Sheed on “the muggeridge”
Some dotCommonweal readers may remember the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who late in life entered the Catholic Church and is perhaps best known in America for his book about Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God. In the 60s Muggeridge wrote book and film reviews for several American magazines, including Esquire. In what was supposed to be a review of a play about Sherlock Holmes, the late Wilfrid Sheed made light fun of the sudden ubiquity of “the muggeridge.” This is Sheed at his cattiest and most playful. Not a proper review but a brilliant piece of writing.
Perhaps the outstanding feature of the new muggeridge is its formidable second-strike capacity. Woe to anyone who controverts it—the muggeridge strikes back with the speed of a cobra, with a suave giggle and lick of the forked tongue. The macdonald* was good in this respect, but hopelessly wasteful: it used to try to answer its enemies point by point. The muggeridge simply giggles and licks, and its enemies become instantly paralyzed.
The muggeridge’s extraordinary output also enables it to review the same book in several places at once, which clears up a lot of silly confusion. The old machines used to disagree sometimes and then they fought like old tin battleships, circling slowly and pelting the landscape with shot. It was a mess. One hardly knew what to think.
Nowadays, none of this is necessary. Simply install a muggeridge in your office (the only thing a muggeridge will not fight with is another muggeridge). Several magazines have already purchased one—and these magazines among our best. An imported criticism machine adds a cachet that anyone can feel proud of.
*Dwight MacDonald
Matt — I guess a lot of participants in the blog don’t know, remember, or care about Muggeridge. For what it’s worth, I never thought much of the Old Mug. I recall seeing him interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr., and I remember being mightily put off. Later, I read through Gregory Wolfe’s biography, and my judgment was only confirmed. The man described by Wolfe was a pretty distasteful piece of work: a serial philanderer, anti-Semite, and all-around hypocrite and liar. (His claim that a miracle took place during the filming of the documentary about Mother Teresa was directly and vehemently denied by the chief cameraman.)
Eugene,
Muggeridge certainly had some serious faults, both before and after he became a Christian. But he had his virtues, too, as well as real literary talent, which was mostly squandered on halfhearted media interventions. He was one of the first journalists in the West to tell the truth about Stalin after a long disenchanting trip to Russia. His book about the Thirties is still considered a classic, and his two-volume autobiography is a small masterpiece. I think it was Paul Johnson who said that, after Evelyn Waugh, Muggeridge had the most elegant English prose style of his time. (Evelyn Waugh once theatrically put down his ear trumpet when Muggeridge began to speak). Johnson’s verdict was perhaps too generous, but Muggeridge really was an uncommonly graceful writer, and it was partly this fact that sometimes got him into trouble: there is often more euphony than argument in his trademark jeremiads. The best way to ruin a talent like his is to indulge it, and editors on both sides of the Atlantic ate it up. But there was always, to use the phrase Sheed borrows from Cyril Connolly, “a gland of charm” in Muggeridge, and he had a gift for friendship. He helped get Wodehouse out of trouble after the Second World War. And if I remember right, he helped make the funeral arrangements for his friend Eric Blair (aka George Orwell).
As we prepare for a royal wedding it’s worth taking time to read Muggeridge’s (at the time scandalous) “Royal Soap Opera”:
“The royal family and theiradvisers have really got to make up their minds – do they
want to be part of the mystique of the century of the common man or to be an institutional monarchy; to ride, as it were, in a glass coach or on bicycles; to provide the tabloids with a running serial or to live simply and unaffectedly among their subjects like the Dutch and Scandinavian royal families. What they cannot do is to have it both ways.’
http://www.stoa.org.uk/topics/monarchy/royal-soap-opera.pdf
From Wikipedia:
In 1957 he received public and professional opprobrium for criticism of the British monarchy in a U.S. magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Given the title “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, its publication was delayed by five months to coincide with the Royal State Visit to Washington, D.C. taking place later in the year. While the article was little more than a rehash of views expressed in a 1955 article “Royal Soap Opera”, its timing caused outrage back in Britain, and he was sacked for a short period from the BBC, and a contract with Beaverbrook newspapers was cancelled.