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Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957) | |
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Prolific English satirist, essayist, novelist, and translator, whose career as a writer spanned over 50 years. Most of R. A. Knox's books dealt with religion and spiritual topics. He converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 29, and devoted his later life mainly to his translation of the Bible. Its complete version was published in 1955. Knox was also a leading member of the English Detection Club. In 1929 he published his ten commandment of crime fiction in the 'Introduction' of The Best Detective Stories of the Year 1928, which he co-edited with H. Harrington. Knox stressed in his Detective Story Decalogue fair play between reader and writer, and forbade death rays, poisons unknown to the science, supernatural agencies, fortuitous accidents. "Chinamen" were totally forbidden. "Words are born and die; they live only so long as they have an important errand to fulfill, by expressing what needs expression. And 'enthusiam' in the religious sense belongs to the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries; it hardly reappears without inverted commas after 1823. In the meantime, it had a literature all to itself; and what a literature!" (Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries by R. A. Knox, New York: Oxford University Press, 1950, p. 6) Ronald
Arbuthnott Knox was born in Knibworth, Leicestershire,
the fourth son of Ellen Penelope French and the Reverend Edmund
Arbuthnott Knox, later bishop of Mancester. Despite his mother's death
when
he was four year old, Knox's childhood was peaceful. Ellen Knox had
caught influenza in December 1891 and was sent to one nursing-home
after another for eight months. (The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald, London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 37) Knox's father married
in 1895 Ethel Mary Newton, twenty
years his junior. Ronald's brother Wilfred become later a theologian,
who authored numerous books;
another brother, E.V. Knox, became the editor of Punch.
Another brother, Dillwyn, was one of the UK's leading cryptologists and
a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. He cracked German codes at
Bletchley Park during WWII. In 1900 Knox
entered Eton, where where he impressed his friends with his sense of
humour and intelligence. At the age of seventeen, Knox took a wow of
celibacy. "The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity,"
he later said. "I was not fleeing from the wickedness of the world I
saw round me. . . . But at this time (as in common, I suppose,
with many people) I was just beginning to form close and intimate
friendships. I was just beginning also to realize that in many cases
such friendships were likely to be dissolved through circumstances of
separation after leaving school." (quoted in Monsignor Ronald Knox, Fellow of Trinity
College, Oxford, and Protonotary Apostolic to His Holiness Pope Pius XII,
compiled from the original sources by Evelyn Waugh, Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1959, p. 72) Knox was the coeditor of The Outsider (1906), an Etonian magazine and while still at school he published his first book, Signa Severa (1906), a collection of English, Greek and Latin verses. Knox, poem, The Wilderness' about planting a garden in School Yard, delighted generations of Etonians. After receiving his B.A. in 1910 in classics and philosophy from Balliol College, Oxford, he became a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1911 he was ordained an Anglican deacon and a year later priest in that religion. In 1912 Knox was named chaplain at Trinity College. During World War I he taught at Shrewsbury School and served at the War Office in military intelligence. To the horror of his father, Knox converted to Catholicism in
1917 and resigned his fellowship of Trinity. In the privately printed
book, Apologia (1917), and in A Spiritual Aeneid (1918)
Knox explained his religious search and his rejection of the
contemporary Anglican Church. In 1918 he was ordained a Roman Catholic
priest. Knox taught at St. Edmund's College, Hertfordshire, from 1919
to 1926, and from 1926 to 1939 he was a chaplain to the Catholic
undergraduates at the Oxford University. In the summer of 1939 he moved
to Shropshire to translate the Vulgate. St. Jerome's fourth century
Latin Bible had remained the official Catholic version for many
centuries, and the bishops of England and Wales requested him to make a
new translation. Knox also worked as a private chaplain in aristocratic
houses, first to Lord and Lady Acton at Aldenham Park, and then to
Katherine Asquith at Mells. Knox's version of the New Testament
was published in 1944, the Old Testament
in 1949 and 1950. The
complete text, with hundreds of revisions suggested by the overseeing
committee, was published in 1955. Knox's work was well-received but the
Church decided to abandon the Vulgate and go back to the original Greek
and Hebrew. Knox himself thought that a new Bible translation must take
the Vulgate as its standard. And it should break away from the literal
translation of sentences. During World War II Father Knox headed a committee that provided Catholic books for servicemen. When Lord Acton decided to move with his family to Southern Rhodesia, Knox moved with his books to Mells, Somerset, where he took up chaplaincy at an old friend's estate. Knox died on August 24, 1957. His last words were, after Lady Eldon had asked whether he would like her to read to him from New Testament: "No." Then, after a long pause, he said: "Awfully jolly of you to suggest it, though." (Monsignor Ronald Knox, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Protonotary Apostolic to His Holiness Pope Pius XI, p. 333) Knox never married. His literary executor was Evelyn Waugh, whose biography on his friend appeared in 1959. The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, daughter of his brother E. V. Knox, published in 1977 a history of her family, The Knox Brothers. The Belief of Catholics (1927) established Knox as one
of the foremost Catholic voices in England. He expressed his worry
about the consequences of modern world view, which has subjected
fundamental dogmas of the Christian religion to criticism, or
interpretation, and to restatement. "Neither the Church of England nor
any Nonconformist body registers any increase of membership which keeps
pace with the annual birth-rate; some of them have to register a net
loss, not only of ministers, but chapels and of Sunday scholars. What
hopes can be conceived that religion continues to be a real force in a
nation which has so feeble a grasp on Church membership as this? . . .
But
can any sensible person delude himself into the idea that a decline of
organized religion does not mean, pro tanto, a decline of
religion altogether?" (The Belief of Catholics, New York
and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1927, pp. 10-11) Among the main causes of this decline Knox saw popular education and newspaper culture, industrial development which focuses men's thoughts upon their material interests and pleasures, a reaction against old faiths and old loyalties, and mass production which has made luxury cheap: "steam travel, motor-cars, and the penny post have brought it to our doors; anæsthetics and the other triumphs of medicine have mitigated the penalties which attach to it. And the same causes which have multiplied pleasure have multiplied preoccupation. A rush age cannot be a reflective age." (Ibid., p. 12) Knox was a prominent figure of the Detection Club. With its major writers he published in the early 1930s Scoop (1930) and Behind the Screen (1931), which appeared in The Listener and were written originally to be broadcasted. The Floating Admiral (1932) brought together again members of the Detection Club. The short story 'The Fallen Idol' appeared in Six Against Yard (1936). Its other writers were Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Russell Thordike. Behind the Screen was a domestic drama, murder within a family. Knox's contribution was its last chapter, 'Mr. Parsons on the Case' in which he showed his skill in weaving together stories written by Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthoiny Berkeley, and E.C. Bentley. The murderer is Robert Ellis, a throughly neurotic type, but also more sympathetic Miss Pettigrew, a dress-maker, is involved in the crime, and Knox ends his account with a small twist: "So the two amateurs pieced it out together. They could not know everything. They could not know that Miss Pettigrew, instead of waiting in the hall all the time, went into the pantry to sneak biscuits, and so never saw Robert pass. That only came out at the inquest, and was used by the court, most unscrupulously, as evidence that Miss Pettigrew was, at the moment at the murder, insane." ('Mr. Parsons on the Case' by Father Ronald Knox, in The Scoop & Behind the Screen by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Hugh Walpole, E. C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Clemence Dane, Ronald Knox, and Freeman Wills Crofts, introduction by Julian Symons, New York: Charter Books, 1984, pp. 215-216) The Viaduct Murder
(1925), Knox's first mystery novel, tells of a group of golfers who
discover the dead body of the
local atheist below a railway viaduct. The pipe-smoking insurance
investigator Miles Bredon, Knox's s series hero, was introduced in The
Three Taps (1927); this work went through many editions. At that
time Knox worked in Oxford, where he
typed his books between eight-o'clock Mass and lunch. Bredon's
investigations continued in The Footsteps at the Lock (1928),
a story about two scheming cousins, The Body in the Silo
(1934), Still Dead (1934), in which a body vanishes and appears
again, and Double Cross Purposes (1937), about treasure hunt
set in the Highland countryside. According to Robert Speaigh, the
purpose of writing them was "to supplement the meagre stipend of the
Oxford Chaolaincy." (Ronald
Knox: The Writer by Robert Speaigh, London and Melbourne: Sheed
& Ward, 1966, p. 32) Knox stopped
writing mystery novels because his bishop ordered him to spend his time
with more
dignified pursuits. As a detective
type Miles Bredon is not so memorable as G.K.
Chesterton's
Father Brown. Miles is not his rival, nor is he a version of Christie's
Poirot or Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. He plays Patience, a difficult
form
of Canfield, and lets at the same time his unconscious work for him.
Bredon is employed by an insurance company called The Indescridable.
Other central characters are Miles's wife Angela, and
Inspector Leyland from Scotland Yard. The Body in the Silo is considered Knox's best mystery. The murderer kills a wrong man, an influential politician, whose body is removed to the silo. Also the blundering murderer ends up dead. Critics have considered Bredon simply a bore and Knox's plots implausible. Knox himself was more good-humored as a critic, but he eventually protested when the young Lady Acton threw Double Cross Purposes into the Mediterranean. Knox's other books, such as Let Dons Delight (1939), imaginary conversations written from the perspective of an Oxford common room, and Enthusiasm (1950), a survey on the history of religion, have been praised for their wit and stimulating ideas. In 1912 Knox became one of the first practitioners of the
mock-serious pastime called Sherlockian scholarship with
'Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,' which first appeared in
Blue Book 1912.
"I believe that all the stories were written by Watson, but whereas the
genuine cycle actually happened, the spurious adventures are the
lucubration of his own unaided invention. Surely we may reconstruct the
facts thus. Watson has been a bit gadabout. He is a spendthrift: so
much we know from the beginning of The
Study in Scarlet. . . . " ('Studies in the
Literature of Sherlock Holmes' by R. A. Knox, Blackfriars, Vol. 1, No. 3, June
1920, p. 159) Originally Knox wrote the essay as a satirical
attack on the methodology of literary criticism, exemplified in the
achievements of the school called "the higher criticism." Knox's absurd
premise, that Sherlock Holmes is a real person, amused Conan Doyle, who
wondered why "anybody should spend such pains on such material." As
a priest Knox had to believe miracles and
divine intervention, but he condemned them in detective stories, in
fiction. He regarded the detective novel as an intellectual puzzle
which must obey the rules of logic – a view which was shared by many of
his colleagues. The American art critic and writer S. S. Van Dine
emphasised fair play in 'Twenty Rules
for Writing Detective Stories' (1928): the detective story is a kind of
intellectual game, which means that all clues must be plainly stated
and described. T.S. Eliot, who wrote three reviews of detective fiction
for the New Criterion in the late 1920s, argued that a mystery story must not rely upon occult phenomena or an irrational element. Knox presented 'Decalogue': ten commandments for the detective story in his 'Introduction' to The Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1928 (edited by Ronald Knox and Henry Harrington, London: Faber & Gwyer, 1929). Evelyn Waugh defined Knox's concept of the mystery story as "a game between writer and reader in which a problem was precisely stated and elaborately disguised." (Monsignor Ronald Knox, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Protonotary Apostolic to His Holiness Pope Pius XII, p. 188) Perhaps most often cited tongue-in-cheek rule is "No Chinaman must figure in the story." With this Knox poked fun with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, and other racist clichés of the period. Explaining its meaning Knox said, "This principle I admit, is one merely derived from experience; I see no reason in the nature of things why a Chinaman should spoil a detective story. But as a matter of fact, if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstall, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad." (quoted in Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925-1930 by J.K. Van Dover, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010, p. 66) I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. Nevertheless, Knox
himself took liberties with one of his rules ("The detective must not
light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection
of the reader") in Double Cross
Purposes. The Decalogue was
challenged in 1973 by the Canadian-Czech writer Josef Josef Škvorecký
in Sins for Father Knox.
Each story deliberately violates one of the commandments. The task for
the reader is to decide which rule had been broken and identify the
murderer. For further reading: The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox by Evelyn Waugh (1959, US title: Monsignor Ronald Knox); Ronald Knox by Thomas Corbishley (1964); Ronald Knox: The Writer by Robert Speaight (1966); The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald (1977); 'Knox, Ronald A(rbuthnott)' by Norman Donaldson, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957)' by Brian Murray, British Mystery Writers, 1920-1939, edited by Bernard Bernstock and Thomas F. Stanley (1989); 'Ronald A. Knox' by Susan Oleksiw, in Mystery & Suspense Writers, Vol. 1, edited by Robin W. Winks (1998); The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox by David Rooney (2014); The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards (2015); Ronald Knox: A Man for All Seasons: Essays on His Life and Works with Selections from His Published and Unpublished Writings, edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox (2016) Selected works:
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