The Knox Brothers
Penelope Fitzgerald's novels expertly map the  unquiet heart. But so, too, do her three biographies, all  of which mingle truth and tact, wit and documentary power.The Knox Brothers, first published in 1977, is  suffused with rich, right strangeness and sad delight.  Fitzgerald begins her group portrait of her father and three uncles a few generations  back, establishing on the Knox side a tradition of   religious fervor, dominant fathers, and invalid mothers.  The Frenches were equally ecclesiastical but not so dour,  her great-grandfather Thomas perhaps the most extraordinary  of the lot: he ended his days wandering through Arabia  preaching Christ's love. (In the end, "agents of the  Sultan, who deeply respected the strange old fakir, were  deputed to keep watch over him, but they could do nothing  when they found him insensible, still with a book in his  hand.")We would gladly spend more time among these ancients, but  this is the story of four sons--two of them agnostic, the  other two deeply religious--born to Edmund and Ellen Knox  between 1881 and 1886. Edmund George Valpy, Fitzgerald's  father, would go on to editPunchunder the  sobriquet Evoe. Alfred Dillwyn was first a classical  scholar and then a world-class cryptographer. Wilfred  Lawrence was concerned above all with poverty and inequity  and made his life as an Anglo-Catholic priest. And, lastly,  Ronald Arbuthnott, too, devoted his life to God, causing  great familial distress by converting to Catholicism. (As a  young boy, he would perform funeral rites for dead birds  while sporting his sister Ethel's "pinafore for a  surplice.") Raised in an era in which Anglicanism and  Empire held sway, the brothers were blessed with a bright  beginning in Leicestershire:All the children were so happy there that in later years  they could cure themselves of sleeplessness simply by  imagining that they were back at Kibworth.... They were  completely safe in the large nursery at the top of the back  stairs, looking down into the kitchen garden, where in  memory it was always summer, with the victoria plums  ripening on the south wall. Their father mounted his stout  horse, Doctor, to set off on his parish visits, and their  dearly loved mother waved from an upper window.This is only one beautiful passage among many inThe  Knox Brothers, and very characteristic as it weaves  between sharp description and never-never-land nostalgia.  Alas, it also points forward to irreparable change. First  their father was granted a larger, less bucolic diocese in  industrial Birmingham, and next their mother died too soon,  in 1892.The Knox Brothersis as acute as it is affectionate.  Whether Fitzgerald is describing "slumbrous"  turn-of-the-century Oxford or an infinitely more advanced  Cambridge circa 1903--or Ronnie's 1951 private audience  with the Pope, during which these men of the cloth mostly  discussed the Loch Ness monster--she effortlessly evokes  vanished worlds. She can also paint an entire relationship  in a short space. As Dilly lay dying, his wife "nursed him  devotedly. These two people had loved each other for twenty  years without being able to make each other happy. They  would have given the world, now they were at the point of  separation, to understand one another." There is everything  to savor in such scenes, so revealing of character and  (perhaps) class. All four brothers, even as they grew into  their separate visions, never lost their love for one  another, and worked their wild talents as hard as was  humanly possible. About the only enigma these intellectuals  and devoted practical jokers could never resolve--and  Penelope Fitzgerald makes us wonder if any of us can--was  "an inner struggle between reason and emotion, and between  emotion and the obligation not to show it."--Kerry  Fried