless egotism,” as her eldest describes it, requires they stick together for protection during her emotional storms.
Privately, McLuhan bemoans the cruel fate that has brought his parents together as both he and Red witness the frenzied events that will ultimately tear the ill-suited couple apart. Then, not suprisingly, when Elsie blows her stack for no good reason either child sees, her sons become easy targets for her fury and frustration.
Later, McLuhan observes his childhood was so very painful in some respects that he can barely stand to think about it. Yet, he loves and respects his mother, somehow intuitively grasping the psychological dynamic fuelling her ballistics derives from her own childhood, damaged by an intense, unpredictable, and volatile taskmaster of a father given to temper tantrums of legendary status among locals.
Naturally, when the often-generous (and certainly incomparable) Elsie brags about either the talented Maurice or the gifted Marshall to the many people she invites to break bread at the family’s table – lavishly praising their brilliant minds, excellent behaviour, and strapping young physiques – both boys glow with pride.
McLuhan fails grade six. His schoolteacher mother, well-acquainted with her son’s intellectual abilities, naturally sets the principal straight concerning the school’s problem. Her son, a brilliant young genius, truly destined for greatness, is simply bored, bored, BORED. When McLuhan enters grade seven on the condition he “handle it,” he handles it, thanks to a teacher who loves words, language, and literature as much as he does.
It is during this pivotal year that McLuhan finally discovers the path he believes he must tread; and, later, by the time he’s making inroads at the University of Manitoba in 1928, he’s already proven his mother right.
McLuhan can see lovely splashes of stars, sparkling jewels so close and bright, clear nights in the fragrant garden on Gertrude; yes, he can see the splendid stars, he can almost scoop up handfuls of them; and, yes, one day – whether he becomes an engineer, doctor, or Olympic rower – he will see the name of Marshall McLuhan glittering magnificently among them, no doubt because he’s finally figured out what it is he wants to do.
He enters the University of Manitoba fully convinced his interest in structure and design will be put to best use studying engineering, but after spending that summer working among a crew of surveyors in the wilds of mosquito-friendly Manitoba, McLuhan anguishes over his future before switching to English and philosophy, a decision that proves to be one of the best he makes.
Nonetheless, the young scholar’s tormented by feelings of inadequacy and his fear that, although he now knows what he wants to study, he’s still no closer to determining how he’ll realize his dream of becoming a Great Man once his studying days are done.
A Christian who reads the Bible daily, McLuhan had attended Winnipeg’s Nassau Baptist Church (at his mother’s insistence), even though his father was Presbyterian; as he matured, McLuhan opted to attend any Church but the dull and stuffy Baptist one. One breezy evening in April 1930, sitting on the throne and pondering what he’d just learned in Sunday school that day, it comes to him:
He’ll write a Great Book that will prove all life – mental, material, spiritual, physical – is governed by laws, laws that no one else has even noticed, laws that no else has even considered discussing between the covers of a book. His book will be philosophically grounded in this world; it will not be a religious book; but, its central idea, issuing from Christ’s precepts and McLuhan’s understanding of the primary importance of Pentecost in view of the laws he’s perceived, will provide comfort and enlightenment. The laws are infallible – as precise as mathematics, as ubiquitous as weather – and, if a person correctly grasps them in all their glory, a person goes a long way.
Pentecost is the divine mystery, the all-encompassing power or energy responsible for the miracle of creation.
Thus, because the world exists – living beings see, feel, hear, taste, touch, smell, and know it – the human race owes allegiance to it (or, more accurately, to its Creator and the fruits of His labour). In believing in Pentecost as the divine mystery, McLuhan pledges his own allegiance to the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274), the theologian canonized as the patron saint of students and universities in 1323 as well as one of the greatest and most influential religious thinkers (who had, incidentally, taken a vow of chastity and renounced the trappings of this world).
Saint Thomas wrote numerous lucid and erudite volumes (including the Summa Theologica), and he also preached with great eloquence and inspiring conviction concerning his certainty God exists and His proof is everywhere (in everything) in this world in which we live. Throughout his life McLuhan will maintain close ties with the so-called Thomist School. His idea of the “sensuously orchestrated” individual of the future corresponds with doctrines aligning God with universal laws and forces; but, as a self-described Thomist, his philosophical position maintains existence is the supreme perfection – being in God and creation – while human knowledge is acquired through sense experience which leads to reflective activity. He often quips, “Should Old Aquinas be forgot,” when he’s queried about his faith, thus demonstrating his willingness to show his true Thomistic colours.
The colourful McLuhan comes to believe that “all the university taught you to do was bullshit.” Still, he’s anxious to discuss his revealing insights and fresh ideas with fellow student and kindred spirit, Tom Easterbrook. Tom and Marsh, the best of buddies, argue incessantly, sparring over virtually everything, some nights roaming the streets well into the wee hours, when the rising sun reminds them a little shut-eye might not be such a bad idea.
It is during these heady months the young thinker decides he needs to address both his weight and love life (or, more precisely, his skinniness and love lack). McLuhan stands six-foot-one-and-a-quarter inches or 1.86 metres tall and tips the scales at a little under 140 pounds or 63.5 kilograms. He takes up scrumming on rugby fields, skirmishing in makeshift hockey rinks, distance swimming at the YMCA and, even though some of his classmates consider the debate-loving brainiac a “moron,” he thoroughly enjoys dancing at university affairs and socials.
Apparently, the striking young man in possession of a certain wayward charm cuts quite the elegant figure on the dance floor, especially when the tuneful tenor stylings of Vaudevillian Harry Lauder float dreamily through the highly charged air.
Just after jotting a few self-defining thoughts in his journal concerning the way in which his bookishness and elevated sexual ideals all but preclude the possibility that he, Marshall McLuhan, will be foolish enough to fall in love before he turns thirty and is better equipped to select a suitable wife for someone such as himself – a gentle, wholesome, and sympathetic woman who will balance, tame, and make him whole – McLuhan does, in fact, fall madly, crazily, passionately in love. He tumbles head-over-heartstrings for Marjorie Norris, a lissom medical student possessed of incomparable beauty, sterling character, and a superior intellect (not to mention her generally soothing and sunny disposition).
Drats! She already has a boyfriend, a steady-as-Freddie beau? What’s that you say? His name is Jimmy Munroe? Rats, drats, and double-drats! I beg your pardon? Really? No! Well, now, what’s the latest item of interest making the rounds of the university grapevine? A rumour? Could it be true?
YES! It’s true! Marjorie ditched the dasher! No! She says she wouldn’t mind a date with young Marshall! She’d simply be delighted, in fact. Delighted! She’d simply be delighted… Who’d a-thunk it? Marjorie Norris? Ha! There is a God!
The full moon floats just above the horizon, luminous and huge, one fine evening in April on the banks of the Assiniboine. She sits prettily on a tree stump. He stands contentedly beside her. All is right with the world.
“Have you ever seen such a moon, bathed in the most fragile strands of clouds, just whispered hints of mistiness, almost a shimmering halo? It’s beautiful, Marjorie, isn’t it?”
“It is when you describe it, Marshall.”
“If I kissed you, do you think you’d see the afterimage of the moon when you closed your eyes?”
“I’m not sure… why? Do you think you would like to experiment?”
“Well… If you didn’t think I was being too forward.”
“Oh, Marshall, I wouldn’t think that. This would be an experiment, after all, wouldn’t it?”
“Well… Yes, it would; it is, too. It’s exactly that… An experiment! You see, Mademoiselle, I’ve never kissed a girl before…”
Prior to the University of Manitoba’s acceptance of his master’s thesis in 1934, McLuhan discovers with bemusement he has indeed become an integral element in the general mix of faculty and students on campus. During his years in its Department of English, he’d penned several brilliant and occasionally controversial articles for the student paper, The Manitoban.
In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” for example, he’d illuminated various aspects of corruption he’d identified in the fabric of his society and culture. Detractors charged him with ultra-conservatism and holier-than-thou tendencies, ignoring the possibility an individual can truly believe in an older and better time, a time when the human race wasn’t going through the mechanical motions in a punch-the-clock universe. Many of history’s finest writers – from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens to Eliot, Joyce, and Blake – have similarly expressed righteous wrath regarding the abhorrent and dehumanizing effects of methods not unlike those McLuhan decried.
R. C. Lodge – one professor who has the pleasure of witnessing McLuhan in action when he teaches him at the University – remembers the exceptional elocutionist who also came to be an excellent sailor as “the most outstanding student” he’s known.
With endorsements of that calibre supporting his application, the up-and-coming go-getters awarded the sixteen-hundred-dollar Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire Scholarship. McLuhan’s mother urges him to apply to Boston’s Harvard University. He gently urges her to mind her own business. He’ll make his own plans, especially after last summer (when Easterbrook and McLuhan had worked their way across the ocean to spend several months bumming around the UK).
In plain English, the determined young scholar will most certainly pursue his studies (either at Oxford or at Cambridge). That’s definitely that. There’s nothing to discuss. There’s absolutely no chance he’ll change his mind. Nope. Never. Not in this life.
For once, Elsie butts out.
McLuhan decides upon Cambridge after he fails in his pursuit of a Rhodes’ Scholarship because, during the crucial oral-examination of the applicant for that honour, the erudite and outspoken petitioner gets into hot water when the none-too-wise guy refuses to back-paddle on a point he considers worthy of heated debate with one of the examiners.
“Mr. McLooklin, are we to believe you are seriously suggesting the study of comic books is a worthy enterprise and pursuit for scholarly young minds? We? The sages of Oxford upon whom your clearly sad and sorry fate so tenuously rests? WE are to believe this utter nonsense, Mr. McLockland?”
“Excuse me, it’s McLuhan, Sir. Marshall McLuhan? Herbert Marshall McLuhan? That’s moi. Muck – Loo – Ann – McLuhan! And, yup, I am fully prepared to have you believe with all your heart and soul the study of comic books is a serious enterprise for young scholars looking fruitfully at our world as it exists right now, at this very moment, if you get my drift. Surely you can’t deny that comic books comprise an essential element of contemporary culture and therefore warrant investigation as cultural artefacts, if nothing else? Ka-zam! Ka-baml Wowie ka-zowie!”
The committee, naturally, instantly nixes any notion Mr. McLuhan may have nurtured concerning his attendance at Oxford, a respectable and respected institution where students respect their betters (instead of besting them in dogged intellectual argumentation).
No matter. Cambridge has better professors anyway plus, he’s already been accepted by that respected institution plus, his fave aunt’s already lent him the additional funds necessary for his English education plus, Marjorie will continue her medical studies while waiting for him plus, once Dr. McLuhan returns from overseas and Dr. McLuhan realizes her dream of opening a practice in the bustling heart of downtown Winnipeg, the pair will tie the proverbial knot.
In other words, it all adds up.
McLuhan’s placidity belies the tumult of ideas swirling in his brain during his Cambridge days.
