Saint Mugg
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
M alcolm Muggeridge, one of the literary spirits behind THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR and a major figure in America's libertarian-conservative movement, despite British citizenship, was born one hundred...
...I lost patience...
...The BBC will rebroadcast his choicest programs and interviews...
...It was an immensely friendly face, but the insomnia suggested the troubled interior...
...Malcolm suffered insomnia even after he gave up his heroic alcohol binges and even after he put his soul in order according to Christian precepts and mystical yearnings...
...By the time we became friends, he had drifted from radicalism slightly flavored with mysticism to a Muggeridgean Christianity heavily flavored with mysticism...
...Thus as we left the restaurant they got into a comedy routine about the need to purchase typewriters immediately—this before word processing was the writer's Stradivarius...
...Still, whenever I suggested we walk down the lane to one of Robertsbridge's ancient pubs, I got the feeling that he feared I was suggesting a binge...
...Malcolm introduced all his themes of impending catastrophe and even Solzhenitsyn found them too gloomy...
...Enough...
...As reminiscences, they were exquisitely reticent about the old rogue's escapades, but their poetic rendering of the 1930s and 1940s deliciously conveyed the drama of those momentous decades...
...In England it was subject to much comment...
...The tourists felt cheated...
...As a joke I arranged a choice table at the very center of the restaurant...
...Was it the accent of a don...
...The memoirs were a superb read in part because, as Richard Ingrams, Malcolm's subsequent biographer, wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, "One of the extraordinary things about his life is that, without apparently meaning to, he has been around at all the truly important events in this century and met almost all of the important individuals...
...M alcolm Muggeridge, one of the literary spirits behind THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR and a major figure in America's libertarian-conservative movement, despite British citizenship, was born one hundred years ago this March...
...Getting that drink could be problematic, for both Muggeridges had been on the wagon for years...
...His grim predictions never arrived on time or, for that matter, at all...
...He had worn the responsibilities of fatherhood lightly, so, too, the responsibilities of being a husband...
...Poor Malcolm, despite his conversion, never had such hope...
...Malcolm was often pungent and poignant, but not always accurate...
...We took a memorable train ride out to his home in the English countryside...
...Once in Washington, in the 1970s, at a time when the ornate Sans Souci was the premier luncheonette among Washington giants, I had him and his wife, Kitty, as guests...
...She wore a wild religious habit with an immense conical headdress...
...In the course of the dinner their otherworldliness got to me...
...His friend, William F. Buckley, Jr., will preside over a conference at the Malcolm Muggeridge Memorial Library at Wheaton College...
...When Malcolm asked the banished Russian dissident if he thought he might ever return to Russia, he replied: "In a strange way, I not only hope, I'm inwardly absolutely convinced that I shall go back...
...Not really...
...They returned from Stalin's madhouse in time for Malcolm to become the first significant English leftist to snitch on the Noble Experiment...
...In the mid-1930s, though he was an unknown, he contemplated standing for Parliament and not as a Laborite, which his politics then adumbrated, but as a Tory...
...He had become a joyous monk—St...
...Mugg would excoriate those who still got under his skin: his old friend Graham Greene, the Webbs, Stalin and his daughter Svetlana (whom the Muggeridges knew and alternately liked and disliked), and, of course, D. H. Lawrence, whom Malcolm ridiculed with tireless delight, frequently reading from the most ludicrous passages of Lady Chatterley's Lover for our general derision...
...I still think he was one of the funniest intellectuals I ever met, and both on this side of the Atlantic and on the other we spent much time together walking the streets of New York or London, gabbing and laughing, popping in on television studios where he was a star, or on college campuses, where the smiles and embraces he reserved for coeds were warm even after he supposedly banked his libidinal fires with zealous Christianity...
...As reminiscences, they were exquisitely reticent about the old rogue's escapades, but their poetic rendering of the 1930s and 1940s deliciously conveyed the drama of those momentous decades...
...At the small dinner parties that the Muggeridges gave in the cottage at Robertsbridge the chief subject of discussion was usually gossip...
...Kitty prepared the vegetables, the nuts, and the cheeses (vegetarianism, again), and I brought along my own Scotch...
...In America he needed no introductions from me, though I did, during a late 1970s visit to England, have the opportunity to introduce him to one of the few American writers he still wanted to meet, Wolfe...
...Weltschmerz...
...Still, there was logic to it...
...Kitty raised eyebrows amongst the sales personnel by insisting that a standard blue button-down was not right for me...
...and off we went to a nearby store to pester a salesman with nonsensical questions about Gutenberg, portable typewriters, and whether he thought Teddy Kennedy was as dangerous with a typewriter as with an automobile...
...Thus the Spring of 2003 will witness centennial ceremonies on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Mugg, as Hugh Kenner, the literary critic described him in the New York Times Magazine...
...When his brilliant memoirs were published in the 1970s his fame reached the heights...
...When he was your house guest, there was no need of preparing a guest bed...
...A little bit of heaven," is how Tom Wolfe described Malcolm's aerie after we visited the Muggeridges together with Tom's wonderful wife, Sheila...
...Wherever they went, Malcolm and Kitty had enormous fun, or so it seemed...
...Malcolm was an inveterate critic of modernity, having little good to say about the recent past, the present, or—oh, horror—the future...
...As with Mencken, put-downs came before perspicacity...
...He loved it...
...Lord Longford was a socialist, famous for his Catholic piety, progressive causes, and dottiness...
...Despite his castigations of egotism he needed reassurance...
...anti-monarchism...
...Malcolm was an inveterate critic of modernity, having little good to say about the recent past, the present, or—oh, horror—the future...
...They were having a grand old time...
...Otherwise in the cottage with his guests it was sherry unless I brought my own Scotch...
...But all noticed it, and the accent along with his charming manners and rhetorical trills attracted to him the reassuring compliments that he seemed to need...
...Privately Malcolm confided that his chief reason for swearing off booze was the preservation of his literary talent...
...Before the timpani begins to roll, allow me to file my reminiscences, for I knew his genius and his quirks well...
...As a false prophet he ranked about even with the environmentalists, say, Dr...
...Others will weigh in...
...Politics and power may have been two of his favorite targets for reproach, but he often derided most wantonly that which lured him most compulsively...
...In 1978, when he stayed with me at my Indiana home, he would be the last to turn in...
...Malcolm's writing extended from daily journalism to erudite expatiations in the most venerated intellectual forums, such as that great cultural hope of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the New York Review of Books...
...At least one affair had been with his good friend Hesketh Pearson, while he was covering the early months of World War II in Washington...
...Malcolm was an exuberant debunker of the high and mighty, of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, of Stalin, FDR, and—let it be remembered— Churchill...
...His celebrity in America has evanesced, a casualty of our secular, liberal, asphyxiatingly conformist Kultursmog...
...As the disappointments accumulated, I began to feel used...
...The BBCneth Galbraith was as much a literary arbiter as an economic gadfly, he reviewed Malcolm's memoirs on page one of the New York Times Book Review, pronouncing them "wonderful" and the work of a "true master of the craft," the craft being iconoclasm but also autobiography...
...Full of utopian anticipation, the young Muggeridges went to Moscow in the 1930s where Malcolm would report for the Manchester Guardian on the New Civilization...
...In his day even mediocre writers recognized and admired a superior literary talent...
...Little pebbles of brown discoloration and minute toadstools called polyps made the face a caricaturist's playground...
...He had a thick rounded nose, big and fleshy ears, and a wraparound mouth from which resonated a drawling, exquisitely accented English, an accent that was his own invention, but an enormous hit on radio, television, and the lecture circuit...
...another left her with an illegitimate son, Charles...
...There in the old cottage, which for me was happily haunted by figures from his roguish past and lined with books and memorabilia from his controversial exchanges, the journeys afar, the glamour days on BBC, St...
...By the 1970s when I knew him he had moved pretty close to American conservatism, though his sense for the Zeitgeist (this time he was capitalizing on Weltschmerz) and his record as a hard drinker and ardent adulterer probably explained the residual acceptance that remained among many American and British intellectuals...
...I remember one of my last visits to Robertsbridge...
...Others will weigh in...
...Regarding his religious conversion, which made him for a time oneof Christendom's most famous converts, it was not an instantaneous Pauline fall from the ass but a long, slow evolution, from extreme skepticism towards modern life to a touching faith in Scripture, the saints, and then the Holy Eucharist...
...His hair, retreating steadily from his wide forehead and providing a thin thatch across the massive dome of his head, was snow-white...
...My impatience was vindicated, and in that interview Solzhenitsyn said something that puts the lie to the claim of the early 1990s that no one sensed that the Soviet Union was about to fall...
...He had an aptitude for identifying with one or two ingredients of the Zeitgeist (anti-materialism...
...It cost him dearly among his peers, but Malcolm survived...
...Thus the Spring of 2003 will witness centennial ceremonies on both sides of the Atlantic...
...In the 1970s, when John KenM alcolm Muggeridge, one of the literary spirits behind THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR and a major figure in America's libertarian-conservative movement, despite British citizenship, was born one hundred years ago this March...
...Perhaps Kitty's affairs added to Malcolm's insomnia...
...Along with Luigi Barzini, the writer with whom I felt most in sympathy after the founding of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR was her majesty's uneasy subject Malcolm...
...Malcolm was an exuberant debunker of the high and mighty, of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, of Stalin, FDR, and—let it be remembered— Churchill...
...Francis of Assisi's sense of amusement...
...In England he introduced me to an older generation of writers and public figures...
...Even after becoming one of the Western World's most famous Christians, Malcolm adored gossip, especially gossip revolving around fornication...
...A red shirt is more appropriate," she said, "for Baub...
...As with Mencken, put-downs came before perspicacity...
...No Englishman ever quite explained it to me...
...Thus the Spring of 2003 will witness centennial ceremonies on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Materialism had been a target of theirs since the 1930s, as it was again that afternoon at Brooks Brothers...
...He had been famous for his binges, and so he usually sent me off with his brother for a pint...
...His celebrity in America has evanesced, a casualty of our secular, liberal, asphyxiatingly conformist Kultursmog...
...His friend, William F. Buckley, Jr., will preside over a conference at the Malcolm Muggeridge Memorial Library at Wheaton College...
...Good heavens...
...We parted company on President Jimmy Carter whose born-again claptrap suckered him in and on Margaret Thatcher—"an old fool," he laughed...
...Before the timpani begins to roll, allow me to file my reminiscences, for I knew his genius and his quirks well...
...The skin on his face seemed thick, browned from gardening, creased across the forehead and at the corners of his wide mouth and eyes from prolonged bouts of despair and insomnia...
...he would be up and at prayer...
...Malcolm's left-wing politics began with his father's socialism but gained breadth and radical intensity from his exposure to Kitty's aunt and uncle, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, leading adepts of Fabian socialism and authors of that idiotic 1935 classic Soviet Communism: A New Civilization...
...It was in May of 1983...
...erupted Lady Longford, "I'd heard there were Americans like you...
...Tom Wolfe esteemed him, along with Mencken and Orwell, as being one of the three great fashioners of English prose in his century...
...Along with Luigi Barzini, the writer with whom I felt most in sympathy after the founding of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR was her majesty's uneasy subject Malcolm...
...Yet from the 1950s to the early 1980s, Malcolm was a protean presence in America, attracting applause from the eminent all along the political spectrum...
...His hearing weakened...
...At the beginning of the twenty-first century there is no reason for an intelligent person not to know that the past century's promise of cost-free personal liberation was a lie...
...Coming as he did from the lower classes of so class-conscious a society as Britain's and spending so much time among the snootiest classes from his Cambridge days to his BBC era, Malcolm had doubtless been stung by the petty affronts of many snots...
...A free society molds a self-reliant citizen," I declaimed, "a citizen superior to the drones of socialist society...
...Prior to it THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR published some of his last works, which breathed a historic pessimism that I then found timely, at least until the Reagan Revolution eclipsed the Carter Malaise...
...Both were confirmed nonconformists and acted the part...
...simple rudeness...
...In the 1970s, when John KenM alcolm Muggeridge, one of the literary spirits behind THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR and a major figure in America's libertarian-conservative movement, despite British citizenship, was born one hundred years ago this March...
...His daughter-in-law Anne believed it stemmed from guilt over all those whom he had hurt in earlier years: the pols and writers whom he had gaily derided, the abandoned loves, his family...
...After Malcolm bought his new portable the raucous humor continued at Brooks Brothers, where I needed to buy a dress shirt...
...Though Malcolm suavely disguised his true longings, his friends surely recognized that all the things he came to abominate—power, politics, egotism, materialism, carnality—were uncommonly strong temptations for him...
...In Robertsbridge I frequently encountered his leftish egghead friends and consequently usually was in need of a drink to allow me to see the world from their point of view...
...This time I have Wolfe's assessment right...
...In his last assignment for the BBC, Malcolm interviewed one of his heroes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Hoping for a Kennedy or a Nixon Watergateer, they had to settle for a couple of street people with high Britishaccents...
...A disastrous maiden speech to a Conservative rally aborted his career...
...Bill fascinated him even if Bill was good for very little gossip of a salacious sort...
...You can never have too many typewriters," counseled Kitty...
...The woeful predictions grew tedious...
...Every time I visited Robertsbridge I left high in anticipation of imminent catastrophe for the West, but no catastrophe ensued...
...It did not turn out particularly well...
...An anonymous correspondent wrote Malcolm a jeering letter...
...I denied that The End Is Nigh and notified the Longfords that the West would survive because of the Founding Fathers' insight...
...For once Wolfe's attire was not the most conspicuous as we made our promenade over the ancient hills and fields once crossed by Celtic kings and Roman legions, Norman knights and Cistercian monks, and now us, modern hikers who by the next morning might be 35,000 feet above the earth on a commercial jet halfway around the world from where the Muggeridges were reading Scripture and Blake...
...Among the sleek lobbyists and politicians, I knew they would create a stir...
...Again he was playing on that enduring ingredient of the late twentieth-century Zeitgeist, Weltschmerz, that so frequently fetched the literary-leaning herd...
...Was it upper class...
...Always he wanted the very latest news on Bill Buckley, of whom he was very fond...
...Malcolm was often pungent and poignant, but not always accurate...
...Yet Ingrams in his biography records that both these early adepts of sexual freedom had treated their marital vows cavalierly...
...He rarely slept...
...That night the Muggeridges' guests included their lifelong friends Lord and Lady Longford, heads of one of England's best-known literary families...
...I had begun to have misgivings...
...And so from counter to counter the seventy-fiveyear-old bohemian went to procure my "red shirt...
...At the appointed hour the Muggeridges paraded in, dressed in their customary bohemian garb of out-at-the-elbow sweaters, dark tattered pants for Malcolm and an equally frayed gray dress for Kitty, a peasant cap on Malcolm, gray hair askew for Kitty...
...Johnson...
...When his brilliant memoirs were published in the 1970s his fame reached the heights...
...Before Mrs...
...The BBC will rebroadcast his choicest programs and interviews...
...Kitty came to my defense: "I agree," said the Webbs' niece, "with Baub...
...Of course, it helped to be a writer of colossal gifts...
...The comic put-on was by then their favorite public pastime, though in private they enjoyed daily prayer and rereading aloud the authors they had favored for years—Cervantes, Blake, Dr...
...Malcolm's literary gifts really were stupendous...
...it contributed to the anguish of his retirement...
...In her youth she had been a showgirl...
...Beneath heavy brows, his eyes were crystalline blue and sparkled...
...By then he was edging offstage into a retirement that he hated...
...By 4:30 A.M...
...Having written everything from journalism to novels to plays, Malcolm was a superb satirist, particularly a political satirist, but his dark little secret was that politics actually attracted him...
...His eyesight dimmed...
...Malcolm's writing extended from daily journalism to erudite expatiations in the most venerated intellectual forums, such as that great cultural hope of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the New York Review of Books...
...Reflecting on him today, I recall a man who radiated enormous personal warmth, a hilarious sense of the absurd, cosmopolitan views, imagination, charm, and that singular dexterity with words...
...Still the inner torment remained...
...The only palliative he never shook was fame...
...I live with this conviction: I shall go back...
...and in my mind I still see us walking single-file up the spine of a very steep Sussex hill, Malcolm in the lead, laughing, next Tom in his white linen suit, a white felt homburg on top, next me, and finally Kitty bringing up the rear with Sheila and a fantastic creature: the daughter of one of the Muggeridge's old friends, "Sister Fifi" she was called...
...Yet from the 1950s to the early 1980s, Malcolm was a protean presence in America, attracting applause from the eminent all along the political spectrum...
...The Muggeridges, now septugenarians, joshed about the place's tony French decor, dramatically eschewing the lushly sauced viands for naked salads (they were now vegetarians, teetotalers, opponents of sexual license, in fine, 180 degrees from their radical yesteryears when they had entertained every intellectual fashion from Communism to free love...
...The personages he spoke of and visited with were all spent forces, menand women more notable for illustrious pasts than for golden futures...
...He was a merry devastator in print and on late-night talk shows, where in the 1950s and 1960s the civilized banter of superior wits such as Buckley and Gore Vidal was not malum prohibitum as it seems to be now...
...Along with the literary symbols of his earlier enthusiasms, he now adorned his cozy twelfth-century cottage a mile or so outside the Sussex village of Robertsbridge with the symbols of the Gospel and pictures of him with Mother Teresa of Calcutta—his BBC documentary introduced her to the world and him onto a long path to the Catholic Church, which he entered in 1982 after years of doubt...
...Still Malcolm went right along prophesying doom...
...Paul Ehrlich, vaticinator of so many famines and cataclysms yet to arrive...
...We were all neoconservatives...
...which was usually enough to endear him to someone significant in the progressive herd...
...He was a merry devastator in print and on late-night talk shows, where in the 1950s and 1960s the civilized banter of superior wits such as Buckley and Gore Vidal was not malum prohibitum as it seems to be now...
...All his life he had resorted to the usual palliatives for the furies in his soul...
...Surely they could not resist his vegetarianism, bohemian dress, and world-weariness...
...Thatcher revived the British economy in the 1980s, the England that Malcolm belabored put me in mind of a vast attic in an old mansion containing the dust-covered heirlooms of better days...
...In a short time the New Civilization's morbid preoccupations proved to be too restrictive and humorless for them...
...After living for twenty years as the youngest of Malcolm and Kitty's children, he died in a skiing accident near Chamonix in the Alps...
...And, may I note, that in my piece on Mencken a couple of issues back I mistakenly included the name of Evelyn Waugh where I should have listed Orwell...
...The underlying theme of all Malcolm's gossip and of most of his writing was that the West was finished...
...When booze and profligacy and laughter failed, he looked longingly heavenward, reliant now on St...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
