Ted Carpenter’s ‘That Not So Silent Sea’ is included as an appendix to Donald Theall’s The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (2001). Somewhat differently from McLuhan and Williams (see ‘Autobiography 1954: McLuhan & Williams on discovering ‘auditory space’)¹, he recalls the discovery of ‘auditory space’ in their Culture and Communication seminar as follows:

Carl Williams (…) sought to refine psychology to an objective science. It was for this reason he was invited to join the group. We felt we needed his bias to balance ours (…) to get Ford funding. [Yet it was] Carl [who] provided the first breakthrough [of the seminar sessions]. He used the phrase “auditory space” in describing an experiment by EA. Bott. (…) The phrase was electrifying. Marshall changed it to “acoustic space” and quoted Symbolist poetry. Jackie [Tyrwhitt] mentioned the Indian city of Fatehpur Sikri. Tom saw parallels in medieval Europe. I talked about Eskimos. (…)  Carl [then] sent a paper on “auditory space” to Explorations, minus all [the] seminar dialog [as just noted from McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, Easterbrook and Carpenter]. So Marshall & I put it [back] in. A mistake. Two articles, one on the mechanics of auditory space [by Williams], the other on acoustic “patterning” [by Carpenter and McLuhan] might have been more diplomatic. But we needed some input from Carl, and clearly it wouldn’t come without [our] help. (241)²

Carpenter and Williams plainly did not get along. This had some of its ground in the fact that Williams (a friend of McLuhan since high school) was close to Claude Bissell, who became Principal of Carleton College (UT) in 1956 and President of UT itself in 1958.  Williams followed Bissell as Principal at Carleton and became President of the University of Western Ontario in 1967 after serving in a series of further administrative positions at UT under Bissell.  

Now Bissell and McLuhan had come to the UT English Department together in the same year, 1946, and had established a friendship that lasted until McLuhan’s death. Williams came back to UT a few years later at which time he and McLuhan had been friends for two decades. This somewhat strange relationship with administration power in the persons of Bissell and Williams served McLuhan well over the years, but apparently irked Carpenter. In ‘That Not So Silent Sea’ he mentions a spat over allocation of some of the Culture and Communication Ford Foundation grant: “The head of Anthropology, as always, supported the administration. So did Carl.” (242)

Carpenter’s explanation of why Williams “was invited to join the [seminar] group”, namely that “we needed his bias to balance ours”, is only partly true, at best, since the number of people at UT who could have been approached to counter-balance McLuhan and Carpenter was very large. There must have been something to single Williams out from this multitude. In fact, he was a very old friend³ of McLuhan from Winnipeg and UM (along with Easterbrook).⁴ This personal background may have been another ground for the animosity between Carpenter and Williams — the two belonged to different, and perhaps competing, groups of McLuhan associates.

Carpenter also gives the impression that Williams was somewhat dim-witted, in need of the “help” of Carpenter and McLuhan to author a short paper. In fact, although Williams (born July 1912) was a year younger than McLuhan, he graduated from UM in Arts (English, Philosophy, Sociology, French) in 1932, a year ahead of McLuhan. He then went to Toronto for his M.A. and PhD in psychology and, before returning to UT in 1949, was head of the UM Psychology Department back in Winnipeg⁵. And in 1954 he was the President of the Canadian Psychology Association.

Williams was plainly a talented person, but in ways other than those prized by Carpenter. Noteworthy for McLuhan is the fact that he and Williams remained friends for half a century despite the fact that McLuhan shared Carpenter’s depreciative view of administration and management — without, however, considering it the only facet of Williams’ personality and without considering even that facet in Manichean black/white terms.