Great moments in the history of the University of Toronto

In 1853, Toronto's University College (the oldest part of the University of Toronto) invited applications for a new professorship in natural philosophy. Among the applicants were such future luminaries as John Tyndall (discoverer of the greenhouse effect) and T. H. Huxley. Charles Darwin was just one of the leading scientists of the day who wrote letters in support of Huxley's candidacy.

Huxley didn't get the job and Tyndall didn't even make the shortlist of candidates. Instead of them, the Toronto school hired William Hincks. Toronto was then in the united Province of Canada, whose Premier in 1853 was Sir Francis Hincks, William Hincks' younger brother. For more about the whole sordid affair, see p. 49 of Martin L. Friedland's The University of Toronto: a History (2nd ed.). 

McLuhan in the Walrus

The latest issue of the Walrus has an article on Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer. I knew that McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism, but I hadn't realized how strong was his antipathy towards Protestantism. Heer says that McLuhan blamed pretty much all that's wrong in modern western culture on Protestant attitudes. For McLuhan, the Reformation was a long, slippery slide into a real slough of despond. According to Heer, McLuhan reached this conclusion during his sojourn in a vast, blighted waste that the Protestants had left in their path (Winnipeg). I wonder if his dislike of Protestantism is one of the sources of the friction between McLuhan and some of his United Church colleagues in the English Department at the University of Toronto (such as Northrop Frye and N. J. Endicott).

Heer refers to some McLuhan clips on YouTube. However, the one from which Heer quotes most extensively is a longer piece on Google Video in which McLuhan goes head to head with Norman Mailer. The discussion was recorded by the CBC's The Summer Way in 1968. Heer includes this neat quotation of McLuhan from that broadcast:

Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

 Here's the whole discussion:


While poking around on the Walrus' site, I found this older piece on McLuhan by Lewis Lapham. Lapham quotes McLuhan as follows:

Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I’m resolutely against…it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button.

Finally, here's a reminiscence of McLuhan by an acquaintance of his.

More vintage Toronto bashing by Wyndham Lewis and now Hemingway, too

I picked up William Burrill's book on Hemingway's years in Toronto, when Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star. Curious as to whether Hemingway had crossed paths with Wyndham Lewis, I checked the index for Lewis' name. Unfortunately, it appears that they didn't meet. In fact, it doesn't look like their stays in Toronto overlapped -- Hemingway lived here (Toronto) only in 1919-20.

Lewis, though, is quoted by Burrill as calling Toronto a 'sanctimonious icebox.' Burrill then quotes Lewis as follows:

If New York is brutal and babylonian, in this place [Toronto] it is as if someone were sitting on your chest -- having taken the care to gag you first -- and were croaking out [hymns] ... from dawn to dayshut.

                                                    --p,. 153 of Hemingway: the Toronto Years, William Burrill

As for Hemingway, well, Robert Fulford quotes him as remarking of Toronto (in a letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas), 'What bothers me is why with my fine intelligence I ever came out here.'

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Walrus Magazine has an intriguing article about Wyndham Lewis, an unlikeable English writer and artist who, sadly, was born in Canada. 'Sadly' for him, since he despised Canada (especially Toronto), and 'sadly' for us, since he was a racist and anti-Semite, which is clear from his political tracts in the 1930's. Indeed, of all the literary and visual artists whose sense of judgment was impugned by their political allegiances in that 'low dishonest decade,' it's hard to imagine anyone who was as thoroughly discredited as Lewis, whose 1932 book on Hitler included a chapter called 'Adolf Hitler a Man of Peace'. To his credit, Lewis did at least come to oppose the Nazis (shortly before WWII).

It says a lot about Toronto in that era that when Lewis lived there during the war, he (bigot though he was) came to detest the city for its intolerance. That is one theme of the Walrus piece that did not surprise me. European intellectuals seldom had much good to say about 'Toronto, the good' before the 1960's. Another Englishman who spent some time in Toronto during the war was A. J. Ayer. He was learning how to kill a man 'with his bare hands' (according to his autobiography) at a secret spy school east of the city. He characterized the Toronto of that time as a 'cold, Scots Calvinist town.' Actually, according to what I've heard, the northern Irish did more to shape Toronto's Calvinist ethos than the Scots did (which might explain why the Belfast of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne seemed so familiar to me).

(This Irish Protestant influence was more pronounced in eastern Ontario, where the Orange Lodge still operates, and one can find an Orange Hall in several towns [such as Peterborough].)

A surprising discovery for me in the Walrus article was the revelation of Lewis's strong influence on Marshall McLuhan, as is attested by a 1967 interview in which McLuhan credits Lewis with the insight that 'the man-made environment is ... a programmed teaching machine.' Here's an excerpt: