Thursday 16 July 2009

A tale of two Erics

Over lunch, until joined by my esteemed colleague Debbie, I carried on reading MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill.

It's funny how books can lead you through all sorts of terrain: typography to sculpture to Modernism to early-twentieth century sexology, the Arts and Crafts movement and many other things. What caught my attention today was Gill's status as the perfect subject for a moral conundrum. According to this book's take on his sex life, he slept with his wife (fine), other women (naughty Eric), his sisters (ooh, racy), his daughters (not very nice) and sometimes had a go with farmyard animals (clearly unEnglish, in fact positively wrong). Meanwhile, he converted to Catholicism and created the great Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral (as well as an exact copy of Little Eric in marble). When this story broke, there was pressure to have the Stations removed: how could people pray in front of these religious icons knowing that their creator was a sexual transgressor? Or doesn't it matter? It certainly fascinating to read of a man who joined the strictest of religious organisations while not altering his behaviour one iota.

By of comparison, here's one each from his sacred and profane sides (though Gill would hate the distinction (buy prints here or see them and sculptures at the Tate:








10 comments:

Zoot Horn said...

I didn't know anything about Gill, so I was really interested in thissy here post. I guess there were lots of libertarian and deviant sexual experiments going on in the early C20th, especially centred on and around artistic/literary coteries and communes (and they probably in turn borrowed some ideas from the Pre-Raphaelites and their ilk; but sexual libertarianism and a sense of historical transition or crisis have gone hand in hand throughout history, usually taking the form of "the end of days is come, it's the new Eden, get your pants off". Libertarian communes were especially prevalent in the middle ages... and during the English civil war, as I know you know Vole. The church also loved persecuting them out of existence of course. The beginning of the C20th was just more of the same I guess). Of Gill's contemporaries, the over-sexed novelist, journalist and editor Richard Aldington, unfaithful husband of H.D. (who herself had a child by another bloke then wizzed off to live with a woman while Aldington had an affair with their friend's partner) and buddy of D,H. Lawrence (nuff said) is a good example; Ezra Pound, part of the same loose group before WWI, lived in Italy with his wife, but strolled down the hillside every evening to spend the night with his mistress. His mate, the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis insisted that love and lust were two totally different things and that the former was tosh; he evaded conscription for ages by having a string of morbid sexually transmitted diseases. Don't even mention Freud and the sexologists. There were also lots of unlikely people joining the church; not because they 'believed' but because religion offered some kind of framework to give form to the supposed chaos of modernity and the failure of humanism, etc (or even because it offered some kind of sensual aesthetic tradition). T. S. Eliot, a cynical old nihilist if ever there was one, is a good example here. Just goes to show you what happens when boojwah mores lose their hold on society. So Gill might be a man of his time really... although, admittedly, an extreme case...

The Plashing Vole said...

Yes, Gill's definitely of his time - he went through Arts and Crafts to Guild Socialism to Fabianism to High Art to Catholicism, and tried to shake off Morris and Co. by being more extreme.

He wasn't millenial though, which is curious - his attraction to Catholicism seems to have been part of a constant quest for authoritative mentors (an early one was Johnston, the fantastic typographer of Johnston Sans fame - the London Underground type). He knew Wyndham Lewis, Orage, Kessler and any number of the 'rebel artists'. What I found interesting was his honesty (very open in his diaries and to his friends about his sexuality) and his hypocrisy in joining the Catholic Church and posing as a moralist in many ways.

Zoot Horn said...

Wow - yes, he does seem pretty unique in his level of honesty. Interesting question about the morality of the artist and attitudes towards the art. Let's take a recent example. Who has bought a Gary Glitter CD recently?

Would it be a cop-out to say that the art stands, but its reception is changed by such revelations? Is there any difference between the quality or value of a work and its cultural reception? I guess not. But context is everything isn't it?: because Gill was such a perverse fella, and because I'm a sulphur-sniffing atheist, I think that Westminster cathedral is the perfect venue for his stuff. Heh heh.

The Plashing Vole said...

Very sophisticated, Zoot. I tend to agree - seeing his art with the knowledge of his personality emphasises the sense that talent and morality needn't go together, that morality is subjective, and that he's well at home amongst the Catholic clergy. The art is still genius, and in any case, the author is dead: our interpretation needn't take into account the artist's purpose and motivation. I do wonder what happened to the sculpture of his penis though. Perhaps Mrs Gill used it when he was away. As a paperweight, of course.

Ewarwoowar said...

Are you reading all this, Merciless?

This is what we'll be like when we graduate and we're intelligent, instead of talking about football, tits and Facebook like we do currently.

Zoot Horn said...

Agree about the genius - I spent ages looking at his prints. Thanks for introducing me to his work Vole. Checked some stuff I have on Jacob Epstein (one of my faves, featured in Walsall art gallery and on Coventry cathedral) who worked closely with Gill, and their sculpture is really similar. I love D. H. Lawrence's paintings too - absolutely nowhere near the same league as Gill, but full of a sensuous naivete. Mind you, Lawrence berated James Joyce's bodily realism in Ulysses as 'filth', which just goes to show the relativity and hypocrisy of morality. Eric carrying on with his daughter is a trifle vile mind. I think Freud is right: civilization occurs when we stop humping blood relatives. Not so much morality, more a plea to get out more.

Zoot Horn said...

Yes Ewarwoowar: when you graduate you can talk about promiscuity, incest and bestiality, and it'll be Art so it's ok. If you look at porn on a university computer however (assuming you're not also doing the English course that features it) then you'll be thrown out of the institution and probably put on a register somewhere as a danger to minors. Isn't intellectual life fun?

Dan said...

My dearest Ewarwoowar. Your allusions to the fact that we (oneself more so) am not intelligent is a load of old codswallop. I, my learned friend, can partake in delightful evenings with the finest wines and cheeses talking about Jean-Paul Sartre and how his father's death, when Sartre was but a small child, heavily seeped into his writings and ideological beliefs. I can talk until the horses are in their stables, the foxes are shot and the pheasant is cooked about Milton, Pepys, Thomas (Dylan, not Iwan you whippersnapper), Marlowe, Yeates, Wilde and Goolden. I am not the kind of fool who's intelligence could barely fill one's own smoking pipe.

You shall have to come round one midsummer's eve and we can talk until the morrow about Cubism and some other people who can't draw over After Eights. Yah?

Ewarwoowar said...

Zoot: I think you'll find that every male student in the MI building is secretly looking at incest porn.

Merciless: Sounds delightful, darling. I'll bring along a splendid book of poetry I've found, it's awfully awfully. And if you're lucky, I might even bring along the Armitage translation of Sir Gaiwan, which excels in subtlety and revels in it's own brilliance.

(To everyone else, many apologies for lowering the tone of what was an interesting conversation between Zoot and Vole. I presume.)

Zoot Horn said...

Come the revolution there will be exams. If you fail: up against the wall.

Also... this is the only place where Vole and I have TIME for anything approaching an intellectual discussion. Normally I just watch tele alone and scratch.