Remembering St. Mugg

...His disillusionment with the notion of a kingdom of heaven on earth "led me inexorably to the kingdom not of this world proclaimed in the Christian revelation...

...The war itself he regarded with contempt as "a kind of running soap-opera" (a favorite trope, by the way: in 1957 he was pilloried by an angry public and temporarily banned from the BBC for calling the British monarchy "a royal soap-opera...

...Within the next three years—either before or after meeting Mother Teresa while making the celebrated film Something Beautiful for God—Muggeridge stopped admiring Christianity as a nifty ethical system and started believing in the Incarnation and the Resurrection...

...Muggeridge had come to Moscow largely under pretext, not much interested in being a foreign correspondent...

...Oumansky said that Muggeridge had given him the impression "when I first came to the USSR that I believed in nothing, whereas I went away believing in something...

...Considered in these terms, the Cold War seems to have been won by the Russians —but at the time of his remark Muggeridge also observed that "the Americans are doing rather well...

...Long before he knew what he believed, Muggeridge knew very well what he disbelieved, and he continued in one way or another to be preoccupied with his "revulsion against the liberal mind as such and all its works...

...By this time, Muggeridge had pretty much made himself persona non grata for a series of harsh reports (smuggled out by diplomatic pouch) which he had written on the Soviet suppression of religion and the state-engineered famine in the Ukraine...

...His witty assaults on human pretensions were supported by his sense of the fundamental mystery of things...

...Be that as it may, Muggeridge did indeed leave the Soviet Union "believing in something...

...Why is Muggeridge on record as having claimed both...

...That "something" wasn't yet the Christianity he was to acquire much later, and certainly not the Roman Catholic Church he was to embrace in his very late years...

...But the longing, if inevitably tinged with farce, was not out of pain or gloom or cranky morbidity...

...A "preference for the inferior" did THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 19 indeed show up in his frenetic work as a star reporter and editor for the Daily Telegraph (1946-53), editor of Punch (1953-57), and TV host of programs for the BBC throughout the fifties and early sixties...

...Yet the attempt to externalise the kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster...

...Except to his family and his closer friends, he no longer felt any allegiances...

...With Hitler's invasion of Russia the previous year, the Nazi-Soviet pact had already been forgotten, and the gray figures in the Kremlin were now being hailed as "liberators...

...Oh, the terrible inhumanity of the humane...

...springing into its vapid existence...

...Asked for his personal credo in 1966, he wrote, "I should be proud and happy to call myself a Christian...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991...

...That's Muggeridge in good form and on target...

...ment hospitality...

...but one may also wonder how a Soviet functionary—a supremely dedicated Stalinist who was later to become ambassador to the United States—could be moved to say off the cuff that Muggeridge's earlier enthusiasm for the Soviet state was nothing more than the symptom of a self-indulgent nihilism...

...In his memoirs, Muggeridge wonders whether Oumansky's remark indicated "an unspoken recognition on his part that my changed attitude represented a genuinely reached conclusion, not an interested calculation...

...The figure of Oumansky, who was pattering on about the Revolution and the Proletariat and Comrade Stalin, "loomed up across the table, misty and remote...

...By the time Oumansky invited him to dinner, the bubbles had burst, Stalin's Great Terror was cranking up, and Muggeridge expected at any moment to be kicked out of the Soviet Union, if not arrested, for dropping his hard-earned counterrevolutionary sentiments among the pro-Soviet geeks who pored over the Guardian...

...Since he was always attracted tothemes of the New Testament (the fallenness of man, the human need for some kind of rescue, the significance of suffering, man's dim perception of the world through a glass darkly, and so forth) and was always amenable to the religious impulse, was there ever a time in his life, really, when Muggeridge wasn't some kind of Christian...

...Or of the Cold War and its wildironies...

...Or the unstinting admiration he heaps on Tolstoy the man (i.e., Tolstoy the colossal egotist, not just the great novelist) in A Third Testament (1976), a television commentary written three decades after a diary entry (August 1, 1948) places Tolstoy in the same jerk-league as Rousseau and Whitman, with Muggeridge plausibly regarding the contrast between Tolstoy's preachments and his personal behavior as "singularly revolting...

...He wasn't sure what to expect from Oumansky...

...He remained outspoken in his scorn for the British Raj and the general prospects of the Empire, but his erstwhile colleagues on the left snubbed him for his slanders against the great Soviet hope...

...At dinner, after several courses and more than a few highballs, Muggeridge, half-drunk, began to feel himself being absorbed into the room: "The mirrors revealed a long, long corridor along which I trudged, with no end in sight...

...The "Dawnism" of the liberal mind, according to Muggeridge, constitutes a "death-wish," so that, by a strange irony, we get "a continuing revelation of what Blake called Fearful Symmetry": Illiteracy increases along with expenditure on public education, the demand for sedatives with increased leisure or affluence, and crimes of violence with libertarian schemes to prevent them and rehabilitate their perpetrators...

...In fact, he longed for death in the expectation of joy...

...Throughout the war, and despite his energetic service to the Allied cause, Muggeridge felt no excitement in the prospect of victory...

...Did it require some blunting of his critical edge for Malcolm Muggeridge to surrender to Christ...

...Amid the small talk and boozy mist, however, one remark stuck...

...The more pacifists and internationalists in the world, the more belligerency...

...Oumansky seemed to Muggeridge to be hugely proud of the house, with its furnishings and decor all intact, and he showed Muggeridge through "tall, dimly lit rooms, heavy with coloured marble...

...Mugg" from his detractors, who regarded his newfound asceticism as yet another stunt...

...The notion makes perfect sense to any believer in Christian eschatology...

...the more maternal and child care, the more foetuses aborted and thrown away with the hospital waste...

...He took up a vegetarian diet, for which he acquired the appellation "St...

...Or the personal warmth he seems to have felt for real stinkers like Walter Duranty and Kim Philby...

...Tovarish!—it meant something after all...

...Was the alleged suicide attempt during his wartime service at Lourenco Marques (1943) for real, or a ruse to fool the Germans...

...That future too had cast its shadow backwards...

...he and his wife, Kitty (a niece of the Webbs), had fully intended to take up permanent residence in the Workers' Paradise, and Muggeridge, not quite 30 years of age, was bubbling with enthusiasm...

...And given his skeptical temperament, where did he get the initial credulity he took with him to the Soviet Union in 1932...

...What it meant, exactly, Muggeridge wasn't sure—but he was certain it had nothing to do with consumers' co-operatives, hydroelectric dams, crop quotas, the press corps in Moscow, or the funny little cranks in the West who wrote articles expatiating upon the excellence of the public health service in the USSR...

...a premonition that a change of tenancy is imminent...

...For the remaining two decades of his life he devoted his wit and his media talents to the propagation of his faith...

...Dinner was at the Spirodonovka, formerly a rich merchant's house which had been requisitioned permanently by the Revolution to be used for governJohn R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...

...Of course, the remark may have been nothing more than a firm hint that it was time for Muggeridge to leave the USSR...

...The thought would come to him in flashes, as when he and Kitty were staying at a dacha in the Kliasma woods outside Moscow...

...By age 30 Muggeridge was permanently stuck with being a man of vision...

...By the mid-sixties, he had stopped smoking and drinking...

...H e was nonetheless enigmatic, leav- ing many questions for biographers...

...Muggeridge had been nursing Kitty for several days, and one evening he went for a brief walk through the pine forest: It just suddenly seemed to me that Russia was a beautiful place—these pine trees, dark against the snow which had now begun to fall, the sparkling stars so far, far away, the faces of the Russians I met and greeted, these also so beautiful, so clumsy and so kind...

...So how did Tolstoy, in Muggeridge's view over the next twenty-seven years, advance from charlatanry to the saintly status of "God's spy...

...On first meeting the official several months earlier, Muggeridge had been treated deferentially, owing to his close acquaintance with Beatrice and Sidney Webb, at the time England's socialist luminaries and the world's "estimable upholders of Stalinist dictatorship...

...In another diary entry several months later (February 1949), Muggeridge considers Tolstoy "the best possible example of the fatal consequences of failing to relate ostensible beliefs to actual behaviour...

...So that really the Cold War became the question of whether the Americans would create more Communists than the Russians would create anti-Communists...

...In his African travels, for example, as an agent for the British Secret Service during World War II, he found that government houses had about them "a musty smell of decay...

...Muggeridge was fond of quoting a passage from the introduction to Kingsmill's Poisoned Crown (1944): What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form...

...If it's true that each human soul is fashioned to enjoy God in some unique way, nothing could be more fitting to Saint Mugg than to be told, precisely, the why of God's creation, the wherefore of His cosmic joke...

...That same faculty apparently troubled Muggeridge during his years as a media celebrity, which he would look back on with some distaste...

...In the last decade or so of his life, Muggeridge longed for "the release of death," and he alluded so frequently to his imminent demise as to move Auberon Waugh to write a mock obituary: We regret the sudden passing of Malcolm Muggeridge "at the age of 150...

...For his endorsement of such sentiments, Muggeridge was labeled a "neoTbry" by another friend, George Orwell...

...But the intimations were more than political, and much later Muggeridge would have to label himself a Christian...

...Kitty, pregnant with their second son, had come down with a severe and frightening case of paratyphus in a land where people crossed themselves at the thought of entering a hospital...

...When Kingsmill died in 1949, Muggeridge, still far from proclaiming any faith, wrote of Kingsmill's "greatness," which lay "in his faculty to see into the mystery of things...

...amid British jubilation when the United States entered the war, Muggeridge could only feel apprehension as he envisaged "the awful perversion of words and meanings that would soon be upon us...

...The dining room was stately, with many mirrors and, over the table, a massive candelabrum...

...Nor was there any call to be flabbergasted when, in December 1982, he and Kitty were received into the Roman Catholic Church...

...to dare to measure myself against that sublimely high standard of human values and human behaviour...

...Muggeridge left the Spirodonovka (and soon thereafter the Soviet Union) with scarcely a clue as to why Oumansky had invited him to dinner...

...It cannot be created by characters or constitutions nor established by arms...

...The context for this comment is touching: leaving Kitty and the children for "the foolish, and often vainglorious, if not squalid, preoccupations of the moment"—in this case the war, which, at age 36 and with hefty family responsibilities, he had no obligation to enter and, really, no business entering...

...When he left Russia, Muggeridge was dogged for many years by a recurring 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 melancholy, the unwelcome loneliness that shadows so many independent minds...

...n Hugh Kingsmill, Muggeridge I found a friend who shared the antiutopianism he had acquired in the Soviet Union...

...The future was casting back its shadows: intimations of a Soviet official sitting among the judges at Nuremberg, or of the French Communists gorging themselves in an anti-collaborationist frenzy after having supported Hitler during his pact with Stalin, or of the U.N...

...In the end life exacts a fearful price for such charlatanry...

...It didn't involve all that much change...

...At the center of this vision was a peculiar intuition that the future somehow adumbrates the present...

...EEarly in the spring of 1933, shortly before leaving Moscow after a long winter stint as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Malcolm Muggeridge was invited to dine with the head of the press department at the Soviet Foreign Office...

...There were many other premonitions, gloomy more often than not...

...On November 14, 1990, at the age of 87, he reached the end of the "long corridor" which he had seen himself trudging fifty-seven years earlier over dinner with a Communist functionary...

...The collapse of his left-wing orthodoxy was dramatized in Winter in Moscow (1934), a semi-autobiographical novel which he wrote almost ten years before Hollywood's Jack Warner produced the fatuous Mission to Moscow and more than twenty years before Nikita Khrushchev horrified a new generation of true believers with the public confirmation that Stalin really wasn't a very nice guy...

...Brother...

...In his memoirs (written mostly around 1970-72), Muggeridge bemoans "the preference I have so often shown for what is inferior, tenth-rate, when the first-rate was there for the having...

...Kingsmill, a writer "uncontaminated" by the ideological conflicts of the age, dismissed utopian expectations as "Dawnism...

...He began feeling an intermittent self-disgust...

...Muggeridge held forth against the heathen with the same sense of irony he had used to tweak the high and mighty...

...his last twenty years seem to have been his happiest, and he was active almost to the end...

...It was often a point of fascination for him "to observe how what is to happen reveals itself in advance...

...the more free speech, the less truth spoken...

...It all fits, and those who were baffled by his "conversion" couldn't have known him very well...

...but that same sense chided him when he used his wit frivolously...

...Chief censor for the international press corps in Moscow, the Soviet official was, according to Muggeridge's memoirs, "a youngish-looking man named Oumansky with crinkly hair and a lot of gold teeth...

...In 1978 he remarked: I've always thought that the Cold War when it was on was one of the most bizarre wars in history because wherever you had the Americans they created Communists and wherever you had the Communists they created anti-Communists...

...Those who seek for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves...

...What Muggeridge seems to have discovered in the Soviet Union, amid the rubble of his utopian hopes, is that the human condition has intrinsic meaning—independent of social or historical circumstance...

...but, as if to prove the point by example, Muggeridge acquired the notion long before he "rediscovered" Christ: "The future casts its shadows backwards...