The press
A great scribe
Paul Johnson
orced to deal with the affairs of TV-am
last week, I missed the chance to pay my own small tribute to Malcolm Muggeridge on his 80th birthday, and I hope I will be forgiven for doing so a week late. Mug- geridge is many things: holy cynic, worldly sage, seer and spiritual traveller. But to me he is above all a very good journalist. There are two main types of successful journalist. The first is excessively attuned to the events of the moment, concerned only with what goes into tomorrow's paper; oblivious of the past, heedless of the future. These fellows get the scoops. They strut con- fidently across Fleet Street in their time, and later become awesome legends, long after their particular deeds have ceased to have any relevance — like the famous front page of the Daily Express, awash in the gut- ter, 'There Will Be No War', which we glimpsed again when Noel Coward's film In Which We Serve was revived on television last Saturday.
Then there is the other kind, much rarer and less highly rewarded, but in the end in- finitely more valuable, who has the capacity to see the events of the day sub specie aeter- nitatis. Muggeridge has always had this gift to a remarkable degree. In a sense it is a historian's gift; and that is why his book The Thirties, which reads as freshly today as when it was first published in 1940, is the work of a historian as well as a journalist. A writer of this kind has to see the world not merely as a series of flashing headlines but in the immensity of time and space, moving slowly on its axis. The gift has a spiritual element too and that is one reason Mug- geridge possesses it, for even as a young man he was passionately interested in the contrast between the life of the spirit and the flesh. Within many great Christian writers lurks the journalistic spirit: St Luke, for instance. Is not his Gospel the first truly popular biography; and are not his Acts a masterpiece of vivid eye-witness reporting?
Muggeridge has always been an idealist though he lost his illusions early. Even on the Manchester Guardian in 1930-32 he sensed there was something wrong with its self-confident righteousness: 'some cruel fallacy,' as he put it, 'some unbridgeable gap between what actually went on in the world and the hopes we entertained about it'. Later in Moscow he quickly grasped the immensity of the horrors which the pursuit of utopianism brings. It was then that he matured as a journalist and acquired his capacity for seeing the events and per- sonalities of the day not as his colleagues saw them — at that time most journalists thought the world of Stalin — but as they would be seen by future historians.
By this I do not mean that Muggeridge has at any time lost his nose for news. Quite the contrary: his appetite for a story; or gossip for that matter, has always been in- satiable. He was a brilliant performer on the Daily Telegraph, rising to deputy editor, and would have made a distinguish- ed editor of it, but was probably considered too clever to be suitable. Certainly he was the best editor that Punch has had this century, enlisting a galaxy of new talent, giving it a sharp news sense as well as striking hard at
exactly the right targets, and making it fora time the one weekly everybody had to read.
However, it is an inescapable fact that one can be a good editor and a good writer but not both at the same time. Despite his marked gifts for editing — including the most precious, discovering talent — Mug- geridge has always been by preference a writer. So he became, and for my money re- mains, the best essay journalist of the daY. shall never forget the morning, shortly after I joined the staff of the New Statesman, that Kingsley Martin came scampering along the corridor to my office and threw a typescript on my desk. His hair was even wilder than usual and his deep-sunk eyes, radiated an exceptional degree of maniacal excitement. 'Take a look at that,' he said. 'I honestly believe it's the best article I've eves seen.' And he used his ultimate term of al3" proval: 'a real crackerjack'. It was, of course, the famous 'royal soap opera' piece which, with infinite jest and for the first time in many decades, reminded the world that not even the royal family was above criticism. Muggeridge later pursued the same theme in an American journal and got himself into a vast amount of trouble in consequence. But the article we printed at- tracted a virtually unanimous chorus — a roar — of approval. It was in a sense the harbinger of the Sixties decade, for Mu,g- geridge has always been a journalistic novator, even though he has sometimes (like the Pied Piper) led the mob in 3 mischievous direction.
That article was probably the Most cessful the New Statesman ever publisheu? perhaps in a way the most influential too. But there are many other Muggerldge classics. He certainly played a major part in, the demolition of that one-time national hero, Sir Anthony Eden, in a wickedly scin- tillating piece which contained the us' forgettable sentence: `He is not only a borei but he bores for England.' But the piece remember best, which he wrote for, ine, while I was editing the paper, was entitleu 'The Great Liberal Death Wish', In it ,he argued that the most lasting destructive force of the 20th century had not bees; Fascism or Nazism or even Stalinism hu.ci the heedless pursuit of liberal ideas. ch not wholly agree with it at the time but was glad to let him say it. The day it Is, published I received a 30-minute phone c. from Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, speaking (she implied) on behalf of all liberals, dress: ing me down like a thieving footman f. printing such filth. This week I re-read ther article and I see now that it was an essay great wisdom and perception. Like neas,IY, everything Muggeridge has written it stanu' up to the battering of time. Muggeridge is now a member, of. 01! Roman Catholic Church and that is right! both intrinsically — for it is his natural r home — and symbolically, because if eV! there was a human community which tries. to see life and the world from the aspect ot eternity, it is Roman Catholicism. I no.tic.e, however, that he waited to join it until tile Pope repudiated censorship.
Previous page
