Customer Reviews

Eric Gill

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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)