Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography.

MALCOLM Muggeridge was, at various times, a hard-line socialist, a selfish adulterer, a courageous denouncer of the Soviet Union, an author of "flawed" plays and novels, a vegetarian, a convert to Roman Catholicism, and a Christian apologist. He was, for more or less all his adult life, a journalist and a man obsessed with himself. The journalism was originally writing, which he did very well, and later broadcasting, which he did in a supercilious and affected voice and very successfully. Gregory Wolfe has written a very good biography indeed. The question is whether Malcolm Muggeridge deserves it. I do not mean whether he deserves a good biography. I mean whether he deserves a biography at all. And if he does, in which of the above capacities is it merited?

There are those who think that whether or not someone's biography should be written is not a matter of merit. But a moment's reflection shows that to be nonsense. We really can't permit everybody and anybody having his life written up. Even now when, I don't know, maybe one in a few hundred thousand chaps gets a biography, there are quite clearly too many biographies. Biography is becoming a producer-driven industry. A society that has lost the tacit discrimination needed to decide who should and who shouldn't get a biography is in deep trouble. Muggeridge thought modern society had lost its values -- that is, its priorities, its ability to discriminate between the great and the trivial. How ironic if his biography should be a witness to that loss.

For at first sight, Mr. Muggeridge -- or "Malcolm," as Mr. Wolfe revealingly and irritatingly refers to him -- does not deserve a biography. Much of this book, like other writing about Muggeridge, is taken up with discussing who he really was or in which of the different above capacities he displayed the real Muggeridge. But there can be no denying that if he was anything he was a journalist. In the end he was not a novelist, and it was journalism he did best.

It has been argued that journalism is the novel of today. Or rather that men who would have been novelists in the past now are journalists. I think that is true. In making that decision, they receive certain rewards and punishments. Journalists, at least the sort Muggeridge was, can make a lot of money and have a lot of influence. But their medium is an ephemeral one. That is the case even if the thoughts they express in it are not ephemeral. Are we really to allow journalists, even excellent ones, to have biographies? Qua journalists, that is? Do Mr. O'Sullivan and Mr. Buckley deserve biographies as columnists and editors?

They might, however, merit biographies on other grounds. They might have had interesting lives, have been "great" men, or even just presented the biographer with an excuse for interesting speculations and discussions.

Wolfe clearly believes Muggeridge to have been a great man. He thinks his Chronicles of Wasted Time a "literary masterpiece," his prose style "among the finest of his generation." He puts him as a writer and "wit" alongside Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh. He thinks him second only to C. S. Lewis as a Christian apologist among modern writers. This is simply exaggeration. If Muggeridge is to be elevated to the ranks of the best, then so must another hundred of anyone's preferred writers, wits, and apologists. It then ceases to be a class of the best. After grade inflation, we have biography inflation.

No, the ground on which this biography is justified is that Muggeridge had an interesting life. It was interesting not in that the events were especially interesting but in that he faced in a heightened way several of the dilemmas that many people of his time faced, and those dilemmas are a useful occasion for fascinating speculations. The two main ones are about the nature of socialism and the source of values in modern society. The story that occasions the first is Muggeridge's encounter with socialism through his father's Fabianism, his own harder quasi-Marxism, his visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 - 33, and his disillusionment.

The second starts with his adolescent secret Bible reading, his conversion as an undergraduate to Christianity and his contemplation of a vocation, his encounter with India after university, his renewed support for Christianity as a world view after the Soviet episode, and his eventual acceptance of institutional Christianity in his Roman submission in 1982. There is no doubt that his stance against the Soviet Union after -- indeed, during -- his visit was courageous and cost him dearly among the many fellow-traveling literati. In his stance against contraception he was also courageous. And his final acceptance of divine authority as the only defense against relativistic modernity was ahead of its time.

Wolfe sees all this as a part of a whole Muggeridge. Muggeridge the performer, the rent-a-quote debunker, the supercilious "wit," is really showing a form of disgust with the world that eventually makes sense in relation to the convert to "the two cities" of Augustinian Catholicism. That's fair enough, to an extent. And to an extent, I suppose that could count for the adultery too. Mr. Wolfe is right to rebuke those who see Muggeridge's conversion to Rome as isolated from his early and middle life. But he goes too far the other way. There was another Muggeridge, selfish, dirty, self-obsessed, and trivial. This self too was real. I can remember just how upset many middle-class English provincial people were when that "awful" "artificial" man came on their television screens. And the deeply unpleasant Muggeridge cannot be neatly reconciled with "St. Mugg." Why should it be? Can everything be in any of us?

In another way, Wolfe's account is too neat, too comfortable. He may not have intended it, but the effect of his account is to present a story that ends well. "Malcolm" comes home, to the Church, to the place that has always awaited him and to peace. Wolfe admits a few ripples, to his credit. Muggeridge was not an orthodox Catholic in belief or practice. More seriously, he was worried about modern developments in the Church itself. Wolfe does not pursue this. He should have.

For the Church into which Newman, Manning, Knox, and Waugh were received was not the Church Muggeridge entered. Essentially, to Catholics, it was and is the same, in that it is the truth. But the Church is large. And what Waugh spotted -- as revealed by his correspondence with Cardinal Heenan -- and what Muggeridge noted is that a change has taken place. Muggeridge saw the Church as the only and last bastion against relativistic modernity. What happens when relativistic modernity shows itself inside the Church, inside the only and last bastion? For there is no doubt that the argument of cultural relativity is now abroad in the Church. It is resisted by a brave and ailing Pontiff and an astute Cardinal Ratzinger. But it is abroad. That does not make for peace and restfulness, or even a feeling of a secure home. Some say it was ever thus. Heresy was always in the Church. But the heresy of relativism is something new, as Muggeridge spotted. It is not so much that it is wrong as that it is corrosive of all belief and even more of peace and security.

Muggeridge's life was more of a mess than Wolfe will allow. And our world, including the Christian Church, is in more of a mess than he suggests. But Muggeridge's life was worth a biography after all. And this is a well-researched and well-written one, a fascinating read; just too tidy and not nearly dark enough. Things one could never have accused "Malcolm" of.