The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  He was attempting to go back, therefore, to the Synoptic problem in its classical form. Whoever the writers called Matthew, Mark and Luke really were, they must partly have taken their information from each other, partly had independent material of their own. Can we deduce what that material was, and where it came from? Some of his ideas on the subject had already been presented to his colleagues in Cambridge, the rest was in notes, and nothing was complete. The obvious fate of these papers seemed to be first of all a dusty file, and then oblivion. But the most distinguished of Wilfred’s pupils, Henry Chadwick (later Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge), came to their rescue. At the cost of much hard work he sorted them out and collated them; they were published in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press. Wilfred Knox, therefore, turned out to be even more fortunate than Walter Headlam.

  After Wilfred’s death, Eddie gave up fishing the Arrow and the Lug. In 1959 he was invited by the University of Cambridge to give the Leslie Stephen Lecture; they wanted him, as a kind of memorial, to speak about Wilfred, but he found that he could not do it. “Mortal things touch the mind,” but even Virgil had not been able to explain them any farther than that. He offered, instead, as a subject the Mechanism of Satire.

  Eddie’s own humour came partly from sheer love of words. A spontaneous pun-maker, who once started an address to the Omar Khayyam Society with the words “Unaccustomarkhayyam to public speaking,” he knew that this talent should be kept within limits. It had made him more critical, for instance, than most people of Ulysses, because he thought that Joyce had no one to tell him that puns could become a dangerous habit. Real humour, Eddie thought, lay not in ingenuity but incongruity, particularly in relation to the dignified place which man has assigned to himself in the scheme of things.

  That was what he wanted to tell his audience at Cambridge. He divided classical satirists into two classes—fierce men starving in garrets, and renouncing popularity and circulation to dwell in tubs, and calm good-livers “who tell amusingly the kind of truth that no one has ever denied.” But for the present century the right spirit, he believed, was self-satire, the ability to see humour in the constant small defeats of life, and “the power to be startled by nothing, however extravagant.” The subject, in the end, turned out to be more relevant than it had seemed, as anyone could have told who had heard Eddie and Wilfred laughing together.

  The eldest and the youngest brothers, left as survivors, had not altered their relationship since the days at Aston. Eddie still marvelled at the prodigy. It was not that congratulations or honours had changed Ronnie, who received them gratefully, but always quite naturally. At a private audience with the Pope to mark his appointment (in 1951) as Pronotary Apostolic, he chatted for half an hour about the Loch Ness monster, in which His Holiness was much interested. But, to Eddie, Ronnie still seemed to need both protection and a certain amount of keeping in order. This, by and large, was his attitude at public celebrations.

  On Ronnie’s sixtieth birthday his friends invited him to a dinner, at which the nostalgic atmosphere was rather agreeably sharpened by Evelyn Waugh. To Ronnie’s niece, who wanted to leave early to look after her baby, he snapped: “Children! Nonsense! Nothing so easily replaceable!” Everyone must stay. Ronnie himself spoke appropriately of the past, pitying those who had not known the years before 1914, “the golden age of the liberal professions”. Eddie said a few words, recalling that Ronnie had been literate since the age of eighteen months, and since then it had been “increasingly difficult to do anything about him”.

  A much grander occasion was the luncheon at the Hyde Park Hotel, under the presidency of Cardinal Griffin, to mark the completion of the Knox Bible. This title, as Ronnie said, seemed to admit him to the company of Pullman, and Hoover, and the Earl of Sandwich, as someone whose name would be remembered only by a product. It was also the moment for him to pay tribute, which he did most generously, to all who had helped him and all who had sent in suggestions, though he couldn’t resist thanking, in conclusion, all who had been kind enough not to send any. Nothing was said about his moments of discouragement. But the occasion was a little marred because no ladies were asked. This was not by Ronnie’s wish, but there was “feeling”, and the ladies organized a separate luncheon, at the same time, in an adjoining room. So the Knox translation sailed out, to the very end, on stormy waters.

  Lady Acton, in particular, was much missed, but in the spring of 1954 Ronnie had received an invitation to visit the Actons at M’bebi, their farm in Southern Rhodesia. For this quite exceptional venture outside England he kept a travel diary. Quite deliberately, he rested his mind by referring new impressions to the old. “The longer one lives, the more one’s pleasures are conditioned by memory. ” The palms were like photographs in missionary magazines, the giraffes like illustrations in Wood’s Natural History, and on the coast at Chwaka, on the way out, “the natives have exactly those principles of punting which I learned from Julian Grenfell in 1907.” All his energies were saved for renewing old kindnesses with old friends. From this point of view the visit was an unqualified success; “[Lord Acton] said, just before we parted, that it was wonderful being able to pick up life exactly where we left it six years ago.” But Africa did not impress him as a possible place of retirement. It seemed to him, like Greek democracy, “built up against a background of slaves,” and it was too hot. On his return (“getting into a train at Paddington,” he noted thankfully), he came up to London and spent an evening at Grove Cottage. The brothers exchanged few words about the expedition. “Well, how were the Actons?” “Very well; rather anxious to prove that it was a good thing to live in Rhodesia.” “And is it?” “It won’t be.”

  Later on that evening, when the brothers were discussing books, Ronnie said tentatively: “Evelyn Waugh writes quite decently, don’t you think?” This was high praise. Ronnie (like Eddie) had been approached by several publishers to write his autobiography, a kind of continuation, that is, of A Spiritual Aeneid, but he was not making much headway. If anyone was to write about him, and he supposed it might come to that, better have someone who wrote quite decently.

  The idea of an autobiography became merged with another project which he had set himself, as soon as his translation of the Bible was finished. He wanted to justify the existence of God to the reason—to show that it is unreasonable to deny God. Unless this was done conclusively, the reason could not be regarded as immortal; if it denied God, it could not survive death. Here, as Ronnie admitted, he was directly challenging Pascal, who had called on reason to recognize its own shortcomings, and to admit how much it depended on the body, and how little it knew in comparison with the heart. In defiance of Pascal, he turned back to the five classic proofs which had made so little effect on his congregations at the chaplaincy, and particularly to his favourite, the third, the Argument from Contingency. This, he thought, was one that occurred naturally to every man as he passed his sixtieth birthday. “Few of us are so unimaginative as to pass a milestone of that kind without giving a thought to the question, ‘If my first birthday hadn’t happened, what then? … That I exist, I cannot doubt; that my existence belongs to me, is in any way part of my nature, I cannot intelligibly maintain.’ We know that we are different from, say, characters in a book. By what means, then, are we projected into the world, an actuality?”

  And yet, even as he tried to plan out his apologia, he was not quite satisfied with it. Reason, after all, was not enough—he wanted his readers to feel “a glow of assent”, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The proof must be “humanized”, and this returns him to his own experience. “This is an old man’s book,” he wrote, by way of a preface, but old men, after all, have experience, and have some idea of how human minds work. An old man “has not changed his point of view, but he has begun to understand the other man’s … if I may use words in a grossly unphilosophical sense, what he demands now is not so much truth, as reality.”

  But as Ronnie struggled with these new ide
as, so much broader and more tolerant than any he had let himself express before, in either the Anglican or the Catholic Church, a doubt assailed him as to whether he could do it. His book exists only in the opening fragments and the preface, which were printed in The Tablet. He had never considered himself good at apologetics. Anyone who came to him for them, he used to say, was at the wrong counter. And besides this, the winter of 1956 found him unaccountably tired. Perhaps somebody else, better qualified or more hopeful than himself, would persevere with the book he would never finish. Exoriare aliquis.

  Ronnie was the third of the brothers to struggle against cancer—in his case, cancer of the liver, which meant increasing spells of nausea and weakness. Not having been told exactly what was wrong with him, he asked Winnie if she could come away with him to Torquay, to try the effect of sea air, but she could not afford to do so, and money matters were always too delicate between them for him to offer to pay. Evelyn Waugh and his wife volunteered to accompany him instead. A large hotel in an expensive seaside resort seemed a curious choice for a sick man who could scarcely eat, walk, or read with comfort, and Waugh found time hanging heavily on his hands, but he was, at least, able to collect some material for the biography he had now agreed to write. On his return to Mells, Ronnie, who was noticeably weaker, celebrated mass in the chapel for the last time at the beginning of June.

  Like Eddie, Ronnie had been asked, as an honour, to give a public lecture—the Romanes, which is delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. The subject was to be “On English Translation”, and Ronnie, having accepted the previous autumn, was determined, although by now he found speech difficult, to deliver it. The date fixed was 11 June 1957. He came up to Oxford and stayed the night at Worcester, as the guest of the Vice-Chancellor, J. C. Masterman. Worcester is near the railway-line, and his friends were afraid he might be disturbed by the noise of shunting, which went on the whole night through. But Ronnie slept well. “Trains, to me, you must remember, are music,” he said the next morning. Later in the day the doctors gave him an injection which it was hoped would carry him through. He was allowed to sit down, without taking part in the formal procession, and wait with his typescript in front of him while the audience crowded in—an Oxford audience, the one he knew best of all, and had known for a lifetime.

  When he appeared [Father Corbishley wrote], even those who had seen him quite lately at Mells were shocked to see the way in which the ravages of the diseased liver had stained his face an almost brilliant yellow, set off by the whiteness of the collar. The Vice-Chancellor entered. The lecture began.

  We held our breath for the first paragraph, wondering if we should be disappointed … We need not have feared. The voice, gentle as ever, yet clear and strong, began. All the old magic was there. Ripple after ripple of laughter ran through the theatre, to be hushed to silence as his argument developed … It was a triumph of literary criticism; still more it was a triumph of simple human courage.

  We almost forgot that he was under sentence of death, until the calm, serene voice quoted, as an example of exact and faithful translation … the rendering by William Johnson Cory of a Greek epigram:

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

  They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept when I remembered how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

  A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,

  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

  For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

  A second opinion on Ronnie’s condition was scarcely necessary, but he was anxious to know how much working life he had left. He went straight on from Oxford to London, where Harold Macmillan, now the Prime Minister, had arranged for him to stay the night at 10 Downing Street; Sir Horace Evans was to make an examination the next day.

  My Romanes lecture went absolutely all right, but I was doped [Ronnie wrote to Winnie], and I came back quite flattened out. Sir Horace Evans fully supports Dr Williams’ diagnosis—I asked him whether he’d reckon my expectation of life in weeks or months, and he said months … so I think on the whole my lines have fallen in pleasant places … Harold Macmillan saw me off at the station himself, and the station-master took off his hat to me twice before the train left.

  The Prime Minister had wished him a comfortable journey. “It will be a very long one,” Ronnie replied.

  In the few weeks of consciousness he had left, he wrote with painful clarity to his friends to wish them goodbye, sometimes mentioning his condition quite casually, towards the end of the letter. Not all of them by any means were Catholics, and some he had not seen for years. He made one or two small requests, knowing that this would make the letter easier to answer. He told the Church of England rector of Mells how intensely cold he felt, even though it was the height of summer, and asked if he would lend him his heavy cloak. All his correspondents, of whatever faith, were asked for their prayers—oremus invicem—let us pray for one another.

  As to his remaining brother, he wrote to him, with the last of a lifetime of family understatements, that “some kind of a sentence seems to have been pronounced.” There was no need for more, they understood each other too well.

  Ronnie died on 24 August 1957. A few days later, Eddie got a letter of sympathy from Rose Macaulay, that sharpest-tongued, but kindest-hearted, of writers. She said that she knew how he felt—“like a survivor from a shipwreck”. For her, the world was much impoverished. Like many others, she had been glad to feel, while all four brothers were alive, that one need never be very far away from a Knox.

  Bibliography

  (other than titles by the Knox brothers themselves)

  1. BIOGRAPHICAL

  Basileon: A Magazine of King’s College, Cambridge 1900–1914. Facsimile edition, with an introduction by Sir Charles Tennyson (1974).

  Birks, Rev. Herbert: The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Valpy French (1895).

  Bone, James: The London Perambulator (1925).

  Brandreth, Canon Henry: The Oratory of the Good Shepherd: An Historical Sketch (privately printed, 1958).

  Brittain, Frederick: It’s a Don’s Life (1972).

  Caraman, Fr Philip, S.J.: C. C. Martindale: A Biography (1967).

  Clinton-Baddeley, V. C.: Aladdin: or, Love Will Find Out the Way, with additional material by Frank Birch (1931).

  Corbishley, Fr Thomas, S.J.: Ronald Knox the Priest (1964).

  Dewey, Rev. Meredith: Obituary of Wilfred Knox. Pembroke College Annual Gazette, No. 24, December 1950.

  Eyres, Laurence: “Some Edmundian Memories”. The Edmundian, Autumn 1957.

  Fothergill, J. R.: An Innkeeper’s Diary (1933).

  Fowler, J. H.: The Life and Letters of Edward Lee Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, 1910–19 (1922).

  Harrod, R. F.: The Life of John Maynard Keynes (1951).

  Hassall, Christopher: Rupert Brooke: A Biography (1964).

  Haynes, E. S. P.: A Lawyer’s Notebook (1933).

  Headlam, Walter: Letters and Poems, with a Memoir by C. H. Headlam (1910).

  Knox, Rt. Rev. Edmund A.: Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (1935).

  Lansbury, George: Socialism for the Poor: The End of Pauperism (1909).

  Leslie, Sir Shane: The End of a Chapter (1916).

  Lindley, Sir Francis: Lord Lovat: A Biography (1935).

  Lovat, Laura: Maurice Baring: A Postscript (1947).

  McDougall, D.: Fifty Years a Borough: The Story of West Ham (County Borough of West Ham, 1936).

  Mosley, Nicholas: Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death, 1888–1915 (1976).

  Peck, Lady Winifred: A Little Learning: or, A Victorian Childhood (1952).

  ________: Home for the Holidays (1955).

  Price, R. G. G.: A History of Punch (1957).

  Ribblesdale, Lord: Charles Liste
r: Letters and Recollections, with a Memoir by His Father (one chapter by Ronald Knox) (1917).

  Simpson, Maj.-Gen. Charles Rudyard: The History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914–1918 (1931).

  Speaight, Robert: The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957).

  _______: Ronald Knox the Writer (1966).

  Spencer, Gilbert, R.A.: Memoirs of a Painter (1974).

  Usborne, Richard: A Century of Summer Fields 1864–1964 (1964).

  Waugh, Evelyn: The Life of Ronald Knox (1959).

  2. HERODAS

  Arnott, W. G.: “Walter Headlam and Herodas”. Proceedings of the African Classical

  Association, Vol. 10, 1947. Kenyon, F. W.: Classical Texts from Papyri in the British Museum (1891). ________: Palaeography of Greek Papyri (1899).

  3. CRYPTOGRAPHY

  (a) General

  Kahn, David: The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (1966).

  (b) Room 40, 1914–1918

  Birch, Frank: Alice in I.D.25 (a satire on life in Room 40) (privately printed, 1918).

  Fraser, Lionel W.: All to the Good (1963).

  James, Sir William: Alfred Ewing: The Man of Room 40 (1939).

  _______: The Sky Was Always Blue (1951).

  _______: The Eyes of the Navy: A Biographical Study of Sir Reginald Hall (1955).

  Marder, A. J.: The War at Sea: From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (1965).

  (c) The ARCOS Incident

  ARCOS (All Russian Co-Operative Society): “Police Raid on the Trade Delegation”. Inostrannoye Torgovoye Obozreniye (Review of Foreign Trade), 16 May 1927.