Ronald Knox:
A Man for All Seasons
edited by francesca bugliani knox
pontifical institute of medieval studies, 416 pages, $65
The greatest writer of English prose in the last century, P. G. Wodehouse excepted, was not Lytton Strachey or Logan Pearsall Smith or the E. M. Forster of Pharos and Pharillon or Hugh Trevor-Roper. It was certainly not John Updike or William Faulkner, who did not always write English. It was not, alas, Evelyn Waugh. Nor, one is forced to admit, somewhat reluctantly, was it Dom David Knowles, the golden-voiced singing-master of monastic history. It is Msgr. Ronald Knox who must take the silver medal.
Why this is not more widely acknowledged is difficult to say. “Every word you have written and spoken has been pure light to me,” Waugh once told his friend, and it was Waugh who came closer than anyone to explaining the difficulty of assessing a fellow writer who did not “employ a single recognizable idiosyncratic style” or stick to a single genre. “No major writer in our history,” he said, “has ever shown such an extent of accomplishment” as this author of essays, parodies, apologetics, criticism, light verse, and memoirs; scholar and author of detective fiction; ecclesiastical historian; translator; and homilist of genius. He was not entirely right about Knox’s style, though one begins to see what he means. Knox had an unrivaled ear; he could imitate any writer in Greek, Latin, or English. But he was not one of those authors like Trevor-Roper—or Waugh himself during the writing of his memoirs—who gives one the impression of having composed with Gibbon or another exemplar open on his lap. Like Newman’s, his style is at once high—solemn, Augustan, elegant, periodic, musical—and low—breezy, chatty, colloquial—without the slightest hint of discord. It is identifiable and wholly singular.