[In the following introduction to Muggeridge's Picture Palace, Ingrams reviews events behind the novel's genesis and suppression and finds it valuable more as historical record than novel.]

A first edition of [Picture Palace], which came out in 1934, must be one of the rarest books in existence. For although it was published and review copies sent out they were almost immediately withdrawn following legal action by Malcolm Muggeridge's former employees the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian). [It] has waited for over fifty years to see the light of day again.

Malcolm arrived at the Guardian in August 1930. He was twenty-seven. His previous job had been as a lecturer in English at Cairo University and it was there that he met Arthur Ransome, now best known for his children's stories like Swallows and Amazons, then a regular contributor to the Manchester Guardian. Malcolm had for some months been submitting reports on Egypt to the Guardian as a freelance and Ransome was asked by E. T. ‘Ted’ Scott, his editor, to pay a call on this promising young journalist with a view possibly to offering him a job on the staff. Ransome reported very favourably to Scott on 15 December 1929:

‘Calls himself Labour but considers Labour better served by the M G than by his own representatives. Wants to write. Has a congenital interest in politics. I asked him how long it took to write the sort of articles he has been sending us. He said he never has time to give more than a morning to doing an article. Concealing my respect behind a pompous manner, I did not let him know that I considered him one of the heavenborn … He is extreeeeeemly (sic) young, but decidedly nice in feel, altogether unlike some other rabbits whose diseased livers and swollen spleens affect the corridor atmosphere. I think he is the sort of lad you would find it refreshing to have about and one who, as his articles show, has a natural instinct for the M G attitude. The feel of the fellow is thoroughly simple, eager and pleasant, and free from any kind of intellectual cockiness while at the same time he is extremely clever and has crammed a lot of experience into his 26 years.’

The sequence in the early chapters of Malcolm's life repeats itself—initial enthusiasm and high spirits followed by disillusionment and despair. When, after Ransome's recommendation had been acted on and he received a letter offering him a job for a probationary period of three months, he was ecstatic. ‘I believe I have never received a letter which gave me so much delight,’ he wrote. ‘Waving it triumphantly in the air, I rushed to tell Kitty and then to the post office to telegraph my acceptance of the offer.’

His joy was understandable in a young would-be writer brought up in a Socialist household and now married to a niece of Beatrice Webb. The Manchester Guardian was an extraordinary institution—a provincial newspaper with a worldwide reputation, respected in all progressive circles for its constant and considered advocacy of Liberal ideas and causes. Its high standing was the achievement of one man, C. P. Scott (1846-1932), who became editor in 1872 at the age of only twenty-five. He later bought control of the paper in 1905 and from then on acted as a benevolent despot becoming not only a prestigious editor but an elder statesman, the friend and confidant of political leaders whom he liked to advise and admonish from a position of high-minded principle. Scott thought of himself and his paper more as fulfilling a public service than in providing news. Not surprisingly he felt he had a duty to continue in harness as long as he could and, although he formally surrendered the editorship in 1929 to his son Ted, he continued to frequent the office until his death in 1932 at the age of eighty.

When Malcolm reported to the paper's offices in Cross Street, he had the sense of finally having found his vocation in life—journalism. Prior to 1932 he had drifted—from Cambridge to a Christian Mission School in India, back to England to teach in Birmingham; then, after his marriage to Kitty Dobbs, to Cairo. Now at last he seemed to have come to rest: ‘I began to catch the fever of journalism,’ he writes in his memoirs. ‘I recognised at once my native habitat in the Guardian office: in the tang of printer's ink, the yeasty aroma of newsprint: curious aged figures carrying copy, or battered trays with dregs of strong tea and the debris of chops or fried fish: the clatter of typeprinters and typewriters and the odd zones of silence somehow existing amidst the noise, like cloisters in a railway station.’

Malcolm had been hired to write leaders—the most prestigious job on a paper which prided itself on its comment rather than its stories. It was work that was new to him and when he was asked as his first assignment to write a ‘short’ on capital punishment, he sought guidance from his colleague Paddy Monkhouse on what the paper's line might be on the subject: ‘Same as corporal only more so,’ Monkhouse replied without even looking up from his typewriter. From that point on, Malcolm said, he fell easily into the leader-writing routine.

Still, as invariably happened, disillusion was lurking. Behind the cheerful and congenial façade which captivated Arthur Ransome was a tortured spirit, restless and craving for some form of certainty. Someone of his piercing perception and sensitive nose for humbug could not find comfort for long in the tepid Liberal optimism which was the hallmark of C. P. Scott's Guardian. He was coaxed in other directions by his first meeting, which took place at about this time, with Hugh Kingsmill to whom, with his brother Brian, Picture Palace is dedicated. On a visit to the Guardian offices, Kingsmill, who was invariably cheerful in a way that managed mysteriously to antagonise his fellow human beings, found the clichés of the Guardian leaders hilariously funny: ‘The people of this country’ … ‘It is greatly to be hoped’ … ‘Surely wiser counsels will prevail.’

One of Kingsmill's inventions was the word ‘Dawnist’, that is a man who believes that given enough good will, or, if necessary, ruthless determination, a new dawn can be brought into being for the benefit of all. If anyone was a Dawnist it was C. P. Scott who, partly as a result of Kingsmill's promptings, was eventually to become in Malcolm's eyes an archetypal baddie—the high-minded agnostic Liberal believing in progress and shutting his eyes to the cruelty and corruption that invariably accompany the exercise of political power. Later Malcolm was to see people like Lady Astor in Russia acting the part in a more dramatic way. In his demonology such well-meaning Dawnists seemed always more odious even than the tyrants like Hitler and Stalin who, he claimed, were the inevitable result of their compromises.

Whatever his feelings for C. P. Scott may have been, Malcolm developed a great affection towards his son Ted—‘a man in his forties with a large noble head, a grey complexion, soft dark eyes and a smile of great sweetness; the whole impression somehow vaguely sorrowful’. He told Arthur Ransome in 1932: ‘I was fonder of him, I think, than of any man I have ever come across.’ Ted Scott reciprocated Malcolm's affection and greatly admired his writing. When, after his father's death in January 1932, he finally assumed complete editorial control of the paper, one of the first things he did was to give Malcolm a substantial pay rise. In the eyes of A. J. P.Taylor, another of his friends at this time, it was thanks to his rapport with Ted Scott, that Malcolm became the ‘spoilt child’ of the Guardian who, unlike his fellow leader-writers, was even allowed home early in the evening without having to wait for the galleys to arrive.

Then came tragedy. In April 1932 Ted Scott went on a sailing holiday with his son in the Lake District. His boat capsized on Lake Windermere and he was drowned. Malcolm, who had dined with him the night before his death, was shattered by this blow which, apart from depriving him of a dear friend, meant the end of his favoured status on the Guardian. The new editor C.P.Crozier, who had been jealous of Malcolm's friendship with Scott, he found deeply unsympathetic; and, in the meantime, on the political front, the arrival of the National Government headed by Ramsay MacDonald, betrayer of the Labour Party, meant further disillusionment.

In a mood of despair he decided to burn his boats and set out for Russia, somehow convincing himself that he could start a new life there. In this instance the process of disillusionment was even quicker. He remained in Russia for only nine months, time enough to see for himself the realities of Stalin's regime to which other visitors seemed determined to turn a blind eye. At the same time Kitty became very ill with typhus, which in a country with only primitive medical facilities was a cause for great alarm. (The illness is described in this book.)

In these unpromising circumstances, Malcolm wrote his second novel Picture Palace, giving a jaundiced impression of Manchester life as seen from the unlikely viewpoint of the USSR. As a work of fiction it cannot be said to be a success. But as barely disguised autobiography it is of great interest. Malcolm made scarcely any effort to cover his tracks. The portrait of C. P. Scott as Old Savoury—the most memorable feature of the book—is partly satirical, but many details are true. There was, for example, a memo which Scott wrote to Malcolm after rejecting a leader he had penned about an ugly new gasometer because it happened to coincide with an advertising feature on the gas industry. ‘Truth should be economised, lest we should make a hard task harder.’

Contempt for Scott is one dominant emotion in the book, the other is Malcolm's love for his wife Kitty. They both appear here, again little disguised, as Pettygrew and Gertrude. To someone like myself who has known them only in serene old age, it demands an effort to picture Malcolm and Kitty as two free spirits living like characters in a D. H. Lawrence novel. But that is how they were. ‘We were children of our time,’ Malcolm wrote many years later. ‘We looked to our bodies for gratification, we pursued happiness in true twentieth-century style.’ These early days are here faithfully described—the rows, the infidelities, the temporary separations; but also, more importantly, the strong abiding love which held them together in spite of all. Alan Taylor remembers an occasion, similar to that in the novel, when Kitty decided she had had enough of Malcolm and Manchester and caught the train to London while her husband ran alongside calling, ‘Goodbye, Kitty. Perhaps our paths in life will cross again.’ She returned the following day.

Other characters are equally identifiable. There are traces of Taylor himself—who lived in the flat above the Muggeridges in Wilmslow Road, Didsbury—in Rattray the university lecturer. Mr and Mrs Boswell are Malcolm's fellow Guardian leader-writer Kingsley Martin and his poor deranged wife Olga. In the circumstances it was almost inevitable that publication would run into legal difficulties. The first publisher to whom it was submitted forwarded the manuscript to Arthur Ransome for his opinion. ‘Arthur was dreadfully upset,’ Hugh Brogan writes in his biography. ‘It was highly libellous, he reported; he thought it was a betrayal of confidence; it might do the paper, as a business concern, much harm in Manchester; it was pornographic, it was caddish.’ Surprisingly Picture Palace nevertheless found another publisher in Douglas Jerrold of Eyre and Spottiswoode who, as a staunch Right-winger, was prepared to take it on provided certain changes were made; the book was printed early in 1934 and then, at the instigation of Crozier, the Guardian struck, applying for an injunction and threatening a libel action over the allegation that the paper was, as it were, living off the immoral earnings of the Manchester Evening News. Jerrold asked Malcolm for a deposit of £2,000 to contest the action, and when, not surprisingly, the sum was not forthcoming, he withdrew the book and it sank without trace. By this time its author was in India enduring another dark night of the soul and appears to have been largely indifferent to its demise.

The suppression of his novel, however, had one beneficial effect. It helped to confirm his view of the humbug that lies at the core of Liberalism. The offending allegation, needless to say, was, in essence, perfectly true. The high-minded Manchester Guardian did indeed depend for its survival on the much racier, popular paper, the Manchester Evening News. And it was an added irony that a paper which was dedicated to the cause of progress, enlightenment and Free Speech should seek brutally to suppress a work of fiction poking fun at its own operation. Malcolm would never embrace the Right, but after the Guardian, Russia and the nonpublication of his book he could no longer subscribe to the Dawnism of the Left. ‘Never glad, confident morning again.’