MCLUHAN
437
acting out so many of our worst habits, and I want to launch some
probes of my own into his literary presence and what it expresses.
A man's life is his own business, and I would not presume to in–
trude upon McLuhan's private self. But the "Marshall McLuhan" pre–
sented in the writings and talkings is a public figure and, like any public
figure, in large part a deliberate fictional contrivance.
This
McLuhan is
only too anxious to sever his present identity from the private biography,
as he once told Eric Goldman:
GOLDMAN:
Here you are the son of Baptist parents, convert to
Catholicism, a Canadian student of English literature, formerly an
engineering student and now....
MCLUHAN:
Oh, don't bother about that data.
GOLDMAN:
Why?
MCLUHAN:
It's all wrong! And, in any case, quite unnecessary.
Despite the disclaimer, it is a history of large conversions, from inherited
Protestantism to Catholicism, from engineering to literature to some
original synthesis of the two, from provincial Canadian (born in Al–
berta, educated in Manitoba) to New York academic entrepreneur and
world mastermind, from M.A. thesis on
'~George
Meredith as a Poet
and Dramatic Parodist" to
Family Circle
piece on "What TV Is Really
Doing to Your Child" (the first and last entries in the hefty
Hot
&
Cool
bibliography), from Herbert Marshall McLuhan to just plain Marshall.
For him this is "all wrong" or at least "quite unnecessary" to under–
standing how he lives now, but I'm not so sure.
While growing up in Buffalo, New York, I encountered a malicious
myth about Canadians that may have been current in other border
towns too. You learned to watch for cars with Ontario licenses so as
to enjoy (you hoped) a glorious show of heedless, befuddled driving.
Canadians, so the theory went, were mostly poor rubes, barred from
civilizing influences by puritanical liquor laws and iron-jawed,
incor–
ruptible policemen - called "the Provincials" and rightly feared - quite
unlike the raffish, all too human Irishmen and Germans and Poles who
kept Buffalo only as lawful as was in
its
nature to be. Thus the Cana–
dians came over for a good time and, it being amply available, were
dazzled into excesses fatal to what reason and mechanical competence
they had to start with. Like the myth of American contempt for
foreigners, this one had some basis in truth.
Now for all I know, McLuhan may
be
an expert driver and a
teetotaler; certainly he can't have much else in common with the des–
perate cutups from Port Colborne and St. Catherines and Crystal Beach
who careen through my half-imaginary memories. But in their ways he
and they may have shared a sense of what a complex fate it is to
be
