268 - Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life

Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life
By Ian Hunter
Nashville, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1980. 270 pp. $13.95.

At the age of three months Malcolm Muggeridge won a "beautiful baby" prize sponsored by the Mellins baby food company. Instead of the usual look of cherubic innocence one expects from such things, the resulting photograph shows a chubby but keen-eyed infant looking out at the world with avid curiosity and just the faintest tinge of nascent skepticism.

In the seventy-eight years since then, Malcolm Muggeridge's combination of wonder and skepticism has served him well and made him perhaps the most colorful, controversial, and consistently irritating personality of the English-speaking world. As editor of Punch, journalist, broadcaster, novelist, educator, social critic, and religious philosopher, Muggeridge has let the world know his views on every conceivable subject from the Monarchy to the Sermon on the Mount. No one in his right mind could agree with all that he has said-least of all Muggeridge himself-but no one can help but be stimulated and enriched by a trip through his life and thought.

Ian Hunter is the tour guide for this particular excursion, which is undertaken more in the tradition of Boswell than Muggeridge. The author, a professor of law by trade, admits that he is an admirer of his subject and that he has "passed some of the most pleasurable hours of my life in his company" and "learned more from him than any other human being." Nevertheless, he has kept his cool and done a scholarly job. A paean to Muggeridge would be the ultimate insult.

Muggeridge is worth spending some time with, if only for his aphorisms. In Jesus Rediscovered, for example, he writes that "the trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they are liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see." He once referred to vices like drinking and smoking as "innoculation against the major vices," and he compared the Ten Commandments to an examination paper-"eight only to be attempted." He described the lure of journalism better than anyone I know when he observed, "The only fun of journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them or take them seriously."

Hunter describes the minor and major traumas and controversies of Muggeridge's life, from his education and difficult early years as a struggling young journalist in India to his disillusionment with the Soviet Union and his emergence as the TV personality everyone loves to scorn. Running through it all in this continuing love-hate relationship with the Christian gospel.

Over the years Muggeridge's attitude toward religion has run the gamut from rejection, to Christianity-is-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to- the- world- but- it's-not-for-me, to a declaration of faith late

269 - Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life

in life that seemingly managed to offend as many people as did his views about Lenin and the Queen.

In the final analysis, Muggeridge is not an apologist but a prophet. He understands, as the author puts it, that "a civilization, like a dwelling, must have a stable foundation, or it collapses," and he sees Christianity as fulfilling that role. "Where there are neither religious values nor an accepted manner of behavior to impose a moral pattern on life," writes Muggeridge, "all that is left is the pursuit of power as such." The flip side of this-and this is the basic theme that emerges from this fine biography-is that the religious mind is the only one that is truly skeptical. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the opposite of belief in God is not belief in nothing but belief in anything. For longer than he himself may realize, this was the most important consequence of what Muggeridge called his "hopeless love affair with Christianity."

Edward B. Fiske
The New York Times
New York, New York