Cleanth Brooks’s poem, ‘Maelstrom’, written in 1944, was published in the first 1946 issue of The Sewanee Review.¹ Later, in the fourth issue of the Review that year, McLuhan would discuss Poe’s Maelstrom for the first time in ‘Footsteps in the Sands of Crime’². The concluding passage of this essay reads as follows:

The sailor in [Poe’s] story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape. Like everything else in Poe the recital proceeds in a casual off-hand manner. Like the chat of a well-bred man of the world. But in this parable Poe embalms the mystery of the sleuth himself. His sailor escapes from the strom by a trick of analysis. The sleuth produces the murderer in the same way. And at the same time the sleuth also enables the reader to “escape” from the horror of his own world by conferring on him the sense of detached power associated with the scientific attitude. To that extent at least the whodunits must be accredited with the formula for happiness which Swift noted as dear to man — the possession of being perpetually well deceived.³

The first three sentences represent a kind of pre-view⁴ in which McLuhan looks forward to his upcoming second conversion (“the means of escape”) and to his life’s work thereafter (in which the Maelstrom will be cited, and sometimes quoted at length, over and over again)⁵:

The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom.  And this provides the means of escape.

But the remainder of this 1946 passage looks backward to what he will later, in 1954, on the other side of his second conversion, call his “obsession with literary values”⁶, an “obsession” he had exercised for more than a decade following his graduation from Cambridge in 1936 as an energetic member of the F.R.Leavis-Scrutiny branch of the Cambridge English school.⁷ (In a letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, McLuhan remarked on his “rotten luck to bog down in English lit at university” (Letters 216) where he apparently meant “the rotten luck to bog down” with Leavis.)

It was near the end of this preliminary period of his career that McLuhan’s attention was drawn to A Descent into the Maelstrom, presumably by Brooks’s poem in the Sewanee Review. Of course he knew of Poe’s story before this time, but apparently without seeing any special significance in it for him and his work. However, with a series of other factors at this time in the late 1940’s (like his study of the symbolists, his rereading of Joyce and Eliot with Hugh Kenner, his meeting and subsequent correspondence with Ezra Pound, his introduction to cybernetics via Sigfried Giedion, his learning of Havelock’s research on Greek orality, his introduction to Innis’s communication work, his beginning reading of modern management theory with Bernard Muller-Thym, etc etc), Poe’s Maelstrom would soon cease from being one more piece of furniture in his familiar world. Instead, it would transform that world — and McLuhan himself along with it. The Maelstrom would help instigate McLuhan’s second conversion which would fundamentally change his tune:

…organic harps
And each one’s Tunes be that, which each calls ‘I’
– Coleridge, The Eolian Harp (draft of 1795)

In 1946, however, that earthquake had not yet occurred — McLuhan had not yet exposed himself to the transformative power of the Maelstrom. Instead he regarded it as merely one more item to be accommodated within his established perspective. This was accomplished by his reading it as a variation on Poe’s detective stories:

Like everything else in Poe the recital proceeds in a casual off-hand manner. Like the chat of a well-bred man of the world. But in this parable Poe embalms the mystery of the sleuth himself. The sleuth produces the murderer in the same way [as the mariner solves the case of the Maelstrom].

In both sorts of fiction, mystery and nautical, an “escape” was seen to be provided in multiple senses:

And at the same time [as he unravels the mystery of his case and so finds an “escape” from it] the sleuth also enables the reader to “escape” from the horror of his own world by conferring on him the sense of detached power associated with the scientific attitude. To that extent at least the whodunits [and their Maelstrom parallel] must be accredited with the formula for happiness which Swift noted as dear to man — the possession of being perpetually well deceived

The reader of Poe was provided with pseudo-escape from the “horror of his own world” by the fictional escapes of the detective and the mariner from their predicaments.  That is, Poe’s readers were captured, as we say, exactly through tales of escape — tales of escape which then provided them with illusory escape from the world in which they were actually captured (not least by their recourse to ‘escape’ entertainment in it!). A double real attachment (to escapist entertainment and to a world which had escaped its foundations) was achieved via a double fictional detachment (tales of escape in escapist entertainment). 

However this analysis may have been fitting in part, it is noteworthy that McLuhan at this time saw no need in his own right for “detached observation”, “scientific interest” and a “scientific attitude”. He already had the correct “point of view” (“my old literate ‘point of view’ bias”, as he called it in his Playboy interview) and any detachment from it could only be negative (with, given his theology at the time, potentially eternal consequences for him). Only everybody else was bound to “the horror of his own world” by being “perpetually well deceived”. He himself, however, was Catholic and, as he wrote to Corinne Lewis before their marriage in 1939, years before she herself became Catholic, “there is nothing good or true which is not Catholic”.⁸

The “horror” here is that industrialism and general modernity “associated with the scientific attitude” which had, in the Leavisite analysis, caused the world to slip its moorings from the established values of the tradition. (The partial fit of this analysis with the Chesterbelloc valorization of tradition provided McLuhan with his Catholic variation on Scrutiny criticism, which itself was a variation on the criticism of I.A. Richards.) So it was that McLuhan dismissed “detached observation” and “scientific interest”, the motors of modernity, as deceptions similar to those of “whodunits” — deceptions amounting to nothing more than “a trick of analysis”.⁹

The whole world was deceived, this is to say, except McLuhan and some like-minded few. More, the world had in this process somehow achieved escape velocity from the power and grace of God. “Modern times” were no longer subject to them, it seemed, and therefore demanded McLuhan’s summary rejection of them:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism.  (Playboy Interview)¹⁰

At this time in the middle 1940s McLuhan — now age 35 — exercised a starkly oppositional mindset, in fact a type of gnosticism. (The aggressive animus he would show against gnosticim in the early 1950’s may have reflected his rueful awareness of his own long constriction in it.) Coming loose from it would define his life’s work. But just how he came to do so is a highly complicated question (to be treated in a series of future posts). Suffice it to note here only that Corinne McLuhan’s entrance into the Catholic Church in 1946 may have signaled the beginning of an easing of his former rather brittle and hyper-intellectualized faith. Corinne was anything but a brittle and hyper-intellectual person and her conversion at this time may well have helped to ease his way into a second one of his own.  She and the life experience of a family with 6 kids — his four girls were all born in the time-span of his second conversion — could well have taught him, as nothing else could, that “there are more [good or true] things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. ¹¹