Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe, 423 pages

From an early age, Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge - the "Thomas" was apparently dropped even by family members early on - combined an appreciation for the power of language with an keen understanding of the difference between appearance and reality.  A long career in journalism, in print, radio, and finally television, only affirmed the importance of these perceptions, and their entanglement - for language can be used to disguise or unmask reality.  Muggeridge spent much of his career as an unhappy iconoclast, bouncing between jobs, trying and failing to become appreciated as a novelist or dramatist.  He worked as a correspondent in India, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington DC, forming friendships with the likes of George Orwell and Graham Greene.  Predicting the dissolution of the British Empire, reporting on the murderous famines in the Soviet Union, and criticizing the soap opera atmosphere surrounding Britain's Royal Family earned him a remarkably diverse set of detractors, however nothing brought more sustained criticism than his gradual conversion to Christianity, first to a Lewisian "mere Christianity" and eventually to the fullness of Catholicism.  To those who had admired Muggeridge as the quintessential outsider and slaughterer of sacred cows, such a surrender seemed a treasonous betrayal so wholly out of character with the man as to suggest a nervous breakdown or senility.

It is the major theme of Gregory Wolfe's excellent biography that Muggeridge's conversion, far from an uncharacteristic aberration, was in fact the product of a lifelong struggle to answer the question Christ posed to His disciples - "Who do you say that I am?"  "St Muggs" the septuagenarian apologist is, in Wolfe's narrative, the same child who read the Bible in secret so as not to scandalize his socialist father, the same college student who spent time at the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in the company of Wilfred Knox, and the same young man whose first overseas adventure was as a teacher hired by a missionary group.  In Muggeridge's case, at least, the eye so adept at detecting the flaws of others was not blind when turned inward, and the seeker after truth could not be satisfied, in the end, with anything less than Truth Himself.