The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  When Seaman went, Punch did not look like having a future. If Evoe’s editorship had not left behind it something healthy and capable of growth, no amount of galvanising and altering would have saved the paper (changing a paper is traditionally in Fleet Street the penultimate stage before going bust).

  Sometimes Eddie lost his temper. This was an alarming family characteristic. To the younger brothers, trained as priests, it happened less often, but it did happen. Ronnie was more likely to be incensed by breakdowns in transport, which he felt was invented, after all, to work for him. Wilfred was partly drawn to the character of St. Paul because the saint’s temper was so bad; and Alec Vidler thought that Wilfred needed grace to control his. Both Dilly and Eddie, when they encountered dishonesty or meanness, or simply at times when they were struck by the inveterate hostility of things, razor blades and collar studs in particular, could sweep clean, like a volcano. They never raised their voices; they jingled the money in their pockets, and with quiet concentration proclaimed the pointlessness of existence in a society where such idiocy could flourish; then their office staff would withdraw, their families would disappear for the time being; even Dilly’s dog James, even the witless Tim, would hide in terror.

  Nobody’s feelings were ever permanently hurt. In Eddie’s case it was truly said that those who knew him best loved him best. That was proved, if proof was ever necessary, in 1935, when, only three years after his appointment as editor, he had to face the greatest mortal blow that could be imagined for him, the loss of Christina.

  In 1933 they had moved from 34 Well Walk, where they had had so much happiness, where the floors were uneven and the children had grown up and there was not quite enough room for anything, to a large, dank, charmless house in Regent’s Park. There was no garden. Neither of them much liked Clarence Terrace, neither of them wanted to leave Hampstead, but, as Uncle Lindsey had said, the editorship meant more going into society and receiving it, and they thought the move necessary. However, they had not given many dinner parties in the tall rooms overlooking the park when Christina began to suffer from her final illness. Like Eddie’s mother, forty years before, she was moved from one nursing home to another, finally to the south coast. In the summer of 1935, she died.

  It was many years before Eddie could bring himself to mention her name directly, even to his own son and daughter. At the time, he asked the proprietors of Punch for a short leave of absence, and an understanding that he would not be writing any funny pieces for the paper that year.

  Even on such a wretched occasion as Christina’s funeral, it was a memorable thing to see all the four brothers together. Wilfred took the service, Dilly, who rarely entered a church, stood in silent misery at the back, Ronnie, who had not been to an Anglican service for nearly twenty years, knelt in the aisle. Those who saw him, not cut off from the human grief around him, but totally absorbed in communion with God, felt that they had seen prayer manifest.

  There were other losses. In January 1937, Mrs K.’s calm voice was heard on the telephone in the desolate house in Clarence Terrace: “Please tell Mr Knox that his father died ten minutes ago.” Almost to the last the Bishop had carved at his own table, with hands so palsied that the silver knife-rests shook and danced, but never making a mistake; in his study, a last book exposing the errors of Newman was in preparation. He died as he lived, a stout warrior. Mrs K. remained, to all appearance, as tranquil and unhurried as when she had entered in her diary: “Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.” As the four brothers came away down the leaf-strewn drive, Dilly, in his anxious stammer, suggested that perhaps she did not feel much at all; “one has to be glad of that.” The others disagreed, Ronnie in particular, but what and how much she felt, they could not tell. Mrs K. returned to the companionship of poor Ethel through the long winter evenings.

  Almost exactly a year earlier George V had died. Preaching at Oxford to his student congregation, asking for their prayers for the dead king, Ronnie told them that he did not want to depress them, or to draw obvious lessons about the shortness of human life. The death of a ruler did not mean much when you experienced it for the first time. “It is different,” he added, “when you can remember a small boy in an Eton collar and jacket who helped to line the road when Queen Victoria took her last journey to Frogmore, and that boy was you; can remember an undergraduate in his fourth year who woke up one May morning to hear the bell of St Giles tolling for Edward the Seventh, and that that undergraduate was you. Like the women in Homer, who wept not for Patroclus but for their own griefs, you regret the passing of your own life in the passing of a king.”

  It was a curious fact that to the youngest brother the past meant most. At the age of forty he deliberately began the process of turning himself into an anachronism, not by admitting defeat, but by politely rejecting most of what he saw around him. At the time of his conversion to Catholicism, G. K. Chesterton had written to Ronnie about his sense of lost innocence: “I am concerned about what has become of a little boy whose father showed him a toy theatre, and schoolboy whom nobody ever heard of.” These were not Ronnie’s worries. He knew, only too clearly, where his childhood had gone. It was still with him, too much so, at times, for his own comfort.

  The chaplaincy, from which he had hoped so much, had proved, by the mid 1930s, a disappointment. He was disappointed, that is, not with Oxford, but with himself.

  It was not that he had expected the undergraduates to be like those he had known before the war. In their memory, he still passed every Armistice Day “in decent quiet and solitude, rereading a pile of letters, scrawled in violet pencil.” The letters were Guy Lawrence’s. Such a generation would not return, but Ronnie made no comparisons. He regarded himself, he said, as medieval rather than middle-aged, a man who refused to fly or go to the cinema and whose idea of the last really good invention was the toast-rack. Oxford, of all places, was prepared to tolerate such an attitude.

  In contrast, he had one of the most agile minds and one of the warmest hearts that Oxford was ever likely to know. And yet although the twelve years of his chaplaincy became, in their own way, legendary, very few recalled him as ever looking quite happy.

  His state of mind could not be properly judged in Lent, when he gave up smoking his pipe, and was described by Eddie as looking actually pale green with suffering. But spring, even when Lent was over, was a trial. March was the cruellest month. “Yes, the term’s not being so bad now,” he wrote to Ethel, thanking her for one of innumerable knitted grey scarves, “but we’re just getting those early crocus days when the sun starts shining and one always feels rather cheap. At least I do.” This was as early as 1928, when Ronnie was forty, and when the reviewers, as he pointed out, had ceased to say that he “showed promise”, and mentioned with apparent surprise that Evoe of Punch was his elder brother, “as if I hadn’t spent most of my early years fetching his boots for him.” His indigestion made it impossible for him ever to drink brown sherry again. In serious matters also he paused to take stock.

  He felt, as Bishop French had so often done, “an unprofitable servant”, believing that he had lost the secret of encouraging young men in their faith. To make himself accessible (since he could not face having a telephone) he followed an unvarying routine; every afternoon, rain or shine, he could be found walking in the Christ Church Meadows; after four, he was always in his room, waiting, in case anybody wanted to call. That was the time for giving advice, but “I am conscious,” he wrote in “The Whole Art”, “that all through my time here I have failed in this duty, owing to shyness and fear of saying the wrong thing.” Four generations of Oxford undergraduates remembered things otherwise, but, in retrospect, this was how they seemed to Ronnie.

  What went wrong? Or what made him think it had gone wrong? To begin with, it was not altogether a successful idea to take in lodgers at the Old Palace. The plan arose partly from Ronnie’s generosity—he made no profit at all—partly from the embarrassing request by certain Catholic parents, that their sons (l
ike Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited) should be kept an eye on. It was never clear to him why so many of the lodgers grew restive. It didn’t strike him as awkward that he had installed both the baths in one bathroom, but only one could be filled at once. Again, after dinner parties, Ronnie frankly hoped that guests would leave by ten. “From ten, when the house has to be locked up (if there are lodgers) by proctor’s orders, I have not encouraged callers. This may be quite wrong; Fr Martindale once expressed himself surprised that undergraduates did not drop in to call at an hour when, he assures me, they are at their most communicative. But we have not all the same talents.”

  Supervision of the unwilling was a torment. So, too, were the slight rejections which seemed to outweigh all his fame and success. Whole days passed, sometimes, without a caller. His nephews and niece were now, at intervals, coming up to Oxford, but even they were elusive. Winnie’s eldest son, a brilliant philosopher at Trinity, tactfully declined an invitation to a canoe trip upriver because it appeared to him a waste of time to tie up under the willows without what was called in the Thirties “some female”. And yet Ronnie was such a familiar sight on the river that every reach of the Isis must still expect to see him, in semi-clerical white shirt and black trousers, at ease in the summer moments when the passage of time, which oppressed him, seemed suspended. “Mint and meadowsweet and lying hay blended their scents in that most delicate of all mediums, the smell of clean river-water,” he wrote in The Footsteps at the Lock. Just as Wilfred and Eddie fished the Arrow, with a discriminating love of the water itself, Ronnie stirred the ripples and reflections of the Isis. Many who did not go with him, finding what seemed to be better things to do, regretted it later. But Ronnie, they felt, was an Oxford institution; he would always be there, there would always be another summer.

  In his chaplaincy sermons, Ronnie was hampered by feeling himself obliged to give a continuous course of Catholic apologetics, beginning with the five frowsty and unacceptable classical “proofs” of the existence of God. He did his best to vary them, but confessed that he was grateful that revelation had been granted to mankind to back up the “proofs”, particularly when (as often happened nowadays) he woke up at four in the morning and was unable to get to sleep again.

  His personal conferences, on the other hand, were full of denunciations of the idleness, drunkenness and spiritual slackness of his charges, their poor attendance at chapel, their pose of languor, “about as attractive as a piece of wet sponge,” and, as the Thirties advanced, warnings that they were unlikely to find employment and that they would be members of a second-class nation. These remarks were called “Ronnie’s rockets” and were, he complained, expected from him and largely ignored. The trouble was that the students of the Thirties were preoccupied with three subjects: sex, travel and European politics. Shyness and his own scrupulous purity of mind made him avoid the subject of sex whenever possible. Travel he considered (as all four brothers did) an overrated activity, and would greet returning undergraduates who wished to boast about the opera at Salzburg or an expedition to Tibet with the question: “Let me see; which country are you boring about now?” Politics he avoided, believing that his business was with the spiritual debate of the twentieth century. Even there, the fashionable language was alien to him. W. H. Auden’s remark that in detective stories only one is guilty, all the others innocent, but that in the Thirties all were guilty, and only the crime was uncertain, seemed to Ronnie nothing but an escape into vagueness.

  How effective he could have been as a political speaker was shown in the early days of his chaplaincy, when he was invited to Glasgow to speak at the Peace Rally of 1928. He arrived to find a crowd of two thousand troublemakers, some Communists, some Protestants, waiting, as the police put it, to get at him. The organizers were anxious for him to leave, and Ronnie decided to stay. “I am so little accustomed to being taken seriously,” he began, “that I never anticipated my presence would make trouble.” He had consented to speak about peace because it seemed to him the only worthy response to the sacrifice of the dead. “Progress may have softened all other human relationships; war it has only made more destructive.” And the row going on outside only confirmed what he had wanted to say anyway; that a peace movement could never be sectarian. “It takes all sorts to make a world,” he told them, “even my world.”

  But at Oxford—where, as the years advanced, he was still the most brilliant speaker at Union debates, and increasingly, like other monuments, something for passing visitors to have seen—what had happened to his cure of souls? “Roughly nothing,” he considered, “that’s the trouble. What I find depressing is just the averageness of it all.” The attendance figures at mass remained much the same, or slightly less. There were no notable scandals, no notable gains. What was it his duty to do? Even the springs of his writing seemed to be drying up, and yet, he wrote to an old friend, “It’s difficult to get over the feeling one was meant to write.” Ought he to go? He waited (for ever since childhood he had attached great importance to such things) for a sign.

  A pattern which a novelist would have hesitated to invent now showed itself in Ronnie’s life. In 1930, when he had gone on a Hellenic cruise with Lady Lovat, he had remembered not the siege of Troy, but his friends who had died at Gallipoli. Now, in 1937, on another cruise to the same haunted coasts, he found a new friendship to revive his hopes. Ronnie, in spite of a wistful leaning to unpopular causes, had always wanted to do things with somebody else—to reform the Church of England with Wilfred, to dedicate himself side by side with Guy Lawrence, who had written “You must be quick and become a priest,” and, in these last years, to find some sort of way into the minds of the hundred and fifty young men in his charge. All these beginnings had been checked in a way that Ronnie accepted with humility, and yet he felt an emptiness, “an air that kills”. He went on the cruise because his doctor had thought that, after several heavy attacks of flu, it might do him good. He was to lecture on classical civilization to the comfortable passengers (uneasily remembering that Father Martindale had refused to do this, and had gone into the boiler room to say mass for the stokers); he had no expectation at all of enjoying himself. There are no second chances in life, but Ronnie came very near to one on that summer voyage, when he became a close friend of Lady Acton.

  Lady Acton was a strong-minded, handsome young woman of twenty-six, the granddaughter of one of the most high-minded of the Souls, and the daughter of Lord Rayleigh, a scientist and agnostic. She had shown her independence of mind when, at the age of twenty, and against family opposition, she had married the eldest son of an old Catholic family, Lord Acton. Five years after her marriage, and not till then, she decided to receive instruction. She had been introduced to Ronnie, and joined a family party on this particular cruise with the idea of getting to know him better before he undertook any formal preparation. Within the first week the two of them were deep in an exceptional and particular friendship, spiritual, intellectual and emotional.

  For Ronnie it came as a totally unexpected blessing which it must be wrong to waste. For the other paying customers on the ship, who had expected to make the acquaintance of the famous Monsignor and hear him make witty remarks, it was something rather more than a disappointment to find him spending all his time with Lady Acton. They could not tell how much he needed to be needed—this was exactly his trouble at Oxford—how much he wanted inspiration, or what it meant to him to have the company of a sympathetic young woman. Perhaps, indeed, only Winnie ever realized that. “There was that terrible break in 1914,” she thought, “when I was in Edinburgh having babies. I knew he missed me, and letters couldn’t be the same.” She understood in what sense his heart was empty.

  “The fact that [Lady Acton] was remarkably attractive while he was now approaching his fiftieth year might so easily have become a source of spiritual trouble to him and of embarrassment to her,” wrote Father Thomas Corbishley in Ronald Knox the Priest. This was impossible, however, with two sensitive people so mu
ch more scrupulous on their own behalf than their friends could ever be. In his struggles to bring home to his hearers at the chaplaincy the Proof of the Supreme Excellency of God, Ronnie had spoken of “the pull of human love, which points to something beyond it.” That was what he felt now. Both of them confided in the wisest Benedictine they knew, who was human enough to feel a mild irritation with the excessive anxieties of both of them. He advised them to pray more, to forget about other people’s experience and theory, not to rationalize what they felt, and to take themselves as they were before God, without fooling themselves. Painfully Ronnie became convinced that, for once, it was not necessary for him to do the most difficult thing. Lady Acton was received into the Church in April 1938, while he became, for the time being, almost completely absorbed in this new friendship.

  According to Evelyn Waugh, Lady Acton, during the course of the cruise, threw a copy of Ronnie’s last detective story, Double Cross Purposes, overboard, together with her lipstick. (Ronnie disliked make-up; he sometimes described young women as “really pretty, without paint.” Wilfred and Dilly were easily deceived into not noticing it, while Eddie had no objection to anything that made women look well.)

  It was the sign of a pact. The detective stories (to which Ronnie’s bishop had also objected) were to go, because he was to undertake in future only what was worthwhile. He had the exhilarating sensation of being persuaded to do something he very much wanted to do anyway. Lady Acton confirmed his half-formed decision to leave the chaplaincy, and, certain of her sympathetic encouragement, he told her what it was that, in late middle age, he hoped and dreamed to write—a new translation, for Catholics, of the entire Bible.