1950s and 60s
Now for something completely different, part 3 …
This week’s postings are very different from those of previous weeks. The standard format of two short letters, one from Marshall McLuhan and one from me, is 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.
Previously, in part 1, I asserted that Marshall McLuhan lost his genius as a result of surgery to remove a brain tumor. In part 2, I explained why the surgery was necessary and how it was carried out. In part 3, today’s post, I explain why the operation was so damaging to McLuhan.
Cordially, Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan [cont’d]
By Michael Hinton
To get a second opinion on the possible consequences of McLuhan’s operation I spoke with Dr. Rolando Del Maestro, MD, Ph D, FRCS (c), FACS, and DABNS. Dr. Del Maestro holds the William Feindel Chair in Neuro-Oncology at McGill, directs the university’s Brain Tumor Research Centre, and is Professor of Neurosurgery and Neurology and Professor of Oncology at McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. He has performed or assisted in between 5,000 and 6,000 operations to remove brain tumors. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the small world that is world-class neurosurgery and research, one of his teachers in neurosurgery at Western knew Dr. Mount, and he was also taught and was a colleague of Dr. Henry Barnett, who was McLuhan’s neurologist in the 1970s in Toronto and treated him for his stroke in 1979. Last but not least, Dr. Del Maestro is a student of genius, in particular the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci.
When I spoke with Dr. Del Maestro I told him what McLuhan’s biographers had to say about the surgery, and the circumstances leading up to it. I expected him to tell me that there is little he can say about the possible effects McLuhan might have suffered without seeing his medical records and even so every case is different. But he did not do so. Instead he told me that McLuhan must have suffered some cognitive impairment. The problem was the length of the operation. Oxygenation is not a concern, however, the problem is that in the surgery, which in its fundamental aspects is carried out today in much the same way as it was done in Dr. Mount’s time, the brain is lifted to get at the tumour by nickel or copper lifts. Over the many hours the brain was lifted the brain tissue, (the little grey cells Poirot called them) must inevitably be bruised, the cells damaged. Forgive me for saying this, he said, if you were a construction worker you could recover from a surgery like this and return to work. But if you’re a surgeon, an architect, or a NATO general performing at a high-level you can never go back and work at the same level. In all your years of experience, I said to him, have you ever known or heard of anyone who fully recovered from an operation like McLuhan had? No, he said. But then, after a brief pause, he said. Let me think about it. If I discover such a case I’ll call you. (So far, he has not called.)
But this isn’t conclusive evidence is it? What would it take to persuade you if you are presently unpersuaded?
McLuhan’s medical records? Even if I could show them to you, and I cannot – Columbia –Presbyterian will not release them without permission from McLuhan’s family and the McLuhan family is unlikely to give me their permission to see them – I doubt that would do the trick.
What about testimony from Dr. Barnett, who treated McLuhan in the 1970s? Perhaps. I spoke with him – he is in his 90s – but he would not grant me an interview without the permission of a member of McLuhan’s family. I phoned Stephanie McLuhan - one of Marshall McLuhan’s daughters. I left a message asking her permission to speak with Dr. Barnett. She returned my call, and left a message asking me who Dr. Barnett was, saying that she did not recognize the name. I phoned back and left a message saying that he was her father’s neurologist. She did not call me back.
What about letters to and from McLuhan in the months before and after the operation? These might be revealing. Unfortunately, McLuhan’s letters from 1967 and 1968 appear to be missing from the McLuhan Papers held by the National Archives.
But consider these two other items and see if they tip the scales. The Nicholas Olsberg clue and the Annie Hall clue.
[to be continued…]
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…
Opposites attract
Marshall McLuhan (February 7, 1960, age 50). Watch out for Mr. In Between.
Marshall, Corinne said to me at breakfast, things are not all black and white. I had simply said that telephone calls in this house must be strictly limited to no more than 2 minutes a call. She said that our two oldest girls, Teresa and Mary, were teenagers and that we must expect them to want to talk for far more than 2 minutes a call. I told her that of course she was right. Between black and white there is grey. But not everything is grey. I said that when it comes to intellectual discovery – and what can be more important than that – it is better to ignore grey entirely and see what makes the most sense, black or white? Corinne said what makes the most sense is the preservation of her sanity. I imagine what that means is that telephone calls will not be strictly limited to less than 2 minutes. Thank God – and believe me I do – I’ve got an office to escape to. After all, I’ve work to do.
Me (February 2010, age 57). Figure and ground.
Marshall McLuhan liked to view the world through the tension of opposites. Not black and white, with its suggestion of good and bad, but hot and cold, high definition and low definition, and, later, left brain and right brain, and figure and ground.
What he used to tell his students in the 1970s, I’m told, is that to truly understand a medium you must be able to look at it both as figure and ground at the same time. That is to see it for what it is, the senses it extends and how (figure) and for how the environment around it adapts and adjusts to its presence (ground). Which brings me to a question posed by Julien Smith, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Trust Agents, in a recent blog post: Can you both stand out (make an impression, cut a figure) and fit in (be accepted, blend into the ground) at the same time? The answer is yes. That’s what rhetoric is all about. To persuade you must stand out and fit in.
Do you try only to stand out or only to fit in? Or do you try to do both?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 286-287.
Media extend us
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). I thought it up.
Ed Hall says he got the idea that media are extensions of us, our bodies our minds, our spirits, from Bucky Fuller. I didn’t get it from anybody. It just hit me. But now that I’ve got it I see the idea everywhere. Blake put it this way – “If perceptive organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: / If the perceptive organs close, their objects seem to close also.” In other words by extending the senses media vary our perceptions and as our perceptive organs vary and the objects of the world vary. O brave new world!
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan enjoyed the game of exploring the myriad ways media extend us and in so doing alter the way we see the world. Every part of us he thought was a perceptive organ.
What is Twitter an extension of? Our voice. A yell.
What is the calculator an extension of? Our fingers and toes.
What is PowerPoint an extension of? Our palms and sleeves where we used to make notes to remind us of things we didn’t want to forget.
What is the digital book an extension of?
What is the digital newspaper an extension of?
What is the digit an extension of?
Is this more than a parlor game? Does it really matter?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 286-287.
Look to the media
Marshall McLuhan (February 27, 1962, age 50). TV!
Every family’s got a drop-out, magazine’s like Life are in trouble, the auto industry is veering out of control, the textbook industry and our schools are being completely overhauled. Why do so few people see that these things and a great many more are directly attributable to the impact of TV!
TV is not the first medium to have entirely reshaped society and it will not be the last. But in many ways it is the most obvious. The book escaped me for years. I caught on to TV in seconds.
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s observation about TV suggests the connection between the rise of the internet and the decay of newspapers.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! In Atlanta where I was early last month for a conference, the 5 star hotel I stayed in (thanks to the special deal the American Economic Association was able to arrange for its members) did not supply newspapers for its guests, as the big hotels do in Toronto. Their thinking being, I imagine that their guests would rather be on-line or in front of the TV. In Montreal the English language newspaper The Gazette is given away outside metro stations to commuters in the mornings and in the afternoons, but few appear to want to take a paper. Increasingly, the front page of the Gazette has become a showcase for advertisements, colour pictures and teasers about blogs and on-line stories. Some days, like last Monday, the lead story no longer leads on the front page.
The French seem to be lagging in the abandonment of the newspaper. The leading intellectual newspaper here is called Le Devoir. What English language daily would call itself Homework?
Are you more likely to get your news from TV, on-line, or from a newspaper? When the newspaper disappears, where will the radio morning shows get their stories?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
The Montreal Gazette, February 1, 2010.
Who should take the risks?
Marshall McLuhan (March, 1962, age 50). Risk is not for the young scientist!
Gordie Thompson, one of the boffins – one of the senior engineers, that is – in the research group at Bell, was telling me that as one of the old buggers he’s the one who has to be the guy who puts the breaks on, who slows things down, who is the sober voice of second thoughts. I told him, Gordie, you’ve got it all wrong. When it comes to scientific research, you’re the only one who understands the science who can afford to take risks, to make a big mistake. The boys in administration won’t take chances because they don’t understand the science. The young guys just out of graduate school are too busy worrying what will happen to them and their jobs if things don’t work out. Gordie, I said, you’re the one who has to do it. You understand what’s going on. You’ve already proved your worth. You can afford to get things wrong. So go out and take a chance. What if you turn out to be right?
Me (February, 2010, age 57). What if he’s right?
Marshall McLuhan’s genius was to be able to pick the counter-intuitive out of thin air, brush it off and get you to look at it and the world in a new way. The conventional wisdom says the old are the spokesmen for stasis. It’s the young you need to look to for change. McLuhan says no. Of those who can take risks in science the young aren’t strong enough in their position in their jobs, in their world to be truly creative.
What McLuhan says about science, I think applies equally to the Arts and every other area of life in which there is a discipline to be mastered. To hazard a prediction of my own, the people I would suggest you look to for the next truly innovative risky technical moves are the old: Margaret Atwood, Myrill Streep, Leonard Cohen, Stephen King, Stephen Hawking, David Susuki, Bill Gates …
Who are the risk takers in your business?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p. 186.
Lucky, I’m so lucky
Marshall McLuhan (December 1968, age 57). I’ve got this thing about the number 3.
My new agent Matie Molinaro is working out splendidly. You wouldn’t believe the liberties people were taking with my radio interviews and TV and film appearances. She is making sure my good name is protected and my wish is her delight. An arrangement in which I assure you I delight. For instance, Matie didn’t bat an eye when I asked her to make sure that when she enrolled me in ACTRA that my membership number was divisible by three. You see, I am a firm believer that the number 3 and numbers divisible by three are lucky. If they’re not then why am I so lucky?
Me (January 2010, age 57). The rule of 3.
There is no doubt that Marshall McLuhan believed that the number 3 and numbers divisible by 3 are lucky. He arranged his life to surround himself with these lucky numbers. For example, he had 6 children, the Coach House, the home of his Centre for Culture and Technology was at 39A Queen’s Park Crescent East, and there are 33 chapters in his best selling Understanding Media. Not surprisingly, his rule for determining whether a book is worth reading is to peruse page 69 – a number divisible by 3 both in whole and in its parts. If that page is enlightening then the book is worth reading.
Superstitions are notoriously difficult to shake. If 3 and numbers divisible by 3 are so lucky, and Marshall McLuhan surrounded himself with them, then you might well ask: Why was he so unlucky when it came to his health, suffering from repeated strokes, a brain tumor, and, in the last 18 months (a number divisible by 3) of his life, aphasia? The answer, of course, is that but for the presence of 3 things would have been much worse.
How superstitious are you? If you are superstitious how much effort do you make to insure the Gods are on your side? Is it just a coincidence that this blog closes with 3 questions?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Matie Armstrong Molinaro. “Marshalling McLuhan,” in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message. Edited by George Sanderson and Frank Macdonald. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum, 1989, pp. 81-88.