The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  To the young men, the “rules” of the cottage seemed odd at first. The fire, for reasons of wartime economy, might not be lit till four o’clock. One former student (Canon Murray MacDonald) recalls “having the temerity to light it in the morning. A note was placed on the fireguard restating the rules: not before four.” The trout which Wilfred caught were cooked by Mrs Moses and handed out in rotation: “If it was your turn you had it, like it or not.”

  He somehow communicated with everyone a deep love from a broken unloving man … Looking back now one realises how deeply he had been hurt, how much he longed for simple affection, how nervous of it he was, and how he hid behind his wit and apparent tartness. The last time I saw him, I wanted to give him a simple parting gift for all that he had done for me. I saw a reproduction of a map of the Radnor-Hereford border. I knew that he would have been too embarrassed to have received it from me, so I left it in his rooms with a note. I was amazed how delighted he was to have it, not simply for what it was but that somebody had given him a present.

  In point of fact Wilfred was given many presents, though each one seemed to amaze him, but this is a very perceptive account, for it shows, what the writer could not guess at, the enduring pain at the loss of his brother. Others who came to Knill were able to break through the nervousness. Horace Dammers, the present Dean of Bristol, felt only his affection, helpfulness and ingenuity. Wilfred confided in him “that he had a recurrent nightmare of sitting in a small boat in the middle of a large lake with his brother Ronnie, while the latter attempted to convert him to Roman Catholicism.” This was perhaps as far as Wilfred cared to go on the subject; on another occasion, up on the shoulder of the hill near Offa’s Dyke, Wilfred pointed to a man in the far distance, aiming a shotgun, presumably at a rabbit. “If that was murder, we should be the only witnesses, ” he told Dammers, and he invented on the spot, with great precision, the plot of a detective story. One evening he informed the young men that he was writing a book on ethics in two volumes: Part 1, Respect to the Clergy; Part 2, Any Other Virtues. Some of them believed this at first, but not for long. “He was the sort of man,” says another correspondent, “who understood every natural joy and sorrow that we could feel at that age, but couldn’t find his own collar stud.” This, however is a misapprehension, because Wilfred never had any collar studs; he used a paper clip.

  As always, he put his pastoral work first. As the short-course students passed rapidly through their University year, Wilfred, for many of them, was the only senior member of the college they really knew. For some of them, this odd figure was their abiding memory of Cambridge. Every year he asked every student in Pembroke to tea, and went on asking, at the risk of a snub, until the invitation was accepted; his lists were like the elements of a game, indeed, of an elimination tournament. And the young men did come, though the majority were not sure why.

  Wilfred’s standards of tea-giving were high, having remained unchanged since Edmundthorpe. There had to be two cakes, one “fancy”, the other a plum cake, with one slice already cut to put visitors at their ease. As rationing grew stricter—the shortages were even worse in Cambridge than in Bletchley—Wilfred could be seen, tattered, persevering, often half-freezing, in the dawn queue outside Fitzbillies, the famous cake shop in King’s Parade. His guests must be honoured. Some people had their own “arrangements” with the shop, but Wilfred would never have dreamed of such a thing.

  Letters from Service personnel on every front recalled his heroic patience in the queue. Tobacco was sent from Mount Carmel, butter and sugar (“to lighten the task of providing those teas”) from New Zealand, plants for the rock garden from Hong Kong. Someone had found a copy of St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles in Rawalpindi, on the way to the North-West Frontier. Living in barracks on four shillings a day, they “kept sane” by writing, and appealed for help when they felt hopelessly alone, or “contaminated by the filth of the world”. All of them would have liked to get back, if only for a day, to the tobacco-choked atmosphere of the chaplain’s rooms on Staircase M. They had not realized—one of them not until he had his arm and half his side blown away—how much they would miss Cambridge.

  Dammers, now a gunner in North Africa, wrote in 1943 that he felt discouraged, but

  I feel as soon as you read this that reinforcements will come pouring over the ether (or whatever the medium for such things is) and meanwhile I must try again. In all seriousness this kind of life makes it difficult for feeble people like myself to keep contact with God and sometimes I feel deeply ashamed of myself. On the other hand I feel a sort of instinct (whether right or wrong I don’t know) against forcing myself to such contact. I feel it should come naturally and get a bit miserable when it doesn’t. Presumably I share all this with hundreds of thousands of others but there it is, I feel that an effort of some sort is required but am not quite clear about what. We are now allowed to recount our battle experiences. Mine are negligible. On the whole I enjoy action. One’s faculties are extended and one has little time to think, while performing one’s technical duties, what a beastly business it is to direct masses of high-explosive against your fellow-men whose most earnest desire is to do the same to you. The only unpleasantnesses are occasional lack of sleep … and when one is shelled or bombed or machine-gunned from the air … Even so the danger is I imagine less than that involved in bicycling fast down King’s Parade twice a week.

  By no means all the correspondents cared anything about religion, but Wilfred saw to it that they cared about something. “Much worse than drifting,” he thought, “is letting others drift.”

  The attendance in chapel, which a priest watches as carefully as an editor watches the circulation, went steadily higher. Wilfred’s methods were a curious mixture of briskness and spirituality. There were no concessions. Students were not asked to “brighten up” the services. He believed that a sermon should never last more than ten minutes; every minute after that bored the listener and undid the work of two minutes, so that after fifteen minutes you were, so to speak, preaching in reverse and ought logically to have a deduction made from your pay. He was no more audible than he had ever been, but relied on people to make the effort to hear his rapid, often cryptic sentences.

  He could make an impression, quite unconsciously as always, on those who did not know him at all. Mr Iain Mackenzie writes:

  As an undergraduate of Fitzwilliam House, reading for Part 1 of the English Tripos between 1944 and 1946, I used to go at least once a week in term to Pembroke College for supervisions from Mr (later Professor) Basil Willey. Quite often, when passing the porter’s lodge at Pembroke, one had to stand aside for an elderly cleric wheeling out his bicycle. He always looked straight in front of him and seemed entirely oblivious of the presence of others; but I was conscious enough of an inner strength in him to find out who he was, and although I never met him, I know that these very small contacts helped me to grow in the Christian faith.

  Probably Wilfred was only going to snap up the last cake at Fitzbillies. But as a true evidence of his character this would make no difference. There are very many ways of bearing witness. When he was told that prayer was wish-fulfilment, or a compensation device, Wilfred never contradicted; he said he did not particularly mind what it was called; it existed.

  But only a very few of his friends knew that during the war years he had to pass through a “black night of the soul”, no less painful to a Christian because so many have experienced it. At one point he could not even repeat the Lord’s Prayer with any sense of its meaning. Then the ordeal passed, and he came out into clear daylight again.

  Once a year, without fail, Ronnie came over from Aldenham to have dinner with Wilfred in Pembroke. The High Table were disappointed on these occasions by his silence. He was not on his own ground, and was haunted by a Cambridge memory of 1937, when a visiting professor had leaned towards him with the remark, “Well, Monsignor, I haven’t heard you say anything very witty yet.” The meeting provided a sort of competition i
n clerical shabbiness, as the brothers’ black suits grew nearer to absolute incoherence. Wilfred’s cassock was almost green, Ronnie’s collars so much too big for him that it was difficult to imagine when they could have been bought. “Clothing coupons” were issued to them, as to everyone else, during the war; but they gave them all away.

  In going to Shropshire, Ronnie was returning to the Border country which they all loved, Housman country, the “blue remembered hills”. With Lady Acton’s eager patronage, he had begun to draw up schemes and headings (“for I cannot work without headings”) for the immense task of Bible translation. Contentment, as being too easy, almost “cheating”, always made Ronnie somewhat anxious; however, it was not to last long.

  One thing he had dreaded in leaving Oxford had been the possibility of a convent chaplaincy. “There are two kinds of nun,” he told Evoe, “those who do you much too well, and those who do you terribly badly.” So far he had not had to face either for any length of time, but, at Aldenham in 1939, a convent came to him. The Sisters of the Assumption, who had a girls’ school in intensely respectable Kensington Square, decided, like many other establishments, to evacuate them to the country until the threat of air raids was past. They began to arrive, the nuns, fifty girls and their luggage, at the beginning of September.

  Ronnie therefore became for the duration of the war a convent chaplain, with board and lodging, but no pay. He still travelled tirelessly as a preacher; the trains still ran, unheated and blacked out; the 10 a.m. to York, which Ronnie believed was the foundation of the whole British railway system, still left King’s Cross every morning. One of the restrictions which he had made for himself was that he could visit members of his family only if it could be fitted into his official engagements. His “plans” were sent out in all directions, on postcards, in his fine handwriting.

  Aldenham changed. As in the days of the Crusades, the wartime ladies of England ruled their homes and farms much more rigorously than the men who had gone to battle. The land must produce food; Aldenham produced, principally, root crops and pigs. The “plans” were now entered in Tildsley’s Farm Diaries, and Ronnie, who could not help learning things by heart, took a morbid pleasure in knowing, for example, that the Maximum Grant for Field Drainage, Other Than Mole Drainage, was £7 10s. But he could not feel that he was of much help on the farm. His indigestion grew worse; his nose was red, his fingers blue with cold, emerging from woollen mittens. Lady Acton had necessarily to make the most economical use of space after the convent had been housed, and there was only one smallish room left for her own farm accounting and Ronnie’s work; the table had to be cleared for his meals. At no time did he have a secretary. All the typing, retyping, packing, posting (but Ronnie was good with string), all the filing, indexing and proof correcting, he did for himself.

  Many people who have never read his version, or indeed any version, have come to respect Ronnie as the man who tackled the Bible single-handed. This, though it was the way that suited him best, was not what had been originally intended. The terms of the commission, imprecise though they were, required Ronnie to work with a committee, under the chairmanship of the Bishop of Lancaster; one of the members was Charlie Martindale, who wrote to his father in 1939: “I expect to emigrate to Oxford and can quietly help Ronald Knox in his translation of the Vulgate … He was sure he could not get me as assistant. Now he has got me.” Cardinal Hinsley had hoped for a joint version from these two eminent scholars. Martindale, however, found that “all [Knox] wants me to do is to make a paraphrase of the most obscure passages in St Paul and St John.” He did not object to this, but he was busy, the committee rarely met, and Ronnie departed to Aldenham.

  The Cardinal was doubtful whether somewhere “within easier access to libraries” would not have been more suitable. Ronnie seemed to be taking on the almost impossible. Newman, after all, had only hoped to be the editor of a team of Bible translators. Wilfred never trusted his own Hebrew, but relied on Dr Loewe, the Cambridge Lecturer in Rabbinics. Dilly had all the resources of the British Museum and of King’s. Ronnie, in the depths of Shropshire, had to entrust all his consultations over minute shades of meaning to the uncertain wartime post. And at his elbow, so to speak, stood the lively new Protestant translations and the only too well remembered Authorized Version, learned by heart with Uncle Lindsey, as unwelcome to him now as it was to Dilly, but impossible, while he could still think and breathe, to forget. He reminded himself that the Authorized Version was never really authorized at all, certainly not by Parliament, but this did not help him.

  Ronnie did not have Newman’s musical ear, nor his pastoral touch with ordinary people, but as a translator he was sympathetic, fastidious and reverent. Possibly, as Belloc once suggested, he was “insufficiently coarse”. His object was still to produce a Vulgate which could be read aloud with pleasure and which English Catholics, perhaps for the first time, might study together at home. “Our first job is to make them love it. If they don’t love it, they won’t read it.”

  He was a wordmaster, but the words of the New Testament cannot be made servants. On a single phrase, consolation may stand or fall. Is the angels’ message “Peace on earth, good will toward men” or (as in the Vulgate) the much more grudging “Peace on earth to men of good will”? The question turns on whether a Greek noun is in the nominative or the genitive case. Wilfred, who was consulted, argued convincingly for “good will toward men”, but Ronnie felt obliged to stick to the Vulgate. The problem was to come up time and again. What did Jesus say to Mary Magdalen, in the mysterious early morning appearance in the garden? Was it the traditional “Do not touch me”, suggesting a spiritual body beyond our comprehension, or “Do not cling to me thus”, suggesting an earthly one? Footnotes and commentaries can modify, but no one reads them, least of all those in search of comfort.

  During the next few years Ronnie was to meet many discouragements. The Hierarchy had approved his work, but persisted in feeling that he ought really to be doing something different. He was urged first of all to go on a propaganda trip to the United States (“In so far as I am justified in making a decision, my answer must be No. [The Ministry] is thinking of a much younger R.A.K., who in 1917 might have been of some use”); then to go back to Oxford to counteract what his bishop called “the confounded left-wingers and pro-Russians”. This task was taken on by his old friend Vernon Johnson, who became chaplain to both men and women students. Ronnie emerged from each of these proposals like Christian escaping from By-Path Meadow. If he had been ordered to go, he would of course have obeyed, but, with an amazing fund of quiet obstinacy, he demurred and survived.

  The convent school, meanwhile, had become a source of real happiness. The nuns he always found intimidating, and he never managed to identify the Sister who darned his clothes, but the girls became, first teasingly and then deeply, attached to him. They were an easier generation than his own highly strung nephews and niece. Schoolchildren have a large tolerance of age, little habits, out-of-date slang, where they can detect sincerity. It was for the Assumption girls that Ronnie wrote his popular Creed in Slow Motion and Mass in Slow Motion. They show him at his best just where Dilly was at his worst—in the art of clear explanation.

  He wrote these things easily; most of his strength had to go into the Knox Bible. It mattered to him in every possible way that the Church should approve of it. At the end of the winter of 1939 he submitted a draft version of passages from St Matthew’s Gospel for the approval of his committee. To his dismay, Martindale raised sixty-four objections to the first chapter alone.

  The impetuous Martindale had wanted something quite different. Knowing Ronnie’s ear for style, he had hoped for three Gospels distinct from each other, “making the reader feel the real delicate difference between the naive Mark, the cultured Luke, the rather stiff Matthew.” At the same time it must be right for dockers, miners and soldiers. Ronnie had proposed to write in decent, timeless English, but there was no such thing as a timeless language, and w
hat did “decent” mean? Were dockers decent?

  To disagree with Martindale, and on this subject above all, was agonizing. But events took an unexpected turn. Martindale, who really wanted to devote himself to the wounded and dying, reluctantly accepted an invitation to lecture in Copenhagen. Two days later the Germans invaded; he was trapped and interned, and had to spend the next five years miserably checking his engagement book to see where he should have been on that particular day. Ronnie’s friends, and even the nuns, were disposed to look on this as a blessing, but they were wrong. Martindale, though he was as quarrelsome as St Jerome himself, had the authority that was needed. Without him, Ronnie was driven back on to his own strength of will, and perhaps he asked too much of it.

  He was most at ease with the Epistles of St Paul, which, many Catholics agree, he made intelligible to them for the first time. In September 1941 he was finishing 2 Corinthians, when the Bishop of Southwark, who had at last found time to look at the draft of St Matthew, reported that he didn’t like it: “It is a complete change from what we have used so long.” This criticism, with its implication that any new translation ought to be exactly like the old ones, was almost too much for Ronnie, and he offered his resignation. The Cardinal, however, having routed the Bishop, persuaded him to go on.

  Sometimes he missed his family intensely. “Brother is the man to stand by brother,” he wrote in answer to a correspondent. “If I went on the rocks, I have three brothers and two sisters to keep me out of the workhouse.” During the London air raids he worried about Eddie. In the green heart of Shropshire the bombing seemed remote, and yet it arrived every day in the news columns of The Times.

  The air raids, however, had a mildly stimulating effect on Eddie. “With casual courage,” wrote his assistant editor, Humphrey Ellis, “he took to wandering about wherever the bombs fell thickest, with a bottle of whisky in his pocket, looking for people who needed it.”