I met Marshall McLuhan when he replaced me as a guest lecturer at Fordham University in September of 1967. That’s the story I’ve been telling all these years, and it’s mostly true. John Culkin, S.J., who had an uncanny talent for keeping his ear to the ground, learned in the spring of 1967 that I was teaching an evening course to high school teachers on how to teach film, at Xavier University in Cincinnati, like Fordham, a Jesuit school. During travels in the Midwest, John swung through Ohio to woo me into coming to Fordham to give that very course in his summer program, which he’d already advertised, attaching his name, but did not care to teach himself. He needed to work the phones to rustle up the funds to pay for Marshall McLuhan’s Albert Schweitzer Chair, promised by Fordham, but the $100K stipend was withheld by New York state, which refused to support the Chair at a “religious” university.
My first actual meeting with Marshall came five months after I finished teaching at Fordham. In January of 1968, I came by Fordham. John introduced us in Marshall’s airtight Fordham office. Marshall’s face sagged and he was still pale from the strain of the 22-hour open-brain surgery in later November, removing a tumor. He was writing a speech with a pencil. The pencil snapped. I offered him my ball-point pen. He gave me his fine-edged grin, the one that kept the mirth to his eyes, and said, “It’ll change what I’m writing, you know.”
But I only truly met Marshall one and a half years later, at the Coach House, when he gave me the Grand Tour. Not only of his Centre for Culture and Technology, but of St. Michael’s College, emphasizing what he regarded as its two gems: St. Basil’s Church and the St. Michael’s College Library. In the library he proudly patted a carrel, which he announced could hold more open books (24!) than Cambridge (22), or University of Wisconsin (9) or St. Louis University (15). My most vivid recollection of that day was later, at the Centre, when he flashed the pages of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, pasted onto sheets of white cardboard, an oversized deck of cards. He had taken two copies of the book and pasted each page onto a dry cleaner’s shirt cardboard. He shuffled his big deck and offered me a card – a reading from the century’s literary pinnacle of discontinuity and simultaneity, those features instantly accentuated by removing the binding and treating the pages as cards. That image of McLuhan offering me a card stuck so deeply that I’ve adapted it to the graphic biography I have just scripted, The BioGRAPHIC Marshall McLuhan. There, bedecked in gaudy vest and tie of a riverboat gambler, Marshall holds out a card from that huge deck, inviting the reader into his game, announcing:
Anything, anything, anything goes
Prepare to discover what nobody knows.
There were later meetings with Marshall, then, perhaps inevitably, came the falling-out. Mine arrived in a letter he wrote me early in December of 1971. I had sent him galley proofs from my forthcoming book The Post-Industrial Prophets: Interpretations of Technology. I’d sent him three chapters: the chapter introducing Innis and McLuhan, and the two chapters on Innis and McLuhan. He took umbrage with the chapter on him. I had called his thinking “theories.” He insisted he did not produce theories. He probed. All his ideas were provisional and exploratory, not the hardened concrete of theory. His chiding somehow felt like it went beyond chiding. That missive was included in The Letters of Marshall McLuhan, published in 1987 by Oxford University Press. Only recently, in researching the graphic biography, have I learned its context. My chapters arrived shortly after two extremely critical works about him were published that fall: Donald Theall’s The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror, and Jonathan Miller’s Marshall McLuhan. Marshall was vexed and aggrieved that Theall, a grad student he had mentored – and a key assistant to the Explorations group between 1953 and 1955 – would write such pointed detractions of his thinking. The Miller book he found, fulsomely, the work of a hidebound “nineteenth century mind.” From my readings of archival sources, Marshall did not let out his spleen on Theall or Miller. He held it in. Then, in December, he let it out on someone else.
That was then. Now I have only a warm gratitude that I knew him, if all too briefly, in those years that cradled the golden age of his mind.
Akedit Feb 14
