Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography

by Gregory Wolfe Eerdmans, $35, 462 pp.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) because he once said something nice about my first book - in Esquire, of all places. The book was about Saint Francis of Assisi. Beyond that episode, what I knew of him was that he wrote the book, based on a television documentary, that vaulted Mother Teresa to international celebrity; that he appeared on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" to excoriate the contemporary world and its vices; that he converted to the Roman Catholic church in his dotage; and that somewhere in my distant past I gave a positive review to the collected essays he published under the title Jesus Rediscovered.

It was only through a reading of Wolfe's sympathetic biography that I have learned the details of Muggeridge's peripatetic, messy, and varied life. To his everlasting credit, while a journalist in Moscow in the thirties, Muggeridge exposed Stalin's genocide in the brutal attempt to collectivize agriculture in the Ukraine. Trendy Leftists of the day turned a stone face against his reportage. Like many of his contemporaries, he served in British intelligence during the war. Subsequently, he became editor of Punch and a "talking head" on BBC radio and television. During all of these various adventures, he was a persistent philanderer (as was his wife Kitty). Wolfe duly catalogues his many affairs.

What I did not known was that Muggeridge, with his searching mind and errant moral life, was haunted by religious questions from his earliest days. He was kept from total disaster by his long friendship with the Anglican theologian-priest Alec Vidler. During the war years he was so despondent that he even made a desultory attempt at suicide. Wolfe is quite good in keeping Muggeridge's religious quest a constant theme amid the somewhat tedious accounts of travels, financial woes, free-lance writing, reporting, and editorial assignments. Indeed, Muggeridge's spiritual quest is the most compelling part of this book.

Those religious instincts found expression in his documentaries on Mother Teresa and Saint Paul, as well as in his keen interest in the writings of Augustine, Pascal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. Muggeridge's fascination with Augustine's Confessions began in his young adulthood and continued throughout his life. Indeed, more than once, Wolfe describes Muggeridge's approach to Christianity as "Augustinian." Muggeridge experienced a constant battle between an active libido and a near disgust at physicality.

Wolfe's biography is a generous tribute to a person whom he dearly admires. My most serious reservation has to do with Wolfe's conviction that Muggeridge stands with G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis as England's greatest Christian apologists of the century. Wolfe sees Muggeridge as a nice counter-balance to the romanticism of Lewis and Chesterton. A good point, but a minor one. Still, Muggeridge certainly lacked Chesterton's capacity for the memorable phrase (Auden called GKC the greatest aphorist of the century). Try to think of one memorable line written by Muggeridge. Second, Muggeridge did not have the reflective character of a C. S. Lewis. Lewis's deceptively simple prose was rooted in a lifelong habit of thinking things through, in a deep level of scholarly attainment, and from a fund of personal tragedy. Finally, neither Chesterton nor Lewis ever sounded like cranky curmudgeons when they excoriated the ills of the world. Try to think of what writing by Muggeridge you would hand to a person seriously interested in the claims of Christianity. Muggeridge's life was interesting and richly varied. Wolfe gets that right. However, his claim for Muggeridge's lasting significance is a bit of a reach.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning