New Criticism provides the key and unlocks the door to McLuhan’s imagination, flooding his parched mind with everything he knows he intuitively believes before he hears it from the mouths (and reads it in the works) of his greatest teachers. Their lectures – as well as their ground-breaking investigations and publications in the interconnected fields of the philosophies of rhetoric, literature, culture, and technology – profoundly shape McLuhan’s lifelong scholastic attitudes, writerly approaches to style, and deeply held technocultural convictions.
Of these, none influences McLuhan more than Practical Criticism, a book in which Richards “exposes” the inadequacy of the Academy’s outmoded approaches to “studying” literature in the twentieth century or Culture and Environment, perhaps the single most important Leavis volume McLuhan reads and certainly, as time reveals, the work most responsible for one of the young disciple’s important breakthroughs. He discovers the ways in which the tools and analytic methods of the literary critic might bear fruit in other areas of investigation in the social sphere, in such unlikely stuff as advertisements, magazines, pamphlets, radio, newspapers, and the cinema.
The intermingling and wide-reaching approach Leavis recommends, a kind of cooperation between the worlds of science and literature, galvanizes McLuhan. Here, in all its glorious precision and exquisite simplicity, is the basis, the scaffolding, and the confirmation for the volume McLuhan dreams of writing, the one he’d imagined back on Gertrude Avenue, the Great Book that would reveal and illuminate the set of immutable laws of creation he’s more and more convinced exist.
Thus, when Leavis suggests, in Culture and Environment, that the principles and practices of the New Criticism’s emphasis on technical and formal investigation might similarly be employed when training in awareness of the social environment is required, McLuhan wholeheartedly embraces the notion, completely understanding its implications in terms of studying the forms, techniques, ways, means, and methods of the modern world (most easily observed in the new electric-electronic media increasingly making their presence felt in all areas of life).
Richards had similarly concerned himself with practicalities when he had conducted several literary experiments during his years as a professor. In the ones he describes at greatest length in Practical Criticism, he explains he presented numerous series of unsigned poems by unidentified authors to his students so they might critique them to assess their value and various merits. Richards had included both brilliant poems written by the art’s greatest practitioners as well as banal poems penned by nobodies.
The students reviled the established writers’ works and, far too frequently, waxed poetic on the virtues of the no-count entries. According to Richards, such gross misreadings demonstrated that an entirely new approach to literature was required. It was no longer enough, in the present world, to read, memorize, and regurgitate the received wisdom on the vague truth and beauty of what makes a poem (and poet) great. High-minded ideals and grand themes are well and good; but, the best way to approach a poem is through each of its words in relation to every other word it contains.
As far as Richards and ideas go, McLuhan intuitively grasps the notion that a good critic examines a poem in order to understand how (and why) it achieves its effects and successfully communicates with its readers through its words’ various shades of meaning in terms of relationships, ambiguities, and resonances in the context of the poem itself.
Richards insists that literary criticism ought to focus on the meaning of words and the way in which they are used. He dismisses the “proper meaning superstition” as hogwash, primarily because words and their meanings are not independent of the way in which they are used. Words control thought. Their relationships create meaning since nothing has its meaning alone. A single note is not music. A single word is not a novel.
Additionally, McLuhan sees, a good critic examines what’s on the page, not what’s beyond it (in terms of who created it and why), in order to form sound judgments concerning its value. In other words, a good critic doesn’t ask how a poem makes its readers feel; rather, a good critic explains why it makes them feel the way it does; or, more clearly, its not what a poem “says” (its content or message) but how its said or “presented” (its context or medium) in terms of the effect it has on a reader – also considered the cause of the poem since a poem only exists when it is being read – that really matters.
By the time McLuhan adds a second B.A. – this one from Cambridge – to his growing list of impressive credentials, he no longer feels he’s beginning at the beginning. In fact, when he leaves the institution in 1936, his list of primary sources and influences has multiplied exponentially as he systematically ploughed through work after work with gusto and joy.
Not only does he find great solace and discover irrefutable support for his theories and beliefs in the French Symbolist poets and Cubist painters as well as the work of novelist James Joyce, economic-historian Harold Innis, poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and painter-writer Wyndham Lewis, but he also begins his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
McLuhan prays for direction for two years before he converts. At one point, he writes to one of the Fathers at St. Louis University and asserts he does not “wish to take any step in it that is not consonant with the will of God… My increasing awareness has been of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and dominate secular concerns – thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind.” Later, he elaborates “there is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian.”
Yet, McLuhan’s anxious, mostly because he worries about how his mother will deal with it. For her part, Elsie weeps copiously. Her eldest has ruined his chances to become a Great Man because Catholics are second-class nobodies in both business and education, at least as far as she’s concerned. McLuhan dismisses her histrionic nay-saying; she, after all, has no inkling of the benefits and solace Catholicism bestows upon him, of the way it counteracts the effects of “that swift obliteration of the person which is going on.”
For the first time in his spiritual life, he’s at peace and deeply grateful for Catholicism. He believes an individual always maintains a constant nonstop dialogue with the Creator; and, “for that kind of dialogue, you don’t need even to be verbal, let alone grammatical.”
The kind of dialogue he would have with Marjorie’s another matter entirely. Here, he most assuredly needs to be both verbal and demonstrative. As the months wear on, McLuhan’s love for his perfect woman wears off, not surprisingly, considering time and distance factors.
At first, they write each other regularly, and he takes enormous pride in wearing the dashing scarves and colourful sweaters she knits for him; but, slowly, his feelings undergo a sea change. By the time he concludes his second year at Cambridge, McLuhan conceives of a way to break it to her gently, never dreaming his brilliant plan will backfire just as brilliantly.
He issues an ultimatum: Come to Cambridge now or forget it! Marjorie heads for England on the very next boat. Egads! This is not supposed to happen. The woman is supposed to refuse to visit, not to hop on the next thing sailing!
The pair spends some lovely times together, trekking around James Joyce’s Dublin, biking through the English countryside, attending the cinema, dining by candlelight, and dancing to the beat of Joe Young’s “Take My Heart,” Irving Berlin’s “Let Yourself Go,” and Walter Hirsch’s “Bye Bye Baby,” but when Marjorie returns to Winnipeg, McLuhan admits to himself, somewhat guiltily, he’s happy she’s gone. A couple of months later, he writes the first love of his life a delicate Dear-Jane letter and reluctantly terminates the engagement.