Muggeridge, Credulous Skeptic

...While others lavish praise on the emperor's new clothes, Malcolm blushes and points his finger at the naked man on horseback...

...The more he observed those who represented the wishes of the great nations, the more despairing—and the more aloof—he became...

...and the Totalitarian State, whether in its classless, socialist society or Third Reich version, is the full realization of their slavery...

...Whitman's soaring strophes in praise of the demos and the all-encompassing "I" are strident discords to his fastidious ear, on the intellectual level of a college yell...

...As luck would have it I was able, unobtrusively I hope, to chat with Mr...

...And those little children are his life...

...All in all, a self-flagellatory exercise in pity which can only end in nausea...

...Not even D.H...

...Muggeridge talks of joy frequently and protests that he experiences its touch in the sounds of music and in the coming of spring, but his joy is essentially an inner thing, something essentially private...

...Animistic savages,",he wrote in The Green Stick, "prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell...

...until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come...

...Muggeridge is at his best, it seems to me, in describing the persons and places he has known...

...To begin with, Muggeridge possesses little of the great gusto that Mencken got into his work...

...To such abnegation of the will he offers only one alternative (again, the ,either/or argument): an activism that leads inevitably to mass tyranny...

...One passage in the book reveals clearly his attitude toward the tyranny of the majority, which Muggeridge considers the salient fact of twentieth-century societies, or rather of Civilization in its final death throes: "The Sovereign People owe allegiance only to themselves...

...In such matters, he resembles those romantics whom he most detests—Eliot, Lawrence, H.G...

...By the time he came to write The Sun Never Sets (1940), Muggeridge was convinced that Hobbes was right in his famous statement: "The general inclination of all mankind is a perpetual and restless desire after power which ceaseth only in death...

...Francis of Assisi, William Blake, Kierkegaard, the aged Tolstoy (after he'd gone crazy), and Simone Weil...

...everlastingly true amidst the swirling fantasy of passing time...

...The quotation comes from Something Beautiful for God (1971), an insignificant little book that might appeal to the sentimental but must make the judicious grieve...

...When he lost his dream of heaven on earth, while "padding about the streets of Moscow" in the early 1930s as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, he simply substituted in its place a different dream of heaven...

...Made straight by his insistence that truth always resides in paradox and can be revealed in either/or propositions...

...He no more deifies the ego after the fashion of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, than he glorifies the State after the fashion of the Marxists or Democratic Man...

...The fact is that he was not born with a doubting mind, as was Mencken, but rather was made a skeptic through disillusionment...

...He blames birth control pills and abortion for erotica...

...Having asked us to swallow that camel, he then goes the whole hog, abandons sense altogether, and insists that salvation resides in Hope: "As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough...

...A dozen or so professors of literature and history, plus a sprinkling of deans to give a dull glow to the gathering, a few good drinks (it takes more skill than the average bartender has to concoct a bad one) before and after a bad meal, concluding with a "question period" that enabled the honored guest to air his views on whatever topic or topics happened to be fevering the Prof...

...But I wonder: Is not quietism a form of death just as surely as activism is a burning away of living tissue...

...Becoming Sovereign, the People had to become slaves...

...Not mud', really...

...In a long essay ("The Loved One") on the godawful books written about John Kennedy, before and after his death, he concludes with a warning and a moral, as it were, that bear repeating: "There is nothing worse for intellectuals than to attach themselves to authority, other than for money, or for fun at authority's expense...

...He sees too clearly to be taken in by mass approval or to lend credence to what others say they see...

...He cannot even believe strongly in the worth of his own prose...

...I thus consider his two autobiographical volumes by far his most impressive work, and look forward to the next volume, hoping it will not be the last...

...We discussed his studies of Byron and the English Romantic period (works I admire very much), commented on Doris Moore's and Leslie Marchand's Byron scholarship, and then I remarked in answer to his query about my present writing that I was reading the opera of Malcolm Muggeridge preparatory to doing an essay on him for this great family journal...

...surrender, not defiance...

...What, I asked, did Mr...

...Christians and Marxists, it seems to me, hate each other not because they differ but because each is working the same side of the street—one selling pie in the sky and the other pie on earth...

...Q. think of MM...

...At the still point only the Word remains...

...Moreover, he readily forgave those who succumbed to the Old Adam within them...

...Let us trace this wondrous spoor to its origin...

...So long as his name remains on the list of contributors, the publisher may consider my subscription safe...

...For Muggeridge there is no middle ground, no shadings of light and dark—but only right and wrong, heaven and hell (the latter being our present home), faith and doubt, spirit and flesh, life 'and legend, imagination and will...

...I think it evident that Malcolm's journey to the mourners' bench has been straight and true from the beginning...

...from the Fabian socialism, inherited from his father, he moved to the misty transcendentalism of his later years...

...I am always," he wrote in The Infernal Grove, "surprised when anything I do is well received...

...Such men readily succumb to the virus of anti-intellectualism...

...Wells, et al...

...He.sounds, indeed, like T.S...

...It was the usual sort of academic exercise that visiting bigwigs are asked to endure...

...Men of such sharp and penetrating vision naturally tend toward pessimism and misanthropy...

...His recent conversion to Christianity—or rather his conversion to the teachings of Jesus, an entirely different matter—has the ring of true conviction...

...Indeed, he has difficulty in seeing the cause for anything...

...Quennell during the preprandial lull...

...In his novelistic record of his experience, Winter in Moscow (1934), he savagely indicts the Communist fanaticism which effectively restored the Inquisition while creating a new idolatry that demanded for its sacrificial victim the peasantry...

...In contrast to most modern rebels, orpostromantics, Muggeridge is not an egoist...

...He errs badly, for instance, in assuming pessimism to be, or ever to have been, "Christianity's great strength, and the reason for its survival...

...Indeed, his very distrust of the popular view (like Kierkegaard he associates the Many with Untruth) has led him, by a circuitous but inevitable path, to the conclusion that whatever most so-called intelligent people dismiss as preposterous must, ipso facto, warrant close attention if not belief...

...Little wonder that he should delight in quoting Pascal's remark that to look for God is to find Him...

...This is precisely what Muggeridge has done...

...From others I might write this off as false modesty, but not from Muggeridge...

...When the dinner bell sounded the warning, he was regaling me with a juicy tale about Malcolm's lasciviousness...

...No other commentator on the age has so consistently clear a vision, or is able to describe our peculiar, as well as eternal, lunacies in such sharp and vibrant phrases...

...The obvious fact is that all millennial theories, and especially Christianity and Marxism, are extremely optimistic, not only because of the salvation promised to individuals but for the meliorism at their core, the view that Progress is in thenature of things, whether it be in the Mind of God or in Historic Process...

...breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne...

...Christianity demands, he says, that we "worship defeat, not victory...

...His journey has been a pilgrim's progress—from what he would call the darkness of materialism into the light of idealism...

...Everywhere in this generally excellent and dispassionate study he shows the nations of Europe following, whether freely or through historic necessity (it matters little which), the latter course...

...Lawrence, whom Muggeridge never tires of mocking for his belief in "blood knowledge" and his silly phallic consciousness, ever performed a greater travesty on human reason...

...The best of Muggeridge can be compared without condescension to the great essayists of the past, from Montaigne to Mencken...

...When he dyers, for example, that "Men can only be humble if they have a God, only content to be alike if they feel themselves children belonging to one family with a father in Heaven," he advocates through implication a quietism that only mystics or those who have despaired of all save a quiet grave would accept...

...Believing power to be an unalloyed evil, he has always disliked the great movers of the earth—those who live in the will...

...Also disconcerted, since I can never manage, ultimately, to persuade myself that what is applauded is ever any good...

...deprivation, not satiety...

...That winter in Russia constituted his journey on the road to Emmaus, for it was there in that madhouse of false and fraudulent hopes which men entertained of an earthly utopia that he once and for all concluded that such secular dreams were doomed and damned...

...Muggeridge loathes and fears the fleshly appetites and is unforgiving of the sensualist—especially when the sensualist happens to be himself...

...Muggeridge has,incidentally, always reminded me of Suetonius—in his concern for details that light up the canvas at the same time they humanize, the portrait, in his central concern with individuals rather than ideas, in his fascination with power and his debunking of the powerful, and in his lucid prose style, at once free-wheeling and strictly controlled...

...In addition he attacks the Western correspondents for swallowing Soviet lies and then helping to propagate them abroad...

...All of which is not, alas, to say that his skepticism is always proof against his credulity...

...I seriously doubt that he always believed such nonsense, but let it go...

...He provides for the flowers and the birds, for everything in the world that he has created...

...Indeed, his is invariably the first, and sometimes only, essay I read in that periodical...

...He leadeth me beside the turbid (to update the adjective) waters and restoreth my soul...

...All such extreme individualists arrive finally at that essentially anarchistic position...

...Of course she doesn't believe there are too many "because God always provides...

...So, too,..for that matter, was the author of Lives of the Caesars a journalist...

...It is difficult to think of a single case of a writer whose talent has not been contaminated to the point of extinction by association with authority on other than hostile or subversive terms...

...After the fashion of Swift, or Mark Twain, or, more recently, Robinson Jeffers, who, after observing the blind leading the blind into the 1939-1945 war, wrote in his poem, "The Soul's Desert (August 30, 1939)": "Clearly it is time / To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert / And look for God—having seen men...

...Rather than view life in aesthetic terms, he sees human existence as a constant struggle between good and evil, right and wrong...

...weakness, not sttength, We are to lose our lives in order to keep them, to die in order to...

...Though a recent convert to the pious platitudes of street-corner • evangels, Muggeridge has always been an otherworldly sort—his eye fixed on distant shires, his ear cocked to receive unheard and unearthly melodies., He has always been the prisoner of dreams...

...I recall an aphorism of the Baltimore Sage: "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under...

...Throughout he denigrates the churches in the name of Jesus and "the true belief," thus sounding, at best, 'like a Kierkegaard .or a Milton, and, at worst, like a clerical windjammer exhorting his captive audience to gtt the Christ back into Christmas...

...The adjective says it all...

...List the greatest writers since Gutenberg and you'll find that all but a handful were journalists in some capacity or other...

...He has a good eye for the color and light bathing the objects before him, and he has the steady hand of a master portraitist...

...Between heaven in heaven—a dubious proposition, Muggeridge admits—and heaven on earth, he chooses the former...

...I would like very much to disagree with such a view, but all efforts at refutation have amounted to little more than quibbling with his manner of statement...

...But not, unhappily, of much understanding...

...From his experience he learned the elementary lesson—one we are apt to forget even as it is repeated over and over—that most people most of the time believe what they want to believe...

...live...

...Written as a tribute to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who has devoted her life to helping the poor and comforting the dying in that wretched city, the book displays Muggeridge at his worst—confessing to guilt feelings for having physical comforts denied to street beggars, pretending to believe that suffering and poverty are beautiful, trying to pass off the inspirational gumdrops of Mother Teresa as inspired wisdom...

...He now and again engages in something not far removed from self-flagellation...

...He insists that he, too, is a servant to the Lords of Life, a mere seaman before the mast...

...There are no eternal Yeas or Nays in his lexicon...

...In Jesus Rediscovered (1969) Muggeridge says much the same thing about overpopulation, which he dismisses as "fantasy...

...Faint praise, an acerb exception or two, and a final remark that Muggeridge was, after all, just a journalist and hence not to be taken too seriously...

...Mencken was a confirmed sinner and proud of it...

...There can never be enough...

...Not the sort of thing to make one stomp one's feet and jump up and cheer...

...or, as happened in the case of Voltaire and Frederick the Great, for both...

...But rather than laugh at human absurdities, as Mencken laughed, he shakes his head, pulls a long face, and laments—and thereby encourages us to turn our heads away from much of what is most delightful in this most delightful of all worlds...

...The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove, and some of the essays in the collection The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge, will still find readers, I sincerely hope, long after we and our troubles have been dispersed to the four winds...

...their enthronement must, therefore, result in their utter subjection to an abstraction—their own corporate existence, as embodied in the State, and, finally, in a demagogue who identifies his and the State's will...

...If his ideas are not very convincing or profound, and he has only a minor skill at tracing causes, he nonetheless gives his reader a front-row seat at the Show...

...As if, God help us all, there were only these two choices...

...He believes, for example, that all man's efforts in this century to make the world a better place and human life more tolerable have had the effect of making it worse...

...Among recent writers, only Mencken is palpably his superior as a master of English prose...

...Indeed, the two have often been compared, though not always, I am convinced, very judiciously...

...Arise, you pigs of the world, point your snouts at the empyrean and thus occupy the vacant places among the heavenly hosts...

...Forty years later he still frequently refers to the gullibility of those on-the-spot reporters, leaving the impression that he was almost the only one awake or honest enough to see that Russia had become a gigantic prison...

...While he can forgive the Great Unwashed for their belief in the palpably untrue, he remains waspishly harsh, as he should be, on the intellectuals for being taken in...

...Mencken took a heathenish delight in the world out there and in the farcical antics of the people in it, and he infects us with that joy...

...Moreover, Muggeridge has always had, so my researches in his early work confirm, a strong moralistic bent...

...Other favorites whom he frequently quotes are St...

...Those books provide a delightful experience in that they so marvelously recreate for us his own experience, which has been wide and varied...

...The wretched fodder finally dispelled the warm feeling that issued from somewhere south of the pericardium...

...I have been reading Muggeridge's articles for years and would no more miss one of his mensual discourses on books (as often as not on the authors more than on the books) in Esquire magazine than I would miss breaking fast in the morning, or (following Paul's advice to Timothy) taking a little wine for my stomach's sake in the evening...

...Though not really on their level, he at times can make you think he is...

...One- delights in his articies, in his felicitous phrasing, his witty rejoinders, the constant surprise in his imagery and figures of speech—above all, in his absolute refusal to swallow the false and empty doctrines of wordmongers and worldsavers...

...Her mindless and unwittingly cruel answer tells us more than we might want to know about such simple saints...

...Wallowing in the stench of human degradation...

...Drs.—in this case British politicians...

...In an interview with Mother Teresa he asks if she believes there are too many children in India...

...Having known most of the eminent figures (particularly the political potentates) of this century, he learned in his early reportorial days that just beneath the purple worn by the mighty is, more often than not, a coat of motley worn next to the skin...

...As for the charge that Muggeridge is a journalist, one must first admit its validity and then dismiss it as being meaningless—that is, if one considers "journalist" a pejorative term...

...Eliot, whom he dislikes intensely (he once described Eliot's work as the death rattle in the throat of a dying civilization), in his desire to escape the tonfines of natural process: "Changelessin a changing world...

...failure, not success...