The Letters of Marshall McLuhan by Marshall McLuhan (review)

HUMANITIES 171 Marshall McLuhan. The Letters ofMarshall McLuhan. Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye Oxford University Press. 562. $45.00 Taken as a whole, this volume of Marshall McLuhan's letters is an autobiography. There is nothing desultory about this selection, which is a mere fraction of the epistolary remains. Here we contact the man and the mind, intimately. Almost everything required for an understanding of McLuhanis here. Ifone had read nothing ofMcLuhan's printed work (his bibliography runs to thirty-two pages) it is possible to find his fundamental ideas in the letters, presented with an unusual degree of clarity, in spite of the fact that he did not have a high regard for clarity per se. His is rather the grammarian's deep appreciation of the fundamental ambiguity of all communication. The condensed, aphoristic style of the books does appear in some of the letters, but in others his deference to the limited resources ofhis correspondentforces him to layout ideas.more explicitly. For McLuhan conversation was king. The Letters is his conversation book; they let us in at the inception to watch the ideas forming and being refined through collegial dialogue of which the letters are a record. Once, in private conservation with McLuhan, I asked him about his writing: 'I'm not particularly proud of my books,' he said. He was not being humble, but serious - giving me a momentary insight into the dilemma of an aural virtuoso who, like Coleridge or Johnson, is reduced in important ways by print. With the bent of a Sterne this left-handed magus wrote books thatseemed like anti-books to some who misunderstood the attempts to retain in them the rich aural ambiguities of the living word. The Letters abound in styles of approach to audiences of one. While there is loving, filial, and domestic simplicityin some letters, and the flash of unbridled ambition in others, one finds, in those to Pound and Lewis, for example, the arcane, imploded codeof their being geniuses together. The letters are arranged in three periods: (1931-6) a young Canadian scholar, of burgeoning intellect, at Cambridge - a slightly priggish Anglophile rube from the Colonies and an incipient rower upstream; (1937-45) a time when ground-breaking ideas streamed out from the point of light· that was his head; and (1946-79) the period when revolutionary ideas produced responses varying from sycophantic adulation to a backwash of misunderstanding and critical outrage which required an indefatigable defence of his published work. He had many fans and many critics, as well as acquaintances in high places who accepted his celebrity less critically. Letters were exchanged with Duke Ellington, Jimmy Carter, Malcolm Muggeridge, Clare Boothe Luce, Edmund Carpeter, Buckminster Fuller, Hugh Kenner, Barbara Ward, Margaret Mead, John Cage, Gyorgy Kepes, Ashley Montagu, Yousuf Karsh, Jonathan Miller, Frank Kermode, Jack Paar, Prince Bernhardofthe Netherlands, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and many others. 172 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 Certain themes persist through the epistolary body. McLuhan's unflagging generosity to his friends; an energetic mania that prompted Eric Havelock to say 'You are a man who works always near the bone, pushing his nerves to the limit'; the almost numbing fidelity to the curmudgeonly Wyndham Lewis in aid of his plight in North America; his unstinting devotion to his mother; and the undeflectable good humour and irrepressible sense of intellectual play. We have a growing sense of the magnitude of the man who advertised to Ezra Pound that he was 'an intellectual thug who has slowlybeen accumulating a private arsenal with everyintention ofusingit.' The editors ofthese letters deserve the highest praise for pulling together a life through this judiciously selected mosaic. (FRANK ZINGRONE) W.R. Martin. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel University of Alberta Press. xiv, 235. $25.00; $14.95 paper Alice Munro's brilliant, complex, and deceptively simple writing is a challenge to critics. W.R. Martin accepts that challenge. The task he sets himself is, he tells us, 'a close reading' of the fiction. Thus, he comments on more than seventy stories individually. Lives of Girls and Women he treats as a unit, although he remains undecided whether to term it a novel or a collection...