1970s and 80s
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…
Now for something completely different
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 will be my 100th post. To those of you who have been following this blog, especially, I should say something, now, by way of explanation and introduction, because this week’s blogs will be very different from the previous ones. Previously, each blog has consisted of two short letters. The first is from Marshall McLuhan, and introduces a particular idea or event in his life. (Perhaps I should make it clear – on the off-chance you have any doubts about it – these letters were not actually written by Marshall McLuhan, but by me as I have imagined him writing them. I have, however, based them on things he actually did say or write in letters, interviews, essays, speeches, or books, and have tried as far as I can to imitate his style without parodying it.) The second is from me talking about what Marshall says in his letter. (These letters I assure you are all actually written by me.) Hence the name of the blog: “From Marshall and Me.”
Today, I am posting the first part of a five-part essay on what I believe is the single most important thing you need to know to understand Marshall McLuhan. Here is part one. I hope you find it interesting and useful in making sense of one of Canada’s most extraordinary and perplexing minds. If you have any comments I would like to hear them.
Cordially Me
Genius has brain surgery and loses his mind: The untold story of Marshall McLuhan
By Michael Hinton
Thirty years ago, on September 26, 1979, Marshall McLuhan collapsed in his office, a book-strewn, file-piled, upstairs room in the Coach House at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. A short walk away from where he lay was the basement cafeteria of the old ROM, his former office on St Joseph Street, his first two homes in Toronto, at 81 St Mary’s Street and 29 Wells Hill Road, and all of the other places he had made his breakthroughs in communications and media studies. The cause of his collapse was a stroke that robbed him of the power to speak, read, and write for the last fifteen months of his life.
There’s a joke – an anecdote in McLuhan-speak about this: it probably didn’t make him any harder to understand. McLuhan’s wife Corinne once said, I’m paraphrasing here, that Marshall had three passions in life God, work, and her. But she ran a very distant third. After the stroke he still had God and Corinne, but the work was gone. Walking, but only just, barely able to move his hands, the man who rocketed to international stardom in 1966 with his dumbfounding eloquence – observing most famously that “the medium is the message” and that media had made the world “a global village” – was unable to communicate in any other way than by shrugging, grunting, grimacing, and forcing out an occasional “oh boy, um, ah, [and] yes.” Once looking out the window on a rainy day, Patrick Watson says, a bit of a poem came out, ‘April is the cruelest month.” A story that always moves me because he spent 40 years of his life teaching English literature, and what he must have been trying to say to his friend by quoting this first line from “The Wasteland.”
The wonder is not that poetry came out of his mouth. Aphasics frequently may sing more easily than they can speak and speak poetry when they cannot speak prose. And McLuhan loved poetry. At one time he had committed most of the Oxford book of English verse to memory. The wonder what he meant by this quotation. It could have been idle word play. This is April, it’s raining, here’s some poetry that loosely fits. But that I think is unlikely. What is more likely is that McLuhan was well aware of the dark meaning of that line of poetry, and of the darker meaning of the epigram that introduces the poem. April, Eliot is saying, is cruel because it wakens the world from its painless sleep to the misery of life in the wasteland. To McLuhan his current life of sharply constrained communication must have felt like a wasteland. The epigram of the poem is a passage from The Satyricon by Petronius. A scene is played out in the town square of ancient Cumae where the Sibyl – a prophetess – is imprisoned in a cage and is being taunted by a gang of children. “What do you want, Sibyl, they cry.” And she says,“I want to die.”
I wrote to Patrick Watson about the story of “April is the cruelest month.” He didn’t want to speak to me about this over the phone. Instead he asked me to send him questions by e-mail. I asked him a two-part question: Was the story true, that McLuhan had actually said this particular line of poetry, and what did he (Patrick Watson) say after McLuhan said it. He wrote me back the next day, to confirm that the story was true and add a question of his own, but unfortunately he left the second part of my question unanswered. (His e-mail reads: “Yes, I think that’s true. Do you know the source of the line?”) Too bad. I’d hoped to be able to discern from his answer something about McLuhan’s state of mind and his at the time. Wonder? Joy? Amazement? Foreboding? Sorrow? Indifference? Or what? Perhaps he couldn’t remember, or didn’t want to. But it doesn’t matter all that much now because McLuhan’s stroke and what happened afterward is not my concern. It was tragic, but it did not cause McLuhan to lose his genius.
That happened I believe a dozen years earlier in New York City, in November 1967 in the course of a long and harrowing operation McLuhan underwent to remove a brain tumor. Saying this I know will anger and upset many people, not only his surviving family and friends, but thousands of his followers around the world bound together by the internet. (The truth McLuhan liked to say, quoting Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot “is whatever upsets the apple cart.”) My intention however is not to upset people, especially the people who loved him, but to tell a story that needs to be told. A story that provides the best answer to a question that appeared in a New Yorker cartoon in 1970 when McLuhan’s celebrity was clearly ebbing: Says she to he on leaving a party “Are you sure it isn’t too early to ask, ‘Whatever happened to Marshall McLuhan?’ ” The story explains much about his life and work that otherwise would remain a mystery. In particular the decline in the quality of his work and the decay of his reputation after 1967. McLuhan you will discover did not die a genius tragically trapped inside a body that didn’t work. He died more tragically as a man who used to be a genius trapped inside a mind he found increasingly hard to recognize and to be reconciled with.
Part 2 tomorrow
Isn’t that amazing!
Marshall McLuhan (August, 1973, age 62). My contribution is an h!
Just got off the phone with Cousin Ron – Dr. Ron Hall, now – who you will remember is a biochemist at McMaster. Idea Consultants is back in action. These long hot sweaty dog days of summer have been a positive inspiration to us both. Ron has done the leg work. They say genius is 99 per cent perspiration. So perspiration is a good thing. The problem is it stinks. Ron came up with the science part of the solution. Don’t mask the smell with perfume or deodorant. Keep the good part of the sweat -those amazingly communicative pheromones. Get rid of the stinky part. Ron wanted to call his bio-chemical product “protex.” As in “pro-tection” and “tex-tile” – protect the fabric. But I added, if I must say – and I will – what Corinne told me was “the distilled essence of genius.” I convinced him to add one little letter to the name which will spell all the difference in the world: the letter “h.” We will call it “Prohtex.” Get it? “Proh-ibit” and “tex-tile” – as in prohibit [the bad sweat on] the fabric. Well perhaps not everyone will get it. But when they do we’ll be rolling in it. Or rather they will. Must run I feel another idea coming on. This could be the big one.
Me (January 2010, age 57): Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea
I don’t know exactly what happened when Marshall McLuhan and his nephew pitched one of the big companies like Johnson & Johnson. But I’m sure the brand guys dined out regularly on the story. It is a wonder that the writers on “Madmen” don’t go more to the life of McLuhan for inspiration. As you might expect nobody in the business world wanted to buy this idea. Perhaps business people today might be more interested, providing that is that the product does not prove to have unwanted and fundamentally deal-breaking side-effects, for example the attractions of the sexual attention of people you don’t want to be sexually attentive. (Tomorrow I’ll take a look at more of McLuhan’s amazing business ideas that business kept on turning down.)
Was the name the problem? Or was it the product? Say that it worked, would you use a product that kept the good sweat –sent the chemical messages of attraction – and got rid of the bad – the stinky part?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, pp. 268-269.
Happy New Year Marshall McLuhan!
Marshall McLuhan (December 31. 1980, age 69). What a night!
Tonight was a good night. Father Stroud said Mass. We had a good French burgundy for communion. Later when we finished the burgundy with dinner there was champagne and Father Stroud and I watched the news on TV with cigars lit. I must say it was a great way to end the year. Of course, as you know, I cannot speak or write for that matter. (Except on this blog. Thank God for small if fictional mercies!) This damn stroke has shut me down and got me down. Corinne pointed to my Order of Canada and told Father Stroud it is the thing I am most proud of. That’s not true, but it’s not like I can speak up to correct her. I do like it. But the thing I am proudest of is …
Me (January 2010, age 57). When did Marshall McLuhan die?
Marshall McLuhan died on the night of December 31, 1980. He went up stairs to bed after Mass, wine, dinner, and cigars and by all reports died peacefully in his sleep. That was the end of his life, but in a way it was not a particularly important event because in more significant ways he had died twice before already: the second time on the 26 September 1979 when he suffered a stroke that took away his power to speak, read, and write; the first time on the 25 November 1967 when he underwent a long and difficult surgery to remove a brain tumor. McLuhan survived the surgery but not, I believe, his genius. I do not say this lightly or without much soul searching and researching. In the months ahead I will make a case that this tragic event is the single most important biographical event in McLuhan’s life. Because if it is true, and there is a strong case to be made that it is true, it means that to understand McLuhan you must pay particular attention to things he said and wrote before 25 November 1967. And you must be careful to discount much of what he said or wrote after 25 November 1967.
Consider this a hint of things to come over the months ahead rather than an announcement that the end is here. Before signing off let me hasten to say this is not the end of McLuhan or this blog. We and the world are not yet done with Marshall McLuhan.
What do you think Marshall McLuhan was most proud of? What do you think he should have been most proud of?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The medium and the messenger, 1989, p.p. 286-288.