THE PILLAR OF FIRE An (unpublished) review of Fiona MacCarthy's book Eric Gill A Lover's Quest for Art and God, Faber & Faber, 1989 by Peter Brooke
This book was published with a great deal of publicity, including a special TV programme on Gill and an article in The Independent colour supplement. That might seem to have been a good thing since Gill's life and work was a long protest against everything the art world stands for nowadays. He recognised and vigorously asserted the principle put forward by William Morris that 'art' is just another word for work well done; he successfully established the kind of rural community life which provides the best conditions for such work; he recognised that the fonction of his own art form - sculpture was inseparable from religion and that indeed all art, which is to say all work, can only realise its highest value if it is done in a spirit of worship; he detested the business spirit and mechanised production, always asserting the importance of the human over the economic. And he seems to have lived in a perpetual state of childish delight at the beauty of the world, which was only possible because he refused any compromise with its ugliness.
All that is so extremely unfashionable and at odds with the spirit of modern media habits that it seems strange that a book about him should have attracted so much attention. But of course, it was not his ideas or beliefs that attracted the attention. The real core of the matter was that, in addition to all that, he had a disordered sex life.
Not that this should have come as a surprise to anyone. The rightness and holiness of sexual activity was one of Gill's pet themes, and it runs through his magnificent Autobiography, which Fiona McCarthy claims is 'full of obfuscation'. She herself quotes the passage in which he describes his first orgasm:
'But how shall I ever forget the strange, inexplicable rapture of my first experience? What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water-tap into a pillar of fire, and water into an elixir of life? I lived henceforth in a strange world of contradiction: something was called filthy which was obviously clean; something was called ridiculous which was obviously solemn and momentous; something was called ugly which was obviously lovely. Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder - strange days and nights, strange months and years.'
McCarthy tells us in her Introduction (which is the worst part of her book and the only part most of her reviewers seem to have read) that she has 'come to see Gill as a rather tragic figure', because of the contradiction between his role as a model English Catholic 'paterfamilias' and his unruly sexual appetite. What is astonishing about Gill, however, and this book confirms it, is the apparent absence of any such contradiction. Gill had sexual relations with his housekeepers, with female colleagues, the wives of his friends, his sisters (or at least one sister) and possibly even his daughters. Yet the book, anxious to develop 'tragic' contradictions, gives little evidence of the ill-feeling, tension and jealousy which such behaviour should normally have provoked. It is as if the normal rules dont apply, and at one point, McCarthy (following one of Gill's Dominican friends) asks in a fit of exasperation: 'Was Gill honestly entitled to the privilege of innocence? Had he really been unaffected by the Fall?'
The question is an interesting one, given that Gill believed in the Fall and Fiona McCarthy, one assumes, does not. In fact, the whole prurient glee with which the media establishment (McCarthy is a former Design correspondent for The Guardian) has swooped on Gill's sexual misdeeds is interesting.
In theory, sexual innocence should be an easy matter for those who do not believe that the sinfulness of sexual passion has been revealed by God. Yet here is a man who is apparently incapable of feeling sexual guilt and whose sexual activities seem to have caused no lasting damage to anyone, and Fiona McCarthy tries to persuade herself that he was unhappy, tragic, eaten up by contradictions, even though all the evidence she gives proclaims the contrary.
While McCarthy thinks that there should have been a tension between Gill's sexual activity and his Catholicism, Gill maintains that the two were mutually complementary. She tells us about a visit Gill paid with his then protégé, the Welsh writer and artist, David Jones, to a certain 'big fat man with a taste for true pornography ... The walls of his flat in Lincoln's Inn Fields were almost papered over with pornographic postcards. At the sight of these, Gill turned to David Jones, saying: "If I were not a Catholic, I should have been like this.'
Again, Gill complained about his brother whose marriage was breaking up that 'Brother Max is so virtuous by nature and so stupid and muddle-headed ... that he prefers to cast M. adrift and break up the home (thus depriving his children of all that home implies) rather than have a love affair to go to confession about.' The same attitude to confession is found in the Autobiography in which he proclaims it as a privilege, an assertion of one's pride in being a man and thus capable of sinning. One has the feeling that having a good sin to confess was all part of the fun (one of his confessors, incidentally, was Fr John O'Connor, thought to have been the model for Chesterton's Father Brown. That must have made things easier).
He develops an argument (which McCarthy hates) that Catholics, confident in their membership of the True Church, can afford to take a lighter attitude to life than Protestants and agnostics, who continually have to prove themselves. And, especially towards the end of his life, McCarthy tells us, new visitors to Pigott's, the last of the rural artistic communities he founded, had to pass through a sort of initiation test in which Gill held forth to them about Christs genitals which, given that He was the Perfect Man, could be assumed to have been of a goodly size. While he was receiving instruction to enter the Church in 1913, he was working on a life size marble replica of his own phallus. One feels a certain sympathy for McCarthy. He ought to have been a neurotic and unhappy soul. It somehow seems unjust that he wasn't.
McCarthy attempts to argue, in support of her view that he was a tragic figure, that 'a chain of destructiveness began at Ditchling, not long after his conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps a part of his tragedy is that he was both ahead of his times and behind them. His urge to experiment with social conventions, especially the prevailing sexual mores, became more obviously and more painfully at variance with the Gills' accepted role as the ideal Catholic family, the public demonstration of fidelity and cohesiveness.'
In fact, Gill's life at Ditchling Common, at Capel-y-ffin, and at Pigott's (the three rural craft communities he founded or co-founded after his conversion to Catholicism) was astonishingly creative, not just for his own work but in his ability to attract and train loyal followers and apprentices - an intrinsic.and necessary part of all serious artistic activity which has now been more or less universally abandoned. Of course there were immense problems, and it is quite believeable that he was crushed by his workload, his financial responsibilities and his despair at the direction in which political events were moving in the 1930s. But anyone who knows anything about the difficulties of maintaining his kind of life, and of holding such communities together, will be impressed by his achievement, especially remembering that, unlike Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter or Ashbee, he had no inherited wealth. All his ventures were financed only by his own work.
The main evidence for Gill's 'destructiveness' is his quarrel with his former close friend, the printer, Hilary Pepler. But though McCarthy tells us that there is a long correspondence on this subject, she actually tells us very little about it, though it is clearly one of the most important events in Gill's life. She also tells us very little about his apparently rather destructive attacks on the Arts and Crafts movement during his Fabian period (before his conversion to Catholicism). Indeed, there is no real attempt to tell us about his thinking at all. The whole book is pitched at the level of events and character informed by the sort of psychology which manages to explain both his great tidiness and precision, and his general sloppiness and easygoing nature, by his 'Victorian' upbringing.
Leaving aside, then, the quantity of valuable factual information which a book of this size cannot help conveying, its main interest lies in what it tells us about our own sexual liberation. Gill, McCarthy says, was both ahead of his times and behind them. Presumably it is as a sexual libertarian that he was ahead of the times, and as a Catholic family man, who loved being surrounded by children and grandchildren, that he was behind. But Gill's sexual libertarianism is utterly different from the unhappy obsessions of modern society. He lived in a different world to that of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr, Peter Greenaway or Tom Sharpe. What is so striking about post war sexual permissiveness - chronically so in the case of pop music (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Ultravox, The Smiths, Prince) - is the carefully cultivated atmosphere of misery and degradation that surrounds it. There is a feeling of the obsessive scratching of an itch, knowing that it will only make the wound deeper. Compare them with Gill, a passage from the diaries which I have taken at random from McCarthy's book:
'C.L. (the discretion is my own - P.B.) came in and I drew her portrait. We talked a lot about fucking and agreed how much we loved it. Afterwards we fondled one another a little and I put my penis between her legs. She then arranged herself so that when I pushed a little it went into her. I pushed it in about six times and then we kissed and went into lunch.' (Gill was a strong opponent of artificial contraception. It is a curious thing that, while he had three daughters by his wife, he does not seem to have had any children outside marriage. I think we can safely assume that he would have accepted responsibility for them if he had).
McCarthy, who has the air of a thoroughly modern woman, finds Gill's highspirited attitude towards sex irritating - 'cheeky chappy', 'Gill, the unremitting tease'. Since she wants to believe he was torn between eroticism and Catholicism, the many passages in which he gives a theological argument for 'the right and proper Naughtiness of life, as God made it' are treated as 'slippery' arguments: 'Gill at his worst was the street urchin, the tomentor who rings all the doorbells then runs rapidly away.'
I regard Gill as simply lacking a normal human faculty which we call modesty if we like it and prudery if we dont - the feeling that there is something squalid about sexual activity independent of a willingness to take responsibility for children. We live in a society which is desperately trying to rid itself of this long-established human instinct, and is making itself miserable in the process. How can we help hating the man who, through some defect in his mental formation, is what we are all trying so desperately to become?
The fact that he has now fallen into the clutches of such as MacCarthy (and Malcolm Yorke, whose Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit managed to get in first with the 'discovery' of Gill's erotic art) suggests, however, that he was wrong. MacCarthy says that he is 'an artist whose work is on the edge of a new phase of popularity' which is to say that the art world has spotted the erotic work and finds it eminently collectable - all that is needed is to strip it of all the old religion and arty-crafty nonsense, and that is the role of Yorke's and MacCarthy's books. The fact that Gill is being revived and written about in these circles is an indication of his vunerability: the real, morally earnest, puritanical arts and crafts practitioners, much looked down upon by Gill ('You can see that the fellows don't drink') are not being, and hopefully cannot be, taken up by the art market establishment. Even Peter Fuller's Modern Painters - for all its chatter about reviving the spirit of Ruskin - refused to revive the thinking of the Arts and Crafts movement in its integrity. And that is in itself very strong evidence in their favour.