TIME AND ETERNITY
Uncollected Writings
by
Malcom Muggeridge
Foreword by
Mother Teresa
Edited with an Introduction by
Nicholas Flynn
First published in 2010 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
1 Spencer Court
140-142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ
Digital Edition converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
This collection © 2010 The Estate of Malcolm Muggeridge (Compilation, introduction and notes © 2010 Nicholas Flynn)
The right of Nicholas Flynn to be identified as the compiler of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1989.
Jack Muggeridge - Malcolm’s youngest brother – gave me invaluable advice and assistance when I started putting this collection together. I was also particularly fortunate to have the encouragement of Mother Teresa, who in the early stages of my research provided a foreword to be used in the finished book.
There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
Simone Weil
IN MEMORY OF JACK MUGGERIDGE
(1909 – 2001)
MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY
54 A A.J.C Bose Road
Calcutta 7700016
INDIA
17 January 1995
Jesus’ words spoken from the cross, ‘I THIRST,’ are written on the wall of every chapel of the Missionaries of Charity throughout the world. When I think of Malcolm Muggeridge, I hear again the words ‘I THIRST.’
Jesus thirsted for Malcolm to know Him as truth and as love. He kept calling Malcolm and year by year drew him closer to Himself. Malcolm too thirsted for Jesus, though he was not always aware of it, especially in the beginning. Yet it was God he was looking for, and he was never satisfied with less. What a joy it was for Jesus and for Malcolm when they were united in the Sacraments of the Church. Now, I trust, Malcolm’s thirst for Jesus and Jesus’ thirst for Malcolm are fully satisfied in heaven.
But Malcolm helped to quench the thirst of Jesus for love in another way. Malcolm is the one who made our works of love for the poorest of the poor known first. Through him, many have come to know the joy of loving and serving Jesus in the poor, and many have even dedicated their lives to Jesus as Sisters and Brothers because of the grace that was channelled to them through his book. And so I thank Jesus, and I thank Malcolm,and I pray that this new book will bring the love of Jesus to many more souls.
God bless you
M Teresa
MC
‘How to understand? What did it mean? What was the significance?’ These were the questions Malcolm Muggeridge put to himself as he pondered the longhaired priests and the muted congregation of a crowded church service in Rostov-on-Don in 1933. Defying the authorities, he was travelling, without a guide or any official sanction, through the North Caucasus and the Ukraine - he was the first western journalist to do so - and witnessing the scenes of horror and desolation that resulted from Stalin’s terror-famine: ‘one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.’
The image of the church, the observer within and the nightmare without, the clamp-down of a compliant media by the government in Moscow, all combine to form a picture, that to me, symbolises the career of arguably the most brilliant and certainly the most controversial journalist of the twentieth century! Never content with mere reportage, Muggeridge sought the significance and the meaning of the events of his time and tried to relate them to eternity. Reaching beyond the ideological platitudes and the utopian fantasies of his contemporaries, he dared again and again, to speak the truth - and unvarnished truth as he was to repeatedly find, is a highly combustible substance.
In the 1930’s the intelligentsia of the West were virtually unanimous in acclaiming the Soviet Government as the epitome of progress and enlightenment at the very time that Stalin and his followers were instigating a reign of terror, impossible, even now, to fully comprehend. Between 1930 and 1937 it has been estimated, 14.5 million peasants died as a result of starvation and persecution, yet Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, Julian Huxley, Sir John Maynard and Walter Duranty, along with, as Arthur Koestler once put it: ‘thousands of painters and writers and doctors and lawyers and debutantes chanting a diluted version of the Stalinist line’, accepted the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’s rule (over others) as benign and justified.
Muggeridge, on the other hand - who recognised the true nature of Bolshevism and accurately reported the Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932-1933 in which between 5 and 7 million people were systematically murdered - was castigated as being a reactionary and a liar and was unable to find work in Britain for a number of years! As it turned out, his subsequent career proved to be no less emotive. Apart from being once targeted by the National Front, spat at in the street and publicly challenged to a fight by a vicar, he was at different times, banned by the South African, Russian and Portuguese authorities from entering their countries and by the BBC from appearing on television; repeatedly anathematised in the press, he was the recipient of not only razor blades and excrement through the post but also accused of anti-Semitism whilst receiving a death threat for being a defender of the Jews!
It is interesting to consider the extent that Muggeridge aroused strong and often adverse reactions. Few who knew him personally could have failed to recognise his sincerity, kindness and generosity. Claud Cockburn once said of him, that ‘there has never been a man on God’s earth who would do more for you when the chips are down’, whilst Wolf Mankowitz remembered him as being, not only ‘a great quality journalist’ but as someone who cared so little about money that he must have given ‘away an enormous proportion’ of what he had earned!
So what was it that stirred up so much antagonism and outrage? The answer is I feel, that Muggeridge dared to write and to speak, honestly and even prophetically, in a time of intellectual myopia and humbug! He tried to understand, to find the meaning, the significance of our life here on earth. We, in the scientific age, may feel that we have driven out God and taken responsibility for the destiny of Mankind but we have proved reluctant to have the disastrous consequences of our actions pointed out! Muggeridge was adept at pricking the bubble of pomposity and of revealing the latest notions of progress and enlightenment - no matter how fashionably attired or loudly acclaimed as yet another manifestation of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.
***
Malcolm Muggeridge was born in Sanderstead, Surrey, on the 24th March 1903, the third of the five sons born to HT Muggeridge, the pioneer Socialist and Labour MP, and his wife Annie. In 1910 the family moved to 17 Birdhurst Gardens, a house in South Croydon, designed by HT and built by a co-operative. In this more prosperous setting the Fabian activities of the family and the exuberance of the Muggeridge boys - Douglas, Stanley, Malcolm, Eric and Jack - were viewed askance by their more sedate and conservatively minded neighbours. Certainly it was an unusual household, one in which such concepts as the overthrow of capitalism and the inevitable triumph of a virtuous and downtrodden proletariat formed the backdrop of family life. The boys’ situation was further complicated by the fact that their father had singled out Malcolm (in whom he felt he had discerned a special brilliance that would outshine the others) to fulfil vicariously all that he had himself, through poverty and circumstance, been denied.This favoured role involved Malcolm in a special relationship with his father, as well as a University education, from which the four other brothers were excluded.
Malcolm immersed himself in his father’s beliefs and hopes, sharing with him the expectation of a soon to be realised, Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Talking at public meetings, or on a small erected platform in Croydon’s Surrey Street Market, HT, a skilled orator and pamphleteer - fond of asking how it was that everything belonged to His Majesty except the National Debt - was in Malcolm’s eyes, one of the elect, destined to victoriously depose the corrupt and wicked overlords. This innocent view survived into adulthood in the shape of a lasting distrust of power and of those who exercise it, augmented perhaps (after the collapse of the Labour Party in 1931, due to the formation of the National Coalition Government, and with it, HT’s hopes) by an unconscious desire to ridicule the enemy his father had failed to overcome.
After attending State schools in Croydon, Malcolm went to Cambridge University. In 1924 he took up a teaching post at the Union Christian Collage, at Alwaye in India, and it was there that he made his first serious attempts at writing. Returning to England in 1927, he met and married Kathleen (Kitty) Rosalind Dobbs ,the niece of Beatrice Webb,the Fabian reformer and sociologist. Malcolm had shared a room with Kitty’s brother Leonard at Cambridge, and the match delighted Kitty’s mother and Aunt Beatrice. Kitty’s father though, far from pleased, called out during the wedding: ’You can still get away Kit.’ Not surprisingly, given the pervading atmosphere of free thinking and their casual approach to the union (they asked the registrar how one got a divorce) the relationship was for many years a stormy one; yet despite stresses and infidelities on both sides, the marriage survived for more than sixty years and eventually became outstandingly happy.
After a brief stay in Birmingham, the couple sailed for Egypt, where Malcolm succeeded Robert Graves in a teaching post at Cairo University. This was the first of many moves, Kitty later estimated, that she had set up home for them no less than twenty times. Their first son, Leonard, was born in 1928 and upon Malcolm obtaining a post as a junior leader writer on the Manchester Guardian, they returned to England in 1930.Two years later they left for the Soviet Union!
Muggeridge arrived in Russia in September 1932 as the Manchester Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. The British diplomat, Reader Bullard, noted in his diary on 24 March 1933:’I met Muggeridge. Since he took over I have noticed that the Guardian’s reports have been much more outspoken and nearer the truth.’ The fact was, that despite Malcolm’s idealistic upbringing and initial optimism, he had quickly realised that the Bolshevik regime, far from being benign or just, was in fact a brutal and evil dictatorship.
Having heard rumours that were filtering through to Moscow, of the disastrous consequences of the collectivisation of farming in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus, Muggeridge decided to see for himself and after travelling through the famine stricken areas in mid February, sent back to England three articles (via diplomatic bag to escape censorship) entitled, The Soviet and the Peasantry: an Observer’s Notes (a full account of this tragedy would not appear until 1986, with the publication of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow).Malcolm’s historic essays, published in the Manchester Guardian on the 26th, 27th, 28th March, were, as his biographer Richard Ingrams has written: ‘the first contemporaneous account of the famine by a Western journalist. It created considerable alarm in Moscow coming, as it did, at a time when Stalin was conducting a strenuous campaign to receive official recognition by the USA. Malcolm was denounced in the English language propaganda paper the Moscow Daily News as a liar and a ban was quickly introduced on journalist’s travel in the famine areas. It was to stay in place until the following year. Official alarm was heightened when Malcolm’s account of the famine was confirmed by another writer. Gareth Jones, son of a Welsh headmaster, was a former political secretary of Lloyd George and a fluent Russian speaker who in 1933 went on a walking tour of Russia. His findings were reported in the Guardian on the 30 March 1933.’
Gareth Jones, who had foreseen the inevitability of a famine the pervious year, arrived in Moscow at the beginning of March, and after having gone to meet Muggeridge, decided to see the devastation for himself. His reports published in a number of newspapers on the 30th and 31st of March fully corroborated what Malcolm had written. The Russian authorities immediately put pressure on other western journalists in Moscow to repudiate these accounts - Reader Bullard’s diary mentions in July, how a ‘prominent communist’ had ‘raved against Muggeridge for his anti-Soviet articles’-while Malcolm, after furiously remonstrating with W P Crozier, the Guardian’s editor, for toning down his reports, found himself out of a job.
Muggeridge left Russia in the spring of 1933, joining Kitty in Switzerland where she had gone to give birth to their second son John in February - a daughter, Valentine, was born in 1934 and a third son, Charles, in 1935.After managing to get a job at the International Labour Office in Geneva, Malcolm set about finishing his acclaimed novel Winter in Moscow and writing a series of articles for the Morning Post entitled Russia Revealed. Ideologically now an outsider and temporally unable to find work in England, Muggeridge managed to obtain a position on the Calcutta Statesman. He sailed for India in September 1934 at the same time as his novel Picture Palace was withdrawn due to a libel action by his erstwhile employers at the Manchester Guardian. In Calcutta he finished a highly critical biography of Samuel Butler, but by the time it was published in 1936, he was back in England working on the Londoner’s Diary section of the Evening Standard.
The years leading up to the Second World War were spent in Whatlington in Sussex reviewing books, writing a religiously introspective novel, In a Valley of this Restless Mind, and The Thirties, which was finished in a barrack room hut near Aldershot after he had joined the army as a private. Recruited into MI6, Muggeridge served in North Africa and later in France during the ‘Liberation’ of Paris, where in the prevailing atmosphere of recrimination, he did all he could to help the scapegoats; two of whom, P G Wodehouse and his wife Ethel - caught up in the furore over Wodehouse’s innocent but misunderstood broadcasts from Berlin - became his lifelong friends.
Returning to civilian life after the war, Muggeridge found a job on the Daily Telegraph, which took him to America as Washington correspondent in 1946, and subsequently back to London as deputy editor in 1948. By 1953 he had become editor of Punch, an uncongenial appointment that had the effect of escalating his appearances on radio and television,where he gained a reputation for the unorthodoxy of his opinions and his exceptional gifts as a broadcaster.This notoriety culminated in a particularly ferocious press campaign against him, provoked by an article he had written on the Monarchy. This article (not by any means his best, as he said himself) was published in America in 1957, shortly after he had resigned from Punch, and was widely misquoted in England. Banned by the BBC as a result, and seemingly viewed by a large section of the British public, with disfavour, if not odium, Muggeridge took a year’s sabbatical, visiting Australia, China, America and the USSR.
By the 1960’s Muggeridge was rehabilitated as far as the television authorities were concerned, and he returned to the BBC via Granada Television, receiving immense exposure throughout the next two decades as a brilliant and often caustic interviewer and documentary maker. Unfortunately, television fame swiftly produces a stereotypical image and Muggeridge, whose espousal of Christianity was becoming increasingly public and whose experience of life made him pessimistic of the success of either sexual or political revolution, became caricatured in the media as an ageing Jeremiah, lashing out against the sensuality and youthful folly he could no longer enjoy. It is worth remembering though, the hothouse atmosphere of the period, when the unscrupulous and the untalented managed to dominate the arts by using every means available to shock and cause outrage. By 1976 even Henry Miller (hardly a prude) had been provoked into exclaiming: ’Sexual revolution? Linda Lovelace? Oh I consider it a misfortune for us that we have created these things....Really I am amazed and disgusted.’
One positive result however, of Malcolm’s emergence as an international television personality was an increased demand for his books. Although he had written prolifically in the 40s and 50s (with the exception of the war years), his only publications, apart from his journalistic output after The Thirties (1940) were Affairs of the Heart, a novel (1949), and About Kingsmill (1954),a tribute to his friend the writer Hugh Kingsmill, written in collaboration with Hesketh Pearson. In the 60’s and 70’s coinciding with the reissue of much of his earlier work, he produced some of his most powerful writing in which he related Christ’s teaching to the circumstance of modern life from a non-denominational perspective, finding a large response among people of all ages and backgrounds, including many who felt separated from the mainstream of Christian churchgoers.
The T’ang poet Han Shan (circa 800AD) wrote in one of his Cold Mountain poems, of evil and corrupt Buddhist priests driving people away from their religion:
‘What a fine shop this is!
And the wine they sell is the best around.
-What’s that? You complain your sales are poor?
But then, you will keep the place full of vicious dogs!
No sooner has a fellow come in for a drink
Than they snap at his heels and drive him away.’
(Translation: Burton Watson)
In our own time, in addition to the shortcomings of some clergy, the espousal of Jesus by people who can appear somewhat over-confident of their own salvation and to have much in common with the Pharisee at the front of the temple thanking God he was not like the sinful publican at the back has had the unfortunate effect of not only driving people away from the Gospels but of making the very word ‘Christian’ represent, to some, an innocuous and sanctimonious view of life. In books such as Jesus Rediscovered, Jesus the Man who Lives, and The Third Testament, Muggeridge spoke to many who were alienated in this way and who recognised that here was someone with genuine insight who spoke to them directly and honestly.
In 1967, Malcolm visited the Holy Land where he wrote and narrated a film for the BBC on the life of Christ.About this time he began to question his non-denominational stance after meeting two Catholics who were each exemplifying in their own way, what Jack Kerouac has called the ‘seed soul’ of Christianity: ’Care and Reverence’- Fr Paul Bidone,an Italian priest working with handicapped children and the aged, and Agnes Bojaxhiu, known as Mother Teresa.
Muggeridge travelled to India in 1968,to make a documentary about Mother Teresa and the order of nuns that she had founded. The film, Something Beautiful for God and its accompanying book of the same name are both moving documents that have made their work amongst the poorest of the poor, amongst victims of leprosy, and abandoned children, known all over the world.
The subject matter, one would have thought, was of a sort least likely to arouse controversy. Eventually however, the respect and renown that Mother Teresa was accorded worldwide, proved too much of a temptation to a few individuals who -perhaps thinking to emulate Herostatus, the man in Ancient Greece who burnt down the Temple of Artemis (one of the seven wonders of the world) in order to immortalise his name -began to attack her. Muggeridge, naturally, was hit by some of the fall-out from these attacks and, beneath contempt as such behaviour obviously is, one example might be worth mentioning: In the course of filming Something Beautiful for God, some footage shot in Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying, which the crew were convinced would prove unusable because of the poor visibility - footage shot in similar conditions in Cairo shortly afterwards, with the same film-stock, and by the same cameraman, proved completely unusable - turned out, when processed, to be bathed in a particularly beautiful light.
Malcolm saw it in this way: ‘I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn. - Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying is overflowing with love, as one senses immediately on entering it. This love is luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film. The supernatural is only an infinite projection of the natural, as the furthest horizon is an image of eternity, Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and made him see. It was a beautiful gesture, showing that he could bring out even in mud its innate power to heal and enrich. All the wonder and glory of mud - year by year giving creatures their food, and our eyes the delight of flowers and trees and blossoms - was crystallised to restore sight to unseeing eyes.’
To quibble with this enchanting passage and to try to ridicule Muggeridge for it, as some people have done, seems to me to be wilfully obtuse. I am reminded of how Charles Lamb, who when a son of Robert Burns was expected at a gathering, remarked that he wished it was the father instead of the son and was confronted by four of the company jumping up to say that that was impossible because he was dead. Malcolm’s response was essentially an artistic and imaginative one. To question the light in the Home of the Dying factually, is to miss the point. Muggeridge (who had once interviewed a rather back-sliding bishop on location, whose every second word was punctuated by a cock crowing) accepted that God’s hand could stoop to ripple even the muddy waters of television, and felt that the light Mother Teresa was shining was so bright that it could impinge itself, even on film, if not make the very stones cry out. He of course realised, that as Simone Weil once wrote: ’A gift of alms out of pure charity is as great a marvel as walking on water’ and would have happily concurred with the producer of the film, Peter Chafer’s statement, that if there was a genuine miracle in Calcutta, it was walking around in sandals and was in fact the subject of the documentary.
From a personal point of view I can say this - that during the time that it was my good fortune to know Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge, I found them to be anything but fanciful, remarkably down to earth and completely unpretentious. To give one example: When I turned up unexpectedly at their cottage in Sussex one afternoon in 1981 - having corresponded briefly with Malcolm - I was invited in and treated with wonderful courtesy. They were so relaxed in fact, that I did not realise that they were in fact in the middle of an important photo shoot for a forthcoming Observer newspaper front-page spread, and that the celebrated photographer Jane Bown was outside investigating possible locations.
Only when, a half hour later, someone came in the front door and Kitty went out to speak to her, did I realise that something was going on. Malcolm, however, carried on chatting completely naturally, giving no indication that he had more important things on hand. It was not until I stood up and said that I would not take up any more of their time, that Malcolm too, got up and taking me out into the hall, introduced me to Ms Bown, saying that I was an old friend of theirs, and how glad they were that I had dropped in to see them. It was beautifully done, and kindly done. A day or so later, I received a letter from them both, asking me to come and see them again with my wife and family. It was crystal clear on that first afternoon and on our subsequent meetings, that not a hint of that self-importance, that surreptitiously seems to envelop almost everyone in the public eye, had touched them.
In 1982 Malcolm and Kitty were received into the Catholic Church, citing Mother Teresa as a major influence in their decision. In his last book Conversion (1988) Malcolm wrote that he had found her insistence on treating all human beings as if they were Jesus, irresistible, adding that there had been no book that he had ever read, or transcendental experience that had ever befallen him, that had brought him nearer to Christ or made him more aware of what the incarnation signified, than listening to Mother Teresa and observing her, had done. Malcolm died on the 14th November 1990, and is buried in Whatlington churchyard in East Sussex. Kitty, who died in 1994, is buried with him.
***
‘It is impossible to scan any periodical,’ Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 1860s,’of whatever day, month or year, without finding in every line of it evidence of the most appalling human perversity, together with the most surprising boasts of probity, goodness and charity and the most shameless assertions concerning progress and civilisation.’ In the nineteenth century, as W G De Burgh pointed out, when society seemed to be ‘on the upward grade, the humanistic creed could offer a certain plausibility; but today in the light of the widespread disintegration of the bonds of human fellowship and social order, it is surely a paradox that it should retain its power to inspire thinking men.’
‘The basis of liberal-humanism,’ Muggeridge once wrote is that ‘there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation.- Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound -to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time.’
Malcolm’s conversion to Christianity was erroneously seen by many people, as a sea change. He himself put it this way: ‘It is generally assumed, by those who know me only through the media, especially television, that for the greater part of my life my attitudes were wholly hedonistic and my ways wholly worldly, until, in my late sixties, I suddenly discovered God and became preoccupied with other-worldly considerations - The fact is - I have never cared much for this present world, and have found its pleasures and prizes, such as they are, little to my taste.’
Muggeridge’s earlier, supposedly secular writings, reprinted here, from his denunciation of Stalin’s organised famine in the Ukraine, to his assessments of D H Lawrence, Havelock Ellis and other luminaries, all have a distinctly religious flavour. The journals and letters that I uncovered amongst his private papers are manifestly those of a spiritual disposition. The totality of his work displays an acute disquiet at the growing arrogance and apostasy of western men and women and of the disastrous effects of their attempts to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth!
The road Malcolm travelled was a long and sometimes torturous one - stretching from his encounter in Russia with the darkest side of human nature in all its cruelty and horror, to the bright legacy of Mother Teresa and Jesus’ Kingdom not of this world. But, as the essays that follow reveal, Mother Teresa was right: ’It was God he was looking for and he was never satisfied with less.’ Those of us who would follow in his footsteps can take comfort, as Malcolm often did, in Pascal’s words: ’I look for God, therefore I have found him.’Looking back later, in the 1950’s, to the land where his journey had taken such a decisive turn, Malcolm’s overall feeling was one of gratitude:
‘When I think of Russia now I remember, not the grey, cruel set faces of its present masters, but rather how kindly and humorous the people subjected to them managed to remain despite the appalling physical and mental suffering they had to endure. I remember a little painted church standing in the moonlight like an exquisite jewel, someone having managed in inconceivably difficult circumstances to keep its bright colours fresh and triumphant. - Above all, I remember going to an Easter service in Kiev - the crowded cathedral, the overwhelmingly beautiful music, the intense sense which, as they worshipped, the congregation conveyed of eternity sweeping in like great breakers on the crumbling shores of Time.’