Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (review)

Harold Innis once characterized what he did as dirt research. By that he meant the long unearthing of the basic facts, figures, maps, and memoranda necessary to pattern recognition and abstraction. For his part, John Watson has attempted to apply Innis to Innis. 'This has involved great effort to track down individuals and obscure archival sources that may cast light on some aspects of the man' (ix). The result, Watson promises, is 'a full-scale intellectual biography' (11) of this country's most important thinker: Harold Adams Innis, 1894–1952. It is a promise deferred.

Watson begins at the beginning: the Innis family farm located on 'marginal agricultural land' in Otterville, ON, itself a town located in the 'middle of the margin' between the urban metropolitan centres and the new agricultural frontiers of western Canada, between the cultural and economic influences of Great Britain and those of the United States, and between a pioneer past that had not yet disappeared and a future that had not yet fully arrived (31). Indeed, Watson uses margin as a trope to connect the Innis story. Innis was – even when he was at the centre, when he was head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto – a marginal man. He opposed the increasing specialization of intellectual life; he lamented the standardization of higher learning and its concomitant reduction to memorization; and he grew anxious and frustrated when his communications work was misunderstood, poorly received, and harshly reviewed.

In the end,Watson's Innis becomes a romantic and ultimately tragic figure. He was a man determined to realize an ambitious intellectual and political project – which in its ultimate phase became nothing less than the renewal of Western civilization against the corrosive effects of modern communications. That renewal, Innis believed, would come not from the centre but from the margin, from intellectuals on the edge of empire. But Innis was also a man destined to fail. 'Obsession with presentmindedness,' he wrote in 'A Plea for Time,' 'precludes speculation in terms of duration and time.' But speculation in terms of duration and time were essential, he argued, to the survival of civilization. That plea, of course, fell on deaf ears. His already dark vision grew darker and he died a 'desperately overworked' and 'embittered' man (222).

In addition to reconstructing Innis's intellectual life, Watson has reconstructed Innis's emotional life from a limited – and more than likely vetted – archival record. As a husband, he took more than he gave and used Mary Quayle Innis as a crutch throughout their married life; as a father, he was absent and distant; and as a man, he was prone to periods of deep and debilitating depression. Watson also has uncovered new evidence relating to Innis's complicated relationship with Irene Biss.

In the mid-1930s Biss was a brilliant and beautiful graduate student; he was a professor and a married man with a family. But their research interests overlapped and they worked closely together for a number of years. There is no evidence to indicate that they had an affair, but Watson believes that Innis was in love with her. He wanted to make her in his own image: 'an intellectual nun playing opposite his scholar monk' (194). He wanted her to remain monastically devoted to his idealized notion of scholarship and uninterested in the those 'hot gospellers' in the CCF and their political debates and policy discussions. Then, in 1938, their relationship ended when she married Graham Spry – 'the type of engaged intellectual that Innis despised' (197) – and left academic work. It is at this point that Innis the staples economist becomes Innis the communications theorist. Although he is careful not to reduce Innis's intellectual transformation to unrequited love, Watson also maintains that the battle for Irene Biss's soul continued but that it now took place on a higher plane in the form of Innis's lonely quest to save Western civilization from itself through intellectual...