Dilly was still at the Admiralty, though Room 40 was in process of being transferred to the Foreign Office under the euphemistic title of the Government Code and Cypher School. Shrunk to a small department, still under the supervision of A. G. Denniston, one of the first Naval officers selected by Ewing, its future importance was undecided. Dilly was waiting eagerly for his release. During the war he had been appointed Librarian of King’s, although he had never managed to get there; and back to King’s, with the Herodas to finish, he firmly intended to go. Meanwhile, it was clear that Olive would never see eye to eye with the Birches. She was not flourishing in Chelsea. She was really only at home with the life of a landed proprietor. In October 1921 he sold out most of his Great Western Railway shares and bought, for £1,900, a house surrounded by forty acres of sodden woodland on a ridge of the Chilterns. It was called Courn’s Wood House, and was a few miles from High Wycombe.
The usual troubles of vacant possession followed. Dilly approached every problem laterally. The agents wrote to ask why he had sent down two people to deal with the valuation who knew absolutely nothing about it—one a lecturer in classics, the other an electrical outfitter. Fortunately Dilly had as his solicitor the celebrated E. S. P. Haynes. Haynes had believed, until 1914, that a just world would prevail; since the loss of Grenfell, Lister, Guy Lawrence and their generation, he no longer thought so; he resigned himself to good living and to knowing everyone and everything, reminding his friends that “to eat and drink with the wrong person is like intercourse with an inefficient prostitute.” Haynes appealed to Dilly a good deal more than he did to Olive, but he was an excellent negotiator; he never came much to Courn’s Wood, however, after the conveyance was completed, because he said it was too cold there, and so it was; a heavy, chalky, insidious chill from the miles of damp woodland laid its finger on every room, above all the dining room, where the table stood like an island exposed to draughts from every quarter, and was only dispelled in Dilly’s study by a large wood fire. Victorian concepts remained in the households of the Twenties, and very often it was only in the study and the airing cupboard that one could feel warm.
Two sons were born to Dilly and Olive at Courn’s Wood. The first, in accordance with her promise, was called Christopher; his second name was Maynard, after Keynes, who stood godfather. In spite of this dedication, so to speak, to King’s, the sweet-tempered little boy grew up to be quite unacademic, while the second, named Oliver after his mother, proved to be a brilliant Greek scholar; if this was an irony of the Fates, it did not wound, for Dilly was extravagantly affectionate to them both when they were young. To push them through the deep leaf mould, he devised and constructed his own vehicle, which Oliver remembered as “a wooden scaffolding erected on a single large wheel”. Here the little boys could be secured at a level with their father’s nose, and conversation could continue. Dilly also threw himself, with not very well-directed energy, into planting, sawing and building log cabins, all on an improved but unintelligible system. But, do what he could, he never looked, as he tramped up the overgrown paths, in the least like a landed proprietor.
The Headlam-Knox Herodas finally appeared in 1922. Much of it, as Dilly warned the academic world through the pages of Philologus, had been done on trains going up and down to London. His eyes had been troublesome, and the Cambridge Press had distributed some of the type during the war, so that it was now impossible to make the alterations he wanted. Still, it was a handsome and definitive volume. There was criticism, of course, of Headlam’s glorious irrelevancies and too numerous parallels, but, in the words of Professor Arnott, “the imperfections pale beside the glowing achievement not merely for the text of Herodas but for the Greek language and literature in general.” Dilly’s own work was compared to the restoration of a damaged old master. In particular, in spite of the Museum’s unwillingness to remount the wrongly aligned scraps of papyrus, he had arranged and made sense out of the fragments of Mimes IX and X (The Breakfast and The Factory Girls), and the almost complete Mime VIII, The Dream. In this “purely personal and even sentimental fantasy”, as Dilly called it, Herodas is rusticating on his pig farm, and wakes his slaves in the early morning to tell them about his dream, a meeting with the god Dionysus at a drunken winter festival, which ends with the hope that his poems will be immortal. This hope had at last been fulfilled. The Headlam-Knox Herodas was worthy of both the master and pupil, and more than worthy of the salacious old Alexandrian poet.
It was an achievement that was not of much interest, however, in the High Wycombe and Naphill district, largely inhabited by retired officers and stockbrokers. Dilly went to the local tennis parties (he played tennis, as he did all ball games, with an unreturnable spin). He was known as an absent-minded dear. As a relief, he wrote verses in a notebook; these give an alarming panorama of the neighbours. Many are said to be lucky to escape hanging, and a visit from the High Wycombe doctors means death within the month. Motorcars and even light aircraft have been bought by husbands to get away from their wives, although the prevalence of adultery is surprising when all the wives look so much like each other. Eric Gill, the sculptor, who at that time lived on Pigot’s Hill, grinds his teeth with rancorous hatred at the sight of anything as natural as a daffodil. (Gill, in reply, asked Dilly why he did not eat Health Foods; but in Dilly’s view nothing was so unnatural as health.) Meanwhile, the boredom of the conversation in Naphill and the length of the stories told by their neighbour, a retired Admiral, added a new terror to the concept of infinity.
In 1923 Dilly made another contribution to Greek scholarship, an elegant dissertation on Cercidas, identifying 150 lines on papyrus as the dedication to an anthology. In consequence, he was offered the Professorship of Greek at Leeds University. Nothing came of it, but the letter was one of the very few papers he kept. It was worth remembering that he might have been a professor.
As soon as the Herodas was finished and he no longer had to work on photographs of papyrus in the train, Dilly bought a motor-bike to go up and down to London. It meant liberation from the stockbrokers on the High Wycombe platform. Olive was uneasy. She knew that he was in even greater danger than Wilfred, because Wilfred understood nothing whatever about his machine, whereas Dilly did understand, but expected far too much of it. And he had not ridden one since he was rejected as a dispatch rider in 1914.
Dilly had been induced to stay on at the Foreign Office as a peacetime cryptographer, continuing to read the secret traffic of the nation’s rivals and ill-wishers, and, occasionally, of its friends. While his work had to remain in secrecy or obscurity, Ronnie was named by the Daily Mail in 1924 as “the wittiest young man in England”. As a sparkling light essayist he blossomed out, not only in the Catholic press but in columns everywhere. Many of these pieces were not religious at all; they simply established his personality and opinions with a wide public. Ronnie Knox was young in his high spirits, nostalgic in his recall of the lost domain of childhood. His imagery was largely drawn from school prizes, cricket, laundry, drawers that stick, embarrassing moments, pipes, trams and bicycles (unsound arguments “give you a sensation of freewheeling instead of pedalling”). The readers got to know him very well. He told them about his expenditure on tobacco, his income-tax forms, his reading (Herodotus, Trollope, The Egoist), none of them quite coming up to the excitement of his first book, Wood’s Natural History; he explained his objection to flying, and the length of time, as a travelling preacher, that he had to spend in stations—he memorized, quite uselessly, the whole map of Cardiff Docks while waiting at Crewe Junction. Then, in describing a walking tour in the Cotswolds, he passed the camp where in 1914 his friends had assembled in their new uniforms. “A little rain crossed that peopled solitude, and memory rehearsed for me the roll-call of the unregarded dead.” This transition to a graver key was beautifully managed, both in articles and sermons.
Ronnie’s weekly pieces have suffered the fate of most journalism, but they had long-lasting, perhaps unexpected, effects. Quite ca
sually and straightforwardly, they introduced an exceedingly brilliant person whose reasoning mind was able to accept the contradictions of Christianity. At the same time they showed that a normal, pipe-smoking, income-taxed Englishman, not a Jesuit, not a mystic, no black cloaks, no sweeping gestures, could become a Roman Catholic priest. The News and Standard columns, with their wide readership, brought very many people to think rather more favourably of God. Ronnie’s informal sermons of the 1920s were in much the same style, and as he tried to sort out, step by step, his own difficulties of faith and doctrine, his congregations found—though they did it timidly at first—that it was possible to laugh out loud in church.
The newspapers of the day were obsessed, or felt that their readers were obsessed, with Famous People. That was why Mrs K. had been induced to write her article, and Ronnie was often run as a kind of rival or opposite number to the equally witty, but deeply pessimistic Dean Inge, who claimed that the world after the Great War was “a place where everybody was wanted, but nobody was wanted much.” Another use for Famous People, so popular that it amounted to mania, was the collection of their opinions about God—“What I Believe”. Everyone was asked, from Bertrand Russell to the excavators of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Eddie contributed to this in Punch by claiming to have interviewed Steve Donoghue, the champion jockey, and getting the reply: “I have always been conscious, especially at the finish of a race, that Good and Evil are Relative Notions, and Sin is a Mere Negative,” while Jack Hobbs is said to have smiled quietly at the scant interest his fellow batsmen took in eschatology. This hit the tone pretty well. Ronnie’s task, in the name of authority and orthodoxy, was to take on the writers one by one and to point out their faults in logic.
For this he was reasonably well-paid, and began to accumulate a certain amount of money. His motives were completely unselfish. Ronnie, like all his brothers, was generous to a fault; during his lifetime, for example, he gave more than £20,000 to the Converts’ Aid Society alone, on condition that nothing should be said about it. Eddie was known in Fleet Street as a soft touch; his sardonic smile was deceptive, any hard-luck story would do. At home Christina tried to protect him, but in vain. Not long after he was demobilized she found him being harangued by an ex-serviceman who had called, uninvited, to read him some verses:
While you sat here at home
I sailed across the foam
And fought with heart so brave
To keep the likes of you safe.…
“I thought he ought to have a fiver,” Eddie muttered. “I couldn’t have written that poem.”
If Ronnie, therefore, was hoping for financial independence, it was for a specific reason. At the back of his mind there still lingered the example of Hugh Benson, who had feverishly written books for money to establish himself as a writer-priest in his own house at Hare Street. Hare Street had been somewhat theatrical and showy. Nothing that Ronnie did after his conversion was likely to be showy, but the idea of a home with some resemblance to the house party with Guy and Harold Macmillan that never took place, a home shared with other congenial priests, a centre for reading and writing—that ambition died hard. And it was particularly tempting at the moment because the daily conditions of his life were becoming unbearable.
Cardinal Bourne had appointed him, as his first post in the Catholic Church, to teach Latin at St Edmund’s, a seminary and dullish boys’ school in a dullish part of Hertfordshire. The level of the classical forms was low. Bishop Knox had feared that the Romans would make “no sparing use” of Ronnie, and Dilly pointed out that this was the sparing use to which in fact he had been put. Ronnie accepted the appointment with true humility. But he had not realized that he would be required to stay at St Edmund’s for seven years.
During the Twenties and early Thirties the Catholic Church in England made a miscalculation, the kind of error which history permits to Rome so that she can resume her majestic progress undisturbed. It was the heyday of the Conversion of England, or Apostolate to Non-Catholics (an awkward word which Ronnie had difficulty in fitting into his lucid sentences). But the task was seen, not so much as the capture of the Establishment as the creation of another one side by side with it, a Catholic model, every bit as good. Power was felt to lie with the aristocracy, public schools, universities, rank and patronage. Right-wing causes were supported everywhere, and the trained intelligence of the Jesuits was directed to organizing a cricket match at Lord’s which would be as smart as Eton and Harrow. Cardinal Bourne’s great anxiety, however, was for the secular clergy. There were too few of them, and their standard of learning was unimpressive; on all brilliant occasions, the demand was for Benedictines or Jesuits. It was, in the true sense, a Godsend when Ronald Knox, after the death of Guy, no longer thought of joining an Order. As a secular priest at St Edmund’s he could be—to quote one of his contemporaries—“a sort of talent scout and a sort of trophy.”
Ronnie’s duty was to be brilliant, and to advertise the place, socially and intellectually. The idea was quite enough to make him miserable; worse still, St Edmund’s happened to be disturbed, as most places of education are at some time or another, by unpleasant feuds. Neither Eton nor Shrewsbury seems to have prepared Ronnie for this. He pined, and his indigestion tortured him. For the sake of good example, he attended the school dinners, where he was faced with mutton stew that tasted of sheep droppings, and a blancmange known as “shape”, which, he pointed out, was its only attribute.
But it was years before he complained. Difficult things were the right ones to do, and, as a recent convert, he felt uncertain and humble. (“Whoa! I’m only a convert!” he once said to an Irish priest who was pouring him out a triple measure of whisky.) His colleagues loved him; the boys remembered him as the priest who could balance on a garden roller, and imitate a mouse taking a sip of beer and then going out to challenge the cat. He retreated from the schoolroom to lecture on the New Testament in the seminary. But the days still seemed long.
Ronnie did not fish, and his summer vacation was spent in Scotland, where he was the yearly guest of the Lovats at Beaufort Castle. Lady Lovat was the younger sister of Charles Lister, which made a strong link; she had “gone over” at the age of eighteen, when she had become engaged to the forty-year-old Catholic clan chieftain, Lord Lovat. Her letter to Ronnie on his conversion was one of the most delightful he had.
I think the first year (or 6 months) after being received are v. difficult—I fluctuated between feeling utterly isolated—or being one of a rather—unsympathetic and very dense crowd. I don’t know which sensation was worst—Both, I think now—were very superficial but meant a rather long swim against the current—(or is it currant? Scarcely the latter I feel!) … asking to be remembered in your prayers—Laura Lovat.
The mixture of seriousness and charm marked Lady Lovat as a true descendant of the Souls. She had utterly transformed Beaufort, restored the gardens, banished the cows from straying into the front hall, and provided a haven for artists and writers. Lord Lovat, who was said to be a patron of every sport and activity except literature, painting and coarse fishing, welcomed his wife’s guests as his own. The great Victorian castle resounded with children and relations and with those who came to discuss sport, farming and politics; Ronnie worked apart, in the peace of the library. All the generous chieftain’s books were there to be lent; Ronnie suggested that the family motto on the bookplates, Je suis prêt, should be changed to Je suis prêté.
Another literary guest was the brilliant and wordly-wise Maurice Baring, said to be the original of Chesterton’s Man Who Knew Too Much. Baring loved things to be done with an air; Ronnie delighted him by translating a line of Rossetti’s, “You could not tell the starlings from the leaves,” into Greek and Latin on the spot. At other times they had to speak Umble, one of Baring’s several invented languages, in which Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop came out as Dumble’s Umble Cumble Shumble. Lord Lovat did not attempt it. “By far the greatest scholar in this language,” wrote Mumble Bumble to
E.V. Lucas, “is Ronald Knox.”
Although Ronnie’s family wished him to be happy, and understood that he needed a change from St Edmund’s, they looked with some misgiving at his gravitation towards grand country houses. Dilly felt that patrons were like the mills of God, and if you were not careful they ground you down exceeding small. Wilfred once again wondered why, if Ronnie wanted to get to know his new church from the inside, he did not apply for a working parish.
Perhaps they did not realize how much Ronnie needed feminine sympathy. He was truly at home in a home. Little habits showed this. An old friend of Ebury Street days, Mrs Baker, recalls how he used to stand by the fire in his long soutane which completely sheltered the cat, so that no one could tell where the purring came from. He understood the day-to-day problems of women, the peculiar diminishment, for example, which a woman feels when her children grow up; he learned that through Winnie and Mrs K. The devotion, too, with which he had picked bunches of flowers for his new stepmother was something he needed to feel, in some form or another, throughout his life.
Eddie and Christina moved back to Hampstead in 1922, to a small Queen Anne terrace house this time, 34 Well Walk, at a rent of forty pounds a year. The village—and Hampstead still felt itself very much a village—was a place of high thinking, plain living and small economies. The steep, charming old streets were full of ham-and-beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller’s where one bead could be bought at a time, for all the Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces. The livery stables had only just turned into a garage, and still called itself a Motor Jobmaster. Poets walked the streets, Stanley Spencer pushed his pramful of painting materials amiably across the Heath, Henry Lamb was living in the top room of the Vale of Health Hotel; his sister Dorothy was now married to Reeve Brooke, an old Corpus friend of Eddie’s. At one end of Well Walk was the wooden seat which John Keats had sat on, at the other was a pub kept by a man called Strube, the brother of the cartoonist; it was a haven for journalists down on their luck.
The Knox Brothers Page 20