Andrew Horrall, an archivist and writer, has just published (McGill - Queen's University Press) a biography of Alan Jarvis, sometime curator of the National Gallery of Canada. Alan was well known in the Toronto art scene in the heady days of Painters Eleven and all that.

One would meet him in the Yorkville galleries of Dorothy Cameron, Jerold Morris or Av Isaacs, at TSO concerts, in the lounge atop the Park Plaza overlooking the university campus where he had begun a star-crossed career or in a supper club where Peter Appleyard might be 'vibrophoning'.

The handsome and aloof Jarvis, no relation to the old Toronto family of that name, grew up on the High Park edge of Parkdale. His father had died at an early age\ leaving two young sons, Colin and Alan, to be raised by a somewhat dominating mother and her benevolent but phlegmatic second husband. Colin, popular and successful at everything to which he turned his hand, was Alan's ideal until his early death from leukemia left the younger boy both fatherless and brotherless.

When I first knew him Jarvis was his mid-forties, a charming, witty but unhappy man with a great future behind him. He had been a Rhodes scholar after being a gregarious but not athletic student at University College. He established friendships with faculty people who provided him with influential contacts in British academia.

Arriving in England just before the 1939 outbreak of war, Alan escaped the notoriously 'stuffy' atmosphere of pre-war Toronto. An aspiring sculptor and researcher into the relationship between art and war in Western culture, he soon became embedded in the artistic, homoerotic and alcoholic culture of those in Oxford who were young and privileged.

My first conversation with him was about the dangers of good, plain Canadian voices falling victim to 'Oxonisation' or, alternatively, when in Britain to the imitation of BBC announcers. He recalled the objection of some of his oversea friends to sending their children to safety in Canada. It would, they had been told, ruin their accents and, later, their social and professional lives.

Jarvis himself became the very model of an upper class Brit both in his speech and his attire. I, too, had been similarly influenced during my time in England. Jarvis suggested that the ideal for Canadian speech and deportment might be 'mid-Atlantic' rather than either British or American. For better or worse, I still have difficulty calling a shop clerk other than a 'clark'. Orthographically, I prefer a program to be a programme and the intermission at the theatre to be the interval.

After leaving Oxford with great expectations but few accomplishments Jarvis spent the last three war years, '42 to '45, planning adult education projects and doing social work. He won the sponsorship of Sir Stafford Cripps, the most influential Labour Party politician in desperate, post-war Britain, and of Lady Cripps and their family. Through them and others he collected an impressive 'connexion' of friends and supporters.

Through work with the Ministry of Information he made the acquaintance of many U.S. news and media people. They augmented the company of Oxford, London and New York friends, all of whom were charmed by his handsome urbanity.

Not a few of them, both male and female, fell in love with him and vice versa.

When Alan returned to Toronto in 1955 he was generally agreed to outclass Cary Grant as he took his part the city's newly multicultural and sophisticated social scene. Even the flamboyant artist, Harold Town, promenading on Bloor Street with his Russian wolfhound on a leash did not turn more heads than did the dapper Alan Jarvis.

Canada's national capital was then undergoing a renaissance to "make it more worthy of Canada's future greatness". The National Gallery's development had been hampered by the cost of two wars, a disastrous parliamentary fire, the Depression and the inadequate support given to its first two full-time curators.

The 1953 report of the (Vincent) Massey Commission on Development in the Arts spurred the planning of a permanent home for the peripatetic National Gallery and the purchase in Europe of works of art that had been thought to be beyond Canada's competence. A new curator was part of the plan, particularly one who could foster art education throughout the nation. By his own persistence and the recommendation of the likes of Sir Kenneth (later Lord) Clark and an international roster of influential friends, Alan Jarvis secured the appointment in 1955.

His tenure would be short-lived. He had to mediate between the Gallery trustees, the Civil Service Commission that appointed him and federal cabinet members who did not share C.D. Howe's expansive "What's a million?" thinking. And the price of multi- millions for the Prince of Liechtenstein's da Vinci was surreal. Then in 1957 the new prime minister was the puritanical philistin, John Diefenbaker, whom Alan styled, undiplomatically, "the voice of God imitating Porky Pig".

The 42 year old, recently repatriated, martini-drinking, 'socialist' Jarvis was definitely not to Dief's taste. He seemed determined embarrass the government with unapproved offers to purchase art and to bankrupt the treasury with 'modern junk' from Henry Moore, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and young Canadians who knew not the Group of Seven.

The PM's appreciation of art was more that of Prince Albert, Sask. than of Montréal's Rue Sherbrooke. Jarvis said 'The Chief' and his ministers had the aesthetic sense of hardware merchants.

The mills of fate that grind "slow but exceeding small" did their work. Jarvis's contract was terminated in August, 1959. He returned to Toronto and his life from then is reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde with a spiralling drinking problem.

He did not recover from that final defeat. He died, alone in his bed, at age 57.

Jarvis battled a deep personal insecurity, guilt and anxiety about his sexuality, lack of a clear career focus and what he told me was a soul that had somehow eluded what the poet, Francis Thompson, called the "Hound of Heaven".

Andrew Horrall's biography of a talented, unhappy man is a gripping and disturbing read.