When the late Malcolm Muggeridge agreed to let Richard Ingrams look at his unpublished papers, he made one stipulation: no resulting biography should be published before Kitty Muggeridge’s death. Ingrams, a friend and admirer of the British journalist, respectfully waited, as did Gregory Wolfe, an American writer and editor. A year after Kitty’s June 1994 funeral and five years after Malcolm’s death, books by both men were released in England. Ingrams’s was simultaneously published in the United States; Wolfe’s did not cross the Atlantic until June of this year. Though Wolfe’s book emigrated later, it deserves the closer attention: if either book deserves to be called “The Biography,” it is his.
In many ways the two biographies are similar. Both proceed chronologically, giving similar accounts of Malcolm’s parentage, Cambridge education, travels abroad, female companions, editorial stints at the Manchester Guardian and Punch, years as a talking head for the BBC, and late-in-life conversion to Catholicism. Both include a selection of photographs–in fact, many of the same ones. In spite of obvious regard for Muggeridge, neither author whitewashes his many infidelities, his inability to commit to any project, or his obsessions with health, morals, and his own persona.
Ingrams, a British journalist and friend of the Muggeridge family since 1961, has written the more sprightly account. His narrative is fast-paced and anecdotal, and he outshines Wolfe in portraying Malcolm’s women, particularly Kitty. But Wolfe has done his homework well. Now publisher and editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, Wolfe became acquainted with the Muggeridges in 1979 during his college days. Not only did he interview many of Muggeridge’s family members and associates and analyze his published writings, he also made heavy use of the unpublished papers now in the Muggeridge Collection at Wheaton College, Illinois. Ingrams’s book has no footnotes, whereas Wolfe’s is extensively documented.
Wolfe’s distinctive contribution is his extensive portrayal of Malcolm’s “tortured spiritual life,” the lifelong struggle between flesh and spirit that, in spite of his many autobiographical writings, “remained a secret to almost everyone except Kitty and a few friends.” As a child, Malcolm read the Bible secretly so as not to alarm his parents; as a young man, he considered becoming a monk or priest. If he outwardly distanced himself from the church during most of his adult life, his private diaries and personal correspondence reveal his continual dodging of the hound of heaven.
Muggeridge voraciously read Saint Augustine and Pascal; Blake and Tolstoy; Chesterton, Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer; and–late at night–the medieval mystics. He befriended contemporary Catholic authors such as Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and William F. Buckley. He ducked into churches in Kiev and Lisbon and immersed himself for three weeks in the life of a Scottish Cistercian monastery. Frequently remorseful over recurrent sexual infidelities and heavy drinking, he interspersed episodes of dissipation with periods of guilt, hypochondria, and asceticism. As Evelyn Waugh observed, Muggeridge’s attitude toward lust was “that of a surfeited and rather scared Calvinist.”
Wolfe clearly admires Muggeridge’s beliefs, if not his behavior. Having spent seven months in the Soviet Union in the early thirties, Malcolm began attacking communism a full 15 years before a group of prominent intellectuals publicly renounced that secular faith in The God That Failed. Social liberalism, which he called “progress without tears,” was the target of many of his barbs; and long before actually forsaking his guilty pleasures, he “had come to the conviction that Christian sexual morality was crucial to the survival of the social fabric.” The philandering journalist strongly opposed both abortion and birth control, though his wife made use of the former and his lovers, the latter.
The contrast between the bon vivant of Muggeridge’s early-to-middle years and the Jeremiah he became in his sixties prompted this anonymous parody in Private Eye, a British satirical journal:
You are old, Father Malcolm,
the young man said
And your hair has become very white
And yet you incessantly talk about bed.
Do you think at your age it is right?
In my youth said the sage, as he
shook his grey locks
I behaved just like any young pup
But now I am old I appear on the box
And tell others to give it all up.
The press dubbed the elderly Malcolm “St. Mugg,” but he was an odd sort of saint. “To me the Christian religion is like a hopeless love affair,” he wrote in 1969. “I carry its image about with me, and look at it from time to time with sick longing.” Not for another 13 years, though he paid increasing attention to religious topics, would the iconoclastic journalist cast his lot with organized religion. In 1982, at the age of 79, he was quietly received into the Roman Catholic church, as was Kitty.
In recounting Muggeridge’s life, Ingrams and Wolfe sometimes select different details or angles of vision, but they rarely disagree. Both recognize Muggeridge’s lifelong religious quest, and both treat his eventual conversion with respect. Wolfe, however, goes well beyond storytelling to careful analysis of a man “fighting against something he knew would ultimately captivate and capture him,” as Muggeridge himself described Saint Paul. Despite his eventual capture, Wolfe concludes, Muggeridge “will never be in danger of being made into a plaster saint. He was much more comfortable with the image of himself as the gargoyle on the church steeple.”
LaVonne Neff is a writer and editor. She recently edited Towards Evening: Reflections on Aging, Illness, and the Soul’s Union with God, by Mary Hope (Paraclete).
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 34
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