Ronnie, who had rather expected “fatal opulence”, as though the Knoxes were entering a new chapter of Barchester Towers, was a little dashed to be told by Mrs K. that “it wouldn’t make much difference; it would make much more if we all got scholarships.” Perhaps even she was disconcerted by a moving day of such formidable proportions—it was during this move that Wilfred’s Bits of Old Churches were finally dispersed—and still more by the sight of Bishopscourt, the family’s new home in Manchester.
Dear Father [Ronnie wrote],
I told you that I didn’t want us to be better off, but only not worse off, so I am quite happy. Besides, you speak as if keeping a carriage was a necessary expense without any remuneration; but if we have a carriage we save cab-fares. Again, if we keep a garden, no more (or at any rate a little less) need to buy vegetables; even extra hospitality always has its remains; with charity the gain is purely moral. So we are practically better off.
About the house sounds more serious. But I am quite ready to
… let my childish eyes
Distort it into paradise …
(this is not a quotation but a thing I have just made up à propos). Anyway there is a walled garden which has a small dogs’ graveyard in it. And whatever it’s like, I shall be ready to be happy there.
Bishopscourt, behind its forbidding gateway and under its mask of soot, was about two miles north of the Cathedral; an electric tram passed within about thirty yards, but you had to be adept—as all the boys were by this time—at jumping off at the right place. There were three acres of garden, “the soil of which,” the Bishop recalled, “was, on the whole, waterlogged, and the surface blackened with coal-dust and fog.” The rooms were ill-arranged, and the butler, who “went” with the house, was offended to find the chaplain working next door to his pantry in a kind of cupboard. “My Lord,” he said, “what is to become of my dignity?” There was, however, plenty of room to entertain visitors on a large scale, from the Ragged School children to the justices of Assize, and to put up ordination candidates; the Bishop was satisfied. Two bathrooms were put in, and the drainage improved, and although the curtains were still being hung in the front rooms as the first Examining Chaplain appeared in the drive, Mrs K. was immediately her charming, welcoming self. Alice, the grumbling cook, and Richmond, the parlour maid, retreated into the cavernous kitchen, and the Bishop entered upon a further twenty years of selfless hospitality.
“What one chiefly remembers of Manchester,” Eddie wrote, “is the great dray-horses bringing loads of cotton to be bleached; they made a tremendous noise, and struck sparks, because of the stone setts.” When they were not at large in the roaring city, the boys took possession of a darkish, dampish study on the ground floor. If they wanted to smoke, they climbed up on to the roof and sat on the top of the glass dome of the entrance hall, where a false step meant a broken neck. The Bishop was unaware of this, and also of some of the scurrilous and wide-ranging discussions in the “boys’ room”. where the brothers could disagree just as fiercely as in the days when they had punched one another in the wind. “In polite and educated circles,” Dr Fowler of Corpus had written, “physical blows are replaced by sarcasm and innuendo, but this refined mode of warfare may give an equal amount of pain.” The brothers, who loved each other, could not resist the temptation to hurt each other at times. Dilly, when roused, was particularly arrogant, always taking, in argument, the extreme position.
The Bishop had understandably determined not to send his second son to Corpus, or even to Oxford. Dillwyn, who seemed equally attracted to classics and mathematics, should try for Cambridge, and sit for a scholarship to Eton’s sister foundation, King’s.
In the December of 1902 the Bishop had received a letter from Canon Bowlby, at Eton, which began: “I cannot imagine a better Christmas present than the report on your two boys.” But the delight and astonishment in young Ronald’s progress became somewhat clouded when he turned to the perplexing Dillwyn, who in his Cambridge exam had done two brilliant papers, one in maths and the other in Greek verse, and had left all the others unfinished. “It is not known whether he has any taste for philosophy or archaeology.” Perhaps Dilly had been asked, but had not replied. The Canon’s letter now takes on the tone of a racehorse trainer as he adds: “As to the Newcastle [scholarship] one can never be sure what D. will do. Only two boys are left who might beat him in classics, Swithinbank and Daniel Macmillan. They are a dangerous pair, no doubt, as they have been improving at the same time as he has.” One feels he might go on to recommend more oats and regular exercise, as, indeed, an Edwardian schoolmaster would not hesitate to do. But Dilly would not compete where he was not interested. His friend Maynard Keynes, who had beaten him the year before in the Tomline Prize, wrote to his father that Knox showed up his work “in a most loathsomely untidy, unintelligible, illegible condition,” forgetting to write down the most necessary steps, and “even in conversation he is wholly incapable of expressing the meaning he intends to convey.” Yet he respected Dilly as a mathematician, and perhaps, as Sir Roy Harrod suggests in his biography of Keynes, “it was precisely the shower of irrelevant ideas impinging on a brain of the very highest quality that produced such successful results.” We recognize the description of genius. So, too, did Nathaniel Wedd, the King’s admissions tutor in classics; he recommended Dillwyn for a scholarship, and said that he “appeared to be capable of indefinite improvement”. This was fortunate for Dilly.
In a certain sense, he had left home already. During his last half at Eton, Dilly had become a ferocious agnostic. He had postponed a confrontation with his father for the familiar reason—not fear, but the fear of giving pain. God once dismissed, Dilly and Maynard Keynes had calmly undertaken experiments, intellectual and sexual, to resolve the question of what things are necessary to life. Pleasure, like morality and duty, was a psychological necessity which must therefore be accepted, but without too much fuss; and just as Dilly had eaten cold porridge at Aston, because the pleasure of eating consisted of the pleasure of filling your belly, so now he declared that one should drink only to get drunk, and that women (to whom he was always timidly and scrupulously polite) existed only for sex. True pleasure came from solving problems: “nothing is impossible”. Happiness was a different matter; it was suspect, as being too static.
Dilly’s Cambridge was liberating in quite a different sense from Eddie’s Oxford. In 1903 it was still a small East Anglian market town with shopkeepers anxious to supply to the great colleges, and not without its share of Victorian eccentrics; old Professor Newton, in his top hat, walked between the rails of the horsetrams and refused to give way to oncoming vehicles. But the spirit of the University was the exposure of truth at all costs, and in that atmosphere, under that remorseless light and in the cold winds of the Fen country, Dilly’s mind was condensed into a harder crystal. By compensation, he developed even wilder notions and a tenderer heart, and made there the friendships of a lifetime.
His rooms, like most of those allocated by King’s to its freshmen, were in The Drain, a row of cramped buildings without running water, and connected with Chetwynd Court by a kind of tunnel. He was obliged to buy crockery and furniture from the last occupant, but, as he wrote to Mrs K., “they look solid, and may last for years … I am doing the room mainly in green,” he added, rather surprisingly, but one could never tell what Dilly would, or would not, notice.
King’s at this time had only a hundred and fifty undergraduates and thirty dons, all unmarried; it was a little world within a world, self-regarding, self-rewarding, and doubtful about how far life outside the boundaries of King’s was worth undertaking. The college finances were depressed, the food uneatable, and Hall so crowded that waiters and diners were in constant collision, but the prevailing air was one of humanism and free intellect, and many felt, as Lowes Dickinson had described it, that “the realisation of a vast world extending outside Christianity was like a door that had once or twice swung ajar, and now opened and let me out.
” But across the way their magnificent chapel stood in all its beauty, a perpetual reproach to them.
The Provost, in 1903, was the mighty Henry Bradshaw, the “don’s don”. Bradshaw, a man of ferocious integrity, once faced a visiting preacher who had said that the loss of Christian faith must mean a loss of morals with the words: “Well, you lied, and you know it.” This was the last year of his provostship; in 1904, he was found dead in his chair, with an open book in front of him. Nathaniel Wedd, Dilly’s first tutor, seemed to many people an aggressive man, shocking with his red tie and open blasphemies, but, as his unpublished autobiographical notes show, he had hidden complexities. By origin he was an East Ender, raised in dockland, who had got to Cambridge the hard way; on the other hand, his hard-working cynicism was relieved by strange communications from the unseen world, to which, as time went by, he paid increasing attention.
But the greatest influence upon Dilly was the best-loved and most eccentric of the Fellows, Walter Headlam. Headlam, one of the finest of all interpreters of Greek thought and language, was a purebred scholar, descended from scholars. In 1902 he was thirty-seven years old, and seemed to have only a frail contact with reality. Travelling was difficult because he could not take the right train, and even when on horseback he rode straight into the pond at Newnham, saying doubtfully, “Do you think I ought to get off?” Letters were difficult, because Headlam chose his stamps only for the beauty of the colours. But his rooms in Gibbs Buildings were open to everyone who cared to come, and anyone who could make their way through the piles of manuscripts and bills was sure to be listened to and taught. The pupils’ work was usually lost and rapidly disappeared under the mass of papers, but Headlam sat “balancing an ink-pot on one knee,” as Shane Leslie described him, “and scribbling words into Greek texts, missing since the Renaissance, with the other. His famous emendations, in exquisite script, were allowed to float about the room until gathered for the Classical Review. A year later they became the prey of German editors.”
Headlam taught both by night and by day, for both were the same to him. His knowledge of Greek literature was enormous and consisted quite simply of knowing everything that had been written in ancient Greek, down to the obscurest Rhetoricians; he had no need for a dictionary. But Greece, to him, was not a dead civilization. He taught the Eleusinian mysteries with reference to ghost-raising and The Golden Bough, Greek obscenities were collated with Burton’s Arabian Nights, he strummed on a hired piano to illustrate the music of the tragic chorus, and, draped in his own beautiful faded crimson curtains, demonstrated how they should enter. Enthusiasm, however, combined with meticulous exactness. Headlam’s vast learning told him infallibly what an author could not have written, his artist’s eye helped him to supply missing letters. And only here, in matters of textual criticism, a battlefield of giants in those days when reputations were lost and won and German and English scholars faced each other in mighty competition, did Headlam make enemies. Confronted with an inaccurate text, his charming, sunny temperament disappeared and was replaced by a concentration of scorn. Afterwards he would be mildly surprised at the resentment of those he had called “idiotic pedants” and “illiterate amateurs”; a party had formed against him, even in King’s itself. Meanwhile his own undertakings, and in particular his edition of Aeschylus, remained unfinished; his own sense of perfection made it impossible for him to finish anything.
Dilly did not find Dr Headlam’s rooms unusual at all, or even untidy. They were exactly the kind of rooms he would have liked himself, and he responded at once to the problems of emendation, which, as Headlam wrote to Professor Postgate, “are, I suppose, empiric; what you call ‘instinct,’ I should rather call ‘observation.’ ” The borderland where the mind, prowling among misty forms and concepts, suddenly perceives analogies with what it already knows, and moves into the light—this was where Dilly was most at home. And he was able to help Headlam to find his notes. They are, after all, always more or less where you left them last night, as long as no one is allowed to tidy them away.
As far as friends were concerned, the college, as E. M. Forster put it, was divided into the excluded and the included, and Dilly, as an Etonian, was included, though this was of singularly little importance to him. The prodigiously brilliant and impatient Keynes had arrived in The Drain a year earlier, and had made his classic comment: “This place seems pretty inefficient to me.” With Lytton Strachey, who had already been up at Trinity for three years, he had taken readily to the Apostolic atmosphere of intense friendship and mutual criticism, based on a very natural desire to talk about each other’s shortcomings, and on a convenient version of some of the notions of their captive philosopher, G. E. Moore. Moore, diffident and speechless himself, was confidently interpreted by the brilliant Kingsmen. His proposition that it is useless to discuss what is meant by “I’ve got sixpence,” but useful to think what we mean by saying it, led to endless variations of “What do you mean by … ?” and “You don’t really mean … ?” His recognition of goodness and beauty (Moore did not think they could be defined) as inherent qualities of things, in some ways like blueness or squareness, and his insistence that it was actually wrong to be in a state of contemplating ugliness, meant that those who could recognize beauty must be in a superior class apart, as, indeed, the Apostles already felt they were. This particularly infuriated Dilly. “Knox, of course, was highly enraged at anyone’s writing such rubbish,” Keynes wrote to Strachey, after a reading of his paper on Beauty. Furthermore, the search for beauty tended to become narrowed to a search for fresh-faced undergraduates with whom one could fall in love.
Homosexuality appeared in many shades in early-twentieth-century Cambridge, linking more than one generation, from the outrageous Oscar Browning, wallowing naked, though by this time decrepit, in the Cam, to the “charmed life”, sometimes more a matter of imagination than of fact, of the Apostles themselves. Headlam himself had found, as he told Mrs Leslie Stephen, that “life is not simple for those who have to choose between conflicting tendencies,” and had expressed this in the finest of his English poems, on the death of John Addington Symonds:
I go mourning for my friend
That for all my mourning stirs nor murmurs in his sleep …
Dilly regarded the subject with detachment, knowing that it explained why Lytton Strachey should at first dislike him violently and describe him as “gravely inconsiderate”. Dilly never became an Apostle, although his name was more than once put forward.
But, in spite of his hesitations (one of his nicknames at home was Erm), he was a speaker much in demand at college societies. Of these there were many, including one organized by Lowes Dickinson (it was here that Keynes had read his paper on Beauty) which was known as the “As It Were In Contradistinction Society”.
The adjective “noxian”, applied to Dilly in Basileon (the irregularly appearing Book of King’s), was said to mean “noxious and anti-Christian”. It must be said that the loss of faith, now apparently final and complete, was a process far more painful for him than for his contemporaries. Thus, G. E. Moore had ceased to be a Christian simply from what he heard his elder brother say at table; Leonard Woolf, so he tells us, gave up God because He was not of much use if He did not produce rain when it was asked for; while Nathaniel Wedd had been told at the age of eleven, “Most people have some form of religion, but your father and I have none,” and advised to find one for himself. But Dilly had been brought up with active Christianity around him, his stepmother’s kindness and hope, his father’s charity and energy. In exactly the same way as Ronnie, Dilly felt the need to justify his faith—since his refusal to believe was nothing less than a faith by an appeal to reason. His scepticism was not logical; it came to him in the form of blazing indignation, a vision of Christianity as a two-thousand-year-old swindle, inducing human beings to fear where there is nothing to fear, and hope when there is nothing to hope for. If the swindle could be proved, that would “save his reason”, and Dilly always hoped
that it might be. Yet his attitude was always to defy God for what He had done, or reprove Him for not existing, rather than ignore Him because He didn’t. And, more treacherous still was the fact that Dilly, like all his brothers, could not forget or unlearn the words of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which had been interwoven since childhood with his daily life. He would never cease to be profoundly moved by “Son of Man, can these dry bones live?” or “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” or “Many waters cannot drown love,” or simply by phrases like “clear shining after rain”, or that strange description of a breeze, “a going in the tops of the mulberry trees”. And Dilly could not forgive himself, because he had been betrayed by his emotions and was unable to keep his own rules.
At Cambridge he swam and rowed on the Cam (“Poor Cam!” said Walter Headlam, “it thinks it’s a river! But rivers sing! rivers are transparent!”), bowled the slow spinners that nobody could play, and played cards at bridge that nobody could understand. Even Maynard Keynes, who allowed no one to hesitate during the game, paused in amazement at some of Dilly’s leads, but Dilly, with only fifty-two cards to think about, was able to calculate the probabilities so rapidly that he and his partner usually won. His absent-mindedness, however, seemed to increase, and he had rather more accidents than Headlam, whom a special Providence apparently guarded. He acquired a motor-bicycle—it was just five years since the Hon. C. S. Rolls had ridden the first one in Cambridge down the Corn Exchange—and this caused difficulties, since Dilly was logically rather than mechanically minded, and insisted, in the face of all experience, however painful, that certain results must follow certain causes. On other occasions his habit of suddenly standing stock still, lost in thought, led to trouble—“Colbeck of Marlborough ran into me at a good pace, and fell on the pavement, but escaped with some bruises.” On an impulse he went down to Eton to take Ronnie out to tea, but kicked a football over the wall “which landed on the floor of a carriage containing two ladies”. In the summer of 1904 he burned himself badly in a fearful explosion, the result of adjusting an acetylene lamp on a motor-car. “As an invalid he is a gentle creature,” John Sheppard wrote to Wedd, “though he tells me that when he first met me he thought me a doubtful character, and I gather he still does.” This combination of mildness and downright rudeness was very like Dilly.
The Knox Brothers Page 8