Eric Gill Paperback – Nov 25 2003

In her Introduction Fiona MacCarthy sketches out a picture of Eric Gill (1882 to 1940) which differs greatly from reverent earlier biographies written by fellow-Catholics. These were reluctant to dwell on the contradictions in Gill’s character - the guru of a simple and spiritual life on the one hand and his rampant sexual life on the other. The author brings out these and many other contradictions very well, and the reader will be torn between admiration and dislike. The book also has many illustrations and photographs, some of which perhaps come out better in the printed edition than they do on the Kindle. They make us familiar with the Gill style.

He was the second of thirteen children of a Protestant clergyman who was very Victorian: patriarchal, strict, admonitory, but warm. Although Eric would turn against most of what his father had stood for, MacCarthy traces many of his later interests and attitudes back to his childhood.

At the age of 15 he went to an art school in Chichester, where he developed an interest in lettering, which would become intensified and which he practised in both its calligraphic and its carved form when he moved to London at age 18 to study architecture. (It was not until he was in his fifties, in his last years, that he actually designed a building: a church at Gorleston-on-Sea.) He was at that time committed to the Arts and Crafts philosophy and to William Morris’ socialism, and he saw himself as a working man. He soon got enough lettering commissions (the diplomat Count Harry Kessler, a lover of fine books, was a great patron) to enable him to marry Ethel, the daughter of a Chichester florist, at the age of 22.

Already three years later, in 1907, he had the first of many extra-marital affaires, with Lillian Meacham, of which Ethel was quite aware: she accepted that Gill went with Lilian to Chartres. On their return, Lillian became his apprentice, and “she and her several husbands remained friend with the Gill family throughout Eric’s life”. None of his affaires seem to have affected his marriage: his wife accepted them as she accepted her husband’s patriarchal views and cheerfully shared all the hardships that his philosophy of life entailed. Her good nature would be the mainstay of the life around him.

In 1907 the ever restless Gill and his family moved out of London toa more idealistic rustic life in the small village of Ditchling, near Lewes in Sussex. There he could pursue the plain living which was his ideal - so much so that in 1913 the family moved out of the village and bought a house on Ditchling Common and two acres of land, where he planned to be as self-sufficient and reclusive as possible - while becoming an increasingly well-known public figure both as an artist and as a guru! Nor was he all that reclusive: two of his close friends from London came to live in Ditchling because of him, and they saw a lot of each other. And the place was always full of visitors, disciples and the community of craftsmen who were working with him.

In 1909 he took to sculpture, and his work was immediately acclaimed by Kessler, Roger Fry, William Rothenstein and others, and the first exhibition of his sculptures in 1911 was a great success. His sculptures were inspired by Africa, India, and many by an eroticism which would later figure extensively in all the art forms he practised. The models for his erotic sculptures were members of his household who were themselves interested in experimental sex, so much so that his sisters were prepared to enter into incestuous relationships with him. And during the puberty of his three daughters he had incestuous relations with them also. All this he recorded in his diaries. People commented on how close-knit the family was, without realizing quite the extent to which this adjective applied. He was always obsessed with sex in general and the penis in particular, and he slept with many other women, some of them the wives of friends of his. “He liked to feel all women in the world belonged to him”, writes the author. And he even recorded in his diary his sexual experiments with a dog.

At the same time this complex man had spiritual longings, and this had taken him into the Catholic Church in 1913 (without it having any effect on his eroticism). Ethel converted likewise and changed her name to Mary. Gill became a lay member of the Dominican Order, and his household was run by him like a religious community. He habitually wore a cassock, which was both convenient for his work and also recalled a monk’s habit. In 1921 he founded a crafts guild called the Guild of SS Joseph and Dominic.

He made his great Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral, during the making of which he was excused war service: he was called up only in 1918.

Ditchling Common had after all not provided the seclusion that Gill had been wanting, and he felt his authority threatened by some mebers of the community there. So he abandoned it in 1924 and moved, together with two other families, to a far less accessible place, Capel-y-Finn, a dilapidated one time Benedictine monastery, up in the Black Mountains in South Wales.

There he moved into wood block printing and into typography, developing the type faces which are arguably his most enduring legacy.

In 1928 he was ready for another change, and moved from Wales to Pigotts, a quadrangle of farm buildings in the Chilterns, where the new community included the families of two of his now married daughters. He also employed a number of young carvers, three or four at a time, in his workshop: by now Gill was really famous and had many commissions for the public buildings like the BBC’s and the headquarters’ of what was to become the London Underground. Life at Pigotts was no longer quite as austere as it had been at Ditchling Common or at Capel-y-Finn.

In the 1930s Gill became interested in left-wing and pacifist causes. He designed three huge panels for the League of Nations building in Geneva.

Over-work and ill health clouded Gill’s last few years. In October 1940 he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He refused a major operation and was quite serene about his impending death, which occurred on 17th November.

Gill's art has no equal. It stands alone as sophisticated primitivism, as demonstration of where Art Nouveau could have flexed some muscle, and as an oeuvre of startling breadth. Although he called himself a stone-carver, he's most widely remembered today as a type designer (Gill Sans, anyone?) and woodcut illustrator. Since those are inherently reproducible media and stone is not, I can't say I'm surprised that they're how his reputation spread.

More than that. Gill was a devout Catholic (at least in later life), borderline or occasional socialist, and productive writer on his notion of The Good Life, one where worship, art, and livelihood merged together into one unified whole. Reading his philosophy and autobiography, one gets the impression of some holy being, left on earth to elevate the rest of us. And, in fact, he might very well have been that.

At the same time, he had trouble keeping friendships (with men, at least) past the first conflict - and, where his will and ego were concerned, conflict seemed certain, sooner or later. Many people advanced his life and career at different times, often with significant financial support. His gratitude toward them was a matter of cheap and easy words, if he even bothered with that. And his notions of Man as the lord of his household took on a somewhat predatory tone, as his private diaries showed, in bedding so many of those who came under his influence, sister, daughters, and possibly family pets included. (One can barely imagine how his wife came to grips with that part of her husband. An informative essay, "He and She," could have shed light, but seems nearly impossible to find in print.)

Well, it's not new. Many men who display greatness also have their dark sides. Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Gustav Klimt - if you're a serious hero-worshipper, there are some wet rocks you shouldn't be turning over, and Gill had a good many of his own. So, I'm torn. I give thanks to Gill the artist and artisan, but I'm appalled by even the little dark underside that MacCarthy has exposed - and there's lots more she left, and lots more than that lost when his diaries were bowdlerized. I admire the man greatly, even if I can't really like him.

-- wiredweird

During his lifetime, and for long afterwards, Eric Gill was regarded as a sort of secular saint: exemplary family man, pious convert to the Roman Catholic Church, brilliant craftsman and desiger of typefaces. The latter part of this is true, of course, he was indeed a brilliant craftsman and desiger of typefaces, and at least two of his typefaces (Gill Sans and Perpetua) remain in use. As a human being, however, he was spectacularly awful, and it is thanks mainly to Fiona MacCarthy's brilliant biography that we know this.

To say that Gill was obsessed with sex may provoke no more than a comment that most men are obsessed with sex, and so what? However, most men manage to control their urges most of the time, whereas Gill did not. There was nothing that he didn't try (well, maybe not necrophilia as far as I know): not only did he have affairs with most of the women in his entourage, with servants in his house, with the wives of his friends, and he also did so with his sisters and daughters, with a dog on at least one occasion. There is little suggestion that he was especially attracted to other men but he did once put to the test his expectation that it would be nice to have a male organ in his mouth. Despite all this he regarded himself as a good husband to his wife (and was shocked when his brother decided to leave his wife), and remained in good standing with the Church throughout his life. He created a sort of Dominican order for lay people during his time in Ditchling, the village in Sussex where he lived longer than anywhere else.

All this we learn from Fiona MacCarthy's book, but in addition she provides many illustrations of his work -- drawings, sculpture, type designs, engravings. Not surprisingly, much of his artwork is sexually graphic, but there is no doubt of his skill.

I was less shocked by the story than I expected, probably because I knew the basic outlines before reading it. I was shocked, however, by the silence maintained by all the people who knew him, and who must have known what sort of a man he was: is it really enough to say that if someone is a good enough artist one should cover up his personal faults, however gross they may be? Incidentally, the source for much of the information in the book comes from Gill's diaries, in which he was a great deal more explicit than any of his acquaintances were.

Those who feel amazed at how the Catholic Church, which condemns all sex outside marriage as sins against natural law, has nonetheless protected pedophile priests for many years, will be less surprised after reading Ellis Hanson's expose of how for a long time people guilty of what the Church considers even worse sexual sins could find that these sins, from the perspective of Catholic theology, could be seen as actually leading them to redemption.

Eric Gill, who lived form 1882 to 1940, was the most extreme manifestation of this. An intensely confessional man towards his religious superiors, Gill nonetheless was unable to contain his sexual appetites towards his children and even his family's dog. Despite this appalling sexual behaviour, there was a lot more of interest about the man, who indeed combined a remarkable array of talents. In his lifetime Gill was best known as a typographer, but he was also a social activist in the tradition of Dorothy Day, advocating like Day that workers should be able to own the means of production. Also, Gill in the 1930s was one of the most outspoken opponents of Britain going to war. In fact, in his later life Gill was inclined to try to develop with variable success communities in which crafts could be worked in this way. With all this work, Gill also had time to work on research: indeed he was one of the developers of the "rhythm method" or "natural family planning". All in all, with the detail provided by Fiona MacCarthy, one can see Gill as perhaps the first "hippie" in terms of his ideals, which stand as amazingly relevant to the 1960s counterculture. (Evidence for this can be seen in the CD booklet of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, and in the lyrics of Linda Perhacs' obscure masterpiece "Paper Mountain Man" - thirty years after he died but could have been written about Gill).

In this biography, Fiona MacCarthy provides much more than revelations of sexual misconduct that are not seen in previous biographies of Gill. She shows in detail the history of Eric Gill and his large extended family, many of whom, like him, were Protestant missionaries who ultimately converted to Catholicism. She does an exceptional job of explaining the personality not only of Gill, but also of those around him, like his stern father - whose influence she wrongly says made Gill somewhat Victorian in his attitudes when I would call them purely Decadent. However, as we go through his life one is able to tie the pieces of a complex - indeed truly remarkable - figure and see just how interesting he is to people whose parents were not even born when he died. We see very clearly his conversion to Catholicism (ultimately living his later life as a Dominican tertiary) and his absorption of various quite surprising influences into his architecture and sculpture, as well as his innovative work as a typographer that today seems amazingly mundane for such a strange and eccentric person. We see the way in which Gill acquired a remarkable number of friends over his lifetime and how he formed his well-thought-out and firm political opinions that (as I have emphasised) resonate with many of the back-to-the-land and "community supported agriculture" movements of modern times.

Along with a large amount of easily read biographical detail that one can absorb easily without being dense in proportion to what Eric Gill did, there is an impressive amount of illustration in Fiona MacCarthy's biography that rivals the much more art-focused Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit. These illustrations allow the reader to understand what this strange and compelling man was about without reading the entire book (which I admit would take many sittings).

All in all, Fiona MacCarthy had produced as compelling a biography as most ever will - of a man who might repel most people but nonetheless can be seen to be much more than a sinner or a criminal.

If Eric Gill was not the most sickening pseudo-Catholic since Titus Oates, one shudders to think who would hold that title instead. Gill's life was such an abomination of desolation, that one can understand the decision of his earlier biographer (the eminent writer and actor Robert Speaight) to suppress the really horrible stuff from Gill's diaries. Nevertheless Speaight, we can now realize, was wrong to suppress it. Just as the English priest Fr. John O'Connor, who appears to have known something of what went on in the Gill household, should not have been seen (as he manifestly was seen) to be giving that household some sort of sanction.

Catholics - of whom this reviewer is one - have been reminded in appalling detail, via the American sex scandals which erupted 13 years after Fiona MacCarthy's book appeared, that the greatest outrages against morals occurred not with the sex acts themselves (vile though they were) but with the machinery of suppression that concealed them for years. They should never have been concealed.

When will we get it into our heads that (as Rabbi Jacob Neusner once put it) "truth-telling is sometimes tough but always free of costs, but lying - though easy to accomplish - exacts an awful charge"? On the evidence of MacCarthy's book, plenty of us still have a long way to go, and have had for many decades. We can't blame Gill's satanic hypocrisy on Vatican II.

It would have been well for MacCarthy to make clear, or at least clearer than she does, two issues: what (if anything) England's Catholic authorities knew, at the time, about Gill; and when they knew it. Living in rural isolation at places like Ditchling - which in those days was almost like living on the dark side of the moon - Gill could well have kept his secrets for a long time. Fortunately for Gill, his champions included saintly men like Chesterton, who would never in his worst nightmares have imagined what was going on in the Gill zoo. Even with these questions unanswered, MacCarthy's is still a cautionary tale.

"Judas hath by transgression fallen, that he might go to his own place." (Acts I:25, Douay-Rheims Bible)