Some time in my early twenties, I returned home and turned on the television to find Michael Parkinson interviewing some gnarled old chap I’d never seen before. Another guest shortly appeared, singing the praises of America and how generous the people were to him, a 'poor Englishman'. With an uncanny likeness to my mental picture of Dickens’ Harold Skimpole, the new arrival to Parky's show stated (words to the affect) that every time he went to the States, all he had to do was admit to being poor and the locals would come to his rescue and pay the difference. He of the gnarled countenance was unmoved and clearly wanted to debate.
'Have you been to the Bronx recently?', enquired the old man.
In the absence of a reply, he added that 'the American Dream is all washed up.'
The old man was Malcolm Muggeridge. Although I cannot recall what else was said, his words did swim against the prevailing tide of materialism and the culture of ‘I’ve got mine’, and his eloquence and honesty planted seeds.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s writing is far more popular in the United States than in Britain, so there's a good chance these words will furrow the brows of those Americans who've read the quotes but not the full body of Muggeridge's writing. I think we should disregard the line about the said district of New York, because Malcolm was prone to the occasional sweeping statement and I doubt whether he ever went to The Bronx. But the point he was making was nevertheless clear to this viewer and his distaste for ‘the American Dream’ was oft repeated, and rests on four seemingly harmless words—the pursuit of happiness.
But we shall return to these words later.

Like many a gifted word vendor who writes with soul, Muggeridge's writing rises in relevance with each year and it is a minor tragedy that such uncompromising vision, sparkling wit and diamond sentences should be kept off the bookshelves by television tie-ins and a mountain of ephemeral dross. Readers may not agree with all that Muggeridge writes and not all of his arguments are impregnable, but if you are going to scale them, you’ll need to rise above parrot philosophy and platitudes.

Malcolm Muggeridge has been hijacked more than once by right-wing politicals, who buttress their prejudices from a suitable portion of Malcolm’s writing, which they have used to bludgeon ‘liberalism’ for decades. In these days of mass political apostasy, in which 'moderate men of all political persuasions' will prostrate themselves before anything and anyone to raise up their careers, I’m no longer sure what liberalism is, or whether—like conscience journalism and writing-as-vocation—it still exists as anything more than an agentable posture or a fashion accessory.
If he were alive today, would Muggeridge have been silent to the plight of Russia's Anna Politkovskaya, amongst others, because she may (or may not) have been classified as a 'liberal'?
Would he have been inclined to overlook the defense of Russian democracy, at great personal expense, by the 39 because they were young Bolsheviks?
In an interview with William Buckley Junior, a relevant portion of which can be found on YouTube, Muggeridge shrewdly challenges the stereotypical understanding of Left and Right, by claiming a natural affinity with the Left whilst trashing Liberalism. Similar to Simone Weil, Muggeridge saw being on the Left not as party affiliation, but as coming down on the side of the oppressed, and an obligation to add weight to the lighter side of the human scale.

In future workings of this essay, I shall attempt to reclaim Malcolm Muggeridge for the rest of us, irrespective of politics or belief, because his appeal is timeless, it is catholic (with a both a small and large 'c') and relevant to anyone and everyone prepared to think beyond the intellectual and spiritual straight-jacket of Stepford County, as well as those who instinctively feel the stuff of life is immeasurably greater than what which the Dick Dawkins can squeeze into his unfeasibly large head.
For the benefit of those who do not know the work of Muggeridge, it might be a good idea to lay bare a few excerpts from his writings, which pack more of a punch now that many of the things he perceived have been implemented, and the progression backwards into cultural bankruptcy and barbarity gather momentum.
Take, for example, a piece on the camera (from 1968), made all the more pertinent by current publishing and broadcasting trends:
'Well was the camera originally named Obscura. It is the ego’s very focus, with all the narcissism of the human race concentrated into its tiny aperture. It advances upon one in a television studio like some ferocious monster, ravening and bloodshot eyed. Of all the inventions of our time it is likely to prove the most destructive. Whereas nuclear power can only reduce us and our world to a cinder, the camera grinds us down to spiritual dust so fine that a puff of wind scatters it, leaving nothing behind.'

Or on 'spin' before it got the name and ‘news’ as PR manipulation.
This piece, entitled Farewell to Freedom, was written in 1954.
'The Press, too, in my opinion, is increasingly becoming a purveyor of orthodoxy than an expression of individual views. The State which in a variety of ways, ranging between subtle pressure and persuasion and unabashed handouts, feeds it with ‘news’, is able more and more to call its tune. The Press…is in process of succumbing to the collectivist zeitgeist. At its obsequies (burials) the mutes are public relations officers, and the service is read by an ordained Minister of Information, with massed choirs provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation…It is in the passion for thinking in terms of categories that I detect the clearest and most ominous symptom of subordination of the individual to the collectivity. A voluntary uniformity, no less than an imposed one, prepares the way for servitude.'

India under the British Raj, from the first volume of Muggeridge’s autobiography, is the subject of this selection, which could easily be adapted to challenge the consequences of (any number of) culturally vacuous corporate empires:
As I dimly realised, a people can be laid waste culturally as well as physically; not their lands but their inner life, as it were, sewn with salt. This is what happened to India. An alien culture, itself exhausted, become trivial and shallow, was imposed upon them; when we went, we left behind railways, schools and universities, statues of Queen Victoria and other of our worthies, industries, an administration, a legal system; all that and much more, but set in a spiritual wasteland. We had drained the country of its true life and creativity, making of it a place of echoes and mimicry.

Mildly stirred or challenged? If so, it is worth noting that scintillating prose, pertinent comment?some believe prophetic— if you want prophecy fulfilled, go back a couple of passages and re-read the line which begins A voluntary uniformity—and punctuation-as-art shine from virtually every passage of Muggeridge’s writing. His words (almost always) soar high above the issues that pin the likes of John Pilger firmly to the moment, and Muggeridge's sentences are imbued with a deeper understanding of the human condition, which bears the seeds of its own undoing. There is also fair-and-frequent scrutiny of Muggeridge’s own flaws, chiefly egotism and vanity.

As a youngster working in Liverpool in 1981, I walked past a town centre bookshop and noticed a poster in the window, which read ‘Malcolm Muggeridge will be signing copies of his Diaries at this store on…’. With that Parkinson interview still in mind, I decided to buy a copy of Muggeridge's diaries. On the stated day I didn’t have enough money, but I went along to the bookshop anyway and just peered at him with my nose stuck to the window (I later told Muggeridge this and he said if I had come inside, he would’ve given me a copy). When pay day came, I went back and bought the Diaries, and both volumes of his memoirs, which go under the title of Chronicles of Wasted Time.

I also read his book about Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God (not his best work). The book accompanied a BBC TV series and it was the main reason I got on a flight to India a couple of years later, where I spent time in a number of Mother’s homes in Calcutta. Not long after my return from Calcutta, I wrote to Muggeridge to ask if he had any advice for an aspiring writer: he advised that the state of publishing made it all but impossible for anything of value to be published (more prophecy fulfilled!).
I wrote again in 1986 to ask if I could meet him. He replied to both letters, and in the second included his ex-directory telephone number, stating he would be happy for me to visit Park Cottage and that I should telephone to arrange a time.

If I was nervous when making the initial telephone call, by the time I got off the train at Robertsbridge station, on my first visit to Park Cottage, I was somewhat overwhelmed at the prospect of meeting a giant of the written word. Amidst a lifetime of detached involvement, he had met Gandhi, fearlessly reported what was really going on in Stalin’s Russia (when his newspaper, The Guardian, preferred the Utopian’s blinkered view of the vile tyrant), dined with Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and George Orwell (at the same time and same table), and mixed it up in interviews with the likes of Bertrand Russell, Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenytsin, in days when the interview amounted to more than the celebrity self-promotion and PR handouts, which have all but killed good feature work and turned much of ‘the media’ into a dangerous, self-perpetuating game.
At the railway station, this council estate boy, whose visit to Robertsbridge had been initiated by an innate love of words, and actualised by the gaucheness and naivety to request an audience with someone who wrote ‘like an angel’, walked nervously out of Robertsbridge station and in through the doors of the pub across the road for some Dutch courage. I sank a very Northern number of pints in a very short space of time: when I arrived at Park Cottage, I was half cut and as Malcolm invited me in, I managed to get my legs in a tangle and sort of fell in through the door.
‘ Would you like some tea?’ he asked by way of a greeting, when I’d recovered my balance. ‘I find tea very refreshing these days…far more refreshing than alcohol, wouldn’t you agree?’ he probed knowingly.

My visits to Park Cottage became a regular day out and, although I didn’t give it much thought at the time (I was at an age when I took things for granted), in retrospect it was a considerable privilege to sit with Muggeridge, in the same chair that had seated Stalin's daughter, Svetlana (amongst others), as I listened to tales from a past no longer present and quizzed him further on things I’d read in his books?to such a degree that his wife Kitty commented ‘you know more about Malcolm’s life than he does’.
Of course Malcolm made better use of his anecdotes, in his writing, than any interviewer could. However, moments of spontaneous laughter were never far away and one came about when I asked Muggeridge how he rated Graham Greene: did he consider him to be a great writer?
Assuming me to be an admirer of Greene’s work?I was not: I merely wanted confirmation that someone else thought he was overrated, and that ‘economy of language’ was a false ceiling, imposed by the cult of mediocrity, along with those who had made literature an incestuous, soulless industry?Malcolm subtly side-shuffled, saying only that he believed Greene had written some good stories at a certain time in his life. From his lack of a more solid opinion I gauged a truer answer.
‘ And compared to Tolstoy?’
Well, this brought a sparkle to Muggers’ baby blues and he started to laugh.
‘ There might be a slight gap’, commented Muggeridge caustically and we laughed a whole lot more.
Laughter was very much a part of Muggeridge and it is for good reason that his writing has been in British comedian Ken Dodd’s prime collection of humorous books for many years, and Malcolm’s account of the reburial of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, at Westminster Abbey, make up some of the funniest pages I have ever read. I believe Calcutta’s Dr. Jack Preger got it about right, when he said to me that ‘Muggeridge took the piss so beautifully’.

Malcolm and Kitty were in their 70’s when I started visiting Park Cottage, and, irrespective of prior telephone calls, Malcolm rarely remembered who was coming on what day (and at what time). Park Cottage seemed to operate on an open house basis and all manner of people would turn up, for any number of reasons, and be invited to sit down for lunch or help Malcolm collect the eggs from the chickens outside.
One day Russian author Leonid Borodin appeared at the door. This was in the days before Glasnost and Borodin had been granted a visa to visit the West. Whilst in the country, Borodin, who served some ten years in Soviet Strict Regime Camps, decided to seek out Muggeridge, whose writing against the regime he knew from the early days of samizdat. The Russian author turned up at Park Cottage with a translator and also an anonymously dressed figure in tow, who/whom Malcolm reckoned to be KGB. At some later point I mentioned this meeting to Borodin’s British publisher, who thanked me for the snippet, as he had known nothing of his author’s apparently clandestine trip to Park Cottage.

Being as I didn’t know any reporters, when applying to join the National Union of Journalists I asked Malcolm if he would propose me for membership. He duly provided me with a letter and at the meeting, which took place at the Mechanics Institute in Manchester, in a room packed full with aspirants, one of the membership committee looked puzzled by my application form and the letter of proposal. He called out to me at the back of the room:
‘… could you confirm the name of your proposer?’
‘ Er… Malcolm Muggeridge’ I blushingly answered, which hushed the assembly and made me sweat unduly, as all eyes in the room turned on me.
‘ Do you know which branch he’s a member of?’ asked the committee member, still nonplussed as to who he was.
‘ I think the union has made him a life member’ croaked I.
At this point one of his colleagues whispered in his ear and came to the rescue of both of us.

Prior to a second visit to Calcutta, Muggeridge also wrote me a letter of introduction to Mother Teresa, stating that my reasons for wanting to take photos in her Calcutta homes were non-commercial and out of genuine interest in the work of the Missionaries of Charity. I’d encountered Mother before (she’d sent me to Confession!) and she rarely gave permission for photos. As it happened, Mother was out of Calcutta and Muggeridge’s letter did me no good anyway, because I was refused permission by one of the senior Sisters. But as I hadn’t taken a vow of obedience, and reckoned vocations are each to his own, I took my photos anyway; a privilege afforded me by Sister-in-charge as a (largely ineffectual) volunteer rather than a prying journalist.

Some on the political right would’ve laid sole claim to Muggeridge, but Muggeridge was given the ability to see the Emperor in all his nakedness by his willingness to look through and beyond: you don’t need to dig too deeply to find the man being equally scathing of other worldly cul de sacs, like the self-blinding lust for power and the aforementioned pursuit of happiness, the limitations of which are summed up by these words:
'All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving.'
This is enlarged upon in this next selection, taken from the New Statesman in 1967:
' In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of 20th century materialism?and the utopian hopes that go therewith?falls flat on its face. The pursuit of happiness is a grotesque fantasy, and the Gross National Product an equally grotesque mirage…the terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost?propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying, as they do, that it is possible for a mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, imprisoned in his tiny ego and enslaved by his squalid appetites, to aspire after a universal understanding and universal love.'[

Like all vendors of lasting sentences, the apolitical Muggers saw above and beyond ephemeral issues. In doing so, Muggeridge gave his sentences the hallmark of timelessness, which his critics can only hope to achieve by association. I suppose Kierkegaard best distances eternity from the transient with the line ‘religion is eternity’s transfigured rendition of politics most beautiful dream,’ and?human frailty aside?for Muggeridge, anything less than eternity was Caesar’s currency in counterfeit roubles.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Muggeridge’s writing is his ability to absorb high-altitude thought and, through the gift of words, make it palatable for a relatively low-altitude readership (which also forms a neat definition of what good writing actually is). Like Michel de Montaigne, in his celebrated Essays (a book, incidentally, which Malcolm always packed in his suitcase on his travels, but never actually read), ‘Muggers’ has woven the deeper thoughts of others into the rich tapestry of his sentences. But unlike Michel de Montaigne, who planted words of the greats like concealed mines, for the conceited to step on, Muggeridge actually leaves the threads visible; so?from Tolstoy to Dostoievsky to Solzhenytsin, through Simone Weil and Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Bunyan, Saint Augustine, Miguel Cervantes, Swift, William Blake, Doctor Johnston, Shakespeare and a host of others?the reader can wind-in the golden string of his learning and follow it as far as he or she is either willing or able.

As early as the 1930’s, a clear thread of spirituality and other-worldliness can be found running through Muggeridge’s writing; it was the cornerstone for most, if not entirely all, of his best work. After a lifetime of proclaiming Christianity from the agnostic’s side of the fence, defending the Christian faith (some would say too shrewdly, because it exempted him from its yardstick) from behind the prefix ‘whilst not being a believer myself…’, Muggeridge finally became a Catholic at the eleventh hour.
Malcolm Muggeridge was not a Saint, even though his vanity may occasionally have raised the notion of his sanctity, and in old age his ego would still ‘rear its cobra-like head’ and butt in on the proceedings. For example, when we were talking once about the Missionaries of Charity, he sat upright and made the proud claim that ‘I started the whole thing off, you know'.
I'm sure Mother would've seen things a little differently and put him in his place once more.

Muggeridge most certainly had the gift of genius and he will be remembered as as a great writer, despite Peregrine Worsthorne's suggestion to the contrary at the time of his death, for his stylised writing few–if any–from the past 100 years could measure up to. This alone will merit a full reassessment of his work, but when you add to this the growing relevance of his sentences, which beat heartily against the dumb-down way of the world and herald the final throes of a burnt-out civilisation, the case for reissuing his autobiography has been answered by the Muggeridge Society and hopefully a full collection of his essays will follow. However, in the revolutionary and recalcitrant spirit of the man, I think Muggeridge would be better served if they turned their backs on the dumb-down industry, committed his complete works to PDF and gave the lot away on the web, for Samizdat is making a comeback.

In keeping with his time in this world, I shall let Muggeridge once again have the last word. Bearing in mind that an entire media industry has made, to varying degrees, a Faustian pact with PR manipulators, I have chosen a pertinent last word. But then Malcolm Muggeridge’s words were made to last and pertinence is rarely more than a word away.
'In Moscow when the great purges were on, some moon-faced Intourist, trying in good liberal style to be fair to both sides, asked one of the British newspaper correspondents there?A.T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph?whether the accusations against the Old Bolsheviks standing trial were true. Yes, Cholerton told him, everything was true except the facts. It fits not just the purges and Moscow, but the whole… twentieth century scene. Perhaps some astronaut, watching from afar the final incineration of our earth, may care to write it across the stratosphere: Everything true except facts. '

words and images © evvy 2008

Some time in my early twenties, I returned home and turned on the television to find Michael Parkinson interviewing some gnarled old chap I’d never seen before. Another guest shortly appeared, singing the praises of America and how generous the people were to him, a 'poor Englishman'. With an uncanny likeness to my mental picture of Dickens’ Harold Skimpole, the new arrival to Parky's show stated (words to the affect) that every time he went to the States, all he had to do was admit to being poor and the locals would come to his rescue and pay the difference. He of the gnarled countenance was unmoved and clearly wanted to debate.
'Have you been to the Bronx recently?', enquired the old man.
In the absence of a reply, he added that 'the American Dream is all washed up.'
The old man was Malcolm Muggeridge. Although I cannot recall what else was said, his words did swim against the prevailing tide of materialism and the culture of ‘I’ve got mine’, and his eloquence and honesty planted seeds.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s writing is far more popular in the United States than in Britain, so there's a good chance these words will furrow the brows of those Americans who've read the quotes but not the full body of Muggeridge's writing. I think we should disregard the line about the said district of New York, because Malcolm was prone to the occasional sweeping statement and I doubt whether he ever went to The Bronx. But the point he was making was nevertheless clear to this viewer and his distaste for ‘the American Dream’ was oft repeated, and rests on four seemingly harmless words—the pursuit of happiness.
But we shall return to these words later.

Like many a gifted word vendor who writes with soul, Muggeridge's writing rises in relevance with each year and it is a minor tragedy that such uncompromising vision, sparkling wit and diamond sentences should be kept off the bookshelves by television tie-ins and a mountain of ephemeral dross. Readers may not agree with all that Muggeridge writes and not all of his arguments are impregnable, but if you are going to scale them, you’ll need to rise above parrot philosophy and platitudes.

Malcolm Muggeridge has been hijacked more than once by right-wing politicals, who buttress their prejudices from a suitable portion of Malcolm’s writing, which they have used to bludgeon ‘liberalism’ for decades. In these days of mass political apostasy, in which 'moderate men of all political persuasions' will prostrate themselves before anything and anyone to raise up their careers, I’m no longer sure what liberalism is, or whether—like conscience journalism and writing-as-vocation—it still exists as anything more than an agentable posture or a fashion accessory.
If he were alive today, would Muggeridge have been silent to the plight of Russia's Anna Politkovskaya, amongst others, because she may (or may not) have been classified as a 'liberal'?
Would he have been inclined to overlook the defense of Russian democracy, at great personal expense, by the 39 because they were young Bolsheviks?
In an interview with William Buckley Junior, a relevant portion of which can be found on YouTube, Muggeridge shrewdly challenges the stereotypical understanding of Left and Right, by claiming a natural affinity with the Left whilst trashing Liberalism. Similar to Simone Weil, Muggeridge saw being on the Left not as party affiliation, but as coming down on the side of the oppressed, and an obligation to add weight to the lighter side of the human scale.

In future workings of this essay, I shall attempt to reclaim Malcolm Muggeridge for the rest of us, irrespective of politics or belief, because his appeal is timeless, it is catholic (with a both a small and large 'c') and relevant to anyone and everyone prepared to think beyond the intellectual and spiritual straight-jacket of Stepford County, as well as those who instinctively feel the stuff of life is immeasurably greater than what which the Dick Dawkins can squeeze into his unfeasibly large head.
For the benefit of those who do not know the work of Muggeridge, it might be a good idea to lay bare a few excerpts from his writings, which pack more of a punch now that many of the things he perceived have been implemented, and the progression backwards into cultural bankruptcy and barbarity gather momentum.
Take, for example, a piece on the camera (from 1968), made all the more pertinent by current publishing and broadcasting trends:
'Well was the camera originally named Obscura. It is the ego’s very focus, with all the narcissism of the human race concentrated into its tiny aperture. It advances upon one in a television studio like some ferocious monster, ravening and bloodshot eyed. Of all the inventions of our time it is likely to prove the most destructive. Whereas nuclear power can only reduce us and our world to a cinder, the camera grinds us down to spiritual dust so fine that a puff of wind scatters it, leaving nothing behind.'

Or on 'spin' before it got the name and ‘news’ as PR manipulation.
This piece, entitled Farewell to Freedom, was written in 1954.
'The Press, too, in my opinion, is increasingly becoming a purveyor of orthodoxy than an expression of individual views. The State which in a variety of ways, ranging between subtle pressure and persuasion and unabashed handouts, feeds it with ‘news’, is able more and more to call its tune. The Press…is in process of succumbing to the collectivist zeitgeist. At its obsequies (burials) the mutes are public relations officers, and the service is read by an ordained Minister of Information, with massed choirs provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation…It is in the passion for thinking in terms of categories that I detect the clearest and most ominous symptom of subordination of the individual to the collectivity. A voluntary uniformity, no less than an imposed one, prepares the way for servitude.'

India under the British Raj, from the first volume of Muggeridge’s autobiography, is the subject of this selection, which could easily be adapted to challenge the consequences of (any number of) culturally vacuous corporate empires:
As I dimly realised, a people can be laid waste culturally as well as physically; not their lands but their inner life, as it were, sewn with salt. This is what happened to India. An alien culture, itself exhausted, become trivial and shallow, was imposed upon them; when we went, we left behind railways, schools and universities, statues of Queen Victoria and other of our worthies, industries, an administration, a legal system; all that and much more, but set in a spiritual wasteland. We had drained the country of its true life and creativity, making of it a place of echoes and mimicry.

Mildly stirred or challenged? If so, it is worth noting that scintillating prose, pertinent comment?some believe prophetic— if you want prophecy fulfilled, go back a couple of passages and re-read the line which begins A voluntary uniformity—and punctuation-as-art shine from virtually every passage of Muggeridge’s writing. His words (almost always) soar high above the issues that pin the likes of John Pilger firmly to the moment, and Muggeridge's sentences are imbued with a deeper understanding of the human condition, which bears the seeds of its own undoing. There is also fair-and-frequent scrutiny of Muggeridge’s own flaws, chiefly egotism and vanity.

As a youngster working in Liverpool in 1981, I walked past a town centre bookshop and noticed a poster in the window, which read ‘Malcolm Muggeridge will be signing copies of his Diaries at this store on…’. With that Parkinson interview still in mind, I decided to buy a copy of Muggeridge's diaries. On the stated day I didn’t have enough money, but I went along to the bookshop anyway and just peered at him with my nose stuck to the window (I later told Muggeridge this and he said if I had come inside, he would’ve given me a copy). When pay day came, I went back and bought the Diaries, and both volumes of his memoirs, which go under the title of Chronicles of Wasted Time.

I also read his book about Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God (not his best work). The book accompanied a BBC TV series and it was the main reason I got on a flight to India a couple of years later, where I spent time in a number of Mother’s homes in Calcutta. Not long after my return from Calcutta, I wrote to Muggeridge to ask if he had any advice for an aspiring writer: he advised that the state of publishing made it all but impossible for anything of value to be published (more prophecy fulfilled!).
I wrote again in 1986 to ask if I could meet him. He replied to both letters, and in the second included his ex-directory telephone number, stating he would be happy for me to visit Park Cottage and that I should telephone to arrange a time.

If I was nervous when making the initial telephone call, by the time I got off the train at Robertsbridge station, on my first visit to Park Cottage, I was somewhat overwhelmed at the prospect of meeting a giant of the written word. Amidst a lifetime of detached involvement, he had met Gandhi, fearlessly reported what was really going on in Stalin’s Russia (when his newspaper, The Guardian, preferred the Utopian’s blinkered view of the vile tyrant), dined with Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene and George Orwell (at the same time and same table), and mixed it up in interviews with the likes of Bertrand Russell, Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenytsin, in days when the interview amounted to more than the celebrity self-promotion and PR handouts, which have all but killed good feature work and turned much of ‘the media’ into a dangerous, self-perpetuating game.
At the railway station, this council estate boy, whose visit to Robertsbridge had been initiated by an innate love of words, and actualised by the gaucheness and naivety to request an audience with someone who wrote ‘like an angel’, walked nervously out of Robertsbridge station and in through the doors of the pub across the road for some Dutch courage. I sank a very Northern number of pints in a very short space of time: when I arrived at Park Cottage, I was half cut and as Malcolm invited me in, I managed to get my legs in a tangle and sort of fell in through the door.
‘ Would you like some tea?’ he asked by way of a greeting, when I’d recovered my balance. ‘I find tea very refreshing these days…far more refreshing than alcohol, wouldn’t you agree?’ he probed knowingly.

My visits to Park Cottage became a regular day out and, although I didn’t give it much thought at the time (I was at an age when I took things for granted), in retrospect it was a considerable privilege to sit with Muggeridge, in the same chair that had seated Stalin's daughter, Svetlana (amongst others), as I listened to tales from a past no longer present and quizzed him further on things I’d read in his books?to such a degree that his wife Kitty commented ‘you know more about Malcolm’s life than he does’.
Of course Malcolm made better use of his anecdotes, in his writing, than any interviewer could. However, moments of spontaneous laughter were never far away and one came about when I asked Muggeridge how he rated Graham Greene: did he consider him to be a great writer?
Assuming me to be an admirer of Greene’s work?I was not: I merely wanted confirmation that someone else thought he was overrated, and that ‘economy of language’ was a false ceiling, imposed by the cult of mediocrity, along with those who had made literature an incestuous, soulless industry?Malcolm subtly side-shuffled, saying only that he believed Greene had written some good stories at a certain time in his life. From his lack of a more solid opinion I gauged a truer answer.
‘ And compared to Tolstoy?’
Well, this brought a sparkle to Muggers’ baby blues and he started to laugh.
‘ There might be a slight gap’, commented Muggeridge caustically and we laughed a whole lot more.
Laughter was very much a part of Muggeridge and it is for good reason that his writing has been in British comedian Ken Dodd’s prime collection of humorous books for many years, and Malcolm’s account of the reburial of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, at Westminster Abbey, make up some of the funniest pages I have ever read. I believe Calcutta’s Dr. Jack Preger got it about right, when he said to me that ‘Muggeridge took the piss so beautifully’.

Malcolm and Kitty were in their 70’s when I started visiting Park Cottage, and, irrespective of prior telephone calls, Malcolm rarely remembered who was coming on what day (and at what time). Park Cottage seemed to operate on an open house basis and all manner of people would turn up, for any number of reasons, and be invited to sit down for lunch or help Malcolm collect the eggs from the chickens outside.
One day Russian author Leonid Borodin appeared at the door. This was in the days before Glasnost and Borodin had been granted a visa to visit the West. Whilst in the country, Borodin, who served some ten years in Soviet Strict Regime Camps, decided to seek out Muggeridge, whose writing against the regime he knew from the early days of samizdat. The Russian author turned up at Park Cottage with a translator and also an anonymously dressed figure in tow, who/whom Malcolm reckoned to be KGB. At some later point I mentioned this meeting to Borodin’s British publisher, who thanked me for the snippet, as he had known nothing of his author’s apparently clandestine trip to Park Cottage.

Being as I didn’t know any reporters, when applying to join the National Union of Journalists I asked Malcolm if he would propose me for membership. He duly provided me with a letter and at the meeting, which took place at the Mechanics Institute in Manchester, in a room packed full with aspirants, one of the membership committee looked puzzled by my application form and the letter of proposal. He called out to me at the back of the room:
‘… could you confirm the name of your proposer?’
‘ Er… Malcolm Muggeridge’ I blushingly answered, which hushed the assembly and made me sweat unduly, as all eyes in the room turned on me.
‘ Do you know which branch he’s a member of?’ asked the committee member, still nonplussed as to who he was.
‘ I think the union has made him a life member’ croaked I.
At this point one of his colleagues whispered in his ear and came to the rescue of both of us.

Prior to a second visit to Calcutta, Muggeridge also wrote me a letter of introduction to Mother Teresa, stating that my reasons for wanting to take photos in her Calcutta homes were non-commercial and out of genuine interest in the work of the Missionaries of Charity. I’d encountered Mother before (she’d sent me to Confession!) and she rarely gave permission for photos. As it happened, Mother was out of Calcutta and Muggeridge’s letter did me no good anyway, because I was refused permission by one of the senior Sisters. But as I hadn’t taken a vow of obedience, and reckoned vocations are each to his own, I took my photos anyway; a privilege afforded me by Sister-in-charge as a (largely ineffectual) volunteer rather than a prying journalist.

Some on the political right would’ve laid sole claim to Muggeridge, but Muggeridge was given the ability to see the Emperor in all his nakedness by his willingness to look through and beyond: you don’t need to dig too deeply to find the man being equally scathing of other worldly cul de sacs, like the self-blinding lust for power and the aforementioned pursuit of happiness, the limitations of which are summed up by these words:
'All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving.'
This is enlarged upon in this next selection, taken from the New Statesman in 1967:
' In the face of the otherworldliness which I still unfashionably find in the Gospels, as far as I am concerned the whole edifice of 20th century materialism?and the utopian hopes that go therewith?falls flat on its face. The pursuit of happiness is a grotesque fantasy, and the Gross National Product an equally grotesque mirage…the terrible vision of a Scandinavian-American paradise, with longer lives, more and better aphrodisiacs and more leisure and amenities for all, dissolves into nightmare, awaking from which one advances gingerly upon the sublime truth that to live it is necessary to die, that a life can only be kept by being lost?propositions which strike contemporary minds as pessimistic, but which seem to me optimistic to the point of insanity, implying, as they do, that it is possible for a mere man, with his brief life and stunted vision, imprisoned in his tiny ego and enslaved by his squalid appetites, to aspire after a universal understanding and universal love.'[

Like all vendors of lasting sentences, the apolitical Muggers saw above and beyond ephemeral issues. In doing so, Muggeridge gave his sentences the hallmark of timelessness, which his critics can only hope to achieve by association. I suppose Kierkegaard best distances eternity from the transient with the line ‘religion is eternity’s transfigured rendition of politics most beautiful dream,’ and?human frailty aside?for Muggeridge, anything less than eternity was Caesar’s currency in counterfeit roubles.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Muggeridge’s writing is his ability to absorb high-altitude thought and, through the gift of words, make it palatable for a relatively low-altitude readership (which also forms a neat definition of what good writing actually is). Like Michel de Montaigne, in his celebrated Essays (a book, incidentally, which Malcolm always packed in his suitcase on his travels, but never actually read), ‘Muggers’ has woven the deeper thoughts of others into the rich tapestry of his sentences. But unlike Michel de Montaigne, who planted words of the greats like concealed mines, for the conceited to step on, Muggeridge actually leaves the threads visible; so?from Tolstoy to Dostoievsky to Solzhenytsin, through Simone Weil and Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Bunyan, Saint Augustine, Miguel Cervantes, Swift, William Blake, Doctor Johnston, Shakespeare and a host of others?the reader can wind-in the golden string of his learning and follow it as far as he or she is either willing or able.

As early as the 1930’s, a clear thread of spirituality and other-worldliness can be found running through Muggeridge’s writing; it was the cornerstone for most, if not entirely all, of his best work. After a lifetime of proclaiming Christianity from the agnostic’s side of the fence, defending the Christian faith (some would say too shrewdly, because it exempted him from its yardstick) from behind the prefix ‘whilst not being a believer myself…’, Muggeridge finally became a Catholic at the eleventh hour.
Malcolm Muggeridge was not a Saint, even though his vanity may occasionally have raised the notion of his sanctity, and in old age his ego would still ‘rear its cobra-like head’ and butt in on the proceedings. For example, when we were talking once about the Missionaries of Charity, he sat upright and made the proud claim that ‘I started the whole thing off, you know'.
I'm sure Mother would've seen things a little differently and put him in his place once more.

Muggeridge most certainly had the gift of genius and he will be remembered as as a great writer, despite Peregrine Worsthorne's suggestion to the contrary at the time of his death, for his stylised writing few–if any–from the past 100 years could measure up to. This alone will merit a full reassessment of his work, but when you add to this the growing relevance of his sentences, which beat heartily against the dumb-down way of the world and herald the final throes of a burnt-out civilisation, the case for reissuing his autobiography has been answered by the Muggeridge Society and hopefully a full collection of his essays will follow. However, in the revolutionary and recalcitrant spirit of the man, I think Muggeridge would be better served if they turned their backs on the dumb-down industry, committed his complete works to PDF and gave the lot away on the web, for Samizdat is making a comeback.

In keeping with his time in this world, I shall let Muggeridge once again have the last word. Bearing in mind that an entire media industry has made, to varying degrees, a Faustian pact with PR manipulators, I have chosen a pertinent last word. But then Malcolm Muggeridge’s words were made to last and pertinence is rarely more than a word away.
'In Moscow when the great purges were on, some moon-faced Intourist, trying in good liberal style to be fair to both sides, asked one of the British newspaper correspondents there?A.T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph?whether the accusations against the Old Bolsheviks standing trial were true. Yes, Cholerton told him, everything was true except the facts. It fits not just the purges and Moscow, but the whole… twentieth century scene. Perhaps some astronaut, watching from afar the final incineration of our earth, may care to write it across the stratosphere: Everything true except facts. '

words and images © evvy 2008