The Man Who Was Muggeridged by Reality

...Yet what Richard Ingrams's excellent book makes altogether persuasive is that Malcolm Muggeridge's conversion was no last-minute inspiration, an effort to pull his own badly singed chestnuts out of the fire...

...Nothing was as it appeared...

...All his days, too, beginning with his years at Cambridge, he felt a pull toward religion...

...In his early years, his fiction tended usually to be about the job he had most recently left (Picture Palace is about life on the Manchester Guardian) or about recent experience (Winter in Moscow...

...As the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he was the first Western journalist to report that Stalin was systematically starving his own people in the early 1930s under the aegis of collectivization, for which he, Muggeridge, was roundly denounced, in the Soviet and Western press alike, as a reactionary and a liar...

...Yet despite all the success that came his way-by his 50s, a high income and international fame were his-he was never satisfied for long...

...I do not say the wittiest, or the most humorous, but the most amusing...

...Muggeridge's own prose, in its day, could have a devastating sting...

...But it did not take him long to see through it...

...Such," replied Muggeridge, "is my constant endeavor...

...In grams had first met Muggeridge in 1963, when the former was one of the editors of Private Eye, a magazine of no-holds-barred English satire of which Muggeridge was one of the guiding saints...

...It wasn't all that easy to take from such an old sinner...

...So it went in the world according to Muggeridge, where we all are little puppets, making our jerky movements, playing our momentary roles, till we are swept off stage...

...Joseph Epstein, author of our June 3 cover story on American arts policy, is editor of the American Scholar...

...and a shared sense of humor with no traces in it of snobbery, nor any of the class consciousness which has vitiated so much modern writing...

...Except that Muggeridge played the decline and fall for laughs, the joke being how funny our contemporary agitations are judged by the standard of eternity...

...a dislike of intellectuals...

...but now that he could no longer hold up the bat, the rest of us were to retire along with him to contemplate the magnificence of the Lord...

...Books The Man Who Was Muggeridged by Reality By Joseph Epstein For roughly twenty years, between the l950s and the 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most amusing writer in the English-speaking world...

...What sort of man found delight in such occupations...

...Besides, he was pleased by its rewards, not least the seat it afforded on the apron of the circus...

...He was brought up oddly detached and remained that way through much of his life...

...He was pleased to have avoided public schools-and hence many of the snobberies and rich sexual complications that pop up in all those English memoirs about Eton and Winchester days-and when he went to Cambridge it was to read for a natural sciences degree...

...he averred that Eisenhower would make a better king than president and proposed him to Americans as such...

...he accused Winston Churchill of being too old, if not gaga, to govern...

...Nothing, certainly, was safe from his satirical treatment...

...Everything in his life- the early socialism, the boredom, the disillusionment, the rather squalid pleasures, the lifelong detachment-was building up to his religious conversion...

...As early as 1934, the writer Lettice Cooper predicted he would become a Roman Catholic, which he did-but in 1982, fully 48 years later...

...All his days he suffered stomach troubles, becoming toward the end of his life a vegetarian...

...La Rochefoucauld was called in as a witness for the prosecution: "We do not so much desert our appetites as they desert us...

...as the caravan passed, he was content for the better part of his life to be among the barking dogs...

...Before his religious phase, he believed men were fools for not understanding the silly irrelevance of their lives...

...At the same time I owe to him several insights into the nature of power and ambition which have influenced my feelings about the political world in a profound way...

...It is an excellent book, a model of the kind of biographical study that is less and less nowadays written but to which biography needs to return...

...The second volume was published in 1974...

...Muggeridge was quite without ambition: money, power, acceptance in the highest social circles never seemed much to stir him...

...Although he taught in India and Egypt as a young man, worked in British intelligence in early middle age, and wrote a few novels in between, Malcolm Muggeridge was for the better part of his life a "mere" journalist, to supply the standard adjective...

...Richard Ingrams's biography Muggeridge (HarperCollins, $27.50) takes up the meaning of those words...

...Mugg" was the way he was often referred to...

...its author had 17 years yet to live...

...Even among men who should have been his political enemies-the old Stalinist Claud Cockburn is a notable example-he could show great and genuine friendliness...

...In other words, Muggeridge had had very good innings as a general carouser...

...And I'm more sure than I've ever been sure of anything in my life that this is bad, and that it is based on the most evil and most cruel elements in human nature...

...In these books he recounted his socialist upbringing, his education, his travels, his life in journalism, but, smooth as the overall performance is, something is missing at the center...

...He began in newspapers, working first for the Manchester Guardian, then going on to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the London Evening Standard, and later for the Daily Telegraph...

...Ingrams knew and admired Muggeridge, but admired him with full knowledge of his weaknesses and flaws...

...They kept on saying it till Muggeridge took over, when they began saying that it was outrageous and ought to be banned...

...This took courage, physical and intellectual, and not least spiritual...

...As for the Pilgrim himself, our man Muggeridge, he gave much delight to his readers while he lived, and there is much to be thankful for in that...

...Convinced of the transience of all human events, he even seemed to take a mildly perverse delight in the transience of his own work...

...He deals in revelation without being interested in scandal...

...I saw an example of Muggeridge's television handiwork one day in 1970 on Michigan Avenue in Chicago in front of the Chicago Tribune Building, where he was stopping Chicagoans on their lunch hour to ask how they thought Wilson would do in the general election...

...His selection of details seems proportionate and artistically correct...

...Muggeridge was no less iconoclastic as a television performer, functioning here chiefly as a provocateur-interviewer...

...He wished to be more than a mere journalist, wanted in fact to be a writer, but journalism seemed to fit his skitterish temperament...

...Certainly, he was ready to pitch everything away at any time for an amusing line...

...In his two-volume autobiography, Muggeridge doesn't give us much help with this question...

...He was early to mock the British monarchy...

...The answer was Harold Wilson, and the election was the British one forthcoming...

...Judged sub specie aeternitatis, of course, everything is a joke, including Winston Churchill, who just might have saved the Western world...

...This biography turns out in the end to be a much more amusing Pilgrim's Progress...

...In some ways, Muggeridge, in his irreverent mode, helped make possible the strain of English satire that emerged with the comedy review Beyond the Fringe and the television program That Was The Week That Was...

...Finishing his book, one feels that one doesn't need to know more than he has chosen to tell...

...He seemed not to give a damn about career...

...It was precisely this, admittedly, that was required in 1940 to maintain the pretense, while waiting for Russia and America to come into the war, that we English were continuing to wage it...

...now he thought men fools for not understanding a being greater than they...

...He was undauntable...

...Muggeridge's father, whom he greatly loved, was a Fabian socialist...

...He also wrote for the English and American intellectual weeklies, and perhaps achieved his greatest fame as a television man of all work: journalist, interviewer, documentary-maker...

...Muggeridge, by running features attacking the monarchy and the Church of England, put paid to this kind of complacency...

...This was Muggeridge's little way of making plain to his countrymen that they were now quite nicely out of it, thank you very much...

...Preaching, in his last years, seemed to come very naturally to him...

...The habit of expos?, begun early in Muggeridge, was to stay with him through his life...

...Chronicles of Wasted Time is the title he gave to the first volume...

...As for the three friends-Muggeridge, Kingsmill, Pearson-Ingrams writes that all three had "in common a number of admirable and to me endearing characteristics-a love of England and English literature...

...He has written about Malcolm Muggeridge before in God's Apology, a charming little volume about three friends: Muggeridge, the journalist Hugh Kingsmill, and the popular biographer Hesketh Pearson...

...In this role, he would cheerfully spur on a perfectly drunk Brendan Behan, ask Salvador Dali what happens to his mustaches at night ("They droop," was the answer), or lightly mock Billy Graham...

...The title comes from a remark of Kingsmill's: "Friends are God's apology for relations," or relatives...

...From the middle of the 19th century, people had begun to say about Punch that "it used to be better...

...Even though he knew he was on thin ice at the BBC, he didn't in the least mind, after a discussion about Orwell's 1984, remarking before turning over the microphone, "And now back to Big Brother...

...Ingrams remarks on Muggeridge never having had any real interest in possessions, nor being an altogether happy hedonist-though on this score he was an ardent skirt chaser and a fairly heavy boozer...

...Whether the trajectory described by his life- from socialism to religion, in by no means easy steps-provides the edification he hoped it might is another, much murkier, yet finally quite serious question...

...everything was much worse...

...Once they were in, Churchill's role was exhausted...

...The players have learned their lines from another play than the one which is being performed...

...To master this tone, a writer must be able to distance himself by taking up a sufficiently high view of the spectacle carried on below...

...At his best, Muggeridge read as if he were Gibbon in Rome living right there in the midst of the decline and fully, almost happily, anticipating the fall...

...a deep suspicion of all institutions and any form of collective activity...

...I say spiritual because, though Muggeridge had gone to the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Guardian, he initially intended, along with his wife, to settle there, thinking it a "new kind of civilization...

...massive features and tiny gossip par[agraph]s, turnovers and middles...

...The first volume begins with a chapter titled "A Part in Search of a Play" and the second volume closes with the interment of the ashes of the Webbs in Westminster Abbey, which, in Muggeridge's reading, meant the end of the empty dream of socialism as heaven here on earth...

...From this height, we all appear comic if sedulous apes, with our inchoate ideals, our not-very-secret appetites, our ludicrous pretensions, the grander the more ludicrous...

...A great many people were put off by the spectacle of the publicly devout Malcolm Muggeridge...

...Religion was no part of the young Malcolm's upbringing...

...printed word, where is they sting...

...In the introduction to God's Apology, he says Muggeridge "is the only person I know in whose company I have never experienced one moment of boredom...

...I've seen," he wrote to Beatrice Webb, his wife's aunt and one of those great Western boosters of the Soviet Union called "useful idiots" by Lenin, "I know I've seen the essence of the thing, its spirit, the mood it engenders, the kind of person in whom it invests power, the set of values- moral, aesthetic, spiritual-it encourages...

...and he was the first to mock-quite rightly-the apotheosis of the then-recently dead President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in an essay titled, after Evelyn Waugh's comic-grotesque novel about funerary rites in Los Angeles, "The Loved One...

...Once, when meeting Khrushchev on a journalistic trip to Russia, the then-Soviet leader told him to write the truth...

...and he retained it as the subtitle to his second...

...As in Cervantes' masterpiece, one feels today that things are out of sync...

...At a perfect length of 264 pages, it seeks portraiture through understanding, not, as biographies in our day increasingly do, definitiveness through exhausting detail...

...He was, in Ingrams's words, "incapable of a grudge against anyone," and that included Hesketh Pearson, who had a brief affair with his wife...

...these books, romans with feet of litigious clay, were nicely loaded up with characters drawn directly from life, tempting many among them to sue for libel...

...Hypocrisy was the common charge...

...Ingrams writes, really, as a friend...

...Muggeridge's knack, his trick, his schtick-for before long it hardened into schtick-was not merely to point out that the emperor had no clothes, but to go a decisive step further to note that the poor fellow was quite without kneecaps, a bellybutton, a scrotum...

...In collecting some of his stronger magazine pieces for The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966, when he was himself 63, Muggeridge took the occasion to note the staggering output of words any working journalist looses on the world: "a vast verbal outpouring, dealing for the most part with topics of no present relevance-notices of books and plays whose authors have long been forgotten, editorials on once burning controversies which now matter to no one, obituaries already out of date when their subjects died...

...Striking the characteristic Muggeridgean note of the utter, comic uselessness of it all, he continues: "Appeals, exhortations, solemn warnings, tributes...

...Before him the magazine, in the words of one of its contributors, was composed of "well-written articles about nothing in particular...

...and many of the senior staff, such was the general air of complacency, sent their articles directly to the printer without showing them to any editor...

...they make false entrances and exits, stumble over unfamiliar scenery, and turn in vain to the prompter for help and guidance...

...To me," wrote Muggeridge of Churchill, "he has always been a slightly ridiculous figure, mouthing the rhetoric of a past age to sustain the fantasies of the present one...

...From Ingrams's lucid account one is able to make out without any great difficulty the figure in Muggeridge's carpet...

...Nothing Muggeridge ever did, Ingrams claims, was based on calculation...

...More efficiently than anyone else, he could set one to musing, chiefly about how absurd was the world in which we live...

...and "What election...

...There is no correlation between word and deed, between the aspirations ostensibly entertained and what actually happens, between (to use Blake's dichotomy) what is seen with, and what is seen through, the eye...

...Muggeridge had mastered the tone of detachment, which allowed him to ask the most fundamental questions as if he were a superior being from another planet where they arranged things like sex, politics, and journalism rather better than we pathetic earthlings do...

...As a young man, his pattern was to be one in which the fires of initial enthusiasm were quickly banked by boredom and disillusionment...

...Later Muggeridge would settle for the almost systematic slaughter of sacred cows...

...The autobiography ends on the words: "Another way had to be found and explored...

...The chief replies were "Wilson who...

...every variety of shape, size and substance-from pulp to pulp...

...Between 1952 and 1957, Muggeridge was editor of Punch, the famous English humor magazine- famous, I should say, for never being all that humorous...

...Others saw it, too, and knew very well what they saw, but hadn't the intellectual honesty that Muggeridge had to announce that they had found yet another heart of darkness, this time in a cold climate...

...In that book, Ingrams notes that "there is a fourth friend involved, too-myself...

...The conductor is working from one score and the orchestra from another, with consequent total confusion in the resultant performance...

...Here he is again, in a full paragraph from his essay "England, Whose England...

...Ingrams speculates that Muggeridge's encounter with Mother Teresa, whose work he did so much to publicize in a BBC documentary and whose simplicity and dignity and devotion humbled him, brought him over to the church, under whose last rites he died...

...He goes on to explain that through his friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge "I have been able to enjoy a kind of posthumous friendship with Kingsmill and Pearson and from talking to him come to cherish certain books which, had I not known him, would perhaps have meant little to me...