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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.
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
