Most Muggeridge

by Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge revels in undocumented revelation. A piquant example is to be found in the essay on Max Beerbohm in this volume. “Beerbohm, it seems to me to emerge,” he writes, “was in panic flight through most of his life from two things—his Jewishness and his homosexuality.” Nor is Muggeridge skimpy with hyperbole; in a piece about his lecturing experience in the United States, he reports that “Americans for the most part talk without listening, and do not expect, or particularly want, to be listened to.” The sacred is not of itself necessarily profane for Muggeridge, but anyone or anything which attains sacrosanct status is—and duly receives profane treatment at his hands. He takes unmistakable delight in romping through the modern pantheon, throwing darts and penciling in mustaches. Among the portraits he has recently disfigured have been those of T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, and John F. Kennedy. He chooses to remain the enfant terrible, unseemly as that role may be for a man well into his sixties. That said, it should also be said that Malcolm Muggeridge is probably the most skillful and entertaining English essayist now writing. Nor is he utterly uninstructive, having spent most of his life where, as they say, the action is. His career calls to mind a passage from Santayana's “The intellectual world of my time alienated me intellectually. It was a babel of false principles and blind cravings, a zoological garden of the soul, and I had no desire to be one of the beasts. I wished to remain a visitor, looking in at the cages.” While Muggeridge's sentiments about the intellectual world of his own time are strikingly similar, fate, alas, seems to have seen fit to place him in one of the more prominent cages. In his own apt analogy, Muggeridge likens his role as a journalist in the 20th century to that of a piano-player in a brothel.

Hardcover

Published May 15, 1966

About the author

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. In the aftermath of the war, as a hugely influential London journalist, he converted to Christianity and helped bring Mother Teresa to popular attention in the West. He was also a critic of the sexual revolution and of drug use.