RONNIE & THE BOYS.

The Knox Brothers
Penelope Fitzgerald
Counterpoint, $26, 304 pp.

During the twenties and early thirties, the Catholic church in England made a miscalculation, the kind of error which history permits to Rome so that she can resume her majestic progress undisturbed."

This statement of ecclesiastical apologetics prefaces Penelope Fitzgerald's deft and sympathetic handling of the ministry of her uncle, Monsignor Ronald Knox. In a fundamental way, the providential view of history that the quotation expresses informs this whole study, her interleaved biography of her three uncles and her father, the Knox brothers of the title. Fitzgerald died earlier this year just before completing the new introduction to this book, which was originally published in 1977. She was eighty-four. This work on her family as well as a biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the Victorian painter, inaugurated her career as a writer.

It is tempting to read The Knox Brothers not for its subject matter, but for what it reveals of the much acclaimed novelist to come--an author of nine novels, including The Blue Flower, winner of the National Book Critics Award. The familiar trope that sees the artist as the god of a fictional universe, an imaginative providence that creates and directs, is in many ways a satisfying way to describe the effect of Fitzgerald's technique as a novelist. Her fiction often gives the sense of a narrator who lets us glimpse only darkly the forces that drive her characters and plots. As a biographer, she is much more direct: The Knox Brothers includes a diagram of an elaborate family tree pointing to the confluence of families and temperaments. Her account of Thomas French, bishop of Lahore, the maternal grandfather of the four brothers, provides the key to understanding what makes them such extraordinary figures.

French wore himself out in missionary zeal, dying in the Middle East, an aged ascetic, continuing his mission to convert to Evangelical Christianity those Muslims who protected him as they rejected his message. Heroic struggle in extreme conditions with little hope of what the world terms success was French's legacy to his four grandsons. Two, Wilfred and Ronnie, worked out this providence in religious ways, the two elder brothers, Eddie, editor of Punch, and Dilly, classicist and code breaker, in secular efforts. All, as the author tells us, "shared one sense of humor and one mind." The technical challenges involved in breaking this unity into the four brotherly parts is considerable; Fitzgerald's ability to meet the demands of telling four stories of brothers increasingly different in career as they age makes this book both a tour de force and a fascinating comparative study.

It is, above all, an account that starts in a Victorian vicarage. The brothers' father was also an Anglican bishop of Low Church or Evangelical faith. The shaping effect of religion, of commitment to divine causes through social reform, was everywhere apparent as the boys matured and the century turned. Life was to be lived not in calm retirement, but in a sort of divine game, whose rules spurred the young men in sibling rivalry. The list of famous acquaintances and friends bulks large in the book's index. The Knox brothers, through the traditional links of public school and Oxbridge, were intimately involved in the major social, artistic and intellectual movements of their age. They register the effects of World War I (Eddie served and was wounded, Ronnie lost two of his closest friends), of Bloomsbury, and of the social upheavals of the twenties. Yet in Ronnie and Wilfred, the long shadow of Cardinal Newman, of the Tractarians and the Oxford movement, is still unmistakable. These two men struggled with the validity of Anglican orders and sacramental theology.

Eddie and Dilly labored in different vineyards: journalism (to make a mission of Punch!) and philology. Dilly, an atheist, found his real life's work not in the editing of classical texts, but in cryptography, working on deciphering enemy secret communications during both World War I and II. The account Fitzgerald gives of the breaking of the German Enigma code is a tale well told. Eddie, the writer's father, was a humorist and legendary editor. Her treatment of him is oddly distant, again reminiscent of the narrative stance in many of Fitzgerald's novels; she manages to convey acute perception with steady reserve, an effect that is literally uncanny.

Commonweal readers will find the description of the English Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities obliquely, but intriguingly told. Fitzgerald thinks the Catholic church misused her uncle's talents. Ronnie, the famous monsignor, was Catholic chaplain at Oxford and occupied places in prominent social circles showing publicly a Catholic establishment "every bit as good" as the Anglican. Her reflections on his work in translating the Vulgate into a modern English version shows her sense of the limitations of his efforts, both ecclesiastical and personal, and the triumph of his will and faith. How public indeed was Ronnie's presence may be difficult for a modern reader to appreciate: he was the most famous English Catholic convert of his age (his bishop father disinherited him) and bore the peculiar burden of apologist in his books, journalism, and radio broadcasts. Evelyn Waugh wrote the first biography of Ronald. Knox's translation of the Bible was intended to be his gift to the church, a testament to the English tongue that would make Holy Writ live for his countrymen. Where the work stands in relation to other modern versions is left moot by his niece. It is her uncle, the Anglo-Catholic Wilfred, however, whom she presents as most the heir to Bishop French. As a superior in the Oratory of the Good Shepherd and a Cambridge don, Wilfred seems, by sheer force of eccentric will and ascetic temperament, to have defined spirituality for generations of Cambridge undergraduates--and for his niece.

To take seriously one's lineage, the intersections of lives in family trees, is to see legacies as gifts or constraints and as directed to some end in oneself. To convey the workings of this sort of providence in four brothers, avowedly one in mind and sense of humor, helps show how Fitzgerald saw the world in a way that harks back to another age, one of faith greater perhaps than we are likely to find in biographers today. At the end of this good biography, the author remains a distant presence, yet she was almost sixty years of age and about to start her career as a novelist. The book represents her coming to terms with herself, if nothing else.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.