Letters of Marshall McLuhan

Philip Lanthier taught in the English Department of Champlain Regional College, Lennoxville, Quebec and was also editor of Matrix, a biannual literary magazine.

When Marshall McLuhan died in his sleep on New Year’s Eve, 1980, he left behind not only a collection of writings which had created extraordinary excitement and controversy, but also a public legend which extended throughout the world intellectual community. Today, as we continue to contemplate the effects of the media on our lives, McLuhan’s insights, though often questioned, are inescapable.

With the publication of his letters, both work and legend can be more fully understood and his contribution to contemporary thought more realistically assessed. Corinne McLuhan, his widow, and Matie Molinaro, his agent, worked nearly three years sifting through over 800,000 separate items, 100,000 of which were letters. Having narrowed the letters down to the equivalent of four volumes, they approached William Toye of Oxford University Press, who made a final selection and provided commentary, annotations, and footnotes.

The result is a fascinating and carefully documented portrait of a mind which teemed with critical and creative energy and which exercised an enormous reach into domains not normally attempted by the average North American professor of English. One of McLuhan’s chief accomplishments was to break down the barriers between disciplines and between the so-called fine arts and popular culture. His first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), examined the world of advertising, comic strips, and daily newspapers; at the same time he was writing learned articles on the poetry of Tennyson, Keats, and T.S. Eliot. The combination was both potent and liberating.

In search of a theory comprehensive enough to explain the twentieth century, McLuhan blithely appropriated the discoveries of anthropologists, architects, psychologists, philosophers, artists, even literary critics, and placed them in his “mosaic of perpetually interacting forms.” The letters dramatize this process on a personal, day-to-day level. They show McLuhan explaining, pontificating, cajoling, probing, questioning, joking. He fills with warm praise and enthusiasm for those whose ideas he can accommodate; he is grandly exasperated with those who could not see what he claimed was right in front of their noses. Needless to say, his range of correspondents was enviable: Ann Landers and John Cage, Jacques Maritain and Duke Ellington, Pierre Trudeau and Woody Allen.

This collection has been divided into three periods: 1931-36, when McLuhan was in Cambridge on a scholarship; 1936-46 when he taught at various North American universities; and 1946 to shortly before his death, when he taught at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, founded the Centre for Culture and Technology, and became a media celebrity. But the locations matter less than the journey of mind: his early interest in the New Criticism of F.R. Leavis, G.K. Chesterton’s doctrine of Distributism, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot; his later fascination with the ideas of artist-novelist Wyndham Lewis and the poetic techniques of Ezra Pound; later still his discovery of the work of Siegfried Giedion and political economist Harold Innis. Along the way he converted to Catholicism, married a girl from Texas, and travelled widely in his global village. The letters document this restless and eclectic mind in its search for what Giedion called “the hidden unity, a secret synthesis” beneath the apparent confusion of modern civilization. Whether or not his theory holds, McLuhan was able to communicate to students, to colleagues, and for a time to a wider general public, the sheer excitement of ideas. These letters demonstrate what it was like to be in touch with live mind.