Classical scholar of ancient Greek orality, at the University of Toronto when McLuhan arrived in 1946. Cameron argues McLuhan absorbed Havelock's work on the epyllion — the "little epic" form — in the 1940s without ever crediting it, while Bob recalls their visible antagonism at a 1978 Innis College debate. The page is a study in unacknowledged influence and scholarly friction.
Across the dialogues
The epyllion was already "abroad" at Toronto when McLuhan arrived — Havelock's form, bouncing in his brain
Havelock's 1939 book and 1945–46 essay on the epyllion were in circulation at Toronto in the years McLuhan arrived.
"Eric Havelock, while he was at the University of Toronto, published his first book in 1939."
The epyllion was "in the air" at Toronto as McLuhan arrived — seeding the form he would later apply to his own two-book "epyllion."
"So I think that the notion of epyllion was abroad at the University of Toronto just as McLuhan arrived in 1946, and that he had this notion of epyllion kind of bouncing around in his brain."
The 1978 Innis College debate lays bare the antagonism — and McLuhan's unacknowledged 1940s debt
At a 1978 Innis College debate, Havelock refused real engagement — McLuhan, rebuffed, ended up pleading and then needling him.
"I was there at the debate or dialogue in '78 at Innis College with McLuhan and Havelock."
Cameron reads the friction as method, not malice — Havelock's footnoted scholarship against McLuhan's new way of thinking.
"Havelock was reacting against what, from his perspective, were superficialities."
McLuhan was "already greatly influenced by Havelock in the 1940s" through the epyllion essays — and never acknowledged the debt.
"His first book was published in Canada in 1939 — he talks about the epyllion form and its relationship to Poe. Then in 1946 he published a series of essays in the first issues of Phoenix in Toronto — that could even be called a history of the epyllion. McLuhan was already greatly influenced by Havelock in the 1940s, and he never [acknowledged it]."
The 1946 meeting given a mechanism — two "philosophers of education" thrown together, the channel by which the epyllion reached McLuhan
Cameron supplies the mechanism of the 1946 encounter — McLuhan and Havelock, both known as philosophers of education, were brought together by that shared specialty, and it was through Havelock that McLuhan took up the epyllion, "very, very important for McLuhan['s] life."
"And it was through Havelock that McLuhan became interested in the Epyllion form."
The genealogy pushed back behind Toronto — Cameron traces Havelock and McLuhan to the same Cambridge teacher and follows the orality thesis through Harvard into the opening of The Gutenberg Galaxy, so the unacknowledged debt is reframed as a shared inheritance neither man had to invent
The Toronto antagonism given a prior common root — Havelock and McLuhan reach the same teacher from opposite ends of two decades, so the debt Cameron elsewhere says McLuhan never acknowledged runs through Richards before it ever runs through the epyllion.
"So another student of I.A. Richards at Cambridge, this was in the 1920s, was Eric Havelock."
The influence reversed — the transmission is not only Havelock-to-McLuhan but Havelock-to-Richards, feeding Basic English and Richards's Plato and Homer translations, which makes the orality thesis McLuhan opens The Gutenberg Galaxy with a Harvard inheritance he was standing inside rather than citing.
"And Havelock's theories about oral education and the switch from morality to literacy in Greece became very influential with Richards."
Connections
McLuhan was "already greatly influenced by Havelock in the 1940s" through the epyllion essays — but never acknowledged it.
The mid-50s Tennyson epyllion study McLuhan co-wrote with Theall makes no mention of Havelock.
Bob speculates Havelock's coolness toward McLuhan partly reflected his sense that McLuhan had misrepresented the Innis chronology.