REMEMBERING MARSHALL MCLUHAN, AND OTHER LITERARY GREATS

As you no doubt noticed while scanning Google today, it's Marshall McLuhan's 106th birthday. McLuhan is famous, according to Wikipedia, "for coining the expression 'the medium is the message' and the term 'global village,' and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented."

So, the Wikipedia article is what the media and the history books will tell you, but for me, it was different. You see Marshall McLuhan was my teacher for one glorious semester when I was in my fourth year at the University of Toronto.

I was fortunate enough to be taught in the same semester by McLuhan and Northrop Frye—another literary giant of equal, if not, greater status. As a matter of fact, McLuhan and Frye were rivals. or more precisely, McLuhan was jealous of Frye.

This was a little known detail as far as society at large was concerned, but was widely known in the academic circles in which I moved back then.

I went to the University of St. Michael's College in the U of T because the English Literature program was highly regarded. Northrop Frye taught at Victoria College, but I had special student status and was able to attend both colleges and sit under both world-famous Professors.

Ironically, what I discovered was that the truly great professor was my mentor, Father David Belyea, who taught a course entitled Religion in Imaginative Literature—and it turned out he was secretly McLuhan's mentor too.

I talk about these relationships in my novel, A Familiar Rain. It's not a campus novel per se, but a story of a neurophysicist who discovers a way to relive his past and visit with his dead wife Laura, who died prematurely at the age of twenty-nine.

Like Laura in the novel, I was enamoured with the idea of being taught by two literary Greats in the same semester, but also, like her, I discovered who the truly great professor really was.

But I suppose as a young student I was overly optimistic. I had read Newman's Idea of a University and was convinced that simply being in that academic milieu would result in the transfer of genius.

Newman talked about the fellowship of academics as a form of "genius locii," where simply being together in the same place would communicate a special spirit.

Of course, it didn't, and in the end I was truly disappointed

McLuhan was heady and aloof. He knew me from class but would studiously avoid all contact outside of class. I remember him coming into the college restaurant every day and sitting with an older professor with white wavy hair.

They were present on campus but not available or part of the life.

Perhaps Newman's notion of spirit was somehow mystically conveyed, but I doubt it.

The same was true of Northop Frye. He was very stiff and formal in class and aloof and inaccessible after class. But unlike McLuhan who reserved an icy demeanour, Frye had an associate, a woman named Jay McPherson who ran interference for him.

I remembered her as the author of The Four Ages of Man—my Mythology text in private school. I recall her as having her hair severely scarped back off her forehead and wearing black men's oxfords.

She was almost as unapproachable as the Greats, although on one occasion she stopped me in the halls and remarked that my term paper that I submitted a few days earlier, "was not unintelligent."

Speak about being damned by faint praise!

I was beginning to despair of learning anything at the feet of the Greats. That all changed when I took Father David Belyea's course on Imaginative Literature.

I can't describe the feeling of being in his lectures other than to say he was intimately aware of everyone in the room and there were hundreds in the lecture hall.

When he would say something profound—which occurred almost every fourth sentence—the room would grow deathly still. The effect was like the silence between the flash of lightning and the resulting thunder clap.

I left that first lecture shaken and resolved to see if I could arrange a meeting with him in his office.

Father Belyea's office was in one of the old Victorian houses on campus. Apparently he was don of one of the men's dorms. He was the kind of man who was dissatisfied with most of the translations of the Bible so he taught himself ancient Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic so he could translate the texts himself.

He could quote extemporaneously from Dostoyevsky and Camus and then add in a line from Salinger or Bob Dylan. For some unknown reason, he took me under his wing and became my mentor. I never knew why. I found he did that with McLuhan too, and they spent many midnight walks together.

What I learned from Father Belyea and tried to incorporate into my own writing was an eclectic range of reading, thought and experience.

He was the kind of man who could quote Gide, even in the original French, and then in his raspy Brooklyn accent, tell an anecdote about a Hell's Angel member who spent the night sleeping on his office floor because a rival gang was after him.

Reader's Digest used to have a feature called, "My Most Unforgettable Character" and Father Dave should be there.

In A Familiar Rain I call him Father Breton and he's the wise guru who convinces Alec to follow his heart.

Today the world celebrates McLuhan, but the truly great man is my mentor, Father Dave, who will always have a place in my heart