SOURCE: Dimbleby, Jonathan. “Intellectual in Search of Salvation: Malcom Muggeridge, A Profile of the Maverick at 70.” The Critic 32, no. 4 (March-April 1974): 38-44.

[In the following essay, Dimbleby emphasizes the influence of Muggeridge's jocular yet cynical personality on his written work.]

No man is easier to caricature than Malcolm Muggeridge. Walking through the steep narrow streets of the mountain village of Aspremont, bestowing beneficent smiles on old brown Provencal faces or stopping to pat the head or kiss the cheek of a pretty child, St. Mug has the benign air of a visiting emissary from the Kingdom above. In the village shop, speaking in immaculate Old English French (where words matter more than accent) he engages in appropriate pleasantries. In the church for the celebration of Mass his unmistakable voice intones the litany in French, and, unmindful of its effect upon the listening ear, booms stentorian and tuneless through the responses. And, when the moment comes, his eye dwells with affection and approval upon the young of the village as they advance towards the altar to receive the Sacrament which he, but not they, understand.

Whether out in the village or at home in the villa he has rented for the winter, where at the drop of the right question he will rail against the “Gadarene descent” of our civilization or aim a perfect malicious verbal dart at some notable of the age, he can be what you want—by turns the funny, cruel, clever, benign religious maniac. But that is a caricature.

Muggeridge is in Provence to complete the second part of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time. He likes the south of France not so much for the weather (“They've done a great publicity job on the place, it can rain for days on end”) but for the beauty and the quiet. Incapable of saying “no” either to work or friends, here he is without newspapers, telephone or distraction.

His working day begins at 5:30 a.m. He has a cup of tea, reads (at the moment he is ploughing lovingly through the New Testament in French) or just “uses the time for contemplation.” At 7:30 he has breakfast, and by 8 a.m. the house is rattling to the nonstop clack-clack of his typewriter reproducing the memories and judgments of the Second World War.

Four and a half hours later he descends for lunch looking as robust as his typewriter sounded. After a light meal (both he and his wife Kitty are vegetarian, teetotal and eat sparingly) he walks for an hour or two, usually upon the same track on a mountain behind the village. There it is quiet: the famed Provencal air, the pine trees, the slight touch of the winter sun and the harsh contours of the boulder-strewn mountains stretching to the horizon, make for perfect walking. When he returns to the villa he works again for another two or three hours. At 7:30 he has supper and then sits in an armchair before the fire, talking, reading, listening to music or playing patience—“which requires just enough concentration to allow you to relax.” By 11 p.m. he is in bed.

It is a rigorous daily routine; for a man who is now 70 it suggests not only a strong constitution, an unusual energy, but when he could now be living comfortably off the fat of his considerable earnings, a rare dedication to work. Why does he do it? Why sit for hour after hour at a small table with only paper and a typewriter before you? Not for the money, certainly. And hardly for the accolades. The Green Stick (Part 1 of the Chronicles) was greeted with a predictable absence of rapture—though it received more attention than practically any other book of last year. Some judgments were particularly harsh. Richard Crossman, for instance, summoned all the considerable authority at his command to denounce the book and belittle the writer—which since Muggeridge had described the ex-Minister therein as a political “sycophant,” could perhaps be viewed as a bit of tit for tat. And Christopher Ricks, Professor of English at Bristol University, attacked the book—both its content and style—in the most savage terms that gentlemen of that profession allow themselves to employ in public.

Muggeridge professes to be untouched by such hostility, noting that “I am afraid I have rarely given much satisfaction,” and that as for Crossman—“Well, my dear boy, I just don't take him seriously as a critic. I know him quite well, like him in fact, but I do not consider that any view he expresses is to be taken seriously.” And the Professor? “What's his name, Crick? Crock? No, that's the Professor of Politics—Ricks, that's it—well, he did say it was appallingly written but he said it so strongly that I am afraid my vanity prevented me from taking it seriously.”

Muggeridge is the master of affected disdain. But for a man who claims immunity from the barbs of his critics, he dwells much on what they say, and defends his case with such concerned dexterity that some would say he doth protest too much. It would be strange if it were otherwise. For Muggeridge is a passionate man. Of course it is usually well concealed or disguised or sublimated into a felicitous expression of spiritual exultation—but like so many who wield an elegant vocabulary to assert a worldly asceticism or pin a judgment on mankind, Muggeridge uses language as a barricade to protect him from the world. So absolute is the conviction that he is right about mankind, so fierce the knowledge of its truth, that he states it, publicly and privately, again and again and again.

If his writing is repetitive and even querulous at times, Muggeridge is unrepentant. “I could at 70 legitimately sit at home, in the knowledge that I have ‘done my bit.’ I have no more worldly ambition, so the only point in writing is to say something, and I shall say something.” He has already said quite a lot. His career in journalism has spanned 40 years and five continents; he has written for practically every newspaper, journal and magazine in Britain (as well as countless others elsewhere); he has been reporter, interviewer, film maker, frontman and pundit for American, Canadian and British radio and television; in short he must have spilled more professional words in the last four decades than any other “communicator” (his term) of our age.

Apart from its intrinsic joys, journalism has always given him the “perfectly honorable and valid basis for pushing off and leaving a wife and family whom you love, but who tie you down, and in a sense are a drag on you. … Journalism is the poor man's divertissement, a fine alibi to escape your responsibilities.” It was to become much more.

The traditional (and still current) view of Muggeridge is that for years he was a brilliant maverick; a gadfly darting, stinging at our world. Then, so the story goes, suddenly one summer (1962 is the usual date given) he found God (like, of course, St. Paul before him), gave up the world, the flesh and the devil and became—a bore. The view is wrong.

For one thing Muggeridge still has a considerable sting. Sitting apparently at peace with the world after a good dinner he talks wittily and mercilessly. His conversation is peppered with judgments; the best, like a pin through the heart of a butterfly, precisely imprison his victim—the rest are wantonly malicious. Thus so-and-so “used to say that life was for the living. What he meant of course was life was for f- - -ing.” And of another: “It's quite simply that he's so stupid—a disastrous appointment.” And of a third: “Of course I'm afraid he's gone senile”—though the poor man in question had on television a few days earlier given every indication that he was in adequate possession of his intellectual faculties.

Like so many journalists, he is a gossip—the sins of others, their frailties, faults and failings, fascinate him. And Malice, close companion of Perception, is never far away. He recognizes it, defending himself only mildly with the question: “If you are to say about people what you really feel, are you to make them seem different from what they really were?” And the judgment: “I dislike any form of hero worship or adulation in anyone.”

Like all men who adopt a position rarely tarnished by moderation or qualification, Muggeridge likes and provokes argument. “There is nothing in this life more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow human beings.” Which of course is not to say that he does not welcome his fellow human beings finding themselves in agreement with him. He rarely yields in argument—and since for the sake of polemic he simplifies, it is easy to forget that his view of the world is based on an elaborate and elegant structure which he will defend to the death. So, frequently, you advance towards what you think is the edifice of his idea, charge and burst in—only to find him walking out of the back door blithely explaining that he never really cared for the place much anyway. If that does not work, he ignores the point.

The trouble with Muggeridge is that he is his own Unholy Trinity. He is journalist, thinker and Christian all rolled into one. So the trivial, the profound and the doctrinal in him get jumbled up together, and because he expresses himself so exquisitely, words falling from his lips with incomparable eloquence, hands orchestrating with matching elegance, he both gets away with it and misleads or confuses his audience. In discussion, reveling at the man's virtuosity, you are so often left grasping at the strands of his thought, desperately trying to unravel them, while he answers your uncertain, logical “but …” with a sweeping, “My dear boy, don't you see …” and you are off again. It is hard to extract his beliefs from the rhetoric which surrounds them, which is why the third volume of his autobiography (on which he plans to spend two years, and in which he intends to explore and explain his “view of the world”) should at the very least be instructive.

Muggeridge is not, as some of his critics allege, a dirty old man manque. He is quite honest about, if—one hesitates to say “obsessed”—perturbed by sex, or rather sexism. He makes little secret of the fact that for much of his life he had and indulged a healthy sexual appetite. That appetite is now, if not extinct, at least well under control. So now he can see “some extraordinarily pretty young girl, and be delighted that she's pretty without having the slightest desire to intrude one's ancient frame upon her.” So too he will admit that “… if one were to subtract from one's life anything that could come under the heading of sex, you would subtract a whacking great sum of it … the amount of thought and planning which have gone into it has been quite disproportionate.” But to charge him with being an old dog in the manger about it now (all that talk of “descent into carnality”) is to waste your time. For he merely replies that in his experience he has always found that the spiritual is far more satisfying than the physical. Pornography is something else, as those who observed his participation in, among other things, the Longford Inquiry, will know. His contribution to the Report was about television. There is some, but not much, doubt that his observations, more than anything else, ensured that the report would be taken rather less seriously than its contributors might have wished. His was a bizarre contribution: inaccurate, overstated, question-begging and tendentious—and Muggeridge was told so roundly by everyone. He remains unbowed, observing that he thinks he has made a useful contribution to the discussion of television and pornography, and in any case, Longford was an old friend and that is why he took part.

But in fact he did much more than condemn the medium and its message. As Bernard Levin subsequently tried to point out to him on television, he gave his public blessing to a putative Act which would allow a man to be imprisoned merely for offending the moral susceptibilities of ten out of 12 good men and true. Muggeridge was clearly embarrassed, but stubbornly refused to yield the point. “The lawyers,” he said, casting around for a scapegoat, “said it would work—I must say, though, I have never had much faith in the law.” It was a lame effort, and he does now admit that he would find it disconcerting if in ten years' time he were to be remembered for that signature on that Report. It was, he nearly admits, a mistake.

Muggeridge abhors pornography because it is aesthetically displeasing and morally corrupting. That it may do no harm according to the lights of sociology and psychology (two disciplines for which he has scant respect) is of no moment. To a Christian, the suggestion that sex can be good without love (and that within the confines of a marriage) degrades mankind, and by definition therefore is “harmful.” More interesting though, is his judgment that “the increasing availability and tolerance of pornography is one symptom of a sick society.” This is a social rather than moral observation (though he does not readily distinguish the two). It is open to dispute, but more important, it is on quite a different level from his outbursts of moral indignation, for it is really a statement about “exploitation.” The “sick society” is a society, in part at least, where “man exploits man to make money” and though Muggeridge rarely strives to force the connection, it links closely with what his son John has called “his funny profound view of the human condition.”

For those who would understand it, that view is obscured by what Muggeridge feels bound to say at frequent intervals not only about pornography but about television. We know what he thinks about the camera—its trailing “umbilical cords” and its “lying lens,” as if it were a malevolent creature from space bent upon world destruction instead of being a mere piece of technological equipment. We know how he sees himself before it—the pianist in the brothel who from time to time plays Abide With Me for the edification of the clients. But for a man who has spent the last 20 years becoming one of its best-known performers that will hardly do. There was naturally the money (“and I don't blush at that”) but more than that, there is the simple fact that whatever he may proclaim to the contrary, he loves it. He is an inveterate (and brilliant and charming) performer.

He even admits that if he were a young man again, he would, if he could, be working in television. So we may take with the familiar pinch of salt such offerings as: “In Broadcasting House, as elsewhere, the Kingdom of Christ shrinks to the dimensions of this world, and its sublime evangel to the verbiage of a Guardian or New Statesman editorial”—it is after all another way of saying the BBC's values are not his. But what about this? “… The morals of commercial television are, and have to be, those of the supermarket … (it) came into existence to carry advertising, thereby enriching their promoters … their purpose is to make profits.” The tone of disdain is familiar: as with pornography, advertising and public relations, the “promoters” are at the bedside of our moribund society—in at the kill. Muggeridge loathes excess.

He lives simply. In England he inhabits a small Sussex cottage, romantically set in the middle of cornfields. There, as in Provence, he lives without ostentation. Kitty's meals are simple but good. Muggeridge likes soup, salad, yogurt with chopped banana, omelettes, biscuits with jam, and for every supper a small, freshly-made rice pudding. The diet rarely varies. They do not “entertain” but welcome visitors with a rare warmth—even the young man who arrived hotfoot from Scotland with the news that he was Jesus, to Kitty's amusement, received the same courteous attention as the rest.

Their pleasures are reading, walking, and listening to music. Late in life Muggeridge has come to love Mozart, Beethoven and Bach. Material indulgence as opposed to material comfort is absent. Apart from the cottage their only possession of note is a Mini van.

Whatever indulgences Muggeridge may have allowed himself as a younger man—he used to drink liberal quantities of whisky and he once had a somewhat grandiose car—the search for simplicity, the asceticism, the repugnance at what is gross, the hostility to what is tawdry, is deep-seated and long-lasting. He was, after all, brought up an idealist, a boy who believed with his father that the new socialism of the 20th century would banish suffering and ease the cares and burdens of the toiling masses. As for the communism growing in a fledgling Soviet Union, here was the promised land, and Muggeridge the romantic, scenting a better world where capitalism would be but a bad dream, dispensed with his worldly goods and with Kitty staunchly at his side headed for this new world. He was 30.

The disillusionment was extreme. Communism too he found, at least in Stalin's Russia, was corrupt. He returned chastened but unforgiving: Western civilization was no less doomed because communism would never save it. The “values of the supermarket” still prevailed; the God of Excess, with his earthy Apostles (like Access) was Our Father still—and thus, lemmings all, we were bound for self-destruction.

Sure of that, one may presume his task was simple; he would illuminate the dying of the light; expose, ridicule, mock; pierce the delusions, fantasies, frailties and absurdities of our breed. To those who think him a crusty old reactionary, he says that he still has “more sympathy for revolutionaries and even members of The Party” than he has for “those who believe in Capitalism.” What he hates almost above all are those fulfilling their “liberal death wish”—who in understanding and explaining all, accept all. Now he calls himself an anarchist—or more properly “a Christian anarchist.”

An intellectual in search of salvation and failing to find it in any worldly institutions or ideologies, it was perhaps inevitable that he would discover God—if not the hollow rhetoric which sometimes accompanies his find. So in revulsion he tells us that without God “we are fated to imagine ourselves to be gods … or to relapse into carnality, seeking fulfillment through sex, drugs and violence and finding only satiety, fantasy and despair.” If he sounds despairing—a voice crying in the wilderness—he denies it.

With society disintegrating around him and its people rushing headlong downhill all the way in the pursuit of the good life, an optimist's steps are all but pre-ordained. St. Mug (unlike St. Paul) has always been treading the same path in the same pursuit, and Christianity was at the end of it. So now, like the sole survivor on a battlefield, he stands anguished in a barren land pointing up to the skies—the only way forward, the only salvation, is through God and God alone. Which is not to judge that every step in the progress of our society has been for the worse. There have been solid and humanitarian advances, reforms that “have been marvelous and are to be supported,” and not every institution, leader or politician is corrupt. But no so-called “progress” has “uplifted the spirit” of man. Muggeridge's concerns sound general rather than specific; about mankind rather than men.

Thus, walking in the soft warmth of the Provencal air, healthy, fit, stiffly agile, clear-minded and with few worldly cares, he talks of suffering. It is of course “one's duty” as a Christian to “seek to lessen suffering to the limits of one's capacity. That we are instructed to do … and I certainly accept it as a duty. But that is a different thing from resenting or imagining that by arranging the world differently it wouldn't be.”

If that sounds cold, Christianity and Muggeridge come to the rescue, for it is plain to him that one man's suffering is the same man's salvation. “I know men are going to go on suffering forever but I have absolute confidence that their suffering is not pointless”—an observation which may cause less worldwide rejoicing than Muggeridge might hope. But he is sure that suffering is ennobling, even inspiring.

As the sun sinks behind the skyline and we leave the mountain, bound for the log fire and tea, King Lear joins our stroll. “Why,” demands Muggeridge, “did Shakespeare put out the old boy's eyes? Because in that suffering, a silly old man was ennobled.” Maybe, but that was in a play, onstage. We would not, one suggests, order mass eye extraction in the real world to make the point, would we? He agrees, but does not budge—for when Faith confronts Reason (and he admits this) Reason is vanquished.

With faith Muggeridge has no fear of the future. “I mean you haven't really got a future at 70, have you? Ten years you know is the maximum you've got left, and that passes extremely quickly. It gives you a freedom from ambition and that is a great release. I look forward to dying. I mean, there are two possibilities, aren't there? One is that it is the end of you, which I shouldn't feel was an enormous loss to creation; or there is some kind of future which is impossible to envisage at all. Either way it offers no terrors.”

When pressed to select an epitaph for himself, he chooses: “He used words well.” On one level he cannot fail. He has no rival as a wordsmith. But has he used them well? How will he be judged? A gadfly who lost his sting? A mean-minded religious bigot? A brilliant, charming, clever, but irrelevant scribbler? A telepersonality, less plastic than most? A prophet of doom crying in the wilderness? Or something more? In the early days of the war Muggeridge was turned out of his Regimental Officers' Mess “The President of the Mess, a man called McNally, I can never forget him, drew me aside and said, ‘You've got to go, we can't have you here.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because of the way you talk, because it's intolerable and there have been many complaints.’ And so I said, ‘Will you tell me what specifically?’ And he said, ‘Well, it's not exactly what you say, it's something else about you.’ Well, that is the kind of attitude which, I admit, had dogged me … I really haven't got the slightest idea why.”

Perhaps it is simply this: that despite his occasional errors and excesses, his obsessions and sillinesses, and even despite his Christianity, what he says about his and our world has too often come too close to the Truth.