Troubled Brilliance

In my last years of high school, Alan Jarvis was one of my heroes. I knew nothing of his brilliant but stormy tenure as head of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, or of his operatic run-in with the Canadian government over his insistence on purchasing a number of great—and expensive—European Old Masters and the loss of his job over those acquisitions in 1959. For me, he was a TV star, on Canada’s still-fledgling CTV network. In 1961 I watched every segment of his series, The Things We See. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but was captivated by how Jarvis was able to reveal deeper significance in specific works of art, opening up hidden meanings. I was considering enrolling in Art and Archaeology, as the Department of Art at the University of Toronto was then called, and so made an appointment with the chair of the department, Stephen Vickers, in the spring of 1962. Walking up the stairs into the brand new Sidney Smith building I was astounded when Alan Jarvis came out the door and strode past me. When I was ushered into Dr. Vickers’s office on the sixth floor, I could hardly contain myself, and blurted out, “I just saw Alan Jarvis leave the building!” Vickers calmly responded, “Oh yes, he was just here. We’re friends.” That clinched it for me. I started my art history studies that September. Jarvis’s presence was also palpable during my graduate year, 1966–67, when Vickers had me research a paper on Douglas Duncan and the Picture Loan Society and arranged access to Duncan’s account books through Jarvis. I started work at the National Gallery the early summer of 1967, where I remained for twelve years. The Jarvis legacy, although faint and invariably conflicted, was still apparent almost everywhere.

You can imagine how much pleasure Andrew Horrall’s new book, Bringing Art to Life: A Biography of Alan Jarvis, has given me. I have found many affirmations of what I knew or suspected already, but have found so much—whole chunks of his life, really—revealed here for the first time. The biography is structured as a chronicle. Horrall is an archivist, currently managing acquisitions at Library and Archives Canada, but with a decade of experience as a military archivist before that and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. His study addresses the few published sources of information on Jarvis, but is based in large part on archives—governmental, institutional, the Jarvis papers at the University of Toronto, numerous other personal archives—and copious interviews. These latter include 31 made by Elspeth Chisholm in the early 1970s for a CBC radio documentary about Jarvis and 32 communications undertaken by Horrall himself. All of this information has been fed into the various strands of the Jarvis story he has identified—familial, educational, sexual, social, professional—which then have been skilfully interwoven to create a remarkably detailed portrait of the man in the sequence of distinct but related environments he so fully inhabited throughout his life.

As rich as this detail is, it occasionally seems excessive. For instance, introducing Jarvis’s father, Charles, who died when Alan was only three, Horrall draws our attention to the fact that Charles worked as an optometrist, then spends nearly half a page detailing his training and how the profession was governed. Similarly, a full page and a half is given to a detailed description of the many accomplishments of Alan’s older brother, Charles, at University of Toronto Schools and later at the University of Toronto. These facts become an effective background reserve for the reader, however, as Horrall later provides a close analysis of the impact on an already fatherless Jarvis of the loss of his only brother to leukemia in March 1933 at age 21, and his subsequent need for what Horrall calls “father brother substitutes.” Another example of how Horrall fine-combs all potential evidence is his close analysis of the reference letters that were included in Jarvis’s Rhodes Scholarship application. It presents a remarkably clear, if somewhat burnished, profile of the young Canadian scholar on the brink of a transformative experience of Oxford. A later, also detailed, description of Oxford’s colleges—their customs and mores, procedures, classes, and so on—efficiently provides a sense of the specific environment that would so substantially reshape him over the following ten months.

Oxford was also where Jarvis’s sexuality blossomed, and Horrall presents a remarkably detailed narrative of his succession of lovers there, full of explicit documentation. This serves the narrative well as the theme is central to our understanding of the man, and Horrall handles it admirably, not only here but throughout the whole biography. From Jarvis’s first lover, Douglas Duncan, with whom he shared a deep affection when he was a student at U of T, through to the young companions who took advantage of access to his credit card when he was virtually infirm near the end of his life, the evidence is presented directly, clearly and abundantly, and we are also reminded frequently of the broader social attitudes to homosexuality. The amount of detail, again, and the frank manner in which it is presented, made me wonder at first if it perhaps loomed too large. A friend recently remarked to me, for instance, that he feels that his own homosexuality affects his essential persona about as much as the fact that he is a beer drinker, and that well could be the case today. Finally, however, Jarvis’s sexuality, and how he projected it, is central to his story, and particularly during the later Canadian years when it always hovered, to varying degrees, in the background of his highly public life. We often forget that homosexuality was a criminal act in Canada until 1969.

Horrall has uncovered evidence that Jarvis sought psychoanalytic treatment for his homosexuality and related drinking in London the summer of 1939, and he does not shy away from analyzing Jarvis’s personal relationships, as well as his professional performance, in the light of a pattern of perceived failures, a record of always falling short. He attributes this to Jarvis, at critical moments, erecting “emotional barriers,” and in some instances makes reference to depression, suggesting, finally, that it was a condition he struggled with throughout his life.

This sense of the inevitability of Jarvis’s lengthy decline and ultimate death from the effects of alcoholism at the age of 57 runs through the whole biography, almost driving the narrative at times. It was not his bisexuality in and of itself that exacted this great cost, however. The sensitive, detailed scrutiny Horrall brings to each relationship reveals a whole range of engagements. Certain key ones, such as the longtime association with Sir Stafford Cripps that opened most of the career opportunities he enjoyed in Britain, were based on a deep emotional bond, not a sexual one. The critical relationship with the New York painter Gerald Murphy, while also not sexual—the bisexual Murphy “was deeply uneasy with any physical intimacy”—nonetheless was charged with tensions outside of the range expected from a surrogate father or brother. His relationship with his wife, Betty, which stretched back to well before their marriage in 1955, was deeply emotional as well as sexual. Other lovers, both male and female, although it seems mostly male, ranged from one-night stands to long-lasting bondings of deep affection, as with his first and, Jarvis claimed, critically formative lover, Douglas Duncan.

No, it was the aforementioned emotional barriers that were Jarvis’s tragic flaw in both love and work, Horrall argues. He strives to build that case in his telling of the post-war British years, an amazing story of opportunities seized and imaginatively exploited by the young Jarvis that has never been described before in such revealing detail. The reader may or may not come away convinced that the tragic fault line runs through it all. The later Canadian years are different, however. The well-known story of Jarvis being hired as director of the National Gallery of Canada at a crucial point in its collection-building history, only to be dismissed shortly after following a politically charged disagreement with senior government bureaucrats over the handling of a proposed major acquisition, is the stuff of classic tragedy. As familiar as this tale is, Horrall is able to bring some new information and certainly new analysis to its telling, and to the entirely convincing sequel of decline and death that follows.

It was not so precipitously steep a decline, however. Horrall describes how Jarvis appeared in a second The Things We See series on Toronto’s CFTO, running from January 1961 until late spring, and then a second series October 1961 through the winter. (The original series had aired on CBC television the summer of 1957, when he was director of the National Gallery.) Also in 1961 University of Toronto Press asked him to write a history of Canadian art to be published as a centennial project in 1967. He declined, and the volume was taken on by J. Russell Harper. McClelland and Stewart approached him in 1968 about a book on the Group of Seven to coincide with the 50th anniversary of their first exhibition, which would be in 1970. Again he declined. Jarvis was hardly a quitter, though. He appeared at major art events as often as he could, in a wheelchair during the final years. He even had an exhibition of his own collages at Toronto’s Gallery Pascal that opened on December 2, 1972. He was found dead in his bed the following morning.

Details such as this make Horrall’s biography very compelling, but occasionally he gets them wrong. A photo of Jarvis “during a final visit to the National Gallery, October 1971” is mistakenly noted as the opening of the Group of Seven retrospective. In fact the occasion was the launch of Jean Boggs’s history of the National Gallery. Horrall even speculates that Jarvis would have been feeling “failure over his inability to write the book that accompanied the show.” That is unlikely since the Group of Seven retrospective had opened the previous year, 1970, and as its curator I had written the catalogue that accompanied it. The McClelland and Stewart book Jarvis turned down, which was eventually written by Peter Mellen, had no connection with the exhibition.

These are small points, and not meant to diminish Horrall’s splendid accomplishment. The massive amount of research he has presented here in an orderly, accessible fashion has, for the first time opened up the life of one of the most important Canadian cultural figures of the third quarter of the 20th century. It is a solid base for the more speculative work to come.”