Mugg's jokes
Alan Watkins
Things Past Malcolm Muggeridge Edited by Ian Hunter (Collins £4.55) This is the third volume of Mr Muggeridge's collected journalism that has been published; the fourth if you include Muggeridge through the Microphone (BBC, 1967, and Fontana, 1969). The other collections are Tread Softly for you Tread on my Jokes (Collins, 1966) and Jesus Rediscovered (Fontana, 1969). The latter ' consisted mainly of broadcast talks and contributions to the Observer: the former of New Statesman pieces of the 1950s and 1960s. In his Introduction to Tread Softly Mr Muggeridge went through his by now familiar patter about how truly appalling it was to contemplate or even recollect the millions of words tapped out in a lifetime of journalism. However true this claim might have been or be in general terms, it was unapt for the 1966 collection, which, as I say, covered roughly the years after Mr Muggeridge had become a national figure, in quite a large way of business.
In his Epilogue to the present collection he goes through the same routine but with greater justification. For the book takes us from the New Statesman of 1928 to the Alternative of 1976. The chief sources are the New Statesman (again), Esquire and Time and Tide, for which Mr Muggeridge wrote a good deal in the 1930s. There is, surprisingly, nothing from the Daily Telegraph, of which he was Washington correspondent and later Deputy Editor, the whole period covering the years 1946-52. I cannot believe he was unproductive during this time. Indeed I myself remember reading an attack by him on Mr (as he then was) Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe. I should have liked to read it again — in fact to see more generally how Mr Muggeridge coped with the exigencies of the Telegraph's leader-page space, which, despite the praise fashionably and, on the whole, rightly bestowed upon the paper, and except on those rare occasions when Mr Colin Welch enli vens the spot, is notoriously one of the dreariest features in British journalism.
Still, perhaps we have quite enough Muggeridge to be going on with. My complaint it that, if Messrs Collins and Fontana (the same firm) consider it worth giving us the Collected or Selected Works — as they clearly do, and I agree with them — they ought to take the trouble to produce an edition, maybe of two or three volumes, uniform in size, in typography and in editorial treatment. Thus Tread Softly contains no references whatever; Jesus Rediscovered has the date and the source at the bottom of the articles. While the latest volume gives, less helpfully, a jumbled-up list at the back of the book, contrived not as a proper list but as if it were a piece of text; so that one has not only to turn to the back every so often but then to struggle to pick out the reference from the horizontally adjacent sources. Here surely is an editorial task which awaits one of Mr Muggeridge's young acolytes, such as Mr Christopher Booker; if, indeed, he continues to regard himself as one. He might be better employed in this or a similar enterprise than in droning on in the Spectator about the imminent collapse of civilisation and the merits of C. G. Jung.
Apart from this, what about the play? I am fairly sure that Mr Muggeridge has never kept a diary; is in general averse to written records. In this he resembles the majority of journalists. Partly it is because they do quite enough writing anyway and (just as journalists are usually bad letter-writers) resent any additional expenditure of effort; partly because they are too drunk late at night to write anything at all. In any case keeping a diary is a nasty, sneaky habit. Moreover Mr Muggeridge has always had a suspicion of 'facts', especially as provided by the authorities. Certainly this has been so since his visit to Russia in the early 1930s. He has often quoted an old colleague: 'Everything is true except the facts.' This attitude is healthy enough in its way, particularly towards 'facts' as presented in the papers and on television. It is also the case that a reconstruction can be truer than a record. The Crossman Diaries are nearer reality than the Cabinet Minutes. Even an imaginative reconstruction, without benefit of diaries, can come closer to the truth. But the last method is liable to let one down. Here, for instance, is Mr Muggeridge on Mr Kim Philby in Tread Softly (a pre-1966 New Statesman piece, I recollect, but no source is given): 'As W. explained the situation to me, Kim had been guilty of an indiscretion, but nothing worse. He would have to leave the Secret Service, lose his pension rights and so on, but we, his friends, could help him to find employment. . . As it happened, I failed to get Kim a job. Later, he found a sanctuary in the Observer, that Salvation Army shelter for the ideological drunks and bums of our time, where I have now found a refuge myself.'
In an article in Esquire, September 1968, reprinted in the present volume, Mr Muggeridge identifies W. as Dick Brooman-White, an MI6 man who later became a Conservative MP. Nothing wrong in that: Brooman-White may have died in the interval. Mr Muggeridge goes on: 'The notion, I was told [by B-Wl, that Philby had tipped off Maclean. . . thereby facilitating his escape with Burgess, was nonsensical. On that understanding I tried to get him taken on by the Daily Telegraph, whose deputy editor I then was, the idea being to send him to India; when that failed, wrote to David Astor, proprietor and editor of the Observer, explaining how Philby came to be needing employment, and suggesting that he would be well worth taking on.' Mr Astor's recollection is that Mr Muggeridge played no part in the employment of Mr Philby by the Observerthat the initiative came from the Foreign Office, who gave Mr Astor the misleading assurance that Mr Philby's espionage activities had ceased. (Mr Astor subsequently learned there were two factions in the FO, proand anti-Philby.) In other words, Mr Astor's memory corresponds to Mr Muggeridge's first, pre-1966 version. Still, it is a minor mystery which Mr Muggeridge might solve in the third volume of his autobiography. It is neither very important nor — to me anyway, for I am not a Philby-freak — very interesting. It merely illustrates the banal point that memory can Introduction Mr Ian Hunter academic lawyer who is also, b( ae deceptive. t [v e n the blurb informs us, a 'reviewer of paperbacks') insists that Mr Muggeridge has always been a religious man. He is not an exhausted voluptuary turning to the consolations, such as they are, of Christianity late in life. In a sense this is true enough. Mr Muggeridge has always been highly interested in, even obsessed by, religion, as may be verified by reading the earlier pieces in this volume and also the recently reissued In a Valley of this Restless Mind. The rational asceticism, if there is such a thing, of his later years was due not to a new-found puritanism or any desire to mortify the flesh but to a wish to go on working. First he gave up smoking, then drinking; he found the regime suited him, as he says privately and, more rarely, in print (in Jesus Rediscovered, for instance), he has no wish to impose his way of life upon others, even if he had the power to do so. This is admirable, as is his private benevolence to friends and acquaintances down on their luck. In conversation he is both courteous and amusing. And he has given many people much pleasure with his writing. I am, for instance, prepared to forgive a lot to anyone who can write (in a review of Thurber's Ross): 'Literary editors can be charming, but they seldom read what goes into the publications they edit, except, sometimes, their own contributions.'
Nevertheless, a writer has to be judged not by what he is or even his jokes but by his central message, if such can be extracted. Certainly this is so with political writers; and Mr Muggeridge, whether he likes it or not, is a political writer; just as he is, despite his claim to the possession of a religious temperament, of the world, worldly. In a 1936 piece, 'Why I am not a Pacifist', he writes: 'There are, for instance, books on my shelves that Hitler or Stalin would not allow to remain there if Sussex happened to be Within his jurisdiction. If Hitler's or Stalin's disapproval of my books is a matter of indif ference to me it is because I know an armed force exists to prevent either from attempting to totalitarianise the village of Whatlington.'
Yet it never seems to occur to the' later Muggeridge that I have exactly the same right to the books of my choice on my shelves without the.prior approval of Lord Longford, Mrs Mary Whitehouse or himself (though this trio would not doubt find my shelves tame enough. That, however, is not the Point.) Or take another example, that of sex among the middle-aged, which seems to obsess Mr Muggeridge to an even greater extent than it does the middle-aged themselves. He often says that it is a ludicrous activity, as doubtless it often is. But then, sex among the young can be equally if not more ludicrous; and Mr Muggeridge rhapsodises about sex among the young in what IS a most curious manner. Not only, however, is middle-aged sex ludicrous: it is also, Mr Muggeridge repeatedly informs us, disgusting, unclean even. When once people get it into their heads that something is disgusting or unclean, they try to have it stopped, preferably by law: male homosexuality is an example. Even if the law is not brought into play at this stage, it is but a short step from labelling an activity 'disgusting' to labelling it `wicked'; and then the law can usually be involved easily enough, if necessary through the intervention of Parliament: so-called 'child pornography' is a recent illustration of this. Now, Mr Muggeridge has not yet suggested that sex among the over-forties should be made a criminal offence. Nonetheless the whole thrust of his recent writings has been towards either urging that People should be prevented from doing What they wish to do or lamenting that they can now do what they were previously prohibited from doing. It is in this crucial respect that he differs from, say, Mr Auberon Waugh. I do not mind Mr Muggeridge excoriating the times or predicting the end of the world. I do, however, tend to turn nasty when he, with Mrs Whitehouse, wishes to call in a policeman to make me change my ways. Paradoxically, the ideal State of this theoretical hater of power would lie somewhere between seventeenth-century New England and Calvin's Geneva.
The truth is, of course, that kindly old Mugg does not want anything of the kind. He has, as he himself confirms, a complete incapacity for conceptual thought. He does not distinguish between, say, what is wrong and what ought to be made unlawful: he merely tosses off a few phrases such as 'Oh Freud, where is thy sting? Jung, thy victory?' or 'Braless in Gaza'. It is all great fun. Long may he flourish! It is the wonder of the age that he has persuaded both Mr Booker and Mr Richard Ingrams — or perhaps they have persuaded themselves — that he is not only a splendid journalist but also a major prophet. Perhaps this may turn out to be Mr Muggeridge's best joke of all.
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