This is a welcome reissue, with a new brief preface, of a book first published in 1977, which rapidly became a classic in the genre of composite biography. Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Edmund Knox (1881–1971), and his three brothers, Dillwyn (1884–1943), Wilfred (1886–1950), and Ronald (1888– 1957), were descended from families teeming with Christian missionaries and eccentrics. The boys—there were also two sisters, but they receive scant mention in this pre-P.C. work—inherited these qualities in abundance. Their father was the evangelical Bishop of Manchester, in the north of England, and the fascination of the story lies partly in watching the variety of ways in which heredity was shaped by circumstance. Ronald, convert to Catholicism, priest, and biblical scholar, is the best-known brother (the curious may find more about him in The New Criterion of September 1997). Of the rest, Edmund became the editor of the humorous weekly Punch; Dillwyn was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, a classicist and cryptographer who cracked the codes used by the Nazi “Engima” machine; and Wilfred was an Anglo-Catholic priest and social crusader who ended his days as chaplain of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Brilliant members of a brilliant family, they led lives filled with shadows; for while Mrs. Fitzgerald—who herself died, sadly, this year just before this volume appeared—tells her story affectionately, with many entertaining and moving anecdotes, it is hard to resist the conclusion that something went wrong for each of these men.

An eccentric is always sure of a warm welcome in England, but there is a price to pay; the grotesque and the outré must be maintained at all costs. Any hint of a real person, with real feelings, beneath the façade will not be forgiven, for the eccentric’s only purpose is to entertain. He, in turn, needs applause, and is lost if it stops. The Knox brothers were precocious little boys, endowed with phenomenal memories (Wilfred, as a child, could repeat the Times leading article word-perfect after a single reading) and exceptionally articulate; they were performers from the beginning. But their world caved in in August 1892, when their mother died at the age of thirty-eight, leaving them orphaned at the ages of eleven, eight, six, and four. Despite Bishop Knox’s later, happy re-marriage, irreparable damage had been done. Edmund and Dillwyn were emotionally cauterized; Wilfred and Ronnie drew closer to each other in grief. “All needed love,” Mrs. Fitzgerald shrewdly comments, “Wilfred and Ronnie because they had had so much in childhood, Eddie and Dilly because they had had rather too little.” It was Edmund and Dillwyn who married and had children; Wilfred and Ronald took vows of celibacy (in Ronald’s case, long before he became a Catholic priest), in line with the family characteristic of choosing the most difficult of any range of options.

A psychologist would find much to study in the various control mechanisms the brothers developed: the invention of elaborate games with exacting rules; the relish for wordplay, crosswords, codes; the mastery of languages; the preoccupation with railway timetables … all were devices for limiting possibility, exerting total authority in an intellectual field—in short, for being safe. This went beyond reserve or shyness (which they also possessed to an unusual degree); it signaled a fear of spontaneity or of emotional risk-taking. Ronald’s early, fervent friendships with young men, like his later closeness to the convert Lady Acton, were perceived by him as dangers, not as means of grace. Dillwyn replaced his religious faith by a more insidious faith in the power of reason. He had little gift for human relationships, falling back on the icy question “Why do you say that?” when confronted by some piece of sentiment, and forgetting to invite his brothers to his wedding. He and his wife, in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s searing phrase, “loved each other for twenty years without being able to make each other happy.” Wilfred took truthfulness to the point of brutality; in the judgment of one of his former students, “He somehow communicated with everyone a deep love from a broken, unloving man.” He assumed he was unlovable, and could not bear evidence to the contrary, so he resolved to make it as hard as possible for anyone to love him. Behind this, as behind Ronald’s obtrusive humility and Dillwyn’s awesome inattentiveness to the obligations of ordinary life, there lay wilfulness, even a kind of unconscious pride. Their mother had been taken from them, their father had become estranged from two of them (Ronald and Wilfred) on theological grounds; their revenge was variously to abandon belief in God, or to embrace a kind of belief which made joy and peace fugitive and fleeting. They were too aware of the transience of things to be content with contentment.

“Evoe,” Mrs. Fitzgerald’s father (pronounced like his initials E.V., it is a Bacchic cry of celebration in Greek), the oldest and longest-lived brother, was also the most balanced in temperament. His predecessor as editor of Punch, Sir Owen Seaman, who occupied the post from 1905 to 1932, was conservative, imperialist, and high-minded. In England these were not seen as disqualifications for supervising a humorous weekly, but as an extra, delicious joke. Evoe brought in younger writers and artists, allowed a vein of fantasy, even surrealism, to flourish, and encouraged a political radicalism that would have horrified Seaman. Evoe’s dexterity in rhyming, his quick-witted word-play, were legendary; invited to address the Omar Khayyam Society, he began with “Unaccustomarkhayyam to public speaking.” Yet he too had demons to exorcize. He left Oxford, to Bishop Knox’s disappointment, without a degree, although the university gave him an honorary doctorate fifty years later; he was wounded at Passchendaele and felt unable to comply with Seaman’s requests for amusing articles from the trenches; like his father he was married twice, his first wife dying after they had been together twenty-three years. As to his view of God, who bulked so large in Ronald’s and Wilfred’s lives and whose absence was so much resented by Dillwyn, Mrs. Fitzgerald gives us few clues, beyond his own words that in his childhood “Church did not seem to rub off properly” on him. He was an Edwardian Englishman, too worldly-wise to be bothered with subtleties, and too anxious not to let seriousness slide into solemnity or pomposity. Wry detachment, he declared in a lecture at Cambridge in 1959, was the proper spirit of the age, “the power to be startled by nothing, however extravagant.”

All the brothers were writers. Edmund’s light verse and other journalism are forgotten now; only Greek specialists read Dillwyn’s edition of the fourth-century satirist Herodas; more recent scholarship has overtaken Wilfred’s work on the New Testament; Ronald’s voluminous writings keep their circle of devotees. There is something of the quality of a faded sepia photograph, too, in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s book; it is all a long time ago, and faintly sad. The intellectual and social milieu in which the Knoxes felt happiest was that prior to 1914, the year which changed everyone’s lives for ever. Like many others, they may have felt guilty about surviving; they certainly felt increasingly bewildered. They kept the twentieth century at bay with wit, ingenuity, and, when necessary, indignation. In their characteristically understated fashion, they rebuked a generation which believed that the world owed it a living, that pleasure is the only good, or, most dangerous delusion of all, that human beings have a right to be happy.