Eric Gill:
Gilliam, Robert
Eric Gill is a figure at least vaguely familiar to many Commonweal readers. The Commonweal masthead is printed in one of Gill's many typefaces (Gill sans ultra bold). In the interwar years and in...
...To many, it seemed he had...
...There seemed little effort on Gill's part to hide them...
...I first came to Gill twenty years ago, led by the Catholic Worker...
...She has traveled widely to consult the far-flung Gill archives...
...The biography portrays Gill as an insatiable sexual adventurer and predator...
...No one who knew him well failed to like him, to respond to him...
...he is a man who loves God and his neighbor with all his heart, and Eric did that to a degree I have seldom encountered...
...Robert Gilliam employees, colleagues, and friends...
...The book is at its best on the intensely religious and communal years at Ditchling in Sussex where Gill was at the center of the Guild of St...
...But the deep contradictions in him do not go away...
...these latter revelations dramatically alter our sense of Gill...
...Only Father Sewell can say whether his generous assessment has survived the reading of this disturbing book...
...I liked the work and found it beautiful...
...The diaries provide a detailed record of behavior, without any accompanying reflection...
...And though MacCarthy reports some strains, the marriage seemed remarkably happy and unaffected...
...Though Gill can never be the same after MacCarthy's biography, I like to recall the kind words of Gill's friend, Brocard Sewell in his memoir, My Dear Time's Waste, "When I am asked what I thought of Eric Gill and what manner of man he was I always answer that he represents my idea of the holy man...
...In the interwar years and in the generation following his death in 1940, much of the interest in Gill was specifically Catholic...
...Though earlier Gill biographers had access to his diaries, she is the first to draw extensively on them...
...It is a careful log of expenditures and activities, particularly artistic and sexual...
...Ms...
...But even here one would like to know more of Gill's rather harsh and sudden break with the Guild...
...In his human feeling Gill was constantly engaging...
...She offers some vague sociological generalizations which are less than helpful...
...She easily loses patience with him...
...Joseph and St...
...Since Gill not only so carefully kept the diaries, but also later provided a key to their code, we can only surmise that he wanted to be found out...
...This is a handsome and well written book...
...Apart from the two incidents with his daughters, Gill seems fairly comfortable with his sexual sins, though he reports confessing them...
...MacCarthy's biography relies on more than fifty interviews with Gill's family and associates...
...More recently, attention has focused on Gill's prodigious and various artistic production, and with good reason...
...None of his hostility to prudery implied any disagreement with the traditional condemnations of fornication and adultery, which though he accepted, sinned against so regularly...
...His wife, Mary, knew about some of his escapades...
...There are good notes and a bibliography at the back, but no intrusive notes in the text...
...In his later years, she portrays him as a little ridiculous, "the aging satyr...
...Of the last, he wrote, "This must stop," as, apparently, it did...
...Her occasional forays into psychological explanation, though not implausible, are less than enlightening...
...Before this he had seemed charmingly exuberant about sex, a bit adolescent, endlessly curious and enthusiastic...
...Dominic, a group of artist-craftsmen, most of them Dominican tertiaries, who lived simply and devoutly making beautiful and useful things...
...It has abundant, well chosen, and attractive black and white illustrations...
...But we see here a life which, for all its remarkable accomplishments, did not go together...
...He remained, despite his sins, seriously and deeply Catholic...
...Gill inspired the love and loyalty of some very extraordinary people- Edward Johnston, David Jones, Donald Attwater, Vincent McNabb, and Stanley Morison...
...MacCarthy likes Gill and she likes his work, though she pays little attention to and implicitly dismisses his social, religious, and artistic thought...
...Gill kept a meticulously detailed diary from the age of fifteen until his death...
...In all this Gill was, I think, not trying consciously to defend or exonerate himself, but to raise sex within marriage to its rightful prominence...
...Sometimes people who knew him have expressed surprise at this, principally on the grounds that the sixth and ninth commandments sometimes gave him trouble...
...Though MacCarthy uncovers these profound contradictions, she does little to explain them...
...None of his thinking about the theological significance of sex and its centrality, beauty, and goodness is unorthodox...
...Though she does not condemn him, you feel she cannot quite forgive him his sexual excesses...
...He wanted to integrate faith and work and family life, to make of his life an integral whole, "a cell of good living in the chaos of our world...
...Mostly, I liked his lucid Catholic radicalism, his fierce and thoughtful rejection of the industrial world, his emphasis on work and community, his friendships...
...Gill's relations with Mary in themselves were very simple: they pleased each other and they went on pleasing one another as long as life continued...
...But the saint is not the man who is immune from the commoner human weaknesses...
...There was, however, a much darker side...
...As Fiona MacCarthy writes, "No one has approached his mastery over a range of [artistic] activity...
...In these respects, it is a model of serious popular biography...
...The second half of the book is more hurried and less sympathetic...
...He had an occasional sexual relationship with two of his sisters, engaged in some homosexual activity in the course of his erotic threesome with Robert and Moira Gib-bings, recorded a casual sexual experiment with a dog, and, most alarming, two incestuous contacts with his teen-age daughters...
...And his personality is still enormously arresting...
...As MacCarthy observes, "he was not a humbug...
...MacCarthy records many infidelities- both before and after his conversion to Catholicism in 1913-with prostitutes, ERIC GILL A Lover's Quest for Art and God Fiona MacCarthy A William Abrahams Book/E.P...
...Dutton, $26.95, 338 pp...
...One of Gill's favorite catch phrases and the title of a collection of his essays was "it all goes together...
...clear, strong, and vivid...
Vol. 116 • July 1989 • No. 13
