I have loose boxers on today & I like to think Gill would be pleased by the way they allow both comfort & allow the genitals to hang as it naturally does. He used to wear a loose home-woven artist's smock with nothing underneath, frequently lifted this to urinate while talking to visitors, and yet is maybe not best remembered for his strong feelings about clothing:
'[Gill's] Victorian primness is aroused by [...] Modern body-fitting clothing, particularly for men. Man's clothing now is depressing, drab, and uniform across all classes and professions and "his undergarments are worse; they might even be called foul". The modern male's penis is "tucked away and all sideways, dishonoured, neglected, ridiculed and ridiculous - no longer the virile member and man's most precious ornament".'
(This is a quotation from Malcolm Yorke's book 'Eric Gill: Man of Flesh & Spirit', & I'm ashamed to say I've so neglected my normally immaculate referencing that I neglected to note the page number when I saved this as a draft on my blackberry several days ago. It's not that helpful to tell you that it's on the page marked with a pink post-it in my copy, but that's all I can remember at the moment).
He is also not best remembered for his Victorian primness, but it's interesting that Yorke can see primness in him. He may be best remembered as a letterer or gorgeous lettering, sculptor of numinous sculpture with a strong ethic of authenticity & the dignity of work, and as a dirty old man. This last aspect only came to the fore from the 1980s, & particularly after the publication of Fiona McCarthy's biography of him, turning his status as sculptor of the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral into that of being an embarrassment to the Catholic Church. Not necessarily to the whole of that august body of course: far be it from me to point out that he wouldn't be the first person to receive their patronage who had sex with underage girls, even his own daughter, & a monk of Farnborough Abbey told me gleefully years ago that they made the mistake of having McCarthy's book as a refectory book, & when they got to the bit about the experiment with the dog, the monk who was reading stopped in the middle of the sentence, went, 'Oh my God', turned over several pages & carried on reading, looking sickly green.
What made me think of this again was that I have been reading some reminiscences of him by David Kindersley & have discovered that he was far more out of step with the Catholic church than I thought he was. I knew that despite the prestigious Westminster commission he did have controversy with the church in his lifetime. He described becoming Catholic as being 'fucked by Christ' & did a wildly controversial engraving of a woman, mostly covered by her long hair, being intimate with Jesus on the cross. Kindersley has explained for me how he could have fitted in in a body which isn't known for its good taste or artiness: he obviously didn't & perhaps this is why he spent so much time in para-religious communities of his own making, away from priests messing up the mass in tawdry mass-produced city churches.
In fact I wonder what he was doing being a Catholic at all, albeit it is difficult to envision what life would have been for someone of his mindset at the time. The sacralisation of sex & freedom of sexual experiment would make him far more one of us than any sort of Christian. For many years he always had two women on the go (married to one of them) & would have sex with both of them every day. I wouldn't have a problem with that as long as it was consensual; I would have a major problem with him having sex with his own underage daughter, & also with sex with a dog. I think one of the things Gill does is cause discomfort in us: he so far left the norms of his own age that he even leaves the norms of our more 'permissive' age behind, which makes it difficult for us to engage with him. Plainly having two women on the go would not be illegal, sex with your underage daughter would be. I'm sure there are places where having two women on the go is illegal even now, so I feel pursuing the legal explanation for my discomfort would be to hide behind someone else's authority.
Similarly there have been cultures & times where it has been the norm for parents to have sex with their children, but he didn't live in one. There are still people who would have great difficulty with, say, my lifestyle, so even the social norms thing falls down.
What can one say about him? I'm frankly at a loss either to censure him, suggest a solution to his Catholic discomfiture, or reach a final conclusion about him. Perhaps you have to be the sort of person who has this sort of effect on other people to be the sort of person who produces his numinous sculpture & lettering. Of course the search for authenticity can lead any of us to places where we or others would probably prefer we didn't go... But I don't feel he would really be a witch in the sense that we mean it today, even though he may even count among the many people who were feeling their way towards our tradition prior to Gerald Gardner & others' synthesis of many disparate ingredients into the Wicca we know today which over the succeeding decades became the Witchcraft we know today. The difference is this: he carried his sexual experimentation to a level that would not be acceptable to our (or any, that I know of) community. In fact I believe that his sexual excesses in incest, bestiality & paedophilia may even necessarily be ruled out by our ethic of Will, since this ethic includes the idea of my True Will, which of necessity cannot conflict with anyone else's if it be True. It is not possible for a dog to tell us that it wants sex with us, therefore we cannot know its true will, & imposing a sexual act on it means an assumption that it is part of its will.
Gill himself once commented, when he was in the house of a man with a large collection of pornography, that if it hadn't been for Catholicism he would have been like that; his implication being that the graces made available to him by his Catholicism prevented him from being worse then he was. I would argue that it could work the other way (bearing in mind the scandalous history of the church's sheltering of sexual abusers): our lack of a mechanism for forgiveness could have made him better, by giving a greater importance to each individual act, with *no* way to undo it. The Catholic's ability (yes, I know this is an abuse of their system, but the fact remains the abuse is possible) to do whatever they please on Friday, have it absolved on Saturday & be in a state of grace for Mass on Sunday is dangerous because it invites trouble.
As to how a sexual abuser & predator could also be a prolific & numinous artist, I don't have an answer to this conundrum. The Christian answer would be that we are all in the image of God yet all fallen, we as Witches have to fall back on an explanation either founded in our lack of will, or in some 'karmic' stuff going on, although this explanation makes me really intensely uncomfortable. At the last analysis I can enjoy Gill's art & sympathise with some of his theories, without having to accept all of him. G*ddess forbid, that would imply that I am him & he is me without the necessary separation necessary to enact my Will.
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