Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life

...He was employed by the Guardian and attacked it in a novel that was withdrawn because of legal threats...

...Muggeridge claims to have been an outsider at Cambridge he prints letters showing him to have been happy enough, and adds a photograph of Muggeridge in the rowing eight...

...He wrote what was taken as an attack on the Royal Family (reading it now one is struck by how mild and sensible most of it is...

...Muggeridge is a prophet...

...Muggeridge has written much of Mrs...

...Had he died in the middle fifties, many more would have remembered an embattled public figure...

...As someone who worked with Muggeridge in MI6 during the War observed, "I remember him as something of a playboy...

...Man bites God," wrote Time of his Jesus Rediscovered...

...Muggeridge's television appearances...

...But on these, surely, his reputation will rest...

...Then, in the mid sixties, he attacked the greatest totem of all, sex: He was now able to tell his reading public that if was a Bad Thing...

...chorused the newspapers...

...Lust and rage danced attendance on his youth, and the novels and plays that lurched from his typewriter are among the bleakest ever written...

...Now a satyr...

...Truth, not facts, dear boy," as he once observed...

...But, as Professor Hunter makes clear, he was disillusioned with Soviet Communism before going...

...Once a comedian, dear boy...

...But in the writings of Malcolm Muggeridge all roads lead to Mr...

...He went to Moscow and wrote a book that became a bombshell in progressive circles...

...Professor Hunter gives an outline of Autumnal Face, written in 1931...

...I an Hunter intended this book to be a work of literary criticism...

...Muggeridge says, many Malcolm Muggeridges, "all those selves, so different and so hideous...

...He was there in the sunset of the British Raj, was in Moscow in the 1930s when that was a Brave New World to many of his contemporaries, was in Paris for the Liberation (his own part being the liberation of P.G...

...A grandmother has a stroke when she comes on a young couple necking...

...Professor Hunter is not entirely sure whether this took place (it is a great turning point in the autobiographies...

...In his autobiography he makes a great play of having sold his dinner jacket first...

...It reminds me of an image I came on once in a cook book and have never been able to get out of my mind: It is of an old lady in Calabria who was seen to bash out an entire and vast ox tripe against the basin of a public fountain...

...But then came television, and he had his pulpit...

...One man came from Scotland, claiming to be Jesus Christ...

...Muggeridge got to Emmaus, wherever that is...

...Then there were the mysterious postwar years about which Muggeridge has little to say, when his career in journalism flourished and he became deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and editor of Punch...

...No writer of fiction would have dared invent such a character.have dared invent such a character...

...There was also an extraordinary biography of Samuel Butler in which Muggeridge pursued him through every paragraph, holding him up, removing garment after garment...

...Frank Harris, reflecting that while Christ might have gone deeper, he, Harris, had a wider experience of life...

...But he is now 78 and Professor Hunter's biography is an account of a spiritual pilgrimage: "His trek was to Em-maus, not Damascus, and only occasionally did he recognize the stranger who walked with him...

...the girl dies after catching flu on a Sunday School picnic...

...Muggeridge believes he acquired them at Cambridge by a sort of osmosis...

...Where Professor Hunter is most fascinating is where, in his capacity as UN observer, he gives his own account of events...

...Muggeridge has always regarded the world with great interest, which is why one wonders how he is getting on in Emmaus...

...Muggeridge had become the hit man of his time...

...There were always women around, and booze...

...A prize shit," reflected Evelyn Waugh in his diaries...

...His biographer has thus to assume the position of a United Nations peace-keeping force...

...A vicar in Berkshire once dreamt wistfully of blacking his eye...

...Some of his admirers will mourn the fact that Mr...

...Visiting journalists are given lettuce and yogurt and taken on long walks, "with God always about somewhere, but tantalisingly never within reach," wrote a man from the Guardian (the paper has not forgiven Muggeridge...

...Into the clearing smoke of battle came the religious books...

...Webb...

...He was so busy on the road, and so entertaining, one hoped no cars would stop for him...

...Muggeridge is also a war front to his contemporaries...

...His father, an office clerk and soap box opera, hoped to see his son a prominent figure in the Promised Land of his Socialism...

...There was nothing unworldly about him at this stage...

...But to his Sussex cottage the pilgrims began to come...

...The picture on the cover is by courtesy of the Evangelical Broadcasting Company of Holland: It is a lovely touch that will delight his old friends...

...There is the young Mugg taking a rickshaw on his arrival in India, dismounting when he sees the sweat spreading across the man's shoulders, walking beside the rickshaw, then quarrelling bitterly over the fare...

...There is the tormented writer of fiction, the secret agent making invisible ink out of bird droppings, the TV pundit, even- once-the film star...

...But to many, most of them outside Britain, Mr...

...And now there is the prophet...

...Weak on God and grace, but brilliantly funny on their adversaries, the world, the flesh, and the devil.'' In a sense Muggeridge backed into faith, holding his nose in fascinated disgust...

...It tends to reinforce a suspicion that it is impossible to get any accurate picture of Muggeridge from his autobiographies, where the old cynical Mugg pads through every paragraph beside his younger selves, jeering and pointing...

...As naturally as some come to edit their school magazines he was, with Kim Philby and Graham Greene, a member of the British Secret Service...

...he himself at 78 supplied the linking commentaries, sitting in happy, writhing judgment on himself like a President of the Immortals...

...Whatever else one can say about Ian Hunter, a professor of Law at the University of Western Ontario and author of The Immigration Appeal Board of Canada (Ottawa 1976), he is a brave man...

...But one activity has been followed all his life...

...Had he died in the sixties, his reading public and I would have grieved over the passing of the greatest comic writer of his time...

...What are his relations with his children like, and with his brothers...

...Similarly with his attempted suicide in Lourenco Marques during the War...

...And what does Mrs...

...He wrote many polite book reviews, referring to Smuts on one occasion as "one of Cambridge's outstanding sons...

...in 1961 he attacked Churchill and in 1965 Kennedy, the dead spring god...

...What are we left with in the end...

...I can't recognize this Christian chap on the box at all...

...It is a wonderful tale, and Professor Hunter tells it well, but there are strange gaps in the biography...

...Should this man be allowed to get away with it...

...he has made her into one of the great comic figures of the twentieth century...

...It is my King Charles's head," he once reflected fondly...

...He was, regularly as autumn, voted the most hated man in Britain, and he stalked the great like a gunfighter...

...This was the strangest Muggeridge of all...

...His diaries were recently published, and the third volume of his autobiography will soon be at the printer's...

...her father dies mad...

...Professor Hunter dismisses Muggeridge 's collection of essays, The Most of Muggeridge, published in 1966, as anaemic...

...A ruling class on the run is capable of every folly,'' wrote Muggeridge gratefully: Kicking old employers in the teeth is another activity that has not changed...

...It may just have been a very old dinner jacket but when the personality has become an art form details are immaterial...

...They are based on his journalism and are mainly profiles of the great: Lord Beaverbrook writing about his Savior ("The Crucifixion was a setback, certainly, but the Resurrection more than compensated for it...

...Wodehouse...

...Muggeridge has always bashed himself, his career, and his beliefs against the twentieth century...

...In the year this book appears there has been on British television a series of programs, Muggeridge Ancient and Modern, an anthology of Mr...

...He taught at an Indian college, walked barefoot, learned to throw rice into his mouth, and tried to incite his pupils to rise against the British: His pupils seem to have found him a figure of great fun...

...What makes Muggeridge hate Samuel Butler so...

...The young was indeed a remarkable figure...

...He goes on to state something even more at odds with the Authorized Version: Muggeridge was an accomplished secret agent...

...He has met most of its great men (" 'I've heard of you,' the Viceroy said, a touch of grimness in his voice") and ransacked its Utopias...

...But even a quick glance through Professor Hunter's narrative will leave you with the impression that whatever century he was born in, when Rome fell, when Luther nailed his treatises to the church door, there would have been Muggeridge buying Alaric a drink, talking much to his friends about Luther of an evening...

...Professor Hunter must be the first biographer who has ever had to flatten himself against the pictures as the life tenant breezed by, showing yet more tourists round himself...

...Muggeridge: The book became a biography...

...Muggeridge has always been a sort of war front to himself...

...Had he died during the War, some might have mourned the author of some of the bleakest novels written in this century...

...People, Beatrice Webb had approvingly confided in him, did disappear in Russia...

...Great charm...

...So where Mr...

...muttered one reviewer...

...Muggeridge make of it all...

...This biography will only confuse those who have come into contact with him...

...As soon as you say this a lot seems to fall into place...

...He began jwell, marrying into the progressive equivalent of the Royal Family: His wife is a niece of Beatrice Webb, the Fabian...

...Her biography would tell one a great deal more about her husband than this book...

...There have been, as Mr...

...her room is taken by her crippled uncle who is then run over by a lorry...

...He was born in that featureless suburban sprawl south of London, into the working class (his upper class vowels, "his uniquely irritating accent," as the Guardian once put it, are of more fascination to his countrymen than his spiritual development: Mr...

...if Stalin had had any interest in public relations he would certainly have made Muggeridge disappear...

...And the twentieth century, like all infiltrated organizations, has showered employment on him, from the Mellins Baby Food Beauty Prize (which he won in 1903) to the editorship of Punch...

...It is great comic writing: The essays are the equivalent in prose of the caricatures of Max Beerbohm...

...In 1958 he attacked Field Marshal Montgomery, a friend ("Good," commented Monty...

...There have always been elements of the ham in Muggeridge, as his biographer notes, and now it was Muggeridge gloriosus...

...But he took himself very seriously...

...The expression is much the same as it was when he won the Mellins Baby Beauty Prize...

...Muggeridge himself is, quite simply, the greatest comic character of the century...