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 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,