Malcolm Muggeridge
A Biography
by Gregory Wolfe
ISI, 490 pp., $15
THERE ARE NUMBERLESS WAYS in which the faithful may taunt, or perhaps I should better say tease, the unbeliever. One such tactic--and for my money the most irritating--is to say that God believes in you, even if you can't return the compliment. Another is to contrast the modest simplicity of belief with the contortions of the malcontent intellectual. "Don't mind me," says the humble friar or devoted nun, brushing past on some modest errand of altruism. "I'm just doing the Lord's work."
Those of us who experience difficulty in recognizing this as genuine humility always used to have a fine old time at the expense of Malcolm Muggeridge, the centennial of whose birth in 1903 has caused a small flurry of notice this year, thirteen years after his death in 1990. Here was a man ever-ready to uncork a sermon about the fallen state of the species and the pathetic vanity of our earthly desires--all while he was notorious as an apostle of carnality and a ringmaster at the circus of his own self-promotion. Every personality type in the eternal argument over divinity is to be discerned in John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that founding text of Protestant fundamentalism. And it was there in "Pilgrim's Progress"--winding between Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle, encountering the likes of "Great-Heart," "Mr. Standfast," and "Little-Faith"--that one seemed to have the best chance to catch the lineaments of Muggeridge. He was Mr. Worldly Wiseman.
A difference between American and British
audiences is that Americans tend to know Muggeridge by his writing, while the British associate him with the early days of television celebrity. When I was young in the 1960s, Muggeridge seemed to be ubiquitous, on game shows and quiz-marathons no less than on brow-furrowing panels about serious matters. The man appeared to have no unaired thoughts.
An excellent mimic would be required to do an impression of his face, which resembled that of a vain old turtle. But almost anyone could have a shot at imitating his voice, with its commingled bray and bleat. My own first appearance on the tube was to debate apartheid as a guest on his Sunday-evening chat-show, portentously called "The Question Why." (I forget if it had a question mark or not. Perhaps it was like the title of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's apologia for Stalinism: "Soviet Communism--A New Civilization," which had a question mark for its first edition and none for the second.)
Muggeridge was married to Beatrice Webb's niece, Kitty, and had been brought up in that area of the British Left that was bounded by the Fabian Society, the New Statesman, the London School of Economics, and Bloomsbury more generally. The tone-setters of this melioristic and high-minded environment placed a lot of faith in social action for the improvement of health, housing, and the rights of labor. But they also stressed the improveability of human nature, this last to be attained by more sexual and educational freedom. In those days, the word "crusade" was still acceptable, and the great anthem of the movement was William Blake's "Jerusalem": I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green & pleasant Land.
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