Correspondence
JOYCE, MARYANN & McCOWN, (REV.) JAMES HART & PURCELL, JAMES MARK & MANSHIP, JOHN & ASH, MARY M. & Novak, Michael & MURPHY, MARJORIE
Correspondence New code, old affront Rochester, N.Y. To the Editors: Your article, "Epoch III: the Church Feminized" [Jan. 28] and editorial, "The New Code" [Feb. 11] came as needed words of hope...
...As the author of your article evidently dislikes Eric Gill and everything about the man (especially that he was a man and a virile one), how can I not love him...
...Of course I got "bad thoughts" from them, as Ms...
...If the woman of the alert, intelligent profile shown in her husband's delicately lined portrait could speak for herself...
...In a sense" and "problematic" are indicia of intellectual fuzziness, so it is scarcely surprising that one cannot tell whether the theologian believes that one cannot easily "do theology" in South Africa or that theology is of dubious value so long as apartheid persists...
...Her anger seems to indiscriminantly spill over the Yorke book, the author, the publisher, the idea of celebrating a hundred-year memorial of Eric Gill's birth, and Eric Gill himself...
...JAMES MARK PURCELL A boll of lightning Gloucester, Mass...
...Mullarkey's review are predictable...
...If the meeting in Geneva is representative of the best of Third World or' 'liberation" theology, how can anyone, of whatever political persuasion, take it seriously...
...Mullarkey calls Gill's "most famous sculpture" has been stashed away in a London gallery basement may or may not indicate that the sculptor's "reputation" is done for...
...JOHN MANSHIP Quarry Gallery Liberation fuzziness Stanford, Calif...
...To me it was liberating to hear an eminent English convert speak of the holy, robust joys of sex (his own marriage bed in the case, as I recall,) and who gave us what I in my innocence thought to be most attractive, non-pornographic studies of the female figure...
...His own account, and photographs of his work, do not spell pornography to me...
...he seemed in so many ways a prophet of the Woodstock generation...
...to gather the Jewish wealth in one place the better to administer it...
...I read this book when I was in my early teens...
...Mullarkey certainly did, but then in the seminary hothouse I got bad thoughts from everything...
...Mullarkey, like Kael, is not too dumb to deal with the interesting ideas in Gill...
...For example, the quotation from Gill about "culture" is apparently meant to "place" him as some sort of functionalist barbarian, but even in Gill's terms the theme about the anthropological function of art would be accepted by Arnold and Eliot, and Herbert Read even borrowed "to hell with culture" to title one of his own books...
...In view of the book's obvious failings, one wonders if the picture Keneally draws of Schindler is close to reality...
...He was also the author of one great book: his Autobiography, which I believe to be one of the great spiritual autobiographies...
...The question would not be important - one Nazi lie or another - if Keneally did not use the incident to launch into a multi-page anti-Polish diatribe equal to the best efforts of the creators of anti-Semitic libels...
...To the Editors: It was a pleasure to see the name of Eric Gill on the cover of the Feb...
...Punishment for his sins...
...It seems she can't deal intellectually with a thinker who ranked idiosyncrasy ("personality," "originality") below workability in an artifact...
...I also suspect that she is afflicted with tunnel-vision on this subject...
...But she makes enough concrete errors on his thought and writing to be worth disputing a little here...
...Kirby...
...But a qualified observer, his student David Jones, said he was an excellent teacher: something which requires perceptive treatment both of your subject and of your pupil...
...Could we in good conscience accept this as Christian-as something Jesus would have accepted and wanted in his church...
...The more serious biographical criticism of Gill that I have read, suggests he was too hardheaded to be a good apprentice, and this later cramped his full technical development...
...In passing, I would say that if the Tate Gallery doesn't exhibit his magnificant Mankind, this is more to the Tate's discredit than to Eric Gill's...
...MARY M. ASH The unspeakable...
...I read it twice, about twenty years apart, both times for enjoyment of an overflowing life well told and for Gill's creative address to relations between religion, art, work and worker, and the natural world, relationships which we demolish to our peril...
...Eric Gill's Autobiography, a landfall, was published months after his death...
...Keneally has it that the order establishing the Cracow ghetto claimed that its purpose was to protect the Jews from the Polish population...
...The Cracow ghetto was not the first the Nazis established on Polish territory...
...As student in a Catholic college in the twenties, I met the new-born weekly, Commonweal, the beginning of a personal adventure...
...Chesterton also used the title An Outline of Sanity (as does a recent biography of G. K. C...
...Keneally chose "[t]o use the texture and devices of a novel to tell" Schindler's story...
...3) That he was unfaithful to his wife...
...This was the rationale elucidated by the Governor General of the occupied Polish territories, Hans Frank, even before any ghettos were established...
...To the Editors: I was saddened by the thoroughness with which Maureen Mul-larkey took apart my old friend Eric Gill [Feb...
...Apparently this incident, seen from a distance, was Schindler's first experience of violence...
...To the Editors: Maureen Mullarkey's "Eric Gill in the Flesh" strikes me as misfit in Commonweal [Feb...
...I find much of his work very fine and very moving, but stylistically it belongs to the 1920s...
...she only needs a different prose style in which to discuss them...
...He was a supreme master of lettering, type design and typography...
...In his book on the "neoconserva-tives," Peter Steinfels made a similar assault on the self-ascription of "sanity," but he need not find the word so troubling...
...Curiously, the few mentions of the resistance movement refer only to actions of the Communist partisans and of the ZOB - a Jewish resistance organization...
...What then is left of Eric Gill...
...But it never came to pass - perhaps because, in a world that accepts all cults and superstitions but rejects Christianity, he was a Christian...
...That "Mankind," the graceful, breathing woman's torso which Ms...
...Why should Eric Gill be scolded for being Victorian and British, incidental or accidental to his time and his heritage...
...Love and hate are always mysterious...
...MARJORIE MURPHY Gratitude to Gill Dallas, Tex...
...There was equal discrimination against all lay people...
...They should be written by writers who are less biased and better equipped to evaluate data...
...Perhaps he became too enamored of his vision of Schindler as an incarnation of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik, and as a result fitted the person to the writer's mold...
...Gill at the time helped to give me a finer and broader concept of the holy...
...Had I more knowledge of him from other biographical sources, would I have more sympathy with Ms...
...He created an important body of work in sculpture and book illustration...
...All during the late '60s and early '70s I expected that there would be a revival of interest in Gill...
...And she is of course correct about the biographer's duty to make committed judgments on his subject...
...He was explicit about his personal struggle with a power house of sexual drive...
...This says something to me as a woman-that the Catholic church sees me as a person of less value and worth simply because of my sex...
...He sought understanding beyond limits of the ignorance and denials inherent in the culture of his childhood and growing years...
...But the rest of her notice confuses artistic criticism with reading her subject into or out of the current liberal establishment...
...I was unable to find in the Library of Congress the actual wording of the order...
...The reports coming out of the new Canon Law, which has as one of its purposes the changing of a number of past rules discriminatory to women, are of new roles and areas opening up to lay people in general, and women in particular...
...In preparation for writing the book Keneally is said to have visited Cracow accompanied by one of his main informants...
...He revels in description of family episodes beyond the hoeing and bread baking, into the hikes and holidays, waterfalls and wilderness, the village cafes of southern France, the night walks home over dirt roads with the Gill children singing songs of many languages...
...I found him daring and refreshing, when those qualities were scarce in the bosom of Holy Mother Church...
...Editor Mclnerny can best defend his characterization of "the sane center," but some historical considerations may be in order...
...25 issue...
...What if the law were to have stated that people of white skin and red skin were allowed to be deacons and all people were to be allowed to be lectors and acolytes, but those of brown or black skin would only be allowed this privilege on a 'temporary' basis...
...Frank Sheed put the word Sanity in the title of a major book of his on Catholic thought, and G.K...
...Correspondence (Continued from page 258) "Griselda-like wife...
...From a hill outside the walls he watches as people are being beaten and shot...
...Strangely, Keneally's Schindler, moving freely about Nazi-occupied Cracow, had managed not to see the brutality that was everywhere...
...and to quarantine the Jews for health reasons...
...Southern Methodist Univ...
...The thousands of arrests, the public executions, the beatings, the evictions...
...Maureen Mullarkey left me with one particular sense of loss...
...This man, Keneally's hero of several brilliant escapes from Nazi clutches, shares with Schindler,the book's dedicatory passage...
...His autobiography came along when I was still in the seminary, in those terrible thirties, when the moral thrust of the church and seminary spirituality seemed concentrated on a puritanical, gnostic, sex-is-dirty andflesh-is-obscene morality...
...JAMES HART McCOWN, S.J...
...It was like a bolt of lightning that illuminated a whole aspect of life of which I had been ignorant and showed me the path that I was to follow, a few years later, into the Catholic church...
...Considering that the Polish underground movement was large and active from 1939, and that the Communists, by their own statements, did not even start organizing partisan groups until the summer of 1942, the imbalance is strange...
...Washington, D.C...
...Brattleboro, Vt...
...But is it really likely that the regional chief of Cracow, working under the very nose of Frank, would have been the only one to change the kingpin's formula...
...Yet we are discriminating against women-half of the human race-in the very same way...
...Now the laity are invited to participate in these roles-that is the laity if you are a layman, not a laywoman...
...Gill's own tale of domestic life includes his failures but gives dimensions untouched by Ms...
...I owe him so much...
...The review makes no specific judgments of the author's own about what Gill carved, painted or sculpted, except to mention that the artist is out of current fashion, like Chaplin or Eliot...
...The rhetoric flows on, but one reads in vain for any content, much less substantiation...
...Ringelblum, writing from within the closed Warsaw Ghetto, managed to note such events in the larger city and beyond...
...to defeat the system...
...The sight makes him vomit, and from that day on, Keneally says, Schindler was "resolved to do everything...
...People like Schindler deserve to be remembered...
...Granted, I suppose, but does it matter...
...So much in his thought was in harmony with the exigencies of that period: his pacifism, his rejection of all in the modern world that dehumanizes people, hence his individualistic socialism, even his quirky ideas on sex and dress...
...Educated Victorian taste is surely expansive, decorative and horny rather than explicit about sex...
...Tripping from his pen, and, presumably, from the lips of the assembled theologians, come such phrases as: "anthropological poverty," "more comprehensive social analysis," "doing theology among the oppressed," and "Christianity as a bourgeois religion...
...The author seems to object to Gill on the following grounds: (1) that his sculpture is dated and unpopular...
...11] came as needed words of hope to those of us who feel we still have ways to go in ending discrimination against women in the Catholic church...
...Books about them should be written...
...I wish there could be a lively, responsible biography from an impeccable source of Mary Ethel Gill whom Mullarkey calls Eric's (Continued on page 285) The Poles are portrayed as little, if any, better than the Hitlerite oppressors...
...The psychic chasm between her and her review subject is clued, as always, by the prose style she derives from Kael, which depends on an audience which shares premises...
...And this hurts deeply...
...MARYANN JOYCE Punishing Gill's sins...
...To the Editors: Bravo to Commonweal for using the word' 'cant'' with reference to the Geneva meeting of primarily Third World theologians, as reported by Peadar Kirby[Mar...
...A psychic chasm Peoria, 111...
...In Gill's essays, the development of the idea is never predictable in the way all the sexual references in Ms...
...It was a pleasure to see Gill's name but a good deal less of a pleasure to read the ill-tempered, badly written and even more badly reasoned article the magazine contained...
...It's difficult to argue with this: all art is dated and tends to fall out of popularity after the artist's death...
...The writer was Ralph Mclnerny and the magazine was Catholicism in Crisis in its third issue (February...
...In the next two decades, my appreciation for the art of Eric Gill deepened from pages of Commonweal and The Catholic Worker...
...2) That his style of dress was dandified and absurd...
...In any case, we are sure Mr...
...that's not Gill...
...Commonweal at its best used to exemplify the sort of biblical realism, resistance to extremism, and calm reasonableness the Catholic tradition admires, and at its best it still does...
...11) treat a certain Catholic writer in a certain new Catholic magazine with such reverence as becomes only Jehovah: respectful refusal even to speak the name...
...Not only the obvious political bias, but, more importantly the intellectual poverty of its practitioners, is graphically, if unwittingly, depicted by the clearly admiring Mr...
...To the Editors: About half of Maureen Mullarkey's review of the Yorke's biography of Eric Gill is a useful summary of a polemic religious artist's career [Feb...
...REV...
...Mullarkey's feminist fires...
...Yet if the law is as reported, it seems to discriminate when it bars women from being installed as acolytes or lectors, except on a temporary basis...
...If you are a woman you are barred from the diaconate completely (despite a history of women lay deacons in the early church...
...And now you cannot even serve on a permanent basis as acolytes or lectors, but only on a "temporary' basis...
...But Gill did something for my spiritual life that I will ever be grateful for, and that is why I got scant pleasure from his remains being raked so cruelly over the coals of Ms...
...Mullarkey's glimpse of a preposterously vain pater familias, typical, dominating, sexist...
...Novak would like it to be known that he himself is executive editor of Catholicism in Crisis.it to be known that he himself is executive editor of Catholicism in Crisis...
...Mullarkey rates it, is it worth three and one half pages of Commonweal to say so...
...Why Eric Gill, versatile artist in stone, in wood, in calligraphy, in letters, should now deserve such animus of debunking, is not clear...
...Its lineage in Catholic thought goes back to gratia sanans, to Thomistic realism, and to Newman's via media...
...Gill's prose is crafted to make sure a possibly differing audience grasps both his idea and his premise, not to jerk somebody's knee by Pavlovian references to the "Aswan Dam" or masturbation...
...What after all does the author think of Louise Nevelson's fur eyelashes...
...How we need George Orwell who unflinchingly condemned the use of language to pervert and obscure truth, even-or especially-in the service of political views he shared...
...I hadn't noticed this in reading him, but this I suspect to be the heart of her argument...
...Keneally describes him as an assimilated Jew, a, Polish army officer, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, Schindler's black-market agent, and an early member of the "yellow" police...
...If the Yorke book is as abominable as Ms...
...Before Vatican II, all lay people were barred from participating in the celebration of the Mass in such roles as deacons and lectors-this was all done by the "professionals," the priests...
...A chapter in the book has Schindler, late in the war, observe a brutal roundup in the ghetto...
...Commonweal, with some assist from course content, acquainted me with names and thought of Chesterton, Belloc, Maritain and Eric Gill...
...The works of far older artists have been buried, to be revived centuries later...
...4) That he was a male chauvinist...
...Materials available at the Library of Congress show that all the orders establishing ghettos gave the same rationale for their creation: to separate the Poles from Jewish influence because the Jews , were intractable enemies of German rule...
...As an example of the "rich interchange" he perceived, Kirby quotes an unnamed theologian: "It is a theological ideology which in a sense was born in the church so that theology itself in the apartheid situation has become problematic...
...Catholic Chaplain...
...Deplorable, but I haven't heard of a critic condemning an artist for his sexual peccadillos since the demise of Queen Victoria...
...In order to correct that imbalance, some of us must risk being thought more "anti-left" than we are...
...If like Mullarkey you make Gill derivative from his sources - I had not expected Commonweal (!) to put the rap on William Morris - you need to indicate which side Gill took in the main nineteenth-century theoretical controversy on art and culture...
...Mullarkey's views...
...But if Gill should be forever unre-membered, he still made a lustrous contribution to his own time, in his engraved portraits, his stone work, his uncluttered, spare wood block nativities and crucifixions...
...He was the author of a body of polemical writings that are consistently interesting, although often eccentric and aggravating...
...His insightful examination of his own psychosexual, social, emotional and religious development was remarkable...
...The latter interpretation would seem to reflect a view that theology should be subordinated to political reform, a denigration of the theological vocation which one would not expect from a theologian...
...so one cannot say Gill's dogmatic approach froze him, as she suggests...
...The feminist criticisms of Gill are meant to sketch a sexual poseur isolated in fantasy from the real world and any real social acquaintance...
...MICHAEL NOVAK The editors reply: Michael Novak is too kind in attributing our reluctance to name the new Catholic' 'anti-left'' magazine in question to reverence rather than, say, to pity...
...The succession of roundups of people leaving churches after Mass, the many "bloody Sundays," the attempts at "returning" Cracow to the status of a''pure German'' city are ignored in Keneally's book...
...To the Editors: It was delicious to see the editors (Mar...
...Nonetheless, for many of us Commonweal is far less critical of the left than of its other targets...
...I confess to being uneducated in the matter of art, and I guess that, like the monkeys, I just like what I like...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
