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First Comes Love, Then Comes Cambridge

The OED is Western scholarship’s greatest achievement.

– Marshall McLuhan

On top of his game, fresh from Winnipeg, flush with funds (despite the general dearth of same among the population due to the Great Depression), head very much in love’s lofty clouds, McLuhan hits bottom at Cambridge with an abrupt and rather humiliating ka-thunk. “One advantage we Westerners have is that we’re under no illusion we’ve had an education,” McLuhan later muses concerning his rude awakening at the progressive university best described as Genius Central. “That’s why I started at the bottom again,” he adds, fully believing his provincial Canadian education means nothing more than the fact he’s back at square diddly-zip.

Such is the response to the advanced state of study and reading in his newest endeavours in the English canon under the direction and tutelage of literary luminaries the quality of I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; Practical Criticism, 1929), F. R. Leavis (Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, 1930; New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932; Culture and Environment, co-authored with Denys Thompson, 1933); and, Q. D. Leavis (Fiction and the Reading Public, 1932).

But, right now, it’s October 1934 in England and it’s gloriously bracing. Crisp and sparkling days yield to sunsets embroidered with silvery hints of rose and aqua signalling the arrival of that famous British chill spell. Night descends, the nocturnal velvet blueness restorative and soothing. McLuhan ranges over narrow gas-lit streets or takes his time over tea in one of the many shops wholly devoted to the country’s revered cuppa. He loves the night, the muffled quiet, the comforting shadows of the hearth’s flames licking the walls in his spacious room; indeed, throughout his life, he will find nothing more soothing than sitting by a well-tended fire, recalling his favourite easy chair on Cambridge’s Magrath Avenue, fondly remembering eating, drinking, and later, either smoking a fine cigar or stoking and restoking his favourite pipe. (McLuhan, incidentally, smokes his first cigarette in May 1935; in December of that year, he becomes slightly inebriated for the first time.)

The ambience invigorates the hicksical Canuck outsider who’s come to Cambridge’s Trinity Hall driven by the dream of securing a very impressive M. Litt. or Ph.D. in his advanced studies of the English language and its finest literature. After living in near-poverty in Winnipeg with his father, McLuhan promises himself he’ll become prominent doing some sort of extraordinary work. He’ll never again lack for sufficient funds. And, once he settles into his new life in the large and lovely room with its wonderful fireplace, he knows he’s one giant step closer to keeping the vow he made.

Undaunted by what others think of his not-so-proper credentials, already well-practised in the art of dismissing those who ridicule him as proof of nothing but their own ridiculosities, McLuhan tears into his studies with all the ferocity of a wanderer in the desert dying of starvation and thirst suddenly realizing the oasis into which he’s stumbled is anything but a mirage.

It most certainly is not a mirage. Nor are McLuhan’s years at Cambridge a disappointment. Anything but. The experience opens his eyes, ears, and mind to near-limitless possibilities, confirming for him his feeling that, if he is indeed going to make his mark on this rapidly changing world, there is no better way to go about doing so than by immersing himself in the stimulating intellectual culture so abundantly available in this refuge from the wild and crazy world beyond its borders. Look no further than the fact that Elsie has left Herbert, has taken Red to go off and make her way in Toronto’s theatre world and – almost unbelievably the pair’s now living in a roominghouse on Selby Street, in the very heart of Cabbagetown, in the city’s working-class neighbourhood. Go figure, eh?

Happily, at Cambridge, McLuhan flourishes. The world-renowned university is credited with reinventing and revitalizing literary criticism through its pioneering efforts to bring it into the twentieth century (from the morass of the nineteenth century’s high romanticism and peculiar standards). Lionel Elvin, McLuhan’s tutor, comments that when the twenty-three-year-old consults with him, he finds him willing, open, amiable, intense, and earnest; he’s not, however, earnest in any plodding nor sycophantic sense of that word; in fact, he still has a playful light in his eye; and, of necessity, he still continues to hold himself and his ideas in healthy esteem.

Naturally, McLuhan begins to take his health more seriously; in order to achieve his goals at Cambridge, he’d logically reasoned, he’ll need to stay in tip-top mental and physical shape; thus, when he learns the Trinity Hall boat club’s training new crewmen, he goes along to the trials and secures a place as oarsman with one of the crews.

McLuhan considers it an honour to wear his team’s heavy white Trinity Hall sweater; and, when he bulks up to 151 pounds or 68 kg, he notes with satisfaction his training diet – lots of fish and meat (preferably mutton or beef steak), veggies, eggs, toast, and fruit, all topped off with a pint of beer – is working its magic.

During his second year, McLuhan relocates to rooms at Trinity Hall; once settled, he surveys his pleasing domain and thinks, How lovely this all is, how fortunate I am. Truly, this is happiness. My love of life has never been greater. And, although the rower’s team is never the fastest, it does sufficiently well in one race – placing fifth – that its members are rewarded with the oars they’d only been allowed to borrow until that achievement. It means a great deal to McLuhan, evidenced in the fact his Cambridge oar is always given pride of place in every office he occupies throughout his life.

In 1910, Cambridge had created the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature, a position towards which the greatest literary theorists of the new century had naturally gravitated; thus, fortuitously, McLuhan’s greatest mentors, the ones who most affected his own course in life – not to mention his approaches to literature, culture, technology, and theory – are, among others, Professors I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, now universally recognized as two of the granddaddies of what came to be called the New Criticism.

Extremely influential as a school of formal investigation into literature, New Criticism’s principles rest upon the belief the author of a given work is not as important as that authors creation. The creation exists independent of the author who created it; it exists for its own sake; and, it contains its own logic and justification which have nothing to do with its creator’s life, intent, history, or biography. A New Critic doesn’t snoop into the details of the private life of the author, in other words, a New Critic examines the author’s creation and aids readers in their appreciation of the work’s form, technique, and effects (based upon the belief that all worthy and valuable Western literature is part of a great tradition rooted in ancient Greece). New Criticism emphasizes formal considerations alongside techniques that achieve their desired effects upon readers. Context and relationship within a given work of art are as important as form and content; additionally, the New Critic endorses this tradition of excellence, the so-called Western Canon, and points out ways a given work of art supports and reinforces the valuable in literature (worthy of study for edification or enlightenment) based upon the principles clearly on display in the great works of the Western Canon.

New Criticism provides the key and unlocks the door to McLuhan’s imagination, flooding his parched mind with everything he knows he intuitively believes before he hears it from the mouths (and reads it in the works) of his greatest teachers. Their lectures – as well as their ground-breaking investigations and publications in the interconnected fields of the philosophies of rhetoric, literature, culture, and technology – profoundly shape McLuhan’s lifelong scholastic attitudes, writerly approaches to style, and deeply held technocultural convictions.

Of these, none influences McLuhan more than Practical Criticism, a book in which Richards “exposes” the inadequacy of the Academy’s outmoded approaches to “studying” literature in the twentieth century or Culture and Environment, perhaps the single most important Leavis volume McLuhan reads and certainly, as time reveals, the work most responsible for one of the young disciple’s important breakthroughs. He discovers the ways in which the tools and analytic methods of the literary critic might bear fruit in other areas of investigation in the social sphere, in such unlikely stuff as advertisements, magazines, pamphlets, radio, newspapers, and the cinema.

The intermingling and wide-reaching approach Leavis recommends, a kind of cooperation between the worlds of science and literature, galvanizes McLuhan. Here, in all its glorious precision and exquisite simplicity, is the basis, the scaffolding, and the confirmation for the volume McLuhan dreams of writing, the one he’d imagined back on Gertrude Avenue, the Great Book that would reveal and illuminate the set of immutable laws of creation he’s more and more convinced exist.

Thus, when Leavis suggests, in Culture and Environment, that the principles and practices of the New Criticism’s emphasis on technical and formal investigation might similarly be employed when training in awareness of the social environment is required, McLuhan wholeheartedly embraces the notion, completely understanding its implications in terms of studying the forms, techniques, ways, means, and methods of the modern world (most easily observed in the new electric-electronic media increasingly making their presence felt in all areas of life).

Richards had similarly concerned himself with practicalities when he had conducted several literary experiments during his years as a professor. In the ones he describes at greatest length in Practical Criticism, he explains he presented numerous series of unsigned poems by unidentified authors to his students so they might critique them to assess their value and various merits. Richards had included both brilliant poems written by the art’s greatest practitioners as well as banal poems penned by nobodies.

The students reviled the established writers’ works and, far too frequently, waxed poetic on the virtues of the no-count entries. According to Richards, such gross misreadings demonstrated that an entirely new approach to literature was required. It was no longer enough, in the present world, to read, memorize, and regurgitate the received wisdom on the vague truth and beauty of what makes a poem (and poet) great. High-minded ideals and grand themes are well and good; but, the best way to approach a poem is through each of its words in relation to every other word it contains.

As far as Richards and ideas go, McLuhan intuitively grasps the notion that a good critic examines a poem in order to understand how (and why) it achieves its effects and successfully communicates with its readers through its words’ various shades of meaning in terms of relationships, ambiguities, and resonances in the context of the poem itself.

Richards insists that literary criticism ought to focus on the meaning of words and the way in which they are used. He dismisses the “proper meaning superstition” as hogwash, primarily because words and their meanings are not independent of the way in which they are used. Words control thought. Their relationships create meaning since nothing has its meaning alone. A single note is not music. A single word is not a novel.

Additionally, McLuhan sees, a good critic examines what’s on the page, not what’s beyond it (in terms of who created it and why), in order to form sound judgments concerning its value. In other words, a good critic doesn’t ask how a poem makes its readers feel; rather, a good critic explains why it makes them feel the way it does; or, more clearly, its not what a poem “says” (its content or message) but how its said or “presented” (its context or medium) in terms of the effect it has on a reader – also considered the cause of the poem since a poem only exists when it is being read – that really matters.

By the time McLuhan adds a second B.A. – this one from Cambridge – to his growing list of impressive credentials, he no longer feels he’s beginning at the beginning. In fact, when he leaves the institution in 1936, his list of primary sources and influences has multiplied exponentially as he systematically ploughed through work after work with gusto and joy.

Not only does he find great solace and discover irrefutable support for his theories and beliefs in the French Symbolist poets and Cubist painters as well as the work of novelist James Joyce, economic-historian Harold Innis, poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and painter-writer Wyndham Lewis, but he also begins his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

McLuhan prays for direction for two years before he converts. At one point, he writes to one of the Fathers at St. Louis University and asserts he does not “wish to take any step in it that is not consonant with the will of God… My increasing awareness has been of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and dominate secular concerns – thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind.” Later, he elaborates “there is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian.”

Yet, McLuhan’s anxious, mostly because he worries about how his mother will deal with it. For her part, Elsie weeps copiously. Her eldest has ruined his chances to become a Great Man because Catholics are second-class nobodies in both business and education, at least as far as she’s concerned. McLuhan dismisses her histrionic nay-saying; she, after all, has no inkling of the benefits and solace Catholicism bestows upon him, of the way it counteracts the effects of “that swift obliteration of the person which is going on.”

For the first time in his spiritual life, he’s at peace and deeply grateful for Catholicism. He believes an individual always maintains a constant nonstop dialogue with the Creator; and, “for that kind of dialogue, you don’t need even to be verbal, let alone grammatical.”

The kind of dialogue he would have with Marjorie’s another matter entirely. Here, he most assuredly needs to be both verbal and demonstrative. As the months wear on, McLuhan’s love for his perfect woman wears off, not surprisingly, considering time and distance factors.

At first, they write each other regularly, and he takes enormous pride in wearing the dashing scarves and colourful sweaters she knits for him; but, slowly, his feelings undergo a sea change. By the time he concludes his second year at Cambridge, McLuhan conceives of a way to break it to her gently, never dreaming his brilliant plan will backfire just as brilliantly.

He issues an ultimatum: Come to Cambridge now or forget it! Marjorie heads for England on the very next boat. Egads! This is not supposed to happen. The woman is supposed to refuse to visit, not to hop on the next thing sailing!

The pair spends some lovely times together, trekking around James Joyce’s Dublin, biking through the English countryside, attending the cinema, dining by candlelight, and dancing to the beat of Joe Young’s “Take My Heart,” Irving Berlin’s “Let Yourself Go,” and Walter Hirsch’s “Bye Bye Baby,” but when Marjorie returns to Winnipeg, McLuhan admits to himself, somewhat guiltily, he’s happy she’s gone. A couple of months later, he writes the first love of his life a delicate Dear-Jane letter and reluctantly terminates the engagement.

If nothing else, McLuhan’s time at Cambridge boosts his confidence and provides him with the kind of self-assurance he needs to pass the “tripos,” the final English-literature examination that stands between him and his dreams. When he receives an upper second (second-class honours) instead of a first (straight As) on the exam, he feels diminished, unhappy, and deeply chagrined. More than anything else, he feels relief the ordeal’s behind him (since exams have always been his Achilles heel).

Not without justification, McLuhan believes a graduate with a mere upper second cannot look forward to the benefits, advantages, and prestige a clean first provides; fortunately, his “poor” standing does not deter him in his quest to create a first-class body of work. After all, he reasons, if John Ruskin, who earned a fourth, had achieved greatness without the coveted first to aid him in his pursuits, the odds are in his favour that he, in possession of an upper second, will similarly accomplish great things.

By all accounts, McLuhan has come by his solid and sturdy strength of character honestly, several decades earlier, growing up deeply committed to excellence and wholly determined to make his mark. The young Canuck from the Prairies would, one way or another, indeed prove he was, in his mother’s words, “clearly destined for greatness right around the globe.”