The married monk
Christopher Bland
ERIC GILL by Fiona MacCarthy
Faber, £17.50, pp.338
Edward Johnston taught calligraphy at the Central School of Arts and Crafts; Eric Gill's recollection of him, the first time I saw him writing, and saw the Writing that came as he wrote, I had that thrill and tremble of the heart which other- wise I can only remember having had when first I touched her body or saw her hair down for the first time... or when I first heard the plain-chant of the Church [as they sang it at Louvain in the Abbey of Mont Cesar] stuns up the three powerful forces that dominated Gill's life. Fiona MacCarthy's biography is a witty and well-written account of Gill's attempt to balance these forces, and of his obsessive determination to reconcile the conflicting claims of art, religion and love.
Eric Gill was the grandson of a mission- ary, and Gill's father began as a Congrega- tionalist, passed through the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection, and ended up as an Anglican minister. Gill's own odys- sey, his 'search for the kingdom of God' as he described his life, took him from the Anglican Church, via agnosticism, the Arts & Crafts movement, and the Fabian Socie- ty, to Rome. It was hearing the plain-chant atLouvain that convinced him of the existence of God.
Gill was fascinated by the concept of an artistic community sharing a common ideal in which religion, work and leisure were fused. He founded three successive com- munities, at Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Plgotts in Buckinghamshire, and Fiona MacCarthy is particularly good at con- veying the slightly dotty, oddly innocent, erotically charged, argumentative piety of life with Eric Gill. Naked tennis with Robert and Moira Gibbings, home-baked bread and homespun garments were in- termingled with long walks and the arduous saying of the Office from Prime to Compline. At Ditchling, where Douglas Pepler and Gill ran the St Dominic's Press, where Gill established a Craft Guild and became a member of the lay Order of St Dominic, you were always likely to find Gill consecrating Pepler or Pepler ordain- ing Gill. The conditions were often testing, Particularly at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains, where Gill's community only lasted four years; Fiona MacCarthy tells us that Philip Hagreen, 60 years later, could still remember the incessant rain and the pervasive smell of goat. It is not surprising that Gill's work often kept him away from home for several weeks.
There was much more, however, to these communities than frequent services and ineffectual agriculture. Gill's industry, his purposefulness, his belief in the holi- ness of work — his workshop, obsessively orderly, was the antithesis of Bohemian squalor — made him an admirable teacher. He gave himself no airs; he considered himself an honest artisan. He began as a letter-cutter, graduating to tombstones from writing out 'Beautiful Zion' for his Uncle Fred. He loved lettering because the printed letter was the thing, not the repre- sentation of a thing; the work he did for 'The Convert' Wood-engraving, 1925, suggested by a letter from Gill's brother Romney Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corp- oration in the late 1920s, the design of the Perpetua and Gill Sans type-faces in par- ticular, still endures. He designed and produced the wood-engravings for some of the most beautiful books printed and made by 20th-century private presses, The Four Gospels, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde for the Golden Cockerel Press, and the Canticum Canticorum for the Cranach Press in Weimar.
Gill as a sculptor made over 100 figures or reliefs in stone; the best-known are the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral and Prospero and Ariel above the entrance to Broadcasting House. (The BBC Governors, after a preview and ex- pert advice, asked Gill to reduce the size of Ariel's sexual organs.) His wood- engravings (over 1000 of them), however, are the most satisfactory fusion of his art and craft, and are, at their best, unequal- led. Here his 'amorous gusto', as Graham Greene called it, is most powerfully de- monstrated in engravings for the Procreant Hymn, the Canticum Canticorum, the Song of Solomon and the unpublished illustrations for Lady Chatterley's Lover. Gill refused to accept any contradiction between his Catholicism and his interest in sex; as a result, God blesses his athletic lovers in 'Earth Receiving', Mary Mag- dalen embraces Christ on the Cross in the 'Nuptials of God', and his Madonnas, whether carved or engraved, are women of flesh as well as spirit. Not surprisingly, the Church found much of this difficult to stomach as Gill became increasingly well- known as a Catholic artist; Gill refused to modify his beliefs (though he occasionally altered his work), and always argued his case with a vigorous and un-Catholic stub- bornness in the face of the decisions of the hierarchy.
Gill was clearly devoted to his wife; nevertheless, he had a regular succession of mistresses, the last, the 18-year-old Daisy Hawkins in the year before his death in 1940 at the age of 58. He wore a white cord as a symbolic girdle of chastity but, as one of his friends remarked, 'Much good it did him'.
There was a darker side to Gill's 'excess of amorous nature' (his own words); he had incestuous relationships with one, and perhaps two, of his sisters, and with two of his three daughters. Earlier biographers have preferred to ignore the evidence of his diaries; Fiona MacCarthy describes Gill's sexual aberrations in a matter-of-fact manner, and sensibly leaves the moral judgments to the reader. Gill saw himself as a purveyor of ideas, and loved to design sweeping schemes for the re-organisation of society; he was even-handed in his hostility to capitalism and socialism, and he acted out his enthu- siasm for small-scale ownership in his own life. This does not prevent his political and philosophical thought appearing rambling, repetitive and half-baked. Most of Gill's writing was intended as a theoretical prop for his own life and actions; the resultant inconsistencies are an inevitable reflection of reality.
This is a thorough and definitive biogra- phy; the book is beautifully designed by Ken Costley, with 88 well-chosen engrav- ings in the text and 129 plates. While clearly alive to his faults, Fiona MacCarthy enables us to appreciate Gill's creative achievements, his appeal to his contempor- aries, and his redeeming sense of humour. David Kindersley, Gill's pupil, agonising over a commission to commemorate Fran- co's troops massacred in the Alcazar, wrote to Gill (who was equally, and predictably, anti-Franco) asking his advice. The postcard came by return, 'Plenty biz. no do! No biz. DO!' It was done.
Christopher Bland is Chairman of LWT and of the Century Hutchinson Group.
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