Everything but Humility

The address by Malcolm Muggeridge at the International Congress on World Evangelization, carried in the August 16 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, attracted wide attention and earned a standing ovation at the congress itself.

The latter fact astonished me. The address was not vintage but latter-day Muggeridge, reflecting a septuagenarian’s young faith. It was hailed as a personal testimony, which it might have been. It had no obvious base in the congress theme. Its theological content had a certain wispish quality, calling for substantial amplification in the minds of his listeners. “A con job,” said one participant, but not without admiration.

Was it? Or was it a pilgrim coming at essential things from the only way he knows? Here undoubtedly is a professional purveyor of words; that insolent drawl, one suspects, could bring life to the reading of a Greyhound bus schedule. All his life he has been an entertainer; c’est son metier. Spiritual awakening for Muggeridge has not demanded the conversion of raciness into the sort of limp prose that is tolerated, even acclaimed, because it has the gift of orthodoxy. On one view we should be thankful that the craftsman’s workshop is still cluttered; old tools, after all, like old slippers and old friends, are often the best.

This leads me to mention of Muggeridge’s recently published volume, The Infernal Grove (Morrow, $7.95), which is the second installment of his autobiographical Chronicles of Wasted Time. The title comes from William Blake, a poet maverick enough to take the Muggeridgean fancy:

Till I turn from Female Love

And root up the Infernal Grove,

I shall never worthy be

To step into Eternity.

Muggeridge resumes the story where he left off in The Green Stick (see Current Religious Thought, December 8, 1972), and now devotes 280 pages to the 1933–47 period. It begins with the writer at thirty-two, taking up a temporary appointment with the League of Nations in Switzerland (“where the Inland Revenue men cease from troubling and the wealthy are at rest”). It ends with a bizarre scene in Westminster Abbey where two caskets containing the ashes of his parents-in-law, the redoubtable Webbs, were interred (“Which is Sidney and which is Beatrice?” asked a troubled relative.)

Muggeridge never stayed long in, or gave his heart to, any one job. He had a poor opinion of the League of Nations: “What was it but another Tower of Babel, climbing inanely into the sky?” When Hitler was actually invading Poland, he points out, the league was in session, discussing—the codification of level-crossing signs.

When Muggeridge went on to India to be editor of the Calcutta Statesman there was the same satirical approach to his work, the same gift of prophecy that foresaw the downfall of the British Raj, the same wicked wit and brilliant commentary on people and events. He longed, he says, to be a part of the bustling life of that great Indian city, yet he clung to the trappings of establishment. He made friends, as he did in other parts of the world, but never close ones, and all seem soon to have been discarded almost as sometime things, so that frequently throughout his account comes the matter-of-fact but poignant reference: “I heard later that he had died.”

His enemies fare nearly as badly at his hands as do his friends. Coming in for a thumping too are “sentimentally virtuous people.” Here Muggeridge brings in Eleanor Roosevelt, who, on a conducted tour of Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp, “spawned the moral platitudes of the contemporary liberal wisdom as effortlessly and plenteously as the most prolific salmon … easily persuaded that the camp in question was a humanely conducted institution for curing the criminally inclined.” Concludes Muggeridge: “A truly wicked woman would have been ashamed to be so callous and so gullible.”

Muggeridge returned to London to work on the Evening Standard before turning to freelancing while “waiting for the war.” When it came in 1939 he joined the Ministry of Information, there to manufacture “counterfeit words with which I was required to juggle—like ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’ … Here, then, was no raging jingoist, but rather the antithesis—and no more tolerable for that. This was seen when, after he had joined the army and been billetted in a country house, his colleagues complained about his generally offensive attitude and had him turned out of the house. Muggeridge coolly comments three decades later: “I have never found any difficulty in understanding how irritating I can be to other people; perhaps because I so often irritate myself.

A fair chunk of the book is given to his time in Army Intelligence—in Lourenço Marques (some interesting sidelights on Portuguese Mozambique here), Algiers, and Paris. He records a half-hearted attempt at suicide, worked with the spy Kim Philby, met André Gide, defended P G. Wodehouse against charges of collaboration in his misguided broadcasts from Berlin. Muggeridge seems to have taken neither the army nor the war seriously, nor did he find himself in combat conditions where diving into a dugout might have jolted him into thinking differently.

Religion evidently had little part in those fourteen years. One may, however, find it curious that the writings of the latter-day Muggeridge should still evince such acerbity, vituperation, and lack of compassion.

Why is he still so critical of others? Last night I watched him in a television interview, and he was asked that question. His answer in effect: because man is sick and lives in a sick world, and he (Muggeridge) wrote about men as he saw them, with all their faults. After all—and he seemed to think this clinched it—he didn’t mind it when others criticized him.

“He has every Christian virtue except humility,” Cardinal Heenan of Westminster says about Muggeridge. But humility surely is what one would look for in a man who claims he never has felt at home in this world. And one might have expected that world renunciation would have called for more than one innocuous reference to God in that forty-minute TV interview.

But Muggeridge has two great assets. One is a happy marriage. Whatever lies behind those oblique references in his autobiography to wartime entanglements, no one can doubt that Kitty has brought him security and the only real love of his life The other great asset I have mentioned earlier: the ability to make words come alive. Witold Gombrowicz said once: “If there is a writer who writes in terror of boring the reader, I am he!” No one who reads Muggeridge can doubt it.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.