'Misrepresenting the Past and Its Culture'

I was still a kid when Marshall McLuhan became the sage du jour in the sixties. Television was a “cool” medium, according to Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). The cooler the medium, McLuhan wrote, “the more someone has to uncover and engage in the media” and “fill in the blanks.” I just wanted to watch Combat! on Tuesday nights. McLuhan was taken up by people hoping to bridge the pop culture/high culture divide while never appearing less than fashionably cultured, to guiltlessly enjoy Gomer Pyle while remaining painfully aware of its lowbrow status. 

In 1969, Rebecca West delivered the Presidential Address at the University of Leicester to The English Association. Her talk is titled “McLuhan and the Future of Literature.” Introducing her subject, West writes:

 

“He has written several books, of which the best known are The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, and has recently appeared in the Penguin Library as part-author of a very distressingly produced little book, called The Medium is the Massage, planned to cheer illiterates on their way, and this is not a petulant description, for the burden of Professor McLuhan’s gospel is that illiterates should be cheered on their way.”

 

Already in the first paragraph you hear the distinctive Westian tone – impatient with silliness, skeptical, acerbic, happy to demolish another icon. As Whittaker Chambers wrote of her: “For all her warmth of heart and incandescence of mind, she is seldom averse to a good brawl.” Her McLuhan lecture/essay, delivered when she was seventy-seven, is fifteen pages long. It is feisty and deliciously disrespectful. A few choice morsels:

 

After quoting a passage by McLuhan: “I will read that again. I do not understand it, and what is more I cannot understand how any person writing in this manner should have become known as a writer except in the sense that the Great McGonigle is known as a poet; and never does Professor McLuhan write better.”

 

“Here we have the most vulgar and erroneous view of book-learning, very painful to anybody who remembers the irruption to England of, say, Ezra Pound or John Gould Fletcher.”

 

“If I plague you with this ridiculous nonsense, it is because this man is a professor at a university, and has influence over his times. He is misrepresenting the past and its culture, which did not fail in the limitation which he ascribes to it. I find very little real humanity in Professor McLuhan’s writings, and many evidences of desperate poverty . . .”

 

“I cannot believe that Professor McLuhan is right in thinking that TV gives better training than literature.”

As Chambers put it: “[I]n a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time.”

 

We could use a reborn Rebecca West in our age of anti-human superstition, though her work was highly uneven. Some favor her novels, though she was not by nature a writer of fiction. None of her novels is satisfactory. In every form she remained essentially a journalist with a strong critical streak. Her essential books are her  masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955). The first title I’ve read twice and annotated heavily. It’s one of my favorite books.

 

West was born on this date, December 21, in 1892 and died in 1983 at age ninety.

 

[Chambers’ remarks are from his review of West’s The Meaning of Treason in the December 8, 1947 issue of Time (collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959; ed. Terry Teachout, Regnery Gateway, 1989). West was on the cover of the magazine.]