McLuhan’s late memories from 1977 and 1978 of his first encounter with Harold Innis have been discussed in McLuhan on first meeting Innis 1. A version of the same narrative appeared a year earlier in 1976 in an exchange between McLuhan and his journalist student, Carl Scharfe. McLuhan would have been thinking about his relationship with Innis at the time of this exchange (Oct 25, 1976) on account of the memorial lectures on Innis he and Eric Havelock had given a couple weeks earlier (Oct 14, 1978) at Innis College (UT).¹ 

I met him [Harold Innis] only when he was already ill, I think it was 1953, about 1953, because my book, The Mechanical Bride, came out in 1951 and he had put it on his graduate reading list. I heard about this and it intrigued me. I wondered what sort of a man would do that. And I at once got something of his to read before going around to meet him. It was, of course, the Bias of Communication and I was amazed. I realised that what he was saying and what I was saying were very similar. I never had any inkling that such a person was on the campus. So having got quite fascinated by his writing. I went around to see him and we had a very interesting chat, naturally. I talked about the possibility of starting a little magazine that would promote various enterprises and I proposed to call this thing Network.² He was quite interested in this and as a matter of fact there’s a long letter that I sent to him on the subject which is over there in Innis [College]. They had it out in display in that recent exhibit of letters to Harold Innis. That was how we began to converse and unfortunately as he got more ill with that cancer, all communication between him and his friends was suspended.³ 

McLuhan’s dating his initial meeting with Innis to 1953 is wildly mistaken, not only because Innis died in November 1952. As set out in McLuhan on first meeting Innis 1 the two had been personally acquainted since at least 1948 — well before Innis “was already ill”. And they had known of each other, arguably from 1936 (when papers written by them appeared in the same issue of the Dalhousie Review)⁴ and with certainly from 1945 (when McLuhan wrote two letters to Innis from Assumption College in Windsor).⁵ These same considerations of course also put paid to McLuhan’s assertion that “I never had any inkling that such a person was on the campus”. 

McLuhan goes on to mention his letter to Innis, which was a March 1951 “rewrite” of an earlier letter written either in late 1950 or very early in 1951. In McLuhan’s story this letter came after Innis had put The Mechanical Bride on a reading list, after Innis’ Bias of Communication had been published, and after Innis and McLuhan had met to discuss these events. But in March 1951 The Mechanical Bride had just been published, too soon to have appeared on a reading list, and The Bias of Communication had not yet been published at all. 

Lastly, McLuhan maintains that “as [Innis] got more ill with that cancer, all communication between him and his friends was suspended”. But McLuhan himself communicated with Innis during this time⁶ And, as would have been followed by him, his and Innis’ intimate friend, Tom Easterbrook, remained in close contact with Innis until the end.