SOURCE: Wolfe, Gregory. “Muggeridge One, Two or Three?.” In Malcom Muggeridge: A Biography, pp. vi-vxiii. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Wolfe points out the seeming contradictions between perceptions of Muggeridge as journalistic iconoclast and Christian apologist.]

I give you the end of a Golden String,
          Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's Gate
          Built in Jerusalem's Wall.

William Blake

As a media figure for more than half a century, Malcolm Muggeridge understood the strange metamorphosis that turns an individual into an image. His face, his voice and his name were multiplied and reproduced innumerable times—on radio waves, television screens and in books and newsprint. For decades he had provided the news-hungry with dispatches from Our Own Correspondent in Cairo, Calcutta, Moscow, Washington and other points around the globe. At the dawn of the electronic age, he became one of the original Talking Heads—an interviewer, distinguished panellist, cultural critic.

While this public exposure appealed to his vanity, Malcolm also discovered the darker side of life as a creature of the media. “There is something very terrible in becoming an image … You see yourself on a screen, walking, talking, moving about, posturing, and it is not you. Or is it you, and the you looking at you, someone else? … Once, sleeping before a television screen, I woke up to find myself on it. The experience was quite terrifying—like some awful nightmare to which only someone like Edgar Allan Poe or Dostoevsky could do justice.”

And yet, despite this fear of confronting his electronic doppelgänger, Malcolm was his own favourite subject. Nearly all of his most engaging work was in an autobiographical mode. From his early novels to his memoirs, Malcolm conveys his experiences as chapters in his own spiritual and intellectual odyssey. At his best, Malcolm was an autobiographer whose honesty and capacity for self-criticism gave weight to his strongly-held opinions about God and man. At his worst, in old age, Malcolm repeated his story a few too many times, to the point of self-parody.

The first challenge that the biographer of Malcolm Muggeridge must face is the existence of Malcolm's own Authorised Version of his life. The two volumes of his Chronicles of Wasted Time have justly been called literary masterpieces. But if there can be no competition with Malcolm's eloquence, it is also true that Malcolm left ample room for the biographer to pursue his craft. His journalistic instincts led him to present various episodes from his life in over-simplified form—as if he were writing banner headlines without getting mired in long, complicated stories. Even one of his most sympathetic friends, the journalist Christopher Booker, felt disappointed by Malcolm's memoirs. With their “protestations of humility, confessions of weakness, eagerness for the joyful release of death and all”, these memoirs began to read “just a little too much like a carefully prepared cover story”. It was only with the publication of Malcolm's diaries, Like It Was, that Booker found himself moved by the unvarnished story of Malcolm's life.

Despite his gregarious public persona, Malcolm was an intensely private person; he rarely confided to even his closest friends what was going on inside his heart. For example, his oldest friend, Alec Vidler, learned about Malcolm's 1943 suicide attempt more than twenty years after the fact, and then only because it was reported in a newspaper. There were moments of anguish in his life that even he could not face directly, much less put before the public eye. The most painful moment of all was the death of his son Charles, which he rarely ever mentioned, and then merely in passing. Malcolm's wife Kitty was his only real confidante, but their relationship was itself storm-tossed for decades before it achieved the harmony that struck so many people who met them in their later years.

Malcolm projected so many images of himself over the years that he has been accused of being little more than an incoherent collection of personalities and opinions. Sorting through these images and searching for the man behind them is the other task that the biographer of Malcolm encounters.

Perceptions about the significance of Malcolm's life and work vary widely. In Britain, he is often remembered as “the man on the telly”, the “pop Socrates”. Whether as interviewer, panellist or documentary host Malcolm always had some outrageous opinion to offer or biting question to ask. An older generation can still recall his controversial editorship of the humorous magazine, Punch, and the infamous article he wrote on the royal family—“Royal Soap Opera”—which earned him temporary banishment from the BBC. While many Britons are aware of Malcolm's books of Christian apologetics, he remains fixed in the national imagination as a creature of the media rather than as a religious sage.

In America, where he is less well known, the opposite is true. The Americans who have heard of him know him as the author of Jesus: The Man Who Lives and Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim. As “St Mugg”, he is held to be a defender of the Christian faith second only to C. S. Lewis among modern writers. His papers have been acquired by the evangelical Wheaton College in America, where they join those of Lewis himself. His American readers know little or nothing of the man who battled the Fabian socialists and other sympathisers of the Soviet experiment in Communism throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Nor do they think of him as a satirist whose acid wit turned against institutional religion as often as it did against the principalities and powers of government.

“The man on the telly” or “St Mugg”? Such is the Atlantic divide over the significance of Malcolm Muggeridge. But this is not the only way in which aspects of Malcolm's career have been separated. If one were to move beyond popular perceptions to the assessments of his life and works among the leading critics on both sides of the Atlantic, one would still find a divided Muggeridge, albeit at a more sophisticated level.

Take, for example, the memoirs of Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling. One of Britain's finest novelists, and for many years a close friend of Malcolm, Powell is known for his close observation of mores and manners. In his memoirs Powell pays tribute to Malcolm as a brilliant writer, faithful friend and literary colleague. But towards the end of To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell writes of his growing unease with what he felt to be deep divisions within Malcolm's personality, which he facetiously calls “the Muggeridgean Trinity”. Unlike the Christian notion of the divine Trinity, however, the three dimensions of Malcolm's personality, Powell holds, were ultimately at war with each other.

In the beginning … was the sceptical wit mocking all, and the wit was with Muggeridge and the wit was Muggeridge. This First Muggeridge—never wholly exorcised but undergoing long terms of banishment from the Celestial City of his personality—would sometimes support, sometimes obstruct, what then seemed his sole fellow, Second Muggeridge. Second Muggeridge, serious, ambitious, domestic … with a strain of Lawrentian mysticism … had a spell-weaving strain and violent political or moral animosities (animosity rather than allegiance being essential expression of Second Muggeridge's teachings), both forms of vituperation in the main aimed at winning a preponderant influence in public affairs … In due course … Third Muggeridge became manifest at full strength, hot-gospelling, nearmessianic, promulgating an ineluctable choice between Salvation and Perdition. He who was not with Third Muggeridge was against him, including First and Second Muggeridge. In this conflict without quarter First Muggeridge, who treated life as a jest—now so to speak a thief crucified between two Christs—came off worst … ending as a mere shadow of his former self.

Powell's characterisation of the Muggeridgean Trinity sparkles with its own brand of wit, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that it traces the decline and fall of a brilliant and promising writer.

Powell's affection for First Muggeridge is evident; he is clearly the hero of the fable. His tragedy is that, delightful and coruscating though he is, he cannot avoid the dark alter egos who eventually crucify him. Lightness of touch and detachment are replaced by anger, intolerance and hysteria. One senses that, on a personal level, Powell increasingly felt that Malcolm was drifting away from him, a sad but inevitable loss.

What Powell describes in friendly and even elegiac tones, many leading critics, without personal ties to inhibit them, have put in a harsher and less forgiving manner. For critics such as Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, and Bernard Levin, the divisions in Malcolm are clear and, ultimately, damning. After a long career as a cynical gadfly—by his own admission a sensualist and a mocker of all commitments—Malcolm in old age suddenly gets religion and becomes a Grand Inquisitor bent on burning heretics. Whether the words “hypocrite” or “opportunist” are stated explicitly or not, they often seem to hover behind such critiques. Then to become a Roman Catholic at the end of his life—to join a Church which has an authoritarian structure, and which throughout most of its history has been as entangled with politics and corruption as it is possible to be—this is a total reversal. From revelling in uncertainty to a craven hunger for absolute certainties—First Muggeridge has indeed become less than a shadow. A Muggeridge divided against himself cannot stand.

It would be wrong to deny these charges categorically, since they contain insights into the complexities of Malcolm's personality, as we shall see. But in one sense the process described by Powell is familiar. In the twentieth century, the same lament has been made for other “lost leaders”, including William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In each of these cases, the cry has gone up when an accomplished writer has emerged as an opponent of the prevailing secular, liberal consensus.

But in our efforts to understand Malcolm Muggeridge, it is well to remember the admonition of that first “lost leader”, Wordsworth: “We murder to dissect.” Analysis—even witty analysis of the kind practised by Anthony Powell—breaks things down into component elements. A life as complex and misunderstood as that of Malcolm Muggeridge needs more delicate instruments and an openness to the patterns that lie beneath the shifting surface images.

No true estimate of Malcolm Muggeridge's role in twentieth-century letters can be achieved so long as the focus remains on a very partial view of his career or convictions. Beyond the caricatures of Malcolm's life, beyond even his own autobiographical distortions and omissions, lies a more compelling story. Take, for example, his religious pilgrimage. Contrary to the myth of Malcolm as a late convert, he struggled with the Christian faith from the time he read the Bible secretly as an adolescent. As a first-year student at Cambridge University, he converted to Christianity and contemplated a vocation to the priesthood. In the 1930s, during the so-called First Muggeridge phase, he was publishing essays that upheld the Christian worldview as the only alternative to the collectivist regimes of the modern era. And late into the hot-gospelling Third Muggeridge epoch, his sharpest barbs were aimed at bishops and other Church leaders.

Malcolm's sense of being an outsider prevented him from being able to be unquestioningly loyal to any human institution or form of authority. But Malcolm did not begin his career as a “sceptical wit mocking all”. His first forays into satire consisted of two novels, one an attack on a Liberal newspaper (the Manchester Guardian) and the other pointing out the West's blindness to Stalin's atrocities in the Soviet Union. From the outset of his career, Malcolm expressed his “political and moral animosities” through the medium of black humour. He knew the consequences of this public stance. “Such a disposition made one ostensibly irreverent, pessimistic, disloyal, and—the commonest accusation—destructive in attitude.”

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm's public persona as an irreverent cynic (“First Muggeridge”) reached its height. First as editor of Punch and then as a television personality, Malcolm gained his reputation as debunker of myths and pieties, a verbal demolition artist. He knew instinctively that television lent itself to the staccato rhythms of debate and controversy rather than the careful accumulation and articulation of ideas. Malcolm's TV persona constituted only a part of his life, but it dominated the public's perception of him. If one actually reads Malcolm's writings from the 1930s to the early 1960s, one finds frequent references to Christianity and its greatest visionaries and mystics. These references did not perhaps counteract the image (largely self-created) of Malcolm as a cynical, worldly journalist, but they are an indication of an inner struggle that continued throughout his life. After an evening of witty conversation with friends like Powell or Hugh Kingsmill, Malcolm would go home and pore over Augustine's Confessions, or the mystical visions of Bunyan, Blake, Pascal, Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky. These writers all shared a profound sense of sin and suffering, and yet they showed that the City of God could be glimpsed from the City of Man by the passionate pilgrim.

When Malcolm was received into the Roman Catholic Church near the end of his life, he defended the decision by arguing that he had joined the one institution whose ultimate authority was divine, not human. To his critics, these two positions—the non-conformist and the believer in religious authority—could not be further apart. But for Malcolm, this action was the final reconciliation of his “political and moral animosities” with his desire for a transcendent communion. Like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm found that the Christian understanding of the two cities provided the perfect platform from which to undermine the pretensions of a fallen world. Malcolm, like Waugh, was something of a Christian deconstructionist.

What Anthony Powell and others have failed to recognise is just how consistent Malcolm's life and thought were. Powell's three characters—the satirist, the moralist and the Christian apologist—are inextricably woven together. Malcolm stands squarely in a tradition of Christian writers that includes Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. Each of these writers produced satirical attacks on modern, secular progressivism from the perspective of Christian orthodoxy.

In the twentieth century, the intellectual elite has preferred religious figures to remain cloistered in a visionary world, rather than straying into the centre of the public debate. When C. S. Lewis dared to combine his religious writing with his academic career, Oxford was offended. And when Malcolm brought religion into the discussion of public affairs, he brought down upon himself the scorn of an even larger cohort of pundits and intellectuals.

In the face of such an onslaught, the ultimate temptation for the biographer of Malcolm Muggeridge may be to concede too much, to grant that Malcolm was perhaps nothing more than a “pop intellectual”, and focus on him as a hilarious and memorable character. In that case, the temptation is to play Boswell to Malcolm's Johnson, concentrating on his innumerable witty retorts, bons mots and other examples of his dazzling sense of humour. This is a temptation that I have resisted. For all his brilliance, Boswell moves too quickly over the younger Johnson and does not delve deeply into the darker, more tortured side of Johnson's personality. In addition to Malcolm's wit, I have looked into the fierce inner struggles—the Augustinian battles between flesh and spirit—that formed his vision of the world in his early years. I have also paid careful attention to Malcolm's thought, because he was much more than a pop intellectual. Malcolm was neither an artist nor a scholar. But he possessed a powerful imagination that enabled him to see through the pretensions of those who pursue and wield power, and to record his commentary with astringent irony and, on occasion, with savage indignation.

At his best Malcolm Muggeridge achieved prophetic stature. He was prophetic not only in the sense of his moral criticisms of the West, but in the accuracy of his predictions. The prophetic gift is not so much an ability to see into the future as it is to sense the deeper currents flowing under present cultural trends. Malcolm sought to tear through the veil of fantasy that people place between themselves and reality. The collapse of the British Empire, the rise and eventual fall of Soviet totalitarianism, the commercialisation of a global culture, the pervasive influence of the media on all aspects of life, even the British royal family as an ongoing soap opera—in these and other historic developments, Malcolm proved his ability to see more clearly than most of his contemporaries.

Though his best writing is scattered through six decades of journalistic production, Malcolm's prose style is among the finest of his generation. Like Waugh and Chesterton, he had a highly developed sense of the absurd, and harnessed his own anarchic imagination to the defence of order. Above all, Malcolm's sense of the incongruous, of the disparity between human aspiration and human achievement, made him a supremely comic writer.

There was, of course, only one Malcolm Muggeridge. Among his favourite quotations was Blake's notion of the Golden String, which, if followed throughout one's life, will lead eventually to the gates of the New Jerusalem. Such a thread can be traced through Malcolm's own tumultuous life.