Dance of the Iconoclast

In his five years as Punch's editor in the 1950s, Malcolm Muggeridge quickened the dowdy humor magazine with pungent political satire. Circulation shot up. But when Muggeridge proposed lampooning Prince Charles's boarding school, he went too far even for Punch and was forced to quit. Nothing daunted, hardly loath and all that, he went on to ridicule the whole monarchy in a savage piece in the Saturday Evening Post. For that breach of British etiquette, he was roundly denounced, ostracized by his friends -- and even banned, for a while, by the BBC.

The end of his career? Hardly. The irrepressible iconoclast bounced back, not by showing restraint but by being more boisterous than ever. As a TV interviewer, he became a master of the elegant insult. Even the people who hate him love to watch him. London's "Pop Socrates," as he is called, is equally intemperate in his writings, some of which have now been collected in a book, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge (Simon & Schuster, $5.95). Muggeridge, says London Critic Colin Maclnnes, has the "gift of absolutely compulsive readability."

World as Wilderness. Muggeridge is compulsively nasty to politicians, whatever their party. "Macmillan," he wrote, "seemed in his very person to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavor of mothballs." Churchill, whose writings were "gaseous and overwritten," became a "kind of totem." In his old age, he was "produced as totems are, to keep up tribal morale." As for liberalism, said Muggeridge, it is "really just a death wish. We liberals are so made that anyone who wants to murder us is a hero and anyone foolish enough to be on our side is a villain."

The modern-day preoccupation with sex enrages Muggeridge. "Like a deep-frozen, broiler-reared, cellophane-wrapped wing of chicken," he wrote, "American women tend to be more appetizing to the sight than to the taste." He is devoutly pessimistic. "The concept of this world as a wilderness, and of human life as short and brutish, fits the circumstances of most people most of the time." And he despises all schemes for human betterment. "Deliverance from happiness would seem to be the greatest need of mankind today."

Disillusioned Fabian. Extremists like Muggeridge are usually in revolt against a conservative, straitlaced childhood. But Muggeridge rebelled against a conventional left-wing upbringing. His father was a Fabian Socialist; his mother was a proper working-class girl. He married Kitty Dobbs, niece of Fabian Founder Beatrice Webb. When he journeyed to India to teach English, he urged his students to rebel against British rule.

Later, he went to work for the liberal Manchester Guardian, composed pontifical editorials that often ended: "It is greatly to be hoped . . ."

In the 1930s, Muggeridge toured Russia to see what wonders the Bolshevik Revolution had wrought. When he became aware of mass starvation and terrorism, he discarded his comfortable left-wing views for life and became a determined foe of Communism. It was this experience that turned him into such a mordant critic of his fellow men.

When other foreign correspondents in Russia continued to file rosy reports on the Soviet Union, Muggeridge fumed:

"They went around like enthusiastic vegetarians in an abattoir. They had seen the future all right, but it didn't work, except as the past had worked--brutally, mendaciously and callously."

Too disillusioned to remain on the Guardian, Muggeridge joined Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard, started turning out truculent copy attacking all kinds of ideologies. When World War II broke out, he was recruited for the intelligence service and sent as an undercover agent to Mozambique. "It was a hilarious experience," he recalls. "The Germans and we were bribing the same Portuguese and sleeping with the same girls." Though he was decorated for his activities, he lost all taste for espionage. "In war it is permissible," he says. "But in peacetime it's a sick trade, a surefire road to mental aberration."

Signs of Reverence. A fixture on Fleet Street since the end of World War II, Muggeridge at 63 actually seems to be enjoying himself. Perhaps one reason for his popularity is that he seems so much at home in "little England." Delighted that Britain is at last relieved of the "boredom" of empire, he jests: "Aspiring proconsuls, retired to Sevenoaks, take their fury out on lawnmowers." And the man who has spent his life mocking almost everything under the sun has lately begun to show some reverence for religion. "We have to make the world a wilderness to find God," he recently wrote in a surprisingly sunny personal testament. "The meaning of the universe lies beyond history as love lies beyond desire."

And if final confirmation was needed that the old curmudgeon is indeed mellowing, he switched TV roles last week. Instead of appearing as the barbed interviewer, he played the part of the jolly, flippant gryphon in a performance of Alice in Wonderland. Since this modern, de-animalized version had Freudian overtones, the BBC declared it unsuitable for children under twelve. But Muggeridge won warm reviews anyway. "Mr. Muggeridge's whole life," wrote Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Guardian, "has been leading up to the evening when he would dance a dab-toed quadrille, before a carefully prepared audience, against a sky of gathering gloom."

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