Читать книгу Unlikely Paradise - Alan D. Butcher - Страница 12

3 THE FAIRY GODMOTHER

THE DECISION TO ATTEND THE Ontario College of Art (OCA) only partially solved the problem of Frances’s further education. It would be in the field of art, but as so often happened in Frances’s life, the solution to one problem simply revealed another. She would be studying art, but which branch? Art is a broad field. Her initial leanings were toward portrait painting, but her first year, Foundation Year, introduced her to the wide range of disciplines available to her: painting, yes, in all media, as well as life drawing, architecture, design, lettering, modelling, costumes, and the entire history of art.

At the beginning of 1947, some eight months before her art studies were due to start, and without consciously considering sculpture as her chosen field, Frances nevertheless followed her natural inclination. She began woodcarving, and this occupied much of whatever spare time she had. In the back of her mind there was always the knowledge that she would need every dollar for the years at OCA. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs would pay the tuition, plus a subsistence of sixty dollars a month, but she would have to live in Toronto, and there would be a thousand-and-one minor expenses, day after day, month after month.

March and April saw Frances pushing ahead with her woodcarving, getting her materials and tools together and producing four dog portraits. In May, she placed six dog portraits in Ada Mackenzie’s gallery in Toronto. These were among her first carving efforts. Later she sent six more dog portrait samples to a sales outlet in Mont Tremblant, Quebec. By the end of September 1947, Frances had seen many of her carvings selling briskly in the two outlets she’d chosen. She produced a wide variety of breeds, among which, perhaps for subtle personal public relations purposes, was a carving of the Alsatian belonging to Ada Mackenzie, the gallery owner. Frances sold the carvings for seventy-five dollars each; the sales outlets sold them for whatever the market would bear.

By the middle of August, Frances was preparing to leave home again, this time for “wild” and “sprawling” mid-century Toronto. The city was not as big and cosmopolitan as Montreal, and it was still seven years away from the inauguration of the first subway system in Canada (and even that would only run between the train station and Eglinton Avenue, a distance of less than seven kilometres). North of Eglinton wasn’t quite cattle country, but it was close. And the city was still very much “Toronto the Good.” A quarter of a century would pass before the law would allow you to have a drink on your own front porch, and all you could do on a Sunday was wait for Monday.

But to Frances it was the Big City, and she got lost half a dozen times in her house-hunting which took her all over town, without success. She and an ex-navy friend, Marion Cornett, planned to rent an apartment together. Marion had taken a job with the Telegram, a Toronto newspaper. She was more familiar with the city and quickly found a place in Rosedale, at 181 Crescent Road. “When I went home to our place in Rosedale, I’d take the streetcar,” said Frances. “This was the old streetcar that went up Yonge Street through Hog’s Hollow. In those days the streetcar was heated by a coal stove.” At some point along the way the conductor would stop and stoke up the stove, then continue up Yonge Street.

“When I went to see the rooms, I was sort of disappointed,” said Frances. “They were in the cellar.” A basement apartment was all right with Marion because she simply did not care where she lived. But Frances was different. To her a cellar was miserable — people’s legs going by the window, the atmosphere damp and unappealing. “My slippers became mouldy under the bed. Horrible.” But they had a wonderful landlord, a Mormon. “I heard him one day, hammering a nail. It must have bent or something and he cried ‘Oh! That Free Methodist nail!’ I guess Free Methodists were about the worst thing he could think of.”

The basement apartment was in one of the wonderful old Rosedale mansions which had been “renovated” to accommodate about thirty roomers. The roomers came and went. “There were a bunch of students from Ryerson, and some elderly people down on their luck. They changed all the time.

“And yet, in a way, I liked the basement apartment,” said Frances. “We had our own washroom, even though it was a laundry tub. There was a toilet down there. Beautiful old house. I got to know Rosedale very well because I rode around on a bicycle all the time. It was a bit confusing at first; there didn’t seem to be a straight street in the whole area. We used to have taxi drivers come and ask us where they were.”

Frances was in the Rosedale mansion for all four of her OCA years, first in the basement with Marion, her ex-navy friend. Shortly after moving in together, Marion left to get married, and Frances eventually took a top floor room, smaller but nicer and more convenient.

In that first year, after Marion’s departure, Frances was faced with having to carry the full cost of the basement apartment. She approached Marnie Pond, another first-year student at OCA, with the idea of sharing. “Marnie’s family came from Simcoe. They knew my relatives there, but not to speak to. Unlike the Ponds, my family was not upper class.” Marnie Pond was a strikingly beautiful young woman of eighteen, an only child, fresh from Branksome Hall, an internationally acclaimed and very posh girls’ school in upscale Rosedale.

“I would have been delighted to share the apartment with Frances,” said Marnie. “At the time I was living with Mrs. Graham, a friend of my father. She had a nice apartment on Bloor Street at St. George. My father came with me to view Frances’s rooms.”

After a brief introduction to Frances — “How do you do, Mr. Pond.” (warm smile) “Nice to meet you.” — the gentleman’s eye slowly scanned the basement apartment, what Frances herself called “the cellar.” He glanced at the washtubs, and the toilet at the end of a dim hallway; saw the legs of passersby through the ground-level window; sensed the mouldy slippers under the bed. And was appalled.

“No,” he said to Marnie, “I’d rather you stayed with Mrs. Graham.”

“He was horrified,” said Frances. “He’d seen the cellar, and the living conditions, which to him must have been primitive in the extreme. He’d absorbed the unabashed bohemian atmosphere, and I’m sure he looked at me — five years older than his daughter, an unknown woman, an artist, and an ex-sailor!”

“I had come straight from boarding school to OCA,” said Marnie. “I was an only child. My father was very protective.”

She did not join Frances.

“At the time, I was kind of mad at her,” said Frances, “because she wouldn’t share the apartment with me. But more than that, I think it was her father’s upper-class attitude that really teed me off. Okay, a bit of ego there, I suppose, but his obvious contempt just irritated me. I imagined him thinking that I had a lot of unmitigated gall to suggest that my ratty cellar might be good enough for his lovely Branksome Hall daughter. But then again, when I thought about it later, I had to feel that maybe, just maybe, he was more than a little bit justified.”

Shortly after the brief meeting with Marnie’s father, Frances moved to the third floor of the old mansion, to a smaller and less expensive single room, and stayed there for the remainder of her time at OCA. “It was a tiny room. I could stand in the middle and reach anything I wanted. It was so small, almost like a cupboard, so I did all of my work at the school.” OCA was open in the evening, and any homework that was required could be done there.

The year 1872 had seen the formation of the Ontario Society of Artists, a group which four years later opened an art school in Toronto. This school, in 1912, became the Ontario College of Art (OCA). In 1996 the college would see its name changed to the Ontario College of Art and Design, reflecting its artistic scope and standing as one of the largest art/design universities in North America. But in 1947, it was still the earlier OCA when a young woman walked through the front door: Frances Gage, art-student-to-be.

“The place seemed to be a rabbit warren of stairways and passages and doorways. It was so confusing. Later we were in the basement. That’s where they put the sculptors because we were so messy and noisy.”

Creative pursuits treat rules with the indifference they deserve, and rules at OCA were observed casually; there were much more important things to consider, like food. “We always spread papers on the model stand and had our lunch there. At lunch time in the OCA of 1947, you didn’t see too many knives and forks. We’d cut the bread for sandwiches with a saw, or whatever was around. Most students brought their own lunch, though you could, if you wished, and had the money, buy lunch in the cafeteria. We always made tea, and a lot of the instructors came and joined us. Will Ogilvie, the drawing instructor, came frequently.”

Finances meant that Frances brought her own lunch. “I had the grant from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. At that time it simply had to be the best veterans’ program in the world! But I still had to do odd jobs elsewhere when I could. And I did everything, anything that came along. I worked part-time for a veterinary surgeon on St. Clair Avenue (Dr. Edith Williams), to learn my animal anatomy. It was very good practice. Mostly cleaning cages. I also got a job each summer as a counsellor at a summer camp, Camp Tannamakoon, in Algonquin Park. I worked there for years.”

The first year at OCA was an exciting time. No more “juvenile” high school art classes; this was the Big Time, the real thing.

“We were in first year together, the same class,” said Marnie. “We became friends, the way one does at school. With the end of the war, Frances must have found the atmosphere very free after her time in the navy, and I had come straight from boarding school, so we both had the feeling of being cut loose.

“She was not much of an extrovert — there are always lots of those around, among artists, or would-be artists. No, Frances was a serious, hard-working woman. And she was a woman, not a teenager. I was eighteen, she was twenty-three. There were many her age in that year. I think 1947 saw the biggest student roster ever, because so many veterans enrolled.

“Those first days were a very innocent time,” said Marnie, “compared to the student life of today. First of all, in the life drawing classes, I had to get used to the idea of drawing a nude model. Not much of a shock to people now, but back then I can remember thinking How can somebody stand up there like that? I don’t remember if Frances agreed with me.” (when asked, Frances, the pragmatic ex-sailor, said, “She can stand up there like that because she’s being paid for it.”)

At the end of her first year at OCA, Frances was struck by one of her first major illnesses, the first of a long history of medical problems. She spent three months in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital battling a serious bout of infectious mononucleosis, a viral disease that attacks the liver. “It was a bad dose and I lost one whole term in my second year at art school, the autumn of 1948, but my wonderful Rosedale landlord kept my room for me. I don’t think the medical profession knew very much about mononucleosis in those days. I’d wake up and there’d be four or five doctors in white coats staring down at me, and I’d be thinking Oh, I’m gonna die! It took me a long time to get over it. I probably wasn’t eating properly, skimping on my food. Students do that. Food was not often a critical matter. We knew we’d live forever.”

In Frances’s days in art school, when the glass ceiling was made of reinforced concrete, some might wonder if women were really expected to be sculptors. “Just expected to get married,” said Frances, “and have children, and look after husbands.” But Frances did not encounter any such exclusion, at least not in the art world. Exemplified by art circles such as the Beaver Hall Hill Group in Montreal, and the Julian School in Paris, women had long since assumed a prominent role in the creative world, despite the frowns of the academies.

“The only resistance I found,” said Frances, “was in my own family. My father always felt I should be doing something else, and expressed that view in a way that’s become a cliché: ‘Art is all very fine, my girl, but what are you going to do for a living?’ And I don’t think I was the only one who encountered that, not where families were concerned.”

She felt her instructors at OCA were outstanding. “In Foundation Year, that was first year, there was Arthur Tracy, he was extremely good, particularly with techniques; Carl Schaeffer; Jack Martin; Will Ogilvie was my favourite, he taught drawing.

“And then there was our sculpture teacher, Emanuel Hahn …”

Emanuel Otto Hahn (1881–1957) was one of the preeminent sculptors in Canada. As head of the sculpture department, he taught at OCA from 1912 to 1951. Among his many works is the design for the Canadian ten-cent Bluenose and twenty-five-cent Caribou coins, still in use after seventy-five years. In 1929, Hahn won the commission for the Adam Beck monument which now stands on the median on University Avenue in Toronto. It was unveiled in 1934.

“The Beck sculpture is a great memorial,” said Frances. “Hahn was a wonderful craftsman. He taught me a lot about carving, and how to use tools properly, which was particularly good.

“But Manny Hahn was extremely difficult. He and I just didn’t get along, but it wasn’t me especially. Though maybe it was — I remember at one of his parties I refused to sit on his lap, and that was that. Crossed off his list forever!” Hahn had stormy encounters with others of the faculty. “Manny was just impossible to deal with. He was in his late sixties and really in his dotage. He retired (Frances’s expression was “terminated”) in 1951, the year I graduated. He had had life tenure, but he was simply too difficult.”

But when is a man all of a piece? Experience teaches us to extend to talent a certain consideration, to accept vagaries of conduct, to see their better sides. Frances herself saw his genius as a sculptor, his imagination; his superior skills that lent her own a breadth she might not have gained. She saw him as once a very good-looking man, though height-challenged, the once-handsome physique now lost to obesity. “I don’t think he’d seen his feet for quite a while.” His head was round, the nose short, and his temper shorter. “He made his own wine,” said Frances, “and had a little jug in his office. In the morning he’d come storming into the studio in a very bad humour. A few moments later he’d come out of his office with little round patches of colour on his cheeks, and he’d be quite jovial.”

While Frances recognized that, technically, he taught her a tremendous amount, she would nevertheless hide from him a piece she valued and wanted to develop. “When I was working on something, he would invariably come and tear it all apart and start it all over again. And then, of course, after he did that, the work wasn’t mine, was it? And that taught me a very important lesson.”

It was a lesson she forgot only once. In later years, Frances was to conduct night-school sculpture classes. Like virtually every artist who was ever born, Frances was constantly concerned about finances. To live creatively, she sculpted; to put bread on the table and pay the rent, she instructed in half a dozen different night-school carving courses in southern Ontario.

During one evening class, a student was having difficulty achieving a certain effect on a clay bust. Frances suggested what might rectify the problem, but the student couldn’t seem to grasp the idea. Impatiently the student threw down her tools.

“Well, show me!” she said.

Frances, forgetting for that moment the lesson learned at the hands of Emanuel Hahn, took an instrument and made a slight cut down the side of the bust, then worked for a moment on the planes of the head. “There,” she said, happy to have shown the student a valuable sculptural technique.

The student burst into tears. “You’ve ruined my whole day’s work!” she cried.

“And she was right,” said Frances. “I mean, even if it’s bad, the student has something no one else has. Even if it’s second class, it is uniquely theirs and the instructor has no right to go into that person’s mind and, you know, sort of shift things around. I never did it again.”

Emanuel Hahn had married Elizabeth Wyn Wood (1903–66) in 1926 when he was forty-five and she was twenty-three and one of his students at OCA. Frances met her in the late forties; Wyn Wood was still as lovely then as she was in the beautiful marble portrait Hahn created of her in the year they were married. “She said she married Emanuel thinking it would help her career, but I don’t think it did very much.

“I think she was a little suspicious of Emanuel — he was a bit of a womanizer.” Frances would sometimes assist Hahn with one of his castings, working with him in his Adelaide Street studio. He and Wyn Wood had adjoining studios. Both were art instructors, he at the Ontario College of Art, she at Toronto’s Central Technical School. “Yes, a little suspicious of him. When he was teaching, she would appear around the corner of the studio at the College of Art to see what he was doing. All of a sudden we’d see her look around the corner of the doorway.”

The summer after graduation, Frances met Doreen Uren at Tannamakoon, the summer camp where Frances had a part-time job as a counsellor, a post she’d held for the past three years. Doreen had red hair and freckles — the sweet soft-featured, easy-going girl-next-door, whose arms and hands bore the vicious burn scars of a boating accident some years before. But there was determination beneath that sweet exterior; an unrelenting single-mindedness that kept her exercising her arms and hands to retain her piano skills. “Doreen was in her late teens, a superb pianist, and later, an accompanist for the famous singer Lois Marshall.

“Doreen had a funny sense of humour. Well, maybe not so funny. One time at camp she put somebody’s bed up in a tree. A lot of people might not think that was funny. I guess it would depend on whose bed it was.

“I had seen Doreen before, but didn’t really know her. She was aware that Barbara Howard and I, recently graduated from OCA, were looking for a place in Toronto, and she told us about the possibility of a studio in Mona Bates’s house at 519 Jarvis Street.”

Mona Bates had been a piano prodigy, giving her first public recital at the age of seven. As a concert pianist she had toured Europe in the early twenties, finally settling in Toronto in 1925 and opening a studio in the Jarvis Street house, an old Massey mansion, where she taught for forty years. Doreen Uren was one of her special students. Through the young girl’s recommendation, Frances and Barbara moved into a small ground-floor studio at the Jarvis Street address in the summer of 1951.

The years 1951–53 were hard, both financially and psychologically. There was the initial euphoria after four years at OCA and the excitement of stepping out into the world of art. This was quickly followed by the harsh realities of no job, no money, and no prospects. “I had finished studying at OCA,” said Frances, “so there were no more cheques from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. No one was beating a path to my door, and I had no income other than a few dollars in my pocket that I’d put aside from my counselling at summer camp, and any bit of private sculpture tutoring I could scrape together, and a few dollars working part-time for Dr. Williams, the vet.” At one point, in the spirit of quid pro quo, Frances painted the entire third floor of the Jarvis Street house in lieu of rent. OCA, too, offered the opportunity to make an extra dollar or two, but sadly just the opportunity. “I taught a night class there for Jacobean Jones, the sculpture instructor who had replaced Emanuel Hahn. It was just for that first winter after I left the school. Jacobean hired me as her assistant. It was never officially recognized, so I never got paid. I was told later that she was notorious for doing that sort of thing.”

Frances couldn’t understand how she and Barbara Howard existed in the cramped Jarvis Street studio. “We almost murdered each other, trying at one and the same time to both live, and work, in that small place. Our work area was no bigger than the average kitchen. In fact, our work area was our kitchen. My stand, that always had a work-in-progress on it, was in front of the sink, and next to me was the gas stove. Behind me were Barbara’s workbench, Barbara’s easel, and Barbara. She was usually working on a large canvas, often four-by-six feet or bigger. If I were working on a small piece — and even a small sculpture takes up a surprising amount of space — we would literally be working back to back.” One of Barbara’s works that was hung over Frances’s bed actually fell on her one night.

“One of your heavier works,” said Frances, rubbing her head.

“Mmm,” said Barbara.

“Heavy with significance, a weighty subject,” said Frances.

“Mmm,” said Barbara again, examining the corner of the canvas that had struck Frances’s head, then replacing the painting above Frances’s bed.

“I think she was more concerned over the condition of the canvas,” said Frances. “But, really, the Jarvis Street studio was just an impossible situation, a crazy idea. But you don’t know until you try it.”

Frances had always been interested in music — listening, singing, and playing. In the navy she was the Wrens’ answer to Édith Piaf, and during her last three years at OCA she played second violin (“very badly”) in the University of Toronto’s symphony orchestra. There were close ties between the university and the art college, on more than just the academic level, so Frances — holding the view that if you want something, ask for it — went to them and asked to play the violin. “The experience opened my eyes to new dimensions in music. It was a wonderful time, an adventure. It also showed me, once again, that people aren’t going to be aware you want something unless you let them know. Most of the time they’ll give it to you. Often they’ll be delighted you asked.” Generations of people who have been in business for themselves have recognized this as the Entrepreneur’s Rule Number One.

In the latter part of 1952, Barbara Howard left Jarvis Street for England, and Frances stayed on in the small studio. During this period she was still working for the veterinarian Dr. Edith “Bud” Williams (nicknamed “Bud” for unverified reasons, though the story is that a tiny niece or nephew couldn’t pronounce “Edith,” which is the way many of us get our nicknames). Williams shared accommodations with her friend Dr. Frieda Fraser on Burlington Crescent just south of St. Clair Avenue. Frieda, a tiny woman, barely a hundred pounds and to a great degree a recluse, was professor of preventive medicine at the University of Toronto.

“I first met Bud just before I went into Sunnybrook Hospital,” said Frances. “Ruth Holmes, who taught museum studies at OCA, introduced me. I worked for Bud part-time after school for three years, and continued after graduation while I was living on Jarvis Street.”

Dr. Williams was the vet who looked after the cats belonging to Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, known in the art world as “The Girls,” two Toronto sculptors already famous for their art, and their parties. “When Frieda and Bud learned that I’d never heard of them, Frieda and her veterinary companion had us all together for dinner, and The Girls invited me over for tea the next day at their studio, an old church on Glenrose Avenue near Mount Pleasant Road and St. Clair Avenue.”

In 1913, when The Girls first arrived in Toronto from the United States, they took a studio in the Church/Lombard area, where they lived and worked as sculptors for seven years. In 1920, they moved to the old church on Glenrose and remained there for the rest of their lives.

Frances Gage’s first impression of their church was of a large room crammed wall to wall with sculptures, dust, and cats. She had never seen so much sculpture. “It was wonderful!” A.Y. Jackson, a frequent visitor to the church studio, called it “a most colourful place!” He said that in many ways it was the art centre of Toronto. And the parties! “What wonderful parties they put on!” said Jackson. “Artists, musicians, architects, and writers were proud to be invited to a Loring-Wyle party.” Rebecca Sisler, an old friend and fellow sculptor, remembered “the regular gatherings when everyone came and mingled among the sculptures (which were) in various stages of completion, and were part of the background.”

“Their parties were a legend in Toronto,” said Frances. “There was always a ‘little bit’ to drink. Frances Loring liked her rye whisky. The neighbours, all the members of the Group of Seven, and a lot of other people came. I didn’t get in on any of the really wild parties, when The Girls were in their prime. I went to a couple of them later on and helped with catering and giving out drinks, but they weren’t as wild in those days. A.Y. Jackson painted a cardboard Christmas tree, and they always put that up in December. Emily Carr was there once, but The Girls were not impressed with her, or she was not impressed with The Girls, one or the other. Pity, because she was such a great woman.”

It was through The Girls that Frances met Helen and Charlie Band. Charles Band was a prominent businessman and philanthropist, and former president of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Frances, quite frankly, considered Helen a saint. “They lived in Rosedale, near the Sherbourne subway station. Helen knew The Girls were always short of money, so she arranged for Duguid’s, the wonderful Yonge Street butcher, to send The Girls a package of meat twice a week. And these were steaks! I had some myself. Florence Wyle sometimes fed a steak to a neighbour’s dog. This big fat dog would come to the window. ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ she’d say and he’d get a steak.”

The Bands had a wonderful collection of works by the Group of Seven. “They also had Emily Carr’s White Church right inside the front door,” said Frances. “Charlie Band knew a lot of the Group of Seven personally.”

“Sculpture, in Canada, is something one backs into while viewing paintings.”

“I remember a young woman saying that,” said Frances. “She was writing a thesis on sculpture.” Frances shook her head. “A real winner she must have been.”

Frances was not alone in her exasperation. The Girls would repeatedly say to anyone, whether they were listening or not, “For God’s sake, look at sculpture!” Frances Loring, whose work is most certainly contemporary, nevertheless had a jaundiced view of modern sculpture, and considered much of it “adult kindergarten work.”

Academic training formed Loring and Wyle, and at the risk of being considered old-fashioned, they followed the academy’s artistic preoccupation with anatomy in their work. Old-fashioned? As Florence Wyle said, “No good work is old-fashioned.” Frances Gage agreed. Why should some artists be considered old-fashioned simply because they observe a discipline as basic as anatomy?

Now, in the spring of 1953, came the culmination of the relationship begun by OCA instructor Ruth Holmes’s simple introduction of Frances to the vet Edith Williams, followed by Edith’s introduction of Frances to the sculptors Loring and Wyle — The Girls — and the subsequent artistic, sculptural, and social relationship forged between Frances and the two sculptors. And thus, finally, to the day when The Girls approached Frieda Fraser on the subject of Frances Gage.

“They spoke to Frieda,” said Frances, “pointing out that I had a modest talent as a sculptor, but needed further training. Frieda was quite wealthy, through her own work and family money, and she agreed to finance two years of study for me at the Art Students League in New York City.”

And so it happened. Dream-like, New York rose in Frances’s mind. Later that year, in the fall of 1953, she turned her steps south, steps on a journey that would take the rest of her life.

The alleyway leading to the street was dark now. The berm rising beside the shack cast the entire area into deep shadow. The late January evening settled over the woman who still stood in the shack’s doorway. An icy breeze ruffled the light brown hair across her brow; she felt the cold, and shivered.

Time to go. For a moment a smile touched her face as she glanced inside the door, at this … this appalling shack. This incredible, disreputable, rat-infested … glorious shack.

If I had known, she thought, her mind far away, if I’d known then what I know now. No, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Not a thing. I’d do it all again, a hundred times over.

She shook her head. The thoughts of that time … so many years ago it seemed; was it only four?! She smiled again at the memory. Oh the bliss, the unmitigated bloody joy of that time, when New York was just a month away. The unbelievable wonder of it all. And the year in Paris that followed. That priceless time: the excitement, the learning, the exultation when I succeeded; the depression and sense of inadequacy when things went wrong; the challenges; and when I won, the feeling of triumph, almost sublime, of having the world, the whole world, in my hands.

Such wonderful years.

And now?

She pulled her cardigan closer against the cold. Turn off the heater, she thought. Time to go home to bed. Time enough to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

But, ah — she paused a moment more — those years in New York … in Paris …