The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  A letter arrived from the wife of the distinguished Dutch scholar, also a commentator on Herodas, Professor Grooneboom: “When we hear that our dear Professor Knox is not well, we say to one another that we wish nothing better than that he was among us here.” Dilly put the letter away, with the earlier one offering him the chair of Greek at Leeds. If Olive could not face Cambridge, what would she say to the prospect of Holland or a northern University? She had been in the deepest anxiety over his accident, and she loved him dearly. Sacrifice must be met with sacrifice.

  Emerging from hospital, he practised walking round the lawn, following the footsteps of a large tortoise to whose shell he had attached a wooden engine on a string. Its trundling could be heard on summer mornings, and in the winter, when it buried itself, the engine was left above ground to mark the spot. Then, partially recovered, Dilly bought an Austin Seven to cover the five miles to High Wycombe station, which gave him exactly time to recite the whole of Milton’s Lycidas, taking his hand off the wheel now and then to say: “Look! It drives itself!”

  Few people were anxious to accept a lift from Dilly; one who did, without the slightest worry, was the artist Gilbert Spencer, Stanley’s brother.

  After our marriage [he writes], my wife and I took rooms at Mr Rogers the chairmaker, just at the bottom of the road leading up to Dillwyn’s home in Courn’s Wood … [He] always gave me a lift to the station and used to amuse himself seeing how far he could go downhill with the engine off. He also told me that our terminus (Marylebone) was so out of the way that he was pretty nearly the only passenger, which explained why he was so politely received by the station-master. But we thought it was his highly important position at the Foreign Office.

  Since his early friendship with Henry Lamb, Dilly had always liked a certain kind of low-keyed, unassertive, but deeply felt English picture. He did not much care for the large bright Medici prints which hung in his dining room. It was agreed that Spencer, who, with a wife and young baby, needed commissions, should do a portrait. This firm but delicate pencil drawing, an excellent likeness, illustrates another of Spencer’s remarks: “For an artist, not to understand someone does not mean not to know them.”

  In another range of Dilly’s sympathies was his Sunday visitor, the impeccable Professor Lobel. As editor of the “laundry lists”, the Oxyrhynchus papyri, Lobel came down with his fragments and problems, not so that they could consult each other, but simply so that they could sit side by side, each in his own Greek world, exchanging perhaps half a sentence. The children were overawed, and hid in the brushwood.

  If Edgar Lobel was the most imposing of my father’s friends [Oliver recalls], Frank Birch was the jolliest, most amusing and mondain. When he came down to Courn’s Wood I was slightly ashamed of the cold unworldliness of our home, and vaguely conscious that the half-bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape customarily provided for visitors was not enough.

  It was not enough, but Frank Birch produced a magical change in Dilly. The cold and daunting “Why do you say that?” which was his answer to anything muddled or inexact, disappeared into the gaiety which Birch brought with him. Never to be forgotten was Birch’s virtuoso appearance, all but unrecognizable in wig and elastic-sided boots, as the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. It was remarked in King’s that he was the only member of college to appear in pantomime while still a Fellow. For the occasion Dilly treated the family to seats at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and the smaller ones sat laughing, half in terror, as the Widow found a baby mixed up with the washing. “Quite spoiled, isn’t he? Never be the same again!”

  Otherwise, Dilly came up to London only for work and cricket, which also worked a transformation. To Oliver,

  an outing to a Test Match was a spree, almost, on which we were alone together. My father’s metropolitan manners came as a surprise. To begin with, he took a taxi from Marylebone; unheard-of extravagance. Then he forgot to collect our change at the turnstiles, and waved aside more change for a score-card, in his hurry to watch the game. Such carefree behaviour seemed a far cry from the thrift and sobriety of Courn’s Wood.

  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 roads 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.”

  For his fiftieth birthday, in 1934, Dilly resolved to entertain his brothers and sisters to lunch. Eddie, when he was fifty, had given an elegant family lunch at the Café Royal; Dilly decided on the Spread Eagle at Thame.

  The famous inn was still under the management of John Fothergill, who has described in his Innkeeper’s Diary his successes as a host, but not the trials of the guests, which increased towards the end of his heyday at Thame. As mine host he still looked welcoming as he stood at the door, a figure left over from the Beardsley era, with copper buckles at his knee, and in chilly weather wearing a sealskin cap made out of his mother’s muff. His grand manner remained, but dining at the Spread Eagle had become unpredictable. There were long delays, and Fothergill had barred off all the lavatories in the house, so that guests had to pick their way through the long wet grass of the orchard to relieve themselves, often pursued by vindictive bees, said to have been brought from Hymettus.

  Dilly made an anxious host, though Fothergill was apparently ready to honour them, and bowed over Christina’s hand with the strange compliment, “Madame, I admire your teeth.” You did not order on these occasions; Fothergill provided. After they had sat some time, he returned bearing in his own hands a small dish of perfectly plain boiled potatoes, with an explanation which only he could have given: “You must not think I would insult you by serving anything with them.”

  When poor Fothergill departed to Market Harborough (“a Midland desert not fit for a pigsty,” he wrote to Eddie), Dilly entered a farewell verse in his private notebook:

  Long the Spread Eagle host has ranked

  His very privy sacrosanct;

  Now all things shall be free to use,

  Nor need we mind our pees and qs.

  But relaxations, even unsuccessful ones, were not so characteristic as an intense concentration and withdrawal, when, as Olive told her son, “your father is miles away.” “It was years after his death before I knew what he did,” Oliver said; “to his work he referred not at all, any enquiries in that respect being met with the dismaying device of total silence.”

  During the Thirties, finding that smoking and patience were not sufficient as alternative tranquillizer and counter-irritant to the active mind, Dilly suddenly produced a new way of writing poetry. A devoted reader of Sylvie and Bruno, he particularly valued Lewis Carroll’s notion that “if you have a long tedious evening ahead, why not store up the useless hours for some other occasion when you need extra time?” The hours spent at Naphill dinner parties seemed now to be turned to account in the fastnesses of the study, from which he emerged every now and then with a poem in his hand. These were, perhaps, an attempt at wholeness, that is, at uniting the two sides of himself, the relentless “Why do you say that?” with the unpredictable visits of intuition.

  The rules, Dilly claimed, were transparently simple; each line must end with a word of the same form, but with a different vowel, the vowels “of course” coming in their proper order, a, e, i, o, u, or the equivalent sounds in English. One of his earliest examples was:

  Just look at my father A

  And mother together! E

  I fancy that neither I

  Would very much bother O

  If rid of the other. U

  Irrelevant proper n
ames could not be allowed. Wanting a more difficult rhyme-word, he had tried:

  And waiting in a sad row

  For the head-waiter, Pedro,

  The inmates of the hydro

  Longed for their tea and cod-roe,

  And talked of Wilson (Woodrow).

  That wouldn’t do, Dilly thought. The situation was improbable. There was no rationale. Why should they talk about Woodrow Wilson? Might they not, however, have been driven mad by the Peace Treaty? And after all, why not write poetry about food and drink? Why should a life spent in eating and drinking be considered baser than a life devoted to sex? Sex, it was true, was a kind of communication with other human beings. But then, drink helped one to forget them.

  It was suggested to him that the Pentelopes, as he called his fiveline verses, were an acquired taste, that not very many people would appreciate them, and that (like Gerard Manley Hopkins) he was making poetry too difficult to write. And it would be almost impossible, under these new rules, to convey emotion. About whom or what? Dilly asked. Why do you say that?—Well, for example, A. E. Housman had recently died. What epitaph could be appropriate for him, except, “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead …”?

  The pain and restraint, the hesitation on the part of the messengers which the repetition in the first line suggests, surely these couldn’t be expressed under the new “rules”? It turned out that Dilly had done so, on the very morning that he heard of Housman’s death:

  Sad though the news, how sad

  Of thee, the poet, dead!

  But still thy poems abide—

  There Death, the unsparing god

  Himself dare not intrude.

  He agreed that it would scarcely do to show this condensed version to his brothers. It was put away in his tin box, where the pile of Pentelopes grew, awaiting the day when the new system would be acclaimed as the easiest and most obvious form of reducing poetry to a game.

  Two years earlier than this, in 1934, a wave of intense depression had led Dilly to try and make over the whole of his wooded estates to King’s. It would have been an ingenious solution.

  My dear Dillwyn [Maynard Keynes had replied], the college is in fact already in the timber business on a certain scale, and is not unduly unsuccessful, but there are great difficulties in the way of the college going in for it on a large scale. But all this does not mean that we should not like you to come up and talk about it.

  Once again, the appeal of Cambridge was strongly heard. Nevertheless, in 1936, for the first time, Dilly began to refuse his invitations to Founder’s Feast. The reason was simple; the dinner was noted, even among Cambridge colleges, for its hospitality and its fine wines, and, in consequence, for the occasional indiscretions of the guests. These, to be sure, were heard by Kingsmen only, but the time had come when Dilly could not risk even the hint of a shadow of a reference to what he was doing. He had started work on a new problem.

  The importance of this problem was the cause of his erratic behaviour, the sudden gloom and exhilaration, the obsession with the obstinate five vowels of the alphabet which emerged in the queer poems. His department was face to face with difficulties far beyond the imagination of Room 40.

  Since the end of the Great War every government which had something to hide, and could afford to hide it, had been in the market for an electromechanical system of encipherment which would avoid repetitions, and so make the old methods of solution through letter frequencies almost impossible. During the Thirties, cipher machines were patented by the ingenious which generated their own alphabets by the million, printed or indicated the letters, and could be put into reverse to decipher them for the receiver. Each type had its advantages—compactness, ease of operation, accuracy. France, Italy, and later the United States, chose the Swedish Hagelin. The Soviet Union had its own. Germany bought the Enigma. The keys, the settings and the method of operation were all secret. It was the business of the Foreign Office’s Department of Communications to solve Enigma and, later, the Enigma Variations.

  At the beginning of the Thirties Wilfred was quite alone at Oratory House, except for the daily visits of Mr Smith, the gardener. But in 1933 he was joined there by Dr Alec Vidler. The arrival of this great priest, theologian, and natural administrator and organizer, a man whose horizon widened year by year, was of untold value to Wilfred, always fortunate in his friends. A certain shyness had held him apart from the University. An Oxford man to the very depths, he felt doubtful of his reception in the bright windswept fenland city. He had no access to the University libraries. Students came to consult him, he was supremely at ease with the fruit-pickers, but he was seen very little in the colleges. As a scholar, he was a member of the New Testament Seminar conducted by F. C. Burkitt, but he seemed almost afraid of social distractions. Alec Vidler put an end to all this, drew him out and dusted him off, induced him to take steps to get his Doctorate of Divinity, and introduced him to the heads of colleges. He was pleased when Wilfred was invited to give the University sermon (although, owing to the rapid, quiet delivery, not many people could hear it), and delighted when he was made a Canon of Ely. At a deeper level, he confirmed Wilfred’s vision, in the true spirit of the Good Shepherd, of a universal Christianity, with total authority, but without sectarian bitterness. Then he introduced him to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose social ethics, based on his experience in industrial cities, made a direct appeal to Wilfred; only, by temperament, he could not quite admit this at once, but let several months pass before saying that he had found Niebuhr “quite interesting”.

  His natural tendency to broadness of spirit could be judged by his services on the Committee for Christian Doctrine, which met during those years to find a basis of common doctrine for the whole Church. No Roman Catholics attended, but Wilfred was invited as a representative of Anglo-Catholic opinion, which, it was thought, would mean extreme Conservatism. Many were disconcerted when he spoke out in favour of the tolerance of birth control and civil divorce. If his first draft manifesto had gone out, he told his old friend Stephen Langton, “it would have produced the headline ‘ANGLO-CATHOLICS CALL FOR CONTRACEPTIVES’ (Daily Mirror). Then we should have cut some ice. Thine, Wilfred.”

  The strength of this came from Wilfred’s serene inner certainty. When faith was discussed he was the most consistent and even conservative of them all. On the essential beliefs of Christianity he was as firm as a rock, nor did he care if most people, or indeed if everyone, found them too difficult. “At the end of the day, God is still where He was.” But on the necessity of recognizing the human needs of this world, Wilfred was also firm.

  As a matter of fact the Committee’s summing-up, when it eventually appeared in 1938, was greeted in the daily press as CHURCH SAYS SEX NOT EVIL. The report, in consequence, sold surprisingly well, and the Committee had to school themselves to patience and hope that their painstaking summary of the faith would make its way in time.

  Ronnie, for his part, analysed the report in several despairing articles. “Nobody who reads it can fail to be impressed by the goodwill of the signatories,” he wrote, “or by their learning in certain fields. But their whole conception of faith differs so completely from ours, that no bridge of understanding seems, at present, to be possible. There is nothing to be prayed for except a revolution in their whole method of thought.”

  When Dilly came over on his increasingly rare visits to Cambridge he usually saw Wilfred, paid a visit to the Oratory, and told his brother that he could no longer be surprised by the vagaries to which Christianity led. Yet he was not quite unsympathetic to Wilfred’s studies, because they were concentrated on the one saint whom Dilly could tolerate, the recklessly determined St Paul, to whom nothing was impossible.

  If Meditation and Mental Prayer is the most accessible of Wilfred’s books, where his speaking voice can still be heard, St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles is the one by which fellow historians and theologians remember him. In it he set out to reconstruct the mind of the Hellen
ized society of the first century, when Jew influenced Greek and Greek influenced Jew under the uneasy Roman peace. The Gospels were not the only biography produced in the first century, nor was Paul the only man who wrote letters. Only by understanding the climate in which they were written can we hope to estimate whether they are true or not, and Wilfred is scrupulous in not doing this for us. “The fact of Paul’s experience may have been no more than an illusion, but for him it was a matter of immediate certainty. It followed from this that nothing else mattered.” Each chapter then explains a different aspect of the Greek religious and philosophical notions which Paul had to use and to adapt by hook or by crook, if anyone in Corinth or Ephesus was to be got to listen to the truth. Wilfred’s knowledge of the sources, from classical literature to magical papyri, went deep and wide and has rarely been equalled. He knew his own Greek world, that is, as well as Dilly and Headlam knew theirs. Through all his weight of learning, it emerges unmistakably as a place of fear, craving for either a practical guide or a magical formula, and dominated by the power of the stars, in which, we are reminded, Paul himself believed, when he set out to fight against them in their courses.

  Wilfred’s work is scholarship for scholars, but, in his approach to it, he never forgot those who were not. The widening gap between theologians and anyone else to whom Christianity might be of interest was of great concern to him. “If we read a great deal of theology,” he said, “we shall need a great deal of faith.” The Gospels and Epistles were disintegrating in the devoted hands of twentieth-century structural analysts. Christ was left with no Life, and St Paul with very few Letters. The popular religious best sellers of the Thirties took no notice whatever of these developments, and Wilfred was shrewd enough not to despise them. H. V. Morton’s tour of the Holy Land, In the Steps of the Master, a consistent best seller, treated every place and event in the Gospels as simple fact. It was followed by the equally popular In the Steps of St. Paul. But if Morton were to write “In the Steps of the Theologians”, Wilfred said, we should pretty soon find ourselves in the desert.