The Knox Brothers Read online

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  The Knox Brothers

  with an introduction by Richard Holmes

  Edmund 1881–1971

  Dillwyn 1884–1943

  Wilfred 1886–1950

  Ronald 1888–1957

  Dedication

  For My Father

  “Evoe”

  OF PUNCH

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Genealogy

  Introduction by Richard Holmes

  Foreword

  I. Beginnings

  II. The Sterner Realities of Life 1891–1901

  III. “We imagined other people might think we were peculiar” 1901–1907

  IV. Knoxes and Brother 1907–1914

  V. Brothers at War 1914–1918

  VI. The Twenties 1919–1929

  VII. “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” 1930–1938

  VIII. The Uses of Intelligence 1939–1945

  IX. Endings 1945–1971

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Genealogy

  Introduction

  by Richard Holmes

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD’S MARRIED NAME, the name under which she became loved and celebrated as a novelist, subtly disguised her true inheritance. For Fitzgerald was really a Knox, and this marked her invisibly – or perhaps, indelibly – all her long life, and especially in her later and astonishingly creative years.

  As a Knox, she was descended from one of the great intellectual, Anglo-Catholic clans of late Victorian England. She was born Penelope Mary Knox in December 1916. Her great-grandfather had been the missionary Bishop of Lahore; her grandfather was Bishop of Manchester; one uncle was the writer and translator of the Bible Monsignor Ronald Knox (like Newman, a Roman Catholic convert); and her father was for sixteen years the much-admired editor of Punch, at a perilous time (1932–1948) when the magazine was still a great institution of national identity, like The Times or Speaker’s Corner or Harrods (and shared some of the attributes of each).

  The Knox Brothers is her remarkable tribute to this family inheritance. It is a strikingly original group biography, and a highly engaging piece of family history, written with extraordinary wit and shrewdness: a funny, tender, clever book. But it is very much more than that. One might call it a study in a vanished civilization, and I am sure that it is destined to become a twentieth-century classic.

  Its place in Penelope Fitzgerald’s work is intriguing. The biography first appeared in 1977, when she was sixty. But because of her unusual, late-flowering literary career, it was in fact one of her earliest books, and seems intimately connected with her self-discovery as a writer. In taking the measure of her formidable family background (and this is hardly a work of pious memorial), Penelope Fitzgerald found a narrative style, a fascination with human character, and a series of moral preoccupations which seemed to release the whole flow of her fiction.

  Her late start as a novelist was something Penelope Fitzgerald was frequently, and often wistfully, quizzed about – for instance at the Hay-on-Wye Festival of 1994. She was famous for the modesty of her replies, and one explanation was that she had simply been too busy with life, until she happened to enter a Ghost Story competition organized by The Times in Christmas 1974, when she had just turned fifty-eight.

  (Her winning story, ‘The Axe’ was published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories in 1975, and subsequently collected posthumously in The Means of Escape. Its victim, an ancient and – one might say – an almost disembodied office clerk called Singlebury, is introduced with a gentle but slightly unnerving irony, that is already recognisably hers. ‘Singlebury had, however, one distinguishing feature, very light blue eyes, with a defensive expression, as though apologizing for something which he felt guilty about, but could not put right. The fact is that he was getting old. Getting old is, of course, a crime of which we grow more guilty every day.’)

  More searching interviews (such as that by Hermione Lee, for BBC Radio 3, in 1997) revealed how directly her first novels drew on a mass of autobiographical material, stored up over forty years, and awaiting a moment of release. The pattern of her life suggested a long, slow period of imaginative and intellectual assimilation, in preparation for a literary career that she had always hoped for, but never quite expected.

  Tantalizing glimpses of her as a teenager appear in later chapters of The Knox Brothers. But, characteristically, she always refers to herself in the third person, as ‘the niece’ or ‘the daughter’. If you blink, you will miss them. From these we learn that she was largely brought up in literary London, in Hampstead and Regent’s Park, with an elder brother, and her father’s circle of brilliant acquaintances such as Belloc and AP Herbert. She attended (unhappily, one gathers) Wycombe Abbey, near Oxford, one of the most academically demanding of public schools for girls. This too appears in a wonderful, single-paragraph cameo in chapter seven.

  In 1935, when she was still only eighteen, her mother died of cancer, which devastated the household. She writes characteristically of her father, Edmund Knox, at this time of overwhelming grief. ‘It was many years before Eddie could bring himself to mention her name directly, even to his own son and daughter. At the time, he asked the proprietors of Punch for a short leave of absence, and an understanding that he would not be writing any funny pieces for the paper that year.’ She says not a word of her own (‘the daughter’s’) feelings, but only notes that her uncle Ronald, when attending the Anglican funeral, being a Catholic insisted on kneeling alone in the aisle. (p. 208)

  Penelope Knox took a First at Somerville College, Oxford. She then worked in a series of institutions, great and small (the wartime BBC, a children’s drama school, a Suffolk bookshop) having married Desmond Fitzgerald, a lawyer, in 1941. The family was mildly bohemian, in the Knox tradition, and were happy to live on a Thames barge, while taking occasional summer holidays in Italy and one memorable winter holiday in Russia. All of these experiences appear, transformed but recognisable, as settings for her later novels.

  In 1976, the year following the ghost story, her husband Desmond died after a long illness. Penelope Fitzgerald never wrote directly about this time. But it was now, in amazingly rapid succession, that she produced in just five years, no less than six books which must have been, in some sense, bursting within her. The fascinating thing is that the first two were not novels, but biographies.

  She had been working for some time on her life of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1975), perhaps as a distraction from her own immediate pain and unhappiness. It was inspired, she said, by Burne-Jones’s stained-glass window of the Last Judgement, in St Philip’s, Birmingham. ‘No agitation here, the dwellers on the earth simply stand waiting for their sentence. The whole effect depends on the late afternoon sun slanting through the glorious red of the massed angels’ wings. It is a window for Evensong.’ (p. 271) The biography is lively, engaging, and well-researched, with a particularly striking picture of Burne-Jones’s domestic life. But it also has the slight narrative stiffness, the uncertain deployment of materials, and uneven emotional tone, of a first book.

  Nothing could be less true of The Knox Brothers, which appeared just two years later in 1977. Somehow, an artistic transformation has taken place. From the very first chapter, with its amazing and moving tale of her great-grandfather the missionary Bishop, sailing calmly out to his lonely death from Muscat, ‘in a fishing boat, under a blazing sun, with his book-bag’, the biography is pitched with a narrative assurance, a gentle irony, and a delight in curious anecdote, which proved
to be the hallmarks of Fitzgerald’s clear and silvery style.

  Reading The Knox Brothers now, some twenty-five years after it was written, one is delighted by its period charm, its playful narration, and its barely repressed sense of mischief. But one is also struck by its technical ambition. For Fitzgerald, the obvious choice was to write mainly about the two famous literary figures of the family: her father Edmund and her uncle Ronald. Here were two well-known, but nicely contrasted brothers, who provided a perfectly balanced biographical subject, of great interest and wide appeal.

  But in fact, of course, there were four Knox brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald took the daring (and indeed characteristically loyal) decision to write about all of them, and all of them equally. The biography thus has a highly unusual and almost musical form: a string quartet. The brothers’ individual stories are not presented separately as four static portraits (perhaps the obvious biographical method). Instead, they are carefully interwoven and developed, with a novelist’s sense of their growing individuality and changing fraternal alliances.

  Their story begins in a country rectory deep in rural Leicestershire of the 1880s: the ‘blue remembered hills’ of arcadian childhood. (p. 15) As Penelope Fitzgerald later said, in an interview for the Highgate Institution Newsletter, in 1997: ‘They were a vicarage family and vicarages were the intellectual powerhouses of nineteenth-century England.’ But soon, as the four brothers grow up in Edwardian England, each alarmingly clever with strong but increasingly distinctive personalities, Penelope Fitzgerald starts to switch her narrative from one to the other, obtaining penetrating effects of emotional contrast, suppressed rivalries and shifting loyalties.

  These transitions are wonderfully well handled, as for example in their very different experiences in the First World War. One brother is in the trenches, another in Naval Intelligence, the third working as a priest in the East End, the fourth writing books of spiritual comfort (chapter five). There is a wonderful scene in which they all manage to meet up, for one evening in 1917, in Gatti’s restaurant in Mayfair, and drown their sorrows in champagne. (p. 139)

  These contrasts immensely enrich and deepen the human scope of the biography. Though it remains a work of family history, it becomes something much broader. It is partly the vivid, humorous evocation of a lost England. But it is also a study in different kinds of human intelligence, and different kinds of virtue. One of the many things we learn, is that intelligence and virtue are not the same qualities at all. Another is that neither is very comfortable to live with. A third is that both may frustrate happiness.

  The oldest, and the longest-lived brother, was her father Edmund Valpy Knox (1881–1971). Fitzgerald draws the portrait of a clever, handsome, clubbable man, a brilliant journalist, a lightverse writer, a survivor of Passchendaele, a legend in Fleet Street, universally and fondly known by his curiously perverse and unpronounceable pen-name – ‘Evoe’ of Punch. This was meant to be in the tradition of Lamb’s ‘Elia’, at the London Magazine. But Eddie used to complain that people were always referring to him as ‘Heave-Ho’. He was unfailingly generous and encouraging to young writers.

  But Fitzgerald also hints shrewdly at a disappointed, and perhaps embittered man, driven in on himself by the early loss of his own mother, difficult and saturnine as a father, secretly feeling that his ambition to be a poet was never fulfilled by his ephemeral Fleet Street glories. The editor of Punch thought that real humour ‘lay not in ingenuity, but incongruity, particularly in relation to the dignified place that man has assigned to himself in the scheme of things.’ (p. 264) Years later his daughter, in the interview with Hermione Lee, would describe herself as ‘a depressive humourist, or a depressed humourist, which comes to the same thing.’

  In strongest contrast was the youngest brother, her affectionate and even cleverer uncle, Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957). Fitzgerald presents him as a conscious celebrity, the widely-read essayist, detective-story writer, Catholic apologist, Biblical translator and (significantly) pipe-smoker. He emerges as an odd mixture of childlike unworldliness, and powerful social ambition. He is the poverty-stricken socialite, the shabby chaplain visiting the great country houses of England, the golden friend of the Waughs and the Lovats and the Asquiths, who also lives in tiny, freezing, antiquated rooms at the Oxford University chaplaincy.

  For some years Knox was considered by many to be the intellectual heir to Cardinal Newman in England. But in Fitzgerald’s wonderfully funny, but faintly subversive account he is always ‘Ronnie’, never Monsignor Ronald Knox. Ronnie ‘did not have Newman’s musical ear, nor his pastoral touch with ordinary people.’ Ronnie was always slightly in danger of being spoilt, or self-dramatising, or taking up poses (kneeling alone in the aisle). He ultimately played safe with his translation of the Bible, sticking close to the uninspiring Catholic Vulgate instead of returning to the original Greek and Hebrew texts, and so rendering ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men’ as what Fitzgerald calls the much more grudging ‘Peace on earth to men of goodwill.’ (p. 241)

  Of course Ronnie was witty, intelligent, charming, modest to a fault. He was the greatest popular asset to English Catholicism of his generation. He was always ready to write engaging, religious articles for the newspapers (quickly to be turned into a never-ending stream of books). These articles, writes Fitzgerald carefully, ‘introduced an exceedingly brilliant person whose reasoning mind was able to accept the contradictions of Christianity. At the same time they showed that a normal, pipe-smoking, income-taxed Englishman, not a Jesuit, not a mystic, no black cloaks, no sweeping gestures, could become a Roman Catholic priest. The News and Standard columns, with their wide readership, brought very many people to think rather more favourably of God.’ (p. 166)

  The final, softly ironic landing of that last sentence suggests that Fitzgerald, in exploring the subtle ambiguities of Ronnie’s character, had quickly begun to find her mature style. This she would carry directly over into the humorous, subtle, understated portraits of her fiction. Indeed Ronnie Knox, himself an ironist and prose stylist of great finesse, seems to have inspired Penelope Fitzgerald by example.

  Writing of his uneasy sojourn as the Catholic chaplain at Oxford in the 1930s, we find her entering into his persona, and imitating his voice, in a way that is perhaps closer to fiction than traditional biography. ‘He regarded himself, he said, as medieval rather than middle-aged, a man who refused to fly or go to the cinema and whose idea of the last really good invention was the toast-rack. Oxford, of all places, was prepared to tolerate such an attitude.’ (p. 210) It is fascinating to compare this with the much blander and more respectful accounts of Evelyn Waugh (1959), or Father Thomas Corbishley SJ (1964).

  Next among the brothers, the closest in age to Eddie but the shortest lived, was Dillwyn Knox (1884–1943). In some ways he is the most enigmatic, and fascinating of all the Knoxes. He is the eminence grise behind the family, the austere Mycroft to Ronnie’s glamorous Sherlock. Fitzgerald unfolds his character slowly, expertly, appreciatively. First we become familiar with a tall, bespectacled, fiercely clever and donnish young man, with a biting wit and distant manner, who seems both withdrawn and imperious. His standard response to anything vaguely emotional or wrong-headed is, sharply, ‘Why do you say that?’ (p. 221) He is the dry, atheist scholar of Greek texts, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an aloof friend of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

  But as it turned out (and unknown even to his own family) Dillwyn was also a brilliant cryptographer. Recruited by the Admiralty to its top secret ‘Room 40’ in 1915, he broke the German naval flag-code in World War I; and in World War II he helped to ‘find the way in’ to Enigma at Bletchley Park, even as he was dying from cancer. Fitzgerald clearly admired this work and dedication enormously. It arose from a different kind of unworldliness, oblivious to praise or recognition, hugely conscious of duty and a different kind of virtue. She explains his cryptography at great length, and has brilliant perceptions of the kind of superb inte
lligence, hovering between poetry and mathematics, that it involved.

  In Fitzgerald’s portrait, Dillwyn also slowly reveals an oddly romantic side to his nature, a natural grace and shy gallantry. He unexpectedly falls in love and marries one of his wartime secretaries from Room 40. Twenty-five years later, he somehow finds himself surrounded by particularly tall and pretty girls at Bletchley Park. He is instinctively kind to, and protective of, ‘the niece’ when she is an awkward teenager, unhappy at her school. Fitzgerald presents this in a brilliantly funny paragraph, rich with tenderness and ironies, and ending in a characteristically provoking epigram. (One needs to know that ‘Dilly’ loved cars, but was an appalling driver.)

  ‘The fates did not give Dilly a daughter, before whom, very likely, he would have been as helpless as he was without his spectacles. To his niece, confined for what seemed an eternity to a boarding school at nearby High Wycombe, where the girls, although their anatomy made it impracticable, were obliged to play cricket, Dilly was the kindest of visiting uncles. Agitated at having brought her back late in the Baby Austin, which seemed to spring and bounce along the road like a fawn, he bravely entered the precincts, blinking in the bright light, confronting the outraged housemistress, who said, “Rules are made to be kept,” with the answer: “But they are defined only by being broken.”’ (p. 191)

  Finally there was Wilfred Knox (1886–1950), in some ways the most obscure, humble and unworldly of the brothers, yet also the most unbending and emphatic. Wilfred inherited the burning missionary zeal, but none of the Victorian pomp, of his bishop forebears. He was an Anglo-Catholic priest in the East End, a dedicated socialist, a fearless motor-bike rider, a welfare worker, an eccentric recluse and just possibly a saint.

  He remained closest, not to the other priest in the family, Ronnie; but to the most worldly of his brothers, Edmund. He always came for family Christmas, when ‘the niece’ was there, and consumed huge helpings of brandy butter, the famous Knox ‘hard sauce’. He loved to go trout fishing in the summer with Eddie in Wales, his one other sensual indulgence. Fitzgerald shows a man of great spiritual honesty and simplicity; but also one of harsh impatience, extreme loneliness and cruel abruptness. Religious doctrine had divided him from Ronnie, and Fitzgerald guesses that the loss had damaged him emotionally for life. She quotes a fellow priest: ‘he somehow communicated with everyone a deep love from a broken, unloving man … Looking back now one realises how deeply he had been hurt, and how he hid behind his wit and apparent tartness.’ (p. 235)