MALCOLM Muggeridge tried just about everything on his long, erratic pilgrimage to the Roman Catholic Church - world wide travel, drunken philandering, political promiscuity and contentious pontification through all the media.
He was sizzling with talent, a journalist, author, playwright and broadcaster on radio and television whose style in prose and speech was satirically acerbic - except when discussing his favourite subjects, himself and God. Like one of his idols, St Augustine, Muggeridge must have prayed often for chastity, "but not yet". After a career that was hectic in public and in private, he was; eventually received into the church at the age of 79.
Even before then, critics and friends, derisively or affectionately, called him St Mugg. Some uncharitably suggested that the erstwhile compulsive lecher and bellicose controversialist became pious and mild only as his virility diminished.
The outstanding achievement of Gregory Wolfe's earnest and thorough biography is its demonstration that Muggeridge, while often keeping his seriousness well hidden, was always motivated by his religious aspiration: from boyhood, when he used to read the Bible secretly in bed; as a Cambridge undergraduate, reading natural science and English literature, when he was coverted to an idiosyncratically circumscribed Christianity; and in all the years of philosophical exploration thereafter.
For most of his life, though baptised twice, he was a noncommittal Christian who was unable to believe the essential miraculous tenets of Christian dogma - but like his friend Chraham Greene, who called himself a "Catholic agnostic," he kept trying. Lord Longford and Mother Teresa were among the evangelical believers who helped him finally to conform.
Malcolm was born in Crydon. His father was an accountant who worked for a shirt company and had political ambitions; a socialist, he became a local councillor and, for a short time, a Member of Parliament.
After university, Malcolm went to India to teach at Union Christian College in Always, a small town in Kerala. He was pleased to discover that "we are the only Indian run college in India". While he was there, his first freelance articles were published in the Calcutta Times. His brief teaching career took him back to Birmingham, and sent him abroad again, to Cairo, where he began contributing articles to the Manchester Guardian. His writing made such a favourable, impression there that he was invited to Manchester to write leaders, which was to start very close to the top of English journalism in the 1930s. The Manchester Guardian, before it moved to London to become the less highbrow Guardian, was almost as influential as the Times, in the days when the Times was, called "The Thunderer".
Muggeridge, always impatient, mocked Fabian liberal gradualism. Eager for more radical policies, he flirted with communism. However, a few months as a correspondent in the Soviet Union disabused him. He was one of the first of the few correspondents who reported Stalin's genocide by starvation in the Ukraine.
During the second World War, he joined the army, and served as an Intelligence officer. Seconded to M16, he spent some time under cover as a civilian vice consul in Mozambique. In that neutral country, the agents of Germany, Italy and Britain knew each other well, but Muggeridge had an advantage, as Britain had learned to decipher Enigma's coded messages. Though Muggeridge later joked about his experiences as a spy, he was evidently a successful one. He brought about the capture of a German submarine, according to Wolfe, and finished the war as a major.
As a journalist afterwards, Muggeridge veered to the right. He joined the staff of The Daily Telegraph, where he stayed for eight years, as a foreign correspondent and deputy editor. Restive again, he turned to broadcasting quickly establishing a reputation as the BBC's liveliest interviewer and panellist.
At the same time, in 1952, he accepted an offer to become the editor of Punch. He greatly enlivened the aged magazine, postponing its demise by deliberately shocking many of its aged readers, the Colonel Blimps and their ilk who had long been accustomed to Punch's genteel, thousand word jests about vicarage garden parties, petty DIY disasters and neighbours who didn't return borrowed lawn mowers.
It was during Muggeridge's refreshingly scandalous editorship that I began writing for Punch. He was charming and funny and gratified his contributors by doing little or no editing. He raised the circulation, but the Cavalry Club and some other die hard conservatives cancelled their subscriptions, and the Agnew family, then the publishers, got very nervous. Fortunately, by 1957 the job bored him, so he was glad to accept £5,000 to go away.
The most sensational article for which he was responsible appeared not in Punch but in the Saturday Evening Post, now defunct but once the most popular of America's weekly slicks. Muggeridge wrote a piece on, "Royal Soap Opera," in which he pointed out that "it is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal". Fleet Street led a verbal lynch mob, and the BBC temporarily banned him - in effect, imposing a substantial fine. Muggeridge is credited with being the father of the London satire boom of the 1960s and guru to Richard Ingrams, who was then the editor of Private Eye.
Gregory Wolfe anatomises Muggeridge's long and ultimately happy marriage. Kitty responded to his frequent infidelities with some of her own. In old age, they enjoyed Darby and Joan tranquillity in a cottage in Sussex. Wolfe, the Oxford educated publisher and editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion and a fellow of The Milton Center at Kansas Newman College, is more interested in Muggeridge's spiritual progress than in his domestic vicissitudes.
Wolfe concludes that one of the great clowns of the twentieth century should be regarded as a popular theologian on a par with G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. I'm doing my best to adjust my memories.