The Unknown Innis

The Unknown Innis TOM COOPER Perhaps the most challenging medium for presenting the life and thought of Harold Innis would be the theatre. The biographer may draw upon a wealth of Innis materials, from copious correspondence to diaries and documents, and the academic may inspect a formidable canon of Innis texts, essays and lectures. Yet the playwright is most concerned with the man himself - what he meant by what he said, who he was when alone, what his inner feelings and thought processes were like, how his mannerisms and attitudes changed with age and circumstance - and consequently approaches his assignment with great humility. Audio tapes and newsreels of Innis, if existent , have yet to be exhumed, and his acquaintances ' memories have yet to correlate. Some of his students recall Dr. Innis as their most outstanding lecturer - stimulating, encyclopedic, pungent, profound - others recall a flat, monotonous fact-binder whose lectures resembled stock market reports. Some colleagues and administrators speak of Dean Innis' inability to communicate , his financial stringency, and his reliance upon delegating responsibility, while others emphasize his encouragement of first-rate scholarship , indigenous Canadian social sciences, and individual integrity. Some friends remember how little time he spent with his own family while many of those closest to him speak of Innis as an excellent and attentive father. Numerous educators and economists remember Innis the skeptic, the cynic, the iconoclastic agnostic while others remember the generous, humble, anecdotal spokesman for the free individual in a fully balanced and independent Canada. Some speak of the "later Innis" as an obfuscating denouement descending from the staples stage and others recall the post-war Innis as a penetrating genius opening the door of in-depth communications study and multidisciplinary methodology. What colleagues, friends, family and students alike fail to remember is the selective and imJournal ofCanadian Studies pressionistic nature of memory itself: Pirandello's picture of a public figure becoming transformed into a statue is an accurate metaphor for the ossification of mass memory. Certainly Innis himself would agree that the act of remembering imparts a bias not unlike the bias imposed when memory becomes routinized through the preserved printing of words such as these upon paper such as this. Memory is in the mind of the beholder. Not only are individual memories of Harold Innis faded, fragmented, and framed from points of reference, the documents surrounding his life give only brief glimpses of the man behind the mask - a mask all the more deceptive as it was the ''non-mask'' of simplicity and straightforwardness , which carefully concealed the constant activitity of a penetrating and probing mind. Although Innis' World War I letters to his parents indicate a continuing trust in Christian theology, it is likely that these letters conceal his real thoughts on religion, thoughts of increased questioning and doubt reinforced by exposure to commonplace death, indifference, hypocrisy, and cynicism. Innis' later statements about the cataclysmic effect of World War I upon his attitudes call into question a literal interpretation of his letters to his devout Baptist relatives in complacent , conservative rural Ontario. The over-all tone and text of the Innis correspondence indicate that Harold was not unaware of the bias of his audience. Moreover, those meeting Harold Innis upon social occasions were not always aware of what he was thinking. During the Sunday afternoon teas for faculty and graduate students which he hosted in his home, Innis would listen attentively to an austere and long-winded colleague and then confidentially thumb his nose to the children offstage as if to playfully say ''what a tedious formality." I It is not surprising that the Marx Brothers, with their irreverent puncturing of pomp and pretense, were his favorite entertainers. Nor is it surprising that few people ever glimpsed the hidden feelings and attitudes of a man seemingly ''incapable of putting anyone on.''2 On many occasions a visiting colleague would discover that ''no sooner was I out the door than I could see Innis at his desk working again.''3 111 Innis' mind and body raced back to his work so rapidly that one would wonder if they had ever left it. He frequently gave the impression of wishing he were elsewhere, of...