Time and Eternity Read online

  Title Page

  TIME AND ETERNITY

  Uncollected Writings

  by

  Malcom Muggeridge

  Foreword by

  Mother Teresa

  Edited with an Introduction by

  Nicholas Flynn

  Publisher Information

  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

  www.andrewsuk.com

  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.

  Editor’s Note

  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.

  Quote

  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

  Dedication

  IN MEMORY OF JACK MUGGERIDGE

  (1909 – 2001)

  Foreword

  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

  Introduction

  ‘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 un
usual 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 poli
tical 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!