Perhaps all biographies generate their subplots, secondary personal dramas emitted as a kind of by-product of the enterprise.This was certainly the case with a book I wrote in the late 1980s, a biography of the Catholic craftsman Eric Gill. My subsequent rift with Gill's literary executor, Walter Shewring, contains sadnesses and mysteries still unexplained.  Shewring was my first contact in planning this biography. As sole literary executor, he had the power of permitting or forbidding me to quote from Gill's unpublished correspondence, diaries and other writings, most of which had been sold by Gill's widow Mary to the University of California at Los Angeles after his death in 1940. I knew he had vetoed much of the quotation Malcolm Yorke had hoped to use in his 1981 study of Gill's art, Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit. This meant I approached Shewring, a classical scholar who had been the resident intellectual in Gill's close circle, with a good deal of trepidation.  For many years he had been a schoolmaster at Ampleforth, the public school attached to the Benedictine monastery in Yorkshire. I sent a tentative letter asking if he could spare an hour or two to see me. He replied by return in the lovely sub-Gill script I would come to know so well. "Dear Miss MacCarthy, Certainly I should like to meet you for discussion, but do you know where Ampleforth is?" It was characteristic of him to assume potentially disastrous gaps of knowledge in other people's minds. His last instruction too was typical: "Will you write to let me know? I have a morbid fear of telephones & refuse to answer them."  I trekked to Ampleforth on November 4 1984. Shewring was not a monk but he had rooms within the monastery and his life had been celibate - though not from choice, he implied later when our friendship had matured. Being female, I was banned from Ampleforth's monastic heartland, so our interview took place in a barren waiting room warmed only by a very small gas fire of pre-war vintage. Attempting to make this first tea party convivial, Shewring had brought along a tin of Scottish shortbread, which he opened with some ceremony. He was cautiously approving of the new biography.  I loved him at first sight. Although in his late 70s, he had something of the freshness of the very clever schoolboy, an irresistible mix of erudition and innocence. A Catholic convert, he had first arrived at Pigotts, Gill's community in the Chilterns, near High Wycombe, in the early 1930s. Like other rootless young men, notably David Jones the painter, the young classicist and poet had been taken in and nurtured. He was still on close terms with Gill's surviving daughter Petra and her children, descending on their families for the school holidays. For me, Shewring was important not only in his role as Gill's executor but as a living link with Pigotts, confirming the patterns of its intimate relationships and teaching me its solemn, holy, risqué tone of voice.  We made friends. He sent me copies of his books, made introductions and suggestions, communicating in a peculiar form of speedwriting. Of one of Gill's former apprentices, he informed me: "[he] is not always accessible, he tends to be intoxicated & foul-mouthed, but if you cd get hold of him in the right mood, he mt have some interesting recollections." The proposed book had become almost a collaboration. By late January 1985 he wrote to ask me what I thought about calling one another by our Christian names, "without suggestion of an improper intimacy". He signed the letter "Yours, Walter (Shewring)", allowing for my possible rejection of the scheme.  Later in that year we met for lunch at a favourite restaurant of his, Marmaduke's Haunted Bistro in York. Shewring was in ebullient spirits, having abandoned his old schoolmaster's tweed jacket in favour of a formal three-piece suit and a pinky-mauve wool tie. He ordered two bottles of Corvo wine, his bon-viveur side emerging, and talked about Rapallo, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound. When we left the haunted Bistro, Walter clasped me to him, saying, "Here's to the great book!"  I saw Shewring six or seven times over the next two years and we corresponded often. Our meetings settled into a routine. Sometimes I picked him up from Ampleforth. These northern outings took place on Saturdays. Shewring would be waiting in the monastery yard clutching a canvas holdall in which to carry back a new supply of very special sherry from his wine merchants in Pickering. Our appointment was for 12 but he always looked as if he had been waiting there since dawn. We would wend our way towards the Pheasant Inn at Harome, returning to Ampleforth late in the afternoon.  When in London, he stayed at the Challoner Club, an austere Catholic guest house opposite the Brompton Oratory. Even in the summer he complained that it was freezing. By now accepting my role in providing treats for Shewring, I decided to take him to lunch at the Savoy, an environment as diametrically opposed to the rigours of the Challoner as I could devise. Here we ate a whole sole each and Shewring was at his most eloquent and charming. Looking back at my old notes of that day's conversation I find the little comment, "I love to talk to him".  In the summer of 1986 I had spent several weeks studying the Gill collections in the Clark Library at UCLA. It was here, in Gill's diaries, that I found the detailed entries relating not only to his multiple adulterous affairs but also to incest with his sisters and his daughters, and even sexual experiments with the Pigotts dog. In themselves these entries were certainly shocking but somehow they came as a relief to me. My previous half-assumptions were now knowledge. Many of the puzzles lingering in Gill's life story were suddenly clarified. I knew how to proceed.  The same evidence had been available to Gill's earlier biographer, Robert Speaight, who worked through the same material in preparing his book published in 1966. Speaight, a Catholic and a friend of the Gill family, appalled and embarrassed by the revelations, saw it as his duty to suppress them. Twenty years later, the conventions of biography were considerably altered, frank discussion of the sex life of one's subject being well on its way to becoming de rigueur for biographers. I did not consider for one moment that Speaight's gentlemanly reticence was possible for me.  Shewring had given me his official permission to have photocopies made of Gill material in the States. Once the typescript was finished, in January 1988, I still needed his permission for quotation, especially crucial since the evidence of Gill's sexual aberrations was potentially so explosive and likely to be challenged in Catholic circles where his reputation was still that of revered paterfamilias.  On January 23, my 47th birthday and a treacherously icy, snowy day, I drove to Ampleforth to fetch him, having booked a table at the White Swan at Pickering. The typescript was in the boot. After lunch, over coffee, I asked him if I should leave the typescript with him, for perusal at his leisure. He said he would be glad to check the source notes, but as for the text, "I leave it to you".  The next day he wrote formally in his capacity as Gill's sole literary executor, giving me "unrestricted permission to quote from any unpublished Gill material in any library"'.  There is no doubt in my mind that he was quite aware of the specific revelations of incest and adultery my typescript would contain. Gill's extreme sexual appetites were no secret to his Pigotts intimates, and Speaight's earlier dilemma in being faced with the same evidence had been the subject of discussion within this inner circle of family and friends.  Shewring had himself refused to take on Gill's biography because, he explained, "I was too fond of Eric". His reluctance at this juncture to confront the exact contents of my typescript amounted, I believe, to giving it his tacit blessing. He had been fond of Gill but he wanted the truth told as long as he could trust someone else to do the telling. We had been friends for several years, he understood the way I worked and I think he had decided to put his trust in me.  I sometimes wonder if there might have been a further hidden reason, something Shewring was maybe only half aware of. An element of male jealousy, resentment of Gill's level of sexual charisma and his droit de seigneur attitude to sex, emerged in several other interviews with male contemporaries. Shewring was now an old man who had spent most of his adult life among the monks at Ampleforth. Could his complicity be seen as a final act of protest towards the holy man who flaunted his sexual success?  Through 1988, in the months leading up to publication, there were more excursions, and I met Shewring once in Bath on his holiday visit to a Gill descendant. Just before Christmas I sent him an advance copy of the book. He wrote back on January 16, making the general comment, "Though of course I don't agree with everything that you say, I think you have illuminated a great deal," before launching into two pages of what he called "school-masterly corrections" on little points of detail. At this stage he was still sending me "much love".  It was a shock four weeks later to receive another letter, a short distraught note on half a sheet of lined paper that seemed to have been torn out of a school exercise book, telling me that "our acquaintance & our correspondence must cease". To me the sense of our collaboration had been precious. I shook with sobs as I read the note, then tore it into strips.  What had happened in the intervening weeks? I can only imagine that members of Gill's family, who were hostile to the book and to me, had influenced Shewring. No doubt they had reproached him with being taken in by a sophisticated woman of dubious intentions. Perhaps he had told them of the lunch at the Savoy.  He wrote a few more times, semi-conciliatory letters. After Bernard Levin, at the height of what became a widespread Gill controversy, wrote a vitriolic column in the Times accusing me of being too indulgent towards Gill, I received a sympathetic letter in a spryly caustic style that was almost the old Shewring, defending me against Levin's "vulgar & mean" attack. But essentially the friendship had now foundered. He died in summer 1990, much enfeebled, his mind wandering, and it was impossible not to suspect that the previous year's painful sequence of events accelerated his decline.  The book on Gill had been my first full-length biography. I began it in a state of naivety, imagining my only loyalty lay with Gill himself and the truth relating to the bizarre contradictions of this single human life. What I had not been prepared for was the fact that in searching out the truth, especially the truth of a near contemporary, you impinge on other interconnected lives as well, stirring emotions, resurrecting memories. In the dangerous complexities of writing a biography, the book on Gill was my baptism of fire.  · This essay appears in Lives for Sale: Biographers' Tales, edited by Mark Bostridge and published by Continuum on August 26 at £16.99
When Fiona MacCarthy embarked upon a biography of artist-craftsman Eric Gill, she was unprepared for the hostility that would greet revelations about his incestuous past.