The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes

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      More searching interviews (such as that by Hermione Lee, for BBC Radio 3, in 1997) revealed how directly her first novels drew on a mass of autobiographical material, stored up over forty years, and awaiting a moment of release. The pattern of her life suggested a long, slow period of imaginative and intellectual assimilation, in preparation for a literary career that she had always hoped for, but never quite expected.

      Tantalizing glimpses of her as a teenager appear in later chapters of The Knox Brothers. But, characteristically, she always refers to herself in the third person, as ‘the niece’ or ‘the daughter’. If you blink, you will miss them. From these we learn that she was largely brought up in literary London, in Hampstead and Regent’s Park, with an elder brother, and her father’s circle of brilliant acquaintances such as Belloc and AP Herbert. She attended (unhappily, one gathers) Wycombe Abbey, near Oxford, one of the most academically demanding of public schools for girls. This too appears in a wonderful, single-paragraph cameo in chapter seven.

      In 1935, when she was still only eighteen, her mother died of cancer, which devastated the household. She writes characteristically of her father, Edmund Knox, at this time of overwhelming grief. ‘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.’ She says not a word of her own (‘the daughter’s’) feelings, but only notes that her uncle Ronald, when attending the Anglican funeral, being a Catholic insisted on kneeling alone in the aisle. (p. 208)

      Penelope Knox took a First at Somerville College, Oxford. She then worked in a series of institutions, great and small (the wartime BBC, a children’s drama school, a Suffolk bookshop) having married Desmond Fitzgerald, a lawyer, in 1941. The family was mildly bohemian, in the Knox tradition, and were happy to live on a Thames barge, while taking occasional summer holidays in Italy and one memorable winter holiday in Russia. All of these experiences appear, transformed but recognisable, as settings for her later novels.

      In 1976, the year following the ghost story, her husband Desmond died after a long illness. Penelope Fitzgerald never wrote directly about this time. But it was now, in amazingly rapid succession, that she produced in just five years, no less than six books which must have been, in some sense, bursting within her. The fascinating thing is that the first two were not novels, but biographies.

      She had been working for some time on her life of the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1975), perhaps as a distraction from her own immediate pain and unhappiness. It was inspired, she said, by Burne-Jones’s stained-glass window of the Last Judgement, in St Philip’s, Birmingham. ‘No agitation here, the dwellers on the earth simply stand waiting for their sentence. The whole effect depends on the late afternoon sun slanting through the glorious red of the massed angels’ wings. It is a window for Evensong.’ (p. 271) The biography is lively, engaging, and well-researched, with a particularly striking picture of Burne-Jones’s domestic life. But it also has the slight narrative stiffness, the uncertain deployment of materials, and uneven emotional tone, of a first book.

      Nothing could be less true of The Knox Brothers, which appeared just two years later in 1977. Somehow, an artistic transformation has taken place. From the very first chapter, with its amazing and moving tale of her great-grandfather the missionary Bishop, sailing calmly out to his lonely death from Muscat, ‘in a fishing boat, under a blazing sun, with his book-bag’, the biography is pitched with a narrative assurance, a gentle irony, and a delight in curious anecdote, which proved to be the hallmarks of Fitzgerald’s clear and silvery style.

      Reading The Knox Brothers now, some twenty-five years after it was written, one is delighted by its period charm, its playful narration, and its barely repressed sense of mischief. But one is also struck by its technical ambition. For Fitzgerald, the obvious choice was to write mainly about the two famous literary figures of the family: her father Edmund and her uncle Ronald. Here were two well-known, but nicely contrasted brothers, who provided a perfectly balanced biographical subject, of great interest and wide appeal.

      But in fact, of course, there were four Knox brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald took the daring (and indeed characteristically loyal) decision to write about all of them, and all of them equally. The biography thus has a highly unusual and almost musical form: a string quartet. The brothers’ individual stories are not presented separately as four static portraits (perhaps the obvious biographical method). Instead, they are carefully interwoven and developed, with a novelist’s sense of their growing individuality and changing fraternal alliances.

      Their story begins in a country rectory deep in rural Leicestershire of the 1880s: the ‘blue remembered hills’ of arcadian childhood. (p. 15) As Penelope Fitzgerald later said, in an interview for the Highgate Institution Newsletter, in 1997: ‘They were a vicarage family and vicarages were the intellectual powerhouses of nineteenth-century England.’ But soon, as the four brothers grow up in Edwardian England, each alarmingly clever with strong but increasingly distinctive personalities, Penelope Fitzgerald starts to switch her narrative from one to the other, obtaining penetrating effects of emotional contrast, suppressed rivalries and shifting loyalties.

      These transitions are wonderfully well handled, as for example in their very different experiences in the First World War. One brother is in the trenches, another in Naval Intelligence, the third working as a priest in the East End, the fourth writing books of spiritual comfort (chapter five). There is a wonderful scene in which they all manage to meet up, for one evening in 1917, in Gatti’s restaurant in Mayfair, and drown their sorrows in champagne. (p. 139)

      These contrasts immensely enrich and deepen the human scope of the biography. Though it remains a work of family history, it becomes something much broader. It is partly the vivid, humorous evocation of a lost England. But it is also a study in different kinds of human intelligence, and different kinds of virtue. One of the many things we learn, is that intelligence and virtue are not the same qualities at all. Another is that neither is very comfortable to live with. A third is that both may frustrate happiness.

      The oldest, and the longest-lived brother, was her father Edmund Valpy Knox (1881–1971). Fitzgerald draws the portrait of a clever, handsome, clubbable man, a brilliant journalist, a lightverse writer, a survivor of Passchendaele, a legend in Fleet Street, universally and fondly known by his curiously perverse and unpronounceable pen-name – ‘Evoe’ of Punch. This was meant to be in the tradition of Lamb’s ‘Elia’, at the London Magazine. But Eddie used to complain that people were always referring to him as ‘Heave-Ho’. He was unfailingly generous and encouraging to young writers.

      But Fitzgerald also hints shrewdly at a disappointed, and perhaps embittered man, driven in on himself by the early loss of his own mother, difficult and saturnine as a father, secretly feeling that his ambition to be a poet was never fulfilled by his ephemeral Fleet Street glories. The editor of Punch thought that real humour ‘lay not in ingenuity, but incongruity, particularly in relation to the dignified place that man has assigned to himself in the scheme of things.’ (p. 264) Years later his daughter, in the interview with Hermione Lee, would describe herself as ‘a depressive humourist, or a depressed humourist, which comes to the same thing.’

      In strongest contrast was the youngest brother, her affectionate and even cleverer uncle, Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957). Fitzgerald presents him as a conscious celebrity, the widely-read essayist, detective-story writer, Catholic apologist, Biblical translator and (significantly) pipe-smoker. He emerges as an odd mixture of childlike unworldliness, and powerful social ambition. He is the poverty-stricken socialite, the shabby chaplain visiting the great country houses of England, the golden friend of the Waughs and the Lovats and the Asquiths, who also lives in tiny, freezing, antiquated rooms at the Oxford University chaplaincy.

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