January 24, 1960

Figure of Grace

By CHARLES A. BRADY

MONSIGNOR RONALD KNOX By Evelyn Waugh.

efore Evelyn Waugh fixed that public image of that essentially "private person," Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, in this splendid first biography of the celebrated monsignor, one was still at liberty to view Knox as a cross between a Gilbertian curate and a kind of P.G. Wodehouse clergyman whose idea of a pastoral cure was a perpetual long week-end punctuated, at canonical intervals, by the highest of high teas. Mr. Waugh has seen fit to choose a different fashion of remembering his friend of thirty years- one that, if it will not altogether please, will surely surprise the reading world, Catholic as well as Protestant.

Neither affirming nor denying his subject's personal winsomeness, Waugh views him as an ineluctably shy personality continuously growing in holiness, touched, on at least one occasion, by what Waugh is inclined to accept as genuine mystical experience. The straightforward narrative account is set down with old-fashioned punctilio in prose of classic distinction, singularly free of bravura, and marked by the hard clarity of outline that is one of Waugh's several manners.

This does not mean that Waugh overlooks entirely the side of Knox which made him seem at times a kind of Peter Pan in a biretta whose wire-drawn flights of wit were not invariably attended by ecclesiastical imprimatur. It does not mean that he eschews retailing the staple Knoxisms, leaving any real Boswellizing to lesser hands, in order to concentrate on the paradox that the most distinguished Anglican clerical convert to Roman Catholicism since Newman was destined to suffer Newman's fate of "the official frustration of his talents."

Waugh hints more than once that Knox felt the lack of some more "formal recognition of the work he had done" than the polysyllabic title of Protonotary Apostolic. A point that Waugh seems to overlook here is that Knox was not the stuff of which bishops are made; and that, so far as honorifics were concerned, he was able to dower his title of "Msgr." with something of the overtones Samuel Johnson lent his own honorific of "Dr."

Knox wrote once to Cardinal Hinsley: "We all have our heroes, and mine is Newman rather than Manning." Without suggesting that his blither subject is otherwise much like the ascetic of Oriel College, Waugh completes the parallel to Newman by finding no fewer than two villains (this somewhat Stracheyan part of Waugh's chronicle is currently a matter of some controversy in England) in the persons of Cardinal Mourne, whose portrait gets etched in acid understatement, and of Archbishop Amigo.

Knox's Anglican connections, on the other hand, are treated with affectionate forbearance, even with a measure of nostalgia extended to few of the Roman Catholic personages. (An exception, of course, is the set celebrated in Waugh's novel "Brideshead Revisited," who served Knox over the years as hosts and hostesses.) Knox's maternal grandfather, Thomas V. French, Bishop of Lahore, emerges as a truly saintly eminent Victorian. As for his evangelical-minded father, the doughty Bishop of Manchester- no wonder the son loved Trollope when he could see a nobler and more foursquare Barchesterian than Dr. Grantly in his own father!

Aside from the monumental version of the Vulgate, what does Waugh think will survive of Knox's extensive literary output? Among the longer books, "Enthusiasm" and "Let Dons Delight," "his most brilliant piece of secular work"; "God and the Atom"; a handful of essays and satiric squibs; above all, the collections of sermons which constitute not only our day's most notable specimens of a now neglected form but almost a new genre.

Except for a decade's interregnum immediately succeeding his conversion, Knox may be said to have kept his curious niche within Britain's conglomerate Establishment. By the time of his death from cancer in 1957, he had become a species of minor-national hero. All through his life he maintained a Lear-like counterpoint of Punch and Aquinas, of witty levity combined with moral gravity, which could produce, in one decade, a Biblically aligned variety of the parlor game of Snakes and Ladders and, within another, a one-man translation of the Bible. A past master of the non-malicious hoax, Knox conceived of his Oxford "chaplaincraft" in terms of what a later English generation has come to call "gamesmanship." His besetting temptation was never toward power, only toward pleasing others. If he had a certain vanity- always without pride, however- he had also a countervailing humility.

Waugh has done his lapidary best for an admired friend who never gave him "spiritual or moral advice." What Waugh here calls "the economics of Grace" are inscrutable. Would it be presumptuous for a reviewer, who admires Waugh's comic genius and was perturbed by certain undertones in his excruciatingly autobiographical last novel, to suggest that the writing of this admirable biography must have been a salutary exercise for a certain Pinfold-Waugh, who was at once so much more and so much less than a mere persona for the writer who contrived him?

Mr. Brady, critic and novelist, is Professor of English at Canisius College. He serves as the Saturday book critic for the Buffalo Evening News.

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