Marshall McLuhan. Judith Fitzgerald
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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