The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Mrs K. became alarmed, and wrote to both Ronnie and Wilfred to go and see what their brother was doing. She could not leave the Bishop, who was occupied with preparations for a great holiday mission on Blackpool sands.

  At Eton, Ronnie by now, though still fragile and delicate, was swimming in a golden atmosphere of popularity and success. As Captain of the School, he was known as the cleverest boy within living memory; his recent operation for appendicitis had kept the whole school in suspense; he was getting ready his first book of poems, Signa Severa, for publication, and had just been given his gold Newcastle medal, “one of the oases,” as he told Mrs K., “in the arena of my struggling existence.” His friends, too, were those who seemed set apart, not only because they had been born into the governing aristocracy, but because they naturally did all things well. But at Cambridge, anxiously trying to find Dilly’s tobacco and to be generally useful, he felt himself a small boy again. “I generally came to feel myself rather a fraud,” he wrote home, “as Dilly quite suddenly got up and went out to dinner.” Maynard Keynes, he added, had taken pity on him and showed him round the college, but, not unexpectedly, he had had to go to Evensong by himself. “King’s Chapel is topping,” he added.

  Wilfred also came over to see Dilly; his comment was that he had already warned his brother that no good would come of messing about with motor-cars. “I don’t know that Dilly liked this very much, but he had to admit I was right.”

  Wilfred was going up to Oxford in the coming autumn. The Bishop, although he did not know the whole extent of Dilly’s agnosticism, knew enough about it not to risk another son at Cambridge, and Wilfred, without much remark from his family, had won a scholarship to Trinity, Oxford. His letters home were in his customary unruffled style. He told Mrs K. that the President of the college, Dr Blakiston, would make an excellent butler (there was a vacancy by now at Bishopscourt), “while his removal would confer a real benefit on the University.” As cox of the Trinity boat, he had had several opportunities of shipwrecking the University crew, but had “decided to spare them”. In the meantime, since Winnie had come up as a student to Lady Margaret Hall, the river had become a place of daily dread, being crowded with strange females whom he was required to take on picnics.

  The Bishop did not fear idleness or dissipation from Wilfred, but he might, if he had known more, have feared something more serious, for this third son had gradually reached a state of mind in which he “didn’t particularly believe in anything”. He had lost the precious sense of communication with God, without losing the need for it. Wilfred had, however, a great capacity for clearing his mind, and for making it wait patiently for what might come. He did not want to waste time, and he was aware that—as he wrote many years later—in times of crisis “the weakness of the flesh will probably suggest to us that the laziest method is really most suited to our individual temperament.” To avoid the dangerous empty moments when vacancy threatened, he set himself—when he was not working, or with friends, or at socialist meetings—a series of ingenious tasks. One of these was to establish, by a series of controlled experiments in the college gardens, whether tortoises really preferred yellow flowers. Wilfred always lifted the Trinity tortoise carefully, by the edge of its shell, to avoid putting it off its feed, and he made his notes the basis of an essay on the inductive method.

  It was surely to the credit of the brothers that all four of them stood by their father when, in 1905, he organized a march to London in support of the Church schools. Even Dilly refused an invitation to go to Brittany with the artist Henry Lamb, whom he found totally sympathetic, to join, as he put it to Keynes, “10,000 Lancashiremen and that unprincipled ruffian, the Dean of Manchester,” in the great demonstration. The Bishop described his feelings on the summer’s day when, after weeks of preparation, he descended from his hansom at the appointed rallying-place and found himself alone. But the excursion trains soon came rolling in, and with the support of Lord Halifax, he led his procession, more than a mile and a half long, to a mass meeting at the Albert Hall. There were brass bands and waving banners, and Eddie in particular was delighted when the chosen hymn, under the swelteringly bright sun, was “Lead, kindly light, amid encircling gloom”. But there was no mistaking the desperate earnestness of the occasion. Lancashire in those days was prepared to go to great lengths to maintain her independence and her right, if she wanted it, to maintain her religious education. It also brought home keenly to the brothers how wide the gap was now between their interests and those of their father.

  In the November of 1906 Dilly attempted a reunion of a different kind when he invited his father and brothers to the Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of the Eumenides, which was intended to revive the glories of the classical play in Cambridge. Eddie and Ronnie came, and, sitting together, saw Rupert Brooke, in his first term at King’s, come on stage as the Herald—“a vision of ideal beauty,” according to the connoisseur of poetry Eddie Marsh, but, in the view of some of the undergraduates, “accoutred in a not very decent manner.” Dilly himself was being apprehended as an object of beauty by Lytton Strachey, who was in the audience, and, after a change of heart, had begun to find his appearance “transcendent”. Only Walter Headlam, excluded by his enemies from the play committee, sat, unaware of these cross-currents, in an unworldly trance, totally absorbed in the music and in the crimson robes which his own researches had shown to be the authentic colour worn by the choroi of Aeschylus. Dilly knew, indeed, that his beloved master had become increasingly vague, insisting, although he seemed in excellent health, that his health was failing and his days were numbered. The work for the second part of his Tripos, Dilly wrote home, had “begun to bore”, and he dismissed still more acidly the prospect of the Civil Service. He was determined on a permanent Fellowship at King’s, and the chance to be of use to Headlam in his definitive edition of Herodas.

  A papyrus of the Mimiambi of Herodas (or Herodes, or Herondas, for even his name was, and still is, in doubt) was one of the more striking acquisitions of the British Museum from the excavations at Oxyrhynchus in 1889. These finds had excited the whole world of learning. Even Bishop French, on his last journey, had been given news of them by the Sultan of Muscat, but although a scholar himself, he had commented: “Human sciences are passing; only God’s word abides.”

  The Herodas was a little roll about five inches high, preserved in the dry sands of Egypt, worm-eaten, rubbed, missing in parts, written out, not too carefully, by a copyist in about ad 100. It gave a complete version of some of the mimes, or satiric dialogues, which since ancient times had been known only through allusions or quotations in other Greek authors. Herodas was not a very good writer—not considered as such by the great authorities, who graded Greek and Latin literature as carefully as they did their pupils’ work. He was an oversophisticated, sprightly, not very clean-minded Alexandrian, writing in a distinctive metre, “limping iambics”. “Malign fate”, Dilly thought, had preserved these mimes when so much else was lost. But their value to classical scholars, grammarians, archaeologists and historians was beyond price.

  But who was to edit the mimes? Nothing can be attempted with a newly discovered papyrus, closely guarded by a great museum, without the editio princeps, that is, a clear text deciphered and transcribed by an expert palaeographer. This was being done, in 1891, by the British Museum’s specialist, Dr F. H. Kenyon, while the honour of the first critical edition, after his work was completed, had been entrusted to W. G. Rutherford. But, to the horror of the world of learning, Kenyon suddenly married and went off on his honeymoon, thus selfishly delaying the editio princeps. Rutherford had to publish without it, exposing himself to the cruel mockery of German critics. Other editions followed, but none were satisfactory, and the work of scholarship waited for the deeply respected Henry Jackson, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But Dr Jackson, who seems never to have consulted the papyrus himself, delayed, distracted by “innumerable worries”, and distressed by the terrible discovery tha
t one of the mimes took place in a sex-shop.

  None of these things were upsetting to Walter Headlam, who knew more than anyone else about Herodas, but refused to stand in the way of Jackson, and treated the many editions as an excuse to put off his own. Brilliant expositions, delivered in an airy aside, were taken down on scraps of paper by Dilly and John Sheppard, and added to the ever-mounting piles. Difficulties, as always, Headlam referred to the whole of the rest of Greek literature. He distrusted archaeology: “so easy to take a spade!” And Herodas must be brought to life, as Aeschylus had been. He and Dr Jackson might act out one of the mimes at Trinity, or they might demonstrate how the Athenians, on festival days, danced on a slippery goatskin until they fell flat. His imagination took wing. When he was thrown out of his horse-and-trap he exclaimed, as he sailed through the air: “Now I shall never edit Herodas!”

  But this kind of light-heartedness is possible only for the essentially serious. To present an unknown author to the world, even if he illuminates only an obscure corner of corrupt Alexandria, and to do it in the spirit of true scholarship is, after all, not an unworthy task. And Headlam did care a little about fame, even if he was too unmethodical to set about winning it.

  The situation had grown more complex. In 1900, to quote Dr Kenyon’s words, “a small box which must have remained in the possession of some native” was sent from Egypt to the British Museum. It was found to contain papyrus fragments, “some of them reduced to mere powder,” and those fragments proved to be some of the missing portions of the Herodas papyrus. It would now be necessary to reconstruct what was left of Mime VIII, The Dream, and Mime IX, The Breakfast, like a jigsaw puzzle. A scrap of papyrus glued into the wrong place would destroy the sense entirely. Six years had passed since the box arrived, and still no agreement had been reached between scholars.

  This, then, was what Dilly wanted to do. He did not care that, in spite of winning the Chancellor’s Medal for Latin verse, he got only second-class honours in the second part of his Tripos. He did not care whether the Apostles thought him a thing of beauty. Just before he went down, he wrote and produced a little farce, The Limit. The play dealt with the tribulations of Delicia Crackle, a college bed-maker, and Dilly bicycled on to the stage as Screachey, the aesthete, complete with long black beard. Then, in 1907, he went down, content to keep body and soul together until he could return as a Fellow.

  That Easter, Eddie and Dilly took Ronnie on an expedition to Rome. Like the trip to Germany, it was paid for by the Newtons in the hope of some educational benefit to the boys. The little party, in straw hats and white flannel shirts, were respectably lodged at the Pensione Bethell in the Via del Babuino, at the rather high price of forty-two shillings a week.

  Ronnie, who was nineteen, had by now been for a year at Balliol, where he had gone on a first scholarship, but somewhat reluctantly, feeling that in leaving Eton, where for six years he had been a favourite with both the boys and the masters, he had been exiled from an earthly paradise. “I feel curiously schoolsick,” he wrote to Winnie. He had gone up to Oxford, however, with a number of brilliant friends from his election and had found his feet at once; only now, in Rome with his brothers, he was reduced once more to the status of the youngest, the Little Grampus. He attended the English Church, kept the coffee hot for the moment when his elders would deign to get up, and went out to try to buy Punch, in which Eddie’s poems were now appearing regularly. Ronnie was trying to write a short story himself, in the manner of Hugh Benson, the diary of a priest who, attempting to exorcise one of his parishioners, is possessed by a nameless, hideous evil. Meanwhile Eddie and Dilly had got hold of a Baedeker which told them that the top of the Via del Babuino was “a haunt of artist’s models, chiefly natives of the Abruzzi,” and they sometimes left Ronnie to his own devices, although Dilly refused to learn any Italian beyond the sentence “These lavatories are dirty,” and ordered everything he wanted in Latin. Yet he managed to check the kinds of marble on the walls of a large number of churches, to see whether green malachite was as rare as it was said to be in the Choliambic Fragments. This, needless to say, was an errand casually suggested by Headlam.

  In the autumn, Dilly went to teach classics and ancient history at St Paul’s. The school was then in Hammersmith, and he found lodgings at 37 Talgarth Road. In class, he made no attempt to keep order, but was “loved by all”. He used to say that the VIII form at St Paul’s were so clever that he had to sit up half the night to keep ahead of them, and that this seriously impeded his social life.

  Eddie was also in London. After coming down from Corpus he too had done his share of schoolmastering, a year at North Manchester Preparatory School, which prepared boys for Manchester Grammar. Like Wilfred, but unlike Dilly and Ronnie, he was able to keep order and stood no nonsense. “He comes into the room and smiles at me,” he wrote on one boy’s report. “It is not enough!”

  The years at Corpus were to be the only years of his life during which he did not work hard; but he wanted to write, and suffered, as generations of authors have done, at the stuffy and inky boredom of the classroom. In 1905, after a number of attempts, he had some verses accepted by Punch. In 1906 the Manchester Courier took a piece on the elections—the Liberal landslide during which, in Manchester as in London, the crowds stood in the cold streets to watch, as red and blue rockets shot up into the sky to give news of a Liberal or a Conservative victory. A few weeks later the journalist James Bone, the “London end” of the Guardian, came back to Manchester to do an article on the Old Ship Inn; he promised to help, if Eddie could get down to London. The Courier gave him a letter of introduction to Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere; finally, the Bishop arranged to raise his allowance to £150 a year until he found his feet. Eddie settled an outstanding bill of 16s 9d for cigars, and set off.

  Many years afterwards, he used to regret that he had come to London too late; to become a real “character”, he said, one must have arrived before the Diamond Jubilee. But the fog-bound London of autumn 1906 was exciting enough, and he felt like a country boy in the capital. His family expected an account of the historical buildings and institutions; Eddie concentrated on the theatres and music halls, the transport, of course—one whistle for a motor-cab, two for a hansom—politics, the life of the streets and the newspapers.

  Fleet Street, with the Empire it served, was in its great days, with hardly a warning shadow of the long decline to come. As James Bone described it, it was still the Street of Adventure, short and undistinguished in appearance, with cookshops, cheap tailors, provincial papers crowded into upstairs offices, but above all the din, “that terrific pulse of the news that, once heard by a youth on his first newspaper, is never forgotten till his own pulse runs down.” The district was crowded with typesetters and compositors, and “the meanest tea-boy felt that he was part of a great power that could make war, though it could not make peace.”

  Editors seemed all-powerful, the reporters were heroic bohemians who emerged from the Cheshire Cheese and the Press Club to write copy for a drunken friend, who might make a rapid recovery, so that his editor was faced with two stories at once. There was a quartet—James Bone himself, Philip Gibbs, the essayist Robert Lynd, fragile in his Rhymesters’ black cloak, and that fine writer H. M. Tomlinson, whose father had been a foreman in the East India Docks. They were, as Lynd said, “the sort of people our mothers warned us against”. All four accepted Eddie as a promising beginner, and helped him.

  Though the Street was dominated by the daily press, the 1900s were the heyday of magazines—The Strand, The Pall Mall Gazette, Tit-Bits, Pearson’s—covering a wide range of interests as well as solid fiction and “astonishing facts” (or “it is not generally knowns”). Although Eddie was later to write: “What is the difference between literature and journalism? None, except that journalism is paid, and literature is not,” this was a time of great popular writers, who were happy to contribute to the magazines. Joyce, in Trieste, was struggling with the second version
of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, T. S. Eliot, at Smith Academy, was feeling “the disillusion only possible at sixteen”, but the public had many years yet to become aware of them, and meanwhile they enjoyed, without perceiving any subtleties, the stories of Hardy, Conrad and Kipling. Furthermore, they read poetry. The “pocket anthology” fitted into a Norfolk jacket, and could be taken out on long weekend walks; it had fine thin pages and a piece of ribbon attached as a bookmarker. The Golden Treasury (1891 edition) was the right size for this, so too was A Shropshire Lad. “Poetry,” Eddie wrote, “is presumably to be felt. It is presumably, by feeling, to be understood.”

  There was also a large public for the art, or craft, of light verse, in which all four brothers excelled. “Every newspaper editor, I think,” wrote H. A. Gwynne of the Standard in May 1907, “is looking out for a good versifier, and if Mr. Knox is able and clever in this way, I think there will be no doubt of his being able to get his foot on the journalistic ladder.” Eddie combined Dilly’s ear for metre, and Ronnie’s skill in rhyming, with a political sense and a certain dry response to life’s unpleasant surprises which was all his own.

  “It was very stultifying, having no money,” he recalled. The Courier had paid £3 7s 6d for five poems, and Punch 10s 6d for a contribution. His first lodgings were in Trevor Square, Knightsbridge, then “a very humble place”, but the best he could manage. “My landlady had three classes. The highest were ‘carriage folk.’ Beneath them were what she called ‘middle-class people like myself.’ And the third was the Poor, in speaking of whom she mingled a certain amount of sympathy with a tinge of contempt. The trouble was that of course I never knew where I belonged; every time I paid my bill I knew very well that I was in the third grade, but I could never find out where she placed me.” Soho attracted Eddie, who had a keen appreciation of its cheese and wine shops, but the district was favoured by Dilly’s Apostolic friends, in whom he detected an unwelcoming coldness. He decided to try Bayswater; the atmosphere of the Edwardian boarding house is preserved in a letter from a fellow lodger, about a bet on the Derby: