The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  His New Testament finally appeared, officially authorized, in October 1945. It was published by Burns & Oates, who had stood loyally by him, and it began to sell at once. Over the next twelve years or so the royalties earned for the Hierarchy came to about fifty thousand pounds.

  Ronnie hoped that the Knox Version would hold its own for at least fifty years. He died before seeing it replaced by competitors—the great Jerusalem Bible, prepared by the Dominicans straight from the ancient texts, and the Revised Standard Version, which at last, in the long troubled history of the Church, has proved to be a Bible acceptable to both Protestants and Catholics. Both these translations looked to the future, and Ronnie’s to the past, but that does not take away the value of his struggle against the recalcitrance of languages and of Bishops, his “Nine Years’ Hard”, or the new ground which he broke when he persuaded English Catholics that the Bible was there to be read.

  Working doggedly away at Aldenham, he had made very little comment on the progress of the war—“politics aren’t at all in my line”—but early in August 1945, when news came of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed to him that if the Church was going to make no official pronouncement—and he waited several days for one—then, surely, “one might write something”. In God and the Atom, a long essay rather than a book, with less clarity than usual but a great deal of feeling, he made one of the earliest protests in print; he did not question God’s providence, but whatever possibilities nuclear energy might offer for good or evil, we had missed one of the greatest opportunities in history in dropping the bomb, instead of “showing what we might have done and not doing it”.

  Extracts from the little book appeared in The Tablet and it was published in November, but it did not “take”. In a letter to Winnie, thanking her at Christmas for yet another gift of home-knitted socks, he noted sadly that “my atom book hasn’t had any reviews at all that I’ve seen; but I suppose it will be unloaded on the sort of people who just ask for a ‘book,’ knowing that the one they want will be out of circulation.” It fell flat because it was not what he was expected—not really what he was “supposed”—to write, the fate of all long-established authors. The family were touched by his resignation and alarmed by his low spirits as he faced another winter of penetrating draughts at Aldenham.

  In 1946 the three remaining brothers and their two sisters were together at Beckenham Grove when their stepmother died. Mrs K. had defied the passing years, straight as a ramrod, her white head held high. She had been one of the last private customers of the Bank of England; mounting the steps in her black cotton stockings, and with her large black umbrella, she had continued to cash her small cheques, with the air of one who is used to good service. Now she was gone there had to be a sorting-out of books and furniture, since Ethel would have to stay on, and the maids intended to run 18 Beckenham Grove as a sort of discreet boarding-house. Ronnie had the chance to recover his copy of Wood’s Natural History. He sat reading the anecdotes, all of which he professed to believe, aloud: “When cut grass is given to giraffes, they eat off the upper part of it, and leave the coarse stems, just as we eat asparagus.” He was lost in rediscovery. Later it appeared that, unlike Bishop Knox, who had cut Ronnie out of his will, Mrs K. had bequeathed her small property equally. What was the best thing to do with the legacy? A characteristic idea, at the same time romantic and reserved, struck Ronnie. The cousin who, fifty years before, had courted Mrs K. had fallen on hard times, and Ronnie had always believed “that there might have been something in it” if the Bishop had not come along; so he arranged, in total secrecy, to make over the money to the old man he had never met.

  In the spring of 1947 the Actons, discouraged by the difficulties of peacetime, decided to emigrate. The nuns had already left Aldenham. Now the house would be closed down for the time being, and the chapel, perhaps, for ever. “This is to mention the fact that I’ll be uprooting from here in the autumn,” Ronnie told Winnie, “because the Actons are moving lock stock and barrel to Southern Rhodesia … This place will be off the map after September. It’s all rather depressing, and would make up well into a novel if it weren’t too like Brideshead.”

  This last remark—that of a writer who has, perhaps rashly, given away his material—showed that Ronnie wanted to try something new. Houseless, he began to look around him. What about Crewe? There, at the great rail junction, the living reality of the cold print of Bradshaw, he could take trains in all directions to see his family and friends. So many of his analogies had started there. “When a traveller gets out of the train at Crewe,” he had written, meditating on the subject of loss through death, “has he left the train, or has the train left him? There are two points of view. To his fellow travellers he has become merely a smell of stale tobacco. On the other hand they have become for him only a row of dimly remembered faces.” Or there was Hugh Benson’s Hare Street, which belonged now to the archdiocese of Westminster, but was seldom used. The old dream revived. Perhaps he could rent it, and Vernon Johnson, who was retiring from the chaplaincy, might come and share it with him. Winnie wanted him to come to Edinburgh. In spite of failing eyesight she had continued to write—even when she was induced to rest in a nursing home she had sat up all night and written a novel about a nursing home—and Ronnie had been her unfailing literary critic, as well as her tender counsellor in every difficulty. But all these schemes came to nothing. In October 1947 he went, as chaplain and paying guest, to old and dear friends, the Asquiths, at Mells, in Somerset.

  Under the original arrangement at the Manor House Ronnie was to pay eight guineas a week and his wine bill. “But of course,” he wrote, “one doesn’t know how an arrangement like that will work out, and may terminate on either side when I reach the end of the Old Testament.” In the event he stayed at Mells for the rest of his life, and was made so comfortable that the Evangelical conscience, which was his inheritance, was troubled; he wondered whether it was more demoralizing to enjoy comfort, or to take it for granted.

  Going away and leaving Mells

  Is five and twenty different hells …

  one of his occasional poems begins. “It’s a very unexacting place,” he told his family with relief, “everybody wearing what they’ve got on, and not being taken out to see farms.” He was living in a circle of Conservative Catholics, near Downside Abbey, he was warm all the year round, and felt part of a family. And the tradition of the Souls was maintained in the lovely old house and village, for Mrs Raymond Asquith, who had invited him to come, was the daughter of one of the most famous of them all, Frances Horner, the patroness of Rossetti and Burne-Jones.

  Dilly was no longer alive to comment on his younger brother’s last move from one grand house to another, but he would have agreed that it made him happy. “The three great appetites of our nature,” Ronnie had written, “are our love of pleasure, our taste for power, and our craving for human affection.” The first two meant less and less to him, the last persisted at the close.

  If it hadn’t been for Mells, or “a perch somewhere”, Ronnie, as he dramatically put it, would have been faced with sleeping on the Embankment. Both his life and Wilfred’s had touched before on this hardest test of their vows, the renunciation (while the birds of the air have nests) of a settled home. At Pembroke, when Meredith Dewey came back from service with the Navy, Wilfred was uncertain of his place in the college, but the difficulty solved itself; he continued as chaplain, Dewey became Dean. He examined Wilfred’s chapel accounts, which were accurate in total but quite inexplicable in detail, with some amazement. Then came the problem of the garden, for Dewey was also a gardener, but he was resourceful, and “in order,” he told Wilfred’s niece, “to avoid the spectacle of two clergymen throwing snails at each other, I divided the rockery in half.”

  Wilfred’s last years at Pembroke opened with a notable triumph, when in 1945 he bet R. A. Butler a bottle of claret at High Table that Labour would win the election. The Labour victory gave him as much satisfaction
as his one or two honours—the Doctorate of Divinity in 1945, and in 1948, a Fellowship of the British Academy. St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles, which had been published at the worst possible time, in 1939, was being considered at leisure now by English and German theologians, and for a short popular Life of St. Paul he was given, to his amazement, £400—he was less pleased when, in the Times list of best-selling books of the year, it was attributed to Ronnie. In the meantime he was writing something else, but that was a matter of loose notes, crammed into the drawers of his desk. He always wrote straight onto the typewriter, and never discussed work in progress.

  In 1946, as Superior of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, he conducted their annual retreat. They knew him, he told them, too well not to realize his own lamentable failure to live up to the ideals by which their life should be governed. But he wanted to say something about forgetfulness of self, not as a means of salvation—“salvation can never be more than a by-product of the main activity of our lives”—but as something necessary for its own sake. “We think of ourselves as so many billiard balls, moving up and down an infinite table, charged with the duty of avoiding collision as far as possible. ” But avoidance of collision is not enough, compassion is not enough, even sharing is not enough. We need to be able to think of ourselves as nothing. “After all, it should not be so difficult.” But it is difficult. And Wilfred recalled a remark of St Francis de Sales, that if our self-love dies half an hour before we do, we shall have done well.

  It seemed strange to think of Wilfred, of all people, suppressing his individual personality. “There has never been anyone like Father Wilfred,” wrote Canon Henry Brandreth, “and it is impossible to believe that there ever will be. It would be absurd to regard him as a typical member of the Oratory or of any other society to which he belongedh … yet he sacrificed his own interests and inclinations on its behalf with a wonderful steadfastness.” Only in this way can the free self sacrifice self-love, and still remain free.

  The only one of the four brothers to retire—though this, of course, is not the same thing as stopping work—was Eddie. At 10 Bouverie Street he regarded himself, when the war ended, as a caretaker. For him, the joke was played out, though not his sympathies or his connoisseur’s interest in the ironies of life. Some of these were pleasant—when Oxford, for example, made him an Hon.D.Litt., half a century after he had gone down without his degree; and in any case, he never tired of observing the remedies which were offered to society, even when he declared he could no longer quite understand them. He wrote, in valediction to his own brain

  O idle and incorrigible cranium,

  Why do I fill you up

  With facts about art and economics and uranium,

  You poor inverted cup?

  You lumber-room of nonsense, you rag-bag, you emporium

  Of left-off remnants, you receptacle of hay,

  What did you do with those lectures about thorium

  I lent you the other day?

  Is there any limit to the number of notorious

  And beautiful people, you sieve, you net,

  Whom I pass into your keeping, illuminate and glorious,

  And you forget?

  In a world where obviously everything worsens

  Cannot you remember overnight

  The names of thousands of self-sacrificing persons

  Who are putting it right?

  Mary and he had bought Grove Cottage, one of the oldest small houses in Hampstead, close to the edge of the Heath, and marked on earlier maps as the Two Pigeons Inn. The freehold gave them the right, if they cared to exercise it, to graze a donkey on the Heath, many old friends within reach, and the ballerina Karsavina for a neighbour. Eddie was at once in demand for every kind of local committee; “I am welcome on them all,” he observed, “because I never say anything,” but long practice at the Punch Table had taught him to effect a good deal without many words, and it gave him satisfaction to think that he had helped, through one committee and another, to add an acre of common land to the Heath. The air of the hill village suited him as it had always done. “He seemed in good form, I thought,” Ronnie reported to Winnie, “and dodging the traffic remarkably well for a man who always stops in his tracks when a remark occurs to him.”

  The Tatler asked him to write their Book Page in succession to his friend Elizabeth Bowen, and for some years he continued to go down to the Table on Wednesdays, bidding a gradual farewell to Fleet Street. It was a source of pride to him that his son, safely returned from prisoner-of-war camp, was making a name for himself as a Far Eastern correspondent. But, although Eddie had long ago foretold the post-war difficulties of his country, he had hardly counted on the disappearance of the magazines and dailies, one after another, or, eventually, of the Punch offices being sold. Still, the paper was tough, and survived.

  Vogue la galère! [Beachcomber wrote to him] A fig for melancholy! For is not the merry maid May here, with the east wind in her breath, her gift of sleet, and promise of snow? And is not the cobalt bomb, with a warhead crammed with deadly germs, on its way? What a world it is—but how lucky we are to remember what it was once like.

  Fleet Street, in its turn, missed “Evoe”. Stories accumulated about him, many of them associated with the journalist-haunted pubs and wine cellars of the quarter. On one occasion, when a few of the Punch staff were having a late drink together, the barmaid looked with curiosity at Eddie’s neat dark overcoat, dark hat and impeccably rolled umbrella. “What do you do for a living?” Eddie folded his hands on his umbrella and looked down at the ground. “I live by my wits,” he said. And that was true enough.

  By the Christmas of 1948 a first grandchild had been born, but the acknowledged guest of honour at Grove Cottage, as always, was Wilfred. There were frosted decorations on the table that year, which momentarily caught light from a candle. Wilfred looked on serenely. He was warned that “the snow was on fire”. “So it is! How uncharacteristic!”

  It was for the last time. At the end of the year Wilfred, who had been suffering, like Dilly before him, rather more pain than he admitted, underwent an operation. For the Christmas of 1949 he could not leave Cambridge, and was the guest of the Master, S. C. Roberts. The question of “hard sauce” with the pudding, absolutely necessary to the festival, arose. Wilfred was on a rigorous diet. “I don’t know if any man has eaten hard sauce with rice pudding before,” he wrote, “but a man can try.”

  In January he told Eddie that he had urged the medicine men to remove their stray ironmongery (which he compared to the grapescissors which Aunt Fanny had always kept on the table at Edmundthorpe), so that he could come up to Hampstead, “but,” he added in a postscript, “an unexpected setback.” The whole business of being looked after, of giving so much trouble to the nurses, distressed him much more than the pain, which he referred to, when it grew intense, only in one short letter: “O Lord, how long?” There were long spells of unconsciousness, and he could not read his Daily Office, or open the letters that poured into Addenbrooke’s Hospital, some of these from Hoxton, and even from Stratford. “Do you remember the old East End ‘Wish yer well’?” Stephen Langton wrote. “Well, I do, I do.”

  Ronnie came up to Cambridge and stood, looking hollow and shrivelled with cold, totally miserable. “Can’t I buy him anything?” he asked. “I seem to have plenty of money.” Since Lady Acton had gone to Rhodesia, there was no one to make him invest it. Perhaps champagne? But Wilfred’s condition defeated earthly generosity. On 9 February, he died.

  So many students wanted to get into Pembroke Chapel for the memorial service that there had to be a ballot for tickets. It was hard to envisage life in college without their tattered chaplain.

  Meredith Dewey gave Eddie a list of Wilfred’s possessions. The only “good” things had been a scarlet gown, which really belonged to the Bishopric of Ely, and an oak desk, which really belonged to Pembroke. The sofa, rather decrepit, might be worth three pounds, the typewriter “was not a very up-to-date mac
hine, I think”. His clothes were left to the Franciscans, his books to the college. Dewey also asked Eddie to come to Cambridge as often as he could. “The resemblance,” he wrote, “is consoling.”

  In extreme illness, Wilfred had written, the soul “fetches its prayer”, as the body fetches its breath. Those who had been with him had seen this. He had also written that we should be wrong to think of eternity as static, and, in consequence, boring. Why should we not go on, through all eternity, growing in love and in our power to love?

  The scattered papers in the drawer turned out to be towards a draft of a book on the sources of the Synoptic Gospels, and the interrelationship between them. This was anything but a fashionable subject. The prevailing scholarly method was “form criticism”, which analysed the Gospels into a series of exemplary narratives improvised by an undefined body, the early Church, to meet the political and moral needs of the first century. The question was no longer “What did Jesus teach?” but “What kind of awkward situations led the early Christians to invent these stories?” The idea that the Gospels might be meant to give any kind of real picture of Christ’s life on earth, or that they drew on contemporary sources, or in fact had any sources at all, had receded far into the background. Wilfred, of course, had studied Formgeschichte, but found it unconvincing. His knowledge of Hellenistic literature made him certain that the Gospels were not folk tales but spiritual biographies, and that each was written, not by a harassed committee, but by an author. Beyond this, as always, he uncompromisingly faced the larger question: by what right do we teach children that Christ was born in Bethlehem if we do not believe it?