SOURCE: Russell, Henry M. W. “Late to the Vineyard: Explaining Malcom Muggeridge.” The Christian Century 113, no. 19 (5-12 June 1996): 624-29.

[In the following essay, Russell argues that Muggeridge did not give up his skeptical objectivity in converting to Catholicism.]

Malcolm Muggeridge was aware that to account for his conversion to Christianity, many people might look for a “sinister explanation, expatiating upon how old lechers when they become impotent are notoriously liable to denounce lechery, seeking to deprive others of pleasures no longer within their reach; how a clown whose act has staled will look around for some gimmick, however grotesque and unconvincing, to draw attention to himself.” Though Richard Ingrams knows that Muggeridge wrestled with religion at least since his Cambridge days (he writes that “the mistake his attackers made was to think that Malcolm had only come to Christianity in old age, when in fact it had been something of a life-long obsession”), his own analysis comes perilously close to replicating the banalities suggested in Muggeridge's prophecy.

Like a movie based on a book, the title suggests the banal, the sensational, the warmed-over gestures of an original tricked out with a veneer of glittering details. The book was projected as early as 1982, to come out after Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge's deaths (1990; 1994). Ingrams, a journalist long associated with the satirical magazine The Private Eye, now with the Manchester Observer, was a friend of the family, and was granted extensive access to the diary Muggeridge kept from 1922 until the 1960s. This may explain partially why his approach is superficial and anecdotal; for him Muggeridge's books barely exist except as milestones in a chronology. It may be impossible thoroughly to assess Muggeridge's career unless someone finds and cares to examine the endless hours of talk he produced for film and radio, not to mention his news articles, leaders and gossip notes. Until then, surely his books, as well as his famous documentaries, would help to take some measure of the man. But Ingrams seems more interested in writing a biography in which he can praise his old friend and then work out ambivalent jealousies, angers and religious spites on the dead image before him.

Ingrams's chapter on MM's childhood is perfunctory and largely dependent on Muggeridge's own account in the memoir Chronicles of Wasted Time of his love for the father who shaped him. The chapter, in a disorderly fashion typical of the volume, gets its subject to Selwyn College, Cambridge (1920), entrance to which involved obligatory confirmation in the Church of England. Here, according to Ingrams, Muggeridge exercised his habit of adopting the local “style” while remaining in at least vocal opposition.

The chapter on “Cambridge and India” devotes itself to an appreciation of the considerable influence theologian and future priest Alec Vidler had on Muggeridge's religious thinking, which led him to a second, private confirmation. Ingrams seems to believe he has discovered something here that Muggeridge suppressed in order to dramatize his later rediscovery of Jesus. But Chronicles makes it quite clear that Muggeridge found faith attractive even at this age—and he is explicit about his religious debts to Vidler in the “Letter to a Friend” that opens Paul, Envoy Extraordinary (1972), which traces the apostle's journeys.

The section on India is considerably better. Thanks to larger excerpts from the diary, letters and autobiography, the reader is drawn into a time when elite men and women journeyed to the ends of the earth to teach among a people to whose language and culture they were complete strangers and from whom they could not escape by a day's plane ride. Teaching at the Christian school at Alwaye, Muggeridge was attracted to the power that Gandhi exercised on the Indian imagination as well as to the power of his spirit. Muggeridge's certainty that the Indians would have to find their own Christian forms and self-rule occasionally battles his love of projects and progress.

“Marriage and Journalism” is a chapter titled presumably to emphasize Muggeridge's divided loyalties. Ingrams draws on Muggeridge's keen satirical portraits in his autobiography of his wife's aunt and uncle, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, using a names-and-anecdotes approach to give a swift sense of the parochial and even incestuous world of British socialism—presented here as a kind of cottage industry for a bored upper class. But he can make little of such relations, although he is fond of asserting, without a shred of proof, that Beatrice and Muggeridge—contrary to his later disparaging comments—“took an immediate liking to one another.”

The hopeless vulgarity and posing of the young nonconformists of the 1920s is clear in details like Muggeridge's sermonizing his mother-in-law, Rosie Dobbs, on the evils of good breeding or telling Vidler that he and Kitty asked about the procedure for divorce while in the Birmingham marriage bureau to get married. Regarding Muggeridge's stint at the Manchester Guardian in the '30s, Ingrams offers a witty portrait of the personal intrigue and of the orthodox twaddle demanded from that paper's acolytes, best represented in Muggeridge's famous anecdote of timidly asking a fellow leader writer “what the paper's line on corporal punishment might be,” only to be told “Same as capital only more so.”

In 1932, after his friend and protector Ted Scott died, Muggeridge eased into a special correspondent's position in Russia. For the Muggeridges this was intended as a permanent move, a bold step away from bourgeois fellow traveling to the real thing. The Guardian experience would find its way into a novel about the newspaper written in Muggeridge's spare time in Russia, The Picture Palace, which the newspaper suppressed with the threat of an expensive libel action. But a more important story emerged in the Soviet Union. The history of the Crimean famine—deliberately caused by Stalin to starve millions of his class enemies—still registers only vague recognition in public knowledge. Muggeridge's role in breaking that story, in articles published in the Guardian in March 1933, is a proud one. Then, to the shame of the press, politicians and historians, the story was suppressed at Soviet demand. The vision of the tame Moscow press corps dutifully submitting their stories for Soviet censorship speaks volumes about the might of pens that write for advertising and circulation figures. The fatuity of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, and countless others in the free world who explained away the existence of starving millions is always searing, no matter how many times it is told.

For Muggeridge this was a pivotal event. In England Muggeridge performed the same kind of analysis that Alexander Solzhenitsyn (with infinitely more risk to himself) made in Russia, contending that not only were the political expressions of socialism corrupt, but that the well-springs of its “intellectual” figures, whether Lenin, the Webbs, Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells, were as poisonous and deluded.

Ingrams is at his best when he bluntly writes, “Supporters of the Soviet government welcomed its strenuous efforts to impose atheism and eradicate Christianity almost more than anything else that had been done.” A. J. P. Taylor's praise of the regime—“Think of the fact that a new generation is growing up free from Christianity—that's something worthwhile”—is juxtaposed with Muggeridge's portrait of Beatrice Webb adoring at the shrine where she housed her iconic portrait of Lenin.

Although Kitty had accompanied Muggeridge to Russia, she returned to England to find adequate medical care for the birth of their second child, John. Her absence opened the way not only for Muggeridge to risk real reporting but for some of the dreary affairs that Ingrams wallows in. Ingrams is able to make almost nothing out of the effects on Muggeridge's soul and mind of these agons of fornication. We merely “learn” that they caused marital conflict and self-loathing. These early affairs were, however, logical exercises in the pagan materialism which Muggeridge and his equally pagan bride-by-state-consent had adopted. They were the perfectly rootless, aimless heroes of their own Hemingway story, but with enough Christian conscience to detest abortion. At this stage they hurt each other in the cauldron of unholy loves, but made the pretense that it was a reasonable way to live out human freedom. Once children came and were not, blessedly, aborted, Kitty grew out of this puerility.

Muggeridge eventually returned to India. Ingrams's account of this period focuses first on Muggeridge's friendship with four Bengalis as detailed in MM's memoir, while the second half highlights his affairs with two Indian women and Kitty's counterthrust that left her with another man's child. What is best in this chapter is a letter that outlines her poignant attempts to create a home for their children in the wreckage of this all-too-modern marriage.

Of all the books Muggeridge produced, Ingrams shows real interest in only two. The Earnest Atheist was Muggeridge's biography of Samuel Butler, whose novel The Way of All Flesh was intent on exposing the brutality and hypocrisy of his father, or at least Butler's image of him. What intrigues Ingrams, however, is only Muggeridge's skewering of Butler's homosexuality.

The compact poetic beauty of Muggeridge's summing up of his friends and their political legacy in The Thirties does penetrate Ingrams's sensibilities. He justly writes that this is the book in which Muggeridge “finally found his form as a writer.” Although he hears “Gibbon-like detachment, elegant mockery, expressed in perfect prose,” it is not Gibbon—who believed that the mistakes of history were only the problem of superstition overcoming reason—that he hears, but Gibbon's disciple of the 1800s, Thomas Carlyle, who saw in history only a nightmare of mutability. This book alone would make Muggeridge a serious writer.

Kitty's apparent wartime affair with the writer Hesketh Pearson added one more strain to a much-enduring marriage, and after the war Muggeridge dashed off to America to savor the pace of a modern empire, though depression, alcohol and general signs of moral nausea accompanied his worldly rise. Brief mention is made of 1) Muggeridge's opposition to communist infiltration of the English National Union of Journalists; 2) his offering himself as a possible candidate to the Conservatives; and 3) his editing of Ciano's Diplomatic Diaries, written by Mussolini's son-in-law. Ingrams fails to see that the personal actions and the literary endeavors were connected. The work on the diaries was, true to Muggeridge's pattern, a commentary on the war just over and a warning for the future: the Allied appeasement of the Axis is seen through the moral structure and emotional calculations of the ones “appeased.” The diaries reveal the utter futility of good intentions toward aggressive and hungry powers.

Although Muggeridge reread Augustine's Confessions around 1949 (probably as a result of the passing of his friend Hugh Kingsmill), his moral behavior was growing ever worse. Wit, mockery, intelligence and charm can carry a man very far before his collapse. At the same time Ingrams notes that Muggeridge's contact with Catholicism was more frequent due to his habit in the 1950s of spending winters in Roquebrune near Auberon Herbert, brother-in-law of Evelyn Waugh. But Ingrams views Muggeridge's sense that “more and more one has the feeling of living on the edge of an abyss” or that “it is now very nearly the zero hour; the last phase in our decomposition” as a sort of Chicken Littleism rather than the basso profundo of most Christian writers of this century.

The rewards of heroic and contemptuous opposition to the stuffy old establishment became clear when Muggeridge was offered the editorship of Punch (1952-1957) at the same time that it is said that he was to be offered the editorship of the Sunday Times. The liberal world loves its executioners even if its hates its prophets. Ingrams chats mostly about Muggeridge's baiting of Winston Churchill and the royal family, his movements into BBC radio and television, and his long affair with Pamela Berry (1953-63). With some details on the BBC programs Any Questions and Panorama, the chapter becomes a hodgepodge of projects, interviews and public reactions to Muggeridge being provocative about one thing or another. Finally, the BBC tired of controversy that did not make it look nobly crusading.

For Ingrams, Muggeridge's years in TV are the climax of a successful career; the years after, a falling away into pious and incomprehensible mysticism. I can only see these years as his dance upon the tomb of his spirit—a man frantically trying to avoid “the awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.” Occasionally Ingrams acknowledges, much to his credit, that the booze and the women were all too clearly symptomatic of a man who was having a Hell of a time: “It was also a mistake to imagine that Malcolm enjoyed his years of hedonism when the truth was they had caused him a great deal of unhappiness and even torment.”

In 1963 he finally broke off his long affair with Berry, abandoned drinking, barbiturates and promiscuous womanizing, and began what Ingrams calls his “slow rediscovery of Christianity.” Moves that helped regularize the Muggeridges' life included finding a home in 1956 near Robertsbridge (an area they would never abandon), becoming grandparents in 1961, and restoring ties to Vidler when he moved nearby in 1967. Friendship with the Longfords, sincere Catholics in nearby Hurst Green, became close in the last 25 years of Muggeridge's life.

In the mid-'60s “religion was to be Malcolm's theme to the exclusion of almost everything else.” Muggeridge showed a renewed burst of energy devoted to BBC productions, including his own televised autobiography, Twilight of Empire. In 1968 Muggeridge produced his famous film and book on Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God, bringing her to the attention of the world and finding someone about whom it was impossible to be cynical. She thanked him by urging him repeatedly to join the church. Like so many others who are appalled by the human representatives of the church, Muggeridge found it hard to see the Catholicism behind the myriad abuses perpetrated in the name of Vatican II, abuses his daughter-in-law Anne heartwrenchingly outlined in her book The Desolate City.

In 1968 Muggeridge pursued another great Christian, this time St. Paul and his missionary journeys. Ingrams relates the wonderful story about how, in re-creating a scene on Paul's road to Damascus, Peter Chafer filmed Muggeridge and Alec Vidler on a lonely road in Turkey, only to find that his camera seemed to pick up the image of a third figure between them, as if they had taken the road to Emmaus instead. For the nonbeliever Chafer, this scene seemed uncomfortably like the time he had filmed—at Muggeridge's insistence—in Mother Teresa's House of the Dying. Though there was almost no light, the film showed a “beautiful soft light” that Muggeridge always believed to be miraculous, while brightly lit exterior shots were confused and dim. Ingrams approves of these safe, if somewhat mysterious, spiritual journeys.

He grudgingly admits that Muggeridge took part in Mary Whitehouse's “Festival of Light” campaign against pornography in 1971, but assures the reader that “Malcolm's heart was never really in the antipornography crusade.” Overall, Ingrams is ambivalent about Muggeridge's Christianity. He wobbles between respect for the spiritual quest and horror that Muggeridge should claim actually to have found something. He enjoys calling Muggeridge “the 20th century's Savonarola” and making snide comments about “Moral Rearmers” and “assorted religious crusaders, some of them linked to right-wing political movements.” Ingrams admits that the British are “easily embarrassed by any form of religious enthusiasm,” but he makes only sporadic attempts to go beyond his own embarrassment about the central fact of Muggeridge's last quarter-century of life.

Ingrams especially becomes nervous when Muggeridge exercised his faith as if it had some relevance to the world. About Muggeridge's condemnation of television as “the repository of our fraudulence,” he writes that “Malcolm was too clever a man not to see the anomalies of his position. It was, in a way, a repeat performance of his attitude towards sex when having, it seemed, taken his fill of the pleasures of the flesh, he turned around and denounced it all as a fantasy and a fraud.” Is it useless to point out that Ingrams had already written that Muggeridge did not take any great and lasting pleasures from the flesh?

Ingrams's judgment is at its lowest ebb when criticizing Chronicles of Wasted Time (The Green Stick, 1972; The Infernal Grove, 1973), a source he taxed heavily for this book. His objections are based on the fact that it contains omissions and inaccuracies, and that “the reader was given the impression that all his life he had been the sort of person they knew from watching him on television—an assured worldly-wise satirist.” He prefers the diaries, which “revealed at last the true Malcolm, a man who for most of his life had been a restless and tormented figure, oversexed, a prey to depression and insomnia—all made worse by his awareness of forces pulling him in another direction.” This eventuates in the magisterial pronouncement that “considered as autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time could not be judged a success.” If successful autobiography is gossip about booze and women interspersed with namedropping and the odd spiritual neuralgia, then Ingrams may be right.

It is clear, however, that Muggeridge conceived of his autobiography not as an account of his dreary sins and interesting achievements but as an exemplary story that tells the tale of a time. When a man alludes to Proust, Tolstoy, Blake and Dante in his titles one may safely assume he is up to more than mere facts. The voice of the autobiography has a marvelous range and fluidity, but its major tone is a relentless confession of self-imposed loss in a world of beauty that presents itself to humanity as no true home. If Ingrams is ludicrously wrong about the autobiography, he has nothing but two incidental references to Jesus Rediscovered, and none to Jesus: The Man Who Lives, nor to Christ and the Media, based on Muggeridge's 1976 Langham Trust lectures in which he explains in some detail his convictions about the electronic wasteland.

On November 27, 1982, Muggeridge was admitted to the Catholic Church by Father Paul Bidone. Despite quoting Father Bidone's statement that Muggeridge's grasp of Catholicism was “better than anyone in the Church,” Ingrams somehow knows that “the Sacraments, the Rosary, the Blessed Virgin—had little or no meaning for him.” He goes on to call “purgatory, the intercession of saints, the Devotion of [sic] Our Lady” central teachings of the Catholic Church. Ingrams's profound ignorance of what is central versus secondary in the church, and of his limits in assessing another man's spiritual beliefs, is distasteful and silly. If Ingrams is calling Muggeridge a charlatan and an apostate Catholic, he should be honest about it. If he does not know how utter an indictment his words are, both of Muggeridge and of the priest who confirmed him, then he should remain silent.

For Ingrams the truest Muggeridge was marked by “his constant change of tack—from one job, one set of beliefs to another.” He asks which is the real Muggeridge—the Fabian, the young communist, the Guardian columnist, the spy, the editor of Punch, the television satyrist, or the Christian apologist? The implied answer is that these are all interchangeable masks that Muggeridge tried on for effect, with the last one no more real nor beloved than the others. Such easy blather ignores the obvious fact that these are, at bottom, a large part of the limited roles to attempt in Vanity Fair. Muggeridge tried many a false one, as do the rest of us, and it would flatter our vanity to say that none of these choices are any better than others.

Augustine was not providing options when he wrote of God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” In the end this is all that Muggeridge's message amounted to, but it is much. It is hard to say much new about the truth. It is also hard to resist imagining Ingrams thrusting a microphone into Augustine's face, cocking a patented eyebrow and archly asking, “Now really are you the Epicurean, the Manichee or the Platonist? Doesn't it seem odd that a man with an illegitimate son should join these psalm-singing fanatics after having had all the fun an intelligent young Roman could absorb?”

Ingrams may resent it that Muggeridge somehow got all the fun and then wormed his way into holiness at the end. He just can't quite believe that it is fair, much like the men to whom Christ told the parable of the laborers who are paid in full despite being hired late in the day. He is somehow surprised that “Malcolm was unwilling to recognize the way in which he had deliberately turned his back on [religion] so long as it suited him to do so and until, in early old age, the strain and unhappiness of a life of hedonism became too great to bear.”

This is false. Muggeridge shows himself in his writings quite aware that he had turned his back on God and that as a result his world seemed a tissue of illusions. But does Ingrams really think that humans choose God because we are good and have pure motives? Indeed, does he think that we choose God at all unless God's grace leads us to do so?