and so many others.īut in life Bruce was, despite a sometimes gruff exterior, the most sympathetic and least abrasive of men: a perfect Canadian, raised in Simcoe and then Toronto, in a vast, intense, and varyingly unhappy family, whose fate he documented in his masterpiece, the memoir “ Thin Ice.” A tale of gray-good Scots-Presbyterian Canada and its dowager-queen city, Toronto, at a period when it was at its grayest and goodest, the book describes the indignities of being a young Canadian yearning for the south.
No one who has seen his countless covers for this magazine will forget them: the disgruntled giant apes waiting for a casting call for “King Kong” or the Francophile New York bodega specializing in caviar and champagne or the “ quiet car” on the New York subway, library-stilled or the wall of Egyptian hieroglyphs startlingly revealed by our endless midtown demolition or the exotic forties night club hiding beneath a manhole . . . In what used to be called a “biting” vein, he blended a wild surrealist sensibility-founded on an impeccable illustrator’s technique, always manifesting visions, dreams, impossibilities in scrupulous hyper-realism-with a sharp, sometimes caustic tone, beautifully underlit by melancholia.
With a paintbrush in his hand, or with his fingers on a laptop, he was the most inspired of satirists. Many creative people of original gifts live at right angles to their talent, the difference between who they are and what they make being astounding, but no one was ever more right-angled-transcendent talent to human type-than Bruce. Bruce McCall, who died earlier this week, was, as those of us who knew and loved him recognized, very nearly unique among artists and writers of his quality.
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