McLuhan's closest companion from the University of Manitoba — they met in a 1928 engineering class — and later Innis' associate at Toronto. Cameron casts Easterbrook as the friend who disagreed with McLuhan his whole life (regretting it only after Take Today), and as the conduit through which McLuhan first read Innis' essays as they appeared.
Across the dialogues
The Manitoba classmate — the friend who disagreed with McLuhan his whole life, and regretted it
Easterbrook met McLuhan in their 1928 Manitoba engineering class — the start of an intensely active intellectual friendship.
"they were in the same engineering class. I think that when McLuhan took engineering in 1928 at the University of Manitoba."
Easterbrook spent a lifetime disagreeing with McLuhan — and, after reading Take Today, admitted he regretted it.
"He regretted that he had disagreed with everything McLuhan said his whole life long."
The conduit for McLuhan's early Innis — Innis' associate, McLuhan's Winnipeg friend for decades
As Innis' associate and McLuhan's decades-long Winnipeg friend, Easterbrook was the conduit for McLuhan's early, pre-1951 Innis reading.
"He was doing that through Easterbrook, who was sort of Innis's secretary — his very good friend, and who had been McLuhan's friend for decades, back in Winnipeg."
Placed at the hinge of the Innis friendship — from the 1932 Europe trip to near-secretary in Innis' last bedridden years
Cameron fills in the friendship's span — a 1932 trip to Europe with McLuhan, a 1936 thesis Innis had published with his own foreword, and, from 1950–52, near-secretary to the bedridden Innis — making Easterbrook the human bridge between the two.
"Easterbrook was a very close friend of McLuhan."
Promoted from conduit to catalyst — the born skeptic who twice remade McLuhan, handing him first Chesterton and then, in 1946, the Innis book, and who carried the "solipsism" question back and forth across the five decisive years
Easterbrook actively shuttled writings both ways between the two — feeding McLuhan Innis and Innis McLuhan across the late 1940s.
"And Easterbrook then begins giving articles and writings of McLuhan to Innis and articles and books and writings of Innis to McLuhan."
The cul-de-sac enters Easterbrook's own thought as Innis' "solipsism of Western civilization" — the outstanding fact of modern life he argued with McLuhan about ever after.
"So the biggest question that Easterbrook took from Innis was that the modern life is in a cul-de-sac that it cannot get out of."
Bob makes Easterbrook the agent of both McLuhan turns — handing him Chesterton first, then Innis' 1946 book that triggered the "second conversion."
"Easterbrook hands the first transformation of McLuhan with the Chesterton book, and then he hands the second transformation with the Innis book in 1946."
Cameron frames the friendship's productive friction — the born skeptic forcing the born enthusiast to bring his ideas "down to earth and make them clear."
"Easterbrook was a born skeptic, and McLuhan was a born enthusiast."
Connections
McLuhan's Manitoba engineering classmate (1928) and lifelong friend — who disagreed with him his whole life long.
Innis' associate and the conduit through which McLuhan read Innis' essays as they were issued, before 1951.