Curmudgeon

By Stefan Kanfer

LIKE IT WAS: THE DIARIES OF MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

Edited by John Bright Holmes; Morrow; 560 pages; $18

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity. He saith it in Calcutta and in Moscow, in London and New York, in newspapers and TV until the reader's attention flaggeth and verily his eyelids drop. Happily, Malcolm Muggeridge does not maintain a testamental tone throughout his selected diaries from 1932 to 1962. Despite the sackcloth prose, Muggeridge made his reputation as a restless journalist, BBC wit, and the scapegrace editor of Punch. When he is not ostentatiously wishing for death or lamenting his carnal desires for this or that mistress, he remains a world-class caricaturist.

Here is George Orwell, resembling "Don Quixote, very lean and egotistic and honest and foolish; a veritable Knight of the Woeful Countenance ... A kind of dry egotism has burnt him out." Here is Winston Churchill in retirement, "a curious mixture of cunning and animality" pathetically exhibiting an old Boer War poster advertising -L-25 for his capture: "It's more than they would offer for me now."

Here is Evelyn Waugh, "extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach . . . playing this part of a crochety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear -- 'feller's a bit of a Socialist I suspect.' Amusing for about a quarter of an hour." Here is Graham Greene delighted when a bomb from the blitz hits his house, symbolizing not only the end of his estate, but of his marriage; Arthur Koestler, "all antennae and no head," and Novelist Rose Macaulay "looking immensely aged, everything about her having diminished except her false teeth."

Even for bygone celebrities, Muggeridge offers malicious, revelatory anecdotes: "When D.H. Lawrence was dying he complained that his feet were cold, whereupon Frieda warmed them against her enormous German bosom ... a very symbolic scene worth remembering." When Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, "was very broke, in desperation he telephoned to the Daily Mail an announcement that he had died. A long defamatory obituary duly appeared, and Douglas was able to collect."

Yet these are only gargoyles on Muggeridge's religious edifice, an eccentric structure whose foundations reach back to youth. As a vaguely Christian, mildly leftist correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, he journeys to Moscow to watch Stalin's betrayals of the revolutionary ideal. Like a minute hand, he begins imperceptibly moving right. In India, he pursues an amorous concubine, then wallows in self-abnegation and awaits the imminent collapse of the British raj, ridding the country of the Muggeridge type forever. Assigned to intelligence during World War II, he regards the conflict as alternately bemusing and boring. In America, he surveys a country "not of humans but of mechanical brains." At home he concludes that "the true destroyer of Christendom isn't Stalin or Hitler or even the Dean of Canterbury and his like, but Liberalism."

In his disdain, Muggeridge overlooks an even more pernicious influence. As editor of Punch, he hears the magazine described as revolutionary. "Correct," he replies, "Punch is now critical of all authority,, including revolutionary." In so criticizing every human endeavor, in mocking not merely politicians but their constituencies, the curmudgeon eventually leaves himself no earthly attachments outside the self. It may indeed be that Ecclesiastes is correct and that all is vanity.

Still, it is more convincing to lament to an audience than a mirror.

-- By Stefan Kanfer

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