My Life -in Pictures
Muggeridge, Malcolm
N o, this is not a collection of outtakes and reminiscences from "Masterpiece Theatre" and the like. My Life in Pictures is a photograph album of one of the best-spent lives in British journalism....
...The caption form of writing allows only for the barest glosses, but even here, Muggeridge excels...
...His candor did nothing for his popularity with the left...
...M any readers today regard him, if at all, as the venerable St...
...Of Graham Greene, Muggeridge writes: "He is one of England's finest storytellers and novelists...
...He includes a number of shots here from his saucy television days, many with "theatrical" expressions, as he puts it...
...He writes, briefly, of William F. Buckley, Jr., Mother Teresa, Kim Philby, Douglas MacArthur, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and numerous others who have crossed his path...
...and there is one picture included here of Muggeridge dancing the Lobster Quadrille with Sir John Gielgud in a production of Alice in Wonderland...
...He rapidly achieved the celebrity that only television can provide, becoming not only a journalist but a decidedly puckish "controversialist," as much a subject as any of those he interviewed for BBC...
...Television became the "dominant motif" (although he has also been its scathing critic) for well over ten years of his life, the period he will presumably treat in the next volume of Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...Unfortunately for those who know no Muggeridge, it is difficult to picture the great liberal death wish, or his dismay at humanity for seeking to create Utopias...
...He quickly got into hot water over a cartoon hinting that then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in his last tour of duty, should step down...
...In a Saturday Evening Post article, he took issue with royalty and created another uproar, although there are indications that press lord Beaverbrook took a big hand in stirring the pot...
...Muggeridge, to be sure, has never been camera-shy, and has ever had a taste for the controversial and for stirring up public comment...
...After his stint at Punch, Muggeridge embraced television, being one of the first to recognize the possibilities of the broadcast interview...
...He may have been chastened, but he never let up...
...But Muggeridge got the message: "Being anathema is a chastening experience," he captions one photograph, in Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...He provides sketches of those luminaries 'he has known, in a tone mainly friendly, occasionally bittersweet, and sometimes tart...
...He writes that Evelyn Waugh possessed an "inner quality or generosity of character which was expressed more privately and in a way that would help most...
...He went to see the "Russian experiment" in 1932 as an eager and sympathetic correspondent, and instead observed the famine in the Ukraine, which he wrote about at a time when almost all other enthusiastic left-wing journalists chose to look the other way...
...Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, on the other hand, who made a career of defecting to and then leaving the West, is "an utterly tragic person, living a life beyond bearing...
...For no matter how fine the craftsman is with words, and Muggeridge is one of the best, human nature craves the visual...
...At present his fame stands very high, certainly because of his sheer craftsmanship, ability to entertain at a serious level and his sense of irony, but possibly also, I wonder, because this is a comparatively lean period in this country for literature...
...He worked as an editorial writer, gossip columnist, and Washington correspondent at various stages in his career, and in 1953 became editor of Punch, where he set about the task of sharpening the magazine and to "spicing it with politics and current affairs...
...Mugg, but such was not always the case: he was not born old, as this book shows...
...And so on...
...It is, if there is such a thing, minor Muggeridge, which is still pretty high-grade for anyone else...
...He describes his election as rector of Edinburgh University (where the students, who thought they had elected an irreverent agnostic, found someone trying to turn them to thciughts of "the truths of the Christian religion"), his conversion to Christianity and finally to Catholicism, and his life in the countryside of Robertsbridge, Sussex...
...He went to India to write about the last days of the Raj, and worked in British intelligence, MI6, in World War II...
...But the author has dealt at length with the larger issues before, and here does what he can...
...Indeed, it may be taken as a companion volume to Muggeridge's ongoing autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and the results are as felicitous as if Mencken or Chesterton edited such collections to accompany their own works...
...I even sometimes suspect that future generations might see him as lightweight and see us as lacking inseriousness, too, for holding him in such high regard, particularly over his later novels...
...which he looks particularly lugubrious...
...CORRESPONDENCE MY LIFE IN PICTURES Malcolm Muggeridge/William Morrow & Co./$22.95 Joe Mysak THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 57...
...In My Life in Pictures Muggeridge collects impressions and souvenirs of a lifetime in abbreviated style, and with little of the satire to which his readers are accustomed...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
