St. Mugg at 100: A Godly man in a Godless age.

Malcolm Muggeridge was the modern equivalent of an Old Testament prophet. Using the English language with extraordinary skill and power, he sought to persuade men and women to turn their backs on the world of materialism, with its cults of money, sex, drugs, self-indulgence, and pleasure-seeking, and to choose instead the numinous, the altruistic, and the eternal.

There was something in him of John Wesley, rather more of Jonathan Edwards, the philosopher-preacher. He took over the modern-style church, the TV studio, and from its pulpit in our living rooms he broadcast a doctrine of renunciation, of austerity and of self- discipline, couched in an irresistible framework of subtle humor, sophisticated literary references, and startling images.

Mugg came from a background of what the English call lower-middle-class religiosity, which was given a global flavor by early experiences in India, where he made eclectic raids on Buddhism and Hindu practices. There was always in him something of the holy man or fakir, a wandering hermit dressed in a loincloth, living off minute offerings and dispensing spiritual wisdom -- indeed, he looked like that.

But it took time for Mugg to emerge from a worldly carapace. Back in England, he became a journalist of outstanding gifts and the latest in a series of accomplished essayists which stretched back to Lamb and Hazlitt. When war came in 1939 he produced an instant book, The Thirties, which gives a scintillating, cynical, and devastating picture of what Auden called "a low, dishonest decade." He had spent some time in Moscow for the Guardian and exposed the cruelty and humbug of the Stalin regime at a time when the New York Times's Walter Duranty ("the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met") was defending it. Mugg's Winter in Moscow was one of the earliest descriptions of what Communism in practice was really like. The experience gave him a lifelong distrust of any doctrine which claimed to transform the human predicament in this life. His cynical approach to government of almost any kind was confirmed by his wartime experience in the Secret Service, which gave him access to the follies and idiocies of high strategy. His one useful contribution, at the end of the war, was to save the life of P. G. Wodehouse, in danger of execution for treasonable broadcasts on Nazi radio.

In the post-war world, Mugg became deputy editor of the London Daily Telegraph, where he imposed its durable and highly successful formula of ingenious and quasi-poetic reaction. He also enlivened things by conducting a tempestuous affair with his proprietor's wife, the beautiful Lady Pamela Berry, daughter of that Edwardian hero of intellectual romance, the first Earl of Birkenhead. Both were superb letter-writers, and their correspondence, if it is ever published, will make scorching reading. For a spell, Mugg became editor of Punch, the moribund Victorian comic magazine which he suddenly turned into a weekly display of uproarious and savage persiflage -- the beginnings of the modern satire movement.

Indeed, Mugg was the founding father of Sixties extravagance. Tiring of Punch, he reverted to essay-writing. I vividly recall the arrival at the New Statesman office of a brilliant piece by Mugg called "Royal Soap Opera," a cunningly phrased rap over the knuckles for the royal family, the first criticism of that institution since the Abdication Crisis of the 1930s. This set a new trend, and formed a curtain-raiser to the mad decade of the Sixties, a time when every institution and moral principle was viciously assaulted.

Mugg himself soon tired of Sixties nihilism and attacked its values -- or lack of them -- in turn. Indeed, the great crisis of his life had come. Hitherto, his religious fires, though burning within, had been banked and smothered under layers of careless hedonism. Mugg drove fast sports cars. He was a natty dresser. He chain-smoked. He reminded me of Charles Lamb who, when asked how he learned to smoke so furiously, replied: "I toiled after it, Sir, as some men toil after virtue." He drank deep and, when drunk, became lascivious. Kingsley Amis left a horrific account of a night which he and Mugg, both drunk, spent with Sonia Orwell, widow of the great novelist. Mugg was extraordinarily persistent in his seductions. One woman told me that, in order to fend him off in the back of a taxi, she ended by breaking his little finger.

Then, suddenly, all was put into reverse. After a hectic lecture tour in America, Mugg sickened of his tobacco consumption and never smoked again. Next he stopped drinking, and with the renunciation of alcohol, the fires of lechery were extinguished. Then Mugg foreswore meat and became a thorough-going vegetarian. These huge vacuums in his life were promptly filled by religion, whose long-banked fires suddenly turned his being into a raging furnace of faith. He said to the anguished Graham Greene, who got drunk from a perverted sense of moral duty and had a mistress as a sort of penance, "You, Graham, are a saint trying to be a sinner, and I am a sinner trying to be a saint."

The reborn Mugg was never a tub-thumper. He made the fullest use of TV, as well as the presses, in his evangelical zeal, but he was always subtle, cogent, hugely literate, often witty, always humorous, never angry or fumiferous. His appeal was always a halfway house between the powerful reasoning of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (and with the metaphors from First Corinthians) and the mysticism of St. John of the Cross. His model was Mother Teresa, whose work he helped to popularize. Mugg had a contorted self-taught version of the pre-war English upper-class accent which was sui generis and gave to his TV sayings and sermons an unforgettable allure. His white hair and bronzed monkey-face, creased in laughter and often illuminated by joy, turned him into one of the most arresting sights on the box. He loved TV and hated it; admitted it was the most intoxicating vice of all, subsuming all the rest, but found it indispensable to his work of evangelism, as well as an irresistible temptation to vanity.

Mugg preached God. He also preached the English language in all its glory. He articulated it superbly and wrote it like a recording angel. He drew up copious draughts from its prime wells: of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, of Milton and Blake, Pope and Gray, Coleridge, Dickens, Kipling, Chesterton, and Hardy. He was a fastidious picker of adjectives, a master of complex syntax, an architect of metaphor, and an artist who carved his paragraphs with a Donatello chisel. Any writer can study his work with profit. He had a bravura and, when needed, the invective of a Mencken, but with no cruelty or obsessive brutality. Behind all the brilliance and linguistic fireworks, there was a benevolent spirit, a kindly heart, and an ever-smiling face.

We now celebrate the centenary of his birth. Whether his reputation will be lasting I do not know. He was a journalist, writing and speaking for the day, with no eye to posterity. His friends treasure his memory, but they are dying off. He survives in a few books, in the yellowing files of magazines, in the flickering images of old TV clips -- a genial, Godly man in a Godless age.