Books
Worldly innocence. Jan Morris celebrates the life and work of Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first book has just been reissued
Published 28 January 2002
The Knox Brothers
Penelope Fitzgerald Flamingo, 288pp, £7.99
ISBN 0007118309
This irresistible book is a joint biography of the four astonishing Knox brothers, whose lives gave a characteristic tang to the England of the 20th century: Edmund ("Eddie"), humorist and editor of Punch; Dillwyn ("Dilly"), classical researcher and Bletchley Park cryptographer; Wilfred, High Anglican priest and biblical scholar; Ronald ("Ronnie"), Roman Catholic Monsignor, writer of detective stories and translator of the Bible. Opposite page 149, there is a photograph of a puckish small girl, about ten years old, with an expression of intelligent self-amusement, captioned simply "The niece". It is a childhood picture of the book's author, Penelope Fitzgerald, who was Eddie Knox's daughter and so niece to all the rest, and it is proper that it is there: because this is one of the very few biographical works whose author is at least as interesting as its subject.
It was first published in 1977, when she was 60, and miraculously just beginning her literary career. In the 20-odd years left to her, she turned out to be one of the most transcendently gifted English novelists of the 20th century; and this early factual work could now be read as a sort of key to, or forecast of, the lovely fictions that were to follow. Such a reading would, however, be one of those egregious errors to which writers of literary criticism are all too often prone, because The Knox Brothers is a perfectly rounded work of art in its own right, and if Fitzgerald had written nothing else, she should always be remembered for this.
It would be hard, one has to say, to write a dull book about the Knox Bros. They were an extraordinary crew, living through an extraordinary period of English history, from the 1880s to the 1970s. They were born of Anglican clerics - bishops of Lincoln, Manchester and Lahore figured in their family tree, besides sundry rectors and vicars, a chaplain to the East India Company and the fanatic missionary prelate Thomas French, who died trying to convert the Muslims of Oman to evangelical Christianity ("I cannot say I have met many thoughtful or encouraging people who want Bibles and Testaments . . ."). Unsurprisingly, matters of conscience, dogma or liturgy played a large part in their lives, while allowing room for surprises, anomalies and eccentricities beyond number.
They were all mad about trams. They all loved elaborate word games. When Ronnie was converted to Roman Catholicism, Wilfred felt it like a death in the family, and his father (Edmund Manchester) disinherited him. In Dilly's translation of Herodas, when somebody wants to know the price of something, it comes out as "Why mumblest ne freetongued descryest the price?". Eddie fought at Passchendaele, and was expert at shooting rats with a revolver. It was said of Ronnie that he never had to wash up so much as a teaspoon, but Wilfred lived all his life in conditions of almost penitential poverty, his chief extravagance (it seems) being cakes for the students who came to tea with him at Cambridge.
The Knoxes were Oxbridge one and all, at a time when the clever, quirky ethos of the old universities was paramount in the state. In their different ways, the brothers were powerful public figures. The most self-effacing of them, Wilfred, became a celebrated college chaplain, influencing the attitudes of two undergraduate generations. The least remarkable, Edmund, was one of the lions of Fleet Street in its heyday. The most fascinating, Dilly, was instrumental in breaking German codes in both world wars. The least beguiling, the buckle-shoed Ronnie, was the most famous English Catholic of his time, and perhaps the best-known theologian of any persuasion.
The rich variety of their contribution to the national life says much about the nation itself, at a time when everything that had seemed most stable and resilient about it was beginning to crumble. This is a very funny book, but it is a sad one, too: we feel that these four outstanding men, affectionate always to each other, united in family pride, wonderfully quick and original, knew very well that they were performers towards the end of a long drama.
No Greek scholars would ever again be cracking the codes of the King's enemies. Hardly a heart would break trying to decide the truth about divine revelation. When did you last see an elderly Anglican clergyman going fishing on his motorbike? And what became of Punch? It is this retrospective strain of pathos that makes the book so unforgettable, because the retrospection is supplied by the most truly creative of all the Knoxes, the niece Penelope. Richard Holmes, in an exemplary introduction to this new edition, remarks on the unobtrusive skill of its technique in blending four separate lives into a single narrative, and he suggests that The Knox Brothers "opened the door directly into Fitzgerald's own imaginative world".
I think this is true: and through that door, there drifts the peculiar air of mingled innocence and worldliness that made Fitzgerald's novels unique, and that here elevates the craft of biography into the art of creative evocation.
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