IFIRST MET Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) over twenty years ago—in the summer of 1983 at his home in Sussex. He was about eighty, and if some of his jokes were becoming tired, he still told them with an engaging, dry zest. (He had stopped watching television, the great television performer said: “I’ve had my aerials removed. It was a painless operation.” As to the opera on the death of Rasputin that Stephen Spender wrote and Nicolas Nabokov composed while serving the Congress for Cultural Freedom: “That was indeed an abuse of the secret service.”)

I had called on him to discuss a book I was writing on intellectuals and the Cold War. But the conversation ranged more widely, from Solzhenitsyn, whom he had just interviewed, to Arthur Koestler, who had recently committed suicide.

After tea, poured by his wife Kitty from a huge enamel pot into chipped cups, Kitty chatted to my wife Verna about their campaigns in the Christian cause— against abortion or for the restoration of small medieval churches.

Muggeridge raised another matter with me that obviously distressed him. It was the proposed new edition of his most famous novel, Winter in Moscow(1934). His friend, the Russian historian Leonard Schapiro, had at first agreed to write an introduction. But he had just now changed his mind. He still regarded the book as a brilliant exposure of the Soviet Union, its apparatchiks, its fellow-travelling dupes and above all the more-or-less corrupt Western journalists who reported it. But having re-read the book, Schapiro had decided that as a Jew he could no longer recommend it in the light of its many sketches of unpleasant Jewish communists.

Schapiro insisted that Muggeridge was not anti- Semitic but seemed to believe, as did many foreign correspondents in Moscow, that communism had been imposed on Russia by Jews thirsting for vengeance against the old regime. Some of the portraits of Jewish communists were also, he added, in bad taste. He simply could not write the kind of introduction the book deserved.

Schapiro had been as tactful as he could be to an old man who had done great service—and suffered for it—in the anticommunist cause. But it is easy to understand his refusal. John Gross summed up well: the Jewish sub-theme does not cancel out the book’s remarkable virtues but it is “a serious blemish”.

Compared with the library of eyewitness junk about the Soviet Union from, say, Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Real Russia (1934) through Frank Hardy’s Journey into the Future (1952) on to Manning Clark’s Meeting Soviet Man (1960), Muggeridge’s novel shines like a good deed in a naughty world. In any case the triumph of Hitlerism sharpened his sensitivity and perception. He quickly dropped the old pre- Hitler anti-Semitic banter. (By the time he published his diaries Like It Was (1981), he had deleted any remark with any tincture of anti-Semitism.) But the blemish in Winter in Moscow remains.

It was sad that almost sixty years after writing this “brilliant book” (Schapiro’s words), he could not find an English publisher for it. His inferior novels were republished— the confessional In a Valley of This Restless Mind (in 1978) and Picture Palace, his satire on “The Manchester Guardian” (in 1987). The Americans have kept Winter in Moscow in print. But in his own country, you have to resort to the antiquarians to find it.

This was typical of the last years of Muggeridge’s life. Critics began queuing around the block to give him a kicking, especially when he revealed himself as a man of God. Some (A.J. Ayer; Bertrand Russell) despised the new St Mugg (who gave them a hard time in television interviews). Others scorned a religious mountebank (Auberon Waugh; A.N. Wilson). Still others ridiculed his sanctimonious moralism (Kingsley Amis who, in a sort of spiteful obituary, related how Muggeridge initiated an orgy with Amis and Sonia Orwell. It turned out to be a fiasco: in his biography of Muggeridge (now reissued in paperback), Gregory Wolfe concedes that the anecdote has “the painful ring of truth”. It also belongs to the pre- Christian years.)

But since his death there have been some attempts to rehabilitate him, or at least do justice to an oeuvre much of which was ephemeral. Wolfe’s biography and tribute is the best-researched. It is particularly sympathetic to Muggeridge the Christian. In a new introduction, Wolfe presents him as “a champion of the great Christian existentialists”—Augustine, Pascal, Blake and Kierkegaard.

SOME CAUTION is necessary when considering Muggeridge’s scholarship, in this or any field. You wonder if he ever really read any of the great Christian apologists he quoted with such heartfelt passion. A Canadian television producer has recorded how he prepared for Muggeridge a 120-page summary of the life and thought of Soren Kierkegaard, whose ideas are supposed to have influenced his conversion. It was to be the basis of a television program. Muggeridge asked the producer if he would be kind enough to reduce the précis to fifty pages. Three months later, on the day of filming, an irritable Muggeridge was leafing through the fifty pages. “This is gibberish,” he was saying. “Absolute gibberish. No one could have said this stuff.” Muggeridge had apparently not considered the ideasof the Danish theologian until that moment.

The same producer also reported Muggeridge’s dismissal of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. He’sobsessed with sex, Muggeridge insisted. His films are worthless! When the Canadian later told Kitty about this troubling conversation, she cheerfully shrugged it off: “Oh, I doubt that Malcolm has actually seen a Bergman film. In fact, I’m sure he hasn’t.” But, as with Winter in Moscow, these are blemishes rather than radical flaws. He was no scholar, philosopher or theologian. His major Christian work, Jesus: The Man Who Lives (1975) is a restatement of the traditional Jesus, the Son of God, and a rejection of such apologists as Ernest Renan, the French historian who saw Jesus as a great ethical or revolutionary teacher.

Wolfe considers it the book Muggeridge was born to write. It is indeed a testament of a man born again, of a witty, stylish and independent journalist who had at last found the Lord of Silence. But it is indifferent to scholarship, history and theology.

Muggeridge found Christ not in Thomism or existentialism but in the notes of the Plainsong, the paintings of El Greco, the songs of Blake. He might also have found Christ in Mel Gibson’s film of the Passion. His gifts were insight and prophecy. For example, his essay “The Great Liberal Death Wish” is long on commination and short on argument. But it stays with its readers: as Alan Watkins said of Muggeridge, Mon semblable, mon père.

In any case Muggeridge was still unable to accept the Creed and the Eucharist:

Happy indeed the guests at this feast, but I alas have never been among them, nor most probably ever will be. Sadly I have to admit that its sublime symbolism has always eluded me. The magic of transubstantiation fails to work; the wafer and the wine fall on my tongue as wafer and wine …

Wolfe rates Jesus above Muggeridge’s other major books, not only The Thirties (1940) when he first struck form, or Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes (1966), his best collection of essays and reviews, but even the acclaimed two volumes of Chronicles of Wasted Time (1972/73), Muggeridge’s “autobiography”.

Chronicles is marred, Wolfe says, by too many omissions (the death of his son), too many lies (denying episodes of homosexuality at Cambridge) and too many purple passages and digressions. But Chronicles is not meant to be a full autobiography. It is a story, liberally based on personal experiences and anecdotage, of the eclipse of liberalism in the twentieth century, with some notes on the new civil war now deciding the future of the world. So he gives us selective recollections of a progressive, socialist childhood, the inner collapse of the British Empire in India, the totalitarian nightmare in Moscow, the black comedy of the secret service in the war, the liberation and squalid épuration of France.

The memorable passages of Chronicles are not the constant spasms of self-deprecation (“… the preference I have so often shown for what is inferior, tenthrate …”) but the sketches, often cruel, of liberal harlequins in the Last Days. Here, for example, is the Englishman Wicksteed hanging around the hotel lobby in the Moscow of the early 1930s:

… a Walt Whitmanesque figure, in a corduroy suit, with a high colour, an untidy beard, watery eyes, and wearing sandals, who had steered a course from Blake’s Prophetic Books to Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, taking in Havelock Ellis and Housman (Laurence rather than A.E.) on the way and casting many a backward glance in the direction of William Morris and even Ruskin … a sort of unofficial tourist guide (sometimes with a burly Red Army soldier in tow), glad to get a meal in the hotel restaurant and a drink or two in the bar … Spare a kopek, comrade! Broken down, vodka-smelling, far from his native habitat of PEN Club meetings within sound of Sloane Square, and there’s a wind on the Hampstead Heath, brother …

Here is its savage sketch of the 1943 re-interment in Westminster Abbey of Muggeridge’s uncle and aunt by marriage—Sidney and Beatrice Webb, authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. Their ashes had already been buried in a special plot in their garden at Passfield Corner in Hampshire, but Bernard Shaw had persuaded church and state that such great leaders of English thought should rest in the Abbey. The urns were ceremonially dug up and carried to Westminster.

… the set—the Abbey seemed as perfectly chosen as the characters were perfectly cast. Where was there a better compere than Shaw, the old Irish jester? What better musical accompaniment than the great organ? Who more appropriate than the Dean to give his blessing to the materialist conception of history as expressed in two urnsful of ashes, to be deposited with all the other illustrious bones and ashes in the Abbey? Or than Mr Attlee to pronounce the eulogy of two such estimable upholders of Stalinist dictatorship? For me the story that began with those walks with my father was now, once and for all over. Another Way had to be found.

He thought he found it in the end. In 1982, to the great satisfaction of Mother Teresa, he was accepted into the Catholic Church—with, he said, “a sense of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant”.

Some sceptics were unmoved by his baptism. At the service a coachload of retarded children kept up an accompaniment of obscure noise. Muggeridge thought it beautiful. Critics thought it a stunt. Graham Greene wrote: “I hope you make a better Catholic than I have done.”

Muggeridge had already declared:

I should certainly have failed in every respect to be a worthy follower of Jesus, outdoing Peter in denying him, Thomas in doubting him, and perhaps even Judas in betraying him.

He added: “I might just have been up to doing what Simon did” in shouldering the Cross on the Via Dolorosa.

I can only add that his remark to me that afternoon in Sussex—“Christendom is dead, but Christ lives”— impressed me as authentic. Only clowns and mystics, we are told, speak the truth. Which was Muggeridge? Wolfe says he was both.

Peter Coleman’s subjects in this series of reviews on the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century have included Ignazio Silone, Dwight Macdonald, Willi Muenzenberg, Michael Oakeshott, James Burnham and Arthur Koestler.