B.W. Powe - Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye

They met in Toronto in 1946. H. Marshall McLuhan, fresh from Assumption College and Saint Louis University, had just been hired at the University of Toronto in the Department of English. H. Northrop Frye had been an associate professor in that department since the late 1930s. Fearful Symmetry, Fryes canon-changing study of William Blake, was about to be published. McLuhans first book, The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man, would be published in five years. Frye was about to become a public critic of impressive influence. McLuhans stardom was to come in the 1960s. Their meeting took place at a faculty gathering in Victoria College on the campus of the University of Toronto. It was a moment of a rare convergence.

One came from Canadas western provinces (Edmonton, Alberta). One had come from the east coast (Moncton, New Brunswick). They encountered one another in the centre of Canada, in the city of Toronto the countrys omphalos. An omphalos is the name philosophers give to an intellectual-spiritual centre, a site of sacred and turbulent power. They met one year after the end of the Second World War. It was almost the midpoint of the twentieth century. The Cold War was beginning.

They were introduced to one another (by whom?) at a social occasion, a welcoming to new faculty members. The two men shared spiritual pathways. McLuhan was a convert to Catholicism, but he had been born into a Methodist-Baptist family. Frye had been born into the Methodist heritage too, but he had left his fundamentalist-literalist background to become for a time an itinerant United Church minister. He was once asked what his religious vocation brought to his teaching: I marry and bury students, he quipped. by this he surely meant revelation and trust: new worlds will come. The two men would be colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Toronto for the next thirty-four years.

I like to imagine their first conversation. Was it about Blake? Perhaps it was about James Joyce. They shared a passion for these epoch-turning authors: Blake, an apogee figure of Romanticism; Joyce, a pioneer of Modernism. Perhaps McLuhan and Frye discussed their educational paths in the 1930s. Frye had gone to Oxford; his MA work was guided by Edmund Blunden. McLuhan went to Cambridge to be a candidate for a PhD; his doctorate was guided by Muriel C. Bradbrook, a noted Shakespearean scholar. Oxford, Cambridge (or Oxbridge, so Virginia Woolf liked to call a conjunction of the two illustrious universities): one was the royalist university of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and W.H. Auden, among many a place sometimes called the school for aesthetes; the other was the revolutionary college, the school that sided with Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War. When McLuhan arrived at Cambridge, the university had on its faculty I.A. Richards, Q.D. and F.R. Leavis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. McLuhan and Frye were mere kilometres away from one another in their years of learning, of being shaped by study and mentors.

They must have been amused or mystified? by their names. Mars Shall Clue; North Frye (his name had hot and cold in it). Each with the same first name initial: H. Fryes first name was Herman, McLuhans Herbert. The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers, McLuhan would say later. They were one year apart in their birthdates: 1911 for McLuhan, 1912 for Frye. Both were born in July; one week separated their birthdays (Frye on the fourteenth of the month, McLuhan on the twenty-first). Both Cancers, though I know this recognition would not have passed through their minds. They were wildly ambitious, English professors whose visionary gleam would take them far beyond their specialized domains.

In a fit of premonitory inspiration, the university hiring committees had summoned the two men who would become the most formidable and influential intellectual-seers that Canada had yet produced. Their offices would be close by. They attended departmental meetings, participated in curricula discussions, shared students, debated points of theory and observation, riffed in conversation, muttered diatribes in private talk and some lectures, in letters and notebooks. Above all they read and reread the other. They would absorb the others genius and intensities and use them to fire up their probes and inquiries.

I like to think that at their first meeting the sparks of brilliance between them were palpable. They may have thought: here was someone in Toronto, in the tweedy halls of the university, who could match their inner fire, their proclamations to themselves of the original flame. Frye declared in his journal (circa the mid-1970s), I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that. Did each man size up the other? Both must have intuited: this is a worthy opponent. All reports of their first meeting are sketchy. The intimations are that the first encounter was cordial. Still they were good readers of atmospheres. Here was another person who had considerable presence.

McLuhan and Frye crossed one anothers paths that day. They would do so again on the wooded campus pathways. They were to cross each other in their ideas and perceptions. When two such powerfully charismatic spirits converge, the moment is a crossroads it is a juncture, an apocalyptic instant. Can I prove that they instantly recognized the presence of intellectual and spiritual fire in one another? No, but I can imagine what was happening: Frye spent a lifetime teaching that we recreate when we read and reread (all rereading is revisionary); McLuhan teaches that every moment thrives with influences and effects: all times are etched in the here and now.

Two souls had met. A story had begun. Henceforth what they lived would be what they had dreamed for themselves: epic quests of discovery, intellectual journeys that would alter the spirit of their age and the one to come. They would hunt for media laws and codes of the imagination. They would be obsessive in their need to find unities and patterns. At stake? Nothing less than whole vision. Nothing less than breakthroughs into conditions of intensified consciousness. They would be more than teachers or critics: they would be indispensable guides to the new environment of electronic super-Nature, to the super-structure of our imaginations incarnated in literature.

At this first juncture McLuhan and Frye might have observed the other jot down an idea on a torn piece of paper. McLuhan was left-handed, Frye right-handed; complementary patterns again. Epiphanies came quickly to them. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, a poem in pieces, each jigsaw line like an epiphany: they would both place it on their course reading lists. (In 1946 Eliot was a cutting-edge poet, not yet canonic: his Nobel Prize would come in 1948.) Neither McLuhan nor Frye could affably offer a car lift home because neither had nor would ever have their driving licences. Their wives, Corinne and Helen, did most of the driving for them. (Were these two formidable women present that day? They would have instrumental roles in their husbands lives; their stories need to be told too.) The two enjoyed witticisms and puns, though McLuhans need to pun bordered on the compulsive. Did he troop out one of his innumerable jokes to see if the shy Frye would grin or laugh outright? McLuhan flourished in public gatherings: conversation was invariably a springboard for an improvisation on his latest ideas. His verbal riffing was known to provoke his colleagues into astonished or angry reactions or paralyse his listeners into confounded silence. Frye was sensitive to the jostle of crowds, tending towards a polite reserve. The mood in the college greeting room that day was no doubt smoky. McLuhan favoured cigars; Frye didnt smoke. Both liked to drink: Frye would share a beer with colleagues and students; McLuhan drank just about anything. They may have quoted lines of poetry. McLuhan and Frye had formidable memories and could reel off lines from Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Pound, and Eliot.