A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Brain surgery
Now for something completely different, part 2…
Yesterday, I explained that this week’s blogs will be very different from the previous ones. This week, in the lead up to my 100th post, which will take place on Tuesday, February 23, the standard format of two short letters, one from Marshall McLuhan and one from me, is temporarily abandoned. Instead I am posting, in 5 parts, an essay which explains the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan.
In part 1, I asserted that Marshall McLuhan lost his genius as a result of surgery to remove a brain tumor. In today’s post I tell you more about this operation.
Cordially Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan [cont'd]
By Michael Hinton
It is time to tell you about the operation, the scene of the crime. On the basic facts leading up to it and what happened during and after it his biographers (Marchand, Fitzgerald, and Gordon) are in substantial agreement: In 1967, McLuhan had reached the pinnacle of his career. The Gutenberg Galaxy had won him a Governor General’s award in 1962. Understanding Media had sold 100,000 copies in the spring of 1964. An east and west coast marketing campaign orchestrated by two San Francisco PR men and ‘genius scouts,’ Howard Gossage and Gerald Feigen, rocketed him to international stardom in 6 months in 1965. Lionized by Fortune 500 corporations his key note speeches earned him $5,000 to $25,000 gigs in 1966. Awarded a $100,000 teaching and research chair at Fordham University, in Brooklyn, he moved Corinne and 4 of their 6 children to New York City in August, 1967, where he arranged for jobs for two of his colleagues, Ted Carpenter and Harley Parker, and his eldest son Eric, and schooling for the other children, and a house for them all to live in close to the university.
With a new salary, new job, new office, new secretary, new city, and new home his stress levels must have reached record heights. Stress was the last thing he needed. Over the past 7 years he’d suffered from headaches and black-outs. (In 1960 exhausted by a punishing work schedule, he’d suffered a stroke that he tried to pretend had never happened.) Believing sickness was the result of weak will, and therefore a sign of weakness, McLuhan felt he could indulge his dislike of Doctors and hospitals by avoiding them. In September and October 1967 the blackouts got worse. In October he blacked out in class at Fordham. Deeply concerned, Carpenter, John Culkin – who had persuaded McLuhan to come to Fordham – and Corinne persuaded McLuhan to see a neurologist in Manhattan. Dr. Lester A. Mount examined McLuhan and arranged for tests which showed that McLuhan had brain tumor, a benign but growing meningioma the size of his fist, buried in the lower part of his brain at the base of his skull.
McLuhan’s choice was fairly simple: have the operation which would not be easy and if all went well live, or suffer ever increasing pain, blackouts, blindness, insanity, and ultimately death. The operation took place at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Dr. Mount performed the operation which began at 8 in the morning of Saturday, November 25 and was not completed until 5 in the morning of Sunday, November 26, having lasted 22 hours, making it “the longest neurosurgical operation in American medical history.” Dr. Mount’s greatest concern, says Fitzgerald, was that the length of the operation which he estimated would take only 5 hours and might result if the utmost care was not taken in the exposure of “some of the cells of the brain’s surface to the potentially devastating effects of oxygenation” because he had to “lift McLuhan’s brain to get at the tumour.” “His esteemed patient’s faculties will,” she writes, “almost inevitably, [would] sustain some degree of damage.”
McLuhan did suffer from the operation. The pain was excruciating, for which he took heavy-duty pain killers, and his life was “forever altered.” Five years of reading and people, places and associations were scrubbed from his memory. He was “variously fragile, tense, irritable,” she says,” and, on occasion, uncharacteristically demanding and irrational.” No one, however, suggests the operation took away his genius. Gordon remarks, instead, how remarkably productive McLuhan was in the years after the operation: 7 books and 21 articles. And yet it is clear there was something wrong. The articles were squibs. Some quite obviously recycled from the years before his surgery. With each year that passed and with the appearance of each new book his reputation fell. Projects he thought important were left unfinished. Six of the seven books were co-authored and the one that wasn’t, Culture is Our Business was viewed by McLuhan, as a failure. Asked by his son Eric late in his life why he never dedicated his books to any one McLuhan told him it was because he wasn’t very proud of them.
To be continued…
Now for something completely different
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 will be my 100th post. To those of you who have been following this blog, especially, I should say something, now, by way of explanation and introduction, because this week’s blogs will be very different from the previous ones. Previously, each blog has consisted of two short letters. The first is from Marshall McLuhan, and introduces a particular idea or event in his life. (Perhaps I should make it clear – on the off-chance you have any doubts about it – these letters were not actually written by Marshall McLuhan, but by me as I have imagined him writing them. I have, however, based them on things he actually did say or write in letters, interviews, essays, speeches, or books, and have tried as far as I can to imitate his style without parodying it.) The second is from me talking about what Marshall says in his letter. (These letters I assure you are all actually written by me.) Hence the name of the blog: “From Marshall and Me.”
Today, I am posting the first part of a five-part essay on what I believe is the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan. Here is part one. I hope you find it interesting and useful in making sense of one of Canada’s most extraordinary and perplexing minds. If you have any comments I would like to hear them.
Cordially Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan
By Michael Hinton
Thirty years ago, on September 26, 1979, Marshall McLuhan collapsed in his office, a book-strewn, file-piled, upstairs room in the Coach House at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. A short walk away from where he lay was the basement cafeteria of the old ROM, his former office on St Joseph Street, his first two homes in Toronto, at 81 St Mary’s Street and 29 Wells Hill Road, and all of the other places he had made his breakthroughs in communications and media studies. The cause of his collapse was a stroke that robbed him of the power to speak, read, and write for the last fifteen months of his life.
There’s a joke – an anecdote in McLuhan-speak about this: it probably didn’t make him any harder to understand. McLuhan’s wife Corinne once said, I’m paraphrasing here, that Marshall had three passions in life God, work, and her. But she ran a very distant third. After the stroke he still had God and Corinne, but the work was gone. Walking, but only just, barely able to move his hands, the man who rocketed to international stardom in 1966 with his dumbfounding eloquence – observing most famously that “the medium is the message” and that media had made the world “a global village” – was unable to communicate in any other way than by shrugging, grunting, grimacing, and forcing out an occasional “oh boy, um, ah, [and] yes.” Once looking out the window on a rainy day, Patrick Watson says, a bit of a poem came out, ‘April is the cruelest month.” A story that always moves me because he spent 40 years of his life teaching English literature, and what he must have been trying to say to his friend by quoting this first line from “The Wasteland.”
The wonder is not that poetry came out of his mouth. Aphasics frequently may sing more easily than they can speak and speak poetry when they cannot speak prose. And McLuhan loved poetry. At one time he had committed most of the Oxford book of English verse to memory. The wonder what he meant by this quotation. It could have been idle word play. This is April, it’s raining, here’s some poetry that loosely fits. But that I think is unlikely. What is more likely is that McLuhan was well aware of the dark meaning of that line of poetry, and of the darker meaning of the epigram that introduces the poem. April, Eliot is saying, is cruel because it wakens the world from its painless sleep to the misery of life in the wasteland. To McLuhan his current life of sharply constrained communication must have felt like a wasteland. The epigram of the poem is a passage from The Satyricon by Petronius. A scene is played out in the town square of ancient Cumae where the Sibyl – a prophetess – is imprisoned in a cage and is being taunted by a gang of children. “What do you want, Sibyl, they cry.” And she says,“I want to die.”
I wrote to Patrick Watson about the story of “April is the cruelest month.” He didn’t want to speak to me about this over the phone. Instead he asked me to send him questions by e-mail. I asked him a two-part question: Was the story true, that McLuhan had actually said this particular line of poetry, and what did he (Patrick Watson) say after McLuhan said it. He wrote me back the next day, to confirm that the story was true and add a question of his own, but unfortunately he left the second part of my question unanswered. (His e-mail reads: “Yes, I think that’s true. Do you know the source of the line?”) Too bad. I’d hoped to be able to discern from his answer something about McLuhan’s state of mind and his at the time. Wonder? Joy? Amazement? Foreboding? Sorrow? Indifference? Or what? Perhaps he couldn’t remember, or didn’t want to. But it doesn’t matter all that much now because McLuhan’s stroke and what happened afterward is not my concern. It was tragic, but it did not cause McLuhan to lose his genius.
That happened I believe a dozen years earlier in New York City, in November 1967 in the course of a long and harrowing operation McLuhan underwent to remove a brain tumor. Saying this I know will anger and upset many people, not only his surviving family and friends, but thousands of his followers around the world bound together by the internet. (The truth McLuhan liked to say, quoting Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot “is whatever upsets the apple cart.”) My intention however is not to upset people, especially the people who loved him, but to tell a story that needs to be told. A story that provides the best answer to a question that appeared in a New Yorker cartoon in 1970 when McLuhan’s celebrity was clearly ebbing: Says she to he on leaving a party “Are you sure it isn’t too early to ask, ‘Whatever happened to Marshall McLuhan?’ ” The story explains much about his life and work that otherwise would remain a mystery. In particular the decline in the quality of his work and the decay of his reputation after 1967. McLuhan you will discover did not die a genius tragically trapped inside a body that didn’t work. He died more tragically as a man who used to be a genius trapped inside a mind he found increasingly hard to recognize and to be reconciled with.
Part 2 tomorrow
What’s in the cards?
Marshall McLuhan (1969 age 58). The solution to life’s problems
My son Eric and Eugene Schwartz tell me that The Marshall McLuhan DEW-LINE Newsletter is selling like hot cakes. I send them stuff when I can and they send it on to my subscribers. Great idea that the Distant Early Warning (Card) Deck. Worked that one out several years ago. Eric put it together from my notes and Eugene came up with the cracking idea to charge the subscribers an extra $5 if they want to get the deck. The card deck is a technology for delivering creative solutions to life’s problems. I call it The Management Game. Actually Games. Here is how to play the simplest one: Take any card. On the card is an aphorism. Relate the aphorism to your current hang up. I drew the 5 of clubs. The aphorism reads: “since life is short our faces must be long.” My current hang up is my health. Nothing seems the same since that brain surgery in November of 67. Well, as Corinne says I must take each day as it comes. Is that my solution, or is that my problem?
Me (January 2010, age 57). Playing a different game
The distant early warning or DEW line was a 1950s cold-war radar alert system Canada and the United States built in Northern Canada in the 1950s. The system was designed to give Americans and Canadians a heads up if Russia attacked by sending planes or missiles over the Arctic circle. McLuhan liked to announce himself in speeches as a voice from the DEW-line. That is he had to come to warn of dangers ahead. But in naming his card deck – which if you live in Montreal you can see on display at the Canadian Center for Architecture until February 25th, 2010 – after this famous piece of cold-war technology, McLuhan misleads. The name doesn’t quite fit. The deck says you can find answers for your hang-ups or problems by contemplating the aphorisms on the cards. Yet the DEW line was not a system for finding solutions to a problem (say nuclear attack), but a system for knowing whether you have a problem (look there’s a bomber!).
Let’s play McLuhan’s Management Game differently. Instead of calling “to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards,” as the game suggests, and then picking “a card and … [applying] its message,’ let’s shuffle, select a card, look at the aphorism, and only then decide whether in fact we have a problem.
The card I’ve drawn for us all is the 4 of spades: “When all is said and done more will have been said than done.” Sounds like a call for action. I know what I’m going to do. (Tell you about it on Tuesday.) What will you do?
(Look next week for the announcement of a winner to our classify Marshall McLuhan contest.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Readings for this post
Marshall and me, Reading Marshall McLuhan’s Cards, December 3, 2009
Marshall and me, What’s Marshall McLuhan’s Stuff Worth, December 4, 2009
Happy New Year Marshall McLuhan!
Marshall McLuhan (December 31. 1980, age 69). What a night!
Tonight was a good night. Father Stroud said Mass. We had a good French burgundy for communion. Later when we finished the burgundy with dinner there was champagne and Father Stroud and I watched the news on TV with cigars lit. I must say it was a great way to end the year. Of course, as you know, I cannot speak or write for that matter. (Except on this blog. Thank God for small if fictional mercies!) This damn stroke has shut me down and got me down. Corinne pointed to my Order of Canada and told Father Stroud it is the thing I am most proud of. That’s not true, but it’s not like I can speak up to correct her. I do like it. But the thing I am proudest of is …
Me (January 2010, age 57). When did Marshall McLuhan die?
Marshall McLuhan died on the night of December 31, 1980. He went up stairs to bed after Mass, wine, dinner, and cigars and by all reports died peacefully in his sleep. That was the end of his life, but in a way it was not a particularly important event because in more significant ways he had died twice before already: the second time on the 26 September 1979 when he suffered a stroke that took away his power to speak, read, and write; the first time on the 25 November 1967 when he underwent a long and difficult surgery to remove a brain tumor. McLuhan survived the surgery but not, I believe, his genius. I do not say this lightly or without much soul searching and researching. In the months ahead I will make a case that this tragic event is the single most important biographical event in McLuhan’s life. Because if it is true, and there is a strong case to be made that it is true, it means that to understand McLuhan you must pay particular attention to things he said and wrote before 25 November 1967. And you must be careful to discount much of what he said or wrote after 25 November 1967.
Consider this a hint of things to come over the months ahead rather than an announcement that the end is here. Before signing off let me hasten to say this is not the end of McLuhan or this blog. We and the world are not yet done with Marshall McLuhan.
What do you think Marshall McLuhan was most proud of? What do you think he should have been most proud of?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p.p. 286-288.
A Fitting Memorial?
Marshall McLuhan (March, 1970, age 58). The Coach House!
Now that I have The Coach House I don’t think I will ever be happy anywhere else. Unfortunately it seems I’m booked to be everywhere else this year. Thanks to my assistant Margaret Stewart’s help here is the full list of destinations: “the Bahamas [no, it will not better there], Washington, New York [no, I do not love NY), Montreal, Greece, St. Louis, Ottawa, and San Francisco [no, I will not leave my heart there].” On top of this more brain problems. The Dr Barnett has given me these blood thinners to take. Well I’ll take them, if I remember to. Don’t want a stroke. But no more operations. Look what happened last time. I’ve got to keep going, even if I have to go away to do it. Today, I don’t mind telling you, the medium is a mess. Can’t seem to find anything. Never mind I’ll make do with what’s at hand. Let’s see what errors I can find today in Culture is Our Business. Somehow the damn thing got published without being proof read. Got to run, now, I’ve got work to do.
Me (December 2009, age 57). An insult to Marshall McLuhan
Just a little more than two years earlier McLuhan’s year of triumph, academic 1967/1968, (which he had spent at Fordham University in New York City, where he had held a $100,000 Schweitzer chair in the Humanities) was interrupted in November 1967 by a tortuous ordeal. He had undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor. The surgery had been long and trying. And his recovery had been long and trying. He had suffered loss of memory and even now years later he was far from his old self. The photographic memory was gone, the energy for which he was famous was damped down, and his quirks were exaggerated. On a good day you could almost see the old McLuhan, but there were few good days.
McLuhan loved The Coach House. The question is did he deserve the Coach House? The Coach House in the 1970s was a small “seedy” building set back from the street. In the Spring of this year on a trip to Toronto I went to visit it. It was a pilgrimage of sorts I wanted to see for myself where McLuhan worked and where the famous Monday night seminars took place. What I found was a small, locked, run-down, garbage-strewn, windows-papered-over, lightless shack with a plaque on it proclaiming it the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. In a comment on a previous post, Michael Edmunds, wrote that the University of Toronto and St Michael’s College had “little respect for McLuhan.” It would seem they wanted neither his papers nor his program. It is understandable that neither Toronto nor St Mike’s had the money to bid for McLuhan’s papers. It is less understandable that they would insult his memory by making a run-down 19th century garage his most visible memorial.
Is this right? Why is the University of Toronto intent on insulting the memory of one Canada’s most extraordinary thinkers this way?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
www.mcluhan.program@utoronto.ca
Home Sweet Home
Marshall McLuhan (May, 1969, age 57). A Coach House of my own!
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad to be back in Toronto. Of course, after my nightmare year in New York in academic 1967/68 what with the brain surgery and ‘the recovery’ it’s hardly a surprise that I’m reveling in the quiet and still delights of dear old Hog Town. While I was away Toronto University gave me a new office and my own building to house it and my Center for Culture and Technology in, the Coach House. It’s tucked in back of the Pontifical Center of Medieval studies, and close to all my favourite haunts: my old office at 96 St. Joseph, the coffee shop in the basement of the ROM and the bar on top of the Sutton Place Hotel. Yesterday was the official opening. No expense was spared for the party. My secretary Margaret Stewart told me the final damage was $382.58. The Toronto Star reported the event today with the head line, ‘Guru’ McLuhan boy at heart. And so I am. Which reminds me I promised to meet Tom Easterbrook at the Sutton Place bar at 5 pm for whiskey and cigars – don’t tell Corinne, my Doctors say no scotch, no cigars, but I’m tired of Doctors orders. I’m back, and at long last I’ve got something to celebrate, and at the present moment I feel like celebrating. Got to run, Tom’s awaiting.
Me (December 2009, age 57). At least it made him happy
McLuhan loved The Coach House at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent. It was his place. And he filled it with the things he loved, his books, piled everywhere, his rowing oar from Cambridge, his files. And it contained things he loved: a wonderfully-1960s floor-to-ceiling mural by McLuhan’s friend, who worked as a designer at Eaton’s, René Cera, The Pied Piper, and of course the Monday night Seminars, which were the high point in his week in the 1970s. Here he brought and spoke with the wise and wonderful – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Buckminster Fuller, Eric Havelock, and Peter Drucker to name a few. The question is couldn’t the University of Toronto given him something better than the Coach House? Even in the Spring of 1969 the Coach House, which was built in 1828, was small, rundown, “seedy,” and, well, as Bette Davis would have said, “a dump.” (More on this tomorrow.)
Do you have a place of your own to work? Is such a place necessary to be creative and productive? What is the minimum necessary?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Virginia Wolfe, A Room of One’s Own, 1929.
What’s Marshall McLuhan’s stuff worth?
McLuhan (November 14, 1968, age 56). “The victor belongs to the spoils”
You will find the aphorism “The victor belongs to the spoils” on the 8 of clubs in my DEW-LINE card deck. The deck is a technology I invented some years ago to quickly produce creative solutions to puzzles by playing the management game. There are in fact four games you can play: let’s play the first one. “Take any card. Relate the aphorism to your current hang up.” My card is the 8 of clubs and my current hang up is money. You see a year ago I had what the English would say was “a bit of bad news.” I had an operation to remove a brain tumor. Hurt like hell and cost a fortune. The operation was in New York City. I survived. But haven’t felt much like myself ever since. What with their poking around my brain for 22 hours and those damn drugs they say I have to keep taking. Can’t seem to match names up with faces and a lot of stuff I know I should know – dates, books, characters, plots – for the life of me I can’t remember. On top of all that everyone says I need to make as much money as I can while I am a top celebrity. Question is, how does the 8 of clubs aphorism relate to my hang-up?
Me (December 2009, age 57). Okay, Let’s play
“To the victor goes the spoils” is the way the original proverb reads. Marshall McLuhan plays around with this to get “the victor belongs to the spoils.” The question is what controls what? Do victors possess the spoils, the money, or do the spoils, the money, actually control or possess them. If the latter, which is the message on the 8 of clubs, Marshall McLuhan would be well advised to spend less time worrying about money, or rather let other people continue to use his name (the McLuhan brand as people now say) to make money, and spend time on the preservation and growth of his intellectual reputation.
How much money was involved? Who was cashing in? Consider the year 1967 before it all went bad with the brain surgery. Marshall McLuhan had won a $100,000 Schweitzer chair at Fordham University. At that time a Professor of English literature, which is what McLuhan was, earned a salary of $14,000 a year. $100,000 was big money. Today adjusting for inflation $100,000 would be worth something like $500,000. Of course this sum did not go all to McLuhan, others got a part of it. For example, McLuhan hired his colleagues and friends at Toronto Ted Carpenter, Harley Parker, and his son Eric McLuhan to be his research team to help him teach a course called “Understanding media,” and do some projects. And that was part of the problem. Marshall McLuhan was now a business, an industry. What was good for the business was not always good for Marshall McLuhan.
Challenge: Try Marshall McLuhan’s Management game and tell me how it goes.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 227.
Tom Wolfe, “What If He’s Right,” reprinted in The Pump House Gang. 1968, pp. 163-166
Fear and loathing of doctors
Marshall McLuhan (November 25, 1967, age 56). I’m allergic to Doctors
I do not want this operation. The operation is to remove a tumor that they tell me may have been growing in my brain for a decade. The tumor, Dr. Mount says, is causing my headaches, the pain in my eye, the black-outs that have been getting worse. I blacked out in front of a class here at Fordham University. Corinne told me she was worried sick. Culkin was worried too. Everyone tells me I must have this operation. That if I don’t I will go blind. That I will die.
The clock is ticking. How can I sleep? Dr Mount wields the knife today at 11:30 a.m. Here’s what he told me he will do. First he will cut a small hole in my skull. Then insert the lifts. They’re metal. Look like spatulas. They will lift up my brain so Mount can get at the tumor. Apparently this part of the operation won’t hurt as the brain does not have nerves like the rest of the body does. Mount says the tumor is the size of my fist. He expects the operation will last 5 hours or so. But he will work as fast as possible to get the job done with the minimum of damage. That’s my worry. I know they will do away with the tumor. I just hope they do not do away with me.
Me (November 2009, age 57). What the Doctors did
Marshall McLuhan’s operation lasted 22 hours. Judith Fitzgerald, one of his biographers said it was the longest brain surgery in American medical history. A neurosurgeon I interviewed this summer, Dr. Rolando Del Maestro, says this is an exaggeration. But it was he says a very long operation, and given its length an operation filled with danger for Marshall McLuhan.
Many of you are wondering what happened to him. Whether he survived the operation. Whether he made a full recovery. What the experience did to him. These are things I will talk about in the weeks ahead. What I can tell you now is that he did survive the operation and he did recover, in part, but not in full, enough to return to work, but I don’t think to work at the same level. To be blunt, Marshall McLuhan survived the operation but his genius did not. This was and is a tragedy. A tragedy is “a dramatic performance ending in a catastrophe.” (Short Dictionary of Classical Word Origins). What was catastrophic about his loss of genius was the impact it had on McLuhan, his reputation, and his legacy.
Consider the books he published after the operation, after 1967. All were completed with the help of co-authors. Not one measured up to the heights he achieved with The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. One cannot help wondering whether they would have been written at all without the help of his co-authors. And one cannot help thinking whether it would have been better if they had never been published. For with the appearance of each new book his reputation for brilliance, and original thinking fell.
What is a genius? What does it mean to lose your genius? What is lost when genius is lost?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Judith Fitzgerald. Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy, 2001, 128-135, and 191.
Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989. P. 212-213.