In Across Canada By Story I spend some time discussing my links with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Today I learned some interesting new facts about both of them. This was courtesy of an intriguing new Exhibition on McLuhan in the St. Michael’s College Library at the University of Toronto ….which happens to located on “Marshall McLuhan Way”.
The well-known facts about Marshall are all there, including the unfamiliar news that at first he published as “Herbert Marshall McLuhan”. We are reminded that he first produced the phrase “the medium is the message” at a conference for radio broadcasters in Vancouver as early as 1957, and that The Gutenberg Galaxy came out in 1962, winning the Governor-General’s Prize (from a jury chaired by Northrop Frye) and establishing his reputation, so that in a few years the San Francisco Chronicle was calling him “the hottest academic property around”.
By 1967 his fame had spread so that the Toronto Star called him “Toronto’s most influential and controversial celebrity.” From 1965 t0 1969 in the US alone, interviews with him ran in Harpers, Newsweek, The New York Times, Life, Fortune, Esquire, Look, TV Guide, McCalls, Glamour, Vogue, Family Circle, Mademoiselle, the Saturday Evening Post , and in Playboy.
Ah, yes, Playboy…. the magazine full of airbrushed naked women who occasionally caught the passing eyes of teenaged boys who really bought the magazine “for the articles”. After Playboy ran their 1968 piece on Marshall (labelled “a candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media”), Marshall wrote to Jack Kessie, the Managing Editor. The letter, on display in the Exhibition, was pure McLuhan. He assured Mr. Kessie that “nudity is not realism.Compared to the clad figure, nudity is sculpture. Clothing is an anti-environment, a kind of weaponry, providing an enclosed space that is pictorial rather than sculptural….'”
To reassure Playboy’s head man further, he went on “Of course, basic human sex attraction is olfactory, not photo-factory, hence the playful harmlessness and natural innocence of your pictures.” Perhaps we can assume that before Mr. Kessie went home to be greeted by his sweet-smelling wife, he considered raising the price of ads for perfumes in the magazine.
I have written about how Marshall and Northrop Frye (that’s Herman Northrop Frye) were two very large fish in a fairly small Toronto pond. They were wary of each other and tried to avoid giving offence, working together as U. of T. English Department colleagues. They were, I argue in the book, friendly rivals. Yet in the Exhibition there is a 1971 letter about Marshall from Frye that hints at the strain. Ronald S. Berman, the Chair of the National Endowment For The Humanities had written to Frye from Washington asking if he would recommend McLuhan to give a major speech.
In part Frye’s letter reads…”and I think he would do a very good job for you, assuming that he took the assignment seriously and wrote out his speech beforehand. He makes a deliberate technique of uttering what he calls “probes”, or challenges to the imagination, which to many people sound like simply irresponsible statements, and his habit of regarding the whole of culture as a gigantic allegory of his own view is growing on him.”
At the end of the letter, Frye’s irritation at having been lured into these frank statements seems to me flick out, like a dragon’s tongue. See what you think..” If you invited him to give the lecture you would, I think, be taking something of a risk, but I think you ought to take a risk, like everybody else, and not hedge your bets by enquiries of this kind.
Yours sincerely”
From the Exhibition I walked for five minutes to re-visit Marshall’s old Centre For Culture and Technology, at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent. It still reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s famous phrase “an unused Newfoundland fishing shack” and I was unable to get inside, to remind me of visits to see Marshall there. But I was able to clamber through the undisturbed snow, to peer through the window inside the room that launched a thousand probes.
Douglas Gibson 
Thanks for your piece Doug. My father, Erik Jorgensen, a U of T forestry professor became great friends after my father did an appearance on Bruno Gerussi’s brief television show frolicking through High Park, chewing spruce gum, and explaining why trees are so important to urban culture, and coining the phrase “urban forestry”. McLuhan phoned my dad at home out of the blue and invited him first to attend the graduate student evenings at the Centre for Culture and Technology. As I was still in High School, I used to go along to these evenings with great pleasure and awe. Sitting on cushions and hearing various students speak of their world views certainly broadened mine. Their friendship extended to Sunday afternoon open houses in Wychwood Park and wonderful friendships. I myself went on U of T and became one of the many hundreds in Northrop Frye’s class on Religion and Literature. I was most honoured when, following a highly successful submission on “Lazarus in Literature”, Professor Frye invited me to his office along with other As for a glass of sherry. Very fond memories of all of these broad and free thinkers! Thanks again.
Birthe Birthe Jorgensen drbirthe@gmail.com 416-653-2405
Back in the early sixties while attending Assumption University in Windsor, I went to a joint presentation by Marshall McLuhan and Sydney Harris, a well known columnist from Chicago. I can no longer remember what the topic was, but I still recall vividly the starkly different speaking styles of the two men who each spoke for twenty minutes.
Mr Harris spoke in simple clear language, very directly and with flawless logic. His speech could have served as a model piece of writing following George Orwell’s six rules.
On the other hand, Mr. McLuhan’s talk was enigmatic, rambled a bit and was full of jokes, puns and vague allusions, much like the probing style described by Professor Frye.
When question time arrived, a woman asked, “Mr. Harris, would you please summarize
what Mr. McLuhan said?”
Harris paused, “… Summarize what Mr. McLuhan said… Hmmmm… How do you unspread butter?”
Some forty years later I had the satisfaction of using the butter line to good effect in a
faculty union meeting.
Frank Green
London