Malcolm Muggeridge was already in his fifties when he first tasted real fame, but after that things moved fast. The Muggeridge boom began in Britain with his controversial editorship of Punch (1953– 1957). His attacks on the cult of the Royal Family (mildness itself by today’s standards) brought him notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic; by the 1960s, television had taken him up in a big way, and he seemed to be in demand everywhere, as broadcaster, journalist, lecturer, and “personality.” For the next twenty years or so he was to remain an almost inescapable feature of the media landscape. And then it all faded, quite quickly. When Richard Ingrams’s biography appeared in Britain last year, I was struck by how little stir it caused—a reflection on the subject, I think, rather than on the book itself. Ten years earlier, there would have been review-articles, reappraisals, a general buzz of excitement. Now nobody had anything much to say: the caravan had moved on. Yet Muggeridge’s story was well worth telling. The achievements may not especially endure—few of them were meant to—but the career retains an undeniable interest.

He was born Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge, in 1903. The “Thomas” was in honor of Thomas Carlyle, who was one of his father’s heroes; he grew up in a home where money was short, but where there was plenty of time for talk and ideas. The biggest idea of all was socialism. His father, whom he doted on, had left school at thirteen and worked his way up from office boy to company secretary; he was also an early Fabian, a veteran of town-hall politics, and for two brief years (when Malcolm was already grown up) a Member of Parliament. Socialism was his life, though it was socialism tempered, in the spirit of those times, by a devout respect for culture. He read Shakespeare aloud to his family, and played Beethoven on the pianola. The first book he bought for Malcolm, when he was eleven, was called A Pageant of English Poetry. It was a present that the boy cherished.

The example of home counted for a good deal more with Muggeridge than the example of school. At seven—around the age his future friends George Orwell and Anthony Powell were starting out at preparatory school, as a prelude to Eton—he had begun attending a state elementary school in south London. (His first teacher there, Helen Corke, was currently involved with D. H. Lawrence, who was teaching at another school nearby.) At twelve, he won a scholarship to a local grammar school, where he was to be chiefly remembered as talkative, excitable, “a bit of a chump.” He generally ended up in the bottom half of the class. But he could do better when he forced himself to, since he managed to secure a place at Cambridge.

Two aspects of his life in Cambridge deserve comment. First, although there was nothing in his purely secular upbringing to account for it, he embarked on a prolonged religious phase. He was confirmed twice into the Church of England—once to satisfy college regulations, the second time to show that he meant it; he even considered being ordained. Secondly, he adjusted to what was still the heavily upper-class atmosphere of the university with remarkable ease. However much he may have rejected public-school values, he had no qualms about adopting a public-school manner. He returned home at the end of his first term with a brand-new accent and some brand-new slang; according to Ingrams he even insisted on addressing his parents, hitherto known as Mum and Dad, as “Mater” and “Pater.” (When she first met Pater, incidentally, Mater had been a working-class girl from Sheffield.) Some of the slang was subsequently dropped, but the accent remained, and for the rest of his days Muggeridge continued to give a brilliant impersonation—with perhaps just a hint of caricature—of a well-connected, infinitely worldly clubman.

Soon after graduating, he left to take up a teaching post at a college in India. As Richard Ingrams says (quoting from the letters he wrote at the time), his response to the newness and strangeness of his surroundings was much more positive than the impression conveyed in the world-weary memoirs he wrote in the 1970s. He got on well with his Indian colleagues, and developed a strong admiration for Gandhi. But boredom soon set in, as it was often to do in the course of his career—reinforced on this occasion by the loss of his Christian faith. (The college was a Christian foundation.) He preached a provocative sermon in the chapel, and published an article attacking the college’s “dead” teaching—“wax hyacinths and pink paper roses imprinted from the West.” It was time for him to be going. He returned to England, taught for a while, then took up another college post in Cairo. Finally, after a series of not very successful attempts to get into print, his luck turned. In 1929 he went to Manchester and joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian.

By this time he had got married. Kitty, his wife, was a formidable person in her own right. (She needed to be, to stay the course with him.) She was also a niece of Beatrice Webb, who had been a dominant influence in her early life: her mother and Beatrice were daughters of a celebrated industrialist, the friend of many leading figures in Victorian society, and for Muggeridge marrying into the clan was a decided step upwards. Beatrice, a snob in spite of herself, would never have felt at ease with Muggeridge senior (she described him as “a Fabian and very worthy person, though of modest means”) but his son—“the most intellectually stimulating and pleasant mannered of all my ‘in-laws’ ”—was another matter. She and Malcolm took an immediate liking to each other; later on, the connection enabled him to study the uppermost levels of British fellow-traveling at close quarters.

Thanks to his job, he was also given a privileged view of one of the last prominent survivors of Victorian Liberalism. When he first joined the Guardian, it was still edited by C. P. Scott, who had been appointed to the post in 1872, when Disraeli and Gladstone were in their prime. After Muggeridge left, he painted a cruel picture of Scott (under whom the paper had acquired a world-wide reputation) in a novel which had to be withdrawn before publication, as the result of a libel action brought by Scott’s successor. For anyone interested in the inner history of the British press, Ingrams’s account of the background to this episode will make absorbing reading. But for the world at large, the important thing is that in 1932 the Guardian sent Muggeridge to Moscow for a few months while their regular Russian correspondent went on leave.

For Muggeridge, and equally for Kitty, who accompanied him, the assignment represented much more than a professional opportunity. His experience in India and Egypt had sharpened his instinctively left-wing views. He had taken to calling himself a Communist (and to wearing a red tie); in Cairo, he had even started learning Russian. What appealed to him about the Soviet experiment had little or nothing to do with Marxism. He spoke of it, in a vague fashion, as embodying “new values,” “a new kind of civilization.” It was everything that capitalism wasn’t. Kitty concurred, and they set out for Moscow with the intention of settling there permanently. Aunt Beatrice lent them money to help ease their way.

Muggeridge was far too intelligent to maintain his illusions about life under the Soviets for long. But intelligence wasn’t enough: Walter Duranty was an intelligent man, and we know what kind of stories he filed from Russia during the same period. The issue was essentially one of character, and whatever was cussed and contrarian— and honest—in Muggeridge’s nature stood him in good stead. He was determined not to deceive himself, and not to deceive others; still less was he tempted to succumb, in Duranty fashion, to the blandishments of Soviet power.

His scope in Moscow was limited by the fact that when he got there he found that the man he was replacing was not yet ready to leave. At first he was restricted to carrying out occasional assignments and submitting pieces on a freelance basis. Within a short time, however, he had succeeded in ruffling feathers. In January 1933, the Guardian ran a story by him referring to accounts he had heard of the enormous suffering being caused by the collectivization of agriculture. (It drew a rejoinder in the shape of an indignant letter signed by Bernard Shaw and other Soviet sympathizers.) Then he persuaded the paper to underwrite a journey to southern Russia and the northern Caucasus, so that he could see what was happening for himself. The result was an important three-part report which appeared toward the end of March, the first eyewitness account of the full ravages of collectivization by a Western correspondent. The editor of the Guardian—C. P. Scott’s successor—didn’t tamper with the articles, but he was uneasy with them, and soon afterwards Muggeridge found himself being blue-penciled: the paper toned down his reports of the arrest of a group of engineers working for the British firm Metropolitan-Vickers, as the prelude to a notorious show trial. He resigned abruptly, and left Moscow just as the trial was about to begin.

Later, he regretted not having stayed longer; according to Ingrams, he was haunted by the thought that his departure might have been prompted by fear. But sixty years on, we are far more likely to be impressed by the courage he showed in speaking out as strongly as he did about the Soviet regime, not least because he knew that it meant antagonizing many of those close to him—the historian A. J. P. Taylor, for instance, with whom the Muggeridges had shared a house in Manchester. Writing to Beatrice Webb in January 1933, he was particularly forthright:  

You’ll say I haven’t seen enough, haven’t met enough Russians, have mixed too much with foreign diplomats, but I’ve seen, 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 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 cruel elements in human nature.

Needless to say this did nothing to deflect Beatrice from her worship of Lenin and Stalin, and in a sense she already knew what he was telling her; it was just that she put a different gloss on it. Before he set out for Russia, he had paid her a farewell visit, and he never forgot the sight of her warming her hands by the fire and suddenly announcing, “It’s true that IN THE USSR people disappear.” The remark was made, he added, “more in an envious than accusatory tone.”

In 1934 he published a novel based on his Russian experience, Winter In Moscow. It was a valuable book at the time, and it is still well worth reading: it contains particularly entertaining sketches of Western correspondents in Moscow, and of gullible or willingly gulled Western visitors—“political pilgrims.” Unfortunately, it is also marred by a series of anti-Semitic comments. They are not what the book is about; they don’t cancel out its virtues. But they do represent a serious blemish—serious enough for the historian Leonard Schapiro to have reluctantly changed his mind about writing an introduction to a new edition which was mooted in 1983. (Ingrams prints part of the admirably fair-minded letter in which Schapiro bowed out.)

Opposition to Communism was to remain a consistent theme in Muggeridge’s career, but it was only one theme among many. After Russia he seemed more restless than ever. He took a job with the International Labour Organization in Geneva, which he detested; he went out to India again, for what was meant to be a three-year stint on the Calcutta Statesman, but came back after only a year; he spent a fruitless spell on the gossip column of an evening paper. Finally he and Kitty and their four small children settled in the Sussex countryside. He kept going by turning out articles and reviews, but the aim was to write books. In 1936 he published a study of Samuel Butler, which a publisher had commissioned before Muggeridge left for India, and for which Kitty had done much of the research while he was away. In 1938 he published another novel, In a Valley of This Restless Mind. (Ingrams doesn’t make any great claims for it.) When the Second World War broke out, he was still at work on his essay in contemporary history, The Thirties; he completed it, not long after joining the Intelligence Corps, in a barracks hut.

The book on Butler was a minor bombshell. It had been commissioned on what must have seemed the reasonable assumption that Muggeridge would find the author of The Way of All Flesh a congenial subject. Instead, he produced a hostile, essentially satirical portrait—a case of the debunker debunked. If it were published today, it would probably provoke howls of “Homophobia!” and that was the subtext of much of the angry comment it excited at the time. But there are other grounds for objection. The manner is too flip, the joys of ridicule too freely indulged. Whatever Butler’s limitations, he was a much more considerable figure than Muggeridge allows.

It was in The Thirties, as Ingrams says, that Muggeridge at last found his form as a writer. The book delivers a dismissive verdict on an entire decade: it is a tight-packed sottisier, a witty collage of errors and illusions—some sinister, most merely absurd. Read in small doses, it is highly entertaining, and it undoubtedly hits a good many nails on the head. But what does it finally amount to? Ingrams, echoing the review Orwell wrote in 1940, sums up its message as “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Yes; except that it is really more like “Vanity of vanities, dear boy, all is vanity.” The tone makes the music, and you can still hear the clubman’s drawl—which is why the book palls if you try to read too much of it at once, and why Ingrams is shooting altogether too high when he talks of its “Gibbon-like detachment.” You end up feeling that, for all its virtues, it isn’t even quite true. You can get a more accurate picture of life in Britain at the time (or so I believe) in a roughly comparable work by Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Weekend.

There is a certain slackening of interest in the second half of Ingrams’s book, though he gives a readable enough account of Muggeridge’s wartime service in British intelligence (which was not without its comic-opera aspects), his years on the Daily Telegraph, of which he nearly became editor, and the manner in which he set about renovating Punch. He might perhaps have revealed more about his own role in the story: Muggeridge was one of the principal “godfathers” of Private Eye, the magazine that Ingrams used to edit. On the other hand we can be grateful, at a time when many biographers would have made a meal of them, that he doesn’t dwell on Muggeridge’s energetic extramarital activities— though he can hardly avoid discussing the long affair with Pamela Berry, the wife of the owner of the Daily Telegraph, and he does tell us that in the 1950s and 1960s Muggeridge was known among COLLEAGUES AT THE BBC as “The Pouncer.”

Muggeridge’s journalistic output during his years of glory was prodigious. Far from slowing down, once he could afford to, he redoubled his efforts. The wonder is that he remained as compelling a performer as he did. When you saw something by him in a newspaper, it was what you tended to turn to first (albeit a bit guiltily). He could give even the most routine television appearance his special stamp. But in the end, inevitably, he started repeating himself. The instances Ingrams cites could easily be multiplied: every time he attacked D. H. Lawrence, for example, he seemed to trot out the same (admittedly ludicrous) passage from Lady Chaterley’s Lover. And it wasn’t only the overworked phrases and gambits that started jarring, but the whole image of the suave all-round iconoclast. By the 1970s, even admirers were growing tired of the celebrity who had achieved fame chiefly by means of bashing other celebrities, and who was now, especially in the two volumes of memoirs he published in 1972 and 1973, flinging around insults like confetti. Churchill was “vaguely obscene,” the once-revered Gandhi was “crafty and calculating,” T. S. Eliot was “somehow blighted, dead, extinct”—there was no reason why he couldn’t have gone on like that forever.

Eventually, though, he grew tired himself. Cynicism wasn’t enough; he edged his way back, very publicly, toward religion, campaigned against pornography and permissiveness, and assumed the new persona (it sometimes overlapped with his old one) of “St. Mugg.” In 1982, a few months before his eightieth birthday, he and Kitty were received into the Catholic Church.

There was a great deal of scepticism about this final phase. You often heard, and quite often read, comments to the effect that he wasn’t so much giving up sin as being given up by it; that he had only taken to denouncing the pleasures of the flesh when he could no longer enjoy them. Who can say? Personally, I don’t think one should be in a hurry to pronounce on other people’s sincerity in such matters. There might have been less incredulity, too, if more had been known about how strongly he had been drawn to religion in his twenties (something he kept oddly quiet about in his memoirs). What is true, however, is that his return to Christianity wasn’t conducted in a manner particularly calculated to impress or inspire intelligent non-believers. It took place in the full glare of the media, with the result that it never quite threw off the air of being a performance.

How much will remain of his work? Journalists, and still more broadcasters, have to resign themselves to the fact that they deal in perishable goods. But something can sometimes be salvaged. It is entirely possible that one day an editor will judge it worth his while to assemble a Muggeridge anthology; and if old television programs ever achieve the permanence or seeming permanence of old movies, a few of his (especially the one he made when he went back to India in 1964) rank high among those that deserve to be rescued. But these are matters for speculation. The one thing beyond dispute is the lasting value of the example he set with his reporting from Russia. He rose to the challenge, at a time when there were powerful inducements not to, and for that, if there is any justice, he will always be honored.

Notes
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Malcolm Muggeridge: The Biography, by Richard Ingrams; HarperCollins, 264 pages, $27.50. Go back to the text.