Shelf life.(The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox)(Book review)

ONE of Chesterton's most frequently quoted jokes was his answer to the question, Which book would you most want to have on a desert island? He said, "Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding"--and there was much of his personality in the remark: wit, of course, but also a rather obtrusively self-complimentary insistence on his own commonsensical attitude toward life.

Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957)--the great man of letters and Catholic convert who became one of the leading apologists of the 20th century--was influenced by Chesterton in many ways, and his approach to the same question was likewise revealing. According to David Rooney's impressive new guide to Knox's works--The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox (Ignatius, 427 pp., $17.95)--the book Knox wanted on the desert island was ... a Bradshaw railway schedule. The thick "ox-Bradshaw of to-day," wrote Knox, was "that noble volume which all of us, if we thought the matter over with proper deliberation, would pack next to the Bible in our desert-island bookshelf. Nowhere else, assuredly, can Fancy roam so free; nothing else affords the same opportunity for solitary pastime." Here, too, we have a window into the writer's character: Knox was a whimsical figure whose flights of fancy were nonetheless based on a very prosaic--even donnish--attention to specific facts.

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Rooney's book is focused on Knox's ...