The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
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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with a tall, bespectacled, fiercely clever and donnish young man, with a biting wit and distant manner, who seems both withdrawn and imperious.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 intelligence, 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)
Despite all this, or because of it, Wilfred finally became a Doctor of Divinity, a Fellow of the British Academy and an influential wartime university chaplain at Cambridge. He proved a natural pastor among the young. ‘The attendance in chapel, which a priest watches as carefully as an editor watches the circulation, went steadily higher.’ His demeanour, ‘a curious mixture of briskness and spirituality’, was so striking that one undergraduate recalled that the very sight of Wilfred silently wheeling an old bicycle through the Pembroke College gate, ‘helped me grow in the Christian faith.’ (p. 238)
So Penelope Fitzgerald builds a memorably rich, composite portrait of these four brilliant and unusual brothers, which is both moving and compelling. We are left with the tantalizing question: which one of the brothers was Penelope Fitzgerald’s favourite? It cannot be assumed that it was her own father, Edmund. It might, for example, have been Dillwyn. For beneath her bright, witty narrative, the biography allows for large areas of shadow, leaving deliberate zones of mystery, and moments of discretion. For instance, we only discover in passing asides, that Ronnie was actually disinherited by his father the Bishop; that Dillwyn’s marriage was unhappy; and that Edmund became ‘haunted’ and depressed by having to write his weekly article for Punch.
We are told that among the characteristics that they all shared, was the terrible ‘Knox Temper’. But perhaps we are slightly shielded from the causes of this, and how exactly it manifested itself – shouting? sulking? silent furies? It was known to terrify colleagues (Dillwyn’s), alarm fellow priests (Wilfred’s), and even drive the family dog out of the sitting room (Eddie’s). The reader can usefully consult the Index under ‘Knox Brothers: Collective Characteristics’, which also included love of pipe-smoking, Greek poetry, and steam-trains.
We never learn much of the two Knox sisters, Ethel and Winnie, though Winnie in particular clearly played a vital part in her brothers’ emotional lives. This reminds us that it is essentially the picture of a male world, and among Penelope Fitzgerald’s imaginative triumphs are the evocation of particular closed, long-lost, masculine societies: the Edwardian Cambridge of MR James, Housman and Lytton Strachey; the boisterous Fleet Street of the 1930s; the tense, cocoa-drinking, war-time nightlife of Bletchley Park. (p. 229)
In fact it is now clear how the Knox biography seemed to open the door directly into Fitzgerald’s own imaginative world, taking her from history to fiction. In the same year of its publication came her first novel, a murder mystery, The Golden Child (1977), followed almost immediately by The Bookshop (1978, using the Suffolk experience, including a poltergeist that she always claimed was genuine); and then Offshore (1979, using the Thames barge) which won the Booker Prize; and then Human Voices (1980, using the wartime BBC). In five years she had established herself as a major fiction writer. Afterwards, she only once returned to biography, in an intriguing life of the reclusive Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1984).
Over a decade later, in her last two novels, Penelope Fitzgerald seemed to return to fictional versions of her Knox inheritance. The Gate of Angels (1990) is set precisely in an Edwardian Cambridge like Dillwyn’s, and begins with the incident of a bicycle accident that is close to a ‘romantic encounter’ described there by Ronnie. (p. 77–8) Moreover, its theme of the battle between intellect and emotions, one very close to Fitzgerald’s heart, is central to her picture of the Knox family. There are similar