by Bruce McCall
My artistic tools in the early phase were a short step up from caveman levels of sophistication: an HB pencil, a bottle of Higgins india ink, a crow quill fine-point drawing pen and a big flat Speedball pen for lettering, stubs of Crayolas excavated from chesterfield cushions and under beds, and an early Scripto ballpoint pen that leaked ink like a busted pump. From somewhere materialized a small black tin box of used watercolor paints, a dozen tiny cakes scoured down to crusty remnants by a previous owner. One sable watercolor brush, stiffened by age and too much use into a point, completed my tool set. It’s a measure of my cluelessness that I was content with it. In any case, if an art supply store had existed in Simcoe circa 1946, I wouldn’t have known what to ask for. Or even what to want.
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Why do so few kids continue to push forward with art after kindergarten? Interest trails off; of my many Simcoe classmates, for instance, I was the only one to keep on drawing after art ceased being mandatory in school. Other diversions eclipsed the slow, solitary act of making pictures. My preference for sitting alone, pulling images out of my brain and seeing what happened when I transposed the intellectual to the visual, excited me. Whether this was fired by genes or by talent and boredom, I still haven’t a clue. Whatever. An engine in my prefrontal lobes—or is it the hippocampus, the amygdala, or for all I know the Christmas tree lightbulb—was revving up and driving me onward.
Millions of pencil sketches in the early years represented an investment in training the tendons and muscles in my right hand to precisely record what my brain so effortlessly visualized. Fine-motor control, taming dumb digits to obey commands relayed by the central nervous system, spiral far beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s dictum of ten thousand hours to proficiency. (Artists don’t count practice hours.)
Of course, no artist can so smoothly link brain, eye, and hand that the intended rendering is realized every time. I’ve only once or twice even come close to fully capturing a mind’s-eye image on paper. That’s okay by me: defeat is no reason to stop. In fact, ninety percent of the pleasure of a creative act is in the chimerical pursuit. Next time I’ll hit the center of the bull’s-eye. Never have, never will. Yet a certain delusional quirk cons the artist into slaving away, through one screwed-up effort after another. That frustration can’t be borne by the normal mind. The sanest course is to surrender, whereupon the would-be artist turns to some pastime that offers better odds, leaving a few misfits to persist in their creepy obsessions.
Like every other lad on earth, I craved instant, or at least satisfyingly prompt, gratification. But the written word demands an investment of time to absorb and cogitate. And rewrite. Thus, when temporarily sated with wordplay, I’d set aside my pads of lined paper and ten-pound encyclopedia and commence to draw. My chosen subject was—now, what the hell else but the one and only subject a seven-year-old kid in 1942 knew was worth his time and effort—the war.
It was difficult, not to mention sure to produce an inevitably lengthy, ragged end result, to verbally describe a dogfight between a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt Bf 109 over the Channel in the epic days of late summer 1940. Words can function brilliantly, but who can write and keep pace with sentences and punctuation good enough to capture a fury lasting seconds? How much easier, and more gratifying for the originator, to grab a bunch of pastels and romp high in a cloudless cerulean sky, the Channel a flat gray mat far below, to follow the hot pursuit of an Me-109, the evil flying jackal of the Luftwaffe, by a svelte RAF Spitfire!
No profundity snuck into this and the hundreds of other aerial scenes I did. The point was to discharge emotional ammunition. So transitory was the pleasure of the image, so fleeting the feeling, that unless the drawing hit a bull’s-eye in both composition and rendering, its meaning and its value shriveled and died on completion: another ball of paper dings off the wastebasket and rolls off to a corner of the room. Next?
Whatever drawing and writing I churned out in those wartime years barely differed from daydreaming: embryonic creative impulses, fashioned by hands still mulishly uncooperative and still only sporadically coordinated, attempting to immortalize on paper scenes inspired by movie moments colliding with my imagination. Whether my drawing skills rated equal to, or even better than, those of any other wannabe artist—in my class, my town, my country—I neither knew nor cared. Begun in early boyhood, my drawing stayed deeply private and personal, and had never been seen as a public contest for supremacy.
Art wasn’t a conscious ambition. It ran deeper: something, part hobby, part self-expression, part ideas, that I wanted and soon needed to record in a closed-loop system dependent on no external factors. This solitary aspect was just as well. Nobody praised me or even much noticed what in hell little Brucie was doing, holed up in that bedroom all day. My ego would eventually swell with the flattery of praise and attention, but not for a few years.
It was a dire fact of wartime life that paper didn’t grow on trees. (Well, yes, it sort of does, in fact, but not in this particular context.) Access to exotic extras like tracing paper was almost impossible, a reality that inspired a frantic household ransack. I’m ashamed now to confess that I unearthed pay dirt on the bottom shelf of a battered old cabinet, where expired books, like ailing Eskimo elders, were put out to die. I found and hefted a weighty hardcover tome published late in the nineteenth century: Sir Walter Scott’s smash bestseller of 1814, Waverley, donated by some now-forgotten family friend who had wildly overrated the McCalls’ literary tastes. What it offered—and what I quickly tore out—were two dozen or so unblemished pages of transparent vellum, each laid over a fine engraving bound into the book.
Tardily but sincerely, I hereby apologize to the shade of Sir Walter for having desecrated his classic. And for failing thereafter to read a single word of it.
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Week after week all through my boyhood years, The Saturday Evening Post was nudging me toward the craft of illustration. There was no real competition: we had no art books, and I saw no art shows and thus had no chance to aspire to some legitimate niche. Thanks to this magazine I was soaked in colorful, antic imagery fifty-two weeks of every year, bewitched by samples of America’s most famous living illustrators. The idea that drawing and painting vivid pictures to run in the Post was the royal road to artistic success controlled my work. It fought with no competing forces. Temptation—the study of art, its history, its evolution over the centuries from the Romantic to Realism to Impressionism to Surrealism to Modernism—never distracted me.
My admiration for the illustrators who brought stories to life in memorable paintings every week was aesthetic and nothing else. Prosodic excellence, originality, the quality of the story, lay off to the side. It was only years later, when I started recognizing the critical differences between superior writing and workmanlike prose, that the fiction featured in The Saturday Evening Post was revealed to be steadfastly lowbrow, deliberately so. The magazine’s editors knew what they were doing, and it wasn’t capital-L Literature. It was entertainment, pitched to a readership of eighteen million.
Norman Rockwell painted 322 Saturday Evening Post covers between 1916 and 1963. For much of that time he ruled as America’s most famous artist, most beloved artist, and finest artist. He was sui generis, so confoundingly skilled that no artist ever tried to copy him. Rockwell was tall and skinny, his face arguably better known than that of many movie stars. He wasn’t handsome, but he conveyed an inimitable decency.
I adored Rockwell’s work. Any Rockwell cover stimulated an afternoon’s fond, inch-by-inch examination. The “corny” charge, the jeering criticism of his work as trafficking exclusively in a mythical America, the world Rockwell populated with clichéd characters—the lovable kid making harmless mischief, the benevolent small-town cop, the gawky young GI, the bashful couple getting their wedding license from a grandfatherly clerk, ad infinitum—all of it was provably true, upsetting to neither
the Post readers nor to me. These were incidental elements.
His characters couldn’t exist in the real world, but Rockwell documented the places, things, and rituals of everyday American life with absolute, sometimes stunning, fidelity. He had no identifiable “style.” His scenes looked found, natural. Tricks of composition were ingeniously buried. Rockwell studied every detail he placed in his pictures; should you find an error anywhere—even a tiny prop of zero importance to the picture—the entire illusion of reality he slaved to create would collapse. So he never erred.
Rockwell seemed a regular guy. No airs, a dedicated painter, happy to patiently work alone in his studio, day after day. I sent him a fan letter in October 1946, wrapped around a few pencil drawings. I had no motive other than perhaps earning a pat on the head. Two weeks later the mail brought a note and a pat on the head, signed Norman Rockwell.
The Rockwell romance continued for five or six years, before a wider perspective and budding maturity combined to identify additional heroes. Collier’s, the only serious rival to the SatEvePost, had its own Rockwell, Robert Fawcett. Fawcett was a more cerebral artist than Rockwell. Each illustration was a feast of detail. He seemed incapable of leaving an inch of space unfilled. His characters moped, grimaced, and sneered like a cast of British stage actors strutting their stuff with grace and energy, exaggerating their movements for those up in the balcony.
Fawcett was a great draftsman: that is to say, he could really draw. His illustrations in a 1953 Collier’s series of Sherlock Holmes stories show him at his peak. You could almost smell the horsehair and macassar in the stuffy rooms where Holmes, the veiled young mystery lady, and tweedy Inspector Lestrade have reached a dramatic turn. Fawcett wasn’t a painter like Rockwell. He stripped away the merely decorative, worked in a blend of ink and aniline dyes, and grabbed the reader by the balls.
Robert Fawcett was great. C. G. Evers, on the other hand, was sublime. He conjured dense scenes for steamship lines, the U.S. Navy, and Philadelphia Electric Company, among others. Evers wasn’t an editorial illustrator; his work was watercolor reportage in advertising and in navy wardrooms. His subject was water: stormy water, calm, cool water. Evers wasn’t celebrated. His scope was too narrow to make his name a household word. C. G. Evers was only the greatest marine artist of the twentieth century.
Austin Briggs, Bernie Fuchs, Peter Helck, Bruce Bomberger, Mead Schaeffer, and Chesley Bonestell held and still hold niches in my personal pantheon. Bonestell was the first postwar space artist. His haunting depictions of Mars and Venus and other planets on his fanciful tours of the cosmos were one-quarter science and three-quarters conjecture. (NASA and space satellites were still years away.) His bold visions of worlds beyond ours lifted my visual imagination into another dimension. Brilliant pioneering work, Chesley: space and its mysteries caused hearts all over the world in the late forties and fifties to pump faster. He was the Merlin who opened the world’s eyes.
The styles of these illustrators of course varied widely, but I recognized an underlying consistency that united them and shaped my approach to art and illustration. They stuck to realism. Their work looked at the world, at life, intelligently: No bogus sentiment. No fakery. Just life, unretouched.
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I’d dreaded the end of the war because without it, what could be the theme of life? Kids like me had grown up inside a giant bubble that was rapidly deflating: our enemies gone, our kill-the-Nazis play now pointless. The sky overhead was suddenly empty of aircraft that were no longer needed as the military was dismantled. “Peace”—what did it mean, what did it portend? How would I fill my days?
An interim few months let us taper off from World War II. The atomic bomb in August finished off Japan but furnished nothing a kid could turn into play. The Nuremberg trials entertained us, especially in the aftermath, as one Nazi rat after another died a painful death, then vanished from the earth, leaving me with no archvillains until 1946 and Winston Churchill’s Missouri speech. We’d never warmed up to the Russians; now the Commies were officially the skunks. The Cold War was on.
It’s doubtless a matter of mind coloring memory, but I’ll forever remember 1947 as one long spring day, bright with yellows and dynamic orange under a cloudless peacetime sky. It was a palette that had been in storage since September 1939 (December 1941 for Americans). Now peacetime was in the air everywhere. To kids like me, the gray, grimy, worn-out world had just been washed clean.
“The United States peers into a crystal ball,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in The Last Fine Time, his sensitive book about life in postwar Buffalo, “and what it sees is Kelvinators. It sees relief from patriotic abstinence, a whole continent beginning to untruss. . . . Postwar ads paint a future succulent enough to redeem with interest the drab, self-sacrificing years just past. As paradigms for national life in a new age, advertising’s benign, iconic predictions are perfect.”
Amen to that. The same euphoric release from grim regimentation gusted through Simcoe, Ontario, eighty-six miles southwest of Buffalo, New York. Much had stood still during the war. The word “new” was, in fact, new. In no time I developed a raging thirst for new experiences and new anything. The cornucopia of postwar affluence hadn’t dumped big changes into McCall family life. To Dad, as to millions of others, it didn’t really matter very much. Infected by the dream virus of postwar promise, he shared his grand plans: An amphibian flying car. A new DeSoto. A house in ritzy Rosedale, the Beverly Hills of Toronto. Hugh and I would be enrolled at Royal Roads, the military prep school in faraway British Columbia. We kids slavered and nodded and dreamed our own dreams.
Dad’s dreams soon deflated, of course, but it would have been petty to begrudge his expulsion of hot air. In any event, two years of peace and prosperity had yet to produce bounty trickling down to the McCall household, still languishing in its wartime state of suspended decay. The one advance we kids recognized concerned bubbles. The labs of military science had devised a revolutionary product: a tougher breed of bubble, balloon-size and pop-resistant. Even sissy kids could now blow spherical miracles skyward as stupefied bullies stood by.
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Simcoe had been the McCall family hearth for almost two hundred years when, in the summer of 1947, Dad moved us to Toronto. It isn’t that we never returned. Mother’s three sisters, my grandfather Walt and his second wife plus their two kids, and squads of friends dating back to high school days in the twenties ensured that we’d continue to return to our former hometown.
In Toronto we certainly didn’t feel isolated. Air-conditioning was still a luxury, and at least theoretically, an electric fan cooled the occupants of a room. Never my room, though. Our top-floor apartment at 2377 Danforth Avenue became a broiler thanks to the effect of sunshine on a flat roof three feet above us. Our apartment always lacked serenity; now it was unlivable. Summer heat bred some chemical reaction that also made it a stink box. And so in those first summers we fled Toronto like Brits fleeing the 1857 Sepoy Massacre. Dad and Mother took over her sister May’s austere house in 1948, 1949, and 1950. May was a teacher who taught me in grade six. She lived her entire life as a spinster and traveled in summertime. Back in Simcoe I tried unsuccessfully to revive friendships interrupted by the Toronto move. Out of sight, out of mind; now the one hospitable refuge in life had turned alien.
Our aunts May and Eva were older sisters with little in common with our mother. Her eldest sister, Netta, lived on a small farm in Lynn Valley, four miles from town, with her husband, Ed. Poor all their married lives, they never bitched about it. Warm and generous Netta, beloved by everyone who knew her, exactly defined what a mother could be and our mother couldn’t.
Leaving Simcoe was easy. Living in Toronto would be harder than our sheltered lives had prepared us for. In the four months between Dad’s announcement and the actual move, I floated in gorgeous daydreams of the life awaiting us in the big cit
y. Somehow, for inexplicable reasons, an abrupt elevation in our social status was my constant delusion. Picture a tall old elm tree in a huge manicured park on a sunny summer afternoon. A group of schoolmates—in school blazers and caps, like me—sits in the shade, listening enraptured as I recite tales of my Simcoe boyhood.
I can’t imagine what idiotic notion made me equate the move to Toronto with my enrollment in a private school. Nor could I possibly have spellbound a gang of acolytes about Simcoe and my adventures there. Everything about that fantasy is egregiously stupid. But it takes more than that to explain why it remains vivid through the decades. It’s a long leap into a distant past. And a rendezvous with myself, in my final days of innocence.
As my life became more complicated, my drawings offered an escape.
Chapter 2
Underground Artists
On a sunny and cold Thursday morning in November 1947, the car carrying most of the McCall family from Simcoe to their new life in Toronto (a life, the kids expected, that would be a whirl of unending action, fun, and pleasure) trundled to the far side of the city and crash-landed on the dark side of Pluto.
Not that Pluto, but since it was a featureless wasteland with no signs of life and a distinctly alien atmosphere, it could have been. Confronting us was a formation of redbrick buildings housing thirty-two identically sized apartments that had been slapped together by a federal government agency to give overseas Canadian veterans places to live until the housing crisis slowed. Danforth Court was its name. It sat on Danforth Avenue, a miles-long East End corridor lined with modest storefronts, used-car lots, greasy spoons, and off-brand churches.
