A Mugg’s Game – Religion & Liberty Online

“Write what should not be forgotten” —Isabel Allende

For over half a century, no other journalist/political commentator/frustrated novelist had the impact of Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990). Yet he is largely forgotten today. Maybe it is time to take another look at him and the amazing career of the man known as “Mugg.”

Muggeridge was a product of that Edwardian upper-middle-class world that helped make England such a powerful political intellectual force. His father was one of the earliest members of the new Labour Party and gave young Malcolm his first introduction to radical ideas. After study at Oxford, where he didn’t distinguish himself, Muggeridge drifted into a career as a journalist and teacher, spending time sharpening his jaundiced view of the world in India and Egypt. He married Kitty Dobbs, the niece of the doyen of British leftist political thought, Beatrice Webb. Despite his negative views of her and her husband’s, Sidney’s, left-wing politics, Muggeridge got along with them. Mrs. Webb shrewdly observed that despite his cynicism about politics, there was a puritan side to him, something she predicted would come to dominate the last years of his life. After his marriage, he got a job writing for the prestigious Manchester Guardian, then edited by the high priest of Edwardian liberalism, C.P. Scott.

Early in his career, Muggeridge developed a strong contrarian sense that first showed itself when he was sent to Russia in 1933 by the pro-Soviet Manchester Guardian to cover what the newspaper characterized as “the miracle” of Communist success. Along with Gareth Jones of The Times, Muggeridge exposed the extent of the murderous famine that Stalin was imposing on Russia and especially in the Ukraine, which cost an estimated 5–6 million lives. Their work countered the lies spread about Communist success by Walter Duranty of The New York Times, distortions that won Duranty a Pulitzer Prize. Muggeridge’s book Winter in Moscow (1933), on the other hand, earned him the hate of the fashionable defenders of Stalin’s rule, like the Webbs and Bernard Shawand, the English left-wing establishment. Nonetheless, the historian A.J.P. Taylor called Winter in Moscow “the best English language book ever written on Soviet Russia.”

Always expert at biting the hand that fed him, Muggeridge fell out of favor with the Manchester Guardian when he wrote a satirical novel about it that lampooned Scott’s naivete about politics, especially Communism. For the rest of the 1930s, he drifted from job to job, including a wasteful spell working for the dying League of Nations, as well as writing a number of failed books. On the eve of World War II, he produced a brilliant historical survey of what the poet W.H. Auden called “that, low, dishonest decade,” The Thirties, which traced the collapse of democratic government and the rise of the dictatorships. George Orwell gave it a positive review, calling it brilliant but depressing while noting that Muggeridge recognized that truth was being distorted and manipulated not only by dictators like Hitler and Stalin but also by left-wing intellectuals, a theme he (Orwell) had discovered when his book on Communist betrayal of the democratic forces in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, was boycotted by left-wing journals.

Orwell and Muggeridge would become friends after the war, having been introduced by the novelist Anthony Powell. The three of them would have weekly lunches during which Muggeridge especially enjoyed Orwell’s grim view of the world, describing him in a brilliant essay, “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” as “more lovable than likeable,” inclined to making sweeping generalizations such as “all tobacconists are Fascists.” Muggeridge was one of the last people to visit Orwell before his death and he helped arrange Orwell’s funeral. Orwell’s wife, Sonia, offered Muggeridge the job of writing his biography but he had no enthusiasm for the job and correctly believed that she was using him as a decoy to warn off other biographers, of whom there were plenty.

During the war, Muggeridge served in British intelligence in Mozambique and was then transferred to Paris in August 1944. There his gift for meeting people of importance landed him the task of rescuing the humorist and politically innocent P.G. Wodehouse and his wife from British authorities, who regarded him as a traitor for broadcasting from Berlin during the war. It was one of the rare things that Muggeridge was proud of.

Yet Muggeridge achieved his greatest fame in the two decades after the war, first as a reporter for various newspapers, then as editor of the English humor magazine Punch, whose reputation he helped restore. It was on television, a medium he detested, that he gained his greatest popularity, appearing on a variety of BBC shows both humorous and serious as a skilled performer and interviewer. He even appeared in a couple of the British comedy films of the 1950s, including Heavens Above, starring Peter Sellers, where Muggeridge portrayed a confused Anglican cleric, a role he particularly cherished.

But it was his discovering Christianity that led to contentment in his final years. Like a latter-day St. Augustine, Muggeridge found in Christianity what he had been searching for but rejecting. From the mid-1960s, Muggeridge had been undergoing an intellectual and moral crisis. He had long been attracted to the idea of Christianity but held conversion at bay owing to a hedonistic lifestyle. Nicknamed “The Pouncer,” he had a well-earned reputation as a womanizer. It was said that no woman was safe in a cab with him. Then, in 1968, he was asked by the BBC to interview a little-known Albanian nun, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who ran homes for the sick and dying in India. He was deeply impressed by the depth of her faith, something he had never experienced before. Another interview in India moved him profoundly and led to Muggeridge’s book about her, Something Beautiful for God, which was a massive bestseller. More importantly, those interviews and his subsequent contacts with Mother Theresa changed his life.

Mother Theresa recognized the spiritual crisis Muggeridge was experiencing and implored him to become a Catholic. Despite his sympathy for the Catholic faith, he found what he called “the trappings of Catholicism” (confession, the rosary, the intercession of the Saints) unappealing. Over the next decade, now nicknamed “St. Mugg” by the press for his religious pronouncements, he saw himself as a Christian in sympathy with the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion, which became a secular cause in the 1970s and which he regarded as little more than a death cult. He also was profoundly impressed by the new Pope John Paul II for his courageous stand against Communism

In 1982 Muggeridge and his wife became Catholics. The biographer Richard Ingrams argues that this wasn’t just another temporary phase in Muggeridge’s life but a profound expression that had always been part of his makeup: that “religion had been a constant preoccupation of his entire life.” Many people were surprised, although the evidence had been there for a long time that Muggeridge sought some kind of intellectual and moral certainty in his life. As far back as World War I, Mrs. Webb recognized this and thought he would be comfortable in the certainties of the Catholic Church.

There is a theory that Muggeridge was little more than a frustrated novelist, a literary gadfly who sabotaged his reputation by shifting positions on political issues and constantly changing careers. This “gadfly” reputation wore thin over the years until Muggeridge finally found in Christianity what various forms of socialism or public recognition had failed to provide him.

His memoir, with its typical Muggeridge title, Chronicles of a Wasted Life, gives a taste of his contacts—he seemed to have met everyone of importance during his life—and a glimpse into his lively literary style. Unfortunately, he never got around to the last volume, where he would have explained in depth the reasons for his religious conversion. His biography of Mother Theresa will have to serve as his final thoughts on that matter.