Family Fair

By Mayo Mohs

THE KNOX BROTHERS by Penelope Fitzgerald Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 294 pages; $10.95

Dilly said it best: "Nothing is impossible." That conviction shaped the lives of the four Knox brothers. For Dilwyn, the second-born son, it meant breaking the vital German flag code in World War I and finding a crucial key to the Germans' baffling Enigma machine in World War II. For Ronald, youngest and most celebrated of the four, it meant translating a Roman Catholic English Bible--Old and New Testaments--from the Latin Vulgate. For Eldest Brother Edmund it meant a painstaking ascension to the Fleet Street pantheon as editor of Punch. Wilfred, the third-born son, chose a different sort of test. An Edwardian dandy who wore silk ties from London's Burlington Arcade, he took a vow of poverty as a workingman's Anglican priest.

Biographer Penelope Fitzgerald has a blood knowledge of this charmed band of brothers. Eddie was her father; Ronnie, Dilly and Wilfred her beloved uncles. There was also Aunt Ethel, withdrawn and spinsterly, and Aunt Winnie, boundlessly affectionate. "Enter Winnie," wrote Eddie in a childhood play, "and kisses everybody." Penelope follows Winnie's lead: her family portrait, scrupulously honest, laced with good humor and lovingly crafted, is a valentine to the sort of family that has largely ceased to exist.

The Knoxes were born at a happy conjunction of piety and humanity. Grandfather George Knox had been a holy terror, a Low Church Anglican minister who tried to flog the hell out of his sons. Grandfather Thomas French, in Fitzgerald's words, "was a saint ... and as exasperating as all saints," a gifted linguist and longtime missionary to India who would squat in the marketplace of Agra reading the Bible to lepers. But when Edmund Knox, sire of the four brothers, took the cloth, it was of a different cut. The tireless worker for his soot-stained Midlands flocks eventually became Bishop of Manchester. But he remained a gregarious and joyful man who loved to trot his family off for a seaside holiday.

His first parsonage in rural Kibworth became ever after a touchstone of the boys' halcyon youth. "They had their own cow in the pasture, their own rookery in the elms, and, best of all, the railway ran past the bottom of the garden," writes Fitzgerald. "In memory it was always summer, with the victoria plums ripening on the south wall."

The idyl could not last. Father was called to a grimy industrial parish in Birmingham; their mother contracted influenza and died. But soon there was a new Mrs. Knox, an elegant lady from a landed family who encouraged the boys' brilliance: Ronnie was reading Virgil at the age of six. It was she who decreed the boarding schools they later attended: Eton for Dilly and Ronnie, Rugby for Eddie and Wilfred. Dilly went on to Cambridge, where Lytton Strachey fell in love with him (the compliment was not returned). The others went up to Oxford.

Religion became a crisis for all the brothers except Eddie. Dilly abandoned faith altogether. Wilfred deserted his father's Evangelical plainness for High Church Anglo-Catholicism with its in cense, vestments and Roman-style ritual. Ronnie dismayed everyone: in a passion ate search for authority, he "went over" to Rome, and became his adopted church's bright star as newspaper columnist, radio preacher and witty apologist for the faith. Somehow the family ties managed to survive. Even after Ronnie's conversion, the brokenhearted bishop could sign his letters, "With overflowing love, dearest boy."

The family Fitzgerald celebrates is rich in foibles. There are the cherished baths, where Dilly solved his cryptograph ic riddles and Eddie planned the next week's Punch. There is Wilfred, sympathetic for the workers in the 1926 General Strike, but winsomely envious of a fellow cleric gone off to drive a train. And Ronnie, ever the six-year-old boy who had brought a bunch of fresh-picked flowers to his new mother, always needy for the mothering attention of elegant ladies in great country houses. It was under Lady Acton's affectionate (if platonic) wing that he translated his celebrated Bible.

The complex, fascinating brothers took their achievements lightly. In Rome to be honored by Pius XII, Ronald chat ted amiably with the Pontiff about the Loch Ness monster. When Edmund, in his 70s, was asked to write his autobiography, he declined, but suggested a title: Must We Have Lives? Penelope, happily, decided that they must. -- Mayo Mohs

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