395 Wellington Street 395. me Wellington OîîawaON K1A ON4 OttawaON K1AON4 Canada Canada

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format éiectronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. "[Pound] was a man uncornfortable in the midst of an unpleasant world, where dullness masqueraded as creativity and sham masqueraded as culture. He thought he saw the same deceit in every facet of American life. He could not smash what he saw, but he could leave. He went to London, Paris and Rapallo, and in these places whirlpools of energy boiled into being by his presence. America had unleashed into the world the bug that made her itch, and he made many people itch. And. in their itching and scratching, most good writing in English was born and most modem thinking in the arts was done.

Pound's greatest contribution to his century is his emphasis upon the tech- nique of poetry. This emphasis has repercussions far beyond the world of lit- erature. From it stems al1 modern efforts to communicate well, to pass ideas frorn language to language unimpaired, to educate the people to the facts of economics as they truly are, and to keep the intelligence in touch with the live culture of the past. Pound sees the poet not as a mere fiddler with words. He sees him, in Shelley's phrase, as one of the 'legislators of the world.' . . .

There is not an important poet of the century who does not in various ways owe his worth to Pound."

(R.J. Maôween "Ezra Pound: A Personal Estimate." 1963. Rpt. in The An t igonish Review 87-88 [Fa111991 - Winter 19921 132-33.) Abstract

In the early days of "wireless" technology, it was the fashion of first-time and somewhat skeptical users to exhort that they were "'raising' so-and-so by tele- graph." Their use of the term "raising" was homologous with "raising" the departed via the Ouija board, another medium of fascination at the turn of the twentieth century. That the occult and wireless technology co~aturally attended the birth of modernism was no coincidence. Because it was non- corporeal and without the self-reifying "efficiency" of Cartesian causality, "the wireless" was considered occultish.

A similar social phenornenon relating to "virtual" technologies is recumng today, manifest in the resurgence of interest in Marshall McLuhan. W hile much McLuhanism and quasi-McLuhanism is floating around in hyper- space--most of it appropriating the McLuhan name metonymically without considering, beyond a few aphorisms, what the man actually meant--the real story of the rising McLuhan myth is related to Our culture's fascinating schizophrenia: its simultaneous technophobia and technofetish. The hegemony of digital ubiquity, then, coupled with our repressed Romantic aversions to technology are "raising" McLuhan's name; that is, in a search for theorists to explain and legitimize the implications of a suddenly autocratic technocracy, we are exhuming the seer who predicted its rise to dominance in the first place. We are only secondarily "raising" McLuhan "via" the digital chip--that is merely Our "field," McLuhan would have argued--rather, our medium, bringing us back reluctantly to Tom Wolfe's question, "What if he is right?" In short, Our backward search for a bête noire has not only conjured McLuhan, but licensed a historical relativism whose presiding metaphor is that of the rear-view rnirror.

It is in the same spirit of cultural and historica1 relativism that the following thesis presides. Using the metaphor of the rear-view mirror to effect a re- versed historical psychoanalysis, 1 have fixed McLuhan as an analysand for whom the historical figure of Ezra Pound, his modernist mentor, creates a turbulent anxiety of influence. Just as Our technocratic culture revisits McLuhan to assuage its own anxiety (seeking bahfor its phobia, and desiring legitimization and arousal of its fetish), so does McLuhan, 1 show, draw on Pound's modernism to make similar sense (and play) of the burgeoning postmodemity that threatens the visual and the literate with the oral and haptic. Preface

It seems true that British poets swerve from their precur- sors, while American poets labor rather to "complete" their fathers. (Anxiety 68)

If British poets swerve and American poets complete, how do Canadian poets proximate and avert their precunors? The question imposes itself in consid- ering the association between Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound. Born a generation apart, Pound and McLuhan shared an important "resonating in- terval": a Canada/ US. border across which at McLuhan's bequest, flowed Pound's influence. And, as McLuhan would learn, that influence was tanta- mount to an infusion of literary modernism. As late as 1968, McLuhan was still somewhat horrified to leam that he was one of the few professors in Canadian departments of English who was teaching Pound and the early modernists. Most of Canada, it seerns, had not yet caught up to the shift in literary consciousness that Pound's modernism had precipitated some forty years earlier. When we did awaken to the fad, however, our aitics were reck- less in their haste to pronounce Pound's influence on Our modernism. To claim-as have Eli Mandel, Linda Hutcheon, and Frank Davey, to name but a few--that Pound's modernism came to Canada in some proximity to McLuhan to constitute, ultimately, Our own modernism, it is first necessary to examine the Pound/McLuhan relationship. An evident paradox in our critical history, legitimized seemingly by lateness and haste, has allowed that claim of Pound's influence to be made without the requisite check of the requisite check.

The relationship between McLuhan and Pound, as 1 outline in Chapter One, can be broken into two phases: pre- and post-1948. Although the few McLuhan critics who have alluded to Pound (and the fewer Pound critics who have alluded to McLuhan) would have us believe that McLuhan's first encounter with his modernist mentor was in June 1948 at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane outside Washington, D.C., the archiva1 record dearly indicates that McLuhan was reading Pound as early as 1934 at Cambridge. T'hat record indicates that McLuhan received his introduction to Pound from the New Critics, specifically from Mansfield Forbes, who ap proached Pound pedagogically via T.S. Eliot's early criticism. The extent to which McLuhan studied Pound between 1934 and their first meeting in 1948 is less clear. However, through dose analysis of McLuhan's correspondence, persona1 diary entries, and critical essays, as well as through accounts from colleagues like Hugh Kenner, Walter Ong, Felix Giovanelli, and Pound's con- temporary, Wyndham Lewis, 1 trace the implications of what McLuhan meant by writing to Pound in May 1948, "we [Hugh Kenner and II have long taken a serious interest [in] your work" (Lefters of MM 192).

In Chapter Two, 1 consider the much richer relationship that began after the May 1948 letter that introduced McLuhan and Kenner to Pound. A fascinat- ing, mostly unpublished correspondence of almost 100 letters and fragments exists between Pound and McLuhan. To cal1 the correspondence fascinating is somewhat of an understatement: it is nothing less than a sweeping interdis- ciplinary curriculum of modernism and culture. The relationship that grew fervour of his Catholicism and fears of a Masonic conspira9 to execute him, accused Pound of using the rituals of secret societies "as a basis for art activity" (Letfers of MM 235). After that letter, the relationship certainly cooled--as did, curiously, the relationship between McLuhan and Kenner, though more from McLuhan's suspicions of Kenner's plagiarism than from accusations of Pound's occult collusion. By 1953, it must be remembered, Kenner, McLuhan's prodigy, had become the pre-eminent Poundian, responsible al- most solely for the provenance of Pound studies. In al1 that he has published (and he has published unremittingly for some forty-five years), Kenner has divulged little of what transpired among the three in those early years of their association, and, thus, to this day, little is known about it.

More than any other source, the letters reveal how carefully McLuhan was studying Pound in the late 1940s and early 1950s: they reveal McLuhan's recognition of form and paratactic method in Pound's poetio ("Your Cantos, 1 now judge, to be the first and only serious use of the great technical possibili- ties of the cinematograph" [Letters of MM 1931); McLuhan's discovery of Pound's theory of textuality contra history ("1 know that your rationale [is] to direct attention always to the texts . . . rather than relying on historical per- spectives" 11961); and McLuhan's adoption of Pound's belief in intertext and i nterdisciplinary study ("1 am preparing a bibliography of necessary reading in the arts and sciences . . . the ABC of Reading method . . . to provide a coher- ent picture of when and how to use one book to encounter another" [199]). Similarly, the letters from Pound to McLuhan reveal Pound's fascination with McLuhan's desire for a specifically Canadian cultural revolution, one grounded theoretically in Pound's ABC of Reading (1934) and Guide tu

vii insistence that McLuhan move from a consideration of metonymic cause to metaphoric effect, resulting, in 1951, in The Mechan ical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, the book that demonstrates unequivocally the shift in McLuhan's thought toward the epigrammatic and sottisier--toward what McLuhan would cal1 the "probes" of contemporary post-literate inquiry.

Chapter Three looks beyond the letters to examine the shift in McLuhan's critical aesthetic Though McLuhan wrote articles and parts of books on Pound, tutored Ke~erthrough the first to final drafts of The PoeQ of Ezra Pound (1951), wrote often of producing "a [complete] book on E.P. If 1 can surnmon the courage" (Letters of MM 205), and spread the message of Pound's modernism through international lectures and supervision of grad- uate theses, the most direct evidence of Pound's influence are the theories McLuhan espoused after 1948. Those theories constitute a radical departure from McLuhan's previous critical "belles leffres" orthodoxy (especially from the critically tame essays of the early and middle 1940s, like "Aesthetic Patterns in Keats' Odes" and 'The Analogical Mirrors"). McLuhan named Pound and the modernists--who "never ceased to stress the importance of [the] complementary matching process for the understanding of poetry and human experience" (Cliché 142)-as being central to the development of his own methodological bridge between the study of literature as vocation and the more profound participation in society as moral praxis. Their teaching, he would later write in the foreword to IL, not only "opened the doors of perception on the poetic process," but more fundamentally played the pivota1 "role in adjusting [me] to the contemporary world" (IL xiii-iv). That adjustment shows Pound everywhere present in McLuhan's mature

viii exploration contra explication, and of the treatment of formlmedia as critically superior to that of content/ message. Pound was obviously (and admittedly) the most important intellectual midwife McLuhan would ever have.

Finally, Chapter Four considers the differences between McLuhan and Pound and the implications of those differences from the point of view of Pound's midwifery. Bloom's theories of influence and McLuhan's own tetradic Iaw are merged to posit a poetics of influence that is applicable to the apocalyptic, simultaneous field of McLuhan's post-literate modernity.

Traditional approaches to scholarship hold that rigorous argument is achieved through painstaking empiriàst sleuthing. The measure of a scholar is determined by the brashness of his comections, that brashness, in tum, de- termined by his archiva1 thoroughness, his success in not only navigating but fixing, if only momentarily, the archiva1 ephemera. The more patient, care ful, and persistent the scholar, less likely is the possibility that an important due, unpublished letter, obscure essay, or carefully guarded secret escape his eye. Traditional scholarship is a forensic science; its critics are cultural pathologis ts.

McLuhan, a student of the Cambridge New Critics, was an adherent of this traditional approach early in his career. His first and only meeting with Pound gave him cause for much excitement precisely because it was predi- tive story," requiring of the apprentice critic al1 the energies and insights nec- essary to crack the case. Because McLuhan was among the first to tackle Pound's difficult and elusive poetic, the search for "what Pound really meant" was the young critic's primary motivation. Exegesis of the century's most difficult modernist would be a career-crowning achievement.

The presumption existed in McLuhan's early approach to scholarship that some objective truth was latent, even if that truth only manifested itself in a few recurrent structures or patterns. Even the pursuit of structural homology was championed, as long as the facts were available to prove the case.

The following study, which 1 have purposefully subtitled "A Meditation on the Nature of Influence," is one such investigation of structural homology. As such, it is a carefully conceived historical fiction. Seemingly without equivocation, it makes a case for McLuhan's ultimate indebtedness to Pound. Without equivocation, it is suspect in its claims, no matter how comprehen- sive its navigation among and fixing of the archiva1 ephemera. But being suspect was the "effect" 1 anticïpated, for how better to test the conventions of traditional scholarship than to construct a working totem that in the end strains toward its own irresistible deconstructive impulses? Mostly in those moments, as this work attests, is meaning revealed.

As McLuhan learned later in his career, "the gap or interval is where the ac- tion is" (Letfers of MM 404); by contrast, the impulse to make connections "is a hang-up" of "the visually oriented person." McLuhan talked about this finding as a monumental discovery, and soon after dismissed most of his pre- causality" (520). Surveying his career shortly before his death, he remarked that his satiric probes and aphorisms were his crowning achievements.

1 have attempted to bring McLuhan's lessons to bear on this study of influ- ence: consequently, as historical fiction, this work is culturally relativist, ex- isting as analogy. That McLuhan and Pound are twimed in the first place is solely my doing. Except for a coincidence of history-Kenner and McLuhan being detained on their trip to visit Cleanth Brooks at Yale--McLuhan and Pound never would have met, and probably never would have corresponded. 1, therefore, am an author of McLuhan's indebtedness to Pound, and it is the lesson of this thesis throughout that al1 such indebtedness in a post-literate modernity is similarly fictionalized. What history alone decrees is the ficense of authorship. Acknowledgements

1 must first acknowledge the financial support of the UNB Department of English and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counul of Canada. Both gave me the financial wherewithal to complete this work without dis- traction. The early stage of my research was made particularly pleasant by the people at the National Archives of Canada, espeaally Anne Godard, chief cu- rator responsible for the McLuhan Collection. My early work was also aided by the equally accommodating archivists at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the McLuhan Prograrn, both at the University of Toronto. For permission to use the restricted letters of McLuhan to Pound 1 thank Saundra Taylor, Curator of Manuscripts at The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. For extending property rights to Pound's letters to McLuhan, 1 thank David EMS at the National Libraq in Ottawa.

1 am particularly grateful to Roger Ploude for SSHRCC assistance; to Dick Guerin for unfailing support and inspired teaching; to Barry Cameron for incisive counsel and for being the best "cut man" a graduate student could ever have in his corner; to the fine folks at the Department of Extension and Surnrner Session; and to Don McKay for timely help and much integrity. 1 would be remiss as well not to mention the friendship of Tony Boxill, Ted Colson, Anne Klinck, Ed Mullaly, Lissa Paul, Dwight Scott, and Jan Zwicky. To Joe Keogh, Max Nanny, Philip Marchand, and Louis Dudek, al1 of whom,

xii me with personal insight and anecdotes, 1 am also grateful.

Finally, two important people in particular deserve special acknowledgement. My Supervisor, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, though close in age to me, pre vided mentorship and direction beyond his years (and beyond my expecta- tions). From his own careful scholarship and professional acumen I leamed more about being an academic than in eleven years of post-secondary educa- tion. And, finally, in ascending order of importance, my wife Ellen. Those few lucky enough to do a Ph.D. with the encouragement and enthusiasm of a supportive spouse will understand the inadequacy of mere acknowledge- ment. To Say that the following work is half hers diminishes her involve- ment. 1 prefer, rather, to Say that the following is ours: while the textual trifle is mine, the joy, fulfillment, and jouissance that allowed it (and me) to flour- ish are hers.

1 dedicate this to Shelhj, rny constant und chmshed cornpanion through most of this work.

xiii Contents

..* Abstract 111 Preface v Acknowledgements xii Abbreviations xv

1 Introduction: The Medium and His Messenger

2 Letters: Towards a Merging of Parallel Galaxies

194&The First Cycle of Letters 19WThe Later Letters 1951-1953-The Second Cycle of Letters 1957--The Third Cycle of Letters

3 Co~ectiow/ Similarities: McLuhan and Pound in Apposition

1 - Methodology II - Pedagogy III- Form IV - Aversions and Affirmations

4 Conclusion: McLuhan/ Canada as Counter-Environment-- Toward a Poetics of Influence for the Retribalized

Works Cited and Consulted

xiv Abbreviations

For convenience, the following abbreviations are used in the body of the text to denote the corresponding reference works. For full bibliographic citation see Works Cited and Consulted at the back.

ABC ABC of Reading Anxiety The Anxiety of Influence Blasting Blast ing and Bornbardiering Cliché From Cliché fo Archetype CWCMP The Chinese Wriffen Chracfer as a Medium for Poefry DK/ DK/ Some Letfers of Ezra Pound (fo Louis Dudek) Explorations Explorations in Communications GB Ga udier- Brzeska GG The Gutenberg Galaxy GV The Global Village HeC McLuhan: Hot 63 Cool IL The Interior Landscape: The Liferanj Crificism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943 - 1962 Kulchur Guide to Kulchur Laws Laws of the Media: The New Science LE Literanj Essnys of Ezra Pound Letters of EP Selected Let fers of Ezra Pound, 1907 - 1941 Letters of MM Leffers of Marshall McLuhan Massage The Medium is the Massage MB The Mechanical Bride MCV: EP Modern Crif ical Views: Ezra Po und P&D Pavannes and Divagations PE The Pound Era PI1 The Letters of Ezra Pound to lames Ioyce PIL The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Reval uafion Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation Romance The Spirit of Romance SC Self Condernned SP Selected Prose of Erra Pound, 1909 - 1965 TTVP Through the Vanishing Point UM Understanding Media vvv Verbi- Voco- Visual Explorations W&P War and Peace in the Global Village WWMM Who Was Marshall McLuhan Introduction: The Medium and His Messenger

Though Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) were born in different co~ntriesand twenty-six years apart-for some, it must be allowed, too far apart generationally and geographically for comparative analysis--their lives and careers moved in strange parallel during a period when literature was being radically redefined by both a burgeoning teduiological society and by a coterie of writers (Pound to become one of their leaders) who were fash- ioning innovations to bring artistic expression into the twentieth century. And just as it would be foolhardy to study twentieth-century literature out- side the context of this emerging cultural embrace of tedinology and progress (known simply as "the modem"), so would it be unwise to approach a study of Pound and McLuhan without first situating them both within the same emerging discourse--what G.K. Chesterton, one of the new century's first commentators, called "the successes in capitalism and clockwork" ("What 1 Saw in America" The Man Who Was Chesterton 162).

So pervasive was the grip of this new progressive discourse that it affected ev- ery aspect of life, schooling, and work--an insistence captured in Pound's own lines "The age demanded an image 1 Of its accelerated grimace" ("Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" Selected Poems of EP 61). The temper of the age, at least at the outset, was not specifically what it demanded, but precisely that it "demanded," decreeing an insistence on its own forms and patterns that was lives of Pound and McLuhan are traceable to precisely that insistence (which, incidentally, McLuhan predicted would reduce us en masse to 24-hour Network News junkies, al1 sharing the same opinions--a prediction Neil Postman, an early correspondent of McLuhan's, revisits in his latest book, Technopoly), 1 think a fitting starting point for a comparative study must be gin with an examination of their early life and schooling. What characteris- tics, 1 ask, percolate through their early lives to reveal their later genius, and what, if any, similarities do these characteristics share? Are "the successes in capitalism and clockwork," 1 wonder, discernible? Moreover, are they signifi- cant?

For post-structuralists who shudder at the insertion of "lives" as starting point, 1 offer as license Pound's own Lines from "Patria Mia":

With the real artist there is always a residue, there is always something in the man which does not get into his work There is always some reason why the man is always more worth knowing than his books are. In the long run nothing else counts.

(SP 111)

Pound's coveted theory of 'Tradition" held that each life, work, and imagina- tion resonated, if only potentially, with al1 that had gone before and al1 that could ever possibly be, which leads one to ask, as theoretical question counter- ing solipsism, if it is possible to consider anything but relationally? Indeed, what if anything exists beyond influence as Pound desaibed it? And what does this say about infiuence itself? How can McLuhan be considered but as -not to mention the shadows of place, language, culture, class, canon, and countless other iterations tha t Pound as informing modernist referent both manufactured and eschewed? In fact, how can Pound himself ever be consid- ered but by the same measures? The study of influence that follows, that draws lineç of causality from Pound to McLuhan (and vice versa), represents therefore but one particular trace of influence among countless others, all of which taken collectively make Pound and McLuhan the modernists that they are.

Marshall McLuhan was bom on July 21, 1911 in Edmonton, Alberta, then a booming frontier town where--says Philip Marchand, McLuhan's unofficial biographer--a bare-knuckled pioneering spint dominated. By 1911, the Canadian west had been settled and settlers were beginning to prosper, evi- denced by the profits made by Herbert, Marshall's father, in the real estate business in and around 1910. It was the young McLuhan's experience, in fact, not unlike the young Pound's, that his early years were coloured by the rise and faIl of the family fortune, a cycle that ended in near ruin for the McLuhans until, with Herbert's eventual financial decline, it moderated into what Marshall would have experienced as a rather typical middle class exis- tence. However, the cycles of wealth/depravity coupled with the hanhness of the western prairie were uneasily but forever seared into McLuhan's psyche. It is impossible to estimate the impact this rampant capitalism would have on the mature thinker, one who, as Tom Wolfe tells us (H&C 32), was courted in and other corporate giants (at thousands of dollars per hour) to "think out loud" around their executive tables. 1 submit it, nevertheless, as significant, as a tenor of his early i-imes that shaped the man.

Ezra Pound was born twenty-six years earlier (on October 30,1885) into a simi- lar if not more pronounced frontier environment exactly south of McLuhan's Edmonton: in Hailey, Idaho, a town that had, Pound remembered, "one dusty main street with planks for sidewalks, a hotel, and forty-seven bars" (T'ytelll4). Though Pound moved away from Idaho and spent his formative years in Philadelphia, the milieu of childhood he often chose to remember was that of Hailey, where Homer, his rather genteel father, occasionally feared for life and limb: "There were times when it seemed as if one might be muti- lated by some angry seeker after lands'" (Stock 5). And just as overnight wealth accompanied Edmonton's expansion, so did ready fortune accompany Hailey's--to the point where a man could claim, as Pound's father did, that 'The handyman you paid to saw your kindhg wood might tell you . . . when you asked him a few days later to saw some more, that he had ten thousand dollars in the bank and a mine to sell" (Stock 5).

The rapidity of boom and the depravity of bust were known well to both the young Pound and McLuhan. The "successes in capitalism and clockwork" were not without their drawbacks in turn-of-the-century western settlement-- nor their fascinations, as Pound would remember vividly (complete with sto- ries of assayers and goldbrickers) when he wrote "The Economic Nature of the United States" in 1944, the essay that would consolidate his thoughts to- ward "understand[ing] the nature of error" (SP 167) that courted men through Pound's economic theories, and the significance of those theories is in their relation to a vivid childhood remembrance of rampant capitalism, particu- larly of a sight that Humphrey Carpenter daims would "make a child wonder greatly about the meaning and nature of money" (18). In canto 97 are the beautiful lines of the mature poet ruminating on that nature of error, specifi- cally the greed and largess he was witness to as the son of an assistant assayer at the United States Mint in Philadelphia: "371 1/4 grains silver in Del's time / as 1 have seen them by shovels full / lit by gas flares" (673). As Stock ex- plains,

the scene remained in [Pound's] memory and there was still a touch of wonder forty-two years later when he wrote to Sir Montagu Webb, a British businessman interested in monetary reform, that 'silver 1 saw, as no Aladdin, for when Cleveland was elected there was the recount of four million in the Mint vaults, the bags had rotted, and the men half-naked with open gas flares, shovelled it into the counting-machines, with a gleam on tarnished disa.'

(The Lifp of Ezra Pound 9)

In addition to the rise and fa11 of quick fortunes was the long-lasting impres- sion of the prairie and frontier on McLuhan and Pound. For McLuhan, early memories of the prairie panorama outside his first home afforded an "antidote to conventional 'perspective'" (Marchand 4) that may have led hirn, if only subliminally at the time, toward the "total field theory that prefaced his better-known forays into aura11visual and syrnbolist/ scholastic simul- taneities, forays that would eventually lead to his pronouncements on the ubiquity of electronic resonance (and Iead further to his theories on the elec- erner to the resonating immediacy of a re-tribalized (post)/ modern seems tenuous, it is significant enough, as Marchand more than once suggests, for McLuhan to continue to return to this unobscured prairie image as one of his first significant and consciousness-forming mernories--a supposition shared by playwright Frank Moher, whose current McLuhan: The Musical treats the notion of "west" as both necessary counter-culture and unobscured vantage point (in short, "west" as one of the most significant of al1 influences on a thinker concerned mostly with articulating "point-of-viewless" perspective).

This notion of uncluttered vista accommodating multiple perspectives also found voice in many places in McLuhan's later work, none as significant as when he espoused methodology, as he was often forced to do by way of apolo- gia countering dogrnatism. Appearing in his letten and gaining intensity af- ter Jonathan Miller's condemnation of his Catholic programme, McLuhan's espousal of methodology was airned at countering the criticism of commenta- tors who were too lazy or too dense, he claimed, to unravel his cryptic apho- nsms and analogies. Though the following quotation situates methodology in Harold Adams Innis, a colleague and mentor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto in the late 1940s, it could very easily serve as McLuhan's own formula for method (1 quote at length because of its importance to McLuhan's own practice):

Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. . . . As Innis got more in- sights he abandoned any point of view in his presenta- tion of knowledge. When he interrelates the develop- ment of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vemaculaf and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of al1 ...... * .,,, .a.---,- -.------eULUAY VL , -'7-- - the interrelations between the components in his-.- galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits, like a symbolist poet or abstract painter.

(GG216-17)

Indeed, it is this formula for method, what McLuhan calls the "mosaic pat- tern of perception" (CG 265), that is crystallized for the first time in The Gutenberg Gnlaxy, and it is this mosaic configuration/articulation of thought via cryptic aphorism and unsettling probe for which he continues to be praised and damned--as does, inadentally, Pound, the modemist after whom, as this thesis will establish, McLuhan modelled much of his own form and style. The critics' immediate and continued intolerance of their aphoristic methods, their seemingly random "jumps" instead of measured "steps," is but one of many similarities both thinkers share.

The "'disorderly'" trek of Pound's ancestors to get "'across the whole teeming continent'" (qtd. in Tytell 11) held much of the same wonder and possibility for the mature poet--a similar "total field" potentiality that could probably be associated with little else Save a wide-open and pristine (though unpre- dictable) frontier, one that afforded, moreover, "a history rÏch enough to im- press a young boy, with disparate though exotic elements" (Tytell 11). Humphrey Carpenter, Pound's most ambitious biographer to date, concurs, beginning his own massive Life of Pound by stating that "the West has to fea- ture somewhere in any chronicle that claims pan-Americanisrn" (l), an ad- mission that supports Carpenterrs claim that Pound is an infant "gargantua," the name, of course, that Pound chooses to cal1 himself in his quasi-autobio- west, in other words, with its vast panoramas and vantage points (with its unobscured spaces accommodating myths, legends, and family histories of conquest and demise), made the young Pound what he was to become. Where else but in a place of legends coveting the past and unwritten scripts beckoning the future (ask Stock, Tytell, and Carpenter) could a young "gargantua" thrive?

Both Pound and McLuhan, then, were essentially children of the west. 1 sub- mit this, too, as significant, though, in the broader treatment of influence, in- estimable.

Many other parallels cut across the early lives of McLuhan and Pound, few as significant as their introduction to language and literature by culturally re- fined and domineering mothers. Both, curiously, had mothers who were elocutionists; moreover, mothers, who, as society ladies, had forsaken their cosmopolitan beginnings to marry (somewhat unhappily) and live in the western boondocks, something they never let their husbands or their chil- dren forget, and something that translated in both households and the lives of both young thinkers into unusually doting and sympathetic fathers. Elsie McLuhan was a provincially renowned monoiogist who performed dramatic monologues of Shakespeare, Milton, and Browning after the fashion of the Emerson School of Oratory in Boston. She included her sons in pradice and renditions, to the point, speculates Marchand (50), that Marshall was pro- foundly infhenced by her elocutionary training: "He memorized immense quantities of poetry and was familiar with the works of the greatest English poets before he entered university" (9). Pound's mother, a "stiff Victorian Grand Lady who found herself in a dread- ful colony" (TyteI1 14), was a similar mix of culture and gentility, though, from extant accounts (Stock 3-5), rather more stable than McLuhan's mother. Also an elocutionist, Isabel Weston Pound was possessed of a "'high society' voice . . . often regarded as uppish" by the simpler folk around her (Stock 4). She "read the cIassics to her son" (Tytell 16) and "at six . . . he was known as the Professor because of his glasses and his use of complex polysyllabic words" (17). At fifteen--"urged by his mother to start early" (18)--Pound began prepa- ration for university, couching his ambitions (he later wrote in "How I Began") in perhaps the best known of his early recolledions:

'1 knew at fifteen pretty much what I wanted to do. 1 resolved that at thirty 1 would know more about poetry than any man living, that 1 would know the dynamic content from the shell, that 1 would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by translation and--scarcely less important- what effects were obtainable in one language only.'

(qtd. in Tytell 18-19)

McLuhan developed the same kind of interest in language, evidenced on al- most every page of his early journals of the 1930s and by his life-long fascina- tion with the science and practice of etymology. Marchand, in fact, discovered when researching his biography that "one of Herbert McLuhan's pastimes with the children was looking up obscure and interesting words in the dictio- nary," a practice that Ied Marshall to remark years later "that a single English word was more interesting than the entire NASA space program" (Marchand 10). Consequently, McLuhan considered the Oxford English Dictionary to be fascination with language and his mother's insistence on classical and poetic training led McLuhan to much the same resolutions as Pound: to, in effect, immerse himself in and conquer lyric literature, the artistic though elusive manifestation of language. Toward that end, says Marchand, citing evidence from McLuhan's 1930 diary, "he resolved to immerse himself in the very fount of poetic genius, Milton's Paradise Lost, and memorize the epic, if nec- essary, to sharpen his judgementf' (9). Many years later, a mature McLuhan (after the method and judgement of Pound [LE 169, 216, 2381) would discount Milton and his so-called "solemnity," which, in the interest of high-minded Latin pro Deo et Ecclesia, negated "the spirit of play" (Letters of MM 257) which McLuhan had corne to value so highly.

Regardless of what later developed the formative parallels in evidence re- lated to language and literature are striking. Both Pound and McLuhan were generally indifferent students who excelled mostly in the arts and languages (McLuhan aduaIly failed grade six [Marchand 131, Pound, the most influential literary critic among the English modernists "rnanaged to fail a course in the history of literary cnticism" [Ruthven 11). Both resolved to "know more about poetry than any man living," and both strove from a young age to find the "clean edge" and "the laws" that governed language, an impulse probably rooted at some level in their shared experience of elocutionary dicta and the laws of Christian Science, but nevertheless significant in its clear distinctness from the goals of most other youth at the time. That both would pursue these interests meant foregoing the more probable career inclinations toward medicine, law, science/engineering, or the ministry; and it also meant that both would have to endure public school systems that were poorly suited to fascination with, of al1 things, secular occultism, specifically with phrenology, Christian Science, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism. For both, at least at the outset, the experience of this occultism appears to have been related not so much to a religious as to a cultural unorthodoxy: more a fascination with the growing field of psychology (and its turn-of-the-century diminutive, "pop" psychology) than with alternatives to religious practice, and hence an airy dis- traction of sorts, not unrelated to their early experiences of language and liter- ature.

Marchand reports that McLuhan's parents, when he was twelve, "discovered phrenology. . . . the art of studying an individual's character and mental ca- pacity from the conformation of his or her skull" (8) and that at least Elsie, her cosmopolitanism accommodating more esoterica than her husband's conservatism, "dabbled in Christian Saence and Rosicrucianism" (8) at differ- ent times during McLuhan's youth. The likelihood was that, for the

McLuhans, this dabbling in things pseudo-scientific was vogue and quite harmless, enhanting Herbert's success as a commissioned insurance salesman and rounding out Elsie's image of herself as a creature far more worldly than the Presbyterian Winnipeg that stifled and a~oyedher.

For Pound's parents, seemingly more secure in the answers and comforts of their own Presbyterianism, the same sort of dabbling in the occult did not oc- cur or is not recorded, though there is an admission in Pound's autobio- graphie "Indiscretions" that the same "pop" manifestation of occult practice was part of his paternal grandfather's experience: &Vu&\uyf uu i vbribib rivai------found in our trunkroom (Anglicè, boxroom) phrenology; also spiritualism; had some credit for the healing touch, and performed, 1 believe, in Company with his brother Albert, a tour of spiritual or magnetic healing and demonstration; al1 of which goes to show-that while Henry James was having his so modulated breakfasts in Half Moon Street. . . and, on the whole, acquiring just the right tone, the picaresque novel was still being lived in the less tonal or 'toney' parts of his fatherland.

Pound's recollecüon of his grandfathef s dabblings, when considered in paral- le1 with Marchand's findings about McLuhan's experïence of similar phe- nomena, seems to confirm that the occultism of Pound and McLuhan's youth was just such an airy distraction, a bit of small-town carnival that, as Pound suggests, was never far from the hokeyism of his grandfather's picaresque frontier. But, however provincial in its beginnings, this carnivalesque oc- cultism would establish itself as a much more formidable influence when Pound was a postgraduate-when, says Noel Stock, "ideas germinat[ed] that would eventually draw him into the world of the Pagan mystery religions'' (41). Pound's early years in London would also add to his knowledge of the occult, through the influence of what Demetres Tryphonopoulos terms London's "intense public interest in the occultf' and through Pound's ac- quaintance with Yeats, who was "involved in various occult groups [namely the] Dublin Hermetic Society, Blavatsky Lodge of the London Theosophical Society, [and] Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawnf' (23). oracle of the electric age" 125 February 1966]), the latent and heady subversive- ness of this occultism would always be remembered as a fascinating and somewhat frightening glimpse into another realm, one whose quasi-mysti- cism would be rivalled by his later embrace of Roman Catholicism. Nor would questions of the occult be removed from his discussions with Pound, whose coltaboration in secret societies (something McLuhan suspected but had no concrete proof of) was a frequent subtext of their correspondence, eventually leading to the cooling of their relationship only a few years after it started. McLuhan was, by this time (the early 1950s), a conservative and somewhat intolerant Catholic; and Pound, though he did not dispute McLuhan's daims, had little tolerance himself for another's suspicions, how- ever accurate they were.

What is clear, however, is that the existence of this para-worldliness was not distinct from the other pedagogic influences on the impressionable young men--frorn the bookishness, from the early immersion in and play with lan- guage, and from the auditory pleasure (McLuhan, from Mansfield Forbes, Hopkins, and Walter Ong, would soon call it "orality"; Pound, mostly from Yeats, would call it "music") that was a very significant part of their early love of literature and their early experience of the emerging "kulchur" of mod- ernism. This particular complex of shared influences (its elements al1 related to language and the developing "modernist" culture of the time) was impor- tant for each thinker, especially in how these influencing elements eventu- ally evolved into the mature thinkers' most characteristic and lasting pre nouncements on structure, order, unity, resonance, interval, and the unifying tradition. Moreover, the similarity of those affecting complexes is, it must be cant.

But one must ask, for the question begs itself: Were these ele- ments/ interests/influences "in the air" at the time? Should they be studied, then, more in relation to an expanded treatment of early modernism (or any emergent "ism") than in relation to the literary modernism of Pound and McLuhan--in relation perhaps to what McLuhan, echoing Huizinga, called the waning of the mechanical age in favour of the electric? Or, more pre- cisely, in relation to the closed and its residuals giving way uneasily to the open and its prefacing effects, as occurs with any cultural shift--hence the above reference to emergence? Are Pound and McLuhan (and their mod- ernist minions) in any way separable from their time? Or, for that matter, from each other? 1 am fairly sure in answering "no, they are not," an admis- sion that might, on the surface, appear as a derailment of sorts, but is actually much closer to discovery than to some kind of unconscious deconstruction of Freud's so-cdled "family romance."

1 repeat Pound's scholastic herbal: "The graduate student is not taught to think of his own minute discoveries in relation to his subject as a whole" (SP 138), meaning, by buried syllogism, that the student must attempt to address the temper of the age he studies, must lift his eyes from the diet of the au- thors he studies and the cut of their hair (Romance 3,must attempt to Say something meaningful about "his subject as a whole," knowing, as Pound obviously did, that subjectivity is much larger than any one subject. Hence, The mood, the play is everything; the facts are nothing" (Romance 16). Also, "No minute detail of knowledge is ever du11 if it is presented to us in such a in the context of this chapter, the science of what "the age demanded."

It must therefore be the ambition of this study to look beyond McLuhan and Pound, to assume that their ideas and work, though certainly revolutionary, were also representative of their time--and to assume likewise that their time also shaped them (which leads one to speculate on the nature of the term revolutionary). What are "subjects" but studies of subjugation, "deferral" to those impulses that make them/(us) more often unwitting participants than CO-conspirators? And no, this does not quash freedom and choice, for those are metaphors from another discourse, not to be mixed here. My challenge is to define "subjed as whole," and so 1 camot gloss ideology in pursuit of ideaç -nor can 1 separate McLuhan and Pound from their time.

Correspondingly, this thesis could be titled, "Some Aspects of Modernism." It could foreground the times as it backgrounds the thinken. What, then, as an essential part of the question/ problem of "influence," is the relationship be- tween a thinker and his time? And which is the prime mover? Or perhaps more to the point: Can they ever be separated? Or should we try? And if we conclude that they cannot be separated (and we should not even try), then is it accurate to infer further, by more induction, that what is said about one (the private/ the subject) can also be said about the other (the public/ the subject i v- ity)? If symbiosis is the condition to which we accede, where al1 minds are equally saturated and permeable (and permeating a11 others), then what does this Say about the nature of influence? Pound speculates: "Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding" (Romance 5).

In 2928 McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg to study a wide-reaching liberal arts curriculum focused mainly on English and history, with a srnattering of electives in philosophy, foreign languages, and natu- ral/ physical sciences. His undergraduate experience was, like his earlier pub- lic school experience, rather uninspired, and there is no indication from diary entries, critical appraisals, or biographical accounts that he ever came across Pound or other early modernists in his studies as an undergraduate in Canada. In fact, according to Marchand, the literary critics who were being studied at the University of Manitoba during McLuhan's 1928-34 stay in- cluded "Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Walter Pater, [and] Thomas De Quincey-nineteenth-century prose stylists who fashioned their ideas about Great Men and great literature into essays full of profundity, pathos, humour, and charm" (17). McLuhan's tastes seemingly conformed, since his undergraduate interests centered on the Elizabethans and Romantics, and his earliest recorded influences (from diary entries starting in 1930 and continuing to the end of his M.A. in 1934) were those of the belles lettres variety--the British essayists Thomas Macaulay and G.K. Chesterton and the novelist and poet George Meredith. Of the three, the Roman Catholic Chesterton would become the most lasting influence (both in terms of world view and of satiric methodology), even though McLuhan, in 1933, began a master's thesis at Manitoba and expended considerable effort on a Parodist."

The significance of McLuhan's undergraduate education for this study, how- ever, is to be found in what it did not include: namely, to quote Marchand again, "No one in Manitoba [in the 1920s and 30s] seems to have been aware of [the] momentous shift in literary consciousness" (17); "it was as if Joyce, Eliot, and Pound did not exist" (18). And so it would not be until he attended Cambridge University in 1934 that McLuhan would shake the Edwardian pedagogic ideal of gentleman scholar--as well as his well-earned Victorian (and colonial) disdain for al1 things modern, capitalist, and industrial, the very things, curiously, that would later support his lifetime of reflection. To enter Cambridge, then, and the world of Mansfield Forbes, F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, and the New Criticism, was to "unlearn everything he had ab- sorbed about English literature at the University of Manitoba" (Marchand 30).

Attending Cambridge was a shock that McLuhan never forgot and was always thankful for (Letters of MM 5-6)--and was yet another "coincidence" that would move him farther away from the German literary philology that was practiced at Oxford and the major Canadian graduate schools, and thus bnng him closer again to the literary modems and espeaally the figure of Pound who, among rnany other achievements, built a poetics of the "modem" in di- rect contravention to the philological method of German scholarship (Romance 5). To be fair to McLuhan's precocity, however, his own interests at the time (at the end of his master's thesis at the University of Manitoba) were begiming to reveal an intolerance for pedantry, as one of his last letters from Winnipeg (Spring 1934) suggests: IVl.UL L11111.1Sb Ybil6"' U"" m. -a.----- r----r --- - - ever. 1 have not had any du11 moments except with the incredible pedants who crawl al1 over him with their microscopes and fine combs, and then write up their 'discoveries' with a mixture of stupid dull- ness and childish delight that is almost interesting.

McLuhan was clearly ready for his Cambridge experience, and for what he would soon share with his brother as the "correct" method of literary criti- cism: "Don't read a lot abouf your texts [he would soon counsel]. . . . For in- stance too much has been written about Johnson. There is nothing to Say about him. There he is--enjoy him" (Letters of MM 30). McLuhan was quick to embrace the New Criticism.

The question that insists itself at this juncture of McLuhan's academic devel- opment--upon his arriva1 at Cambridge--is at what point did he first en- counter Ezra Pound? Unfortunately, the archiva1 evidence, while in no short supply, is incondusive, suggesting a perfundory interest in Eliot and Pound (more Eliot than Pound in the beginning) but no pre-emptive fascination or exact point or origin of discovery. What the archiva1 records do reveal clearly, however, is the more general and abrupt transition in McLuhan that would force him to reconsider what constituted both the practice and the canon of English litera ture.

Toward that end, the first thing about Cambridge that captured McLuhan's imagination (and would lead to what he later described as his "conversion" to modernism) was the youth of its professoriate. Writing home about his ulty is young and has scarcely anyone over 45 except Quiller-Couch who is about 80" (Letters of MM 21). McLuhan's observation was not without its po- litical subtext, for at the time Arthur Quiller-Couch, though holding an hon- orary chair in English at Cambridge, was ideologically more aligned with the dons of taste and aesthetic "uplift" at Oxford than with the literary "experiment" (as New Criticism was first labelled) at Cambridge, having edited in 1900 the latest installment of The Oxford Book of English Verse, a volume Pound and his fellow modernists attacked as inflated with a dated pedantry of the belles lettres variety. In fact, the legendary Cambridge battles between Arthur Quiller-Couch and F.R. Leavis occurred during McLuhan's stay in London, and he more than once witnessed their not-too-collegial jousts at "open houses" and student/faculty receptions (Letters of MM 67). The important point to be made is that McLuhan was bending to the sway of the Cambridge "experiment" and relishing it, as many of his letters home started to reveal as early as the second term of his first year (early in 1935):

My position in regard to English Literature is alter- ing rapidly. . . . 1 have discovered the utmost reluc- tance to open Keats or Shakespeare, partly because a growing dissatisfaction tells me not where to begin, but largely because of an unconscious reluctance to disturb my previous judgements about them. 1 have recently in this new atmosphere, dissolved the old incrusted opinions . . . and obtained a fresh receptivity which is the thing most difficult to maintain in America. . . . But 1 can see most clearly why the obtaining of a degree in America means literally the e n d of education.

(Letters of MM 54) was being influenced by new methods of literary practice, few as revolution- ary to him as those of Mansfield Forbes, the acknowledged founder of the Cambridge literary "experiment" and the man who was primarily responsible for bringing I.A. Richards and his famous student, F.R. Leavis, to Cambridge. McLuhan wrote home only weeks after arriving at Cambridge that Forbes

lectures ostensibly on 'metre rhyme, rhythm, and the reading (aloud) of poetry.' . . . the man is won- derful-so exated about his subject that he is almost incoherent--He wears an aura of scholarly enthusi- asm, but never tires of delightful gibes at the bilge given out by his fellow lecturers here-'they set out to cover ground--1 shall cover no ground--1 shall teach you to dig, in the most fertile parts.'

(Letters of MM 24)

1s Forbes the seed of the pedagogic ethic that McLuhan would later share with Pound, namely that the good teacher does the necessary legwork (the tedium) to spare the student from wrong turns and dead-ends? Or did Forbes get that from Pound? 1s Forbes to be credited as much as others with the influence of "orality" on McLuhan, with the addition also of excitation that is so much a necessary ingredient in the learning theories of McLuhan? Or did Forbes get these from Pound? Or, beyond Pound, were these ideas/ methods "in the air" at the time, representative parts of the new science called modernism? And what part of this infusion of enthusîasm was attributable to John Dewey, Pound's contemporary, the educational reformer who countered Irving Babbitt's stolid New Humanism with a revitalized canon and pedagogic prac- tice of his own? Once again, any direct line of influence running from Pound to McLuhan îs problematized, blurred and refracted by competing marginalia. Kulchzir, what the chances of direct indebtedness are in a vortex of ideas, in an active culture? And he may well have concluded, as he also does in Kulchiir, that indebtedness (cause) is always inferior to practice (effects). Pound's inference would not be lost on McLuhan, whose lasting originality is the popularization of the science/ method of studying "effects" as hybrïds of imported poetic feeling.

Beneath the innovation and jouissance of Forbes's pedagogy, McLuhan was struggling in his early Cambridge days with a new canon of English literature, one that reflected the pioneering revisionist work done by Pound and popu- larized by T.S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood: "My studies this term have been largely devoted to the 1st part of the 17th century-a strange penod to me. Donne, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Walton, Davenant, and the Cavalier poetç" (Letfers of MM 41). This letter of 6 December 1934 also con- tains the first clear piece of extant proof that McLuhan was not only being in- fluenced by the work of the London literary modems--Wyndham Lewis's aptly named "Men of 1914" (Blasting 9)--but was actually on their trail, read- ing them with interest and delight:

Of late 1 have been wayfaring among the work of T.S. Eliot. . . . the poems I am reading [probably the Faber & Faber edition of Poems 1909-19251 have the unmistakable character of greatness. They trans- form, and diffuse and recoalesce the cornmonest every day occurrences of 20th cent city life till one begins to see double indeed. . . . Now there is some- thing ineffably exciting in reading a man, a genius and a poet, who has by the same stages, in face of the same circumstances, [sic] (he is an American) corne to the same point of view concerning the na- ture of religion and Christianity, the interpretation ------ground of opinion necessary to enjoy Eliot.

(Letters of MM 41)

A McLuhan diary entry only weeks later would reveal the first mention of Ezra Pound-- "Much pleased with Pound's writing in Make It New" (Diary 15 February 1935)--and a letter home on 22 February 1935 would explain that in addition to Yeats and Eliot's Collected Poems, McLuhan purchased Pound's A Drap oJ XXX Cantos with Latham prize money he had won for an essay on Old English Ballads (Letters of MM 60). When put in the context of his pre- vious remark about Eliot being "easily the greatest modern poet" (a remark that would seem to suggest that McLuhan was familiar with other moderns in addition to Eliot), the evidence from the archiva1 record suggests the prob- ability that McLuhan was introduced to the work of Pound in some proximity to the criticism of Eliot (diary entries of 12 April 1935 and 18 March 1935 sub- stantiate this), and that that introduction to Pound occurred in the Company of Mansfield Forbes, whom McLuhan encountered earliest in his Cambridge experience and who lectured by skipping over "1001 things" related and unre- lated to the subject at hand, including diverse references to remembered liter- ary anecdotes and incidents lïke an Eliot visit to Forbes's class a few years ear- lier (Letters of MM 24).

Other interesting tangential evidence does exist to place Pound "at the scene" of McLuhan's conversion to literary modernism in the early days of his Cambridge education. McLuhan's persona1 diary, the small red book in which he documented "for perpetuity" his reading, records at this time a sudden interest in political economics, specifically social credit ("met Sykes. . . Tankerville on social credit" [24 May 19351). More diary entries reveal reading interests in other Poundian areas, including anthropomo rphism and mysti- cism ("Reading Weston's Ritual to Romance" [28 June 19353); French criticism and the Symbolists ("Reading Rémy de Gourmont" [5 June 19351); and a host of other Pound "finds," writers whom Pound introduced to the public and who would have a lasting impact on McLuhan's thought ("Reading Joyce very slowly" [6 August 19351, "Reading [Wyndham Lewis's] Time and Western Man" [29 February 19361, "Reading Robt. Frost, and really beginning to see poetry and its business" [26 March 19381).

More to the point, there exists during this time clear evidence from the same Cambridge diary that Pound's own work was attracting much of McLuhan's attention: "find Pound's poems delightful" (19 December 1935); "Reading Pound's SeZected Poerns" (16 August 1936); "Read Pound's Letters" (3 Odober 1936); "Enjoying Pound's ABC of Reading and Active Anthology" (27 October 1936); "Spent most of day reading Pound's ABC--wish 1 had read it 7 years ago at least" (31 October 1936). The tangential evidence from McLuhan's Cambridge diary suggests three important things about his developing liter- ary sensibility: first, that his extra-curricular reading placed disproportionate emphasis on Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Hopkins, and Joyce (and in exactly that or- der); second, that of al1 the outside reading he did beyond his classwork, his reading of the modems was the most rewarding, actually garnering the most praise (and, from the extant evidence, no derision); and, third, that in his reading of the modems he valued, above al1 else, the criticism of Eliot and the poetry of Pound (a fact substantiated further by his personal correspon- dence, especially a 30/ 31 March 1935 letter home [Letters of MM 651). Given McLuhan's early preference for Eliot over Pound and his later vehe- mence about Eliot's anemically acknowledged indebtedness to Pound (articulated clearest in 'The Possum and the Midwife," a lecture delivered by McLuhan at the University of Idaho in 1978), one wonders why McLuhan did not notice early on that much of Eliot's criticism is in fact a prose rendering of Pound's poetic innovations--that Eliot's criticism, in other words, is some- times little more than notes from "Grampa"? Not that Pound seemed to mind, of course; Eliot was doing him a service, providing historical witness, as Socrates' most famous student had done centuries before. But why did McLuhan not notice the provenance of Eliot's critical dicta, as Eliot himself clearly had, applying to Pound, Dante's debt to Arnaut Daniel? Why did he not notice the uncanny resemblance between the Cambridge English curricula and Pound's The Spirit of Romance, first published in 1910, and read by McLuhan at Cambridge? Why did he not notice the redundancy of Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry: A Sfudy of fhe Conternporary Situation (1932), the book which re-articulated Pound's attacks on Georgian and Victonan verse, but did so under the guise of Eliot's critical tutelage and not Pound's? Did his Cambridge tutors not share with him the absolute pre- cocity of Pound's early work, the precocity, to take yet another example, of Pound's f irst published essay, "Raphaelite Latin," issued in Philadelphia's Book News Monthly in 1906--the short essay that anticipated New Crïticism, Imagism, and the fa11 of the Germanic ideal (and did this in the heart of what Pound called "Arnenca the Sterile")?

While it is clear that McLuhan did recognize and respect Pound's contribu- tions, why did he not afford those contributions the kind of awe-inspired rev- ("commend[ing] Masters at the top of my lungs" [Letters of EP 551) that Pound certainly extended to those wntersl thinkers whom he identified as absolutely "new" and revolutionary: Arnaut Daniel, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Cocteau, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Ernest Fenollosa? Though by the middle of the 1930s McLuhan had embraced Pound in the fervour of the Cambridge exper- iment, it appears that embrace was without the kind of intensity it would have for McLuhan in later years.

These are key questions, ones that would seem to suggest that McLuhan's Cambridge teachers--the very purveyors of New Criticism and those com- plid in the evolution of the modernist enterprise--did not themselves know of Eliot's ultimate indebtedness (or perhaps knew and conspired not to share their knowledge). Since McLuhan was taking rnost of his direction from them, it only follows that he would reiterate their biases, as he did. Was Pound's work inaccessible, then? Or was there indeed, as Pound suspeded, a conspiracy to quiet him by acknowledging his own work in others, specifically Eliot, one perhaps more worthy of emulation as an "academic" model? If one or another of these suppositions is true, it sheds new light on not only the beginnings of literary modernism but also on the way it evolved through the shifing pedagogic ideologies of the early decades of the century.

As it exists in letters and personal remembrances, the archival record of the middle of the 1930s cannot be any more conclusive or specific regarding the earliest McLuhan/Pound connection; however, what that record does reveal about McLuhan's complete reversal--away from the dated nineteenth-century philology toward an absolute embrace of New Criticism's canon and practice development as a media/social theorkt (and as a student of the moderns) but also to an understanding of Pound's own pioneering work and influence at the turn of the twentieth century. Since Pound and Eliot were the artistic practitioners, the literary archetypes, whose work and criticism Forbes, Richards, and Leavis preached, the Cambridge academy of the time (of the King Edward VI1 Professorship of English Literature in 1910, the chair that in- augurated the Cambridge "experiment") afforded the best if not the only in- troduction to Pound and the literary moderns that McLuhan could have re- ceived, regardless of how biased that introduction may have been. Studying the Metaphysicals and other resurgents in the revitalized canon, applying Richards' technique of "close analysis" and Leavis's "practical criticism" to classical rhetorical structures as well as popular and pdp narratives (most no- tably advertisements and journalese, fruitful digressions that Pound himself sanctioned [Roma n c e 25]), and learning how to analyze text (and not only lit- erary text) to determine how it achieved its "effects" were like studying Pound, Eliot, and Joyce first hand. In the London environment McLuhan found himself in, then, the influence of Pound, Eliot, and Joyce, while somewhat distorted perhaps by the pervading pedagogic ideologies, was al1 but inescapable.

Like most influences already cited in this study, it is difficult indeed to sepa- rate McLuhan's experience of Pound and the modems from his experience of other social phenornena, in this case a Cambridge culture and curriculum that owed as much to the pioneering work of the modems (especially Pound) as to its conscious distancing from the "Germanie ideal" practiced at its rival, Oxford. Suffice it to Say, however, that most of the modernist innovations in were reducible, McLuhan would later admit, to Pound himself. If he did not know at the time (and it appears, by his early capitulation to the Eliotary bi- ases of his Cambridge teachers, that he did not), McLuhan would soon corne to realize that Pound was the most important and innovative modernist the- orist of the group, a revelation he would share excitedly with Felix Giovanelli in a series of letters a few years la ter (Letfers of MM 201-204,209-215).

During these formative years for McLuhan (1928-36),Pound's reputation was already well established, built in large part by an almost single-handed over- throw of affected and effete Georgian versification--of the metre and poetic sense Pound found upon arriving in London in 1908. That Pound, a for- eigner (an American, no less), could have achieved this feat on British soi1 and by converting the British Iiterary establishment (most notably Yeats, whom he deliberately sought out as "the greatest living poet to go after"' [qtd. in Wu z 97, see also Goodwin 76-77]) is testament to a genius for sheer penis- tence and energy as much as to a genius for renewed vision and technique.

To appreàate the place of Pound in McLuhan's developing sensibility of the time is to understand not only the sense of departure frorn the norm that Pound's new vision afforded McLuhan but to understand also the ubiquity of Pound's influence (and with that ubiquity the sense of immediacy and impor- tance that must have been associated with being on his trail--indeed, the freshness and subversion must have been exhilarating, akin, perhaps, to what post-structuralism offers some students today). Moreover, the large part the same London literary environment that Pound, Yeats, and Ford Madox Hueffer had worked to remake some twenty years earlier. 1 trace be- low the outlines of that London literary environment in brief brush strokes, brief because while McLuhan was certainly aware of Pound as early as the middle of the 1930s, Pound had no probable knowledge of McLuhan before June 1948 (the only possibility of knowledge--and this probably little more than the mere mention of a name--coming from Wyndham Lewis in the mi d- 1940s)-

Pound arrived in London from Venice in 1908. He had left (or rather been invited to leave) a teaching job at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana after only four months and had crossed the Atlantic in a cattle boat bound for Europe (McLuhan and Tom Easterbrook, curiously, would do the same twenty-four years later [Letters of MM 101, cattle boats being the cheapest mode of trans-Atlantic transportation at the time). As Pound explained in his 1968 "post-postscnpt" to The Spirif of Romance, he taught "Romance tongues" (12) at the London Polyteduiic under the title "The Development of Literature in Southem Europe," cowolidating "a very raw summary of things [from] Rennart's Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania" (9). That bnef teaching sojourn would equip Pound with the few shillings and the concentrated time necessary to publish A Quinzane fur This Yule (1908) and, in the spring of 1909, Personne of Ezra Pound, the edition of poems that would launch Pound in London and align him strategically with two writers he went to London specifically to meet: namely, Yeats, who was impressed first by Pound's musical ear, and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford, or, as Pound called him, "Forty Mad Dogs"), who was then editing The Pound crystallize his thoughts on clarity and directness of prose (Letfers of EP 18). Pound's association with Ford eventually led him to remark to Harriet Monroe (directly from Ford) that "poetry must be as well written as prose" (Letters of EP 48), the oft-quoted comment that perhaps best encapsulates the spirit of modernist energy and innovation.

In the same letter to Monroe, Pound would outline his poetic dicta (and foot- note it in later editions of his Selected Let fers to credit Ford with "hammering this point of view into me"):

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as 'addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing--nothing that you couldn't, in sorne circumstances, in the stress of some emotion, actually Say. Every literaryism, every book word, fntters away a saap of the reader's patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.

(Letters of EP49)

Hugh Kemer cites "testimony that Pound alone of the young writers [Ford] could claim to have 'discovered' about 1908" (MCV: EP 17), and in The Pound Era contends that of the two, Yeats and Ford, Ford's interventions and timely "roll" to criticize his "Rossetian tosh were of more lasting benefit to Pound. Of that roll on the floor, Kenner quotes Pound as saying it "'saved me three years"' (PE 80,78-82).

Pound also met T.E. Hulme shortly after the release of Personae, and along with six others in April 1909 began meeting in London's Latin Quarter to dis- the Georgian poets. They settled on the virtues of classical rendition--of hardness, dryness, and precision as the best media to convey directness of emotion (Norman 47)--and with that the seed of what five years later would become Imagism was planted. Along with his relationship with Yeats and Ford and his association with Hulme's group, the request by Harriet Monroe that Pound become foreign editor for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912 se- cured Pound's place as the key figure around whom literary modernism, as practiced in England, was beginning to evolve. In an important letter to Miss Monroe (18 August 19121, Pound was clear about his intentions regarding what he termed "our Amencan Risorgimento" [renaissance]:

1 hope . . . to carry into Our American poetry the same sort of life and intensity which [Whistler] in- fused into modern painting. . . . That awakening will make the Italian Renaissance look like a tem- pest in a teapot! The force we have, and the im- pulse, but the guiding sense, the discrimination in applying the force, we rnust wait and drive for.

Des lmagistes (1914) would follow from Pound's fervour and his growing stature, and from that would follow Vorticism and "BLAST, A Review of the Great English Vortex," edited by Wyndham Lewis. The Lewis/ Pound rela- tionship that began with BLAST and the first Vorticist manifesto (decrying the smugness of literary Victorianism) is particularly significant for this study because of the relationship McLuhan would establish with Lewis a number of years later--and also because of a parallel manifesto McLuhan and Hugh Kenner would organize in the middle of the 1950s to halt "the neglect of the mately from St. Elizabeths (Heymann 235).

Also significant for this study is the relationship Pound established with James Joyce early in 1914. Indeed, McLuhan's lifelong interest in Pound was rivalled only by similar interests in Lewis and Joyce (many, in fact, would ar- gue that Joyce is McLuhan's most important influence--certainly Joyce was McLuhan's most studied subject in the last third of his career). At the tirne of his acquaintance with Joyce, Pound had become "literary advisor'' for The Egoist, Harriet Weaver's magazine, where, in addition to publishing his own critical prose, he was also publishing other writers whose work was being ig- nored elsewhere, most notably Joyce (PI] 1). Pound's favourable review of Joyce's Du bliners was one of the first (and few) public appreciations the young Irishman received, and it served as the beginning of an important literary re- lationship, one that McLuhan would question Pound about in his own letters to Joyce's first and greatest benefactor.

Finally, it was also during these London years that Pound began work on his lifelong epic, The Cantos, reporting, in a 1917 Ietter to John Quinn, a New York lawyer and literary patron, that he had begun "work on a new long poem (really LONG, endless, leviathanic)" (Lettus of EP 104). With that reve- lation and the appearance of the first three cantos in Harrïet Monroe's Poetry some months later, Pound was approaching the apex of his literary achieve- ments.

The years in London until1920 were busy ones for Pound, since it was during this period that he established the work and reputation McLuhan would en- preserver of culture. In his own cryptic biography that prefaced his Selected Poems (1949), Pound put his output between 1909 and 1920 at "some 40 vol- umes" (viii). Just as significant as his own creative and critical output at this tirne, however, was the tireless and selfless work he did on behalf of other promising writers, the work that is recorded in the many letters from Pound to Harriet Monroe between 1912 and 1918 (Leffers of EP 9-126). It was just as importantly this legacy of influence (these residuals and traces of Pound-- what amounts, really, to his realized "Risorgimento") that McLuhan would encounter at Cambridge in the early 1930s.

But even for al1 his output, innovation, influence, and generosity, Pound was ignored in many quarters, most of them academic, suspected as an insurgent, a radical, even despised by many, which goes some way toward answering the questions posed above regarding McLuhan's less-than-emphatic embrace of Poundian dicta in the 1930s. To reveal this other side of the Pound legacyl reputation that McLuhan would have encountered while at Cambridge--the opinion of Pound he would have received from the tradi- tionalists in Quiller-Couch's camp, some of whom were associated with Cambridge in the 1930s and who detested the New Critical experiment--1 quote from a remembrance by Michael Reck, who visited Pound at St. Elizabeths from 1946 until his eventual release in 1958. Reck's observation of Pound's reception by the Engiish-language literary community in the 1920s outlines the conundrum many young students, including McLuhan, must have faced in navigating the momentous and, to many, unpopular shift in literary sensibility that the modernists, namely Pound, precipitated: IlbllCU IL11511311 YUu11311c~iiau F v ri u&&r YCbU wVVa- on [Pound's] recommendation, no American uni- versity or cultural institution had ever invited him to lecture, he had been invited to serve on no jury of awards in the arts, and no fellowship had ever been awarded on his recommendation. This was the fate of the most influential English language writer of our century. This is how our civilization too often makes use of its men of genius!

(Reck 51)

For McLuhan and his peers, vulnerable and powerless in their deferral to the orthodoxy of system (which included examinations, recommendations, and other career-deciding criteria), the embrace of "Les leunes" (Ford's term for the young modemists of the 10s and 20s), while no doubt exhilarating, was not without its risks. To understand the McLuhan/ Pound relationship in its earliest stages--and also as it developed-is to understand this notion of risk (and later suspicion) that McLuhan, an ultra Conservative, would always harbour toward Pound-and that would go a long way toward explaining his objections to what he perceived as the occult fetishism of Pound. Curiously, similar feelings of risk and reluctance (suspicions rooted in and questioning I intent) were also brought to the consideration of McLuhan's own work, and so this guardedness surrounding reception is yet another thing both thinkers share. Mentorship, influence, even similarity are seldom the value-neutral, uncomplicated idealisms we seem to want them to be. So it was with McLuhan's first experience of Ezra Pound. After McLuhan left Cambridge in 1936 he joined the English department at the University of Wisconsin as a graduate teaching assistant, where, he wrote, his "task as a teacher will be to shake others from their complacency" (Let fers of MM û4). His pedagogic fervour could have been straight from Mansfield Forbes himself--or, for that matter, straight from Pound's ABC of Reading, which McLuhan had read only weeks earlier (Diary 31 October 1936). The most important thing that happened to McLuhan during his one-year stay at Wisconsin was his conversion in March 1937 to Roman Catholicism, an em- brace of "the Faith that would alter, he admitted (Lefters of MM 43), every subsequent decision he would ever make, including his relationship with and treatment of Pound, especially his not-always-subtle attempts at convert- ing Pound, and, findly, his deep pleasure at the news that Pound had, just be- fore the time of his death, "wanted very fidy to be brought to" the Church of St. George, a Benedictine monastery on the island of San Giorgio (unpublished letter from Giles Zaramella Abbot O.S.B. to Sister Mary Joan Cook 16 March 1974 [in McLuhan Collection, National Archives of Canada]).

The curious thing about McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism, relative to his chastisement of Pound's involvement in less orthodox practice, was his embrace of the cults (the sanctioned cults) of Maryology and hagiography, services of the faithful that McLuhan not only wrote and inquired often about (Letfers of MM 72-76,82-83), but also into which he poured much of his own devotion. The mysticism that attended the veneration of Mary and the saints was one of his greatest attractions to Catholicism, and found expression in many of his letters and persona1 diary entries at this time. That McLuhan what they were searching for or in their method of searching for it then in the search itself) is somewhat astonishing, especially since McLuhan always considered Pound (and al1 great artists and visionanes) as deeply religious, even Catholic in their missionary zeal.

It is perhaps instructive in itself that McLuhan never did make the connec- tion, since his myopia suggests something significant about his new-found faith: that the power and influence of that faith, perhaps more than the pre- vailing "pop" sentiments of the time, were responsible for the occult fascina- tion/abhorrence that attended the birth of modernism. It is no coincidence, then, that shortly after McLuhan's conversion begins what will become a life- time aversion to "the other" / the unorthodox/ the subversive--grouped col- lectively under the nominative occult (to "be converted to," for McLuhan, was as much about acquiring historical foes and lines of confiict as it was about winning allies and cultural allegiances). And so, conversion to Catholicism was also conversion to Catholicism's aversion to occult practice, an aversion that starts appearing in McLuhan's letters and personal diary en- tries early in 1937:

There will be no war in Europe. The real villains in the piece are not Hitler etc but the Comintern [a global communist organization], the free masons and the international operators who have their headquarters in Prague. Hitler is being backed by Chamberlain and Roosevelt (appearances to the contrary ).

(Letters of MM 97) frighteningly) close to the themes of Pound's infarnous Rome radio broad- casts; in railing against an international coterie and conspiracy backed by Jewish bankers and power brokers (each ready to supplant centuries of or- dered and hard-won ecdesiastical orthodoxy), he approaches Pound's fear of a manifest "24 Protocols," in which a purportedly Zionist conspiracy going as far back as King Solomon in 929 B.C. would manipulate the gold standard so as to effect a new world order under the Jews. The evident irony, beyond the obvious danger of McLuhan's own mounting fears of conspiracy, is that McLuhan would accuse Pound of advancing the very same argument against religious orthodoxy but from the opposite position, from the side of the sub- versives, the secret interests, that McLuhan is attacking above. My point is that the logic McLuhan began to use to confront the world in 1937--and perhaps "McLuhanacy" in general as it began to develop around this tirne-- was as much a function of his new-found Catholicism (and its requisites for admission and maintenance) as to anything else in his background, cultural and otherwise; in fa&, there is little else in his background that would predis pose him to such powerful and distinctly cowervative aversions. Herein, I believe, lies the first hint of McLuhan's "anxiety of influence," his departure from his strong modernist birthright and his even stronger modernist father, Ezra Pound--and this departure ten years before they began any persona1 rela- tionship. At the very least, McLuhan's embrace of Catholicism and its aver- sions, when taken in the context of his later chastisement of Pound, suggests the importance of the latter to McLuhan's developing sensibility. Great re- spect can be really the only logical pretext for great disappointment. point worthy of exploration--the point of reflection when mentorship gives way to individuation, not that learning ceases, but that the innocence that at- tends the easy flow and ready exchange of knowledge from teacher to student (from culture to su bject) becomes problema tized, refracted by personal ideol- ogy, by a stubbornness of "I"? Does student as thinker become at some point thinker as moderator, necessitating his own Derridean "signature" on that which he never owned (or which is unownable)? And is it the threat of sameness or the insistence of ego that informs this anxiety, necessitating in- dividuation? At what point in al1 mentorships do we inevitably bite the hand that feeds? And what does this Say about the nature of influence, this biting, this stubbornness? If the incisor marks are visible, as they are in the Pound/McLuhan association, is influence confirmed; and if so, why must a seemingly inevitable anxiety attend intellectual pollination? Finally, what does this anxiety Say about Our receptivity to infiuence? About Our tolerances for influence? Or, again, about influence in general?

From the University of Wisconsin, McLuhan went to St. Louis University in 1937, a Jesuit college whose attraction for McLuhan was a well-respected Catholic tradition--McLuhan told Wyndham Lewis that it was "the best Catholic school in the U.S.A." (Letters of MM 134)--and an English depart- ment chairman, Father William McCabe, S.J., who was himself a Cambridge graduate and therefore a sympathetic supporter of New Criticism. At St. Louis, McLuhan was given the freedom of "puffing the 'Scmtiny' approach to literature" (Lefters of MM 93) and mingling among a Catholic "cïrcle of intel- lectuals," whose Company and stimulus, he admitted to Pound years later, was a major advantage of the like-minded Catholic community (Letfers of Louis included Bernard Muller-Thym, a brilliant philosopher and polyma t h who left academia for the world of management consulting (and whose in- terest in advertising had a lasting influence on McLuhan [Diary 7 March 19381); Felix Giovanelli, who taught Romance languages and who accompa- nied McLuhan to the first and many subsequent visits with Wyndham Lewis at what is now the University of Windsor; and Walter J. Ong, S.J., whose M.A. thesis on Gerald Manley Hopkins' prosody was directed by McLuhan. Ung's work in the fields of orality, literacy, and Eliot's "auditory imagination" would have an important influence on McLuhan's later thought, speafically his notions of "reception" and Japanese "Ma" within the pulsating and popu- lace interval.

In total, McLuhan was at St. Louis University for seven years, one of those a year's leave of absence to complete a Cambridge Ph.D. on Thomas Nashe (Lefters of MM 103), whom he described in his diary as one of the premiere Elizabethan rhetoricians and wordsmiths (24 July 1938), and whose work would lead McLuhan into an investigation of the historical territory James Joyce drew heavily upon in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake--the medieval triv- i u rn of Rhetoric, Dialectics, and Grammatica.

Two things of direct Poundian significance occurred while McLuhan was at St. Louis teaching and completing his Ph-D.: first, the emergence of a Pound- like style, an elliptical and aggressive style--one admittedly "uncontrollable and unaccountable" (Diary 15 June 1938)--that got McLuhan into trouble fre- quently, especially with peers who equated style/ medium with sub- stance/ message ("my ideas have been labelled 'blood-curdling,"' he wrote in Lewis, who was the first intirnate of Pound's McLuhan wouid meet. Lewis was living in Windsor, Ontario at the time, having arrived there from Toronto to lecture at Assumption College, first as part of its Christian Culture Series and then as an occasional, and infrequently paid, artist/ writer-in-resi- dence. McLuhan first wrote to Father J. Stanley Murphy, founder of the Christian Culture Series at Windsor, requesting "an audience" with "the great porbnanteau man," then travelled to Windsor with Felix Giovanelli in August 2943 to meet Lewis (it was often McLuhan's habit to bring along a friend at first meetings with famous people--Hugh Kenner accompanied him to his first meeting with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths, for example). McLuhan prefaced his relationship with Lewis in rnuch the same way he would preface his relationship with Pound: by admitting influence and long-established af- fection. He wrote Lewis shortly after he met him, "You have been, for years before 1 met you, a major resource in my life" (Letters of MM 160), a compli- ment substantiated by diary entries about Lewis that begin in 1935 and reach a zenith in late 1939.

The pretext McLuhan and Giovanelli used for originally meeting Lewis was to rescue hirn from poverty and obscurity in Canada by arranging lecture en- gagements and portrait sittings in St. Louis (Letters of MM 129-61), and, curi- ously, the friendship and correspondence that followed between Lewis and McLuhan, though close at times, did not develop much further from that business-like beginning. The exchange of ideas, controversies, occasional threats, and constant witticisms that is in evidence everywhere in the McLuhan/Pound correspondence is not present in the McLuhan/Lewis let- ters, nor is there any indication that McLuhan, as one might suspect from a he might divulge about his friend Pound. In fact, when asked by Lewis what should be said at a lecture Giovanelli had arranged for him in early 1944, McLuhan's reply makes no mention of Pound:

As for topic at the W.C. [Wednesday Club]-- 'Personalities in the world of modern art and let- ters.' Yes, frankly they want anecdotes about 'Long- haired people 1 have known.' You can please them completely, simply by making it a chat about famil- iar names--Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Augustus John, T E Lawrence etc.

(Letters of MM 140)

To exclude Pound, the longest-haired of them all, from this list is cunous in- deed, since McLuhan, from reading the entire Lewis oeuvre (Diary March 1936, April 1937, January-February 1938), must certainly have been aware of the Lewis/ Pound relationship, especially Lewis's opinion of Pound as "'one of the best'" (Blnsting 271). McLuhan must also have been aware, if only from the painter himself in their business-related discussions about portraiture, of Lewis's well-publicized and lucrative 1939 portrait of Pound, the commission, as Timothy Materer points out, that funded Lewis's travel to North America in the first place (PIL 134). For al1 that, no reference to Pound exists in the McLuhanILewis correspondence of the time (1943-44); and it would not be until early 1949, some months after McLuhan and Pound first met at St. Elizabeths, that any direct reference to McLuhan would be exchanged between Lewis and Pound. That reference--'The said WL, cd/ with very small loss of time and labour, putt the above facts into ten lines of effulgent prose, and help the Dallam advertise '1 Presume' which McLuhan sez irrrrrritttated the godam Kenuks" (PfL251-52)--would refer to Lewis's travel book Ammica, 1 obviously mentioned by McLuhan during his visit with Pound in ]une 1948.

While the curiosity of the McLuhanILewis relationship is to be found in what it seemingly did not include (namely, any extant evidence of Pound, Lewis's close friend and McLuhan's privileged study), the value of the rela- tionship for McLuhan was important in two fundamental ways. First, even though related mostly to arranging portrait sittings in St. Louis, the relation- ship with Lewis advanced McLuhan's thinking another level beyond the ScrutinylCambridge stage. Evidence of this new stage began to appear in McLuhan's articles and lettes at the time, which not only announced Lewis's proximity to the young academic but also reflected Lewis's teachings about popular culture. In a December 1944 letter to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy (a colleague at St. Louis University), McLuhan outlined that Lewis- directed departure from Leavis, the departure that freed McLuhan to be the kind of Catholic social analyst (and ecumenical critic) he longed and felt called to be:

Pm out of touch with most things here. The latest Scrutiny, however, is one of the best there has been. Of course the trouble with Leavis is that his passion for important work forbids him to look for the Sun in the egg-tarnished spoons of the daily table. In other words, his failure to grasp current society in its intellectual modes (say in the style of [Lewis's] Time and Western Man or Giedion's Space Time and Architecture) cuts him off from the relevant pabulum. . . . Modem anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas to-day. (Letters of MM 166) that of close analysis of popular culture not only for understanding but for covert action--namely, to counter populism. The above is also strikingly sim- ilar to Pound's own methodological credo espoused in the short autobio- graphie preface to his Selected Poems: "1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same" (viii). Cambridge and New Criticism provided McLuhan with method and tools; Lewis endorsed the use of those tools (that method of dose analysis) on the profane body of modern/popular culture; and Pound and Catholicism sanctioned proscriptive intent, allowing for (indeed championing) a didadicism that, for McLuhan, was the mortar and the strength that bound the Cambridge and Lewis influences into a full- fledged critique of modernity.

McLuhan needed Lewis as he needed Cambridge before hirn to approach an understanding of Pound. Lewis was therefore the essential intermediary be- tween McLuhan's Cambridge sensibility and his embrace of Pound; more- over, McLuhan's relationship with Lewis elevated McLuhan to the status of heavyweight scholar, one able and equipped to interact with the great living figures of modern literahire. It seems unlikely that McLuhan's relationship with Pound, which began in earnest four years after the McLuhan/Lewis friendship cooled, would have been as forthright and as productive without the Lewis experience, as difficult as that experience was at times (Letters of MM 165). In short, by associating with Lewis, McLuhan learned to translate the book learning and culture of remote Cambridge into an assuredness and a visceral understanding of method that he would soon bring, as an equal not an underling, to his relationship with Pound. Lewis's role was therefore in- valuable. In the fa11 of 1946 McLuhan accepted an offer to teach at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, a Catholic college of the Basilian order where he would spend the rest of his career. There, McLuhan "remained rooted in the tradition he admired, that of the Sophists and rhetoricians, rather than in the more logical and dialectical tradition of Aquinas" (Marchand 82), a curricular interest that, once again, got hirn in trouble with his peers and supervisors, who concluded irrevocably (and nearly en masse) that "he was a 'nut"' (Marchand 85). To counter that reputation (perhaps also to escape its grip), McLuhan further removed himself intellectually from accepted Catholic ped- agogy, espousing and practicing the investigation of popular culture as the most fruitful study for the modern Catholic. To support this investigation, McLuhan returned again, and in earnest, to the modems and Ezra Pound, as the editors of his letters detail:

His letters of this period reveal his fascination with the literary world of London in 1908 (when Pound moved there) and after, and with the revohtion in poetry and aesthetia these writers brought about. . . . [Pound especially] fired McLuhan intellectually. Having been greatly impressed by Pound's poetry while at Cambridge, he now read more of his prose.

("Introduction: l946-l979"Let fers of MM 173)

Indeed, his letters and associations in the months leading up to his meeting with Pound reveal an intense and growing moral imperative that reflects not only the fervour of McLuhan's convictions but also the influence of Pound's own polernics. He wrote to Clement McNaspy in early 1946 that "My increas- ing awareness has been of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and denied to the confused secular mind" (Letters of MM 180); and to his old friend at St. Louis University, Felix Giovanelli, he proposed a few weeks later an actual forum for this organized dogma that smacks of a renewed Pound influence (specifically, of an ABC of Reading methodology):

My plan is to start a mag. Not for Canadians by Canadians. But something serious. Not an imita- tion of Sewanee Kenyon or P.R. [Partisan ReviewJ. Something with a strongly practical bias in the di- rection of estimating and prescribing detailed pro- cedures in school and college plus a department persistently focussed on the hatred being-manifest everywhere at every Ievel at present [the hatred of "Being" through abortion, homosexuality, etc-, fre- quent McLuhan targets-cf. Marchand 911.

(Letters of MM 182)

After the fashion of Pound's Guide to Kulchur, McLuhan began articulating his new Catholic vision in terms of an invigorated culture, one infused with emotion/ appetite rooted in morality, and one at odds with the competing populist interests of business and the marketplace. McLuhan's articulation of this invigorated culture is nearly identical to Pound's own similar panegyric in Kulchur

You see, American business, excluded from the lib- arts curriculum conquered the college for al1 that. The dialectically organized curriculum omits al1 emotional education. . , . From outside the school the business man conquers the cumculum. . . . And yet symbolically in such as [Allen] Tate and [Cleanth] Brooks, note a modest confidence in re- newal of the human condition- Not the abstract as- sertion of such a possibility as in [Lewis] Mumford the urbanite, but the quiet cultivation of a positive grammatica. Stirrings, however dim, of a genuine = am-. d .. .&.-A*, A .W.rf .-a-- Mm= -'-'------' ------rible, but the garden is there too.

(Letters of MM 184)

To complement the "genuine culture," McLuhan began to seek as well an- other "genuine community" of intellectuals (Letters of MM 186)--subse- quently dubbed "McLunatics" (Marchand 99)--that would help him consoli- date and spread (more spread than consolidate, as Kenner contends [Mazes 2961) his new complex of New Critical/ pop cultural/Catholic awareness. His first disciple, Hugh Kenner, would also become the best known. Kenner would not only possess the energy and discipline to translate McLuhan's ideas into the researched books they called for, but would also become, via McLuhan's tutelage (and this is the key point), the greatest Pound scholar of the twentieth century, the initiator and popularizer of what is now, thanks to Kenner and his first mentor, McLuhan, the booming Pound Industry. And even after forty-five years of unremitting production, Kenner continues to be, asserts Harold Bloom, the pre-eminent Pound explainer-in Bloom's words "Pound's canonical exegete" (MCV:EP vii).

To situate Kenner's Poundian provenance in McLuhan is not radically origi- nal, since Kenner himself has occasionally and quietly admitted indebtedness to McLuhan; but it is nevertheless important for many reasons, the most ba- sic of which is the fact that critics working on Pound have rarely alluded to McLuhan, and when they have they've been generally mistaken in their facts. Noel Stock, for example, gives McLuhan a brief gloss in his life of Pound by connecting McLuhan to the "Square $ Senes" and the manifesto on 'The Neglect of the Greek and Latin Classics" that both McLuhan and Kenner and McLuhan mentorship of Kenner. K.K. Ruthven does mention the McLuhan/ Kenner relationship but introduces it incorrectly, saying that McLuhan and Kenner met while visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths (167); in fact, they travelled to Washington together to visit Pound while on their way to enroll Kenner at Yale (Mmes 296). John Tytell introduces McLuhan and Kenner in the same paragraph but incorrectly identifies McLuhan as one "who had started his career as a Joyce scholar" (Tytell 300)--in fact, McLuhan's interest in Joyce developed only after earlier and lengthy studies of Chesterton, Hopkins, and Eliot; if anything, Kenner's fascination with Joyce propelled McLuhan's own simmering interest in Joyce studies. And finally, Humphrey Carpenter in his mammoth A Serious Character makes perhaps the most serious errors, suggesting incorrectly that McLuhan "came several timesff (799) to visit Pound (he visited Pound only once), that McLuhan broke off correspondence with Pound in February 1953 after accusations of Pound's complicity in secret societies (true in part except that McLuhan again resumed correspondence with Pound three years later), and that Kenner was McLuhan's graduate student. Kenner had indeed recently graduated from the University of Toronto with an M.A. in English when he first met McLuhan in June 1946, but he was never formally McLuhan's student; actually, during an intense summer of frenzied conversation, they comrnunicated more as peers than as student and mentor, glad to have found each other in the aca- demic wasteland that was Wyndham Lewis's Toronto.

In addition to correcting its facts, the Pound industry would benefit greatly from a detailed and corrected examination of the Kenner/ McLuhan relation- ship because of the fruits of that association for Pound scholarship. In an "having undertaken with Kenner a book on Eliot in which we planned sec- tions on yourself, Joyce and Yeats, we began a study of your poems which is now in progress. So we now see that you must have a volume to yourself" (Letters of MM 194). Not only was Kenner's interest in Pound fired by McLuhan, but his fint serious scholarly inquiries into Pound were conduded under McLuhan's tutelage, making McLuhan, by association with the centu- ry's leading Poundian, an important Poundian himself.

For his part, Kenner has always been reserved about his relationship with McLuhan, admitting indebtedness, no doubt, but never clearly delineating McLuhan's influence. In a 1984 article for Harper's magazine, reprinted in the essay collection Mazes, Ke~erdid admit that "Marshall McLuhan was my first mentor" (Mazes 223)' and in an earlier 1981 remembrance of McLuhan for the National Review, also reprinted in Mazes, he graciously admitted that "I've been going on from extemporizations of Marshall's for thirty years" (297). But aside from those comments, his dedication of The Poefry of Ezra Pound (1951) to McLuhan--which reads "To Marshall McLuhan, A catalogue, his jewels of conversation"--and the following notes to Marchand to aid his biographical account of McLuhan, Kenner has di- vulged little else that would help us make sense of the McLuhan/Kenner as- sociation:

He pushed at me T.S. Eliot, who'd been the type of unintelligibility to my Toronto profs. And he had me read Richards' Practical Cri ticism, Leavis's N e w Bearings in English Poefy, and (eventually) the en- tire file of Scrufiny. He kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I'd never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years I'd lived half a vv LILUW vv Q wybnibu. (Marchand 93)

Later in 19-48, on the strength of McLuhan's recommendation and McLuhan's relationship with Cleanth Brooks, Kenner went to Yale, complete with his mentor's cautions about how to (and how not to) conduct himself. Writing to his friend Giovanelli, McLuhan expressed concern that the brightest grad- uate student he had seen to date might rankle the "timidities and medo- crities" of the Yale faculty, and thus be dismissed as both he and Pound had been (as "nuts"):

[Kenner's] recent successes in publication [Parudox in Chesterton 19471 have much swelled his dome. . . . I've tried to tone him down with suggestions of self- effacement as a necessary strategy. Brooks has very lit- tle production left in him and is scared to death of Kemer and me. , . . Give him some advice about keeping his mouth shut. . . . he's going to Yale for one purpose only. To get his union card--carte ecatant [his PhD.]. Not to impress anybody with his present eru- dition but rather to please his instructors by a show of his capacity to learn from th e m. . . .To receive and not to give while at Yale. . . . Al1 he needs is facts and credit for knowing the same.

McLuhan's concern for Kenner's intellectual welfare reveals an emerging po- litical consciousness that is nowhere present before 1947--and, 1 would ven- ture to Say confidently, nowhere present before McLuhan's second embrace of Pound, specifically Pound's polemical prose, around 1946. Evidence to sup- port this contention of Pound's second and more powerful (and political) in- fluence can be found in the same Ietter to Giovanelli, which continues: IU61LL 1IVVV I LVUIU -nui&& u a~--."-..-W. --.--- O--- course work because I would not be bothered with the intelligence or stupidity of the instructor. But it has taken me a long time to take stupidity and in- difference for granted as a universal and irremedia- bIe human condition. Pound has never reached that point. Al1 his strategies depend on the prior condition of alertness and eager appetite for truth.

(Leffers of MM 203)

In displaying an emergent political savvy and an intolerance (albeit mea- sured) of the follies of academe, McLuhan is dearly reading Pound very care- fully at this point in his career and seemingly very literally, learning equally from both Pound's innovations and his errors.

Moreover, McLuhan's tutelage of Kenner, which resulted first in The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) and then in other critical studies on Lewis, Joyce, and Eliot (some of which contain Kenner's acknowledgment of McLuhan's col- laboration; au of which contain McLuhan's influence), place McLuhan at the scene of the Pound/modernist resurgence that Kenner's work precipitated. Appearances perhaps to the contrary, McLuhan, as early as 1946, was prepar- ing himself, whether knowingly or not, for his association with Pound. Though nothing extant exists to prove the point (and Kenner remains tight- lipped, mostly because of McLuhan's accusations against him of plagiarism and insufficient acknowledgment [Marchand 97-98]), the probability is that McLuhan and Kenner began plotting to meet Pound as early as 1946.

Regardless of how it came about, however, that collaboration resulted in a let- ter of intent to Dr. Winfred Overholser, the Superintendent of St. Elizabeths the 31 May 1948 letter by McLuhan to Pound that began, "My friend Mr. Kenner and 1 are much looking forward to a visit and some talk with you about contemporary letters, and your work, in which we have long taken a serious interest" (Letters of MM 192). Though the point may have been slightly exaggerated with regard to Kenner's interest, McLuhan's was well es- tablished: Pound had been percolating in his mind and crossing his intellec- tua1 path as this chapter outlines, since his early days at Cambridge in 1934. McLuhan's only meeting with Pound--which occurred from 2:00 PM - 400 PM on 4 June 1948 at St. Elizabeth Hospital for the Criminally Insane outside Washington, D.C. (and in the Company of Kenner and Pound's wife, Dorothy Shakespear Pound)--was therefore a high water mark in McLuhan's mod- ernist apprenticeship. Though McLuhan would never meet Pound again, their only meeting precipitated a series of letiers and ruminations that would change radically the way in which McLuhan practiced his literary criticism. "Of al1 the twentieth-century literary giants," Marchand notes at this juncture of McLuhan's apprenticeship, "Pound was closest to being a sou1 mate of McLuhan's" (96).

For his part, Pound was a willing reapient of McLuhan's doting interroga- tions. Accused of treason for wartime, allegedly Fascist, broadcasts over Rome radio that began in 1940, Pound had been incarcerated at St. Elizabeths since December 1945. Pound himself, though not in his defence, referred to those broadcasts as "personal propaganda in support of US. Constitution" (Reck 57). Summarily accused, he was brought to the United States from Italy in 1945 and, after a public hearing during which a jury deliberated for only three minutes, he was declared unfit to stand trial for reasons of an "unsound riod, lasting, in the end, twelve and a half years, until May 1958. It was during this penod of transition and of relative serenity for Pound--couched between the frenzy of Italy during the war years and the "silence" of exile after St. Elizabeths--that McLuhan met and corresponded with Pound. And though they would continue to exchange letters after Pound left St. Elizabeths, it is the period of Pound's incarceration that represents the most important and fruitful time of the McLuhan/Pound association. In fact, it was only hours af- ter McLuhan and Pound parted Company in Washington that McLuhan started the correspondence that was arguably the most important of his life. 2

Letters: Toward a Merging of Parallel Galaxies

Two methods of turning in the evidence of the Adams letters are open. I could quote fragments and thereby be inadequate. The letters are printed. Or 1 could assert the implications, or at least the chef implications. The MAIN implication is they stand for a life not split into bits.

Neither of these two men [Adams and Jefferson] would have thought of literature as something having nothing to do with life, the nation, the organization of govern- ment. . . . [they were] speaking of every man's life in its depth. ('The Jefferson-Adams Letters" SP 152)

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among Our senses and change mental processes?

(GG24)

Forrest Read, editor of the Pound/ Joyce correspondence, has called Pound "one of the century's most prolific correspondents" (PI]13), a description that could also apply to McLuhan's own epistolary output. Both Pound and McLuhan were at the centre of vast networks of national and international correspondents, and they routinely wrote several letters a day to sustain these networks. What is most remarkable, though, is that both also maintained this heavy output for more than forty years, resulting in their letters and cor- respondent~numbenng in the tens of thousands. as Letters of EP), puts the breadth of Pound's epistolary network in perspec- tive, calling it of "Napoleonic proportions" (xvii):

. . . the list of correspondents was indeed various, for in addition to letters from old friends and con- temporaries there came, for the most part un- sought, letters from instructors of history, from diplornatic officials, from classical scholars, from politicians, from professors of economics--from those of them, that is, who wanted frank speaking along lines of unoffiaal thought.

(Letters of EP xviii)

The Pound file continues to grow, filling a rapidly increasing number of books as new letters are found and as previously unpublished letters are brought from archives into public view. The number of books devoted solely to Pound's epistolary exchanges is currently at eighteen and growing, with the latest being Walter Sutton's edition of Pound, Thuyer, Wntson, and The Dial: A stoy in letters, 1994.

Similarly leviathanic, the McLuhan letters are estimated to exceed 100,000 pages (letters of MM viii) and take up some forty boxes alone in the McLuhan Collection at the National Archives of Canada. Like Pound's, then, McLuhan's epistolary reach was colossal and impressive: he corresponded routinely with leading social theonsts (Ham Selye, Rollo May, and Margaret Mead), polititians (Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, President Jimmy Carter, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey), theologians (Malcolm Muggeridge and Jacques Maritain), cultural gurus (Peter Drucker and Buckminster Fuller), writersl scholars (Tom Wolfe and Eric Havelock), musi- ers/ broadcasters (William Jovanovich and Harry J. Skornia), and celebrities (Woody Allen and Jack Paar). The voluminous output of both McLuhan and Pound, while historicaliy invaluable, is not, however, without its problems, those problems mostly relating to the sheer magnitude of the collections.

The McLuhan/ Pound correspondence is a case in point. While small in rela- tion to the Pound/Joyce or the McLuhan/Lewis exchanges, the correspon- dence does have some of the problems of the larger collections of letters: specifically, undated and missing letters, as well as those incorrectly dated and ordered by well-meaning archivists; letters to intimates close to the subject (for example, letters to Pound's wife, Dorothy) thai may or may not have reached the subject, though one normally assumes they did; unexplainable gaps in responding or multiple letters sent for every one received, suggesting that intervening letters may have been lost by mail or afterwards; and letters that are housed in diverse public and private collections, making them diffi- cult to access and, because of holding, copyright, duplicating, and other restric- tions, almost impossible to cross-reference.

For al1 these problems, much of the McLuhan/Pound correspondence has survived, numbering, at present, 54 extant letters and two fragments, with po- tentially ha1 f that number again existing somewhere but currently unac- counted for. (1 make this supposition based on what appear to be gaps in the record of respowes, and also based on the fact that there are currently more letters from Pound to McLuhan [31] than there are from McLuhan to Pound 1231--and McLuhan did, after all, initiate the correspondence, placing, one would suppose, greater onus on him to be a faithful, or at least an equal, cor- likely.

The Pound letters that do survive are located in the McLuhan Collection at the National Archives of Canada (MG31/D156/Vol. 34, and the surviving McLuhan letters are located in the Pound Collection at the Lilly Library at

Indiana University and the Collection of American Litera ture a t The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (and are as- sembled from these sources by McLuhan's editors in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan). Of archiva1 interest also is a forthcoming book of the Pound/McLuhan correspondence from Duke University Press; however, be cause that book is not yet available and because it is impossible to know if its author has unearthed any of the letters presumed missing, the letten used in this chapter corne only from the three institutional archives listed above.

The McLuhan/ Pound correspondence began, as mentioned earlier, with McLuhan's May 1948 letter of intent to Dr. Overholser and subsequent letter of introduction to Pound, and the correspondence ended sometime late in 1957. The last extant letter, to which McLuhan surely replied, is one from Pound dated 24 September 1957. Though mostly balanced and steady over the years of exchange, the correspondence followed three distinct cycles of inten- sity over its ten-year span: it was most intense during 1948, quieted for almost two years until 1951 after the release of Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound and McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, both of which Pound read and ap- proved of, resumed intensity in 1951 and 1952, quieted again in early 1953 af- ter McLuhan's accusations against Pound of col1aboratÏon in secret societies, and then resumed again with a final exchange of letters in 1957, after which typed page or less, and actually stand out in their brevity against the longer letters that McLuhan was accustomed to writing. It would not be unreason- able to infer from this that Pound imposed some kind of word limit on the normally effusive McLuhan, though there is no direct evidence to suggest this beyond a brief caution by Pound early in the correspondence that McLuhan avoid asking so many questions (18 June 1948). McLuhan may have interpreted this caution as a cal1 for brevity; he may have also imposed brevity out of respect for Pound's presumed mental frailty.

Though 1 will explain more fully in the pages ahead what precipitated the cy- des of epistolary adivity and decline, suffice it to Say here and in brief that most of the abrupt stops and starts in the McLuhan/Pound correspondence were related to what one or the other of the correspondents said, usually in a manner interpreted as derogatory by the other. McLuhan, for example, was fond of teasing Pound, occasionally irreverently and with an uncanny ability to hit the raw nerves of Pound's infamy, and Pound often responded by at- tacking McLuhan's Catholicism, his intellectual credibility, and even his mental clarity. One of the extant letters from McLuhan now located at the Beinecke has a characteristic Poundian scrawl at the bottom that reads, "NUTS," suggesting that Pound thought little of McLuhan's work "on the charader of acoustic space" (Lefters of MM 246). Both were overly sensitive to the other's gibes, and it appears neither, at this time in their lives, had much tolerance for enduring what they both imagined were covert conspiracies against them and their way of thinking. And though this paranoia is evident in their letters, the letters also reveal, if not a frequent agreement with, then a great respect for the mind of the other--this, and a genuine interest in his in- revealing contrast to another correspondence Pound was engaged in with Louis Dudek, another Canadian, during the same period (1948 - 1957).

The contrast in tone and content of the two collections of letters is instructive, revealing Pound's greater respect for McLuhan, though the reasons for this are difficult to determine. Where Dudek was the pupil, however, McLuhan was the peer; where Dudek was rarely spared the wrath of Pound's invective and sarcasm, McLuhan was treated more gently and with more humour; where Dudek was made to suffer almost constantly through Pound's sallies on monetary policy and reform, Pound seldom imposed his cultural panacea on McLuhan, preferring to respond in kind to McLuhan's "probesff about modernism, civiliza tion, and culture.

On the other hand, however, the same contrast of the two correspondences reveals the one thing granted to Dudek that McLuhan probably wanted most: genuine affection, albeit fleeting (Dk/138), the kind of affection shared be- tween two ostraazed poets enduring the humiliation of social scorn and the insipid treatment of critics, among whose number Pound sometimes in- cluded McLuhan (Dk/102). Though McLuhan certainly felt he had been sim- ilarly ostracized by a bureaucracy of academics and a Protestant orthodoxy al1 his adult life (MB 51), Pound extended no such acknowledgement of this to him, suggesting that he probabiy viewed McLuhan as an established fixity (worse, an academic), much less pliable and reachable than the burgeoning Dudek. while he viewed Dudek as a creative artist (moreover, a like-minded mod- ernist poet struggling with the complexities of message and technique), he saw McLuhan as one of the journalist-c u m-critic types whose reputations are often made on the hard work of creative artists. Pound's view of critics, espe- cially those housed in academe, is made clear throughout his critical prose: "Let the critic or essay-writer disabuse himself of the idea that he has made anything. He is, if decent, fighting for certain ideas or attempting demarca- tions" (Kulchur 169). And McLuhan's acknowledgement of Pound's view of critics--indeed, as evidenced below, his frequent and outright adoption of Pound's view--suggests that McLuhan was well aware of the differences Pound would perceive in their statures:

One function of the critic is to keep the best work free from the surrounding clutter. But, in order to free the mind from the debilitating confusion, it is not enough to claim priority for excellence without considering the bulk which is inferior. To win more and more attention for the best work it is necessary to demonstrate what constitutes the inevitably second-rate, third-rate, and so on.

In 1910 in London, the words could have been the young Pound's exadly. Coming from McLuhan forty years later, however, what they reveal is an im- portant observance of the different positions he and Pound held; and, from this, a caution that McLuhan would bnng with him to the epistolary relation- ship with Pound. It is in this spirit of cautious observance, then, a caution that in no way diminishes the quality or importance of the early correspon- McLuhan and Pound begin.

* * *

As for the relationship that existed between McLuhan and Dudek, Pound's Canadian correspondents, there was little that ever developed, even though their individual associations with Pound were important for the popular- ization of literary modernism in Canada. What McLuhan contributed, via Pound's modernism, to literary criticism in this country (outlined in Mandel's The Family Romance, Hutcheon's The Canadian Postmodern, Cameron/Dixon's SCL: Minus Canadian, and Fekete's The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literay Theory from Eliot to Mc Lu han), Dudek contributed, also via Pound, to poetic invention and form. Yet McLuhan and Dudek disliked each other, in the end vehemently, a dis- Iike that bears some relevance to the McLuhan/ Pound association-

In the McLuhan/Pound letters that survive there is only one mention of Dudek (from Pound [6 December 1948]), yet in the Dudek/Pound correspon- dence there are a number of important references to McLuhan, al1 but one precipitated by Pound. The first reference, in a January 1952 letter from Pound, is Pound's association of McLuhan with the "live thought" of a new generation of academics, and, along with this, Pound's sharing of McLuhan's address with Dudek, presumably to encourage a widening of the "northern coterie" (Pound to McLuhan 20 June 1951). Dudek responded indifferently: "1 did not communicate with McLuhan but kept in touch with his writing in Canada, and I ran into him at an academic conference very soon afier" (Dkl McLuhan with "live thought" and the emerging "cohesion/ faintly appearing among profs," and further asserts Pound's respect for McLuhan in the sugges- tion that Dudek "might even get McLuhan to lead a symposium on it [on en- couraging, via a new "collective" and magazine, "maximum awareness" among the professoriate]" (D k/ 102).

Pound's clear respect for McLuhan obviously rankled Dudek, to the point where he began publishing anti-McLuhan propaganda in his own magazine, CIV/n, which began in Montreal in January 1953 and was so named after

Pound's "laconic" : "CIV / n [civilization] not a one-man job" (D k/ 103). Dudek's editorial comment on that June 1953 letter from Pound reveals his feelings about McLuhan, feelings, moreover, that Dudek communicated to Pound:

My various discussions of McLuhan in CIV/n and elsewhere were highly aitical because 1 saw him as compounding with Madison Avenue instead of making a radical criticism of illiterate culture; and also as turning away from the major arts to an ex- aggerated concern with the vaporous media, treat- ing them, rather than the traditional arts, as the shaping forces of society. The Venerable Bede might as well have turned his attention to the dunghill in AngleSaxon England, as begin the true education of his people with Latin and the Bible.

Dudek's Poundian biases are clear: the "radical criticism of. . . culture," the separation of culture into high and low arts, and the equating of media and the low expressions of popular culture with the "dunghill" al1 ring loudly of ity Pound initially admired; however, as Dudek's criticisms against McLuhan mounted, so did Pound's suspicions of McLuhan, especially in the Dudek/ Pound correspondence. Respect soon became tempered with some consternation, as the following from Pound to Dudek indicates: "Why you spose anything can be got into McLuhan's occiputt 1 don't / know" (Dk/108). Dudek, it appears, was competing against McLuhan for the affections of Pound, and with some success. (Of course, McLuhan's own rapidly develop ing critical unorthodoxy also contributed to Pound's suspiaons.)

Initially indifferent to this treatment (Pound certainly never wrok to him about Dudek's aspersions), McLuhan, with the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, was well aware of DudeKs accusations and countered with his own dismissal of Dudek's critical provincialism (GG 217). The exchange set up a series of subsequent ripostes that illuminate in their vehemence the bril- liance of what a cooperative association might have accomplished. Dudek ac- tually went as far as accusing McLuhan in 1968 of being a fascist: "[McLuhan] has gone wildly astray. He is now someone to be warned against. . . . [his] 'message' is in many ways the same that Benito and Adolph spread abroad" ("McLuhanism in a Nutshell" Open Letter 183). To his credit, McLuhan never responded publicly to this, nor to later Dudek shikes. By cornparison, Dudek certainly seemed the more ruffled and the more extreme of the two; what prompted the severity of his spite against McLuhan, beyond a jockeying for Pound's affections, is still unclear. The key point, however, is that Pound's two most significant Canadian prodigies, both pioneer purveyors of his literary modernism in this country, were themselves embittered foes. And Pound, rarely the arbiter, did not seem to care. 1948 -- The First Cycle of Letters

The first cycle of letters between McLuhan and Pound--nineteen of which survive, al1 written in 1948-began shortly after McLuhan and Ke~ervisited Pound at St. Elizabeths on 4 June 1948. McLuhan, buoyed by the visit and the signed advance copy of The Pisan Omtos that Pound had given him (Letfers of MM 193), immediately wrote to Pound upon returning to Toronto and ex- citedly pumped him for information and the answers to questions that had been percolating in his mind since his early Cambridge days. He inquired about his own favourite topics, namely those that he had discovered in the modernism of Pound: he asked about Pound's forma1 affinities with Ben Jonson, about the effects of The Cantos as Syrnbolist simultaneity, about Pound's knowledge of Joyce's anematographic technique, and, after a "hint" from Pound, about the possibility of The Canfos as extended, historical detec- tive story, modelled after Edgar Allan Poe's patterns of Dupin's sleuthing (Letters of MM 193-94). It was always McLuhan's suspicion that The Cantos was an enormous Symbolist jigsaw puzzle, inviting the cultural detective and exegete alike. Hence his questions.

One can only imagine Pound's rancour at the unorthodoxy of McLuhan's scholarship (the aforementioned "NUTS" probably sums it up); he re- sponded, nevertheless--and on his prized Italian-made letterhead ("J'AYME DONC JE SUIS")--with a cleverly bemused tact that communicated his gen- uine interest in continuing the exchange, but that also put McLuhan in his soned and certainly less convoluted than that shown during his Rome radio days only six years earlier, Pound responded to McLuhan's frenzied first letter: "You go right on writin' me letters--but don't x/pect me to answer questions-- even if answers are known" (18 June 1948). And under separate cover a few days later he added the sparse note: "What else hv. you got in print?" (21 June 1948). Pound's salvos seemed to have the desired effect, because McLuhan's subsequent letters are shorter and less harried, without what Carpenter correctly calls the frenzied "white heat" (799) that characterize the first few. If Pound had meant to bring McLuhan down a notch with his ques- tion about publishing, however, McLuhan was oblivious, answering Pound's inquiry in the next and later letters as if it had been asked in good faith. (McLuhan, at the time, was struggling with launching The Mechanical Bride, engaged in a publishing nightmare he wodd later equate with Joyce's experi- ence of launching Ulysses [Letters of MM 2291.)

Pound's interest in McLuhan's publishing record, though, is much more im- portant than it might seem at first, having its roots in Pound's own measured approach to assessing individual credibility and forming new alliances. Just as he had been wary of the young Henri Gaudier-Brzeska upon first meeting him, taunting him amicably for proof of sincerity and production (GB 44-47), so too was Pound's question of McLuhan an indication of the same caution, a strategy Pound expounds upon in an early letter to Harriet Monroe and later in his ABC of Reading. In the 1915 letter to Monroe, Pound, appropriating a critical credo from Remy de Gourmont, states that "'A man is valued by the abundance or the scarcity of his copy'" (Lefters of EP 48) and later in A BC he value:

Until you have made your own survey and your own closer inspection you might at least beware and avoid accepting opinions:

1 From men who haven't themselves pro- duced notable work.

2 From men who have not themselves taken the risk of printing the results of their own per- sonal inspection and survey, even if they are seri- ously making one. (ABC 40)

In his seemingly imocuous question of McLuhan, Pound was therefore fol- lowing his own and earlier critical measures, assessing McLuhan's suitability for serious communication (suggesting that Pound felt, at this time, rejuve- nated and ready to resume the fight, not wanting to waste time on a corre- spondent who would not prove worthy of working on his behalf), and dis- playing a mental darity in his political craftiness that would seem to suggest that he was cured of the mental anguishl confusion that caused his incarcera- tion at St. Elizabeths in the first place. From that simple question, and in the light of earlier and similar Pound tactics to effect other strategic alliances, it seems fairly certain that Pound in 1948 was quite sane, even though his epis- tolary invective might suggest otherwise. However, to understand the corre- spondence in its early stages is to understand this question of sanity that loomed for al1 in Pound's Company, McLuhan being no exception.

Two passages in parallel, one from Pound and one from his wife Dorothy, both of which were in the first group of letters sent to McLuhan, reveal this its questionable sanity. The first passage is from Dorothy (21 June 1948), the second from Pound (n.d., but probably also 21 June 1948); both detail Pound's agenda vis-à-vis how McLuhan could be of service to him (1 record Pound's letter exactly as it appears to preserve what he insisted was the "look" of the text on the page):

E.P. is more interested in agenda , than in analysis of the past. To get a few of you scholars to combine and break the deadlock on al1 live scholarship ;improve the curricu- lum by definitely insisting on a better set of 50 ( or even 100 ) books , and to cover with infamy the people who keep necessary texts unavailable even for the small body of students intelligent enough to want them.

McL/ start thinking of the NEEDED injection / AND how to get the synnge in position to shoot the medicine into the corpus viliss/ of the whole goddam shysteml slicks univs/ newsagencies and instruments of hell.

Beyond the rather unfortunate inclusion of the syringe metaphor (which Pound may have included as a joke at his own expense, as self-effacing in other words, though this is uncharacteristic), it was as if the first letters the two exchanged were largely strategic volleys that demarcated limits and toler- ances, and attempted quickly to advance agendas that were just as quickly re- canted. Perhaps this is how a11 interactions between "found" mentors and students begin. What the first few letters reveal most simply, though, is McLuhan's delight in cataloguing (almost showing-off) what he has learned from Pound and the lesser rnoderns, and Pound's renewed competence to hold his own in the advancement of his earlier "agendas," including recruit- ing others toward that end. In short, McLuhan had met and was in active new recruit. Both were quite sane in their delight at having "found" each other.

In addition to the major tonal and strategic impressions the first few letters, taken generally, make, the fint letter that each sent to the other is a fascinat- ing study in itself, especially the first letter McLuhan sent to Pound after his Washington visit. That letter in particular raises a number of points that will recur often in the ensuing exchanges and establishes not only McLuhan's in- debtedness to Pound but also his motives in engaging Pound, his obvious mentor, in correspondence.

The first and most striking point McLuhan makes in that 16 June 1948 letter to Pound is the rather forceful insistence (quite uncharaderistic for McLuhan) that Pound record his poems:

It would be of the utmost interest and value if you would make some recordings of your poems. An album of 5 or 6 discs is indicated, The machine for doing this is a light portable affair. Records initially on tape etc. An album would do more to get you a hearing than anything else. Laughlin [James Laughlin, founder of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Pound's American publisher] would surely be interested. (Letfers of MM 193)

Exposed to Pound's critical prose mostly via the early collections of essays and related compendia (for example, Pound's ''Transiator's Postscript" of Gourmont's The Nntural Philosophy of Love), McLuhan was well aware of Pound's own ideas on the value of the "musical ear." As indicated in Verbi- that musical ear for an understanding of modern poetry (VV V n-p., No. 14). In Gourmont's postscript, Pound isolates music as the generative quality in creation, saying "creative thought has manifested itself . . . in music" (P&D 208); and, in another essay in the same collection, oral rendition is desaibed by Pound as that which supersedes literal meaning: "one can hear [rneaning] when sung. 1 mean hear their words and grasp their simple meaning" ("Musicians: God Help 'Em" PM3 220). Pound's words, of course, echo those of Eliot, whose "auditory imagination" was also a well-known concept to McLuhan (Cliché 63), as was Pound's own summation of the "auditory imag- ination" as ". . . melopoeia. Cantabile. Musical ratios" (Letters of MM 202).

Was McLuhan's suggestion of a recording, then, a bit of his own strategy to ingratiate himself with Pound, whom he anticipated would be sympathetic, or was his offer one that revealed his own discornfort and what he presumed was the discornfort of others with Pound's highly elliptical poetry (and, by ex- tension, style; and, by extension, mental clarity)? One might assume the for- mer (ingratiation) if McLuhan had merely written "interest," but his addition of "value" suggests desires more directed, desires probably related in some way to the odd phraseology "to get you a hearing," which in itself is Ieft un- qualified in the letter. Was McLuhan already at Pound's defense in this first letter, suggesting that an oral rendition of Pound's literal miasma might ad- vance the argument and cause of Pound's questionable sanity? If he was, and this appears likely, then he was using Pound's own arguments about the complementarity of orality and clarity to build Pound's defense. A higher compliment could not be uttered, nor could a more direct influence ever be found. McLuhan, the clever rhetorician, was using what he leamed from Pound to build for him a defense against insanity, the phraseology "to get you a hear- ing" meaning, in this context, not to get Pound a poetic hearïng but to get him a medical one; in other words, to get him certified as sane and out of the "BUG House," his slang for St. Elizabeths. From matching the suggestion of McLuhan's offer of a recording with what McLuhan had clearly learned from Pound about the rhetoric of orality, it is possible, I think, to conclude with some surety that a powerful theme of McLuhan and Kenner's visit to St. Elizabeths was Pound's own infatuation with his incarceration, an infatua- tion that McLuhan interpreted as a plea for help. The lead in McLuhan's first letter was therefore his response in kind to his mentor's plea. It also appears evident that Pound's best-kept secret--the fact that he was at least partially sane and that his "insanity diagnosis was [the] warm coat that protected him from a harsh indictment [i.e., execution] awaiting outside St. Elizabeths' gates" (Torrey 248, 220-258)--was never shared with McLuhan. While doser Pound associates like William Carlos Williams, Archibald MacLeish, and Katherine Anne Porter were indeed privy to Pound's secret, what amounted ultimately to his defence against execution for treason, casual associates like McLuhan were presumably sutured into the put-on to buffet and lend plausibility (as McLuhan did) to its truth. There appears enough evidence to suggest, in other words, that Pound was using McLuhan to advance the presumption of his own insanity.

McLuhan himself would approve of this kind of critical sleuthing, approve specifically of working back from effects [the subsequent letter] to causes [the former St. Elizabeths visit). For McLuhan, this pattern of reversal-this mov- paradigm of "causes to effects8*--wasthe "formula" of modernism, was, more- over, the only appropriate methodology in the electric age of "total field" si- rn u ltaneity. His observation in Through the Vanishing Point that 'The cur- rent rediscovery of territorial space points dramatically to the changing sensi- bility and space orientation of the population in the electronic age" (3), fur- ther supports his contention of this shifting/reversed paradigm in late, post- literate modernism. In other words, when reality is manifest as simultaneity, the only way to apprehend any cause is first through a study of its effects. This, for McLuhan, was the finding of the modernists via the French Symbolists via Edgar Allan Poe. This, correspondingly, supports a reverse ex- egesis, working from letters to what probably was exchanged in an earlier visit.

More dues in that 26 June 1948 letter also reveal how McLuhan's desires to free Pound are sirnilarly aafted from a dose reading of Pound's early work McLuhan writes in that Ietter:

The prime difficulty of your poetry-The Cantos--so far as contemporary readers are concerned is surely the intensely masculine mode. This is an age of psychologism and womb-worship. Your clear reso- nances and etched contours are intolerable to twi- light readers who repose only in implications.

While the prophetic nature of McLuhan's observations bear some comment- Pound specifically and modernism generally are only now beginning to be studied as misogynous discourses (vide Gai1 McDonald's Learning to be Pound's politics but in his method of criticism, in what Pound himself de- scribed as an "exterïorization [of] form" (P&D 204):

There are traces of it [the brain as a mass of highly charged genital fluid, in other words "manifest masculine form"] in the symbolism of phallic reli- gions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos. (204)

As allegorical and ridiculous as Pound's ideas seem now, McLuhan was clearly using those ideas to decipher the forms and methodology of The Can tos-and using them also, articulating them in the words he knew Pound would recognize, to caution Pound about the receptivity that his forms and methods were likely to receive from an increasingly "feminized middle class" (MB 107)' a public whose opinion would largely decide Pound's fate. McLuhan knew Pound's own publishing history was rarely without contro- versy around the gender polemic He knew of Pound's steadfast support of Hamiet Shaw Weaver and Margaret Anderson's attempts to publish Joyce's Ulysses, despite its affront to the "softer sex"; he knew of Pound's well-publi- cized feuds with the female editors of the Little magazines with which he was associated (Hamet Monroe at Poetry, Dora Marsden and Weaver at the Egoist, and Jane Heap at the Little Review); and he knew that Pound himself had published a "castrato" version of Lustra in 1916 after the unabridged version resulted in "anxieties over its indecencies" (Letters of EP 133). About Pound's "iconic" male forms and attendant critical standards--what Pound termed "the hard and the soft" (Lefters of EP 133)--McLuhan was well-inforrned, and so crafted his arguments to Pound accordingly. Once again, what could moti- commentary and inquiry (and rooted again in Pound's own poetics), but de- sires to impress a mentor with lessons learned and free him from his ideolog- ical morass?

Significant beyond the way in which McLuhan courts Pound's affections and his understanding is what McLuhan targets as contributing to Pound's ideo- logical morass: not his anti-semitism or fascist leanings, but the air of mascu- line superiority and ego which inform them. That McLuhan would target Pound's misogyny as the first instance of his criticism of his mentor is more than precocious; it shows proof of McLuhan's penetrating insights and his close readings of modernism, not merely as literary aesthetic but as cultural theory. Forty years later, K.K. Ruthven, on the crest of a feminist insurgence in the Pound industry, would corroborate McLuhan's findings exactly, echo- hg McLuhan's thoughts on the "ferninized middle dass" (M B 107):

The fact that those who wrote for the principal modernist magazines in the early twentieth century tended to be male, and those who edited them fe- male, suggests that the maieutics of modernism are a feminist issue, and that the aggressive masculin- ity of a Lewis or a Hemingway, or the rnisogyny of a Hulme or an Eliot, are manifestations of a desire to establish modernism as a masculinist stand against a prevailing feminisation of culture.

(Ruthven 75)

McLuhan's clever duplicity in that first letter, however, is not without its pa- tronizing overtones, overtones which beg the question of McLuhan's own as- sessrnent of Pound's mental health at this time. Why else would McLuhan so carefully sugar-coat his offers of help? His similar dealings and correspon- bility rivalled Pound's, revealed a consistent staightforwardness with never a hint of duplicity. So where did McLuhan fa11 on the question of Pound's san- ity? In the wisdom of hindsight and much subsequent critical appraisal (most notably, studies that confirm Pound's sanity during the St. Elizabeths years- Torrey's The Roots of Treason, Laughlinfs Pound as Wuz, and James J. Wilhelm's The Lafer Canfos of Ezru Pound) it appears Pound was quite sane in his treatment of McLuhan, manipulating him, as he had manipulated oth- ers in the past, for his own gain. However, it also appears that Pound's men- tal dexterity was unnoticed by McLuhan, and that, in al1 probability, McLuhan was unconvinced of his mentor's sanity. While we will never know for sure what McLuhan thought of Pound's mental stability at the time nor his insan- ity diagnosis, it is dear from his first letter that McLuhan felt Pound had gone too far: so far that the "iconic" forms of The Cantos had to be ren- dered/ deciphered orally to recoup some sanity for their maker and so far that Pound's highly charged and lance-like metaphysical aesthetics had to be tem- pered to fit the new age's "womblike world of comfort and soft sympathy" (M B 14). To McLuhan, at least, Pound was already a relic of an earlier tirne.

In contrasting Pound and Eliot on this complementarity of aesthetics and sen- sibility, McLuhan wrote to Felix Giovanelli, his former colleague at St. Louis University: "ER: '1 write for those who are top flight inventors and creators in the arts.' T.S. Eliot: '1 croon to those who are living and partly living a Song of their remote but better selves'" (Letfers of MM 203). The key word is "croon," indicating what McLuhan thought was Eliot's greater awareness of the changing sensibility, at least Eliot's awareness of the necessity of sensibility in a healthy aesthetics: 1 nererore . . . ruuiiu lis] i5iiurcu aiiu r;iiur ID W~UCLY misunders tood. But wid ely. Old Possum [Pound's name for EIiot] was the shrewder man. And 1 dis- Iike him for his virtues,

(Letters of MM 203)

In light of this comparison, one wonders how McLuhan interpreted such re- marks by Pound as "good ideas always attacked by subversives" (21 June 1948[?])? Did that line in particular suggest, for McLuhan, a solidarity of like- minded intellectuals, as a purely objective textual analysis might infer, or did it confirm what McLuhan feared was a continuance of Pound's dangerous in- transigence, of the naive and stubborn conservative polemic that resulted in his incarceration at St. Elizabeths in the fint place? On the question of Pound's sanity we will never know exactly what McLuhan thought; on the is- sue of latitude, McLuhan dearly thought Pound had gone too far. His ready embrace of Pound's cause is proof enough that McLuhan considered that there was much work to be done, and proof also, seemingly, that Pound had actively engaged McLuhan in the cause of proving his sanity, thus perpetuat- ing the illusion, at the expense of the hapless McLuhan, that he was in fact in- sane. What we do know for sure is that the question of Pound's sanity was very much on McLuhan's mind.

Finally, at the risk of belabouring the analysis of McLuhan's first letter to Pound after returning to Toronto, the concluding paragraph of that letter bears close scrutiny, as it confirrns more of what was exchanged dunng the McLuhan/Kenner visit to Pound at St. Elizabeths and illuminates also an ernism. McLuhan's 16 June 1948 letter to Pound concludes:

I've been pondering your remark that Cantos 1-40 are a detective story. Should be glad of further clues from you. But one thing about-crime fiction that 1 have noted may or may not be apropos here. Poe in 1840 or so invented the cinema via Dupin. Dupin deals with a corpse as still life. That is, by cinematic montage he reconstructs the crime, as a11 sleuths have since done. Are Cantos 1-40 such a recon- struction of a crime? Crime against man and civi- lization? Are the entire Cantos such a reconstruc- tion at once of a continuing crime and of the collat- eral life that might have been and might still be?

The paradigm of the detective story would become a characteristic McLuhan trademark, used almost exclusively in his explication of the forms of literary modemism and as a bridge to his parallel analyses of post-literate popular cul- ture. In The Mechanicul Bride (1951), McLuhan situates the paradigm first in Poe's 1846 essay "The Philosop hy of Composition":

Poe said: '1 prefer commencing with the considera- tion of an effect.' Having in mind the precise effect first, the author has then to find the situations, the penons, and images, and the order which will pro- duce that effect and no other.

(MB 106)

McLuhan continues by explaining how the paradigm of the detective story is applicable beyond criminal analysis to art analysis--"the sleuth . . . studies the corpse in its exact layout as a great critic would examine a masterpiece of painting" (M B 106)--and, some years later in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he insistence on an "active culture" that puts "ideas into action":

It was Edgar Allan Poe who first worked out the ra- tionale of this ultimate awareness of the poetic pro- cess and who saw that instead of directing the work to the reader, it was necessary to incorporate the reader into the work. . . . Poe saw plainly that the anticipation of effect was the only way to achieve organic control for the creative process. . . . [Therefore] not only is the detective story the great popular instance of working backwards from effect to cause, it is also the form-in which the reader is deeply involved as CO-author. (GG 276-77)

The bridge between Poe's paradigm and literary modernism is first articulated in Verbi- Voco- Visual Explorations, where McLuhan equates the technique of literary modernism, specifically Eliot's "objective correlative," with Poe's forma1 innovation:

Eliot said that 'the only way of expressing emotion in the fom of art is by finding an objective correla- tive; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chah of events which shalI be the formula of that particular emotion; . . . ' That is to Say work back- wards from effect to cause. Establish the effect be- fore you know what will be the cause of that effect

This is the way detective stories are written, and the way al1 modem production is achieved.

(V V V n-p., No. 4)

Further, by making C. Auguste Dupin, the brilliant amateur sleuth, "an aes- thete" (TTVP 7)--moreover "an artist-esthete" (GG 277)--Poe, McLuhan daims, preapitated a radical metaphysical shift that now culminates in a new modirs opernndi of post-literate modernity: "The effects of new media on our sensov lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structures of our world" (IL xiv). In approaching Pound via Poe's metaphysical shift, McLuhan was articulating the rudiments of his later theory that the post-literate world is best approached (as Pound is best ap proached) by the artistic sensibility itseIf, for only that sensibility can discern and make sense of the non-dialectical in postmodernity. As Philip Marchand outlined to me in a persona1 letter, it is this method of periplum/probe--of the poet/ critic "rewriting history by the seat of his pantsn--that most readily characterizes the methodological sllnilarity in Pound and McLuhan.

To ground his complex and elusive claim of Poe's ultimate influence on the moderns, McLuhan uses Pound's well-known search for the appropriate im- age for "In a Station of the Metro" (GB 86-87) as the historical pivot around which "the reversa1 of this cultural gradient," this radical metaphysical shift, revolves (and from which, he qualifies, cornes Eliot's notion of the "objective correlative" outlined above, and Pound's notion of "absolute rhythm" [GB 841, of poetic effects that depend as much on the auditory as on the visual). The specific instance of Pound's struggle against the dialectical (and resolu- tion toward the aural) is the important point in McLuhan's explication of the shifting cultural/artistic paradigm: McLuhan found in Pound's formal strug- gles and theoretical resolutions the "equation" for how literary modernism worked, as he later admitted to Pound in a letter:

Your own tips are always exact. But they are of little help to the uninitiated. Once a man has got ont0 technique as the key in communications ifs differ- The essential point to be made in the context of this study of influence, how- ever, is not Pound's confirmation of that modemist "equation" during the St. Elizabeths visit (speafically, the detective story "tip"), but, in fact, his sugges- fion of it. Nowhere before the St. Elizabeths visit and McLuhan's subsequent letter to Pound does McLuhan espouse any of the theories detailed above, precisely those that would become his distinguishing trademark. In fact, in an article on Edgar Allan Poe published in The Sewanee Review only four years before the St. Elizabeths visit ("Edgar Poe's Tradition" 1944, reprinted in IL), McLuhan displayed no interest in Poe's forms and no awareness of the modernists' use of those forms, prefacing his article solely on content areas and on matters of "taste" as they related to Poe's rhetorical tradition.

Though there is some treatment of "a Poe problern" in that essay-a problem primarily of taste, of Poe's habit of forcing contemplation on morbidity--it is considered more at the leveI of content than at the level of forrn. Quite sim- ply, the focus on morbidity is thematically objectionable to McLuhan. To his own question, then, "Why is Poe essentially preoccupied with symbols and situations of horror and alienation?" (IL 218), McLuhan responds: "Poe brought rnorbidity into focus, gave it manageable proportions, held it up, not for emulation, but for contemplation" (220 emphasis mine). McLuhan could go no further theoretically in 1944 than hold up the "Poe problem" for con- templation, not understanding, it appears, the genius inherent in it until Pound's suggestionfremark that Cantos 1-40 might be a detective story. moved him theoretically from the consideration of content to the wider con- sideration of form, and therefore it could be argued that Pound's remark was the critical bridge that connected the "equation" of literary modernism with what was beginning to coalesce in McLuhan's mind as the detective story paradigm--the paradigm that, from Poe and the Symbolists, was the key to understanding the literary modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Joyce.

If Pound's remark had merely confirmed his pre-existent thinking, McLuhan would not have written "I've been pondering"; he simply would have agreed in turn, ignored Pound's remark completely, or used it as a jumping off point to preface his own findings, which are the normal protocols of complicity. Instead, his tentativeness over the remark points to a major Pound influence: while McLuhan certainly was innately aware of the detective story paradigm as it related to cinematic technique and the Symbolists, he did not have the language to articulate its relation, sui generis, to the forma1 experiments of literary modernism before his visit with Pound. And this marks a major-- perhaps the pre-eminent--Pound influence on McLuhan.

Alter that visit in 1948, it is likely that McLuhan, had he been asked, would have reversed his answer to the question he posed above, responding that the genius inherent in the "Poe problemM-the problem of forcing contemplation on morbidity--was, in fact, what the modems chose to "ernulate, not merely contemplate" from Poe's treatment of the seemingly profane (Le., the rnorbid, the criminal, the grotesque, etc., those very things that offended the content- oriented McLuhan in 1944). Subsequent to his "conversion" to the study of form, McLuhan must have found particularly satisfying Pound's own as- actly that "which makes the h o kk u" (SP 432); that "special moment," in other words, is the value of Poe's prose.

Thus, the real genius of the moderns, necessitating a "reversa1 of [the] cul- tural gradient" (TTVP %), was in adopting forma1 innovation to emulate the "effects" of Poe's "special moment"; in other words, to view the "Poe prob- lem," in its offensiveness (moreover, because of its offensiveness) as a solu- tion, which is, in general, the method of literary modernism: forcing con- templation/ participation through a patchwork of artistically orchestrated "effeds." That the method of "periplum/probe" as tacit compass figures here is not coincidence. This method is precisely the advance Pound details in his "metroW/imagist anecdote, specifically that "the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy" (SP 375). And in that "energy," not despite the emotive/offensive but because of it, is meaning both made and discerned. Pound and his theory of the hokk u in Gnudier-Brzeska and SP, then, are the exact reference points McLuhan uses to undentand literary modemism and its roots in Poe and the Symbolists, as he explains, using Pound's very words, some years Iater in Through the Vanishing Point:

. . . the hokku form has been called the form of 'superpositions.' It is a paratactic way of arranging objects and situations, colors and rhythms, without counteraction. It is based on the discovery that things radiate energies and create their own spaces even without the benefit of visual or lineal ties. (an approach popularized by McLuhan) that emulates the artistic in its full and rich anay of the senses.

After Pound, McLuhan never wrote again at the content level of literary analysis, and he revisited Poe's entire o e u u r e (again, it appears, from Pound's due during the St. Elizabeths visit) to attempt to uncover other important paradigms that would enhance his undentanding of modemism. He discov- ered another important one in Poe's "The Descent into the Maelstrom," one that self-reflexively encapsulated his own experience of learning from the morbidity and the profane, and one that accommodated his transition from literary critic to cultural/ media analyst. In the following, read "McLuhan" for Poe's mariner, and note also that the following passage appears opposite a self-refemng background picture that features a well-dressed and briefcase-tot- ing McLuhan surfing contentedly on an enormous tidal wave (representing one of the first instances in which McLuhan is sutured into the critical appa- ratus of his own text--such is the compass-reading of the peripatetic as defined by Pound):

In his amusement born of rational detachment of his own situation, Poe's mariner in 'The Descent into the Maelstrom' staved off disaster by under- standing the action of the whùlpool. His iwight of- fers a possible stratagem for understanding Our predicament, Our electrically-configured whirl.

(Massage 150)

"We are now obliged not to attack or avoid the strorn," McLuhan continues in another book, "but to shidy its operation as providing a means of release from Pound, the method of "[study] to oppose same" (Selected Poems of EP viii). In his second, post-Pound reading of Poe, he extrads as critical credo a forma1 paradigm for dealing with modernity that is also a pithy exemplum of his own experience of that modernity. He has moved, via Pound, from a fo- cus on causes to a consideration of effects, from a focus on content to a con- sideration of forms (both of which paradigm shifts he cannot remove himself easily from, hence the necessity of the self-reflexive praxes that begin appear- ing in his post-Pound work).

It is not surprising that McLuhan's post-Pound essays on Poe depart radically £rom the pre-Pound 1944 Poe essay. In The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry" (1951), for instance, McLuhan announces the transition he has made in the following observation:

. . . whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulating an exter- na1 environment as a means of evoking art emo- tion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the sym- bolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of con- trolling art emotion or of exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolu- tion--from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion.

(IL 157)

Quite obvious is the parailel between Pound's description of Poe's "'special moment' which makes the hokku" (SP 432) and McLuhan's description of Poe's "interior landscape": both engender a resonance that is modernism's own formula for "effect," and in so doing both radically rewrite the FORMuIa self being, again, the modus operandi of post-literate modernity, which McLuhan now announced was the aesthetic discovery of literary modemism. In the process, mimesis is recast, as a magnet recasts the rose pattern in the steel dust (this much Kenner learned from McLuhan): "Every artifact is an archetype, and the ongoing cultural recombination of old and new artifacts is the engine of al1 invention and drives the subsequent wide use of invention, which is called innovation" (G V 71).

As McLuhan corredly observed and communicated to University of Toronto colleague Harold Adams I~is,the metaphysical shift in sensibility and tech- nique that this modemist "discovery" preapitated was radical:

. . . the esthetic discoveries . . . developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats . . . have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 y ears. (Letters of MM 220)

Perhaps not as obvious but certainly apparent if one takes the broader view is the relationship between Pound's inferences regarding forms and effects and the resulting expansion of McLuhan's critical horizons. After Pound, McLuhan's critical canvas stretches broadly to include "study of the grarnmars of al1 the media at onceff (VV V n-p., No. 16). The "equation" of Pound and the modernists becomes the formula that McLuhan uses to interrogate the world, the simple cornmon denominator of al1 media being, as McLuhan recognized after Pound, its grammars or forms. Thus, the post-Pound McLuhan can confidently assert that the primary role of artists is the creation (McLuhan wrote the following in early 1967)' is made accessible and decipher- able in these very forms:

Man in outer space as yet has no means of imagin- ing the nature of his own experience in space. Until artists have provided him with adequate forms to express what he feels in space, he will not know the meaning of the experience.

(TTVP 30)

As if in response to an earlier lack, the post-Pound McLuhan often revisits the instance/exemplum of the transformation of his own critical sensibility. The following example of Picasso's self-described modemism is especially noteworthy because not only does its appearance mark one of the rare men- tions of Picasso in McLuhan's oe u ore, but Picasso's expression of his own bil- dungs concerning modemism seems to parallel McLuhan's tutelage under Poe, the French Symbolists, and Pound almost exactly--and hence its impor- tance to McLuhan:

'When I paint, 1 always try to give an image people are not expecting and, beyond that, one they rejed. That's what interests me. It's in this sense that 1 mean 1 always try to be subversive. That is, 1 give a man an image of himself whose elements are col- leded from among the usual way of seeing things in traditional painting and then reassembled in a fashion that is unexpected and disturbing enough to make it impossible for him to escape the ques- tions it raises.'

(TTVP 242) mention of Picasso's modernist technique reveals how far indeed his critical sensibility, via Pound, has evolved. Clearly McLuhan has advanced consid- erably (and in only a few years) from that 1944 essay on Poe. Before his associ- ation with Pound, it seems unlikely that he would have been able to utter his most characteristic of al1 aphorisms, "the medium is the message." And whiIe Pound may not have been the direct progenitor of that aphorism or re- sponsible solely for the radical transformation of McLuhan's critical sensibil- ity, he certainly was the most important intellectual midwife McLuhan ever had.

That first letter to Pound after McLuhan returned to Toronto, then, is not only a treasure trove of suggestion, strategy, and learning, but it is also the pivot around which McLuhan's focus and sensibility start to shift. That letter, the earlier visit, and the subsequent correspondence with Pound are also the points at which McLuhan's modernist apprenticeship coalesces and begins to expand outward into mature, independent inquiries of its own--mostly, as later letters will show, in some measure of response to Pound's "stronger" course. By contrast, the relationship and correspondence with Wyndham Lewis, while signifiant for the development of McLuhan's pop- and mass- cultural interests, was never as important or as profound as the briefer asso- ciation with Pound. Other letters exchanged between McLuhan and Pound during that first cycle of epistolary activity (1948) hold similar riches. In general, the following dis- tinct themes emerge and recur: McLuhan's acknowledgement of Eliot's debt to Pound (Letfers of MM 195) and the centrality of Pound's critical prose in the modemist enterprise (195); McLuhan's cataloguing of his debt to Pound's in- tellectual midwifery ("I've been through [Ford Madox Ford's books] for the first time" [200], "Frobenius not to be had in English in Toronto. 1s he to be had in French?" [ZOI]); and McLuhan's frequent references to Pound's prose ("ln Guide to Kulcher [sic] 1 have found al1 the help with the Cantos that any- body needs, including full light on your remark made to me in Washington that 1-40 are a sort of detective story" [199-2001, and to Felix Giovanelli "Pound's prose is precise. It has to be read very slowly. Everything he men- tions has to be read [2Ol]).

Taken generally, McLuhan's comments to Pound and to other correspondents (mostly Giovanelli) during this period of intense Pound interest reveal McLuhan's desires to embrace and share Pound's scholarship and to function as a ready ally willing to investigate if not take up Pound's frequent calls to arms. McLuhan continually appears eager to impress Pound with his knowl- edge of literary modernism and its debt to him, and equally ready to learn from his mentor: "going through Ford, and trying to read al1 that he says 1 must, has given me quite a feeling of inadequacy . . . [which] will pass by the time 1 have finished the next 200 volumes" (206). McLuhan also makes fre- quent reference to his own work and scholarship on Pound's behalf (and as a the lazier readers of Our time" (196); "1 am busy getting a Latin school started for the very young" (199); "1 am preparing a booklet . . . a bibliography of nec- essary reading in al1 the arts and sciences with sufficient commentary on each item to provide a coherent picture of when and how to use one book to en- counter another (199); "Next a Baedeker for the university frustrates. A list of books with specific indications of their kind of relevance. A Guide to Kulch. for the kind of people who rernain illiterate through the misfortunes of current educaîional misguidance" (205). These projects were modelled af- ter the End of scholarship and pedagogic intervention Pound called for in his critical prose, specifically in ABC of Reading, "How to Read," Pavannes and Divagations, The Spirit of Romance, and Guide tu Kulchur. In a letter to Felix Giovanelli in August 1948, McLuhan asked for copies of exactly these texts for his own library (Letters of MM 201), suggesting in a subsequent letter (January 1949, Letfers of MM 210) that these contained the core of Poundian thought.

The Pound book, the Latin primer, and the texts based on "the ABC of Reading method" (198), however, were never produced, which says more about McLuhan's affinity and strategies to embrace (and impress) great men than what has traditionally been considered the unfortunate result of his boundless though unfocused and undisciplined energies. When McLuhan embraced a thinkerlidea, he became enamoured of it to the point of hysteria, a condition that sanctioned myriad promises and aspirations. The association with Pound was no exception. tions; and, in what appears to be a case of transference, he began to adopt Pound's epistolary style, complete with the cocky assuredness, the puns and phonetic spellings, and the caustic invective. The normally sedate and well- mannered McLuhan, to this point free of conspiracy fears, sounds distinctly uncharacteristic in the following polemics against poet and critic Yvor Winters and anonymous pubiishers of literary magazines (both, incidentally, favourite Pound targets):

I've had to write about Winters because of his views on Eliot. Winters is a naive, unconscious Kantian who can place everybody but himself. I'm going to place him very hard. Kantian esthetics . . . are unconsciously behind al1 American critical ac- tivity . (Letfers of MM 204)

Curious isn't it how almost the only qualification for those hvirps associated with literary mags in our century is complete ignorance. And yet, perversely, the public regards them as ever so knowing. Result, current views about you and [moderns] te tally unrealistic. Hard to account for the huge dis- crepancy between the equipment of yourself, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and the totally inferior equipment of those engaged in promoting or discussing you.

McLuhan suddenly and in a spirit of uncharaderistic vehemence seems eager to take up any case that involves a defense of the modems. If Pound is not behind this in substance, then certaidy he is in style, for Pound's approach was to meet every opposition, no matter how slight, as a tangible threat. McLuhan's adoption of this attitude is clearly visible in his developing intel- unlike Pound's, McLuhan's mental health would also suffer for this attitude. He would write to Giovanelli in late 1949: "This business is beginning to affect my health. Sheer rage and frustration 1st declared itself physically at your apt. when 1 arrived with that 'headache.' A kind of 'heart' condition as- sociated with that sarne rage and 'headache' occurs whenever 1 think about Evelyn [Shrifte, an editor "fumbling" over The Mechanical Bride]" (Letter5 of MM 215). The influence of Pound's style was not value-neutral or without its high costs for McLuhan.

The 1948 McLuhan/ Pound correspondence continued quite congenially until the appearance of two passages in separate McLuhan letters, the first of which raised Pound's ire, the second of which pressed Pound into a response that would defled some of the momentum McLuhan had gained from his study, via Pound, of the rnoderns-and serve ultimately to cool the correspondence. The first passage is in a 1,5July 1948 letter from McLuhan to Pound and broaches for the first tirne McLuhan's Catholicism. Presumably to soften its introduction and appease an obviously contrary-minded Pound, McLuhan, again the clever rhetorician, cautiously introduces Catholicism by announc- ing another's findings of the affiinities of "Confucianism and the Benedictine rule":

The present abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Saint- André in Belgium is a Chinese . . . former minister of foreign affairs for China about 1895 - 1906. In his Soilvenirs et Pensées . . . he speaks of the deep affinity between Confucianisrn and the Benedictine ruIe-- sense of the family in that rule especially. The sense of work and studies- Also of close relation between Gregorian and Chinese music and language. . . . To know what's going on. The devil of a job in isolation. -W... Y""" rw-r" ------J I them there to talk. To think. To write-

Considering Pound's last wish for burial--to be brought, as mentioned earlier, to the Church of St. George, a Benedictine monastery--McLuhan introduc- tion of Catholicism via the Benedictines is somewhat prophetic, if only in re- gard to Pound's death-bed wish. In 1948, however, Pound was not impressed with McLuhan's letter, which he interpreted as a rather blatant attempt to lure him into a Catholic coterie, specifically McLuhan's circle of "10 compe- tent people." Pound's response was to exdude McLuhan from his own cov- eted circle, rhetorically of course, implying that the real literary work worth doing was done by les jeunes in the early decades of the century: "The penalty you pay fer not readin grampaw's works when written instead of with 30 year tirne lag" (26 August 1948). Pound's exdusionary retort, pencilled heavily on one page (and thus indicating some vitriol), effedively and once again put McLuhan in his intelledual place. The sting of Pound's remark was that it made McLuhan feel like an outsider, one poorly suited to carry on the mod- ernist enterprise, which is what he obviously envisioned for himself. McLuhan would not write of Catholicism again, at least to Pound, for several y ears.

Finally, a passage in a 16 August 1948 letter to Pound effectively brought the first cycle of letters to a halt. Seemingly innocuously, McLuhan wrote:

One thing I've discovered about al1 contemporary readers. Each one has a single reading pace. The books each one likes (understands) are just those 3UllIF YQ6C3 JIIVUIU WL ILUU v LL y C~AW WWLJ YI.- 1-1 J -- ten. This is an unconscious effect of mechanism. People really do think of themselves as specialized machines nowadays. 'Thatfs just my speed' is a most revealing remark. (Letters of MM 200)

This was McLuhan's first admission in the letters to Pound of his interest in the intersection of rnechanization and popular culture. In his earlier discus- sion of The Mechanical Bride (30 June 1948, Letters of MM 194)' he had made no reference to the assimilation of the repeated patterns of typography in the human unconscious, which is the major argument the book advances and which was to becorne a fundamental McLuhan tenet--indeed, the pre-emi- nent McLuhan "discovety." Instead, McLuhan described the book to Pound as foremost a cultural study, one that addressed some of Pound's own favourite themes: "one job on current ads, comics, gallup polls, press, radio, movies etc. etc. is to be brought out late this year by Vanguard Press. Popular icons as ideograms of complex implication" (Letters of MM 194). Even McLuhan's description of the book--"popular icons as ideogramsm--was dressed in a language that would be purposefully meaningful to Pound.

To the first real introduction of McLuhan's major finding and life's work, Pound wrote cryptically:

The accident fr/ Aristotle [ from Aristotle] has made an ass of self [McLuhan] studying error.

You waste time on mec. [mechanization]

why not get the few right answers once you get that -- do you go explaining why Jimmie Fedder [Ers diminutive for John Doe] says = 7 ,or =3.

(23 August 1948)

The next day Pound wrote again, just as diredly:

Yes, yes a condition which it is put to you [to] remedy -

(24 August 1948)

Pound's response to a seemingly innocuous paragraph was no light criticism, as McLuhan, familiar with Pound's frequent anti-Aristotelian diatribes, would have immediately understood. In Pavannes and Divagations, Pound asks Aristotle in the persona of Anacreon: "How many plump books have you written on obscure matters, which perhaps even you yourself do not un- derstand very well?" (114). And in Guide to Kulchur, Pound equates Aristotelian inquiry with the rise of critical objectivity and non-involvement, the provinces of the academic dilettante: "Amy, rotted by preceding half cen- tury of mere talk, mere university blather . . . naturally the id01 of, or bait for, professorial dilettantes" (Kulchur 312). McLuhan, then, would have read Pound's criticism as a harsh indidment, one that placed him in the Company of the much despised "hired fools" who populate the "beaneries" [universities] (Kulchiir 344): "The modem and typical prof holds his job be- dictment was that in analyzing the condition of negativity (in studying error, as Aristotle had) and not remedying it (seeking to uncover the instances of ac- tive culture, exact definitions, positive influencelinvention), McLuhan too was avoiding the thesis and perpetuating an Aristotelian-like obfuscation at the expense of the more desirable and less convoluted neo-platonist ap proach. As Pound wrote in his cultural Baedeker:

1 believe even the most rabid anti-platonist must concede that Plato has repeatedly stirred men to a sort of enthusiasm productive of action, and that one cannot completely discount this value as life force. (Kulchur 347)

Pound's indictment, in short, was that conditions should be remedied, not analyzed. Some years later (in 1952), Pound would articulate his position di- rectly in a letter to McLuhan, and suggest, when doing so, that McLuhan's debt in choosing his critical ground was to Wyndham Lewis:

Confucian Anschauung / go for the RIGHT answer dont bothering arguing with other people's errors/

W.L. [Wyndham Lewis] by dealing with partic/ bnt/ and frog inanities and pewk DOES limit the interest in his work / on part of intelligent pbk/ BUT need of fecal analysis in medicine / 'taint the WHOLE /

Pound's response to McLuhan's ground of study (the effects of mechanical repetition/ process on post-Gutenberg culture) directly challenged McLuhan's McLuhan, since the provenance of that critical ground was rooted almost solely in Pound's modernism. The result was that for a period of almost six rnonths McLuhan stopped corresponding with Pound, began criticizing his narrowness in letters to others ("it has taken me a long time to take stupidity and indifference for granted as a universal. . . . Pound has never reached that point" [Letters of MM 203J), and when he did resume the correspondence with Pound he began with a letter to his wife Dorothy, apologizing later for letting his "epistolary socks sag" (206). McLuhan was clearly set back.

While interesting in the context of their assoaation, the first instance of divi- sion between the two is more interesting, 1 think, when taken in the larger context of McLuhan's own evolving critical apprenticeship. The division in 1948 shows how far McLuhan had indeed advanced beyond Pound's critical prose. In 1946 and 1947, when McLuhan was reading Pound's critical prose very closely and very literally, his cntical imperative was deadedly more in- terventionist and less analytical. He wrote in January 1946 to Clement McNaspy, SJ., a former colleague at Saint Louis University,

points of reference must always be made. That is, the examples of real art and prudence must be seized . . . as paradigms of future effort. . . . Hutchins and Adler [University of Chicago founders of the Great Books programme] have part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates.

(Letters of MM 180)

He also wrote of "stirrings, however dim, of a genuine culture" (Letters of MM 184) and of that genuine "culture . . . alone confer[ing] relevance" (186). former student at Saint Louis University, was to bring to light the "developed sensibility in contemporary art" contra the "crippling condition of most pre- sent-day Thomists" (Letters of MM 190), specifically that which treated mere analysis as a suffiaent agent of change. McLuhan's critical imperative was de- cidedly more Poundian before he met the man than after. It is quite probable to infer from this apparent paradox that while Pound's comment on his de- veloping ground of study (the effects of mechanical repetition/process on post-Gutenberg culture) may indeed have been a serious setback for McLuhan at the outset, Pound's comment was also instrumental in launching McLuhan's independence from his mentor. And so again, the association with Pound marks not only the coalescing of McLuhan's modernist appren- ticeship, but also, and perhaps more importantly, McLuhan's departure from Pound's "strongef course. Influence shows itself as much in breaking free of mentorship as in embracing it unwavenngly in the first place-such is the pat- tern observable in McLuhan's 1948 association with Pound.

1951-53 - The Second Cycle of Letters

From the fa11 of 1948 until early 1951 the McLuhan/Pound correspondence was at best sporadic. Few letters were shared and those few were brief and more formal than usual. Both Pound and McLuhan, however, were busy and distracted during this time: Pound, in February 1949, had received the first Bollingen Prize for poetry hom a distinguished group of Fellows in Arnerican Letters (T.S. Eliot's New Critical Mafia, as they came to be known), for which McLuhan was still struggling with editors to launch the then much-revised The Mechanical Bride. 1949 and 1950 were frustrating years for both.

When their correspondence did resume again with some regularity it was due largely to McLuhan's continued interest in Pound and his eagerness to engage Pound in intellectual exchange. Always the skillful rhetorician, McLuhan began his first 1951 letter to Pound with the carefully selected words: "I think this vol. will do much to get your poetry read. Kenner's book will do something too" (Letters of MM 217). McLuhan was referring, first, to D.D. Paige's The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907 - 1941 (1950) and, second, to Hugh Kenner's The Poe@ of Ezra Pound (1951), which bears the important dedication to McLuhan previously mentioned.

When taken in the context of other references to Ke~erand the line in a February 1949 letter to Pound, "Kemer and I plan to work together again this swnmer and hope to get something out" (Lettus of MM 211), the appearance of the Kenner book and its dedication could not help but wam Pound to McLuhan. Perhaps here was the corrective--the remedy supra analysis--that Pound himself had called for in his earlier indictment of McLuhan's critical ground. Certainly Kenner's book was a tremendous risk--as was Paige's (Norman 434)--and it did indeed stimulate Pound studies, precipitating a flood of critical activity that continues unabated today. That McLuhan, in Pound's mind, was at the centre of this, perhaps its most important mover, is the key point. (Further, it is not unreasonable to speculate that in the Kenner/ McLuhan relationship Pound saw the earlier Laughlin/Pound or the portant being the fruitfulness of the associations for the students.)

Whatever Pound did envision, he again resumed friendly correspondence with McLuhan in 1951; McLuhan, in clearly working on his behalf, had re deemed himself. In McLuhan and Kemer at preàsely this time, Pound envi- sioned, via the credibility of active scholarship, a way out of the Bollingen controversy. As he wrote to Kemer and McLuhan (under the same cover) in 1951: "A group has got to speak out. . . . A dozen NAMES might be gathered. Must NOT give any hint of source of impulse. Must be from people not im- plicated in ANYthing. [Allen] Tate, [Conrad] Aiken, [?] West, as well as McL/ and Km/'' (15 June 1951). McLuhan was suddenly as important to Pound in 1951 as Pound had been to McLuhan in 1948.

This reciprocal dependency, though, did not deflect from McLuhan's need to impress upon Pound his knowledge of modernism or his desire to continue to work on Pound's behalf, nor did it deflect from Pound's legendary and con- tinued irascibility. McLuhan continued to phrase his observations in lan- guage he knew Pound would understand-as in his critique of publishers as "homosexuals who have a horror of any writing with balls to it" (Letters of MM 217) and in his touting, as Pound had in Kulchur (349), of techni- cians/engineers as the true modern inventon (Letters of MM 217-18). For his part, Pound continued to respond with characteristic vehemence: "WHEN the hell are yu pseudo profs going to start reading a Iittle history instead of playing about with blue-china ornaments for the what-not? (20 lune 1951). The latter response, while establishing Pound's continued intransigence and rather indelicate handling of his few allies, also sheds important light on his tion "[Have you] power to hire?" 129 December 1949)) that a group of Chinese priests were interested in establishing a college in Canada, Pound replied: "doubt pnests willingness' [sic] to do anything re/ Confucian studies, and to hell with other approaches to China" (20 June 1951). Even after five years of incarceration, Pound's response illustrates that his narrow authoritarianism was as much intact in 1951 as ever: the study of history must ultimately ad- vance Pound's own great men, as the study of Chinese history must ulti- mately advance what Noel Stock termed Pound's "uncritical acceptance of what [he] believes to be a Confucian view of history" (Reading the Cantos 63). From Pound's perspective, nothing less than a Confucian approach to China would do, even if that approach continued to include what Chang Yao-hsin terms the unhealthy racial tendencies that marked the cultural ethos of both Pound and Conhicius (Ezra Pound: The Legacy of Culture 10810).

By the second cycle of letters, the conundmm of being a Pound devotee was well behind McLuhan' though. He accepted Pound's narrowness as he ac- cepted his brilliance. The primary differences in the two groups of letters, then, are to be found in McLuhan's developing brashness and his growing indifference to Pound's effusiveness. He maintains his clear respect for Pound, but seems eager also (and for the first time, really) to advance rather than apologize for his own theories. While cognizant, for example, of Pound's wish to focus energies on and through small literary magazines ("IF 3 or 6 men wd/ AGREE to clean up a small number of papers/ they cd/ at least look forward to grtr/ cleanliness" [O6 December 1948]), McLuhan begins in 1951 to suggest alternatives to effecting similar communication and action: ~..YI"~.~I" ..m.- b,. ,. , .. A .-. -,------ous characters personally known to me, and to let them retype and pass on sheet to anybody they know and / or to feed back comments, idiograms [sic] etc.

Object of sheet to open up intercommunication between several fields. To open eyes and ears of people in physio, antluopology, history . . . to rele- vant developments in the arts which concern them so that they in turn can contribute their newest in- sights to the arts. (Letters of MM 218)

Though Pound wrote much and encouragingly of interdisciplinary study--in Kulchur he writes "Does any really good mind ever 'get a kick' out of study- ing stuff that has been put into water-tight compartments and hermetically sealed?" (32)--he never practiced nor advocated the breadth of study McLuhan's method suggested. Pound's interdisciplinary approach was rather an interlinguistic/intertextual one, as he outlines in ABC:

If [the teacher] knows Guido's Donna Mi Prega as well as 1 now know it, meaning microscopically, he can still get a new light by some cross-reference, by some relation between the thing he has examined and re-examined, and some other fine work, simi- lar or dissimilar. (85)

McLuhan's suggestion of method, then, was a distinct foray that distanced him from his mentor, that was articulated to Pound with little concern to its reception, and that would find concrete form in his Dm Line, "media logs," and other incidental "mimeographed sheets" that started to circulate widely. Collectively, these compendia became Explorafions: Studies in Culture and erratic typography and layout of Pound's letters. McLuhan was clearly starting to manufacture his own responses and forms, but after Pound's models, which is important to remember, as is the fact that much of what critics cal1 "McLuhanacy" (radical departure from conventional norms) can also be traced back to Pound.

Another example of the changed McLuhan in the second cycle of letters is ob- servable in his sudden and unexplained references to Aquinas, another his- torical figure about whom Pound had written disparagingly and extensively. In the D.D. Paige collection of Pound letters that McLuhan referred to enthu- siastically, Pound calls Aquinas "A bad influenceJ' and the "Wrong type of mind" (Letters of EP 339), and in Kwlchur Pound states simply "'1 merely think him unsound'" (165). The clarity of Pound's appraisals of the "unsoundness" of Aquinas appears vividly against the badcdrop of sudden rather convoluted references to Aquinas by McLuhan: first, in McLuhan's strained parallel between Aquinas and medieval usury--"McLuhan has corn- sidered [sic] usury and noted certain obsessions of his contemporaries which make it endemic. Always struck by Aquinas's definition of incest as 'avarice of the emotions.' . . . Incest the impulse of the threatened patriarch. Usury the impulse of the fearful citizen" (Letters of MM 219)--and, second, in McLuhan's equally shained parallel between Aquinas and the ideogrammic method: "Scholastic article forrn as used by Aquinas is ideogrammic. Each ar- ticle a short intellectual drama. Only Aquinas ever got it into that form" (Letters of MM 218). a connection with Pound's own statement about Aquinas's forma1 "Gestalt" in the important "Cavalcanti" essay (LE 188), the uncharaderistic lack of clar- ity in McLuhan's two metaphors suggests that he was foregrounding Aquinas at the expense of some clarity, using Aquinas, in other words, to prove a point and perhaps provoke a reaction. In doing so, McLuhan was announcing some independence from the dogma of Pound. For his part, Pound re- sponded: "suggest that McL procedure is arcyFarcy / whether poisoned by Thos d' Aquin or some other / i.e. seeking category FlRST / and particular af- ter/" (20 July 1952). Pound's criticism, again, was that McLuhan, in privileg- ing the general over the particular, was advancing the "fugg" of academic scholarship. By the second cycle of letters, however, McLuhan was no longer deterred by Pound's disapproval.

Instead, he was eager to demarcate his intellectual territory--admitting to Pound, "1 am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a pri- vate arsenal with every intention of using it" (Letters of MM 227)-and eager also to reassert his own critical ground, precisely that which Pound had ear- lier attacked. He must have wntten the following to Pound, then, with some relish:

Consider the effed of modem machinery in impos- ing rhythm on human thought and feeling. Archaic man got inside the thing that terrified him--tiger, bear, woif-and made it his totem god. To-day we get inside the machine. It is inside us. We in it. Fusion. Oblivion. Safety. Now the human ma- chines are geared to smash one another. You can't shout warnings or encouragement to these ma- chines. First there has to be a retracing process. A reduction of the machine to human form. Circe LVU6lLbA. (Leffersof MM 227)

These kinds of assertions are everywhere present in the McLuhan Ietters from 1951-53. And Pound's response, curiously, was not annoyance, as one might expect after his first reaction to McLuhan's critical ground, but an emerging tolerance and even respect. In a letter of 27 June 1951, for example, Pound put McLuhan ont0 James Craig LaDrière at the Catholic University of America. LaDriGre, McLuhan, and others (induding founders Thomas David Horton and the radical John Kasper) became advisory members of the

"Square $" Series, which published works that Pound considered to be essen- tial for public consumption, but that would not be issued, for any number of reasons, by established publishers. Pound also began to steer McLuhan's pub- lishing, suggesting journals and magazines--"Vigil," "Rural Economy," "World Review," and "Social Crediterr'--that might accept his work (none did). And anticipating what would be McLuhan's reception by the established literary community, Pound began offering McLuhan bits of political and strategic counsel, for example: "McL/ needn't sign every alarm he cries" (6 December 1952) and "Having started serious analysis of imbecility currentl Mc might consider NEED of periodical means of communication. Swabey is at . . . Port Perry, Ontario. . . . we NEED ( anybloodyHOW ) more communica- tion/ less sleep at switches an bitches" (26 December 1951). Pound even ven- tured as far as cautiously endorsing, if only at some distance, the dogrna McLuhan was associated with: "[?] reports a Domenican [Dominicanj re/ church being useful while it DEFINED its bloody terms , and sloshing there- after" (26 December 1951). That is as close as Pound ever came to endorsing orthodox religious dogma, and McLuhan would have known it, just as he crafting exact definitions.

Pound is most succinct on the need for exact definitions in "The Analects"

(Confucius), where he summarizes the wisdom of the Chinese ideogram and the "anthology of 300 [Chinese] poems" as that which "can be gathered into the one sentence: Have no twisty thoughts" (Confucius 197). Pound puts this need for exactness "in the care of the damned and despised litterati," whose value is measurable in how they maintain "the very cleanliness of the tools" (LE 21). In the important "How to Read" essay, Pound continues that history teaches that when "the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of soaal and of individual thought and order goes to pot" (21). Likewise, critics should "go in fear of abstractions" (LE 5), and readers should "throw out al1 critics who use vague general terms (LE 37). Rather, the value of crïtics, like the value of writers, is measureable in the force of their plea for and practice of just such a cleanliness: 'The job of the serious writer is to dissociate the meaning of one word from that of some other which the pore [sic] boobs think means the same thing" (Letters of EP 286). For Pound, as K.K. Ruthven observes, 'To 'cal1 things by their right names' was . . .a critical obligation which began as an aesthetics of the mot juste and broadened into the Confucian ethic of cheng ming" (136). Pound's question of McLuhan, then-"CAN McL/ assist in orga- nizing police work to prevent misues [misuse] of basic terms [?]" (5 July 1952)- -is yet another indication of McLuhan's increasing importance to Pound's agenda, an importance that culminates in Pound inviting McLuhan into the inner circle of "serious characters": (5 July 1952)

To his earlier question--"Ha$ McL/ got the guts to organize a manifesto" (15 June 1951)--Pound, mid-way through the second cycle of letters, would surely have answered YES! In McLuhan, Pound was beginning to believe he had an ally ready to take on the "obfuscation" and "fugg" (Kulchur 31, 106) of aitical and dtural decadence.

What must have truly astounded McLuhan, however, was Pound's rare en- dorsement of his writing, speàfically Pound's approval of McLuhan's assess- ment of "Grampa": "turning back to Russel's [sic] Wreathe / find McL/ pleasantly coherent in cf/ most of the rest . . . I have never yet been able to read after tasting" (5 July 1952). Pound was referring to Peter Russell's edition of Examination of Ezra Pound: A Collection of Essays (1950), in which McLuhan's "Pound's Critical Prose" fist appeared. McLuhan's essay begins with his now familiar iteration of modernism's (specifically Eliot's) debt to Pound and continues by justifying Pound's "impatience" as that which is "everywhere associated with passion for technical excellence" (IL 77), thereby associating Pound and his style/ technique with the technological revolution and concomitant rise in the need for precision that swept the early decades of the twentieth century. On the issue of debt, though, McLuhan is particularly insightful, which no doubt accounted for much of Pound's approval:

. . . while Joyce, Yeats, and Mr. Eliot have never stinted their tributes to [Pound] for his direct effect on their work, no critical comment has so far risen coula De evaluarea. (IL 79)

McLuhan's many critical "comments" (including Kenner's book, which was the first tangible product of those "comments") place McLuhan, as 1 have said earlier, at the genesis of Pound studies. But other subtleties and a web of rarely-before-recognized connections also exist that place McLuhan at the scene of the burgeoning Pound industry in the 1950s. Besides Kenner, two other important Poundians were associated with McLuhan long before they published on Pound. In a letter to the business guru Peter Drucker in 1966, McLuhan mentions "a very able young man in Zurich who has translated the Gutenberg Gnlaxy into German" (Lettms of MM 338). That young man was Max Nanny, who would also translate McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and CO-translateUnderstanding Media--both into German--in the late 1960s. More to the point, however, after his association with McLuhan, Niimy would weave McLuhan's concepts of electric "total field" theory and acoustic involvement/simultaneity into a book on Pound's aversion to di- alebical logic--Ezra Pound: Poefics @ an Electric Age (1973). In a private let- ter to me, Namy admitted that the experience of McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy "became the 'before and after book.'" He also intimated that McLuhan's influence changed the focus of his post-doctoral research at Yale in 1962 and 1963 from "Pound's relationships with the visual arts" to Pound's extension of the definition of the image to include the aural. McLuhan's work, in other words, helped Nanny approach Pound by ear rather than by eye, and helped Pound critio, in the broader context, to extend the poetics of acoustic space beyond the mere sound of Pound's verse to its very typology. (in the McLuhan Collection, National Archives of Canada) detail the extent of McLuhan's influence on Nanny's later work on Pound. Both passages were written before Nanny's seminal work on Pound, and both, if the Kennerl McLuhan association is not convincing enough, should make the Pound lndustry sit up and take notice of McLuhan's seminal position at the start of Pound scholarship:

Reading Pound's writing through your conceptual glasses has been quite a revelation. My work there- fore will have a double-barrelled effect: It will try to elucidate the oral nature of Pound's work, poetics, personaiity and thought. . . . But at the same time the validity of your insights will be confirmed from another, purely literarf angle. 1 only hope 1 shall come up to your standards. (n.d .)

Whether the people will swallow the stuff [about Pound's orality] without or with having read your book, is of course another matter. 1 shall try to summarize your insights at the outset. . . . Whether they like it or not, I am going to wnte it.

(3 June 1963)

While Pound's poetty, specifically his theory of "Imagism," has sometimes been thought of by those whom Pound himself calls "diluters" (ABC 52) as visual topos and the beginnings of "concrete" representation--the term "image," of course, purports visual dimension and stress--Pound conceived of the Image as proximate to the "absolute rhythmf' (GB84) of the "VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rush- ing" (GB92). The third Irnagiste tenet in particular, "as regarding rhythm," phrase, not in sequence of the metronome" (LE 3), but in the "cornplex" of "an instant of time" (LE 4)--moreover, in "the word beyond formulated lan- guage" (GB 88). McLuhan helped Nanny, then, interpret Pound's Imagism in precisely the way Pound would have wanted, as necessarily acoustic, privileg- ing the potency and entelecheia of metaphor and metonym over the visual, fragmented, and typographie patterns of the "metronorne," the diachronic predictability of an either/or topos. In an unpublished letter (27 July 1973) shown to me by Namy, McLuhan offen the following insight about just such a rich orchestration of effects:

Visual man is unaware that visual space is finure minus pround. The symbolists were precisely the ones who broke through this visuai structure into the acoustic structures of figure/ground. Pound is always &pue/ around,- always concerned with the public and the effects and changes to be introduced into that public. (private letter to the author)

It is not entirely surprising, then, that much of Namy's later work on Pound is also done within just this Jakobsonian bipolar framework, advancing the supposition, after McLuhan's clues, that "Pound's mental make-up and predilections as well as his innovative strategies of reforming an excessively metaphoric poetic tradition pushed him close to the metonymic pole" (MCV: EP 77). As McLuhan would have observed, acoustic space is multidimen- sional, therefore accommodating al1 manner of representation, the metaphoric and the metonymic, the diachronic and the synchronic, cliché and archetype. It appears Nanny not only understood what McLuhan was saying, but also imported McLuhan's insights into his own practical criticism, Another McLuhan influence on the birth of Pound studies surfaces first in a letter to Walter J. Ong in early 1962. The letter urges Ong not to neglect 'Donald Davie. . . [who] was at Santa Barbara for a year" (Letfm of MM 285). McLuhan was one of three general editors-along with Richard 3. Schoeck and Ernest Sirluck--of the series Patterns of Litera y Criticisrn (1965-74),to which Davie, at McLuhan's request, contributed the first collection of essays in 1965. The significance of the McLuhan/Davie association in the early 1960s, though, is mostly in the groundbreaking work Davie did on Pound, specifi- cally Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964). Along with Kenner's book on Pound in 1951, Davie's is the other most important pioneering work on Pound; and, like Kennefs book, Davie's was completed in some proximity to McLuhan. And while McLuhan's actual contributions to Davie's book are unknown and probably minor--if Poundians have made little of the Kennerf McLuhan connedion vis-à-vis Pound, they have made nothing of the Davie/McLuhan connection--Davie's own unpublished letters to McLuhan and his words of adcnowledgement in Poet as Sculptor do speak indirectly of McLuhan's involvement in the Pound industry (if only with re- gard to his tutelage of Kenner):

It is dispiriting to have to admit that the study of Ezra Pound's writings, if it has moved out of the pioneer- ing stage, has only just done so. At any rate anyone who now offers to write about Pound camot but be aware of how much he is indebted to previous stu- dents who have broken the ground. 1 . . . am under particular obligation to . . - Hugh Kenner for The Poetry of Ezra Pound.

(Poet as Sculptor v) Not only must McLuhan be placed in the Company of Kenner, Davie, Nanny, and John Espey (Ezra Pound's Mauberley: a study in composition 1955), the pioneers of Pound studies, but he must be placed first among them, even though his published work on Pound is light by cornparison. Rather, McLuhan's contribution and his reciprocal influence was in calling for (and oveneeing) just treatment of one of the century's most important-and, in the late 40s and early 50s, the most critically neglected--modernist. The point raises a fascinating trope: while McLuhan dearly would not have evolved in- tellectually as he did without Pound, would Pound have evolved, in the tex- tual/critical guise we now have him, without McLuhan? Herein lies the clue to the mamage/ complementarity of primasr and secondary activities, of artist and critic as Pound envisioned them, working collaboratively toward "the valid" (ABC 192). McLuhan and Pound were both, then, and seemingly on each other's behalf, present at the intellectual birth of the other.

The approval that McLuhan enjoyed from Pound continued through to the end of the second cycle of letters, though this has been generally disputed by the few critics, mostly biographers, who have treated the relationship between the two. After Carpenter (799),the critical consensus seems to be that the McLuhan/Pound correspondence ended after McLuhan's accusations against Pound of collusion in secret societies. However, a careful examination of the correspondence leading up to McLuhan's accusation reveals otherwise. The surviving evidence suggests that Pound corroborated McLuhan's findings about secret societies and that McLuhan, contrary to Pound's wishes, stalled therefore a misconception that Pound scolded McLuhan for his accusation; in fact, he championed McLuhan's observation for what it revealed about McLuhan's developing critical sensibility. The surviving evidence after McLuhan's February 1953 accusations suggests that, if anything, Pound ex- tended what had become his increasing approval for McLuhan's exposure of "the fugg" of "my genera tion and fis" (5 March 1953).

In al1 that has been written about hirn, McLuhan's interest in the occult is rarely mentioned, mostly because of the delicacy of the subject-McLuhan himself admitted in 1954 that "1 can find nobody here who can or will discuss [it]" (Letters of MM 244)-and also because McLuhan never developed his in- terest in the occult into a cohesive ideological position (but neither did Pound, for that matter). McLuhan's occult interests were incidental and re- lated mostly to his reading; those interests rarely infiltrated his books and ar- ticles, and when they did they were usually parts of wider treatments, and so only indirectly related to the esoterica of the mys terium. Mostly, it was his deep Catholic faith and his fascination with cultural transitions and ideologi- cal shifts that grounded his interest in the occult, as William Toye, one of the editors of McLuhan's letters, suggests (Toye's is the only sustained elucidation of McLuhan's occult interest that 1 have corne across):

In the early 1950s McLuhan's interest in Renaissance and Neo-Augustan literatures (e.g. Pope and Swift, who were interested in Rosicrucianism and Masonry), as well as modem iiterature, led him to undertake research into the effeds of esoteric thought on the arts. Tracing the symbolism and ntuals that were a means of trans- mitting gnostic and pagan religious thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he became fasci- 111 LIlC LIdllSlLlUII LIU111 LIIC l\Clla133aii~c ru riir nbb vr Reason, and with the continued presence of these themes and associated liturgies and symbols in modern art and literature-as reflected in such works as Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses. As a Roman Catholic, McLuhan suspected that 'secret societies,' and 'secret doctrines8--associ- ated wi th gnosticism, Rosicrucianism, and Masonry--persisted among élites in the twentieth century. (Letters of MM 235, n. 1)

Before the early 1950s' McLuhan displayed more an awareness of than an in- terest in the occult. In a 1938 letter he speculated that "the real villains" in Europe before the second war were not the fascists "but the Cornintern [a global communist organization], the free masons and the international opera- tors who have their headquarters in Prague" (Letters of MM 97). McLuhan was reading Wyndham Lewis very closely at this time, espeaally Lewis's criti- cal works-The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927)- which are full of occult speculations that expose the dangers of rampant "freemasonry" in modern art and soaety. His occult interests in the late 30s, therefore, were more a parroting of Lewis's than the beginnings of a whole- sale investigation.

McLuhan's next recorded expression of interest in occult matters was in asso- ciation with Joyce. In May 1946, he wrote to Felix Giovanelli of being "a bit startled to note [that the] last page of Finnegan [Finnegans Wake] is a render- ing of the last part of the Mass. Remembered that opening of Ulysses is from 1st words of the Mass. The whole thing an intellectual Black Mass" (Letters of MM 183). As with his reading of Lewis, McLuhan made no more (or at least published nothing) of his identification of occultism in les jeunes. What is Giovanelli only days before he first met Hugh Kenner in June 1946. It is probable to assume that Kenner, first and foremost a Joyce enthusiast at that time, would therefore have heard much from McLuhan about Joyce's use of occult allusions in Ulysses and Finnegans Wuke; yet Kenner to this day has written nothing, with the exception of his comments on Mead's Apollonius and McLuhan's fear of a Freemason-sponsored contract on his life (Mnzes 297), about the occult and les jeunes, nor about McLuhan's identification of such. To give Kenner the benefit of the doubt, though, it was really only in association with the private Pound correspondence that McLuhan's interests in occult matters began to coalesce, and his most sustained commentary on occultism occurs not in that Pound correspondence but in an October 1954 Iet- ter to Walter Ong (Letters of MM 2434). McLuhan's treatment of the occult is therefore scant and scattered, existing almost solely in relation to his associ- ation with Pound, Lewis, and his few close Catholic confidants.

When McLuhan first broached the subject of the occult with Pound, they had been corresponding for some three years. Nevertheless, McLuhan's first ref- erence to the occult was articulated in his typical cloaked fashion, a stratagem that usually attended his trepidation in addressing a subjeb. McLuhan wrote Pound in July 1951:

Haven't read Frobenius German work but am curi- ous in view of some recent books to know whether he illuminates the question of the Cumaean Gates, the ring wall cities, and Peripolesis-periplum, the Troy game etc. (Leffers of MM 228) was in epistemological symbolism (Mead's so-called gnosis), speafically in es- oteric rituals and ritual initiationlentry into the underworld or, for that mat- ter, any "secret" world. In an undated letter written sometime in late 1952, McLuhan asks Pound if "Vergil [sic]tried to fuse tale of the tribe with solar cy- cle stuff," and in the same letter if Virgil and the method of Eleusis mark a transition from "art based on will" (the Romantic paradigm of the tortured artist and the kindly muse, both ideologically pure) to "art based on learning process" (where purveyors of culture are first arbiters of knowledge, and thus ideologically complicit in what they "make"). Virgil's Aeneas, Edith Hamilton explains (putting the proper emphasis on "knowledge"), sought out "the cave of the Sibyl of Cumae . . . [who] guid[ed] him to the underworld where he would leam al1 he needed to know" (Mythology 226). McLuhan equated this dassical symbolism and esoteric "entry/ descent" with the erudi- tion of the Neo-classical literary modernists--with Pound, Eliot, and Joyce- each one of whose knowledge of Greek and Latin cornmanded entry, he thought, into a secret caste of elite makers. In the oh-ated accusatory letter to Pound in February 1953, McLuhan, adopting Lewis's BLAST-styled invective and typography, condemns first among al1 other occult dangers the "monopolies of knowledge" (Letfers of MM 235) that the rnysferiurn, the vi- sionary experience of gnosis, invites. It perhaps never bothered or occurred to McLuhan that Eliot mentions the Sibyl in his epigraph to The Waste Land and that Pound's first canto opens with the Nekuia passage from Book XI of the Odyssey, and describes a similar descent after knowledge by the mystae. Regardless, at the most basic level, McLuhan was opposed to occultism as a high-cultural repository of privileged individuals with secret knowledge, a position which put him at odds with Pound's own belief in an "Apostolic Began").

Ruthven explains that "'Apostolic Succession' was a spiritualistic affair, the sort of thing Yeats rnight have been interested in, and not unrelated to that doctrine of metempsychosis evoked in [the poern] . . . 'Histrion,' [which] daims that 'the souls of a11 men great / At times pass through us'" (Ruthven 49). Pound's theory of this mystical teleology, which Eliot appropriated for his own and more recognizable theory of "tradition" in "Tradition and the Individual Talentt' (The Sacred Wood), is expressed in Pound's critical prose as a kind of perfection embraceable in both the constancy and "elixir" of "the eiders" (LE 227):

Dante believed in the 'melody which most in-cen- tres the soul'; in the preface to my Guido 1 have tried to express the idea of an absolute rhythm. . . . Perhaps every artist at one time or another believes in a sort of eiixir or philosopher's stone produced by the sheer perfection of his art.

McLuhan makes his reservations about this elusive elixir and the privileged elite clearer in his next letter to Pound, which questions Pound directly on an occult stratagem/ conspiracy of the early modernists:

. . . you, Eliot and Joyce use as central guide in al1 matters of letters, sounds, phrases situations the whole traditional lore on the diverse labyrinths of the Cumaean Gates. Rock Labyrinth. Water labynnth and so on. It's taken me a long time to get wised up. Why couldn't one of you have given some tips on this matter 30 years ago? I can see of course how Yeats never did develop the mastery of 13 LIICIG aull&c ~~LLLCLUIL A\~.w ~iibu 6' U' "'W" "'-' ters. Masonic? Something no critic should know?

(Letters of MM231)

The exclusionary qualification concerning Yeats, the only practicing occultist of the above group, is an important clue to what McLuhan was observing in the modernists' use of the occult. He was observing not the pradice of oc- cultism, but the ritual use of occult symbolism "as a basis for art adivity," as he explained in the February 1953 letter to Pound (Letters of MM 235). The distinction behveen occult practice and ritual appropriation is important, as it not only corroborates others' findings on Pound's involvement vis-à-vis the occult--Tryphonopoulos concludes, for example, that "there is no evidence . . . that [Pound] ever joined any occult group" and he "seems not to have been interested in 'phenomena"' (xiv, 70)--but it also reitera tes McLuhan's O wn primary interest in modemism, namely methodology, the process of achiev- ing hybrid artistic "effect-" As McLuhan explained with intentional irony to Walter J. Ong, "'God is dead' . . .equals: God has abandoned the work of grace in creation? Prelude to incarnation as understood in pagan cuits? At least so 1 hear from the inside boys" (Letters of MM 234). "The inside boys," Lewis's "Men of 1914" (Blasting 9), are thus condemned by McLuhan (as they had been by Lewis [Time and Western Man]) for their

use of the arts as a technique of salvation! as a channel of supernatural grace!

(Letters of MM 235) method of occultism: namely, in presuming to imbue grace on artistic activ- ity, and thus manufacture an un/ super-natural spiritual surrogacy of sorts. 1n McLuhan's mind, Pound, Joyce, and Eliot were appropriating the place/ role of an abandoned, post-Nietzschean God in bestowing a kind of grace, regardless of how esoteric, on their own works of creation, bringing to those, in other words, a kind of reverence thaï not only rivalled but replaced the doctrinal. For the Roman Catholic McLuhan, this was sacrilege; God had not, in fact, abandoned the work of grace in creation (as the letter to Ong implied), He had been ousted by the creative artist! Therefore, the hubris of Pound and the modemists was both in substituting aesthetics for spirituality and in holding up aesthetics itself as doctrine, holding up the arts, as he wrote later to Ong, as "the sole meaw of grace" (Lettus of MM 244).

In the days and months after the February 1953 letter to Pound, McLuhan wrote to allies on many orthodox fronts. He wrote frequently to Walter J. Ong, the Jesuit, and rekindled his correspondence with Wyndham Lewis, praising Lewis specifically for what he now recognized was the significance of Lewis's similar accusations against "freemasonry" (Letters of MM 236). "Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication," the only article McLuhan wrote that contained expressed occult references was published at this time and championed Lewis for his traditional reverence for the spirit/body split that was so central to McLuhan's own doctrine. In that arti- cle, McLuhan acknowledges the innovation of the literary modemists--as that which "manipulat[es] matter and experience into a pattern which could arrest the mind in the presence of a particular aspect of existence" (IL 85)--but quali- fies strongly that true artists like Lewis are "god-intoxicated men" who connatural gnosis and emotion favoured by . . . Eliot and theosophy, in which the emotions are used as the principal windows of the soul" (91).

The argument McLuhan advances is that modemist innovation is laudable as long as it does not seek to supplant or become itself an alternative to the pas- sions that inhere naturaiiy in belief and communion. But the argument, once again, put McLuhan in direct conflict with Pound who, in The Spirit of

Romance (154) and Guide to Kulchur, advocates the generative though elu- sive presence of "atmal, [or] union with the divine" (Kulchur 328), and who, says Gai1 McDonald, "was convinced . . . that there were spiritual presences in things discoverable not by analysis but by imaginative identification" (181, in other words, by creative and innovative mimesis. By contrast, in asserting Lewis as "god-intoxicated"--meaning cognizant of the spirit/ body (emotive) split-McLuhan champions Lewis, contra Pound and Eliot, as a sort of ausad- ing Christian humanist:

FOR THIRTY YEARS and more Wyndham Lewis has been a one-man army corps opposed to these forces which seek to use art, science, and philoso- phy in order to reduce Our world to the nocturnal womb frorn which they suppose it to have been borne. (1L 83)

McLuhan's use of third person indirect and non-descript pronouns above ("these forces" and "they") echoes and serves to counter Pound's own use of allusive language in a 1939 letter to Henry Swabey: "The mysteries are not revealed, and no guide book to them has been or will be written" (Letfers of EP 327). Perhaps in raising his objections as he did-to mysteries that Pound of emotion as a soul-like surrogacy--McLuhan was being as direct as he could have been in countering that which had always been allusive and, as Pound admitted, rarely if ever discussed. The point of real fascination for this study was Pound's response to McLuhan's objections and accusation.

Curiously, Pound never did deny McLuhan's findings and moreover he seemed to corroborate McLuhan's accusations against him, at least as those ac- cusations related to modernist methodology, the creation of artistic "effect."

When McLuhan first suggested the possibility of confluence with classical es- oterica (the Cumaean Gates, etc.), Pound responded "yr/ . . . wnting will be- corne a lot livlier when yu start looking for credits rather than debts Il not matter much where a man GOT what ,but what he did with it ( or without it

) AFTER he got it" (21 July 1952). At this early stage, McLuhan's two principal objections against the occult as a basis for art activity had not yet been formed, so it is not urneasonable to infer that McLuhan took Pound's response to his questions about Virgil as both encouragement to keep going and counsel to steer his course. After all, at precisely this point McLuhan does shift radically in his assessrnent of occult influence from the early examination of classical, mostly Virgilian, provenance to what Eliot and Pound "did with" what they "got" from the occult, speàfically its proprioceptive methodology. It seems quite reasonable to posit, then, that Pound was as much responsible for McLuhan's findings and the development of his research into "the occult as a basis for art advity" as McLuhan's own Catholic-grounded aversions and CU- riosities were. Pound certainly never stood in his way and was throughout McLuhan's inquiries resolutely encouraging. Pound wrote:

Believe in Shenendoah hv/ AT Iast found someone capax understand what McL/ was driving at / and to resent sabotagik cuncta tion / Isn't it time McL/ ALSO let off on YOKELSI my generation and his/ . . . al1 incapax knowing enough particulars to have any REAL general ideas re/ ANYTHING hence the bamfoozelment /

(5 March 1953)

Pound's reference in the first line above was to the Wyndham Lewis issue of the magazine Shenandoah (Summer-Autumn 1953), to which he and McLuhan had contributed. McLuhan's contribution was the Wyndham Lewis article that addressed Lewis's resistance to the occult practice of the "Men of 1914." Pound clearly approved of McLuhan's assessrnent of Lewis (as Lewis hirnself did [Letters of MM 2391) and, from the above and other parts of his 5 March 1953 letter to McLuhan, clearly approved of what he considered the critical transition in McLuhan's approach-the transition to the search for credits (what was done with invention/ technique) from the tracing of debt (which was the province of the much-despised philologist). It seemingly mat- tered less to Pound that McLuhan was bothered by his findings about the oc- cult as a basis for art adivity than the simple fact that McLuhan had made the correct correlation between the occult and modernist technique, that of achieving artistic "effect-" On precïsely that account, Pound ended his letter of response to McLuhan's accusatory salvo, asking McLuhan if he was "maintaining any [other] contacts and correlationsf and if so, can't yu REMIT?" Voicing his approval that McLuhan was "attend[ing] to these corre- positive and encouraging than any other that McLuhan had received (or would receive) from him:

resumes of IDEAS needed in '53. . . .

and so on

R. S. V bloody P.

(5 March 1953)

McLuhan did not respond to this letter for almost two years, and when he next wrote to Pound in December 1954, the offering was a curt and polite note that briefly outlined his work "on the diaracter of acoustic space-the space of pre-literate man" (Letters of MM 246). The letter had none of the fervour of the earlier exchanges, and to Pound-who wrote "NUTS" on the bottom of it- the sudden departure from occult themes represented a devolution in McLuhan's critical thinking. Pound was clearly dismayed, responding in al- most the exact words McLuhan had used to speak approvingly of Lewis (IL 83), that "1 am not interested in abstract discussion unless it is nourished by at least some of the vital facts which the powers of hell and corruption have been hiding under the blackout of history" (4 January 1955). About the lan- page of Pound's letter there can be no mistake: Pound was imploring McLuhan to return to a more meaningful and generative discussion, one which he thought McLuhan approached in his observations of the intersec- tion of occultism and literary modemism. and what he now admitted was his naive endorsement of the tech- nique/formula for literary modemism. As he confessed to Pound and other

correspondents around this time, "1 did and said al1 the wrong things in my early appearances in the little mags. 1 had no party line. 1 was objective. 1 was a Fool" (Letfers of MM 233). The party line he would corne to rest upon, marking his most radical departure to date from Pound and his the- ory/practice of modemism, was orthodox Catholicism, as he explained with tones of farewell to Pound in early 1953: "Now that 1 know the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies 1 have no intention of participating in it any further. . . . To hell with East and West" (Letters of MM 235). In champi- oning Pound's modernist formulae and innovations for achieving literary "effects," McLuhan obviously felt he had built a career upon conspiring as an unwitting patsy with the perpetrators of occult methodologies. His "bloody rage at the discovery that the arts . . . are in the pockets of these societies" (Letters of MM 235) was therefore mostly the horror at discovering what ap peared to be his own complicity in occult pradice. And so for some four years his correspondence with Pound lapsed, unfortunately at the apparent zenith of its usefulness for both men. Pound, it must be repeated, never disputed McLuhan's findings.

1957 -- The Third Cycle of Letters

The 1957 correspondence between McLuhan and Pound is disjointed, consist- ing of four extant letters and two fragments from Pound and only one extant letter and undated fragment from McLuhan. In many ways, this disjointed- it reflects a splintering of McLuhan's loyalty to Pound. Like his mentor, McLuhan was plagued by conspiracy theories (Kenner writes that at this time McLuhan was convinced that the Freemasons had taken a contract out on his life [Mazes 2971)' and the fact that his mentor, in McLuhan's mind, cleverly sutured him into one--the conspiracy of a neo-classical literary modernism buffeted by occult formulae for achieving artistic "effecr--was something he would take many years to overcome. Certainly by 1957 he had not yet over- corne what he thought was Pound's manipulation of him, nor had Pound, for that matter, overcome what he thought was McLuhan's rapid and debilitating critical decline. Dismayed with the outcome of one of his most promising students since Laughlin-he refers to himself vis-à-vis McLuhan at this point as "yr/ proP (28 August 1957)--Pound wrote to the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter that "McL/ .. . seems headed toward aridity and discussion of safe topio" (18 August 1957). Presumably these "safe topics" included ones seem- ingly as imocuous to Pound as McLuhan's expressed interest in his typogra- phy via the typewriter "as a new art form" (Letters of MM 250).

Pound, in a reversa1 of roles from the other two cycles of correspondence in which McLuhan took the lead and initiative, wanted a more generative ex- change and began by engaging McLuhan in a discussion of "college require- ments" and "suppression of classic studies' (28 August 1957). In pedagogy, Pound knew he had a safe ground on which both could agree. In another ef- fort to assuage McLuhan, Pound also praised Kenner's Dublin's Joyce (1956), writing that "Yrl yung frien Knr got one good pinch of insecticide into his latest introdl " (28 August 1957). Pound's observation is interesting beyond its rhetorically disguised peace offering; it corroborates my earlier suggestion that McLuhan, just as much of Eliot's more accessible and theoretically polished criticism had its provenance in Pound's anteriority.

As the 1957 correspondence came to an end, Pound became more insistent on McLuhan's return to some kind of "active" critical inquiry. He praises McLuhan for his "start at Sottisier" in The Mechanical Bride, "which may have been du11 but it was a real drive in criticism" (24 September 1957). In "How to Read" Pound defines the sottisier as a "sort of fool-colurnn [of] the French" (LE 17) that illuminates stupidity via a plethora of quotations from a decadent culture. McLuhanfs Mechanical Bride, which uses advertising as the French had used quotations to illuminate stupidity and the work of ideology to effect mental lethargy, was just such a corrective in Pound's mind, and therefore worthy of revisitation, mostly to pull McLuhan out of the "SLUMBBBBur" into which he had "apparently relapsed" (24 September 1957). It is not unreasonable to infer from Pound's remark that he was equat- ing McLuhan with Major C.H. Douglas, the economist whose theories of so- cial credit or "national dividends" (SP 177) becarne so important to Pound shortly before the war years. Just as Douglas had approached the study of cul- ture through a consideration of economics and the sanctions monetary policy impose on the general populace, so was McLuhan's Mechanical Bride chal- lenging a corporate-run advertising economy that rooted its practice in profit- taking at the expense of citizenry and artists. Did Pound envision McLuhan as a latter-day Douglas? It is entirely possible given his praise of Mechanical Bride as sottisier, and given his critical statements about the relationship between economic systems and a full knowledge of history: in short, as Pound outlines in Kulchur, "history that omits economics is mere bunk show" (K iilch u r 259) and "imbecilities" (310) of present capitalist culture.

To incite McLuhan further and entice him back into active engagement, Pound implores McLuhan for any "news of rear guard action / ??" and "ANY contacts whatever ? any pipe lines?" (24 September 1957). Pound's efforts to awaken and engage an otherwise indifferent McLuhan reveal the real gen- erosity and warmth of Pound, a side of him that frequently is ignored for the more self-centered and vitriolic. H.D.'s comment about Pound's "inexpress[able] kind[ness] to anyone who he felt had the faintest spark of submerged talent" (End to Toment 10) seems particularly appropriate in this context and seems the probable motivation for Pound's letter of 24 September 1957. In that letter, Pound is dearly disappointed at the lapsed state of the cor- respondence and condudes the ietter (and ten years of on-again off-again cor- respondence) with a playhil poke at what he surmises is the source of their di- vision: "cordially, but as if descending among the shades to visit McL" (24 September 1957). Coifed in the occult pun is genuine regret for the loss of a worthy correspondent. McLuhan perhaps never knew of the affection and re- spect he had eamed from Pound. Perhaps at this point he would not have cared.

The McLuhan/Pound correspondence, mostly because of McLuhan's dog- matic shortsightedness, ended rather unceremoniously. McLuhan, though, would return to Pound in later years, giving lectures and incorporating Pound's theories and ideas into his own critical works. Writing to David Sohn, the educational consultant for Bantam Books who had written the in- troduction to his City as Classroorn, McLuhan admitted the parlayance of tionship [in which] my admiration for Pound's work increases constantly" (Leftns of MM 456). Even as late as 1977, McLuhan's affection for Pound is strong enough to motivate him to go out of his way to look up Olga Rudge, Pound's lover and the mother of his daughter Mary de Rachewilt., while in Italy for an academic conference (Letters of MM 535). In McLuhan's mind, Pound was always the foremost moderrtist, its greatest innovator and risk- taker, and possessed of a mind so encyclopedic and ideas so influential that examination of their riches and extensions never ceased. Pound's desperate and rather pathetic attempts to resurrect the correspondence in its final year is proof, however, that McLuhan had drifted far from his mentor; but, despite that drift, Pound remained, like Chesterton and Innis and Lewis, one of the cornentones of McLuhan's thought. Though he wrote sparingly of and as- cribed little to Pound (preferring to cite his more exotic influences--Siegfried Giedion, Edward T. Hall, J.C. Carothers, Karl Polanyi, and Alexis De Tocqueville), Lifës "oracle of the electric age" (25 February 1966)' no matter how far he strayed into McLuhanacy, was first and forernost a Poundian, as the next chapter will further illustrate. 3

Connections/ Similarities: McLuhan and Pound in Apposition

The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or duster; it is what 1 cm, and rnust perforce, cal1 a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are con- stantly rushing. (G B 92)

The Electronic Age is one in which information comes to everybody in any job, in any soaal or personal activity, in- formation comes from al1 directions at the same time. This creates a very peculiar field, as it were, 'field' in the sense that the physicists use the word, or the psycholo- gists. A field of instantaneous interrelationships.

(Letters of MM 252)

As voice, print, image, and sensory data proceed simulta- neously, figure and ground are often in apposition rather than in a sequential relationship.

In his introduction to Pound's Literary Essays, Eliot wrote that "Pound's criti- cal writings . . . form the Ieaçf dispensable body of aitical writing in our timef' (xiii). For Eliot specifically and modernism generally (including "the complex of ideas . . . reaching into the next epoch" [SP 284]), Pound's indispensability translated into what R. J. MacSween, a founding patron of Paid eu ma, termed inescapable influence (The Antigonish Review 87-88 [Fall 1991 - Winter 19921 132-33). What grew from that influence, as McLuhan was fond of pointing out to its provocateur, was a modemist aesthetic that is colossal and "plasticff guistic extensions. Taken together, these Pound interpellations form what Pound himself called in the early 1950s "the Pound Industry" (Brooke-Rose l), which, for some forty years since, has accommodated al1 manner of explor- ers, from linguists to anthropologists to psychiatrists. The Pound Industry is now synonymous with al1 types of modernist inquiry and Pound himself pervades the Industry as referent, a cornplex around which myriad signifiers and al1 manner of explorers converge. As referent, Pound has become phe- nomena--plural and polyvalent.

In The Pound Era, a "historical fiction" (MacSween private letter) that at- tempts to articulate the complex tenor of Pound's times, Hugh Kenner ap proaches a definition of this ubiquity, specifically of Pound as referent. Kenner rnakes the important point at the outset that Pound, in his work, "makes no effort to vanish" (33), but rather that his persona is one that both saturates and resists time, somewhat like the ideogrammic referent (the com- parison is Kemer's). Like Pound, Chinese written characters "are neither ar- chaic nor modern. . . . they exist now, with the strange extra-temporal persis- tence of objects in space" (PE 31). And, "any object in space," continues Ke~er,"is [itseif] a memory system" (31). Kenner wants us to infer that Pound too is such a memory system, accessible only (and here Kemer draws on McLuhan's tutelage) through "aerial perspective," where "there is no 'point of view' that will relate . . . idioms" (29). "In the time of discourse, as distinguished from the space of architecture," Kenner concludes, "there are

no points of view" (27). In laying the groundwork for a forma1 approach to the study of Pound, Kemer is articulating the differences between McLuhan's McLuhan writes:

IN A PRE-LITERATE WORLD WORDS ARE NOT SIGNS. They evoke things directly in what psy- chologists call acoustic space. By being named, the thing is simply there. Acoustic space is a dynamic or harmonic field. It exists while the music or sound persists. And the hearer is one with it, as with music. Acoustic space is the space-world of primeval man. Even his visual expenence is much subordinate to his auditory and magical domain wherein there is neither centre nor margin nor point of view. (Counterblasf79)

The two introdudory chapters of Kenner's seminal text (especially the impor- tant "Space Craft" chapter) would be difficult to understand without a knowl- edge of Ke~er'svery real debt to McLuhan's concept of "media." McLuhan's definition of media--as "environments and inclusive processes, not products and packages" (Letters of MM 438)--1eads us to posit, by deduction, that "era" is just another medium, a specialized extension of man's temporal faculty; and, as with any medium, "era," as extension, is bound inextricably to the human sensorïa, in this case to temporal perspective. The following para- graph from a letter McLuhan sent to J.A. Bailey, a marketing executive for the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, N.Y., outlines the problematic of "era" in a (post)/modernist climate of diminishing visual stress and mount- ing reliance on what Kenner argues in The Pound Era is the necessity of the "aerial perspective" to navigate a total-field (or acoustic/ retribalized) envi- ronment:

We no longer live in a visual world. Quantum mechanics began to call it the world of 'resonance' 3LQllU C1U121 a112 YbhUAAUA YIVYbICIbV YL I -Y--- -r---' or tactile space, or kinetic, propnoceptive, or cosmic space. Al1 of these spaces enter into the most ordi- nary compositions that we still cal1 'pictorial.' Our studies here have taught us that the TV child has lost the habit of visual convergence and has become monocular, or Cyclopean in his adjustment to the outer world. Cydopean vision is that of the hunter. The hunter has no point of view, no goals, no per- spective. These changes are the result of electnc technologies and are causing the collapse of al1 ex- isting bureaucracies with their visually pre grammed structures. (Letfers of MM 388)

Long before Kenner, McLuhan argued that the shift from visual/civilized to acoustic/ tribal (from the industrial to the electronic) was observable only via "a sort of aerial perspective," which he called "despotein" from the Greek (Letters of MM 391). Such a perspective, McLuhan argued, invited an equally radical shift in critical methodology, where "the gap or interval" was privi- leged over the discursivity of "hendiadys," or metamorphic/metonymic change--simply put, the teleology from A to B, what the Greeks called "efficient causality" (G V 3). Drawing on the Japanese concept of "m a," which states simply that space is never empty, McLuhan argued that contrary to western philological consensus, there is nothing iIlogical or illusory about the gap, since "the gap or interval is where the action is." Moreover, the gap or interval, as similar to the television instant replay, "is felt in some way to be superior to the play itself, since it has translated the event [the transition from A to B] into an art form" (Letfers of MM 460). For McLuhan, the gap or inter- val, theretore, contained the real essence. By contrast, "the visually oriented person is always looking for connections rather than intervals." But the con- nection, McLuhan insisted, "is a hang-up" (Letters of MM 404), a residual participation in the abstract but on individuation clearly dileaneated. "From Parmenides onward," McLuhan argued, "connected space and logical reason- ing supplanted analogy and forma1 causality" (Letters of MM 520).

Though Pound's aversion to philology as a kind of rote connect-the-dots ar- chaeology echoes loudly here, McLuhan's argument for his own "Make it New" (hsin jin hsin) critical methodology was rooted primarily in the notion of Symbolist "discontinuity," in which the pause itself and not the teleologi- cal transformation before and after the pause contained the meaning (Symons 102). Once again, however, McLuhan was quick to suggest the modernist ap propriation of this Symbolist innovation: "The Symbolists long ago, and

Yeats, Joyce, Pound, [and] Eliot in this century, spent their entire lives ex- pounding the aesthetics of the resonant intervals of acoustic space. . . . The major factor is that the in terval is where the action is" (Lettus of MM 466). Writing to his son, Eric, in 1970, McLuhan talked about this finding as mon- umental discovery: "It is a bit mortifying to discover at this time of day [i.e., late in one's career] that the technique of metamorphosis is quite simply that of the arrest, the interval, whether of space or tinte or rhythm" (Letters of MM 417).

The Symbolist-grounded (and "ma"-corroborated) radical shift in critical methodology McLuhan advanced ultimately altered the treatment of rela- tional analyses, removing the hegemony of having to establish "connections" as the first and final arbiter of scholarly license, and opening comparative study to the flux and play of post-structural inquiry--a technique McLuhan would corne to cal1 "probing," the technique of the "lighthearted and intelli- these "probes" was often articulated to puzzled students through a method of intentional misdirection, in which McLuhan would say, on the one hand, "1 have no theories whatever about anything," and, on the other, that "my can- vasses are surrealist, and to cal1 them 'theories' is to miss my satirical intent altogethef (Letters of MM 448). Simply put, his canvases were the sottisier tha t Pound had correctly identified; as Menippean sa tires, they "present[ed] the actual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image" (Letters of MM 517) and not as theoretical panacea or structuraiist (i.e., Aristotelianf Chomskyean) archaeology.

Roland Barthes, the French semiologist of the 1970s whose reputation in Europe rivalled McLuhan's in North America (Robert Fulford actually titled one of his editorials, "Meet France's Marshall McLuhan" [Toronto Star 17 June 1978]), certainly approved of McLuhan's Menippean play, asking McLuhan to collaborate with him on a book of "probes" and hyperbole (Letters of MM 539). And though the book, like so many other McLuhan col- laborations, never got wntten, McLuhan's most serious student (Ke~er)cer- tainly took note of the forma1 implications of the new critical method, prov- ing that, as late as 1971 when The Pound Era was released, Kenner was still paying close attention to the lessons--the forms and techniques if not the ideas--of his "first mentor."

The change via a new electric hegemony in the prïvileged sensorium that in turn necessitated the equally radical shift in aitical methodology is observable in Kenner's "era" study of what he calls the Pound "industrial" cornplex. Following McLuhan, Kenner's definition of "era" in which Pound exists as sual/ typographic/efficient causality where A:B as C:D in favour of a patch- work diaspora that contains more accurately what Leo Frobenius termed the "Paideuma" or "tangle or complex of . . . inrooted ideas" (Kulchur 57) of Pound's increasingly "resonant" and thereby acoustic environment W i t hi n what McLuhan termed "the resonating interval" (G V 3-12), Pound is con- tained by Kenner (not captured but contained [and uneasilyl--the distinction is important) as boundless and "plastic," essentially as "memory system." As such, Kenner's revolutionary and canon-forming Pound book exists as biog- raphy, history, and "historical fiction," simultaneously constructing and de- constructing Pound as it struggles with its own textuality. Like McLuhan's own methodology that informs it, Kenner's criticai poetics answers the effi- cient through a formal replay of the historical, the perceptual, and the ana- logic, bringing "full orchestrat[ion]" to bear on the complexities of a "resonating" post-literate modernity. And though Kenner would seem to have popularized this approach to Pound for public consumption, it must be remembered that McLuhan first identified the shift from quantum mechanics to resonant relativity in the 1920~~the exact period that marks the pimacle of Pound's European modernism (Letfers of MM 338). As Pound wrote at about that time:

The old music was fit for the old instruments. That was natural. It is proper to play piano music on pi- anos. But in the end we find that nothing les~than a full orchestra will satisfy Our modemity.

(LE 434) treatment, even though there is clear evidence to suggest that the formation of an "industry" bearing his nominative-especially one populated by univer- sity-subsidized "parasites on my work" (Norman 465)--was a point of some consternation for him. Rather, Pound's work on Fenollosa and specifically on what he tenned the "verbal sonority" of Chinese art did much to corrobo- rate Kenner's treatment via McLuhan, holding, as it does, the first prÎnciple that "relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate" (Fenollosa 22). Pound imported from Fenollosa and the Chinese the notion of an organic interrelatedness that informs McLuhan's forma1 gestalt vis-à-vis the electric field and Kenner's treatment of Pound's temporal satura- tion, which, when combined, constitute Kenner's definition of "era" as "a confluence of energy," within which "new objects of attention enter into new combinations . . . while the mind's identity (called Tradition) remains" (PE 146-47). Kenner's Pound, as referent, is therefore 'The mind of Europe," a map of "patterned integrity" crossed constantly (and each time re-drawn) by new map-makers and explorers. And while the contours or patterns of that mind remain intact, its bridgework and topography are ever changing. This is how Kenner defines "the Pound era," and such is how that "era" contains Pound: In a word, uneasily.

It is no coincidence that in his book on Fenollosa, Pound advances an almost identical definition of "era" as the intersection of "the transferences of force from agent to object, which . . . occupy time" (7). And so, the cntically sanc- tioned approach to Pound--universally popularized by Kenner, via McLuhan, in The Pound Era--is first suggested by Pound himself, a revelation that would not surprise K.K. Ruthven (EP as Liferanj Critic) nor Ian F. Bell (Crific ously his own camouflaged press agent. In that vein, Pound's words through the mask of Fenollosa show just how derivative (perhaps dependent, perhaps mimetic) Kenner's approach to Pound really is. Pound writes:

. . . no full sentence really completes a thought. . . . The truth is that acts are successive, even continu- ous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string ever so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. Al1 processes in nature are interreiated; and thus there could be no complete sentence . . . Save one which it would take al1 time to pronounce.

(Fenollosa Il)

Such organic interrelatedness becomes Pound's "fundamental of al1 aesthet- ics" (Fenollosa 3), a "readerly" ground inviting al1 manner of scrutiny as structuralists and post-stnicturalists alike observe the critical patterns and dimensions (Kenner, from Buckminster Fuller, calls them "knots" [PE 1451) attendant in the Pound Industry.

Ruthven's study of Pound's critical prose reaches the same conclusions about "electric field," "gap," "interval," and "interrelatedness" as do McLuhan and Kenner, but goes further to caution that because Pound was so calculating in precipitating the manufacture of his own "Industry" identity, the astute critic must heed "the metadiscursive problem" of writing about Pound "in a non- venhiloquial manner" (168):

Guide fo Kukhur . . . puts itself together by taking itself apart. A vade-mecum with a difference, it is aware in its mockingly reductive title of its unlike- ture3. . . . rri ~txuii~rrucriii~LILDCLLJ, . . . UULU~ i.v Kulch ur continuously undermines its own author- ity, drawing attention to its 'ridiculous title' and dassifying itself as 'a stunt piece.' In its persistent risk-taking and open acknowledgement of the pos- sibilities that a rereading of a few other books might have made it quite different from what it is, Guide to KuIch ur is an amazingly open-ended production to have corne from a writer usually thought of as by that stage unremittingly authoritarian.

(Ruthven 139)

That Kenner popularized the methodologica1 approach to "Pound-as-refer- ent" that theorists like Ruthven and Bell find so accommodating (and so lib- erating) is clear. That Kenner's debt, though existing as both precedent and prescience in Pound's own work, is pnmarily to McLuhan, again method- ologically, is equally clear. The more important consideration for this study, however, is how the method of centering Pound as "plastic" and informing referent accommodates the treatment of influence, since, to further com- pound the problem (and further animate the resonating interval), "the McLuhan canon" (Letters of MM 525) too has becorne sirnilarly signified, its seer a fluid and informing referent about whom mynad signifies and vari- ous communications and media industries advance their own meanings and assumptions. Within such a complex of competing vortices and from the lessons imported from Pound to McLuhan and Kenner, Pound and McLuhan, it would seem, can only be treated as focal points themselves of a much larger vortex, one which they may indeed have precipitated and which certainly contains them, but one which also dwarfs them in the infinity of the interconnections and intersections which occupy its own time. cally efficient "connections," would be to devolve into lineal causality and regress into an earlier Cartesian "era," certainly not the one about which Kenner, at Pound's bequest and McLuhan's modelling, was writing. To im- port another due from McLuhan--this time relating to his frequent crïticism of scholars like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky-- the astute critic must beware of becoming mired in just this Cartesian tradition, "working with figure minus ground" (Letters of MM 472), and therefore missing the broader perspective, the forma1 gestalt ("despofeinf'), in purely structuralist, content-centered forays. Rather, to place "influence," as critical censure, in some meaningful proximity to Pound and McLuhan, a more appropriate method would be to focus on what Pound termed "credits" instead of wallow- ing in the pedantic and philological tracing of "debts." As Pound wrote to

James Vogel in 1928, "N o use starting to ait. each other at start. Anyhow it requires more crit. faculty to discover the hidden 10% positive, than to fuss about 90% obvious imperfectionf' (Letters of EP 220). Pound's words to Vogel parallel exactly (and may indeed represent the infancy of) McLuhan's privileg- ing of the elusive "ground" over the insistent "figure."

And so 1 offer as method, in lieu of a lineal and unreflexive causality of influ- ence, what Donald F. Theall calls "the essai concrète" (168), McLuhan's fore- most contribution, he argues, to the fomal apparatus of modernist aiticism. The essai concrète is a "spatial dialogue'' in which two things--for instance, art and aphonsm in McLuhan's Through the Vanishing Point--are placed in ap position and allowed to clash contrapuntally. As forma1 gestalt, McLuhan's essai concrète also owes something, continues Theall, to Pound's own "technique of verbal exhibits used in The ABC of Reading" (168), and so im- or referents of Pound and McLuhan seems rnost appropriate, even in light of Ruthven's cautions about "the rneiadiscursive problem" of corporate mimicry.

About this "metadiscursive problem" as it relates to setting two vortices in appositional dialogue, McLuhan is most insightful:

. . . structural form . . . is inseparable from 'putting on' one's audience. The writer's . . . public is the forma1 cause of his art or . . . his philosophy. The figure/gro und relation between writer and public . . . is an interplay, a kind of intercourse. . - . [which] is characteristic of role- playing in general. There is, as it were, a sexual relation between performer and public. . . . Perhaps there has been insufficient thought given to the nature of role- playing in its metaphysical or formal causality.

(Letters of MM 511)

Pound and McLuhan in apposition, then, become a special kind of ground; straddling modernism and post-modernism, their simultaneous resistance and appropriation of each other becomes "a confluence of energy" within which roles and personne are not only exchanged but also played out to hy- perbolic extreme. Spatial dialogue, in turn, sanctions dithyramb and Eleusis, a new critical ground within which pre-Parmenidean "parallels" must in- evitably supplant "connections," and, in the process, restore formal causality as superior to its visual or lineal or efficient binary. Again, McLuhan and Pound would have approved of the appositional dynamism:

(The] parallel is not a connection, and 1 think that most of the problems about 'sources' over the cen- (Let ters of MM 525)

You donft necessarily expect the bacilli in one test tube to 'lead to' those in another by a mere or logi- cal or syllogistic line. The good scientist now and then discovers similarities, he discovers family groups, similar behaviour in presence of like reagents, etc. . . . I see no reason why a sjmilar seri- ousness should be alien to the critic of letters.

(LE 76)

From McLuhan, I repeat, "The connedion is a hang-up" (Letters of MM 404).

1 - Methodology

"Our age is an esthete of the methodologies of all other ages"

(Coun terblasf 64)

Having established what Pound and McLuhan, based on the evidence they left us, would consider an appropriate theoretical approach to their "parallel" analyses, the critic must next consider the choice of which among many of their grounds (forms/ ideas) to begin. In the case of McLuhan and Pound, that choice is immediately apparent: it must be their methodologies, for though their grounds are made complex by multiple theoretical iterations and sec- ondary interpellations of vaned intensities, most of those, as the beginning of this chapter outlined, are reducible to method. For Pound, methodology (what he called technique-"the precise rendering of . . . impulse"), was the most fundamental "test of a man's sincerity" (LE 9), and thus was the place McLuhan, as Kenner contends, technique or methodology, as medium, im- parted the most important of McLuhan's messages:

McLuhan thought that prose should work like the mind, not the other way round [sic]. Whatever he was thinking of grew in iconic power the more rapidly he could relate it to a dozen other things, if possible in the same breath. So he got called 'the professor of communications who can't communi- cate,' an academic Harpo unable to stick to a point. His point was that there was never a 'point.' Points are Eudidean junctures . . . as corne to life only in diagrams. (Mazes 227)

The origin of Pound and McLuhan's critical methodologies extends back to their early apprenticeships in art analyses and evolves frorn there into the realm of social criticism. In Pound's case, the impulse that moved art analysis into the field of social crïtiasm began first at the level of language and became for the mature Pound the "not yet half learned" lesson of history. When, wrote Pound, "the application of word to thing goes rotten . . . [then] the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot" (LE 21). To his own related questions posed in "Murder by Capital" in 193%- "what can drive a man interested almost exclusively in the arts into social theory?" and "what causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?" (SP 228)--Pound's musings on language provided the sole answer: "as lan- page becomes the most powerful instrument of perfidy, so language alone can riddle and cut through the meshes" (LE 77). Though usury and avarice might be the outward signs of "the bad manners" that inhere in social corrup- tion, their cause was almost always associated by Pound with "NOT defining one's terms" (Kulchur 248). And so, for Pound, because of the correlation be- EP 262), the evolution of art analyses into social criticism was first and fore- most the exercise of a moral imperative which it was his responsibility, as a genuine literary artist charged with safeguarding the language, to effect:

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature de- cay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuber- culosis under the impression that it was merely eat- ing jam tarts. (ABC 33)

A simple reason for Pound's insistence, voiced usually in association with so- cial credit and other monetary policies, that the state should extend more aid and comfort to its artists was that in Pound's mind artists, in safeguarding language, were constantly working for the betterment of the state. Philosophically, Pound's demands, though at times counterproductive in their vitriol, betrayed his belief in a fundamental cultural ecology, whereby artist and state existed (and should therefore function) symbiotically. To do otherwise, usually at the expense of the artist, was to break the social covenant whose strength alone, Pound expounded in Jefferson andlor Mussolini and Ku lch ur, characterizcd ali great eras and civilizations: "When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters al1 sorts of artists--painters, po- ets, sculptors, musicians, architects. When a civilization is du11 and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instnictors, and repeaters of things second- hand" (LE 226). Accordingly, Pound's theory and practice of art was insepara- ble from not only its socio-political implications but its direct cultural applica- tion. In the end, it was the job of the critic to ensure that the two would not Shelley's programmes. Both were indeed, after Shelley's phrase, "'legislators of the world'" (MacSween 132).

The provenance of McLuhan's methodology was similarly rooted in art anal- yses and similarly evolved, on the strength of a moral imperative (in this case doctrinal--Catholic, in which poet/philosopher functioned as emancipator), into the broader field of social commentary. Not surprisingly, McLuhan named Pound and the modernists--who "never ceased to stress the impor- tance of [the] complementary matching process for the understanding of po- etry and human experience" (Cliché142)--as being central to the development of his own methodological bridge between the study of literature as vocation and the more profound participation in society as moral praxis. Their teach- ing, he would later write in the foreword to his literary criticism, not only "opened the doors of perception on the poetic process," but more fundamen- tally played the pivota1 "role in adjusting [me] to the contemporary world" (IL xiii-iv).

The key words McLuhan used repeatedly to describe this "adjustment" and how it licensed soaal partiapation were "perception" and "language," both of which were translated into an important Pound-like justification for the con- vergence of aesthetics and social action: since "literature is the study and training of perception" and since "language alone indudes al1 the senses and interplay at al1 times," then "the literary man is potentially in control of the strategies needed in the new sensory environment [i-e., of electric simultane- ity]" (Letters of MM 304). McLuhan used this clever little causal syllogism-- based, like Pound's, in language--in every single introduction and foreword mula provided not only a quasi-mathematical proof of his literary "groundm-- reminding innovators and traditionalists alike that "1 have not wandered as far from literature as it might appear" (Letters of MM 304)--but also sanc- tioned his proscriptive intent, enabling him to move, at least theoretically, beyond "ground" to the "figures" which indeed stemrned from and comple- mented it. And just as figure and ground were complementary and inter- changeable, so were critic and artist, artist and society, soaety and aitic (G V 8). McLuhan expressed this Pound-like symbiosis accordingly:

Ever since Buckhardt [sic] saw that the meaning of Machiavelli's method was to turn the state into a work of art by the rational manipulation of power, it has been an open possibility to apply the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society.

(MB vi)

The tools and practices of artistic analysis, then, were used by McLuhan, the proprioceptive Catholic, to apprehend and expose the machinations of soaal injustice; methodologically what informed technique was a kind of self-refer- ring liberal humanism: "either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flot- Sam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality" (M B 75). McLuhan's careful articulation of the intersection of aesthetics and social action was due, no doubt, to his perception that the hu- man stakes were suddenly much higher in his generation than they were in Pound's, for in his time, he reiterated often, "the ad agencies and Hollywood have themselves appropriated the methods of artistic analysis in an attempt "to get inside the public mind in order to impose their collective dreams on McLuhan predicted early in his career, to a postmodem world that fashioned ifself as a work of art. And so, the astute critic--moreover, the human- ist/moralist critic--must, as Pound and Wyndham Lewis had done, not only treat that world as a work of art in order to make sense of it, but also must alert its public to the dangers of living without art as a field of self-evidentiary study. McLuhan's critical aesthetic therefore is an early form of narratology:

1 have found that to consider art as . . . a means of perceiving the hidden dimension of the environ- ment, is exceedingly useful. Instead of explaining to people that art is something to be taken seriously because of some inherent superior quality, it makes more sense to point out that art has an indispens- able function in cognition, and that men without art strongly tend to be automata, or somnambulists, imprisoned in a dream.

The observation of Lewis's avant garde (his so-called "men-without-art'' the- ory) further corroborates not only what McLuhan called the "ernbryonic" [i-e., microcosmic] intersection of artist and Society (Counterblast 4), but also the symbolism of the artistic mask or persona that attends this intersection, a symbolism pregnant with meaning preasely because the artist "puts on" soci- ety for conscious and symbolic effect: 'The world of Ezra Pound is based upon a recovery of the idea of mask as a pattern of energy. Thus any poem, paint- ing, novel, is a mask of the writer worn by the audience" (Cliché 97). McLuhan's comment on Pound's "put on" and the following quotation on Lewis's controversial socio-political polemic go a long way toward describing Pound's own seemingly troublesome, but equally meaningful, "eccentricit[ies]" florrey 224): LCWIS Wa3 a vi3iuiiaiy ivi w iivrxa riir IAIVQC WLU~I~U~J scene became the means of intense seeing. The artist's personality at hostile grips with the envi- ronment is dramatically offered not for its pathos or anguish or as a moral evaluation, but as a means of clairvoyance. (Revaluation 67)

The O e u vre of the serious artist/ critic, in other words, does not only extend to the boundaries of canvas or page but employs equally the artist/criti&s per- sonality as an expression (an "outering" [GG 431) of style. McLuhan's use of the word "clairvoyance" reverberates with echoes of Pound's own words de- scribing much the same phenornenon, the convergence of the aesthete and his society:

. . . 1 believe that Greek rnyth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experi- ence tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from persecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper. (Romance 92)

This is an interesting and insightful way of thinking about Pound and McLuhan's seemingly irreverent, certainly unorthodox first-person personas. Their media--their "full orchestration"--were carefully refined to convey their messages; they were indeed walking billboards, the shared goal of their utter- ances being complementarity of medium (corporeal and otherwise) and mes- sage. art, as languagefnarrative, provided the "ground" or substrate from which social reality stemmed and from which it could be interpreted; and, because of the symbiosis, secu nd u rn na t uram, of figure/ ground, literary art and society could not (and should not) be refracted by aitical inquiry. Defined as such, their shared methodology was one which only uneasily separated artist and critic, "maker and matchef (Cliché 138-45), requiring of both equal partiapa- tion in and equal responsibility for "Kulchur." Both maker and matcher (Pound and McLuhan), under the aliowances of modernism, must therefore seek "ever-new means of probing and exploration of experience [which] sends [them] badc again and again to the rag-and-bone shop" (Cliché 126) of cultural antiquity, which, Pound added, "is not a mere curio cabinet or museum ex- hibit, [but]. . . function[s] in al1 human life from the tribal state onward" (LE 76). "Kulchur," continued Pound elsewhere in a letter to F.V. Morley, "occurs in or above the stinking manure heap, and can not be honestly defined with- out recognition of the dung-heap" (Letters of EP 294). Diminutive and oth- erwise, Kulchur / culture wa s art and society.

Ideologically, Pound and McLuhan are best understood as conservative re- former~,their conservatism rooted in literary archetypes infused with a liber- alizing humanism, their reformism a result of moving from those archetypes into solving the theoretical problem of applying the lessons of antiquity (accessible through art) to the field of modernity. As such, their methodolo- gies are a form of "intellectual iconoclasrn, of breaking up the old forms of expression and ways of thinking, with a view to reshaping them again" (W WM M 220). Philosophically, both were traditionalists whose methodolo- short, was identical, as was the justification they used for them.

Beyond foundation and justification--the poetics of intent--the outward man- ifestation of their methodologies is also homologous. Both Pound and McLuhan believed the only effective and representative critical gaze was the widest possible one, which, as Pound wrote, 44shoulddevelop a critickm of poetry based on world-poetry" (LE 225) and should not in the process elimi- nate difference: "this communication is not a levelling, it is not an elimina- tion of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different" (LE 298). The breadth of McLuhan's approach, learned from Pound and the New Critics while at Cambridge (Letters of MM 51), was similarly polyphonic and expansive, ren- dered fonnally by employing a "mosaiC or "galaxy" or "collage" methodology to a world that by McLuhan's time had become "a great multimedia poem" (W W M M 231), apprehendable only

by means of a discontinuous and discursive presen- tation of quotations, explications of other people's works, aphorisms, metaphors, analogies . . . [and] making connections between anthropology and psychology, literature and technology, history and philosophy, and combining brilliant insights with what some called nonsense.

(Letters of MM 176)

The timeliness of the "mosaic" approach, a far-reaching and at first glimpse ludicrous extension of Pound's interdisciplinary embrace, was a result of what McLuhan perceived as a speeded-up environment, and therefore was a of instant awareness" (W W A4 M 231).

The two most cha racteristic and recognizable components of McLuhan's "mosaic" or "galaxy," each functioning reciprocally as synecdoche, were the aphorism, modelled after the grammat ica of rnedieval scholasticism contra "the Ciceronian method of explicit spelling out of information in the Iorm of continuous prose" (GG 102) and "the heuristic probe," modelled after the Symbolists' use of language as anti-environment (TTVP 139). Just as the French Symbolists evolved from using language as "a package of prepared messages" to using language to "probe into new experience" (TTVP 1391, so did McLuhan's mosaic configurations sanction random and serendipitous collage over "essay-like presentations" (TTVP 2) of unidimensional relations. The use of probe as anti-environment is again traced by McLuhan from the French Symbolists to Pound: "Al1 serious art, to use Pound's phrase, func- tions satincally as a mirror or counter-environment to exempt the user from tyranny by his self-imposed environment, just as Perseus's shield enabled him to escape stupefaction by the Gorgon'' (Laws 226). Al1 serious art, in other words, emancipated the viewer by providing him with an alternative to conventional perspective.

Though not fully defined in 1951, the method of both Pound's and the Symbolists' "heuristic probe" is first used by McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride, where it "provides positions from which to examine [cultural] ex- hibits" (M B vi). These positions are not conclusions, McLuhan qualifies, "in which anybody is expected to rest but are intended . . . as points of departure" (vi). As points of entry and exit and not repose, McLuhan's forays or probes (84) and parallel also the detached points of view and suspended judgements of those exegeses, for post-literate probing, McLuhan argues, is a kind of the* retical disarmament that counters and is incompatible with the battle-ready ideologues of the Gutenberg age of high literacy (GG 139)--whose approach Pound termed "yesterday['s] .. . method of sentiment and generalization" (SP 21). Rather, like the artist--who "seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. . . . [and] does not comment" (SP 23)--the critic of the global theatre of the absurd must, McLuhan insists, be similarly detached; moreover, his methods, to radically counter "yesterday['s]," must complement the methods of his cul- ture in order to be meaningful:

The professoriat has turned its back on culture for 200 years because the high culture of technological sodety is popular culture and knows no boundanes between high and low. There is no longer a gap be- tween business and culture or military and civilian life. (Counterblasf 49)

Apropos "probe and . . . Pound," McLuhan notes that not only were "Pound's last Cantos [in 19651 titled 'Rock and DrüY [sic], [but] his ABC of Reading uses past literature as probe, not package" (Letfers of MM 325). That use of lan- guage as probe, in McLuhan's mind, makes Pound's methodology worthy of emulation in the post-literate age, for "whereas the package belongs to the consumer age, the probe belongs to an age of experiments" (TTVP 251). The equating of literature with probe--bringing with it the suggestion that litera- ture is "language charged with meaning" (ABC 28)--betrays again McLuhan's close reading of Pound's important "How to Read" essay, in which Pound ad- vocates "a definite curriculum in place of the present émiettements' as the cal methodology, then, McLuhan imported from Pound's work the notion that no derivative theory nor ideology Save that of the unadorned primary source can effectively function as productive anti-environment, since dogma, bound as it always is with "value judgernents, . . . create[s] a moral fog around technological change such as renders understanding impossible" (GG 213). Therefore, the point-of-viewless probe as "total involvement" (in Pound's case, the literary anthology of primary sources, his dissociative ABC [IL 78]), can achieve what "civilized point of view" (WUP 17) cannot: comprehension contra somnambulism, active participation in culture over passive submis- sion via philologie observation. The methodological ethic espoused, in short, is that of participation, what Laughlin called Pound's "peripatetic" (The Master 4)--active "readerly" engagement over passive "wrÏterlymcapitulation.

McLuhan's method of using probes as counter-environs also rings of Pound's use of hypotheses as the male principle, the ripostes or retaliatory sally meant not only to counter and disperse the adroitness of the "ferninine," but also to syrnbolize the vigour and energy of masculine "seminal" thought. To legit- imize this "biocriticism" (not only feminists "write" the body), Pound recalled Gourmont's phrase, "fecundating a generation of bodies as genius fecundates a generation of minds" (PbD 207). The probe was McLuhan's advancement; it was the sperm that, not unlike Pound's "Rock and Drill," was evangelical in zeal and fervour, ever fertilizing. Çuch was the male drive; for rhetori- cians like McLuhan and Pound, the opportunity to adapt the male's nature to his method of argumentation was a chance to effect a working peripl us. Only that which was probing, after ail, could lead to meaningful discovery, to the birth of new insight. McLuhan's search for a radical new methodology as productive sense-enhanc- ing (or sense-negating) anti-environment is explained by Barrington Nevitt as a forma1 response to the re-tribalizing of McLuhan's world, specifically its reversion to a Heraditean from an Aristotelian praxis:

Literate Greeks invented ph usis [physisj--Nature in visual space--by abstracting it from chaos--the 'buzzing confusion' of multi-sensory existence. Upon this abstraction their successors have built Western civilization that separates Thought from Feeling to create the illusion of 'objectivity.' This culture also substituted Aristotelian YES OR NO logic of statemen f s for Heraclitean YES AND NO dialect of existence itself. . . . Electnc information speedup has created a new all-embracing environ- ment . . . that is now recreating us. . . . by ushering in new process patterns that are retrieving Heraclitean YES AND NO dialect with new mean- ing.

In Ku Ich u r, Pound describes an almost identical forma1 iteration / replay as concomitant with "the ideogrammic method, [which] consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and de- sensitized surface of the reader's mind. onto a part that will registef' (51). The following from McLuhan's "Pound's Critical Prose" details how important Pound's theory of the ideogram (of "the econornical rendering of complex ac- tualities") was to McLuhan's own eventual methodology:

. . . when [Pound] says that Sweeney Agonistes con- tains more essential criticism of Seneca than Mr. Eliot's essays on Senecanism we have a typical ob- servation whose form is that of exact juxtaposition. It is not a casual statement but an ideogram, a pre a precise anaiysis or seneca, on one nariu, ~IIUVI Sweeney Agonistes, on the other. Syntactically elaborated it would fil1 many pages. But Mr. Pound seldom translates himself into ordinary prose. And anecdotes and reported conversations which enrich his essays are, in the same way, never casually illus- trative but ideogrammatic. . . . And it is the conse- quent solidity and sharpness of particularized actu- ality (in which the Chinese excel) that baffles the reader who looks for continiious argumentation jn Mr. Pound's prose and verse alike.

(IL79-80)

Indeed, McLuhan's own admission of the complementarity of ideogrammic and electric simultaneity suggests just how close was the affinity he perceived between the "cornplex gestalts" (WdP93) of Chinese pictonal writing and the similar effects on a western sensibility retribalized by the electric: "In an elec- tronic world where all-at-onceness is inevitable and normal, we have redis- covered an affinity for the discontinuity of Oriental art and expression" (TTVP 221). Such electric technology, because "involving al1 the senses at once" (GG 34), was therefore an "orientalizing force" (Letters of MM 342). And so, McLuhan finds once again, via Pound's teaching of the Chinese ideogram, another iwight into western typography that yet again seems to ex- plain and complement the technology-based formal changes that he saw ev- erywhere around him.

Related to Pound's theory of epistemology--that "real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits" (Kulchur 99)--the ideogrammic method that so obvi- ously influenced McLuhan was rooted in Pound's belief in "periplum" (ABC 44). Used throughout The Cantos as navigational/ epistemological compass bord seen by men sailing" (59 / 3X), "periplum," as interpreta tive suture, in- volves readers in the experience of Iiterary effects, exacting their active partic- ipation by focusing their perceptual field. As Gai1 McDonald explains, Pound effects this interpretative suture by opening up the perceptual field to the in- determinacies of kagrnent and chaos, recreating, in the process, a multi-sen- sory field within which reader and author, similarly orïented, encounter the same stimuli toward the desired end:

[Pound's methodology] permits the role of quester after knowledge to be passed around, or held simul- taneously, by characters in the poem, by the poet writing the poem, and by the reader trying to corn- prehend the poem. . . . The confusing absence of predidable markers . . . unsettles narrative assump tions; the 'rag-bag' assortment of materials (letters, quotations, musings, and translations) dismantles poetic deconun. We lose both the spectatonal posi- tion and the cornforts of convention. With precon- ceptions destabilized, we must devise a substitute for the Aquinas map as we go dong; Pound's aim is [therefore] to present education as an experience of navigation by periplus. . . . We and Pound are not, as it were, outside the poem observing its shape in overview, but inside it, mapping its shape as we en- counter it.

(McDonald 145)

Reclaiming the cognitive in mosaic configuration (McLuhan's "rag-and-bone shop") from the Newtonian or auto-inducing (Pound's "Aquinas-map" of the exegete [Letters of EP 3231)' infuses content with the generative, ensuring the application of what Pound called "appetite" (Kulch ur 98) and "enthusiasm" (Romance 223) to the pursuit of "live thought" (Kulchur 56). In "coasting" by periplum (ABC 44), Pound was configuring theoretically what McLuhan as exempla by its formal "outering" or "extension of consciousness" (UM252), by a methodology concomitant with its intent--in other words, by a method- ology that treats languagel literaturel sen tentiael aphorism/ cliché as "probe." Innovation by "periplus" therefore antedates scholarship: while the scholarly presents a kind of resplendent cartography not unlike the scientific (ABC 17), the artistic-- to use Pound's example, Homer's Odyssey--naviga tes a reality "not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map . . . but as a coasting sailor would find it" (ABC 43-44). And so as readers "naked to the diversity of existence" (IL 81), McLuhan writes, we are free to experience Mauberley as "The London Scene" of the twenties and The Cantos as "the human scene for a long period" (80). For Pound, the work of art--vigorous, radical, and unpopular in its forma1 invention--"remains the permanent ba- sis of psychology and metaphysio" (SP 23). As narrative that infuses al1 real- ity and as "forma" that "rises from death" (Kulchur 152), "Literature is news that STAYS news" (ABC 29). The best literature, in other words, is the sum of its forms, forms which, unlike themes, styles, tastes, and eras, never go out of date.

Herein lies the source of McLuhan's high praise for Pound's "intellectual benr (Letfers of MM 202), what McLuhan phrases "the very process of intel- lection" that leads to a neo-scholastic "universalism" (G G 113)--clearly the same universalism that, as Pound writes, admonishes "provincialism [as] the enemy" (SP 202). Methodology, as medium, is therefore both exempla and salvation, simultaneously adrnitting the reader to and protecting the reader from what McLuhan describes as the "cultural blues" (W6P 16, 97-99) that at- tend retribalized angst. McLuhan saw everywhere in Pound the workings of obsession with "teaching by examples" (IL 7ï). By twinning Pound's special definition of artists--as "the antennae of the race" (ABC 81)--with Pound's theory of navigation by periplus, McLuhan posits a role for post-literate artists based on a similar exemplum: a methodological vigour that not only in- forms and elevates, but, even more fundamentally, participates vicariously, through periplus-like engagement, in sensory life:

The artist studies the distortion of sensory life pro- duced by new environmental programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form. In social terms the artist cm be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deneaion of the needle by the changing play of forces. So understood, the artist is not a peddler of ideals or lof@ experiences. He is rather the indispensable aid to action and reflection alike. (TTVP 238)

And so the use of literature itself as radical methodology, as probe cu rn anti- environment, especially early in his career, typifies McLuhan's approach to what he later terms--with hints of Poe's 'The Descent into the Maelstrom" and Gaudier-Brzeska's "al1 poetic language is the language of exploration" (GB $@--the "electrically-configured whirl" (Massage 150). Art and the critic's interrogation of it must be similarly Promethean, concluded McLuhan: "le style c'est I'hornrne," counselled Pound (SP 452), and McLuhan certainly seemed to take note.

Nineteen years after The Mechanical Bride, however--when "Sputnik [has] put the globe in a 'proscenium arch,' and the global village has been trans- probe" (Cliché 12), requiring of the now fin-de-siècle socio-literary critic who attempts to circumscribe it not the yardstick or measures of the "matcher" but the precise and innovative forms and methods of the "maker." Hence, not only McLuhan's later interest in and inclusion of neo-scholastic "aphorism" in his mosaic configurations, but also the appearance in his post-1965 (post- Understanding Media) work of a different voice, one decidedly more artistic and playful than critical or argumentative.

Just as "the symboliste revival of oral culture . . . relied much on 'disjoined sentences' and aphorism" (GG 103) to convey and contain the new multi-sen- sory awareness of a collateral orality, so too did McLuhan's mature writings become self-reflexively disjointed with aphonsm and pun, illogical and elu- sive induction, tenuous connection of syntactic opposites, and a plethora of seemingly private metaphors, al1 "put on" (Cliché 145) by McLuhan as a de- liberate affront to a Gutenberg-patterned periodic structure that continued to extinguish ernotion as it lulled its readers to sleep. "Like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the rnind" (UM 18), the effed of such periodic linearity was to manipulate readerslcitizens into the sole consideration of content, which a mature McLuhan now felt it was his job to expose and counter. Interrogated and evoked by aphorism (as was Francis Bacon's technique in The Advancernent of Learning [GG 102]), reali- ties under examination, McLuhan discovered, could become invigorated as they became problematized, awakening the reader, as Pound had, and "massaging" him into active engagement. The aphorism was methodologi- cally evocative because it did not define or explain itself: "in its incomplete- ness and suggestiveness," says Marchand, "it invited 'men to enquire further' so could the moralist critic "massage'' that citizenry out of its somnambulism. McLuhan's punning on mass age/ massage/message was deliberate, a bit of Joycean fun that served as peripatetic exemplum.

Pound counselled a similar suggestiveness that rendered the artistic elusive and the apprehension of that abstract "ànematographic" (GB 89) and involv- ing:

As in the Greek, or, indeed, as in most moving po- etry, the simple lines demand from us who read, a completion of the detail, a fulfillment or crystalliza- tion of beauty implied. The poet must never in- fringe upon the painter's function ; the picture must exist around the words ;the words must not attempt too far to play at being brush strokes.

(Romance68)

As an extension of the theory of probe, McLuhan's post-1965 use of aphorism as radical methodology also owed something to Pound's reading of the Aristotelian notion that "'the apt use of metaphor, arising, as it does, from a swift perception of relations, is the hall-mark of genius"' (Romance 158). McLuhan seemingly translates Pound's rare approval of something Aristotelian--his theory of metaphor, which is championed no doubt because it "starts TOWARD ideogram" (SP 453)--into yet another justification "for probing around" (Massage 10):

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories. . . . When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposi- tion in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. (Massage 10) Like Mallarme and the modems, who "refused to be distracted by the fashion- conscious sirens of content and subject matter and proceeded straight to the utilkation of universal forms of the artistic process itself" (MB 75), McLuhan's aphoristic indulgence opened up the possibility of a new imagina- tive engagement through which the critic both partakes of the artistic and opens the field of critical inquiry into the serendipitous. It was as if McLuhan was measuring himself by Pound's own critical dicta: first, that "the writer's blood test is his swift contraposition of objects" (SP 452), second, that "a man whose wit teems with analogies will often 'twig' that something is wrong long before he knows why" (ABC 84), and, third, that "the critic who doesn't make a personal statement . . . is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a mea- surer but a repeater of other men's results" (ABC 30). Translated into method, Pound's dicta transformed McLuhan from active critical participant

(a well-schooled disciple of high modemism) to imaginative medium and ce conspirator (one of the original unruly brats of post-modernism). As Pound qualified in Kulch ur,

It does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological se- quence of what has happened, or the names of pro- tagonists, or authors of books. or generals and lead- ing political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, econornic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order. . . . An education consists in 'getting wise' in the rawest and hardest boiled sense of that bit of argot. appropriation of probe and aphorism championed formal exploration of pro- cess over causal explication of product, following, in other words, Pound's dicta to the letter; and, moreover, applying those dicta not only as forma1 trope but as a means of self-preservation amidst the anxiety-ridden (in McLuhan's case, elechic) vortex: "To follow the contours of process as in psy- choanalysis provides the only means of avoiding the product of process, namely neurosis or psychosis" (GG 45). In his radical methodology, McLuhan becomes, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom, "the resourceful man":

What could be more practical for a man caught be- tween the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology [than] to make himself a raft of ad copy. He is behaving like Poe's sailor in the Maelsfrorn who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives. May not it be Our job in the new electronic age to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures?

Pregnant with considerations of purpose and audience, McLuhan's method- ology contains and accommodates as exempla forma1 trope, aphoristic en- gagement, heuristic probe, and (like Tsze Sze's second thesis [Confucius 1231) a self-preserving nosce te ipsum, a neo-classical Pandora's box "not only of sur- vival but of advance" (M B 75). Politically, this methodology, while described by McLuhan (with echoes of Lewis) as "a proportionate extension of arduous vision" (MB75), was really the re-creation for utility and accessibility of the artistic vision, as McLuhan, somewhat fittingly, outlined in a Playboy inter- view: '- '------"= ------O ment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of in- sight, of pattern recognition. . . . 1 want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks

The "pragmatic purpose" of which McLuhan speaks, confirms the self-realiza- tion of his own metamorphosis: namely, that his innovative and creative use of the formal aspects of methodology to achieve vicarious effect admits him to the Company of artists. Observed accordingly, McLuhan's seemingly radical methodological departures are no less provocative than those of the like-minded literary artists whom those departures emulate--Pound, Joyce, Lewis, and the Symbolists--whose difficulty, Pound wrote, "is to give a feeling of the realiiy of the speaker, [and] . .. to gain any degree of poignancy in one's utterance" (SP 418).

Pursuing the implications of his own methodology, McLuhan was indeed challenged by and overcame both difficulties. Yet among critics who remain blind to 'the oral tradition of both preliterate and postliterate cultures" (Cliché87), McLuhan's "constitution of the process," his critical voice, is that of the sycophant. When McLuhan is considered in light of the modernism he took quite literally, however, his evolution as cntic is far less troublesome, as is his abrupt break with Pound in 1957: just as Pound's modemism had li- censed McLuhan's participation in social discourse so too did Pound's mod- ernism license the elevation of that partiapation into the realm of the artistic, an elevation that would lead to the cornpetitive anxieties and hubris that Dudek's scom). Again, the medium of Pound and McLuhan's analogical and paratactic communication--the methodology/ technique "for achieving rich implication by withholding . . . syntactical connection" (M B 80)--was foremost among their messages. Hence, the exegetical relationship between Pound's poehy and his criticism, the seemingly troublesome flight of McLuhan's ma- ture production int~the absurd, and the inevitability of Pound and McLuhan's creative/artistic clash. Both, methodologically, were pursuing the inevitable extensions of their own entelechies; both, I would argue, could hardly avoid pursuing the farthest implications of their own synchronic forms. McLuhan's son and collaborator, Eric, agrees:

My fathefs communication studies . . . were an ex- tension of his work in literature and a profound application (you might Say, upda ting) of grammar and rhetoric. His work will not be fully compre- hended except in that light.

(W WM M 242 italics mine)

What must be reiterated, however, is that McLuhan and Pound, though their methods may have seemed to evolve to the contrary, were essentially con- servatives, essentially seeking what they perceived was a middle ground where their dogmas would succeed on the strength of some utility. McLuhan's comment in Understanding Media that "the implosion of electric energy in our century ca~otbe met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and . . . flexibility" (71), betrays what McLuhan valued most highly, just such a functional utility: "we hope that the jagged edges of Our iconic thrusts and queries will serve to open up, rather than to enclose, the imagery of the perceptual field" (TTVP 2). To misread "jagged edges" and intent.

Contrary to what has become popular critical consensus, McLuhan and Pound were not discouraging inclusion but inviting participation. They were actu- ally opening up the Tradition, via what McLuhan called "do-it-yourself ex- ploration" kits (Revaluatio n 651, for vicarious play, inviting readers into their discourse as equal partners, not as vacuous automatons. Louis Zukofsky's ob servation that The Can f os were "'an ideation directed towards inclusivenessf" (Carpenter 482) seems particularly appropriate here. If readers suddenly had more work to do (as McLuhan wrote of Pound's readers) to navigate the quasi-Metaphysical conceits of unadorned intellectual analogy and contex- ture, then this was the result of a more democratic field, one that "eschews the associational devices of ambivalent language" (Letters of MM 202)--one that, in advancîng a Pound dicturn, holds a narrow, deductive "provincialism [as] the enemy" (SP 202). Nowhere is their shared view of this respect for readers and the recumbent implications of their radical methodologies more evident than in their pedagogy. While their beliefs were manifest as forma1 gestalts (do-it-yourself kits) at the level of method, their dogrna as content (as subject matter) was articulated pedagogically. "Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowl- edge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive" (UM272)

Both Pound and McLuhan developed early aversions to the academic systems within which they began, systems that discouraged their natural curiosity and subversion. In "Patria Mia," Pound remembered a system "which aim[ed] at mediocrity, which [was] set to crush out al1 impulse and personality; which aim[edJ to make not men but automata" (SP 132). In correspondence with Pound, McLuhan described similar experienceq the following with teachers poorly suited to lofty goals:

[Teachers] are people of lowly origins and no cul- tural background or tradition. . . . They have no tradition which wouid enable them to be critics of their own world. They have a temperament which prefers a quiet simple life, but no insights into any- thing at all. They distrust any of their number who has ideas. (Letters of MM 227)

Though Pound exaggerated that he could find "no [polite] words" to describe what he called the "dastardliness of the American university system as we have known it" (LE 62), he did often cloak his anti-academic commentary in colourhil metaphors, calling education "rotten at the core" (Letters of EP 263), universities "beaner[iesIw (Kulchur 56), those who ran them like bureaucra- Qes "hirelings and boors" (Kulchur al), and those who taught in them "men with NO human curiosity, gorillas, primitive congeries of protoplastic cells without conning towers, without nervous organisms more developed than that of amoebas" (Kulchur 147). The caustic in Pound's aversion was no where in 1906, because of the dullness and inflexibility of one faculty member in particular, he left without a degree:

'And besides, Mr. Pound, we shd. have to do so much work ourselves to verify your results[.j8

Dated U. of Penn. 1906 when 1 suggested doing a thesis on some reading matter OUTSIDE the list of classic authors included in the curriculum, and de- spite the fact that Fellowships are given for research and that a thesis for Doctorate is supposed to con- tain original research. (Kulchur 215-16)

But Pound would not 'go away without breaking the silence" (Letters of EP 225), as he wrote to the Alumni Secretary of U.Penn. twelve years later. Instead, he would write volumes exposing the contradictions of "petty monopol[ies]" which "talk democracy and breed snobbishness" (SP 131).

The problem with American institutions of higher learning, Pound advanced in those volumes, was twofold, involving first the problem of "mercantilism, the syphilis of al1 American univ. teaching" (Letfers of EP 325) and, secondly, the problem of the "Germanization of universities" (Letters of EP 126, SP 122- 23), which he qualified in a letter to Simon Guggenheim, the patron saint of scholanhip, as the end result of "the American parody of German philology" (Lefters of EP 197). While mercantilisrn in the form of "snotted subsidies" and "big endowments" actually "impede[dl arts and letters" (325), philology, in Pound's mind, aimed "to make a man stupid, to turn his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things unessential" (P&D 90). As con- ceived, education stultified cultural inquiry and rendered the mind of the in- have perceived were al1 imbedded in 'scholarship'" (P&D 90). Formal educa- tion in Pound's experience was therefore a form of state-sanctioned and state- run hypnosis, a confidence trick played by corporate interests to lu11 the minds of the public into neutered cornpliance.

McLuhan held similar aversions to American-styled formal education, in part acquired from the colonial high-mindedness of his anti-American Cambridge fellows. One of the fiat things he learned at Cambridge was "why the obtaining of a degree in America means literally the end of education" (Letters of MM 54), and he translated that early sentiment into a similar life- long argument against the pedagogically staid, stultifying, and conventional. McLuhan's words in the following letter parallel Pound's sentiments almost exactly:

Recent contact with the staff of Western Ont. University has shocked me into vigilance once more. Not merely mediocrity but tepidity of soul, timidity of mind and a horrible rebellion against anything real marks these people. . . . Smirking lit- tle automatons. L 'infame. (Letters of MM 166)

Besides using "automaton," the same descriptor as Pound, to equate educa- tion with that which is machined into cornpliant desiccation, McLuhan also agreed with Pound that a "dialectically organized cumculum ornits al1 emo- tional education" and that "from outside the school the business man con- quers the cumculum" (Letters of MM 1û4). Even vogue cumcula like that of Harvard's graduate school and Chicago's Great Books Programme, popular in McLuhan's day, were mere monopoly-driven "assembly lines" in their world," their learners characterized only by "anguish and starvation" (Ml3 43). Reiterating Pound's notion of a conspiring "rnercantilism" but from a Marxist perspective (Marxist as it applied to the new tribalism created by the algo- rithrnic and digi ta]--the so-called "hyper-agrarianism"), McLuhan wrote tha t "the automatic levelling process exercised by applied science" has evolved pedagogically "to the point where the same curriculum and the same room serve to prepare boys and girls alike for the neuter and impersonal routines of production and distribution" (M B 53). Such neuter, McLuhan felt, became a dangerous contagion, since it was a self-fulfilling extension of the Gutenberg- numbing effects of visual literacy. McLuhan's early and frequent aiticism of du11 and disinterested students (Letters of MM 149, 165, 268, 306) shows just how viscerally he felt the effects of this manifest student somnambulism.

As he began to read Pound more dosely in the early 50s, however, McLuhan removed the blame from his students, realizing that their disinterest was the effect and not the cause of such neuter. He also came to realize that inatten- tiveness and dullness of mind were not poorly leamed lessons but, in fact, well-learned behaviours. His students' almost universal Iack of enthusiasm- which he later attributed to their special position on the cusp of an old system and a new age, rendering them fish out of water (Counterblast 5)--registered as yet another uneasiness for McLuhan, like the effect of Poe's use of morbid- ity, that helped him forge new insights. One of the many lessons to be learned from McLuhan is that he paid rnost attention to that which made him most uneasy. Discovery followed from there, as it did collaterally through the unease, he wrote Wyndham Lewis, of "bearing up against the lethargy of the student mind" (Letters of MM 165): 1 ne yuuiig siuuerii iuuay ~LUWDUY 111 a11 SICLLLALULI Y configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation or- ganized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educationaf scene relates to the 'mythic' world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. . . . Media study at once opens the doors of perception. And here it is that the young can do top-level re- search work. .. . Any child can list the effects of the telephone or the radio or the rnotor car in shaping the life and work of his friends and his society. An inclusive list of media effects opens rnany unex- pected avenues of awareness and investigation.

(UM vii-viii)

The realization that students were being tossed into and trapped by "the ho- mogenizing hopper" (GG 215) because of his culture's resistance to technolog- ical change, led McLuhan to posit a radically new cumculum based in the be- lief that "the essence of education" should provide "civil defence against me dia fallout [i-e., against 'the subliminal operation of Our own technologies']" (GG 246). In "Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath," an important BLA S 7'-styled manifesto modelled after "Watch the Beaneries" (K ulch ur 344- 45), and of which Pound spoke approvingly, McLuhan grounded that new curriculum in media and popular culture, using the same liberties with metaphor and epithet as Pound: "The METROPOLIS today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon" (Explorations 207). For both McLuhan and Pound, only hyperbole and colourful metaphor could shock the public into a recognition of their was as skillful as Pound in using poetic license for dogmatic (and dramatic) ef- fect.

The aphoristic "City as Classroom" became a well-known McLuhanism as well as the title of a 1977 primer for students and teachers that suggested ways to break "the mesmerism of prhr (GG 246) that had abstracted the learning exchange since the emergence of phonetic (Greek) and typographic (Gutenberg) visual stress. That mesmerism, McLuhan argued further, mani- fested itself, again at the expense of students, "as a kind of war conducted by the Establishment to keep the sensory life in line with existing commit- ments" (TTVP xxiv); as a result, its "visual blueprints" had to be updated to address the "nonvisual values" (TTVP 157) of the post-literate age. McLuhan asked simply: "Would it not seem natural and necessary that the young be provided with at least as much training of perception in this graphic and phe togaphic world as they get in the typographic?" (UM230).

As Arthur Kroker points out, McLuhan's embrace of the "poetic process" to infiltrate the conspiratorial ethos of technology amounted to a kind of "technological hurnanism" (66), whereby insight could only be gained by "intense and direct participation in the 'abjects' composing the technostruc- ture" (66). Kroker further writes:

It is only by creatively interiorizing (reulistically perceiving) the 'external' world of technology, by reabsorbing into the dance of the intellect mass me- dia as extension of the cognitive faculties of the human species, that we can recover 'ourselves' anew. It is also individual freedom which is wa- (Kroker 66)

The new media- and technology-grounded curriculum, then, countered mesmerism and homogenization by putting the Establishment's model into radical apposition with popular culture. By fragmenting the discursive supe- riority of the older model and privileging popular culture as an equally Iegit- imate pedagogic ground, McLuhan's new cumculum met students on their own terms, not the terrns of their elders: 'The world of media is one in which the young are deeply versed. It is one that not only shapes their earli- est perceptions, but which nourishes them as well, far beyond any nutriment received in the classroom" (Letters of MM 306). Under the same rules, if the teacher was to reach his students, he too rnust speak the language of their popular culture, which McLuhan explained in a 1967 "dialogue" with Gerald Emanuel Stearn:

In 1936, when 1 arrived at Wisconsin, 1 confronted classes of freshmen and 1 suddenly realized that 1 was incapable of understanding them. 1 felt an ur- gent need to study their popular culture: advertis- ing, games, movies. . . . To meet them on their own grounds was my strategy in pedagogy: the world of popular culture. (HK262)

As the pedagogic ground shifted to accommodate students' post-literate sen- sory bias and their musée imaginaire of archetypal reference-foregrounding, as a consequence, human perception--so increased, McLuhan argued, student attentiveness and vital engagement. Again, Kroker is insightful: "Over and over again in his writings, McLuhan rehirned to the theme that only a sharp- labyrinth of the technostructurefJ (64).

Consequently, while the old model produced the "dropout," the new model processed the "teach-in." The resonant stress was moved from the visual and linear to the oral and haptic--privileging, in the process, exploration (probing/ feeling/ feeding) over explication (proving/ viewing/ desiring). The resulting field, McLuhan argued, was self-reflexively (Le., radically) demo- cratic; it was also labour intensive, meaning, in the end, highly productive for each individual:

The teach-in represents a aeative effort, switching the educational process from package to discovery. As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroorn can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work. (Massage 101)

And sof just as readers could be woven into the "interval" of textuality by the formal innovation of effect-focussed experimenters updating "the Aquinas- map," so too could students be coaxed into similar engagement by centering and using as "points of departuref' (MB vi) the very implications--the "language of formsf (Massage 100)-of their own totally involving culture. As corollary, an added bonus of pedagogic engagement with the formal gestalt of popular culture was the consequent recognition of the rhetorical underhand- edness that such scrutiny revealed: namely, the complex "insidious[ness]" (UM 230) of how advertisers manipulate a non-engaged, neutered public. And because that corporate "eloquence is virtually demagogic in its headlong exploitation of words and emotions for the flattesr of the consumerff (MB42), onslaught" (MB 97). Education, for McLuhan, was therefore serious moral business, most so because by foregrounding and sharpening human percep- tion it was emancipatory. Merely "eaming a living" was already giving way in McLuhan's time to what we in the 90s now know is the necessity of "leaming a living" (Coun terblast 41) in order to protect and preserve oneself. Once again, McLuhan's precocity has proven accura te.

So devised, McLuhan's new curriculum was simultaneously re- and pro-ac- tive, denouncing at once the forms of the archaic (visual) and the content of the modem (subliminal) through both a Pound-like "study to oppose same" and an intense Catholic humanisrn whose Thomistic ethic was to expose the "subliminal grammar of technology" (Kroker 63). McLuhan's pedagogic model, at first glance radical, was only as radical as his methodology, and cer- tainly not dissimilar to Pound's own pedagogic dogma. Both privileged "poetic" engagement over a11 else, preasely the kind of "poetic" that led not only to active participation in culture but more importantly to vigorous and clear-minded interrogation of culture. In the final analysis, Pound wrote, "the function of the teaching profession is to maintain the HEALTH OF THE NATIONAL MIND" (LE 59). In his important essay, "Catholic Humanism and Modem Letters," McLuhan put forth essentially the same argument.

Pound believed also, as McLuhan did, in a requisite shifting of the pedagogic ground from its current ernphasis on product to a necessary elevation of pro- cess. As McLuhan wrote, "The Age of Implosion in education [Le., the res- onating electric age] spells the end of 'subjects' and substitutes instead the structu~alsfwdy of the making and learning process itself" (Counterblast 37). first thesis in 'The Unwobbling Pivot" (chung yung): "What heaven has dis- posed and sealed is called the inbom nature. The realization of this nature is called the process. The clarification of this process . . . is called education" (Confucius 99). Only if education were wedded to process--as McLuhan wrote, wedded inventively to roles (internai) in a rejection of goals (external) (Massage 100)--couId the student "find his plumb center making use of him- self" (Confucius 101). The measure of "process," then, like that of methodol- ogy, was ultimately a functional utility, what Pound inferred from the Chinese ideogram to be a "stretching to an efficient life" (Confucius 101). So conceived by Pound, "education [was] an onanism of the soul" (LE 241), and therefore not very far removed from McLuhan's pedagogic Catholic human- ism.

Though on the surface both Pound and McLuhan appear to champion what McLuhan no doubt would have termed a fickle and regressive Cartesian in- dividualism (the end product of a stress on fragmented specialism), both were far more interested in privileging consciousness sans somnambuIism than in retneving identity. For Pound, such retrieval was needlessly indulgent and recklessly xenophobic: "1 detest an education which tends to separate a man from his fellows" (SP 122); "The aim of right education is to lead a man out into more varied, more intimate contact with his fellows" (SP21).

Finally, Pound, as McLuhan, was most wary of the debilitating effects of ideo- logical suggestion and capitulation, McLuhan's so-called "media fallout" (GG 246). Because learning had been cut off from appetite (what Spinoza consid- ered man's natural love of things in their perfections [Romance 91]), Pound by a surrogate pop cultural pap, "the twopenny weeklies" (Kulchur 98-99), from which they fed for lack of more stimulating fare. To counter this sloth and its extended effects (again, the mimetic adoption of a carefully cultivated "formal" passivity, complete with objectivity as its highest critical virtue), Pound sought not only to retrieve "the best available 'classics"' as a core cur- riculum (Kulchur 314), but also to hold up those "simple radicals or hnda- mentals" for primary consideration (Fenollosa 43), leaving the abstract, in the fom of secondary sources, to the already numb philologists and pedants:

It appears to me quite tenable that the function of literature as a generated prize-worthy force is pre- cisely that it does incite humanity to continue liv- ing; that it eases the mind of strain, and feeds it, 1 mean definitely as nutrition of impulse.

(LE 20)

Pound's own early training had taught him, as McLuhan's had, that the ac- tion and the meaning (and, most importantly, the utility that might stretch into effiaency [Confucius 1011) were in the interval or gap, within which resided the generative (the same labour-intensive and productive involve- ment as McLuhan):

1 am much more grateful for the five minutes dur- ing which a certain lecturer emphasized young Icarus begorming himself with Daedalus' wax than for al1 the dead hours he spent in trying to make me a scholar. (LE 241) Risorgimento, Pound also charted a careful course through them. His own prirners (How to Read, Romnce, ABC, K ulch u r), his "prospectus" for "an ef- ficient college of the arts" curriculum (Letters of EP 41-42; SP 128-33,284-86; LE 38), and his oft-stated plan for a hypothetical "super-collegeff (SP 134) were a11 designed ultimately to Save students tirne. Presumably because he "had to find out at 49 what [he] might perfectly well have been told at 17" (SP 268), Pound's foreword to his most obvious Baedaker (Kulchur) begins what might be described as his utilitarian pedagogic humanism, one grounded, like McLuhan's, in a concem for students over system:

This book is not written for the over-fed. It is writ- ten for men who have not been able to afford an university education or for young men . . . who want to know more at the age of fifty than 1 know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that ob- ject. (6)

The significance of the metaphor of food in the first line above continues what Joe Keogh rightly observes to be Pound's reminder of "stewdants" at the "beaneries," those whose "edges" (read "teeth") have been dulled by bland institutional fare (private Ietter to the author).

In championing the superiority of the classics in contrast to "counterfeit work" (ABC 192), "which . . . IS the critic's job" (Kulchur 335), Pound hoped not only to lead "student[s] to the valid" (ABC 192), but also to speed their way to the discovery that leaming, as "an onanism of the soul" (LE 241), was ulti- mately, as McLuhan would write later, a radical and "proportionate extension art was the expression of a colossal preference (Counterblast 64):

The utility of education or of knowing the subject is mainly to know what one needn't bother to do. The pt. from which one can start to do one's own bloody bizniz. (Letters of EP 221)

As an extension of his methodology, Pound's pedagogy, like McLuhan's, sought to restore appetite and enthusiasm to the learning exchange by return- ing primacy to students (the active participants in leaming) and relegating the abstract and passive (collectively, "system") to the sidelines. Pound proposed to do this specifically by "kill[ing] off bureaucratism and professoriality" (Letters of EP 339), by "driv[ing] the actual artist upon the university seminar" (SP 133), by restor[ing] "fervour and well-lit discussion" (133), and by "driv[ingJ the theses . . . upon the Pressf' (133). Pound's own "teach-in" would allow the student "to attend lectures when he liked" (Letters of EP 99) without the threat of examinations, and, similar again to McLuhan's, would open up the pedagogic field to the rewards and risks of exploration and discovery, in- cluding the danger of confronting one's own inadequacies (Kulchur 183, Ruthven 139). Some years later, McLuhan wrote to University of Toronto President Claude Bissel1 echoing Pound's wishes exactly:

1 hope you will get around to commenting on my suggestion for a non-stop university seminar where everyone could table his ignorance rather than his knowledge. This, again, is the main hang-up of the academic person. He is proud of his knowledge and eager to hide his ignorance. (Let fers of MM 429) Can t os similarly empower readers by inviting their active engagement (to ex- tend Pound's metaphor, by satiating them with intellectual curiosity), it is not unreasonable to posit, as Kenner did in "Poets at the Blackboard" (Hisforical Fictions 109-21), that Pound's poetic works are indeed works in "process," works whose enlightenment is largely educational. McLuhan shared with Kenner his suspicion that Eliot's essay on Ben Jonson was really Eliot's dis- guised work on Pound (or at least that the essay could have doubled as one on Pound). In that essay, Eliot wntes: ". . . not many people are capable of dis- covering for themselves the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson's industrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well" (The Sacred Wood 106). Laughlin, Pound's rnost famous student (as Kenner is McLuhan's) said essentially the same thing about the asyndetic in "Pound the Teachef' (The Master of Those Who Know 1-26).

If Pound and McLuhan's methodology, then, was what McLuhan described as a "do-it-yourself exploration" kit (Revaluation 65), their pedagogy might be described collaterally as either a set of instructions for that kit or as tangible evidence of a finished product--of what the implications of methodology, considered pedagogically, might look like. Purposefully radical in openness, in destruction of boundaries, in dismissal of system and probity, and in expos- ing the unwittingly conFORMist in the conventional, their pedagogy, like their methodology, was a very serious expression of their shared belief in the highest of al1 social virtues, participation--participation in culture, in gover- nance, and, ultimately, "reaching into the next epoch (SP 284), in history. 284), it was the lofty job of the teacher, organizing "for a new paideuma," to effect social change through systemic "wake-up," through strategic redeploy- ment to counter indifference:

The natural nuclei are groups, hitherto utterly in- formal. If the nuclei be formed merely on geo- graphic basis they will remain as ineffective as they have hitherto been . . . let alone powerless of partic- ipation in a general social order. (SP289)

McLuhan agreed wholeheartedly that indifference was the enemy:

. . . it is not listening-freedom to be able to turn on or turn off the unweaned whimperings of hit-pa- rade crooning. It is, relatively, freedom to be able to 'place' them for what they are in relation to the range of human experience. . . . Freedom, like taste, is an activity of perception and judgment based on a great range of particular acts and experiences. Whatever fosters mere passivity and submission is the enemy of this vital activity. (MB 22)

The evidence of Pound and McLuhan's pedagogic "wake-up" of a society caught in a comforting middle class lullaby or corporate trame supports Pound's own contention, and the coevality of methodology and pedagogy, that "a man's duties increase with his knowledge" (Carpenter 625). Pedagogy, like methodology, was, then, the expression of not only a colossal preference (that in turn communicated a specific message) but an equally colossal re- sponsibility for the stimulation and manufacture of harmonious minds: not necessarily minds attuned in agreement (an accusation some might level at Pound, especially after the Bollingen affair), but minds similarly harmonious McLuhan asked no more and tolerated no less of their publics; toward those ends, both would willingly have "plead[ed] the rnissionary sperrit" (Letters of EP 338). As teachers, both remained hungry and rarely satiated.

III - Form

'There is an impression . . . that literary folks are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavours of words and phrases. They stnve for to- tality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utrnost skill." (V V V n-p., No. 11)

For Pound and McLuhan, methodology and pedagogy were inseparable; they were manifest style, technique, and fom, "precise rendering[s] of. . . impulse" (LE 9) that not only revealed critical integrity (Pound's "sincerity" [9])but dso redefined hinctionality as form (Pound) and message as medium (McLuhan). Their shared belief in the primacy of form over content (of students over sys- tem, method over dogma) led Pound and McLuhan to posit that al1 expres- sion--critical, artistic, pedagogic, and political--was likewise a forma1 "outering" (43), as McLuhan called it in The Gutenberg Gnlaxy. The more forma1 the outering (Le., the more inventive and distinct, forcing the ob server "out of the Narcissus-narcosis" [UM551 and into contemplation), the more meaningful the expression. Through its "forma," Pound wrote, "the concept rises from death" (Kulchur 152). would become its well-known McLuhan iteration, "the medium is the mes- sage"--in hÏs discussion of the psychology of the Troubadours:

The problern, in so far as it concerns Provence, is simply this: Did this 'chivalric love,' this exotic, take on mediumistic properties? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotions, did that 'color' take on forms inteqxetative of the divine order? Did it lead to an 'exteriorization of the sensibility,' and in- terpretation of the cosmos by feeling?

(Romance 94)

Pound's suggestion that "mediumistic properties" led to "an 'exteriorization of. . . sensibility"' (McLuhan's "outenng") followed from a rare discussion, at least for Pound, of "the common electric machine" and "the wireless tele- graph receiverff (Ro rnn n ce 93, technological advances whose incongmity at the turn of the century was suddenly confronting even conservative thinkers like Pound. The point to be made in the context of this shidy, however, is the distinct parallel that exists in the way McLuhan introduces the same concept: specifically that "outenng" exteriorizes the sensona and that such exteriority is most visible (McLuhan argued only visible) as anachronism, within envi- ronments where that which is extenorized is new, incongrnous, or clearly does not belong. Only in such environments, McLuhan argued, could the otherwise naturalized become anti-environmental, forcing perception through a distinct but healthy anxiety.

In curious parallel to Pound, McLuhan introduces his concept of "outering" in a chapter of Understanding Media on the wireless telegraph, begins that chapter anecdotally in the year 1910 (the same year as Pound's Romance), and ubiquity of this particular exteriority, the wireless: ". . . with the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now [1964]approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting" (UM 252). McLuhan's only advancement over Pound, small but profound in its implications, is that exteriorized senses are in fact exten- sions, and as extensions they are much more vital in what enhance, obso- lesce, retrieve, and fiip into (Lnws98-99). These properties of extensions be- came McLuhan's laws of the media.

In his translater's "Postscript to The Naturul Philosophy of Loue by Remy de Gourmont," Pound in fact had corne close to equating exteriorization with ex- tension--writing that "the invention of the first tool turned [man's] mind . . . turned, let us Say, his 'brain' from his own body" (PbD 209)--but did not broaden the implications of extension into the areas of media and effeds, as McLuhan would. Before straying too far into media laws of extended sens* ria, however, it is significant to note the place of origin of McLuhan and Pound's mutual discussion of "outering," even if separated by 55 years: namely, technology, a new technology that appeared vividly against a largely pastoral background, whose comparative chasteness rendered "the new sci- ence" of technology foreign, daring, to the conservative reformer, obscene, and to the modern artist, provocative. In short, at the tum of the twentieth century, technology had again become anti-environmental: the advent of electric technology (the wireless) revealed itself vividly to the early mod- ernists against the naturalized background of the previous era's Cartesian processes. with technology, McLuhan, in his essay on Pound, notes a cultural interest in the forms of machination that is particularly relevant not only to the Pound / McLuhan rela tionship (vis-à-vis the "new science" of technology tha t informed Pound's "formal" freshness) but to Pound's modernism as well:

In the America of 1908 the most authentic aesthetic experïence was widely sought and found in the con- templation of mechanical tools and devices, when intellectual energies were bent to discover by pre- cise analysis of vital motion the means of bringing organic processes within the compass of technical means. Mr. Pound records in his Gaudier-Brzeska the delight of his yomg contemporaries in examin- ing and commenting on machinery catalogues. . . . This enjoyment of machinery is just as natural and just as significant a phase of this age as was the Renaissance 'enjoyment of nature for its own sake.' The impersonal concerns and impatience of Mr. Pound's critical outlook are everywhere associated with this passion for technical exceilence. . . . This fascination with technological discovery CO-existing with emdition and sensitivity in language and the arts was what gave Mr. Pound his peculiar rele- vance in London, 1908. (1L 77-78)

Though this notion of fom as exteriorized sensoria must have appeared as new and exciting to a self-described "pastoral" McLuhan (Massage 72) first reading Pound, Joyce, and the other modernists in an industrialized London setting (Cambridge 1934), Pound was writing about and recognized in many pre-modems these properties of form that, by McLuhan's tirne (largely be- cause of Leavis and the New Crïtics), had come to characterize Pound's own poetics--specifically, his manipulation of the forma1 properties of language to achieve hybrïd literary effect. In the early years of the new century, seemingly tence, Pound was exploring the "mediumistic" potential of not only medieval chivalric love codes but also of Greek myth (Romance 92), Vorticism (GB126), and what he termed generally the "'beauty of the means'" versus the "'beauty of the thing"' (SP 41) to reify, as "'primary pigment" (GB al), the abstract, whether that abstract was emotional or intellectual. Pound defined this method of artistic reification as "the rneans of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means in such a way as to exhilarate" (SP 33), and wrote later, seemingly to qualify his notion of exhilaration, that al1 such great ener- gies require, "of necessity. . . many attendant inventions" (SP 377). Pedagogically, it was the job of the artist to invigorate; methodologically, vigour was possible only through invention. Form was the substrate that in- fused both, without which there was "NO renaissance" (Kulchur204). Pound made this point clear early in his career (1911-12) in a series of twelve reflec- tions for The New Age that later became "1 Gather the Limbs of Osiris":

. . . any given work of art is bad when its content could have found more explicit and prease expres- sion through some other medium, which the artist was, perhaps, too slothful to master.

As Pound further explained twenty years later in A BC--because, he claimed, readers had not understood his views on forma1 technique in "I Gather the Limbs of Osirism--theburgeoning wnter's study of the mastea should be less bcused on wha t is said than on h O w it is said, especially on how meaning is conveyed: getting meaning inio words, rather than of particu- lar things said. . . .The term 'meaning' camot be re- stricted to strictly intellectual or 'coldly intellectual' significance. The how much you mean it, the how you feel about meaning it, can al1 be 'put into lan-

The same aesthetic was often repeated as injunction--"mistrust people who fuss about paint and finish before they consider girders and structure" (Letters of EP 220)--which served to clarify the notion of "primary pigment" as that which related to prism, the medium of colour, and not patina. Once darified, this concern with "fo r ma" as "rigorous technique" summoning renaissance (Kulchur 204) became for Pound a cornerstone of his poetics, one related to his later methods of luminous detail, cultural overlayering, ideogram, subject rhythm, analogical and epigrammatic techniques, translation, ideoplasty, and polyphony, al1 transferrable to English for the primary purpose of exacting ef- fect (SP 33).

Pound's numerous injunctions about the prirnacy of form and the necessity of its attendant "parnirition" (SP 376) in the creation of meaning became for McLuhan the subject of a lifetime's experimentation and inquiry. If McLuhan's immense and fragmented critical oeuvre could be condensed to a one-line news bite that synthesized his insights on al1 media from the literary to the anthropomorphic, that line would have to convey his primary interest in the hybridization of meaning via forma1 ingenuity. If Pound and the moderns fespecially Eliot and Joyce) had returned prirnacy to form, then McLuhan, as their ever-attentive student, accepted the role of studying that otherwise, since, as he had learned from Mansfield Forbes and Wyndham Lewis, form was a common denominator that pervaded al2 media, not just the literary. Again, Pound and the moderns were the literary ground of McLuhan's broader sociological~cognitive, and linguistic sweeps.

Early in his career, McLuhan repeatedly described form as the "trick" of the moderns, as the medium of "carefully devised strateg[iesIwthat Pound and the Iesser moderns used "to get the passive visual reader into participant, oral action'' (GG 83). McLuhan began his 1950 article on Pound by identifying just these forma1 "tricks," which he claimed Pound "brought to bear on the re- shaping of poetry in London in 19ûû-1922" (IL 75). The following opening to that article echoes Pound's own high praise for Horner's similar "swing of words spoken" (LE 250):

Mr. Pound is the only writer of Our time whose prose achieves the effect of actual conversation as it occurs among those who exist in an intense focus of complex interests. It shocks again and again with the dramatic stress of the spoken word. . . . incorpo- rat[ing] . .. the radical individualism of generations of seaboard Yankees--not the mannerisms only but the entire movement of mind--the intensity, the shrewdness, and the passion for technical precision.

(IL 75)

As his career progressed through the 1950s and up to The Gutenberg GaZaxy, McLuhan wrote in a much more focussed way about these "tricks": about Eliot and Pound's appropriation of jazz and early film forms, about Charlie Chaplin's translation of Chopin's pianoforte to a mock ballet style of waddle and ecstasy that played to rave approval on the new "high definition" visual erents for hybrid oral energies, about typography's fulfillment of the estab- lishment's dream of a culture of high literacy, and especially about how the front page "newsbite" and the serialized comic strip revolutionized and trained our sensibility for everything from the layout of shopping rnalls and the movement of assembly lines to our divided and therefore disingenuous attention to the global carnival. McLuhan frequently echoed and expanded Pound's aphonsm that "artists are the antemae of the race" (ABC 73), writing that "artists in various fields [among whose number McLuhan added news- paper publishers, marketers, and politicians (Cliché97)] are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of an- other" (UM 54). Form in al1 its applications was a kind of concrete poetry McLuhan saw everywhere around him, always supplanting, by intention, the subject rnatter it purported on the surface to communicate. In the early years, McLuhan was only secondariiy a media guru; he was first and foremost, as Pound's student, a guru of forrns, one who arrived at the study of media and technology through an acquaintance with forma1 properties.

However, because he had the advantage of Pound's preliminary and exhaus- tive catalogues of forma1 experimentation (both Pound's own work and that which Pound had compiled from literary history), McLuhan's study of forms quickly evolved from championing their primacy (which Pound, as a pio- neer, was forced to do) to investigating in detail formal properties, which he would come to call "Media Laws" (Laws ix). McLuhan's own definition of "the medium is the message" (UM 7) reveals his reach into territory that Pound only approached: ". . . the personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, of any extension of ourselves--result from the new scale that technology" (7). The development from Pound is twofold: first, that media extend the senses, and second, that those extended senses alter not only a pre- existent sense ratio that reconfigures consciousness, but alter also, and this is the key point, soaal organization. Pound had indeed approached this, but fo- cussing on culture and artist alone, had missed the broader implications of formal effects, both unconscious and social. McLuhan qualifies the difference between the two approaches, and by qualifying places Pound, regardless of in- novations, in an earlier generation of high literacy:

Just as there was nobody in the ancient classical world to notice the effects of the phonetic alphabet and papyrus on the human psyche and social orga- nization, so there was nobody at the council of Trent who noted that ii was the form of printing that imposed a totally new forma1 causality on hu- man consciousness. (Letters of MM 385)

Herein Lay the second generation of modernist inquiry into forms, described by McLuhan as that which studies not the mechanism of sense ratios (in other words, how forms exact effect to reify abstract meaning and therefore enhance "human perception" [Counterblas t 32]), but studies the new worlds and "modalities" created by extended sensoria (Letters of MM 386). The dis- tinction is between employing form as artefact (Pound's technique) and study- ing form for its recumbent social and cognitive effects (McLuhan's adva me). Once separated from the former generation of inquiry, McLuhan could daim a new set of forma1 dicta, which, because of the proprioceptive "influenza" of eledronic technologies, seemed unnaturally prophetic to a suddenly retnbal- ized age. Those new forma1 dicta were as follows: that we as users of forms use, if only because these things are extensions of ourselves" [Lettm of MM 4271); that as content, we are unwittingly comprised of former environments, as McLuhan was "comprised of" and had to break free f-rom Pound ("The con- tent of any new system or organization naturally consists of the preceding sys- tem or organization, and in that degree the old environment acts as a control on the new" [TTVP 2421); and that, as content under the spell of the old in contravention to the new, Our reality (our seemingly fresh present) is one that we perceive with anxiety and rnyopia through a "rear-view mirror" (Counterblasf 22), not unlike the refracted witness of Plato's cave dwellers:

In our time . . . the amount of innovation far ex- ceeds al1 the impacts of innovation of al1 the past cultures of the world. We are more frantic to re- cover and put together the pieces of the shattered image than any past soaety whatever. It is this im- pulse that motivates the orgy of rear-view mirror- km. . . . Hollywood houses more redskins and more cowpunchers than ever existed on the fron- tier. (W&P 126)

Anxious to recover ourselves, we are the perfect receptacles for new forms that appear as restorative panacea, like electronic technology, which "makes sense by miming the human body and faculties" (Cliché147). And so our cul- tures evolve, not by the rhetoric of their dogma, but by the clash and apparent familiarity of their foms, forms which "enjoy a brief reign" as anti-environ- ments (as technology did for Pound and McLuhan at the turn of the century

[Cou n f erblasf 30]), then "become environmental [Le., natural and invisible] in turn" (Letfers of MM 315). As extensions, then, our forma1 inventions are not new as Pound had implied, but latent and familiar, making them more thology of Explorations, a communications journal CO-published with Edmund Carpenter between 1953 and 1959, McLuhan makes just this point about deceptive restoratives and how they must be countered:

. . . we are largely ignorant of literacy's role in shap ing Western man, and equally unaware of the role of electronic media in shaping modern values. . . . And the current electronic revolution is already so pervasive that we have difficulty in stepping out- side of it and scrutinizing it objectively. But it can be done, and a fruitful approach is to examine one medium through another: print seen from the per- spective of electronic media, or television analyzed through print. (Explorations ix)

Concurrently, the role of the artist/ critic is both to create and identify anti-en- vironments, new forms or new patterns of old forms "that alert us to the meaning of the environment" (Letters of MM 316)--and, in alerting us, help us perceive the dominant environment in its full array of ideological dimen- sions (Cownferblasf 5). The developments from Pound, then, are that forms as essentially narrative structures pervade all media (and that literature is but one media of forms), that al1 forrns are hybrid ideologies which must be con- stantly interrogated to understand how they are manufacturing our reality and reconfiguring Our sense ratios (Le., our consaousness), and that forms are only as revolutionary as (and, in fact, only imaginable within) the sensory context that contains them. As such, al1 future technologies--as forms of an extended human sensoria, of which there are five components and pre- dictable combinations--can not only be anticipated, but the social patterns which follow inevitably from those new technologies can also be hybridized Orwell and other dis/ u-topians (Letters of MM 413).

Therefore, an understanding of forms or media grammars--an understanding made possible in the first place by an archetypal unconscious being "pushed outf' into social consciousness, which is the action of al1 technologies as they move from environment to anti-environment (Counferblasf 31)--imbues what at first glance is an u~aturalprescience into the post-literate world, en- abling the citizens of that world to "escape into understanding" (Lefters of MM 265), and affording the theorists of that world ready and seemingly un- natural insight. Offerïng political counsel, McLuhan wrote to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968 about just such a grammar-grounded presaence:

In effect 1 am saying that it is now possible to ty- pass what used to be called 'fate' by antiapating the effects of new man-made environments.

(Letters of MM 359)

Considered in the context of McLuhan's Catholicism, the word "fate" seems oddly out of place; but, indeed, McLuhan's definition of Christianity involved exactly the same "awareness of process" (Letters of MM 384), the teaching of which, as "life-work" for social philosophers (Co un terblas t 53), accounted for McLuhan's (and Pound's) "missionary sperrif? (Lefters of EP 338). To McLuhan, consequently, al1 artists, social philosophers, and visionaries were Catholic--and more essentially Catholic in exact proportion to their abilities, a sentiment which McLuhan found rooted in both the Catholic catechism and also in Pound's thoughts on the social responsibilities of writers (ABC 32). In addition to extending Pound's clues about the exteriorization of sensibility into a full-fledged gramrnar of media laws, McLuhan also carefully probed Pound's notion of translation for other clues that might aid his advanced study of forms. He found in Pound's fascination with translation and the transformation of cultures a number of important insights that revealed how historical eras were formed and changed, insights that would ultimately sup port his theory that the dominant sense-enhancing and extending technol- ogy- whether it was phonetic, typographie, mechanic, or electronic--was the predominant factor in historical and cultural change.

Without knowing (or necessarily caring about) the reason for such change, Pound identified distind differences in what he called "Kulturmorphologie" or the "transformation of cultures" (Letters of EP 336). Noting that "every . . . great age is an age of translations" (LE 35, 232), he observed the first such morphology in Greek culture between Plato and Aristotle's time:

Arry [Anstotle] was interested in mind, not in morals. It was in the air, it was there, the dedine of the hellenic paideuma. The Homeric vigour was gone, with its sympathetic rascality, its irascible goguenard pantheon. The splintering . . . had be- gun. (Kulchur 331)

In terms of the theory and practice of translation, Pound's identification of a distinct paideuma whose arrangement or "mental formation" (SP 148) was culture, required of the translator attempting to convey that culture more than just le mot juste and "the existing categories of language" (GB 88); rather, (Letfers of EP 275) of language, whose flow revealed, in its intervals, gaps, and even "defects" (Letters of EP 251), the particular culture under study. Max Nanny, a translator himself of three of McLuhan's works and a critic of Pound, corroborates that Pound's theory of translation was one of "contexture," in which Pound "escapes from sameness to contiguity by pro- viding contextually oriented paraphrases instead of verbally equivalent texts, paraphrases that concentrate 'less on finding the words than bringing the emotions into focus"' (MCV:EP 79). Translation for Pound, then, was the process of reconfiguring the act or utterance (or "outering") of the so-called paideuma--what was "in the air" (Kulchur 57)--of sensitizing the reader to what he termed elsewhere "a sort of chemical spectrum" (SP 24) that con- tained "[the] very complicated structure of knowledge and perception" (ABC 104):

Different climates and different bloods have differ- ent needs, different spontaneities, different reluc- tances, different ratios between different groups of impulse and unwillingness, different constructions of throat, and al1 these leave trace in the language, and leave it more ready and more unready for cer- tain communications and registrations.

(ABC 35)

Pound's advance was essentially that the medium of translation and the medium being translated were the same: culture not language. Language merely provided the "trace" evidence of culture. McLuhan would have ar- gued that culture is "ground" to the "figure" of language-in other words, that culture is the much larger and subliminal area of inattention, from which flourishes the more obvious fields of language, dialect, and nuance. but to observe that behind any field of "attention" there lurks an equally sig- nifying plane of "inattention.'' Pound's theory of translation reveals that he too was aware of the "hidden dimension" of which McLuhan and Edward T. Hall write.

McLuhan clearly thought much about Pound's notions of translation and transformation of cultures, both of which notions held that a subtextual knowledge that inhered in people and culture (Kulchur 57) was that elusive quality which resisted easy translation (and which was invisible to many translators). McLuhan's first mention of Pound's name in one of his books makes this point exadly, repeating Pound's finding that al1 great ages are ages of translation:

The main advantage in translation is the creative effort it fosters, as Ezra Pound spent his life in telling and illustrating. And culture that is engaged in translating itself from one radical mode such as the auditory [Le., Plato's], into another mode like the visual [i.e., Aristotle's], is bound to be in a cre- ative ferment, as was classical Greece or the Renaissance. (GG 72)

McLuhan's paragraph is almost a duplicate of Pound's above-quoted para- graph in KuIchur (331). The more telling suture occurs most vividly, how- ever, when McLuhan conflates Pound's findings on translation and cultural fervour with his own theories on privileged sensoria and the psychological somnambulism (or sensory "ablation" [Counterblast 421) those dominances accrue: awareness to another,as between Greek and Latin or English and French. . . . For the dominance of one sëke is the formula for hypnosis. And a cul- ture can be locked in the sleep of any one sense. The sleeper awakes when challenged in any other sense. (GG73)

An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between con- flicting technologies. Every moment of its con- sciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. (GG 141)

As with his more general debt to Pound for reinstating the primacy of forms, McLuhan's more specific debt to Pound for a theory of translation that in- hered in the forma1 apparatus of culture reveals a recurring pattern in McLuhan's use of Pound: notably, the use of Pound's ideas as jumping off points--as he counselled in The Mechanical Bride, as "points of departure," not rest (vi). So it is with the notion of translation. Pound's preliminary finding that great ages are those of translation, coupled with his observation that the medium being translated (and therefore of translation) is in fact the formal apparatus of culture (in translating Greek culture, the necessity of cap tunng the transformation from an oral to visual sensibility), prompted McLuhan again not only to further investigate his mentor's highly suggestive research, but also to extend the implications of that preliminary research into what, without Pound (his blueprint), would seem rather far-fetched induc- tion. work appears distinctly less radical. Even Pound would have been surprised (and flattered). For example, Pound's castigation of a media-obsessed McLuhan as "Nuts" for studying "the character of acoustic space--the space of pre-literate man4' (Letters of MM 246) is seerningly licensed by Pound's own observation that "Homeric vigour" (the pre-literate) was concomitant with a "sympathetic rascality" and "irascible goguenard pantheon" (Kulchur 331), with, in other words, the kind of unfettered tribal imagination sans visual propriety and restriction that characterized the blind (and therefore tactile, haptic, and proprioceptive) Homer (SP 29-30). Homer's "freshness" (Lettus of EP 275) was therefore of the auditory rather than visual variety. Pound pio- neered the suggestion; McLuhan simply pursued the ches of his mentor to their logical entelechy.

In the end, what McLuhan inaccurately described as his own unique contribu- tion to the study of forms--phrased uncharaderistically as "the only commu- nication theory of transformation" (Letters of MM 505)-was more the product of Pound's suggestion (and Pound's own study, via Yeats [UM 351, of Giovanni Battista Vico's Ln Scienza Nuovn [1725]) than any independent rev- elation McLuhan received. Yet, the inaccuracy of persona1 claims aside, McLuhan continues to appear more precocious (and in that precocity more radical) than his sources, probably because of the ground of his perceptual field, namely technology. The statement, for example, that "technology means constant social revolution" (M B 40)--particularized into the observa- tion that the work of the moderns "is often devoted to showing the transla- tion of [the] rhythm of creation and destruction into the . . . industrial form[s] of fragmented mass production4' (Cliché 43)--appears for some reason more of a similar pattern in Shakespeare, the "change from corporate to private space": 'The forma1 perspective in Lear is presented as a very unpleasant ex- perience--the breaking out of the warm, familiar multisensory spaces into fragmented visual space" (TTVP 75). It must then be in the immediacy of the present (an immediacy afforded by the oral and the electronic, and devoid of the more cornfortable historical perspective or hindsight [the codorts of high literacy]) that McLuhan appears so foreign and so threatening to so many.

Seeming to anticipate this very reception, McLuhan explains the phe- nomenon of instantaneous observation in a post-literate maelstrom, and in so doing echoes Pound's own thoughts about the wages of the "good fight" (Letters of EP 13):

One of the strange things 1 have discovered about my own work is that Westerners in general resent having the effects of any technology brought to their attention. That print, or the telephone, or TV should have any effect on them at all, is taken to mean that they have been manipulated and de- graded. The person who is blamed for this, is the person who points it out to them.

(Leffersof MM 513)

I repeat: an understanding of forms or media grammars imbues what at first glance is an unnatural presaence into the post-literate world, enabling the cit- izens of that world to "escape into understanding" (Leffersof MM 265) and af- fording the theorists of that world, if so disposed, ready and seemingly un- canny insight. But such insight, as Pound and McLuhan both knew, rendered the precocious artistl critic "the enemy of his age" (TTVP 159), one 372). And though such "preventing [of] contagionff (Kulchur 185) was dan- gerous and took its toll on the physical and mental health of Pound and McLuhan, McLuhan at least considered that toll a price worth paying:

You must be a fearless character. 1 have never found anybody who was really interested in any- thing who was also afraid to take the consequences of disapproval. Was it Hercule Poirot who, when asked 'What is truth?' replied: 'Eet ees whatever upsets zee applecart.' (Let fers of MM 492)

IV - Aversions and Affirmations

"My increasing awareness has been of the ease with which Catholics can pen- etrate and dominate secular concerns--thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind." (Letters of MM 180)

The great irony of their publics' view of them as enemies of their age was that Pound and McLuhan were not only champions of literate culture (and indeed high Iiteracy), but were also conservative en bloc in their politics, an ideologi- cal sway which predisposed them to disapprove mightily of much of moder- nity. Contrary to the many accusations levelled against McLuhan--most no- tably those that gained populanty and support after Jonathan Miller's self- serving account of McLuhan's supposedly treasonous assault on the book (Letters of MM 425)--McLuhan was in fact not against the book but against that which was obsolescing it, namely the mass age and popular culture. Though popular culture was the ground of much of McLuhan's analyses, and though the forms of popular culture often functioned, in his mind, as effec- tualities (TTVP 243), populism was merely his field of study, not what he wished to promote. This is what the current Wired generation has yet to learn. Rather, populism--called by McLuhan "mass audience" (Massage 22, 68) and by Pound "mass culture" (SP 231)--was either a decadence or a sloth that was usually held in some measure of contempt.

For McLuhan, mass culture was the body politic of western society, that which was teased and lulled by the popular press and corporate interests into "dream fantasies" (M B 13) that were accepted unaitically by preoccupied sleepwalkers; it was that which, as a misguided sign of distinction, held as its highest achievement the seemingly democratic right of "consumption rather than the possession of discriminating perception and judgement" (MB 58). Mass culture was, in short, so enmeshed in the simultaneous field of electronic hannonics that its citizenry, in their corporate acquiescence to that field, al- most ceased to exist. Those citizens were worthy of wake-up, of course, but not until their own culture was exposed as being in ready and sinister abet- ment to its own citizens' predicament. The solution, for McLuhan, was to separate mass culture from its citizenry and reveal the mass age, in other words modernity, for the populist myth that it was. And so again, McLuhan's overriding imperative and the ethic that informed his Christianity was, like Pound's, the method of study for control, the method that exposed not the poison labelled "dangerous," but what Pound called the "arsenic in good soup" (SP 355): "To control these developments by solemn gesture of the hebdomadal hand is Our current strategy. Real control comes by study of the grammars of a11 media at once" (V V V n-p., No. 16). camouflage of tyrants" (Kulchur 170)--and especially about advertising and the popular press, both of which, he claimed, were "the underlying diseases" that satiated "human curiosity" with such frivolity as "24 lines on chromo- somes, [and] six lines on a three-headed calf" (Kulchur 255, 99). It must be remembered that Pound associated the press and its lords with the conspiracy of The Profocols of Zion, for by holding the pursestrings and therefore con- trolling the press, the Jews could also manipulate and control public opinion, easing their way to world domination. Pound's aversion was therefore part of his larger plan. Writing to Wyndham Lewis, McLuhan's pop-cultural Virgil (V V V 17), Pound expressed a rare interest in popular culture in "doing a series of 'Studies of Contemporary Mentality"' for New Age; however, his comment to Lewis on the task--"entertainhg laborious, unimportant" (Letters of EP 118)--betrayed his feelings about the triviality of such endeav- ours, feelings best described in his early essay, Ywelve Dialogues of Fontenelle": ". . . the wise should ever turn their backs on the mob, and . . . the general opinion is usually sound if you take it to mean its own opposite" (P&D 136). In Pound's mind, then, pop culture was anything that kept "mankind's attention off truth, off the root issues, off the modus bene vivendi" (Kulchur 170); it was anything, in other words, outside the unim- peachable solidarity of the Tradition, defined by Pound as "the cultural her- itage" (Letfers of EP 276). The vivid contrast to populism was intentional.

In their shared aversion to mass culture, Pound and McLuhan both cite the tendency of modernity to amplify an already splintered consciousness, ren- dering the modern "westernized" individual mad in a resonant schizophre- nia of competing loyalties. Popularized by Wyndham Lewis in The Apes of the penman (artist) and Shaun the cop (bureaucrat), the notion of the "split man" seeped into early modernism through the advent of pop psychology, notably through turn-of-the-century experiments on the twin hemispheres of brain physiology. To artists like Pound, Lewis, and Joyce, split consciousness was useful because it explained what Pound described as "the schismatic ten- dency" (Ktrlchur 343) that had pervaded western history since Aristotle's in- troduction, through "the Nichomachean notes" (SP 86), of a system of classifi- cation (an extension of the human sensoria, as McLuhan would have de- saibed it) that brought with it not only the division between science and the arts but also the more insidious splitting of high and low culture. Over time, as Pound explained itf low culture became a carnival (and, in the modern age, a glitzy panacea) of applied and popular sciences, and high culture became the bastion that accommodated the self-replicating Tradition.

Without the benefit of the non-specialist's perspective (GB 91-92)--McLuhan and Pound also shared an aversion for specialism as manifest Aristotelianism, what McLuhan described as "Miltonic solemnity" (Leffers of MM 257)-the individual in the midst of Pound's so-called European curse (SP 86) was reduced to a hapless schizophrenic split between his own innate ten- dencies (usually Platonic, tending toward the generative) and those of his populist culture (usually Aristotelian, tending toward the state-sanctioned and the prescriptive). As Pound put it, the division was between "man drunk with god, man inebriated with infinity, on the one hand, and man with a millimetric measure and microscope on the other" (Kulch ur 223). The result was untold anxiety, an anxiety that was translated by Pound and the literary moderns into disdain for a popular culture that was complicit with appIied -of "Aristotle's hedging, backing and filling" (Ku lch ur 306). And so, popular culture, as the realization of the Aristotelian dream (and like Aristotle), "slid about like oil on surface of pond," and, unlike the unimpeachable solidarity of the Tradition, "SAID really nothingff (KuIchu r 313).

As an attentive siudent of Pound, Joyce, and Lewis, McLuhan willingly adopted the concept of "split man," grounding its origin in the same "head versus heart" (MB 107) and "centre-margin interplay" (Letfers of MM 279) as his modernist mentors. Like Pound, he cited the "two voices" (MB 16) that CO-existedantithetically through western history, and, like Pound, he at- tributed the split in consciousness--what he termed a "separation of the senses" (GG 17)--to the rise and eventual domination of Aristotelianism (Explorations 65), manifest in the western world as the rise to hegemony of v isual and typographie dominance: ". . . literate man, when we meet him in the Greek world, is a split man, a schizophrenic, as al1 literate men have been since the invention of the phonetic alphabet" (GG 22). As handed down from the modems, split consaousness was useful to McLuhan because, in addition to explaining the earleye split, it not only seemed to confirm the action and denial of an extended (therefore dominant and, in its fight to remain ascen- dant, recalcitrant) sensorium--"the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of al1 senses tends to result in hallucination" (UM 32)--but also to explain anxiety as the consequence of "the interface" (WbP64) of those competing sensoria (or technologies):

What we have today, instead of a social conscious- ness electrically ordered . . . is a private subcon- scious or individual 'point of view' rigorously im- posed by older mechanical technology. This is a As he continued elsewhere (and in two articles in Neurotica magazine), McLuhan's so-called "rear-view mirrorism" (WBP 18), the connatural union of a previous era's "content" with a present era's "forms," contained both the cause of psyduc and social stress and, from a knowledge of that cause, the re- media1 forma mentum: "Psychic diseases can now be treated for what they are, namely manifestations of the response to man-made technologies" (Letters of MM 490). What split modem man, then, could also be mobilized for his repair.

Split consciousness was therefore tailor-made for McLuhan, a theory of bi- nary--what he called late in his career "the two hemisphere approach" (Letters of MM 359)--that provided the structural complement for many of the corn- peting effects and homologies he observed: wntten and oral, visual and acoustic, hot and cool, medium and message, content and form, figure and ground, light-on and light-through, civilized and tribal, centralization and fragmentation' clich8 ar.d archetype, environment and anti-environment, humanist and scholastic, North and South. As complex as McLuhan's thought sometimes is, its complexity is usually reducible to this fundamental European polemic that, as Pound wrote, attended al1 thought since "the Nichomachean notes" (SP 86). McLuhan's much-touted reliance on Hans Selye's bipolar theories of stress and "numbness" (Kroker 73-74) amounts to really only a biological application and update of Pound's earlier notion of spli t consciousness. familiar that we are blind was the role that the yoiing science of psychology played in McLuhan and Pound's overall poetics. McLuhan's basic theories of media, technology, translation, and extension were al1 rooted in a fascination with, and an intimate study of, the human sensoria, the identical fascination and study displayed by Pound in articles on Dr. Louis Berman's early en- docrïnology, the so-called "chemistry of the soul" ('The New Therapy"), and Remy de GourmonYs phallic physiognomy (translator's postsaipt to Physique de l'amour). Modernity for both Pound and McLuhan, then, marked the be- ginning (more tentative in Pound's case simply because of the newness of the science) of a serious exploration of psychology and its related applications--to the point where McLuhan can hardly be thought about seriously today with- out reference to his signifiant indebtedness to physiological psychology.

Sirnilar to their parallel aversion to mass culture and mass culture's amplifi- cation of latent anxieties was the orthodox ground McLuhan and Pound shared. Both were conservative in politics and aesthetics, sometimes radi- cally (as in Pound's attraction to Mussolini's fascism), though, as has been outlined, their methods and their detractors might argue otherwise. McLuhan's early political orthodoxy was grounded in the idyllic southern agrarïanism he found in G.K. Chesterton's distributionism, a political theory- remarkably close to C.H. Douglas's theory of social

McLuhan eventually wrote much of this myth of Jefferson's "agrarian democracy" (Massage 72),using it, as he had used other scraps and ideas from Pound and the modems, to complement his own theories. Combined with Chesterton's distributionist Elysium, Pound's avowal of similar Jefferson/ Adams (SP 156-58) and Douglasite (SP 441-42) socio-economic utopias prompted McLuhan to attribute io a suddenly privileged Southernism the characteristics of "backward"/ tribal "ear" cultures (GG 60, 250), specifically the generative organicism of the oral that had been histori- cally deprivileged since the phonetic/ typographie ascendancy of the visual. McLuhan's fascination with the American South of "Jefferson and Lincoln" (IL 213-16) continued wel1 into the latter part of his career and contributed significantly to his theories of post-literate retribalization and the attendant energies of electric conflux: ". . . the oral character of the American South has swamped the North since talkies, radio and LP have given it precedence over the print culture of the North" (V V V n-p., No. 2). Because it was formally aligned with the oral and haptic, "the Southern Quality" re-emerged with the rise of the electric.

Not to be forgotten, however, is what McLuhan and Pound hoped would be the self-replicating effects of a resurgent "agrarian democracy": speafically, as McLuhan wrote, "mind[s] aristocratie, Legalistic, encyclopedic, forensic, habit- ually expressing [themselves] in the mode of an eloquent wisdom" (IL 213). the split sensibilities of the Greek rift, nor the minds which erected "insurmountable obstacles . . . by arbitrary classification and arbitrary lirnits of categories" (SP 165), but instead were minds united in a longing for and minds "harmon[ious]" (Romance 116) in the pursuit of a divine, but not nec- essarily deistic, order. They were the minds that, in bringing "order into [their] own consciousness ([their] own 'innerrnost')," would "emanate" order accordingly (SP 66), hence usurping "the ineffable rudderlessness" (SP 216) of much of western history and al1 of mas culture. Pound expressed this order as both the unity through history (so concurrently the order of The Cantos [Kulchur 1941) and as that which united the "fundamental community" of artists in their shared "search for the equations of etemity" (GB 122), a search which, somewhat uncharacteristically for Pound, did not necessarily discount God as noumenal ordering deity:

Either by coinadence or causation the ancient wis- dom seems to have disappeared when the rnyster- ies entered the vain space of Christian theological discussion. The unity of God may be the supreme mystery beyond the multitudinous appearance of nature. But if you put a slab faced boob in the pres- ence of the divine unity before he is well out of kindergarten you make it extremely unlikely that he will ever understand anything.

Though McLuhan's ordering deity was certainly more vulgate than Pound's, the orthodoxy that informed it was likewise ecumenical. Notwithstanding his Catholic doctrine, McLuhan claimed that with the adoption of "the visual dynamic of the phonetic alphabet," tribal man lost his "obsession with cosmic order and ritual" (UM 124). Hence McLuhan's delight--the delight of a be- 80), one that actually served to re-unite sensibility in a Bergsonian collective unconscious. Not only did "electric technology foster and encourage unifica- tion and involvement" (Massage 8), but in "surpassing writing," it allowed mankind to "regain [his] WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic, plane" (Explorations 208). The Rousseauian "organic unity" (UM 349) of the electric was therefore heralded by McLuhan, again sans the doctrinal and suspiciously dose to the occult he had earlier rejected, as the new Tower of Babel (UM 80) that, unlike in the age of high literacy, did not have to be scaled to afford vantage point and access to the heavens, but had simply to be experienced in its "new global envelope of sense" (Leffersof MM 279) to re- veal the noumenal: '70the alerted eye the front page of a newspaper is a su- perficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high order (MB 4). In one of his last letters to Pound (22 January 1957), McLuhan acknowledged just this manifest unity in "the new Cantos" [Section: Rock-D~ill](Let fers of MM 250).

Though he might have arrived at and expressed them differently than Pound, McLuhan's fundamental affiliations--involving, in short, "the physi- cal unity of the human family" (Letters of MM 488)--were essentially the same. And so it is not surprising, finally, that McLuhan invested as much be- Iief in the Tradition as Pound. Pound's much-heralded "dynamic form," his "immortal concetfo" (Kulchur 152), represented for McLuhan a similar mysti- cal confluence of excellence through tirne. Defined by McLuhan as "the sense of the total past as nozu" (UM 301), the Tradition--in modernity no longer in deference to the visual and typographie--was more applicable in the retribal- ized present, he argued, than ever before: 111 IILt: t:leCLLIC a5c . . . lualuly 11u ivii6 Li YibdLILLd 1. self as a perspective of continuous visual space, but as an all-at-one and simultaneous presence of al1 facets of the past. . . . Awareness of all-at-once his- tory or tradition goes with a corrective awareness of the present as modifying the entire past. It is this vision that is characteristic of the artistic perception which is necessarily concerned with making and change rather than with any point of view or any static position. (TTVP 257)

In the end, the accelerated progressivism of Pound and McLuhan is matched only by their conservatism, a seemingly ironic deferral to the orthodox that McLuhan considered a distinct advantage in the modern theatre of absurdity:

Accelerated change invokes the gyroscopic or vor- tex principles of rigidity. Also, to high-speed change no adjustment is possible. We become spec- tators only, and must escape into understanding. This may be why the conservative has an advan- tage in such an age of speedy change and is fre- quently more radical in his suggestions and insights than the progressive who is trying to adjust. The practical progressive trying to make realistic ad- justments to change exhausts himself in minor matters and has no energy to contemplate the over- all. (Letters of MM 265)

Pound and McLuhan agreed that the fundamental role of the &tic should be not to present final conclusions but rather to pose questions that stimulate further inquiry, McLuhan's so-called "points of departure" (MB vi). Toward that end, the areas above are but the major grounds that Pound and McLuhan unique interpretations of modernism abound in their work, making McLuhan's work especially look sometimes, to the careful eye, like derivative early-modemist copy. However, to Pound at least, derivation was sanctioned by and a healthy example of respect for elders within the parameters of the Tradition (Confucius 39, 199, 266); and the scholar's examination of that derivation, in order to keep the fjeld open to further or contrary inquiry, should always end just beyond, and no further than, suggestion: "From dead thesis metaphor is distinct. Any thesis is dead in itself. Life comes in metaphor and metaphor starts TOWARD ideogram" (SP 453). And so it seems fitting that the following quotation from McLuhan not only captures the similarities/connections between Pound and McLuhan but also antici- pates the differences between them that the next chapter will investigate: "The anthropologist [Pound] is a connoisseur of cultures as art forms. The student of communications [McLuhan] is a connoisseur of media as art forms" (Counferblast 64). In their ultimate deferral to art forms, they were in corporate abetment to, but also individually amending, the Tradition. To ex- tend the seeming paradox, both could not have envisioned a higher or more liberating calling. Conclusion: McLuhan/ Canada as Counter Environment--Toward a Poetics of Influence for the Retribalized

In America: the Life, the Land, the Law is not leamed sitting on the earth beside a campfire with smoke & old people's voices chanting, chanting of the ancestors . . . but from the television set; on highways; from billboards; from a sequence of Burma Shave signs & barns painted with 'Bull Durham - Born in the Woods - Chewing Tobacco'. . . . From waitresses with chewing gum smiles, high priestesses of swing shift officiating in the ritual of ice water and patty melt. 'Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Double-Mint, Double-Mint Double-Mint . . . G~s- every boy wants one. That's what the Sears-Roebuck catalogue sez.

Amenca - Diet of image, breakfast of metaphor.

(From "learning america: 1951 - 1969" by Billy Marshall-Stoneking in Sixteen Words for Water: A Play about Ezra Pound n.p.)

The similarities and connections between McLuhan and Pound are mostly rooted in their shared experience of modernism, which McLuhan, growing up in rural western Canada, acquired some 30 years after Pound. Cambridge of the 1930s was for McLuhan what London of 1908 was for Pound: an infu- sion of modernism, whose insistence--Chesterton's so-called "successes in capitalism and clockwork" (The Man Who Was Chesterton 162)--pervaded as even the literary. Civen the insistence of this coda, it is hardly surprising that, just as it accounted for their similarities, so it accounts for many of the differences between McLuhan and Pound. In short, those differences are rooted in a later modernity, specifically, as McLuhan elaborates, in the post- war accelerated modernism of electric ubiquity, Sputnik, and the global embrace of instantaneous telecornmunications: 'The 'simultaneous field' of electric information structures today reconstitutes the conditions and need for dialogue and participation, rather than specialism and private initiative in al1 levels of social experience" (GG 141). If Pound was a child of the birth of modernism, McLuhan was a child of modernismfs blooming into a rebellious adolescent post-modernity--high modernism's inevitable turn. Had their birthdates been reversed, they would have likely reversed roles; that is, McLuhan would have championed Greek culture, order, and history's atten- dant iterations of high literacy, and Pound (instead of McLuhan) would have exposed the "pusillanirnity" (GG 54) in such unreflexive endorsement of vi- sua1 orders.

Al1 this confirms exactly what McLuhan, as a cultural narratologist, espoused: that it is impossible to know one's own environment except from the "formal" vantage point it alone confers (GG 216, 229), whether that is visual and typographie (as it was for Pound) or oral and electronic (as it was for McLuhan). As Pound's inventories of forma1 inventions paralleled early modernism's fetish with the hierarchies of technicaI innovation, so did McLuhan's inventories of media "effects" match late modernism's fascina- tion with the supposed "communist threat" of technological (mostly televi- sion) insurgence. The "Quiz Showf' scanda1 of the 1960s was based in (and for of ideology packaged as domesticity. The "modernism" that contained both Pound and McLuhan, then, was itself a very broad and plastic spectrum that consisted of as many elements that could dissociate as it did principles that might unite. Indeed, Gai1 McDonald's definition of the same modernism that contained Pound and Eliot attests to just this concept of "contradiction"--that which amounted ultimately to modernism being '"troubled within itself'" (210). A comprehensive study of McLuhan and Pound's shared experience of modernism must therefore include an examination of the differences which that modernism also instilled in the two thinkers.

The first and most obvious difference between the two was that, as a man of scholarship (at least as a man with academic affiliations), McLuhan was the sort of institutionally stifled "savant" (PMI 90) about whom Pound often wrote. Pound's early letters to McLuhan certainly confirm this impression, as does, incidentally, Wyndharn Lewis's characterization of McLuhan in Self- Condemned (1954) as Professor Ian McKenzie, "a little routine teaching ha&" with "a very good mind of a routine kind" (SC 262,250). But if McLuhan was pedantic--in as much as pedants cite historical minutiae to corroborate in- sight--so was Pound; both were incessant cataloguers who %sk[ed] picking out the good and the bad" (Kulchur 335) in culture and society, always using their inventories to "expose the counterfeit," as Pound counselled, in an at- tempt to illuminate "the valid" (ABC 192). Though Pound's catalogues, mostly of the good, do indeed appear more overt and dogmatic than McLuhan's, the latter's own inventories of extensions and their related effects are everywhere present in the early works: The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Understanding Media. The method of illumination literature as probe, not package'' (Letters of MM 325)--illustrates McLuhan's indebtedness to Pound's understanding of the unassailability of the primary text, which is explained by Pound in ABC as "careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continua1 COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another" (17). McLuhan wrote to Pound expressly about this very point in 1948, setting up what would be their later divergence on the matter:

Aware of the general disadvantages of books about poets, 1 shall not be in a hurry to deade on the pat- tern or the approach. I know that the rationale of any such job should be to direct attention always to the texts. To keep them before the reader. To insist on the sharpest focus. To let the texts speak for themselves. In practice, would you agree that this means arranging texts and expositions in an imme- diate contemporary focus? To give them their max- imum of immediate impact?

(Letters of MM 196)

McLuhan's catalogues of good and bad, more profoundly than Pound's, were meant to show the deep structures that inhered in phenomena. Especially later in his career, McLuhan had becorne sufficiently influenced by the work of European phenomenologists and post-structuralists like Claude Lévi- Strauss, Stanley Fish, and Roland Barthes to contend that al1 such phenom- ena fwhich, to the end, he persisted in calling "all human artefacts") had "a basically verbal structure" (Letters of MM 530), the presence of which called for a particular kind of inquiry--more a sleuthing among toms than a Pound- like recording of forma1 innovations. Early on a structuralist because of what his age demanded--"whereas formerly we could classify data visuauy, we are n O w press ured into structural analysis" (Letters of MM 293, italics mine)-- titiously from studying the French Symbolists provided the only way to inter- rogate the post/ late-modern world (Letters of MM 491-92).

Born of the age of formalism, Pound was similarly but less a structuralist, at- tempting indeed, as he wrote in 'The Renaissance," "to set forth a color- sense" (LE 218), but in ways almost always less conclusive and rigorous than McLuhan's. The deep structures that informed his own inventories--order, unity, appetite, emotion, ideas in action--were more elusive and ephemeral than McLuhan's, more related to fleeting glimpses of artistic indestrucfibilis than systematic programmes of cultural inquiry. Pound possessed a mystical intuition for what he was convinced were quantifiable patterns and designs, but the articulation of these superstructures and colour-schemes, by his own admission, often eluded him:

. . . 1 admit that the foregoing pp. are as obscure as anything in my poetry. 1 mean or imply that cer- tain truth exists. Certain colours exist in nature though great painters have striven vainly, and though the colour film is not yet perfected. Tmth is not untrue'd by reason of our fading to fix it on pa- per. Certain objects are communicable to a man or woman only 'with proper lighting' . . . fitfully and by instants. (Kulchur 295)

Two distinct and related lines £rom The Cantos further illustrate Pound's dif- ficulty in fixing this ephemera, and thus the difference from McLuhan: first, Pound's seemingly intolerant assuredness that such superstructure exists ("it coheres al1 right / even if rny notes do not cohere" [116/797]), and second, Pound's admission of the agony of articulating that colour-sense ("For a flash, but the Divine Mind is abundant / unceasind [92/620]).

Both Pound and McLuhan, then, were essentially stmcturalist: both used in- ventories of art to reveal deep structure. Whereas McLuhan used the present and pop culture as an art form, though, Pound used the past and high culture. Subsequently, where knowledge, for McLuhan, was that which travelled into tomorrow at the speed of iight, knowledge, for Pound, was that which flowed back through time and was accessible only through slow and careful study (Letters of EP 55). Perhaps because of the nature of the deep structure that pervaded their temporal fields (laws of media for McLuhan, qualities of the artistic for Pound), McLuhan was distinctly more conclusive than Pound in his factual presentation; in this regard, McLuhan was the more rigorous sdiolar, but of course conventional academic scholarship was his calling, not Pound's. In the end, Pound's readers are left with more work to do than McLuhan's; and though this was no doubt partly Pound's intention, a "readerly" covenant of his methodology (and something too that McLuhan borrowed, believing in aphorism and the paratactic), 1 suspect that Pound also considered himself, in the end, sornewhat too suggestive of the underlying presence of the so-called "Divine Mind," that which, again poetically, "affirm[ed] the gold thread in the pattern" (ll6/ 797). Perhaps the difference is between a poet who secondarily wrote criticism as gloss (Pound) and a critic who appropriated the poetic as finish (McLuhan). In the end, Pound's rnere suggestion is McLuhan's more concrete utterance; Pound rernains the self-de- scribed "weeder" in "the Garden of the Muses" (ABC 17), while McLuhan is the more accessible cultural historian. defended what they considered a point-of-view-less approach. McLuhan ad- vocated a reluctance to "attack" (MB v) because "value judgments . . . create a moral fog . . . such as rendes understanding impossible" (GG 213)' and Pound advocated not only that "criticism shd. consume itself and disappear" (Let fers of EP 261) but also that criticism should see "from al1 sides" (ABC 29). Again, however, the seams of ideology were always more apparent in Pound's ap praisals than in McLuhan's. As forceful as Pound was in making his case for that "record[ing] of symptoms" sans **advis[ingof] remedy" (Letters of E P 4), his own objectivity was often lost to deeply felt emotions. Perhaps McLuhan himself, in a letter to research assistant Joe Keogh best explained Pound's struggle with critical objedivity:

Pound has a horror of popular culture, which was the occasion of his blue-pencilling a good deal of The Waste Land. Much of what he threw out of The Wasfe Land was from the music hall world that Eliot loved. Pound took culture very seriously and phonetically and moralistically. My metaphys- ical approach is not moral. . . . 1 am not a 'culture critic' because 1 am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. 1 am a rnetaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surpris- ing modalities.

(Letters of MM413)

When divided between moralism and amoralism, at Ieast rhetorically, the diferences between Pound and McLuhan are more easily understood: Pound's unqualified disgust with media ("every morning['s] fresh tidal wave of obscurantism and slop" [Ku lch u r 1961) is McLuhan's more distanced obser- vation of media's "character and intent" (MB 18)--"I do not Say whether it is a MM 300). Pound's disgust with the cowardice of political machinations ("The real trouble with war . . . is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right peo- ple" [GB1401) is McLuhan's more balanced and as a result more insightful as- sessrnent of the effects of concentrated power as analogous with technological extension: "Concentration of power and control is a universal trend . . . with monopoly resulting in monotony" (M B 22). Pound's distaste for rhetonc and its "attendant horrors" (Romance 223, ABC 33) is McLuhan's more productive discovery that medieval "pronun tiatio'' (GG 94), which became oratory, was obsolesced by the printing press (Explorations l),and was therefore an invalu- able historical moment in its own right: "'Civilization' must now be used technically to mean detribalized man for whom the visual values have prior- ity in the organization of thought and action. Nor is this to give any new meaning or value to 'civilization' but rather to speafy its charader" (GG 27). In short, of their mutually proclaimed critical objectivity, McLuhan's seems more convincing than Pound's, though there remains little question that Pound was decidedly more objective in his creative work than in his criti- cism--choosing to leave "crystallization of beauty" implicit in his works of poetry (Romance 68). Perhaps the difference in this case can be attnbuted to Pound's work in two genres (poetry and critical prose) versus McLuhan's work in really only one, critical prose. Perhaps Pound saw in the latter genre opportunities for uncensored personal expression that the former genre did not easily (or artistically) accommodate. What were antithetical media, then, afforded Pound rhetorical alternatives that McLuhan did not enjoy. As an adherent of the medium's dominion over the message, McLuhan would, I think, have agreed with this assessrnent of their rhetorical differences. tended for Pound, might serve to further differentiate their interpretations of objectivity. In countering Pound's assessrnent of news media as "utterly cor- rupted" (LE 59), McLuhan seemingly relegates Pound to the poetics of an ear- lier age:

The cloak of invisibility . . . would seem to fa11 most naturally on those who own newspapers or who use them extensively for commercial ends. May not this explain the strange obsession of the book- man with the press-lords as essentially corrupt? The merely private and fragmentary point of view assumed by the book reader and writer finds natu- ral grounds for hostility toward the big communal power of the press. (UM216)

There seems little doubt that McLuhan would have considered Pound such a bookman, one ilI-equipped to deal objectively with accelerated post-war mod- ernism, even if he did announce and attend its beginnings. Pound's own swipe at "KOMPLEAT KULCHUR in favour of the "mass of fine literature" which "saves one from getting swamped in contemporaneousness" (Lettms of EP 86-87) certainly corroborates this impression McLuhan probably had. Moreover, in opposing the sornewhat fatalistic belief (expressed as buoyant optimism at the tum of the new century) that things "should change accord- ing to some patent schedule" (Lefters of EP 87), Pound, McLuhan would have argued, was not only ill-equipped to understand what was happening but bi- ased against what eventually did, namely the evolution of literary rnod- ernism into a later post-literate modernism--one that dispensed with the au- thor as cultural arbiter. And while McLuhan too had strong aversions to mass culture, his more tolerant curiosities about its own machinations and where dogma and ideology, while present, were less prescriptive and there- fore less prohibitive. The result was that whereas Pound, a disciple of per- manence and high literacy, was the perfect convenor of early modernism, McLuhan, a disciple of the movement of change (what he termed cultural "translation" [Cliché168]), was the perfect *'oracleJ' of modernism's post-liter- ate praxes.

For McLuhan, interested in the evolution of media from age to age (thus countering and updating Pound's interest in the evolution of art from idiom to idiom), analyses of forms was but a tentative step toward the ultimate goal of adaptation:

Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to invent. We have to . find the environrnents in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

(Massage 124)

Perhaps the difference was largely generational. By 1960, McLuhan wrote to Claude Bissell, analysis was necessary for survival, for indeed the world had changed dramatically: ". . . the world some decades ago reached the point where information became by far the largest product and/or commodity in the world. For example, AT&T is several times greater than General Motors, although it moves only information" (Letters of MM 273). Thirty-five years ago, these were precocious words indeed. By contrast, Pound's era was the era of film, not satellite television; it was an era that, as Pound wrote, realized "the logical end of impressionist art [in] the cinematograph" (GB 89). Pound's matograph literally means "seeing to write," which betrays the ideology be- hind it: early film, borne of the age of high literacy and the "bookman," was considered as a way of writing with images. McLuhan's insight into this early presumption of film as the "electric book" further serves to differentiate his time from Pound's:

. . . the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera hirns to, the audience accepts. . . .The dose relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispens- able to Our Western acceptance of film form. Even the film industry regards al1 of its greatest achieve- ments as derived from novels, nor is this unrea- sonable. Film, both in its reel form and in its sce- nario or script form, is completely involved with book culture. (UM2%)

"When sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in ex- tent" (GG 5), McLuhan further elaborates, television not only obsolesces film but no longer accommodates what Pound called the "particular sort of con- sciousness" (GB 89) of the cinematographic minci:

For with film vou are the camera and the non-liter- J ate man cannot use his eyes like a camera. But with TV you are the screen. . . . TV is not a narrative medium, is not so much visual as audile-tactile. That is why it is emphatic . . . (GG 39)

McLuhan's TV generation required forms that were concomitant with the at- tentions of its eledricaliy re-tribalized sense ratios (Le., its new consciousness), of MM 446). It could be argued that McLuhan was indeed one of these Young, at least in terms of his tolerances for the new. Pound, as has been indicated throughout this study, did no t share these tolerances.

Even Pound's curiosities about "the inebriety of mechanical efficiency" (SP

195)--in evidence particularly in "Psychology and Troubadours" (R O rn a n c e 93 94) and Gaudier-Brzeska (116-17)--though cautiously optimistic, were also quite characteristically anaduonistic. Though McLuhan, McDonald, and Bell have correctly argued that Pound and Eliot's appropriation of the industrial rhythms of the new age was a key to both the formula for literary modernism and its purveyors' attempt to infuse it with the kind of professional credibility enjoyed by science and applied process, Pound's contradictory views on tech- nology make the argument somewhat less satisfying.

Pound was certainly not unaware of technological insistence, admitting as early as 1938 that U.S. parliamentary politia would not "continue into the age of radio UNLESS it avail itself of just that" (Kulchur 173); but his thoughts to Eliot on "what 1 believe" expressed in the short polemic "Credo" in 1930 do reveal a distinct naiveté and confusion, perhaps again generational, about where this technological insistence might lead. Specifically, his thought that "I do not expect the machine to dominate the human consciousness that cre- ated it" (SP 53), betrays what at first seems to be his confusion about automa- tion. The statement contradicts two earlier and more insightful notions about technology that McLuhan would have found extremely helpful, and did in fact use: first in 1922, that "the invention of the first tooI turned [man's] mind . . . tumed, let us Say, his 'brain' from his own body" (P&D 209), chines is not pastoral retrogression. The remedy for the locomotive belching soft-coal smoke is not the stage coach, but the electric locomotive" (SP224-25).

Had Pound retracted his earlier, clearer understanding of technology in his observation to Eliot? Had technology by the 1930s become more than just some "new-fangled scenery" (Romance 192), Iike that to which the Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega objected? Was Pound identifying with the Spaniard at a time when technology was no longer a new fashion as it had been to Gaudier-Brzeska and Edward Wadsworth in 1905 (GB 116), but was indeed threatening to dominate the human consciousness that created it? Pound's observation to Eliot may have been either an early warning signal vis-à-vis his technophobia or simply proof of his confusion; it is impossible to Say ex- actly, except that Pound was rarely confused about anything that appeared to him to be impending. His mind was too nimble for such oversight. What seems probable, then, was that Pound objected simply to those interests and instruments whose ubiquity rendered them invisible--and their users corn- placent. Moreover, he could not easily tolerate his own complicity--or anoth- er's pointing out his own complicity--in the patterns and nuances of technol- ogy, no matter how naturalized. McLuhan's seerningly pejorative characteri- zation of the "user as content" was therefore as objectionable to Pound as was Joyce's parallel illustration (through Vico) of Our unwitting deferral to the ver=language we speak (W&P 60). In fact, many of Pound's responses to McLuhan on the question of technology echo his responses to Joyce decades before. McLuhan's pursuit of the implications of technology and media must, then, have seemed to Pound to be a repeat of the interests that led Joyce into what Pound considered the obscurantism and "extravagances" of Finnegans were not only occupying but consuming otherwise live minds. In Pound's mind, Joyce and McLuhan had fallen to that sway.

What is clear, by contrast, is that McLuhan entertained no such confusions nor phobias, for during his time the question of technological supremacy was no longer moot or impending. In a telling passage from The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan anecdotally addresses the pre-war concerns about technol- ogy that echo Pound's own. The old gardener in the following passage could be Pound hirnself, the self-described "weedef' in "the Garden of the Muses''

As Tzu-Gung was travelling through the re- gions norfh of the river Han, he saw an old man working iin his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vesse1 of wa- ter in his arms and pour it into the ditch. While his efforts were trernendous the re- sults appeared fo be very rnengre.

Tm-Gwng said, 'There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little ef- fort. . . . You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that if just gushes out. This is called a drm-well.'

Then anger rose up in the old man's face, and he said, '1 haue heard rny teacher say that whoever uses machines does al1 his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a hea~tlike a machine, and he who carries the heurt of a machine in his breast loses his simpliciiy. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the striv- ings of his soul. Uncerfainty in the strivings Clearly this ancient tale contains a great deal of wis- dom, for 'uncertainty in the strivings of the soul' is perhaps one of the aptest descriptions of man's condition in Our modem crisis; technology, the ma- chine, has spread through the world to a degree that our Chinese sage could not even have suspected.

Pound and the Chinese gardener both believed that adopting technology made one like the machine; both also believed (or persisted in the illusion) that capitulation to what amounted, ironically, to the modem could be pre vented. Perhaps their decades sanctioned that; McLuhan's did not, nor could he choose to ignore what by the 1960s was a technological and electronic fait accompli If, then, as McLuhan advanced, dominant technologies--as outer- ings of the human sensoria-do indeed raconfigure consciousness by altering ratios among the senses (Let ters of MM 218), McLuhan and Pound, living un- der different technological regimes, were radically different.

"'Modern' ended with Hiroshima" (Sixteen Words for Water 51), wrote Billy Marshall-Stoneking in his play about Pound. If knowledge, perception, and sensorïa are indeed cognate, then what does this Say about the nature of in- fluence across temporal fields (Pound's and McLuhan's), cultural divides (East and West; Canada and the US.), and even genders (the male given society's license to technological proclivity, though this is not immediately at issue here)? As Pound wrote before Hiroshima, "the man who tries to express his age instead of himself is doomed to destruction" (GB 102). Perhaps the global enterprise. Could McLuhan, then--as a post-Hiroshima, apotropaic Catholic--avoid expressing his age? Could he avoid "writing for [his] inferi- ors" and being "in contact with a public" (Letters of EP 146), which, for Pound, was axiomatic for shoddy work and loose style? McLuhan might well have asked, as Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska did not have to, at what price such in- dulgent self-expression? Given these divergent views toward their publia and the other differences between McLuhan and Pound, some thoughts tm ward a theory of influence seem appropriate as a conclusion.

"Every artifact is an archetype, and the ongoing cultural recombination of old and new artifacts is the engine of al1 invention and drives the subsequent wide use of inven- tion, which is called innovation." (G V 71)

If genealogies of bloodlines are possible, why not genealogies of thought Live thought, as Pound's theory of tradition insisted, was as generative and ascendant as the filial, moving in a complex toing and froing across borders and generations. What Pound's theory made clear was that thought both constantly re-invents itself and constantly returns to its origins for renewal. Perhaps this also defines influence, this precocious dependence that seeks new vistas as it observes from old vantage points. As McLuhan correctly identified in the passage above (G V 71), the u nceasing recombination of old and new is the energy, the vortex, the paideuma we cal1 culture; it is also, he added, the engine of Our invention, legitimizing Our participation in a pre- know through the actualities of the present). McLuhan was aware of this paradox early on, writing in The Mechanicd Bride that "the quality of any- body'srelations with the minds of the past is exactly and necessarily deter- mined by the quality of his contemporary insights" (44). Walter Ong found the insight particularly indispensable, for it offered to him, a Jesuit, new and fulfilling ways in which to revisit the old teachings. As Ong writes, 'The philosopher who understands St. Thomas in terms of the 'levels' of abstrac- tion in St. Thomas' philosophical 'system' is understanding St. Thomas' thought in tems of two analogies which never occurred to St. Thomas but which float readily enough to the surface of minds conditioned as ours are. It is impossible to uncondition ourselves. And it is not necessary" (HbC 93). Influence is likewise rewritten by each new reader. But what exactly deter- mines influence? What is the prerequisite for the first return to source;

where does the line begin, or at least what gives rise to the significant nodes along the line or amidst the web (the likes of a Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, or Pavlov [Tom Wolfe H6C 31])?

Louis Dudek, himself a confidant of Pound and a contemporary of McLuhan, suggests that the prerequisite (that to whjch later thought defers) is self-evi- dent and imposes itself through a quiet mystical confluence that culminates in abeyance, clearing a space for beginning. Predictably, Dudek's view owes much to Pound. In his new collection of philosophical asides (Notebooks l96O-l994), Dudek writes:

Most good art attempts to reach the greatest number of people, even with a certain strain of vulgarity or rough energy, as in Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Fielding, Sterne, BaIzac, Theodore Dreiser. But the lad 1s rorever clear, as 1s mat uerweeri L~VL ruratci and Noel Coward. (Nov. 6/93)

(in The Antigonish Reoiao 100 [Winter 19951 65)

Again, a confluence of opinion, of ideologies, determines what "is forever clear." Tom Wolfe, Dudek, and Pound al1 refer, without calling him by name, to Harold Bloom's so-called "strong poet." Bloom's theory of influence, simply stated, is as follows: "Poetic history . . . is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves" (Anxiety 5). Bloom's theory does seem appropriate in the context of this study, as his no- tion of poetic history parallels McLuhan's notion of recombinant artifacts, and his concept of imaginative abeyance parallels Dudek and Pound's similar con- cept of a selectively accommodating tradition. Moreover, Bloom's cal1 for a "comective . . . to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism" (5) and his suggestion that such a practical poetics "should help us read more accurately any group of past poets who were contemporary with one anothef (11) promises just the renewal necessary to reconstitute a theory of influence in a post-literate age of instantaneous resonance, in which the past is suddenly as available to us (and indeed as simultaneous) as the pre- sent. But does Bloom's theory deliver on its promise?

Bloom, following Eliot (The Sacred Wood 110), takes poetic history to be analogous with critical history (Anxiety 93, 95)' meaning that if poetic history is indistinguishable from poetic influence, then critical history and influence are likewise cognate. As modernist seer, then, Pound was McLuhan's strong father (as Browning was Pound's), prompting McLuhan to misread and deny which is exactly what occurred. Bloom, in deference seemingly to one of his own strong fathers (Freud), likens this capitulation to "the 'faamily romance'" (27), levelling accusations of the Oedipal as motivating intent (62). Lacan, also in deference to Freud as precursor, would have argued that as an extension of the Oedipal, the protocols of influence are one of many "scripts" we inscribe with desire. Similar desirous "misprisions" and denials characterized the bonds between Pound and Eliot (McLuhan was especially preoccupied with Eliot's anemic acknowledgement of "il miglior fabbro") and later between McLuhan and Kenner. Curiously, the little-known 1948/49 plagiarism feud between McLuhan and Kenner was over Pound, making the misreading of Pound particularly problematic and the line of influence coming from Pound, if existing anywhere unsullied, hopelessly refracted: In short, McLuhan was misreading Pound to affirm his own aesthetic ground, and Kenner--whose admitted relationship with McLuhan at the time was "McLuhan pontificat- ing, 1 amotating" (Mazes 296)--was misreading McLuhan's misreading of Pound to clear imaginative space for hirnself. Out of such confusion arose The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) and the Pound Industry as we have it today, rife with countless later mispnsions that legitimize imaginative play while deferring ultimately to atasal, or union with the spirits/"strong poets" of the past. Such is the paradox of influence; it clearly manifests itself as a kind of ambivalent sexual attraction, a highly problematized precocious dependence. As Bloom defines it, "Poetry is the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resis- tance to that enchantment" (95). Influence shares with growth the ambiva- lences of the bildungs, of narrative-Lacan again. misreadings of Kenner's misreadings of McLuhan's misreadings of Pound (1 need not mention that Pound, the informing referent and bête noire of al1 this attention, also read widely and with much anxiety). Aside from a few shifting reference points, there are no clear markers to guide us; the field of post-literate influence, void of causalities that inhere in canon and literate "taste," resembles the oral and haptic--we must feel Our way, in other words, through flawed opinions, each simultaneously flaunting and denying its own imperfection. The literate and visual necessarily fail us: Bloom's theory is therefore tailor-made for the apocalyptic "total field" simultaneity of McLuhan's post-modern, for deference to strong fathers is anything but devo- lution. It is rather, as McLuhan and Ong pointed out long before Bloom, that which invigorates culture, which is also, incidentally, Pound and Eliot% the- ory of the Tradition. Culture indeed may rest on the footings of strong fa- thers, but it towers upward only in anxious aversion to its foundation. Anxiety is thus "the energy, the force, the will" (Anxiety 52) of culture; it is preasely that which duplicates the "'instinct"' for worth that remains "after a man has forgotten al1 he set out to learn" (Kulchur 195). In this too does Pound concur.

Northrop Frye, McLuhan's equally famous colleague at the University of Toronto, once called him "a Iaughing Heraclitus" (Keogh "McLuhan and Socrates" 3). In an environment so shifting that it retrieves Heraclitus, there can be no teleology; when thought was shared verbally, McLuhan reminds us, standardization or influence could not be extended as metonym--neither canons nor "semantic uniformity" existed (Leffersof MM 370). In a similarly r etribalized, post-literate environment, McLuhan can therefore be simultane- (which is precisely what he did); and so can Kenner defer to and resist McLuhan, and stiI1 claim McLuhan's and Pound's influence, which h e did. Similarity, agreement, or acquiescence do not, then, constitute influence. Influence is as legitimate in denial as it is evident in acknowledgement, a paradox that attends the age of the death of the visual. Quoting Lichtenberg, Bloom corroborates: "'To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation'" (31). McLuhan would argue that only the doyens of high literacy, of "Cartesian reductions" as Bloom calls them (38), would deny this. The differ- ences that developed between McLuhan and Pound, then, do not nullify in- fluence but strengthen the argument that proposed it at the outset. Anxiety, writes McLuhan, is the productive "cultural blues" of the present (WUP 16); it represents, Bloom adds, a "aeative correction" without which "modem pe etry as such could not exist" (30).

In attributing the strength of the "ephebe" (the later poet) to the "brazen[ness ofl his clinamen [or 'swerve' from his precursor]" (43), Bloom's theoty also seems to account for the resentments which camed McLuhan, some have ar- gued, into the absurd. McLuhan's insistence on an inward-referring doxa to which al1 outerings and extensions are reducible, seems to fulfill another of Bloom's requisites for influence: namely, that "to attain a self yet more in- ward than the precursofs, the ephebe becomes necessarily more solipsistic" (105). In announcing itself aphonstical1y as both "the medium is the mes- sage" and "the user as content," McLuhan's cleanng of imaginative space, his advancement on Pound's suggestions, sanctions just such a solipsism--and, moreover, revels in it. The critiasms of Louis Dudek and Jonathan Miller of wild flights into McLuhanacy are correspondingly less convincing when influences, and thus as ridden with an "epidemic of anxiety" (Anxiety 38) that sanctions flight More than similarity or connection, then, the brazenness of the swerve to locate or invent "a discontinuous universer'--where

"discontinuity is freedom" (Anxiety 39)--confirms influence n n d individua- tion, legitimizing flight. The most prodigious leapers, are also the most in- debted. This is what McLuhan's accusers fail to take into account. In rejecting Pound for his own clinamen, McLuhan was also completing him, as he would complete Chesterton, Lewis, and Innis, his other "strong fathers," in ways just as paradoxic and self-referring.

Arthur Kroker agrees that the depth of McLuhan's apparent fa11 provides us with perhaps his most valuable teaching of dl:

McLuhan's value as a theorist of culture and tech- nology began just when he went over the hiIl to the side of the alien and surreaIistic world of mass communications: the 'real world' of technology where the nervous system is exteriorised and ev- eryone is videotaped daily like sitting screens for television. . . . McLuhan was fated to be trapped in the deterministic world of technology, indeed to be- corne one of the servomechanisms of the machine- world. . . . Paradoxically, however, it was just when McLuhan became most cynical and most determin- istic, when he became fully aware of the nightmar- ish quality of the 'medium as massage,' that his thought becomes most important as an entirely cre- ative account of the great paradigm-shift going on in twentieth-century experience. (85-86)

Though Kroker is clearly referring to McLuhan's servitude to technological determinism--a servitude without balancing system or ideology, Save the ill- to erect a self-supporting clinamen against the pull of mentorship. As Kroker correctly points out (and as Bloom would agree), McLuhan's swerve is essen- tially a "creative" counterblast in response to Pound's paradigm-shifting early modernism and late modernism's equally paradigm-shifting technological insurgence. But it is less that these forces are countered creatively; rather, the significance as it relates to the ephebe is that they are countered at ail, for the strength of McLuhan's determinants (Pound and technology) must have seemed almost insurmountable. It is not entirely surprïsing, then, that McLuhan's swerve was short-lived.

Predictably, McLuhan's "fessera" or will-to-completion (a term Bloom takes from Lacan) is realized, after McLuhan's 1953 abandoning of Pound, in his later championing of his precursor's cause--in the cultivation of latter-day Imagists üke Sheila Watson in the early 1960s, in the solicitation of Pound ar- ticles like the one for Esquire in 1968, in the pilgrimage to visit Olga Rudge in 1977, and in the delivery of ledures like the 4th Annual Pound Lecture at the University of Idaho in 1977. Sufficiently "strong" in his own right by the mid-1960s' McLuhan's preoccupation became to resurred Pound, for without that intervention, McLuhan feared, Pound would remain incomplete. Again, Bloom is insightful:

In the sense of a cornpleting link, the fessera repre- sents any later poet's attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precunofs Word would be worn out if not redeerned as a newly fulfilled and en- larged Word of the ephebe. (67) writing through your conceptual glasses has been quite a revelation" (McLuhan Collection, National Archives)--between the lines of Bloom's elu- cidation of the completion-fixation. McLuhan's resurgent interest in Pound in the early and middle 1960s is tantamount, then, to amouncing his own ar- rival. Only when sufficiently strong did McLuhan attempt this; it is no coin- cidence that the middle and late 1960s mark the apex of McLuhan's popularity and fame- If we did not know that from historical record, then his sudden re- tum to resurrect a neglected Pound through the conviction of his own syntax would be the telling sign.

Finally, because of McLuhan's strength, the penultimate "apophrade6 or re- turn of/to the precursor is triumphant and productive, returning to him a measure of the generative. Bloom's description of this decisive moment in the precursor/ ephebe association not only confirms again the problematic of Pound's influence on McLuhan, but more importantly confirms McLuhan's strength as an equally "strong poet" in his own right, one finally able to trans- late the problematic of "Pound-as-referent" into an acceptance of influence:

Apophrades, when managed by the capable imagi- nation, by the strong poet who has persisted in his strength, becomes not so much a retum of the dead as a celebration of the return of the early self-exalta- tion that first made poetry possible. (147)

Former research assistant Joe Keogh argues that McLuhan's posthumously published hws of the Media (1988) is just such an exaltation, a last iteration that returns to the beginning to frame (and nourish) achievernent: LlVICLUIlaIi 3 J ~cltJL-UiGUniit6 IVAbLiiulmAbl- YI-II r--- vides us, as it were, with a course in comparative idolatry; and his Laws of the Media proceed to de- velop an anthropology for this position (perhaps suggested by the book of Wisdom) in which mankind can be seen worshipping himself in his technological extensions; not as effect, but cause; not as an image, but a force; not in what goes into him, but what cornes out of him.

("McLuhan and Socrat es" 4)

To corne full circle to a beginning solipsisiically, Bloom would argue, con- firrns influence beyond any need to prove similarity or connection. That McLuhan never "returned to" Chesterton, Lewis, or Innis as he returned to Pound is telhg in a more profound way, confirming with little doubt who was the strongest father of them all.

Keogh's suggestion of McLuhan's own self-reflexive return via Lnws of the Media to his beginnings is of particular significance, for McLuhan's last work is in many ways his magnum opus, though it is rarely recognized as such, generally because of its metaphysical complexity. Subtitled "The New Science" (thus recaliing Vico's treatment of language and its creation--the world-as "a severe poem" in Scienza Nuova), the book is important for its discovery ("inventio") of four universal and verifiable laws that attend al1 forms, media, and extensions. These laws, McLuhan notes, "do not rest on any concept or theory, but are empirical, and form a practical means of per- ceiving the action and effects of ordinary human tools and services" (Laws 98). Moreover, these laws "apply to al1 human artefacts . . . or poetic styles or philosophical systems" (98). So if influence constitutes poetry and if poetic systems can be interrogated using McLuhan's Vicoesque "tetrad," then logic its properties and the actions it exerts upon precursors and ephebes. Fittingly, the poetics of influence rest, finally, in McLuhan's own system, just as the modalities of influence (as Bloom's theories confirmed) rested in the man, his bildungs, and its desires and aversions. It is curious and revealing, per- haps, that 1 too, finally, defer to a McLuhan system to investigate influence.

McLuhan's first law of media asks "What does the artefact enhance or inten- sify or make possible or accelerate?" (Laws 98). Most obviously, influence ex- tends the Bloomian precursor, the "strong father" himself, for any deferral to influence enhances the subject which is being hailed. That McLuhan's first iteration, as an agent under infiuence, was to Pound, is confirmed in his post- 1946 prosody and his first cycle of correspondence with Pound. Pound is liter- ally everywhere present, McLuhan's deferral affording him a greater strength than he would othenvise have. But influence also extends beyond the strength of the precursor to enhance the past, namely the Tradition. As in- fluence extends the precunor, so does it extend the precuaor's precursors, imparting a contiguity that extends back through time. At least theoretically, then, influence (or rather, the sum of influences) extends the globe in pat- terns of homology and recurrence, in which any thinking subject is connected to al1 other thinking subjects through a complex of interseding lines of influ- ence. Pound's influence on McLuhan is therefore McLuhan's hail and me mentary arrest of a trace of intersecting influences called, for Aristotelian convenience, Pound. Influence inevitably suggests pause, and what the pause enhances or extends is nothing more than the trace, erased and reconstituted with every new thought or letter or paragraph read. 'organ'?" (Laws99). Influence clearly obsolesces autonomy between the pre- sent and the past (student and mentor), obliterating the need to constantly reinvent process. If influence extends the globe as a village, it also obsolesces the division between centres and margins, for under influence, both inhere in the other, eliminating the need for their demarcation. Every margin be- cornes itself a centre. About this dynamic of influence, Pound was certain, in- sisting that his critical work was intended foremost for students outside spe- cialized academic structures and ultimately to Save students tirne. As one of those students, McLuhan benefitted repeatedly, as this study shows, from Pound's suggestion, building from rnere inference what became a complete typology of his own forms (including, for exarnple, the tetradic).

Influence also obsolesces boundaries, as Pound's influence, via Fenollosa and Legge, opened up the East to the literate westemer, rediscovered Jonson and the Metaphysical Poets, and brought English studies under the sway of the French and Provençal, the japanese Noh, and the Italian lyricists. Pound's in- fluence was therefore cosmopolitan, multi-national, and multi-lingual. It was also fiercely democratic, as Pound, perhaps somewhat ironically, knew better than McLuhan. Pound seemingly knew better than the oracle of elec- tnc simultaneity (who knew intellectually but resisted in practice) that in obliterating borders, influence obsolesced high literacy's rigid protocols of in- formation shanng and acknowledgement. Hence Pound's acceptance of what McLuhan often termed Eliot's intellectual hijacking, a tolerance McLuhan did not share, as Kenner learned. If autonomy between students and mentors was pushed aside in the interests of a schoiarly body politic (Pound's ultimate wish), so was the sovereignty/ownership of ideas: Pound seemed to know as site of intersecting influences himself, and so rather indefensible as a prima inter pares. Though he was undoubtedly dogrnatic, Pound never attributed to himself what he had acquired from others; this was also true of McLuhan, whose acknowledgement of sources was consistent, but never expressed in the same spirit as Pound. That Pound was writing through the achievement of others is always more evident than it is with McLuhan, whose indebted- ness tends to disappear, as if on cue, behind the strength of his own syn- tax/ "cl inamen."

The third law of media asks "What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form?" (Laws 99). Influence surely retrieves a medieval reverence for the teacher/rnentor such that the precursor is mythologized as guide, retrieving the occult in the pro- ces. Pound, of course, embraced his own teachers (Yeats was an early Virgil) as agents of atasal, through whom union with the spirits and live minds of the past could be consciously retrieved. James Logenbach, who wrote the seminal Stone Cottage, noted that "[Pound] recovered the dead by meeting the living who retained the past in their very selves. Yeats became Pound's guide through a poetic underworld inhabited by Rhy mers, Pre-Raphaelites, Victorians, Shelley, and Keats" (Modernist Poetics of History 30). In "raising" the minds of the past through the best of the living, Pound was readying himself, he admitted in "How 1 Began," for initiation into the "Apostolic Succession" of the mystical Tradition. For him, influence was everywhere as- sociated with an occultist retrieval in which various Virgils presided over his own versions of Aeneas. Similarly for McLuhan, influence retrieved the hidden through an excessive mythologization of mentors. In the beginning whom McLuhan embraced), this mythologization manifested itself as the need to acquire the mentor's esoteric secrets, whether they were the Catholic precepts that informed Lewis's interrogation of popular culture or the forma1 dora and provenance of Pound's modernist technique. He asks Pound at a crucial moment of their correspondence: "1s there some secret cult knowl- edge in these matters. Masonic? Something no critic should know?" (Letters of MM 231).

Retrïeved vis-à-vis the occult in Pound and McLuhan's experiences of influ- ence is the complex gestalt of a shared sign system, called by early modemists the Tradition. In enhancing the past, influence, then, also retrieves the past, as is most visible now among those who are retrieving McLuhan to legit- imize their own high-tech enterprises. 1s digital ubiquity noi "raising" McLuhan's name (raising in the sewe of the occult)? In a search for theorïsts to explain and legitimize the implications of computer technology (a11 of it supposedly value-neutral; they have not read McLuhan very closely), pundits have come "face-to-face" with the seer who predided its rise in the first place. These pundits are only secondarily raising McLuhan "via" the digital chip- that is merely their "field," McLuhan would have argued--rather, their pri- mary objective seems to be to appropriate McLuhan as legitimizing medium. Their backward search for a bête noire has not only conjured McLuhan but opened a new set of pathways which constitute a new "ground" in the digital enterprise: as the wheel invented roads, so has the digital chip invented McLuhan. The irony, of course, is that pundits who travel discarnate in the ether of pop cultural trade magazines like Wired appropriate the McLuhan name metonymically without ever considering, beyond a few aphorisms, tices, but their capitulation to McLuhan in this context is analogous in absur- dity to a resurgent interest in Pound by anti-Sernites or in Lewis by neo-Nazis. They are, in short, treating McLuhan as a figure without ground.

The fourth law of media asks: "When pushed to the limits of its potential (another complementary action) the new form wiII tend to reverse what has been its original characteristics. What is the reversa1 potential of the new fom?" (Laws99). In as much as influence enhances the mentor and acceler- ates retrieval of the past, it must inevitably deny mentorship and flip into an ego-fixation. When the ephebe sees himself in utter proximity to another, he quite literally disappears, requiring that his ego assert itself in a denial of death and sudden fear of an anonymous mortality. McLuhan was especially innovative in his reading of the classical "Narcissus-narcosis" (UM 55), stat- ing many tirnes late in his career that it was not his own image that infatu- ated Narcissus in the pool but the image of another projected thereupow-of course, without the mirror or photography, modern inventions, Narcissus could easily be fooled. Narcissus was consequently the first watcher to display a scopic fetish (the first TV junkie), his eventual death by pining away at the image of another a result of the inability of his own ego to assert itself in a re- jection of that image. It is curious that McLuhan would develop and trumpet this original interpretation of the Greek myth at precisely the point in his ca- reer that marked his own rejection of Pound. It is yet another unconscious endorsement, perhaps the most compelling, that Pound was truly the "strong father" whose own myth and image was the "influenza" of McLuhan's ulti- mate scopophobia, his Bloomian "epidemic of anxiety" (Anxiety 38). Unlike the influence of Chesterton, Innis, or Joyce, Pound's influence on McLuhan, because it was so profound, proved both lasting and problematic. As this thesis establishes, Pound is implicated in rnost of McLuhan's impor- tant critical moments: in his conversion to literary rnodernism via the peda- gogyof the Cambridge New Critics, in his discovery of a Symbolist (née Poe) poetics to explain the artistic "effect" or formula of literary modernism, in his application of that formula to the wider field of non-literary fonns and me dia, and in his embrace of participatory methodologies (from periplum to the paratactic) to effect a hyper-modern, self-reflexive, and inclusive critical praxis. That the admission of Pound's influence made McLuhan uncomfort- able at times is not entirely surprising. Pound's influence, while not the only one that shaped McLuhan, was without doubt his most significant and long lasting. To cal1 Pound the most important intellectual midwife McLuhan had does not overstate the matter. Works Cited and Consulted

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