Malcolm Muggerdige: A Biography

Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography. By Gregory Wolfe. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997. xviii + 462 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

Gregory Wolfe's book is impressive. Wolfe has a profound appreciation for his subject. With care he has used unpublished documents, published material, and, apparently, a number of personal interviews. It is a delicious read. Subscribers to the Anglican Theological Review will find the biography challenging. They will also be entertained. After all, Muggeridge was one of the all-time great editors of Punch.

Malcolm Muggeridge stands alongside Evelyn Waugh as one of the token converts from Anglicanism to the Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century. Muggeridge and his wife were in fact received into the Roman Church toward the end of his life and the biography describes a spiritual pilgrimage. However to the last, Morning and Evening Prayer from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer formed the basis of the Muggeridges' daily devotions.

Malcolm first "converted" to the Christian faith when he was an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His religious dialogue with his friend, the theologian Alec Vidler, began there, continued for over sixty years and ripened when the Muggeridges and Vidler lived a few miles apart in Sussex. However, Malcolm's life was marked by innumerable excursions into sensual and worldly byways. The marital infidelities of the Muggeridges would furnish the material for several soap operas. Nevertheless, the Eucharist was the touchstone which held him when he was farthest from being a practicing Christian. The memory of the daily celebration when he lived as a guest for two years at the house of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in Cambridge, kneeling by Mother Teresa at Mass in Calcutta, or hearkening to the Orthodox Easter Proclamation in Kiev, formed and nurtured the qualities which made him a staunch defender of the Christian faith.

Malcolm was also sustained by close personal relationships. In a prayer of thanksgiving he remembered the three people who meant most to him in his life-his wife Kitty, Hugh Kings Mill and Alec Vidler:

K., for undying love, given and received.

H. K., for laughter and light.

A. V, for the roots, the trunk, the branches and the leaves.

Friendships did give a structure and support to his life. But Malcolm seemed to seek a certainty and a structure not provided by the Church of England and the inclusive theology of Anglicanism. Perhaps it was a family characteristic. One of his sons joined the conservative evangelical Plymouth Brethren. Another preceded Malcolm into the Roman Catholic Church.

Muggeridge was a popular television personality, a real BBC "talking head." But he was also a journalist of note writing for such divergent newspapers as the Manchester Guardian and the Telegraph. His opinions, often a surprise to his public, marked him as a consistent non-conforming rebel. Many emperors have had no clothes in the twentieth century and Malcolm had the gift of spotting them all. In spite of his close family connection with the Sidney Webbs, Muggeridge was one of the first to sense the dark side of Soviet Communism. Nazism in Germany, Western materialism, British imperial pretension in India, and English (and American) society and culture all came under his trenchant observation. His opposition to abortion, contraception and euthanasia raised liberal eyebrows hardly more than others were raised in response to his affirmation of sexuality as a sacrament.

In a documentary, Paul: Envoy Extraordinary, which the two produced together, his friend Alec Vidler compared Malcolm's genius to that of St. Paul who "was an intuitive thinker. He had the insights of a seer and was able to express what he saw with the confidence of a poet.... He never used words like 'possibly,' 'probably,' or 'perhaps'." Nor did Muggeridge. Gregory Wolfe's biography attests to that.

FRANK M. McCLAIN

Charleston, South Carolina

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 1999
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