• Malcolm Muggeridge: Three Novels, a speaking tour in the USA, and a bit of autobiography. Reviewed by Rae West

Muggeridge had an outlook similar to the British Civil Service, which, it occurs to me, was itself a resultant of Jewish forces. He had no idea of the mechanics of businesses, including of course their financing. Economics and such things as National Income Accounts were embryonic—think of the amateurishness of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford University—so Muggeridge was unable to comment usefully on Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the activities of the American and European companies which were, of course, paid by Jewish paper money.

Muggeridge interested me to some extent; an emblem of unintellectuality, out of his depth in a world of Jewish and Freemasonic corruption. His books do at least give a picture of the 1930s, for example. No wonder Jews laughed at most of the English-speaking world.

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[1] 1934 WINTER IN MOSCOW

-'Winter in Moscow', a novel based I suppose on his experiences in the USSR, apparently was considered 'anti-Semitic' (in fact I heard of it in a revisionist site on Internet). Out of print. A biography of Muggeridge (which I saw in ULU in Nov 1997) said it was a novel (or at least in novel form). And confirmed it was anti-Semitic; later Muggeridge 'saw the dangers of this' or some similar formulation.
This made me interested to try to get a copy, predictably. I wonder if I'll find one. ... Obtainable in fact through the county library system, though probably not referred to for a long time - spine was leather bound and it was stamped 'reserve store, drill hall, .. Dorking, Surrey.'
I decided to scan it in and perhaps put it (or parts of it) onto Internet, if Eyre & Spottiswoode don't mind, if they still exist. I have a Word format file of the complete text, with preface, and MM's various mottoes and book extracts before each chapter. (Joke - he evidently considered French the proper language for these, quoting Dostoievski in French, but Lenin for some reason in English, along with Taine and Henry (Henri?) Rollin.)

Added 22 Dec 2022: 2013, only 80 years later. An article by Teresa Cherfas, Reporting Stalin's Famine. Jones and Muggeridge. A Case Study in Forgetting and Rediscovery compares Muggeridge with Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (1905-1935), a Welshman who spoke Russian, and who travelled unaccompanied in the Ukraine. He was later murdered in China; it would not surprise me if this was intentional, and part of the Jewish takeover of China. His papers were mostly unpublished, though they seem to exist to this day.
I'd never heard of him until updating this piece on Muggeridge. He's certainly hard to find. The 1976 Britannica has no mention, for example. Nor has Hammerton's Concise Universal Biography (partworks) which might have included him.
Cherfas (Jewish name) puts her emphasis on alleged competition between two reporters.
In Georgetown University's Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 4 (Fall 2013): pages 775–804. On History and Historians.
The Jewish definition of Kulak, as someone deserving to be executed as an enemy of Jews, seems similar to white farmers in Africa under Jewish regimes in Africa, it occurs to me.
Gareth Jones' life and work is celebrated in garethjones.org and discusses a display of his diaries in 2009 in the Wren Library, Cambridge. There was a similar, larger UN Holodomor exhibition in New York, Are You Listening, New York Times? no doubt with many mentions of Walter Duranty. Cherfas in 2013 may therefore be controlled opposition.

Note: Amazon deleted the review below; archive.org has no mention of Muggeridge's Winter in Moscow, though it has others of his books.

Review in Amazon of One of the few novels about Stalin's USSR Malcolm Muggeridge: Winter in Moscow

Realistic novel of westerners collaborating with Stalin's regime

Four stars because Muggeridge, a journalist in real life, observes well, but does not make much effort to penetrate behind the scenes—foreign loans and secrecy; big well-known western companies and their deals; weapons and their military; prisons; Gu Lags. He accepted the historical mythology promoted by Jews, for example about pogroms. But admittedly it is asking a lot to include all these aspects.

Characteristic quotations:-

Pp. 147-152: In most Russian towns there are certain shops whose windows are well stocked with food and clothing. They are called Torgsin shops. People stand outside them in little wistful groups looking at tempting pyramids of fruit; at boots and fur coats tastefully displayed; at butter and white bread and other delicacies that are for them unobtainable. They cannot buy in the shops because only gold or foreign currency is accepted, and most Russians possess neither. Even if they do possess a little gold it is dangerous to disclose the fact. The shops are mostly patronised by foreigners and by Russian Jews who receive remittances from relatives abroad. For the general public, like the special Ogpu stores, and the special Red Army stores, and the special stores for important Communist officials, they are closed shops.

P. 234: "Why do you hate it?" Bramwell Smith asked.
"Not," Wraithby answered, "because they're starving; or because they live in filthy nearness to one another; or because their lives are dull and unhappy; or because of the din of monotonous, shoddy propaganda; or because the bosses are megalomaniac fools and the rest terrorised into imbecility; or because you like it. In its very texture something absurd and trivial and barbarous. Every stale idea vomited up again. Everything that you believe in and that I hate. All the dingy hopes that have echoed and re-echoed over Europe for a century and now are spent. The poor little frightened soul of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is what I despise. Not its works."
"Supposing two or three million peasants do die this winter," the Jewess said mechanically, getting up. "What of it?"
She was off to a lecture on the Film and the Class Struggle. As she revolved with the revolving hotel doors, red lips flashing like a lighthouse lamp, Wraithby understood pogroms.
[End of Amazon review]

• Winter in Moscow by Malcolm Muggeridge

Winter in Moscow, a novel by Malcolm Muggeridge. Anti-Semitic?

© Rae West 2000

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Malcolm Muggeridge: Biographical notes
Or go directly to notes just below on his controversial Winter in Moscow
Malcolm Muggeridge was born in 1903, into a lower middle class household, a fact he liked to repeat. Nevertheless, he graduated from Cambridge in a subject he never specified—presumably English. His attitude to education and careers is shown in his description of Anthony Eden: '.. every promise of a brilliant career.. distinguished record in the 1914-18 war, a first at Oxford in Oriental languages, impeccable family antecedents, an elegant appearance and an earnest disposition..' Muggeridge taught English in India, and settled to journalism. He worked for the Manchester Guardian [Note: Jewish 'liberal' 'newspaper', left from the Manchester cotton mill days] just before Winter in Moscow was published, after which he moved (or was moved) to Egypt. I think this novel must have failed; at any rate, almost all his other books are factual, at least in in a journalistic way (for example The Thirties, published in 1940).
In his novel, Muggeridge wrote: I refer to the position of foreign journalists in Russia, and to the manner in which news about Russia reaches outside. There is a stiff censorship, of course; but it is not generally known that foreign journalists in Moscow work under the perpetual threat of losing their visas, and therefore their jobs. Muggeridge does not analyse further to consider worldwide journalism, where it is under Jewish control. Nor does he consider Jewish journalists in the USSR—who of course wanted to tell lies, in the traditional Jewish manner.
His writings are based half on newspaper stories. These are fragmented and peppered with anecdotes—Wodehouse, unemployment, the gold standard, Hitler, James Joyce, Lindbergh kidnapping, Kreuger the match king. He resembles those comedians whose material is taken from films and TV, or those American women writers whose life is product brand names. The other half of his writings come from his own experiences: his war on the Mediterranean, including north Africa, as a Major in Intelligence; editing the notoriously reactionary Daily Telegraph for about two years in the 1950s, before editing Punch, which was (and continued) in decline.
Accordingly, these topics include English (e.g. Indian English, Somerset Maugham, Orwell), newspaper lies (e.g. fake eyewitnesses, servile reporters), hotels and people in France and Italy (e.g. mass holidays, Beerbohm in Rapallo), people he'd met, or perhaps felt he'd met (Churchill, the Webbs, Cockburn, de Gaulle, Ian Fleming), and spies and intelligence (Philby, Secret Service). Despite an admission that he'd had sex with prostitute(s), he became puritanical—"What are your views on birth control sir?" "Eh err well Ay do believe that those who preach birth control as AN END in ITSELF are err offensive." He was, or imagined he was, religious: this may explain his interest in Samuel Butler, along with such topics as Buchmanism, the Rector of Stiffkey, and Catholicism. On retiring, he turned more to religion: for example, he toured the US, lecturing to almost-all-women audiences. He was part of the 'Mother Teresa' cult.
He came to realise that authority wasn't omnipotent or omniscient. But he had a complete lack of interest in what should have been done, or might have been done. He had little scientific or artistic interest. His descriptions therefore, to give the impression of colour and dynamism, had to be extreme: the word 'bizarre' occurs in almost every chapter of one of his books. His pose was world-weariness, an attitude which clashed laughably with the fact that he was frequently granted TV interviews.

Winter in Moscow
His novel of the 'Russian Revolution' (the Jewish Coup) presents disagreeable characters—provincial English trade unionists, inarticulate sloganising Americans, fat lecherous women, technicians talking of hydro-electric plants and concrete, Jewish bureaucrats... Muggeridge curtails his unattractive descriptions only for one type of character, the amiable bumbling English writer afraid to discuss Jews...
Winter in Moscow is long out-of-print. Biographies of Muggeridge say it's anti-semitic, typically adding remarks such as: 'later he came to see the dangers of this'. The following selections contain all the references to Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism in this novel, so you can judge for yourself.
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WINTER IN MOSCOW. Thirteen selections

By Malcolm Muggeridge. Published Feb 1934 by Eyre & Spottiswoode, London. Selections © Rae West 2000.

[1]
PREFACE
Pp 19-20: The vast army of sympathetic critics of the Soviet regime have done more to enhance its prestige than all its paid agitators and subsidised publications put together. By being sympathetic they have accepted its premises; and once the premises are accepted, criticism becomes irrelevant. As a Jew in the Soviet Foreign Office said to me once, with a wink, "Those that are not against us are for us." I quite agreed. It is no more possible to describe the Dictatorship of the Proletariat dispassionately than to describe a mad bull rushing round a field dispassionately. The moment you become dispassionate you automatically make the false assumption that the bull is not mad, and thereby vitiate anything further you may have to say about the matter. Of all the accounts of the Soviet regime that have been written and spoken, the falsest—the ones least related to the facts—are by people who affect to have no prejudices or convictions either way.
...
It was as though the Salvation Army had turned out with band and banners in honour of some ferocious tribal deity, or as though the organ of a vegetarian society had issued a passionate plea for cannibalism.
In the classified list of stupidities and brutalities which I did not make, and which is not worth making (stupidities and brutalities, being universal, are neither here nor there), is one item which I have always promised myself the pleasure of stressing if ever I had the occasion. I refer to the position of foreign journalists in Russia, and to the manner in which news about Russia reaches outside. There is a stiff censorship, of course; but it is not generally known that foreign journalists in Moscow work under the perpetual threat of losing their visas, and therefore their jobs. Unless they consent (which most of them do) to limit their news to what they know will not be displeasing to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, they are subjected to continuous persecution, varying from tiresome reproaches from petty Jewish Foreign Office officials to the imprisonment and exiling of any friends or relatives they may have who are unfortunate enough to be Soviet citizens. The result is that news from Russia is a joke, ....

[2]
Pp. 22-23: "Her book, Sex and the Soviets, made a great sensation in the States."
Beatrice was a veteran in the revolutionary struggle. It appeared that Trotsky had once made advances to her in a taxi. He had, she often recounted, rested his historic hand on her knee; and she, perhaps mistakenly, had withdrawn the knee from his grasp. Besides this, she had stood shoulder to shoulder with the toiling masses of Russia for no less than ten years in their struggle to create a classless, socialist society.
"How do you like being back?" she shouted gaily to Claude Mosser, a Jew with a soft, romantic face; somehow a little hard, even shifty, underneath its softness.
"Marvellous," he answered. "How stimulating everything is! How exciting! Admit the faults; but the life, the movement, the exhilaration of it all! A new society going through its birth pangs. A new civilisation."
Beatrice nodded. This kind of thing was her speciality. She hoped Mosser was not going to encroach on her territory.
"I suppose you'll be visiting the old village and the old folks again?" she said, her voice solemn, religious.
Mosser had already written three books about revisiting the old village and the old folks. It was just like Beatrice, he thought, to imagine that a theme was never exhausted. The books had been excellent sellers, certainly; but there was no point in flogging a good horse to death. Besides, ever since it had been suggested, unkindly and quite groundlessly, that the Treaty of Versailles had put his birthplace in Poland he had been touchy about the old village and the old folks.

[3]
Pp. 30-31: It was Jefferson, a journalist, rapping out his opinions; his face shiny and his eyes alcoholic; two massive, tremulous chins.
"It's always been my viewpoint," Claude Mosser answered, "that the Cossacks deserved to suffer. Look what they did before to the Jews."
He was not going to let this business about the old folks being Poles prevent him from having opinions on the peasant question generally.
The clatter of Jack Wilson's heavy Russian boots broke into their conversation.
"This sort of show makes me sick," he was saying to Fay, a heavily built American Jewess on the staff of the Moscow Tribune. "Jesus Christ, what is it? Shop-window dressing. Give me Magnetogorsk. Twenty-four hours' work a day, and more. Peasant boys who couldn't read or write five years ago handling complicated machines. That's the real thing. Jesus Christ, yes."
Fay looked up at him respectfully through horn-rimmed spectacles; a blond giant; very sure of himself; very pleased with himself. Genuine proletarian, she thought; the real stuff; better even than Boris who lived with, and on, her.
"Oh! Mr. Wilson," she said, "I wish you'd take me to Magnetogorsk one day."
"I tell you, sir," an American voice boomed, "that I know a bit about electrical undertakings; and this power-station at Dnieprostroi is a big thing. As I figure it out this whole experiment in the Soviet Union is mighty interesting and mighty important. Yes, sir, a big thing."

[4]
P. 33: "Geoffrey," Mrs. Trivet shouted to him, "this is wonderful. I must write it all down at once. Come, Geoffrey. A memorable evening."
At two o'clock Lily Jones was sitting between the director of the press department and his immediate predecessor in that office. The one, Ouspenski, was short and dapper, with gold teeth and layers of curly hair; the other, Mikhailov, was florid and plump, with grey hair brushed smoothly back from his forehead. Each with an arm round her waist, the two Jews fenced together across Lily's body.
Mikhailov said that it was a great relief to him to get away from the trivial routine of the press department, and to be in the provinces actually at grips with the problems of socialist construction.
Ouspenski retorted that, as a student of human nature, and as a man with a diplomatic career in front of him, he found his work in the Foreign Office fascinating.

[5]
Pp. 64-66: "The woman, wife of an exiled kulak; herself a notorious counter-revolutionary, lured Comrade Babel to her house with false promises. . . . Murdered him in the loft with an axe. . . Three soldiers waiting downstairs suspected of complicity. . . Symptomatic of new tactics of kulak elements. . .. Apparent submission used as a cloak for sabotage and other treasonable activities. .
Work sometimes from within collective farms; sometimes even from within Party organisations.
New propagandist campaign and sterner measures against class enemies needed to root out this evil."

He was a Jew; formerly a shoemaker; almost bald, and with a beard trimmed like Lenin's.
As he lay in his bath he brooded on the report; soft limbs, white and hairy, relaxed in hot water; red pate glowing in a mist of steam; little eyes half closed. Enemies at work everywhere; secret underground enemies, corroding the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; enemies in the Party, perhaps even in the Polit-Bureau; enemies all round him night and day, intriguing, sabotaging. After all, he knew the ways of secret underground enemies since he had been one himself; since he had cobbled away in the sunshine on a bench outside his little shop in Kiev with a printing press hidden in his cellar, and at night had printed leaflets that were passed from hand to hand in the factories; since he had decayed a social order from within until it fell like ripe fruit.
A great wave of feeling swept him along. The ingratitude of it! The pity of it. Oh! the pity of it!
"We have done everything for them, and they answer our kindness with hate. We have saved them from landlordism and usury, and, instead of gratitude, we get stabs in the back."
His Jewish religious heart swelled; and his eyes filled with tears.
"But their plots will be unavailing. Already our achievements are great. They will in the future be greater still. By drawing the entire mass of poor peasants into collective farms we have succeeded in raising them up to the standard of middle peasants. This is a great achievement; such an achievement as not a single state in the world has ever before secured."
Now he was triumphant, prophetic; mouthpiece of the Lord of Hosts; very Lord of Hosts.
"Comrade Babel must be numbered amongst our blessed dead; but we, the living, will see to it that his death shall not have been in vain."

[6]
Pp. 82-86: "What?"
"Nothing!" His voice rose angrily. "Nothing. An emptiness." The women, doing their housework in the room, were frightened.
"He'll get himself into trouble and us as well," one of them said. "Why can't he speak quietly and play his concertina? If he wasn't my brother-in-law I'd complain about him myself and have him sent away."
She picked up the concertina and put it in his hands. He sat down and began to play it.
"It's the only battle I've ever run away from," he mumbled. "Running away from the Kronstadt revolt I met the Cheka running back. Not Russians. Jews and Letts and Poles who'd been frightened when the trouble first started, and now were running back to get their teeth into the pride and the glory of the Revolution." He spat and played a mournful tune; a sentimental dirge; trivial, mean music that made his despair seem trivial and mean.
"Free elections and a secret ballot; liberty of speech and of the press; the right to form trade unions; the liberation of political prisoners; the equalisation of food rations,' he told off again on his fingers; then, picking up is concertina, his voice merged in its wail.
"If it all happened again?" I asked
He made no answer, and seemed to have forgotten I was there.
The women in the room obviously wanted me to go. "If anyone heard him!" one of them said, and crossed herself piously.
Afterwards I was haunted by the thought of the Cheka racing back to be revenged on the Kronstadt sailors. I saw them like fiery monsters rising out of slime; little eyes flaming; mouths frothing; teeth gnashing as they raced through the night. Dark shadows made up of the fear and hate and fury and envy that hid in the soul of Mr. Aarons, of Kokoshkin, of Mrs. Eardley-Wheatsheaf, of Stalin, of Bill, of myself. Symbols of the new religion Mrs. Trivet described to a sympathetic clergyman friend. Proletarian mysticism.
* * * * The monsters sometimes went after smaller game than the pride and the glory of the Revolution. Anna Mikhailova, a teacher, lived in her own little corner without interfering with anyone. She had an ancient edition of the Forsyte Saga, and a book on architecture, and an ikon beneath which in summer she sometimes put a bunch of flowers that she'd picked in the country. Years of vegetarianism had dried up her skin. She pecked little morsels of food secretly when no one was looking, and had views on education. This secret, furtive life had made the texture of her body disgusting. It had wrinkled and faded like old newspapers stored in an attic. She was fond of animals, and had a particular voice that she used when she spoke of little children; and she believed that languages should be taught by the direct method, and that co-education was a very good thing.
"I am not," she often used to say, "against the Revolution."
In fact, she had in the earlier stages been for it because she had thought that through its agency women would be emancipated (she had wanted to be emancipated), and many good causes find their consummation. Even now, like Cooley, she felt hopeful about the reinstatement of Goldilocks.
When the monsters opened their jaws she trembled, but with great courage said to the three members of the Ogpu who visited her in her room, "I am afraid of mice but not of you." One of them was a Jew with a small dark face; one a blond Esthonian [sic], and one a Russian. They stared suspiciously at her ikon, and asked her searching questions about her class antecedents. The Jew, she thought, looked funny in uniform. She told them that she had been a governess before the Revolution, and that she had lost her papers.
Certain of her pupils, it appeared, had complained that her teaching tended to be romantic. The ikon seemed to bear out the charge.
"Are you a practising Christian?" the Jew asked. She said she was.
He nodded significantly and made a note.
"My religion," she said, "is my own affair."
"As a person, yes; as a teacher, no," he answered.
The Esthonian read from a paper in a husky voice, "On February 28 you used the phrase, 'Beauty is truth; truth, beauty.'"
"It was a quotation," she said, "from a poet."
"I don't care," he answered. "It's opposed to correct Marxist thinking, and is not allowed. In any case it's nonsense."
She turned to the Russian. "What is correct Marxist thinking?"
He was eager to reply at length, but the Jew interrupted, "Read Lenin instead of bourgeois poets and you'll understand."
She decided not to press the point. On the whole, she thought, I've held my own fairly well.
They were not quite sure what action they had better take. Her room was small, and on the cold side of the house; and her life altogether was so small and contemptible that it scarcely seemed worth bothering about. Was it conceivable, they asked themselves, that such a creature could influence students? Her miserable indeterminate idealism would seem as bloodless and futile as herself. She was a good advertisement of its idiocy.
"You realise," the Jew said, "that from now on you will be under observation, and that any further complaints will have serious consequences."
The young man in shorts who was connected with the I.L.P., and whose name was Roden, stared moodily out of the window. He was troubled with conscientious scruples. In the quiet correctness and prosperity of his Quaker home the case had seemed unanswerable. As stated in the New Leader it had seemed unanswerable.
"The Ogpu worries me a bit," he said to Carver, a Russian Jew who, like Mosser, had re-emigrated from America to join the old folks.
"I've seen hundreds like you go down one after the other," Carver answered gloomily. "You need strong nerves and a hard heart to get on in this place."
"It seems to be a very powerful organisation, and very much in evidence," Roden went on. "I found a little girl crying the other day . . ." .
"You can't tell me anything about it," Carver interrupted. "I'm an authority on the subject." Then, lowering his voice so that Mr. Aarons, who was gently patrolling up and down the corridor, should not overhear, he whispered, "I've served three years for espionage myself."

[7]
Pp. 147-152: In most Russian towns there are certain shops whose windows are well stocked with food and clothing. They are called Torgsin shops. People stand outside them in little wistful groups looking at tempting pyramids of fruit; at boots and fur coats tastefully displayed; at butter and white bread and other delicacies that are for them unobtainable. They cannot buy in the shops because only gold or foreign currency is accepted, and most Russians possess neither. Even if they do possess a little gold it is dangerous to disclose the fact. The shops are mostly patronised by foreigners and by Russian Jews who receive remittances from relatives abroad. For the general public, like the special Ogpu stores, and the special Red Army stores, and the special stores for important Communist officials, they are closed shops.
One day an elderly man drove up in a droshky to the main entrance of a Torgsin shop in the centre of Moscow. It was a cold day; and the man seemed to feel the cold. His face was grey and pinched, yet decided. He wore an old blue coat with gold braid round the sleeves. Something strained in his whole bearing; white gums and tight dry skin suggested under-nourishment. He was, like many another in Moscow, starving. Before the Revolution he had been the captain of a small merchant ship. Now he earned a poor living by teaching languages. His friends still called him Captain Andreyev, which he liked because it reminded him of the past when, it seemed to him now, he had been very happy.
He paid the driver of the droshky generously, giving him nearly all the money he had, and, carrying under his arm a large parcel done up in newspaper, went into the shop. People were waiting at the counters to be served, and a long queue was waiting at the pay-desk. Captain Andreyev joined this queue. Everyone in it was holding something; a few foreign currency notes; a gold watch or ornament.
"They say people are taking gold stoppings from their teeth and bringing them here," someone in front of Captain Andreyev whispered to him.
A peasant woman in the queue overheard. "When you're starving," she said, "you've got to do something." Captain Andreyev nodded. He was not one to chatter with casual acquaintances.
The shop smelt of scent; and somewhere a gramophone was playing. In the pay-desk a Jewess; her face heavily powdered and rouged; a grotesque swollen mask, weighed gold; examined currency notes, and paid out Torgsin bonds. By her side sat an expert whom she consulted when she was in doubt. The expert wore rimless pince-nez and had a long straight nose. Captain Andreyev shuddered and fortified himself by looking round at the counters where food was arranged. He and his family had eaten nothing but bread; very little of that, for some months. The Jewess's manner was supercilious. She scarcely liked to touch the articles or the grimy creased notes that were handed to her; picked them up daintily in pincers; spoke only when it was absolutely necessary, and then in insolent monosyllables. Between one customer and another she looked at her pink finger-nails.
An old woman; wizened, bent, a shawl over her head, stood muttering to herself while the Jewess examined a tiny gold coin she had given her. When she handed back the coin and shook her head, the old woman pleaded: " Please take it. It's gold. I know it's gold."
The Jewess ignored her and looked enquiringly at the next in the queue.
"You pig! You devil! You filthy Jew!" the old woman shrieked, her voice cracked and venomous. Then, when she noticed the doorkeeper; an old man in a brown uniform and with a divided beard, move towards her, she slunk out of the shop and joined the little crowd staring at its window display in the street outside.
It was a tragic pawnshop whose goodwill was famine and whose management was terror. It was Ouspenski's promised land adapted to the circumstances of an economic collapse. It was penitents laying capitalist offerings at the feet of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The Jewess's swollen face was an idol and the shop a shrine where sacred rites were held; creased, grimy pieces of paper, and gold and jewels, clutched in the fists of the devout, then humbly laid on the shrine. It was Ouspenski's glory and his kingdom.
"I have," Captain Andreyev said when his turn came, "some gold to sell. Rather a lot."
He unwrapped his parcel and displayed the model of a ship; made of gold; each detail perfect; even the name Katya printed in minute letters on its prow. The Jewess half rose from her place; and the expert examined the ship eagerly, taking off his rimless pince-nez and screwing a magnifying glass into his eye.
"You'd better come and see the manager," he said. The manager was polite. He laughed nervously, and said, "If you don't mind we'll go and see the director. It's a lot of gold. Too much for me to handle."
They drove in a car to see the director, the gold ship on the seat between them. When the car drew up at the headquarters of the Ogpu, Captain Andreyev smiled. "I thought the director probably lived here," he said. An orderly showed them into the commandant's office. He was in uniform; very smart; scented like the Torgsin shop; a dark, quick man whose features seemed to push out of his face and whose body seemed to push out of his uniform. He began to question Captain Andreyev.
"How do you come to have so much gold when you know the Government needs it?"
"I've got papers," Captain Andreyev answered, producing them.
The commandant looked over the papers.
"I see the ship was a presentation."
"Yes, from an American liner. It caught fire; and I was able to be of some service."
"So it appears. In fact, you saved the lives of the crew and passengers."
"Some service," Captain Andreyev muttered. There was a pause. The commandant seemed to be thinking.
"Why didn't you sell it before?" he suddenly asked.
"I was fond of it. Such a lovely thing. So perfectly made. So accurate. And I liked to have it in my room, and to show it off to people. Besides, it's an exact copy of my own ship that I sailed for twenty years."
"And now?"
Passion swept over Captain Andreyev's face like a wind, twitching his mouth, trembling the corners of his eyes, drawing the skin over his cheekbones.
"Now I need food. My wife and children need food very badly. She persuaded me. But I should have sold it in any case."
An orderly brought in a dossier, and the commandant looked it through quickly.
"I see there has already been a house search and a cross-examination."
"I begged for the ship, and told them it was made of brass and no use to anyone except to me. They let me keep it."
The commandant shut up the dossier and gave Captain Andreyev back his papers.
"You're liable to arrest for having hoarded gold," he said. "Also the gold is liable to confiscation. As a class enemy with bourgeois antecedents you'd get a long sentence if I charged you. In view of the circumstances, however, I shan't charge you; and I shall allow you to have a third of the gold's value in Torgsin bonds."
He smiled patronisingly. Captain Andreyev did not smile back, but bowed stiffly and left the room.

[8]
Pp. 169-171: Carver was more cautious. He was a Soviet citizen and knew what would be, for him, the consequences of a too rigid application of principles. "I don't want to lose my press card," he said. "Besides, Ouspenski's an old friend of mine. We've worked together. We've made love to girls together. We've been drunk together. That makes the position rather different in my case.
Balliger, a little Central European Jew, sat quietly in his place. He had had difficulties before over sending forbidden messages to his newspaper. There had been an interview with Mr. Aarons. "A shocking message," Mr. Aarons had said. "A really shocking message. You! to send such things. You of all people."
(You; one of us; one of the family, he had meant.)
"Shocking but true," Balliger had replied. "It was an official document. I've got the document; and I'll show it to you if you like."
"You've been misinformed," Mr. Aarons had gone on; "and I shall have to ask you to acknowledge the fact in your newspaper. Otherwise you'll be persona non grata here." Otherwise, Balliger had thought, I'll have to go away. He had a wife and children, and a living to earn. The two Jews had understood each other perfectly, and wanted to adjust matters in a decent respectable way without any unpleasantness. They had searched about in their minds for a formula that would enable them to make their little deal without hurting each other's feelings. The formula had occurred to both simultaneously. He's got a wife and family. Poor chap! he's got a wife and family. I mustn't make things difficult for him, they had both thought.
"Very well," Balliger had said; "since you've got a wife and family, and since I know you'd get into trouble if I didn't contradict the message, I agree."
"Of course I realise," Mr. Aarons had said, "that you wouldn't have done it unless you had a wife and family to consider."
They had shaken hands and smiled, satisfied; friendly journalist and Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Thus, for Balliger, too, it was less a matter of principle than for Hartshorn. "It's a good opportunity for making a protest, don't you think?" he whispered to Rosenfeld, representative of a Jewish news agency. Rosenfeld nodded without enthusiasm. His head was yellow and hairless.
"By the way," Balliger went on, "you don't happen to have any roubles, do you?"
They settled down to an earnest discussion about roubles...

[9]
Pp. 223-224: Cavendish stretched himself with a grunt on the floor. "I may be bourgeois," he seemed to be saying; "and a member of a bourgeois parliament with hopes of one day becoming an under-secretary of State; but at heart I'm on your side. I know the kind of behaviour the Dictatorship of the Proletariat expects of me when I'm on its premises." Wraithby found Paul's flat a home from home. The same cushions and books. The same pictures. The same bottles. The same people. One more farewell party, he thought bitterly. One more. A Spanish woman sitting on a sofa by herself bared her teeth at him. To protect himself he leant his head against the shoulder of a bare-legged Jewess.
Three of the girls with fringes and high-waisted dresses grouped themselves round Prince Alexis. He looked at them mournfully; a dark bearded man with a decaying mouth; savage and unhappy and lonely. "Tell us," the girls chanted together like school-children reciting a multiplication table, "how you, a prince, an aristocrat, became a Communist." Prince Alexis made noises in his stomach. How aristocratic he is! they thought. How interesting! How Russian!

[10]
Pp. 227-228: He asked shyly for a bath.
"The fact is," he went on, "where I live there's no bathroom."
"Of course," Wraithby said.
He watched Prince Alexis dry himself. His body was white and tender like a boy's. The head; so battered and decayed, did not seem to belong to it; like an old worn hood on a new motor-car. All the wear and tear of living seemed to have gone into the head, leaving the rest of his body fresh and new.
"Do you really believe," Wraithby asked, "that these awful plays are good; these wretched people happy; these revolting Jews, great leaders and prophets; these decrepit buildings, fine architecture; these dingy slums, new socialist cities; these empty slogans bawled mechanically, a new religion; these stale ideas (superficial in themselves and even then misunderstood), the foundation and hope of the future?"
"You don't understand in the least," Prince Alexis said, drying himself slowly as though reluctant to cover up his body and leave only his stained head exposed. You're a fool. Plays and people and leaders and buildings and slogans have nothing to do with it. They don't matter in the least."
"What does matter then?"

[11]
Pp. 234-235: Wraithby was not surprised to find Bramwell Smith and a Jewess sitting in the hotel lounge one evening. It was inevitable that Bramwell Smith should some time or other find his way to Moscow. "You'll be happy here," he said, "and appreciated here. It's just the place for you." Bramwell Smith told him that he was off to the Krimea. His small, blond, acute head was fastened on to his body without a neck. As he spoke his fingers splayed over the Jewess's knee. "Doris and Olga and Derwent and the children are coming out, too... he said. Already he saw himself advising the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; finger on its pulse; head cocked on one side; prescribing. "And you?" he asked.
"I hate it," Wraithby said.
"Some people can't see beneath the blunders and mistakes," the Jewess murmured.
"I know," Wraithby said. "Back of this and back of that."
"I felt bad myself when I first came," she went on. "Little things annoyed me. For instance, it annoyed me that they couldn't make beds. It got on my nerves so that I thought I'd have to leave. Now it doesn't any more. Isn't it queer that they can't make beds?"
Like Muskett, she had her grievance against the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
"Why do you hate it?" Bramwell Smith asked.
"Not," Wraithby answered, "because they're starving; or because they live in filthy nearness to one another; or because their lives are dull and unhappy; or because of the din of monotonous, shoddy propaganda; or because the bosses are megalomaniac fools and the rest terrorised into imbecility; or because you like it. In its very texture something absurd and trivial and barbarous. Every stale idea vomited up again. Everything that you believe in and that I hate. All the dingy hopes that have echoed and re-echoed over Europe for a century and now are spent. The poor little frightened soul of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is what I despise. Not its works."
"Supposing two or three million peasants do die this winter," the Jewess said mechanically, getting up. "What of it?"
She was off to a lecture on the Film and the Class Struggle. As she revolved with the revolving hotel doors, red lips flashing like a lighthouse lamp, Wraithby understood pogroms.

[12]
Pp. 240-241: A party of German Jews sometimes drove out to the next-door house. They were fat, jolly men who played ball and did exercises in the garden. After dinner they would light their cigars, and drink a liqueur or two, and put on the gramophone. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was irrelevant as far as they were concerned. They had their motor-cars and their girl friends, and did business in Moscow. In all conceivable circumstances, Wraithby thought, they'll have motor-cars and girl friends and do business. Like empire-builders who dress for dinner in the jungle they preserved their standards in Mr. Aarons's Soviet Union; hair glossy; girls slim and blond and elegant; business lucrative; motor-cars swift and tidy; bright toecaps peeping, like buds, out of the foliage of a spat. These, Wraithby thought, are a constant. They survive everything. He liked them.

[13]
Pp. 248-249: Later in the evening he dined with representatives of the Rostov Soviet and of the Rostov Press and of the Rostov Vox. A little Jew with long hair and a crumpled shirt front took the head of the table. "We had Sir Webb here the other day," he said. "Such a nice man!" They ate and drank cheerfully together. The little Jew never let the cognac bottle stray far out of his reach. He had been a political exile in Germany. "Ask us questions," he said to Wraithby.
Wraithby had no more questions to ask. He knew all he wanted to know about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He felt, however, that something was expected of him. "About agriculture?" he began.
Everyone spoke at once. He could distinguish phrases here and there. "Sown area increased by forty per cent. . . wall newspapers . . . spring sowing campaign . . . As the factories in 1920, so now the farms ..."
When the noise had abated, he said, "Thank you. Now I understand." He wanted to ask them, "Boys, dearest boys, are you sure that the parallel is correct? Factories and land? Isn't agriculture somehow more sensitive? Lending itself less to statistical treatment? Will peasants whose lives have been torn up by the roots make things grow even if you drive them into the fields at the end of a bayonet?" But he knew that it was as impossible to argue against a general idea as against an algebraic formula. So instead he said, "Ask me some questions."
Coyly; head on one side; wagging a finger, the little Jew asked, "When will the revolution come in England?"
Wraithby, too, was coy; he wagged a finger. "Who knows?"

Top of this page
[2] 1940 MUGGERIDGE, MALCOLM: THE THIRTIES

-[Fontana 1971 and 72. 110,000 words. Intro + 7 chapters of about equal length.] Index is 8 pages of double-columns, mostly names. Cover design has Low cartoon with paperknife and ?Venetian glass paperweight
- Inside front cover has my sketch of squatters - Paul ? and Paul Miller - in Stanhope St, Islington, N1
- Following notes made c. 1977. The chapter titles, not present in the original, are mine
[The historical parts no doubt need revision; cp. e.g. Taylor's 'Origins of the Second World War' and/or I think 'British History Between the Wars']

Some passages, e.g. wearied description of aspects of life, are vaguely reminiscent of '1984' which of course [like death camps, United Nations, nuclear weapons, victory against Germans, 'cold war' etc] didn't yet exist. Others, especially footnotes, based on other authors and perhaps on further reading; e.g. footnotes on royalty closely reminiscent of his supposedly 'sensational' writings published in 'Tread Softly..' and perhaps added for the paperback version. No doubt some passages may have been dropped, too.

I think perhaps the best summary of Muggeridge's attitude is to view him as a conventional person who realised, as he grew up, that daddy in the shape of governments (and other authority figures) wasn't omnipotent - hence space devoted to machinations of foreigners, and also complete lack of interest in what should have been done or might have been done instead; and space devoted to denunciation of almost everybody in the same spirit. Why this should lead him ultimately to Roman Catholicism is uncertain to me; but clearly the fact that he had only conventional history (e.g. believing the French revolution to be the root which led to Totalitarianism) and I think only a linguistic smattering (his quotations are all routine), with no scientific or artistic training and no interest in comparative sociology or whatever has a lot to do with it. His turning to a foreign institution - a mechanism which he was familiar with in other contexts; see his comments on Treaty of Versailles and ex-'pro-Germans' - and his dislike of other peoples' sex no doubt reinforced his general ignorance.

Long passage on Hitler, his influence, abandonment by Kipling of the swastika when the Nazis adopted it, his little moustache, etc etc. Matthew Lawrence told me however that Mussolini (who wrote a play; details given by Muggeridge) was considered by many more charismatic than Hitler; possibly the account was retrospectively edited or footnoted.]

Muggeridge is too experienced to put many dates in, to avoid his text looking old; so the narrative jogs along, stepping from one subject to a completely unrelated one, with bridge passage, because, presumably, Muggeridge is taking his source material from a newspaper or diary. E.g. 174 ff covers Lindbergh kidnapping, death of Lytton Strachey, 'Queen Victoria had her fame renewed', a 'rebellion in Dartmoor prison', and a long section on Shakespeare. None of his footnote book references are dated.

There is a strange, or not strange, absence of historical knowledge in Muggeridge: he thinks marriage is an 'ancient' ceremony, and his Shakespeare passage on 'every generation has the Shakespeare it deserves' has quotes mostly from the 20th century; he mentions the Treaty of Versailles only in unimportant parts; he is unable to present the differences between pre-1914 Britain and inter-war Britain. It occurs to me that of course most journalists actually don't know much - consider Denis Norden, whose sole knowledge of the 18th century seemed to be that if you were rich and eccentric, that was OK, but if you were poor and eccentric you might be in trouble. Note: defenders of the monarchy, church, etc are no doubt often of this psychological type, i.e. ignorant but having picked up the right noises to utter.

Re this latter, compare Orwell on political movements and class with Muggeridge, who has no conception whatever of class antagonisms, financial power, contradictions between business and politics etc. He seems to consciously avoid this sort of topic; pp 165 and 232, on German landlords, just show how he can't be bothered with fine points. See e.g. notes below on Spanish Civil War

INTRODUCTION His life as he wrote the book at Aldershot and his idea of the war (2 or 3 anecdotes); Kierkegaard, Kafka, black muslims & Jehovah's Witnesses 'crazy'; comments on Roosevelt and Churchill and 10 Yalta 'when [they] handed over Eastern and Central Europe..'; his assumptions surveyed: capitalism doomed and civilisation failed. In fact an entr'acte - followed by 'shallow and fatuous hopes' of Welfare State.

CHAP. 1. CHANGES OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS
I. The 'crisis' a myth; looking back ten years - popular idols, newspaper obituaries
II. Survival of ruling class in England surveyed superficially
III. The Church: doctrines, fashions
IV. Unstridency 'now' of wealth and empire
V. The mood of the times: suburbs, sentimental newspaper writers, H.G.Wells film
VI. Buchmanism and the so-called 'Oxford' group; & the 'Social Credit' movement
VII. Survey of Parliament and its MPs and their hobbyhorses - ten years before, and 'now' in 1940
VIII. Europe dominated by France. Germany's growth.
IX. Heroes of the time: soldier-poets, T.E. Lawrence
X. Un-eminent men: autobiographies of tramps, criminals, a butler ('Coming Sir') etc; and Youth, illustrated by biography of Viscount Knebworth; and the masses
XI. BBC's radio growth, and character - 'British mentality at its best.'

CHAP. 2: RAMSAY MACDONALD: BRITISH PROBLEMS, EMPIRE PROBLEMS
I. 'All leaders mirror their people': Ramsay MacDonald's 2nd premiership, and memories of the first - and the Labour Party and its 'mugwumps'.
II. Unemployment increasingly a political problem; and education. No policies, as Muggeridge repeats over and over
III. Arthur Henderson. Mac's overseas 'role' a soft option: and worship of the Soviet Union - Shaw, Webbs, Gide etc etc
IV. India and the Indian National Congress. 1930: Gandhi starts civil disobedience campaign. Mac's Round Table conference, at St. James' Palace. All-India federation as outcome. An aside on New Delhi
V. Egypt, Zionism, and Arabs
VI. Newspapers: Beaverbrook and Rothermere and the circulation wars

CHAP.3: SELECTIONS FROM THE NEWSPAPERS
I. Headlines and evanescent trivia - including R101, fraud, New Statesman, Edgar Wallace and gangster novels, fake Portuguese currency
II. More of the same: the 'Great War' recedes. Christian Socialism, Liberia
III. On finance and budgets, UK and a bit on Germany
IV. National Government and problems: borrowing and the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Wage cuts. Gold standard dropped; the effects on currency restrictions, tariffs. American Debt's non-repayment by Europe. US financiers and finance; fraud: the story of Kreuger, the Swedish match magnate; Stavisky; Jabez Balfour. The slump.
V. National Government voted in by a landslide - 'Doctor's Mandate' slogan, use of radio

CHAP.4: IMPERIALISM OF JAPAN AND ITALY VS PEACE MOVEMENTS. PUBLIC INDIFFERENCE
I. War and peace observations. The League of Nations: Feb. 1932 Geneva disarmament conference, final plenary session in April '35. Draft convention. Few details.
II. League and Japanese bombing etc. In Manchuria: '32 Report chaired by Lord Lytton; further Japanese invasions
III. Italy, Abyssinia, and 1935: reporters, experts, sanctions.
IV. Pacifism in France, Universities, pledges, L.N.U. ballot, dangers of war: Muggeridge's explanation of psychology of war.
V. Private events vs public .. public tastes
VI. More newspaper stuff. Not dated: 'collage'
VII. Changes in England - urban growth, the country, advertising and publicity.

CHAP.5: BRITISH POLITICS IN MID-THIRTIES; SCANDALS, ECONOMICS, AND CULTS
I. Dropping of free trade; other economic measures described, especially inequalities of wealth. Baldwin.
II. 1933 World Economic Conference: Hugenberg's Nazi-ish speech and nothingness of the meeting [M. describes all his conferences in similar terms, as hopelessly doomed from the start]
III. Ireland: how De Valera got in in 1932, his non-pigeonhole beliefs, and conflicts with the UK over annuity payments and tariffs. Brief IRA mention, as defiant types.
IV. Disappointment of earthly enterprises: worship of Hitler, Stalin, Israel, Celtic twilight - but especially USSR. Arrest in USSR of Metropolitan-Vickers engineers, and Soviet concept of a 'trial'. Eventually released. Large literature grew up - abusive publications, rapid swings of pendulum. Similar in Germany: Muggeridge contrasts Slav and German temperaments, as in Reichstag fire trials
V. Unease in UK; few communists, few blackshirts, Mosley, Oxford girls...
VI. National Government now established. MacDonald's loss of seat, attempt at Universities seat, fade and death. His son similarly manoeuvred into a seat. J.H. Thomas' budget leak and retirement in 1936.
VII. 1935 election: 'peace' the slogan. Muggeridge's interpretation justified by B. himself, who rearmed in spite of the slogan
VIII. Public spending up: arms not seeming to appear. London University and health services and 'art' appearing, slums condemned
IX. Unified feeling against Germany: Chamberlain chosen

CHAP.6: MOVE TOWARDS WAR AND CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
I. German psychology; rise of Hitler; obsessiveness with him, incredulity aroused; 'triumphant career'; refugees
II. Hitler's magnetic field of hate: anti-Semitism in UK too. Futile speeches, resolutions. Switch by some to Russia admiration.
III. Spanish Civil War: writers, clergy, military, policies...
IV. Flood of publications: book clubs; the Nazis; countries in the news; mania for 'facts'; Tom Harrisson's Mass Observation [On 'Mass Observation' see notes on Deirdre Beddoe's 'Back to Home and Duty']
V. James Joyce; films; science; Plans; Inside Information; US journalism
VI. Snobbery and snobbery reversed (mostly from newspapers); royalty
VII. Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson; Baldwin announces abdication
VIII. George VI publicity machine

CHAP.7: START OF WAR
I. Worries about Axis power
II. Czechs and Sudetenland
III. Poland; war declared
IV. 'Phoney war'
V. War aims?

36-8: Buchmanism

45: [Reversal of roles in an Orwell-like passage talks of pro-German to anti-German and vice versa following developments after W W 1; note the label 'pro German' used as A J P Taylor did]

Versailles Treaty: 45-6 on people changing their minds/ 76: in fact about Ramsay MacDonald felt to 'introduce an element of poetry' into the 'dreary wrangles which followed.. Versailles.'/ 158: [Typical passage of assertion without argument:] '.. Clemenceau.. remarked 'I fear a peace without victory, just as we had a victory without peace,' in that showing a clear understanding of the impossible task which had been set - to establish peace on the foundations of a victory, to safeguard a victory without jeopardising peace. The two - peace and victory, were incompatible and mutually destructive. ..'/ 285: 'Though it was known that Germany was rearming, by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles conscription could not be introduced, but it was, and soon afterwards an Anglo-German Naval Agreement concluded..'/ 290: '.. This composite state [Czechoslovakia], set up by the Treaty of Versailles, had long been regarded as a model of sound administration and correct international behaviour. It was democratic, faithful to the League, chose professors for President, and had a close alliance with France; ..' [After Austria, received 'the propagandist barrage which preceded a Nazi attack.']

47: USSR: Politburo deaths at the time Muggeridge was writing

47: 'Europe was dominated by France..' [holding about one third of the world's gold reserves at a time when Britain left, or was forced off, the gold standard - a point also made by A J P Taylor]

49: 'Journey's End' by R C Sherriff, not revivable, says Muggeridge, and previous enthusiasts found it unlikeable. Whole lot on soldier poets, with T E Lawrence a perfect compromise - wrote fine prose and also won battles.

70: '.. MacDonald and his colleagues.. an Economic Council 'to advise His Majesty's Government on economic matters'. To this council were appointed every variety of economist, as Mr J M Keynes, Lord (then Sir Josiah) Stamp, Mr G D H Cole.. They met together, but no proposals were forthcoming. ..'

78: Julian Huxley credulous on USSR in 'A Scientist Among the Soviets'

79: [Visit of Shaw, Lady Astor and Lord Lothian to USSR; quoted from 'Assignment in Utopia', the author's name (Lyons) not being given, suggesting it was almost a standard text]

81: Anglo-Soviet trade agreement and full diplomatic relations with USSR in, I think, 1924/ 208: a new Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement

88: [New Delhi inaugurated ceremonially in 1931]

113: Amusing but surely exaggerated description of a general election: 'All, even the unemployed and inmates of public institutions, become ladies and gentlemen for the occasion. ...' Perhaps this sort of thing really did take place - or perhaps it simply repeats the fears of people who opposed the various phases of 'universal suffrage'; perhaps Muggeridge senior said this to young Malcolm?

120: Invergordon Mutiny; Muggeridge makes fun of a few people who thought it was important [e.g. comparison with Trafalgar] though unable, as far as I recall, to situate it objectively for himself

120: Abandonment of the Gold Standard: again, many media quotes of the time, and description of tone of voice on radio etc, but Muggeridge of course can't identify the importance, if any, of this event: it's in the papers, it must be important, mustn't it? Note: this attitude probably important to hacks.

121 Foreign Travel viewed as unpatriotic as it meant money abroad; but newspapers accepted ads for steamships. Footnote quotes Lunn saying he's sure people wouldn't begrudge the King his travel abroad

138: 'Winifred Holtby attended League of Nations at her own expense'

140: League disarmament plans of various countries ridiculed by Muggeridge, without much detail; reminiscent of 'Clochemerle' [Note that Liberia was once used as a discussion base, implies Muggeridge, (see section on Liberia) but replaced by Lausanne, Geneva etc]

143-5 Kellogg Pact [quoted as another example of an agreement, with the League of Nations, unlikely ever to work]

143: British right to bomb North West frontier only just defended in the League of Nations

145: Newspapers [esp French, perhaps, hints Muggeridge, paid by Japanese] support of Japanese invasion of China; quote by Times on a Shanghai suburb having been bombed, and 'Japanese regret' about this

162: Note: denial of importance of technical change; perh. through dislike of 'materialism' or economic determinism? 'pathetic delusion that technical change changes things' [says Muggeridge, in effect]

164: ['Vigilantes' = K Zilliacus promoted the view that 'class interest.. led the privileged to refer the hazards of war to a universal peace which might jeopardise their privileges']

164,5; 232: [On economic determinism etc; I quote these passages at some length to give an unintelligent, more or less reactionary view; perhaps I can tease out the crap some time:] 'Peace in our time, is an ancient prayer.. resolutions, pledges.. [cp Orwell on tiny minority in Peace Pledge Union] .. Statesmen were to blame.. Or, class interest.. leading the privileged to prefer.. war to promoting a universal peace which might jeopardise their privileges; making them acquiesce in.. acts of aggression.. for fear that if these countries were frustrated, their Governments would be discarded, and proletarian revolution result. .. Such explanations, each sufficiently plausible to satisfy some troubled minds, most found inadequate. If statesmen had betrayed the trust imposed in them, all were alike guilty, since all had at different times been entrusted with power; if armament manufacturers and others fearful for their class interests and profits, were to blame, how had a situation been allowed to arise which threatened to encompass their ruin as surely as those they preyed upon? A Rothschild in flight from Vienna, and stripped of all his possessions, scarcely suggested that the Anschluss was good for dividends; and the losses sustained by persons with capital invested in the Far East as a result of Japanese depredations there, made it seem unlikely that their interest and Japan's were identical. .. Has any man of peace in his lifetime commanded the devotion of a Mohammed or a Napoleon? .. liberal community.. bewildered when they.. are swept.. aside in favour of one who promises .. only privations and death. .. one of the illusions of Liberalism.. that the way to men's hearts is to offer them material benefits..' [Muggeridge assumes followers of Mohammed were offered 'only privation and death'; why such a nonsensical claim?]
- 231-2: [Account of Hitler's rise:] as seen by Rothermere, as a puppet figure, allying with Nationalists, by Conservatives, by Liberals, by 'Socialists and Communists' .. The Nationalists whose prisoner Hitler was to have been, soon ceased to count, only the irrepressible von Papen somehow continuing to exercise shadowy authority..
Footnote: Mr John Strachey 'Fascism is the organised expression of the determination of the landlords.. to stay in power..' 'This most basic fact'.. would puzzle German landlords, who .. would require a lot of convincing that they had stayed in power.' [Prob. reference e.g. to Thyssen; see e.g. Burnham]
- 233: [Note: dictatorship: cp Russell on Rousseau and derivation of totalitarianism from romanticism etc and Sparta. Muggeridge seems to have a simpler theory, perhaps from Burke, or perhaps from romantic novels, insofar as he presents one at all, that it comes from the French Revolution:] '.. Nation, une et indivisible, .. Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer. The Sovereign People owe allegiance only to themselves; their enthronement must, therefore, result in their utter subjection to an abstraction.. Becoming Sovereign, the People had to become slaves; and the Totalitarian State, whether in its Classless, Socialist Society or Third Reich version, is the full realisation of their slavery.
Footnote: 'Dictatorship, Its History and Theory' by Mr [sic] Alfred Cobban. To the general amazement, none of these comforting hypotheses was substantiated by events. .. The Sovereign People spoke with one voice, Hitler's.. .. Marat .. perhaps.. first to see.. if the People were sovereign, with the .. mob as their executive agent, their action needed to be directed by a .. supreme dictator. But for Charlotte Corday, Marat might have played this part.. as it was, it was left to Robespierre, and after him Napoleon. In Hitler it finds its apogee. The Totalitarian State's line of descent from the French Revolution and through 19th century political theory, is also traced in 'Beyond Politics' by Christopher Dawson.' [Both these books undated]
When in 1939 the French President, and M Daladier [etc] appeared in top hats to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the revolution.. they were celebrating the birth of the Totalitarian State. ..'

168: [Purchase of Codex Sinaïticus from Soviet Union for £100,000 and its display for the public]

SHAKESPEARE: 176 Opening of Stratford Theatre/ 177: 'every generation gets the Shakespeare it deserves' with examples, some as far back as the 19th century/ 167: interpretations of Timon of Athens by Dudley Ryder, who became Lord Chief Justice

170: 'public events don't involve peoples' egotism.. they aren't concerned with power.. preferring fornication.. drink.. [sic; perhaps rather naive, and conflicts with other quotes of his, eg 47 '.. Power is their [men's] everlasting pursuit..', in which power is made the main moving force, with men swaying towards it in bulk. At any rate this bridge passage is helpful to justify his lack of knowledge of finance and his attention to the Rector of Stiffkey:]

171: Rector of Stiffkey, Davidson [who after being defrocked died molested by a lion in a circus production - to Muggeridge's evident indifference or pleasure]

174: Lindbergh baby kidnapping

175: Dartmoor prison riot

178ff: section on growth of suburbs, gambling, blocks of flats, population in effect of plebs though he doesn't say this, crypt of St Martin in the fields, cars driving out of London, publicity a mighty machine

188-9: Depression: Reduction in salaries of public servants: Letters to the Times about judges' salaries in the 19th century and Attorney general and fees, emoluments etc

201: Ireland and Casement and inviting Germans in - actuated by hate of fellow Ulstermen?

202ff: Section on Russian show trials as they appeared to the 'west' at the time [at least according to Muggeridge]

203: Yeats poem, a march, for General O'Duffy's blue shirts

206: Calvin's methods at Geneva of trials etc a precursor of the USSR, says Muggeridge; e.g. Servetus before going to the stake was induced to ask Calvin's forgiveness. [He doesn't of course compare the Inquisition]

209: [Race or temperamental characteristics of Jews, Germans and Slavs explained by Muggeridge]

209: '.. government based on terrorism.. It is the mysticism of power, in its technique and temper reminiscent of the Book of Revelation, that terrible expression of the human heart's most cruel and destructive appetite..'

225: Divorce laws and A P Herbert, 'Independent Member for Oxford University' .. adultery.. chambermaids and lodging-house keepers, mechanically spoken after holding up a Bible, seldom, if ever, read, .. the Law paid its small tribute to an ancient conception of marriage, contracted for better or for worse, till death us do part, ..'

228: [Appointment of Chamberlain compared with selecting faithful senior ledger-clerk.. rather than an outsider in the hope that new methods and new vigour etc.]

229: Chapter 6, NEWS FROM SOMEWHERE, about Note: Germany: '.. defeated and full of a sense of humiliation and inferiority..'

229: Note: sect: account of 'Muck Lamberty' who in 1921 wearing a blue cape preached 'Glut ist Geist' - Ardour is the Spirit - in Thuringia. .. free exercise of.. sexual promiscuity..' [Muggeridge hints that he fell hard; no suggestion he feels the slightest regret]

234: [Illnesses attributed to formidable foreigners: syphilis or, because of Hitler's 'reputation for chastity', cancer, preferably of the throat]

235 & 241: Ernst Toller books burnt: suicide in New York; he was 'a member of the short lived communist government of Bavaria'

238: refugees in UK: 'when a hayfield is mown, rabbits collect in the last patch of standing grass'

239: anti-Semitism; Muggeridge describes the 'magnetic field' extending even here

241: Ludendorff opposition to Hitler described as more or less insane, with astrology etc, and futile.

253 ff: [Books about England; Priestley 'Rain Upon Godshill'/ films like 'Drifters' and 'Voice of Britain'/ earnest persons from LSE and depressed areas, housing-estates, malnutrition belts.. Juvenile crime.. prostitution.. birth-control clinics../ 'I Took Off My Tie' by Hugh Massingham /Orwell's books NOT mentioned

256: [Note: food, nutrition: story about 3500 calories proving too expensive; hasty revision down to 2,500; League of Nations; 'protective foods'; sevenpenny and fivepenny lunches 'with oatmeal and herrings for their chief ingredients'/ Then a bridge passage 257 about French Cabinet Ministers, into documenting our chaos, and hence to Mass Observation; implicit satire on limitations of questionnaire which Muggeridge isn't intelligent enough to follow through properly]

259: [Popularity of bogus statistics, like five-years plans.. 'never so extravagantly falsified.. The desire for what seemed most life like.. matched by a desire for what seemed most unlike.. like the two roads branching right and left at the foot of the Hill Difficulty.. Realism and Surrealism, the two roads might have been named. ..'

260: Finnegan's Wake and reviewers [with passage based on mathematics, which presumably Joyce and Muggeridge couldn't understand: 'The logos of somewome to that base anything.. sin.. with his cosin..']

260: '.. Jeans.. Hogben.. Einstein's Relativity theory was explained in terms which the meanest intelligence could grasp..'

261: [Planners: Muggeridge says 'plans were in the air' and thinks e.g. Keynes was a planner. '.. It was another South Sea Bubble.']

262: ['Inside stories'. '.. Mr Vernon Bartlett.. calm and sagacious. .. Madame Tabouis..' Muggeridge thinks Time specialised in intimate details of persons and happenings 'soon produced a London progeny; private sheets and news-letters multiplied.. the Week.. Commander King-Hall.. Mr John Gunther..' (Muggeridge seems to have thought 'Time' inspired 'The Week']

263-4: [American correspondents.. reckless.. 'their livelihood might have been endangered if they had allowed their sympathy with the victims of oppression to extend to American Negroes; .. they condemned British policy.. Perhaps it was fitting that the English should thus be dosed with the medicine they had formerly been lavish in dispensing. .. As invalids soon accumulate a collection etc etc so did contemporary ills leave their litter of books..'

266: inverted snobbishness examples, proletarians accepting well meaning worker-by-brain bourgeoisie; girls announcing 'sometimes in the presence of servants' they intended to work for the class war

272: Monarchs: Death of George V [in 1936]: 'Previous Hanoverians had often been universally execrated' [says Muggeridge; similar theme in 'Tread Softly..']: Geo I, Wm IV, Geo V, examples, the 'execrations' all taken from newspaper quotes, some of them second-hand, e.g. from a book on the monarchy by Kingsley Martin/ 273: Mrs Simpson's name in the Court Circular [Cp Private Eye jokes about criminals in the 'Court Circular'/ 'The English distributors of Time .. took the precaution of removing pages which dealt with the King and Mrs Simpson' - there's a more directly worded account by Cockburn of this - and note the general feeling, see e.g. Alistair Cooke, that the Americans were regarded with hostility by British upper classes for exporting this news story to England.]

284: [Hitler says he's a somnambulist - cp. Orwell on his being a sleepwalker. One wonders perhaps whether A J P Taylor took up this image in putting his view as Hitler as an opportunist with a belief in his star. This chapter about Germany: 'It was known that Germany was rearming..' Also Italy: adoption of the Passo Romano or goose-step, and acquiescence of Mussolini when Hitler marched into Austria. Also 278 ff appeasement of Italy when it sunk British ships, (Muggeridge naively seems to accept supposed British neutrality about Spanish Civil War) Chamberlain and Halifax etc]

287: [Note: model of power:] 'when a law abiding citizen.. with money.. robbers.. natural to.. ingratiate with least villainous looking..' and footnote with 'another tactic is to persuade himself that the robbers have other victims in view'; note: ingrained assumption that Britain is always law abiding, honest, generous to others, innocent etc

289: [Cliveden Set gets a mention]

290: [Hitler and Czechoslovakia; 292 ish suggestion Sudeten Germans should join Germany and enraged remarks, all more or less echoed serially by Muggeridge.]

294: Munich Conference arranged; Chamberlain announces this to Parliament expecting France to go to war over Sudetenland, and Britain to go to war for France. Uproar, triumph, etc. 294-298 or so turgid outpourings of Muggeridge oratory, switching from newspaper quotes to Biblical style generalities to personal comments and insults - politician with a big nose, academic is a liar -to sexual or animal metaphors on strength, and of course not answering the question of what ought to be done.

303-306 or so: [Describes in pessimistic oratorical prose how the Second World War appeared when it broke out as compared to what people thought it would be like; suggestion that horrors failed to materialise and that Muggeridge would have preferred it if they had. This of course is a purely English viewpoint; cp. A J P Taylor on the Polish experience, for example.]

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[4] 1967 MUGGERIDGE, MALCOLM: TREAD SOFTLY FOR YOU TREAD ON MY JOKES

A book club edition: 'Readers Union', founded 1937

These are newspaper articles, some merged from two, some edited for tense after subjects' deaths; all, irritatingly, undated, 'the output of forty years of assiduous journalism', which he's disinterred; average 6 or 7 pages with considerable padding. He considers his output exceeds the Bible and the Encyclopedia Britannica 'many times over'; I fear arithmetic isn't his strong point. But then again:-

Note: Interesting to speculate how laboured his writing is. His second sentence is: 'Let us suppose an average daily stint of round about one thousand words.' At say a couple of hundred words an hour this allows plenty of time for dips into reference books, dictionaries, books of foreign phrases, quotations from acceptable authors, etc.

See \notes\religion for him on tour in US to give flavour of his way of life and British attitudes

Concerns include sex [Puritanical repulsion e.g. dislike of 'pleasure', of contraception ('birth-pills', 'diaphragms'), and what he regards as pornography; also plenty of mention of homosexuality, where appropriate, not exactly in a condemnatory spirit, but condescendingly], Christianity [Christ produced as an example of goodness; presumption being this applies to organisations too; in the same way, gas chambers, the destruction of Dresden, Stalin, 'displaced persons' are produced out of a hat when it suits him. 161 shows his favouring of the Roman Catholic Church as 'far and away the strongest bastion of Christendom'] class [reiterates that the world that members of class X knew no longer exists, without evidence, of course] and power in the sense demanded by patriotism - see e.g. his section on Macmillan, and his sections passim on spying and on 'men of action' [e.g. description of granite-faced Soviet 'police'; naturally it doesn't occur to him to criticise, for example, British functionaries in India]; in addition I suppose one could say anything he's not used to - e.g. sunbathing and mass holidays and hire-purchase payments and the health service, though modern roads and cars for some reason don't seem to raise his ire, nor, for more easily grasped reasons, do modern newspapers and journals, even when they transmit complete lies, as in his 'St Eatherly' piece..
Unconcerns: [1] He has virtually no technical knowledge; hence there's never any discussion on (say) fusion vs fission, or whether dentistry has made progress, or whether vaccines spread disease after the first world war. He is purely a commentator [2] This lack of knowledge applies to social topics - proportional representation? International government? Foreign legal systems? - He appears to have not a clue [3] Since he has to amuse, he has a callous exterior which is unpleasing; now and then he finds a legitimate topic, eg the USSR and famine, but can't seem to find a style to express the horror of it - a huge famine is treated with some distaste just as for example sexy American students or silly youth groups are.

And the English language: two articles deal with India, with heavy emphasis on the Indian version of the English language; and many are book reviews, either of novels or of biography. He confidently assigns judgments: 'Cakes and Ale' better than anything Beerbohm wrote, and detestation of C P Snow and 'Snowmen' for example. And attaches labels: a mixed collection of contemporaries are called 'satirists' in a slack way.

And himself: we're continually told of his lower middle class start in life, of his teaching Indians English, of his evasively-depicted work in Intelligence during the war, his work on the Guardian and I think the Telegraph, and editing Punch

And politics; or rather people whom he knows who were more or less involved in political events: Churchill, the Webbs, Cockburn, de Gaulle. Note: example of incapacity to abstract: he has no conception of the idea that the First World War might have damaged Russia to the point at which men fight for bare necessities; he's content to weep crocodile tears. See for example England, Whose England? a sort of survey of 1914 to 1964, in which (cp Ustinov, say) he seems to have learnt nothing. Another example is his treatment of the BBC, and ITA, and of servile newspaper correspondents in Moscow; he knows, or vaguely feels, it's bad, but has nothing useful to say. He's also careless; e.g. on India-China dispute he's anti-China, but seems to know nothing of the facts ['.. all the fighting took place on Indian soil'], and e.g. he seems to think Wells' 'Mind at the End of its Tether' is to do with nuclear weapons. Instead of policy he substitutes description; and this has to be extreme to give the impression of colourful or dynamic writing. I think the word 'bizarre' occurs in almost every chapter, usually in reference to mannerisms, style of life, clothing [e.g. Evelyn Waugh's top hat at a funeral], some official thing ['the bizarre post of Director of the Spoken Word'] or of course sexual activity [e.g. dumpy Samuel Butler and friend visiting a prostitute alternately] Another word is 'literal': 'Mirabeau, with characteristic shrewdness his finger (in the most literal sense) on the point of all pornography.' However, it does work: like a situation comedy one is drawn in and absorbed for a while.

[2007 note: and decline of England, which he insists on - revealing the huge gap between pre-WW2 and post-WW2 assumptions about Britain; fertile ground for the growth of nonsense since it's so difficult to estimate power or influence or even wealth. Twilight... Macmillan exuded moth-ball flavour, Anthony Eden fatuous..]

Style: These pieces seem absolutely journalistic in every possible sense; but it's impossible to say whether Muggeridge fought against editors and so on, or whether, as seems likely, his sense of self-interest smoothly caused him to adopt the right methods along with word-counting. There isn't a single date anywhere in the essays, I think, apart from in the 20s and 30s. Pieces often have a discursive introduction which seems to use the rule-of-three principle; there's a personal mention of Muggeridge as playing important part with stuff on appearance, mannerisms etc to show he really was there, though some sounds like Aldous Huxley's remark on Strachey's Arnold; finally the book or essays etc are adverted to; then yet more discursive matter. Exaggerated descriptions are of course compulsory. Things which don't support his side are ignored. Another important aspect is not explaining things which in due course can be predicted to be not known to many people, i.e. assuming household-name attitude to e.g. Churchill's relatives, Hugh Kingsmill [who?], wartime incidents, what did the Burgess-Maclean 'row' actually involve?, and the activities, if any, which he carried out in intelligence. Curious lack of abstract thinking ability, as noted above, carries into his discussions; he seems to have no idea of the power of consumer demand, for example, treating sycophantic rubbish about Kennedy as though it had a serious function apart from money-making.
Strange Impressionist feel which I just can't pin down; see his pieces on Hugh Kingsmill, and the final piece Life and the Legend, where even after re-reading it's difficult to see exactly what reasons he has for saying the thing he does. Oddly, he's generally critical of the style of others - Trevor-Roper, Asa Briggs; he likes Alistair Cooke however - but shows a marked preference for Gibbon; this seems odd until you reflect that conceivably, because of Gibbon's inability [as I presume it to be without reading him] to criticise the Church, so perhaps Muggeridge imagines himself in the tradition of Gibbon.
I suspect his patchy education (obscure school; plus presumably a few years at Oxbridge - and that's that - as of course was common enough, before the mass production of MAs and PhDs) needed concealment and this may explain his quirky judgments - Randolph Churchill more interesting than Winston? Gandhi, Stalin, and de Gaulle as supreme 'men of action'? Respectable man who was a concealed sensualist interesting? He refers to Julien Benda and treason of clerks in the thirties, Hugh Thomas on Spanish Civil War, O Henry stories (p 248), volumes which he reviews, here; these seem to be his sources - newspapers' stashes of info, run of the mill books in English, and the circle of people he met or half-met who provide anecdotes. These include Prince Mirsky who converted to Leninism and returned to Moscow, later to 'disappear'; a chap from Salford and his family, who lived in a cellar and couldn't get away - the chap read an article by Shaw; a chap living in the country - presumably for economy, rather like Henry Williamson - married, but on journeying to London would met some woman or other for sex.

- CONTENTS:
1 INTRODUCTION ['Only the greatest bores like Walter Lippmann imagine that their offerings reach beyond the last edition. Let ridiculous dons - a Rowse, a Leavis [latter in fact never a 'don' I think] - persuade themselves that their convoluted sentences will continue to assail posterity..']
2 TREAD SOFTLY FOR YOU TREAD ON MY JOKES [1 Jan 1953: he becomes the eighth editor of Punch. What is humour? I idly asked myself..' Ends with routine remarks on TWTWTW and Private Eye]
3 MANY WINTERS AGO IN MOSCOW [Early 1930s: newspaper correspondent in Moscow. There was nothing to do and people trod soundlessly on snow. 'How marvellous the Russian revolution seemed when it happened! ..'] [2007: When I typed this I hadn't heard of his novel. It's not mentioned here very briefly - there's no account of who he modelled his characters on, though he says many were recognisable; or what actual evidence he had for famine... Disappointing cowardice really]
4 GHOSH! [British Raj perpetuated itself.. Victorian afterglow.. in the field of academic letters.. 42: various inept Indianisms and mixed metaphors on Dr Johnson, Charles Lamb, Beerbohm] [2007: "quite a clearing-house of contemporary culture", "A little overwhelming at first, in its magnitude and magnificence", "Cambridge took me by the throat..", "Dryden found English brick and left it marble" [taken from a Dowden volume, study in literature], "Montaigne began to take stock of himself and all human experience.", "the editor of Encounter was unaware that three writers.. wrote essays at all..", "he is made one with London...", "the dainty, fastidious handwriting.." And so on. Mugg could go on quoting for ever. This is the piece in which Mugg wonders if the odd sing song accent was caused by 41: missionaries being the first purveyors of English education in India.]
5 DOWN WITH SEX [In Racine, Wisconsin, on Sunday morning. Frank Harris, Fanny Hill, Playboy, 'really vicious stuff about flagellation, wife-changing, every sort of kinky practice and perversion.' Ellis, Lawrence, Wells, Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Reich with his orgone box. Kama Sutra, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Candy, The Tropic of Cancer. 'Never, it is safe to say, in the history of the world has a country been as sex-ridden as America is today.' 'Sexologists': Kinsey, Dr Masters]
6 THE LEGEND OF MAX [This turns out, after an immense prologue, to be a review of a biography by Lord David Cecil. At Rapallo; Muggeridge brings in Somerset Maugham, up the coast at Villa Mauresque, apparently because he lunched with him and found Maugham felt irritated at Beerbohm's penury and his own unpopularity with smart set. Beerbohm broadcast on the radio only. 'His.. gifts and charm.. much exaggerated by admirers who in reality were more attracted by the period flavour he conveyed..' 60-62: Miss Kahn puts him through hoops, then Miss Jungmann after looking after Gerhart Hauptmann. 63-65: Jewishness and homosexuality, from which he was 'in flight'; murmurings about the case of Oscar Wilde]
7 THE EYE-WITNESS FALLACY [Turns out to be twin review: They Saw It Happen compiled by Asa Briggs, Eye-Witness by John Fisher. '.. For one who, like myself.. professionally engaged.. in reporting.. compilations like these have a more than passing interest..' and goes on to describe bars, reporters, and stringers, though without any illuminating information. [Note: interesting technique of Muggeridge's is to cast aspersions (on people he doesn't like) without giving any evidence:] Rousseau's Confessions.. for the most part.. fabrications.. Harold Laski .. [was] one of the most elaborate and audacious liars I have ever known. .. George Orwell.. grotesque inaccuracies in what purport to be objective descriptions [M gives no supporting evidence].. Beatrice Webb's Journal.. As one who knew her, and was present at some of the occasions described.. I should be hesitant about thus accepting her testimony at face value. ..' Hypocrisy in Nuremburg trials ('.. for Western judges to sit side-by-side with Soviet ones, and convict Germans of using forced labour and partitioning Poland, was itself a monstrous crime against our civilisation..'), Edward Grey, Russell on books on Russia, Clydesiders not eating meat, cars in Russia thrown in] [2007: News Chronicle he claims printed an account of Goering's last words on being hanged! Geoffrey Dawson of The Times kept out anything displeasing to 'Nazi bosses'. Walter Duranty in Moscow must be surely someone appearing in 'Winter in Moscow' on collectivisation of agriculture. 72ish describes pressures on reporters behind the iron curtain, and in Washington, and in third world bars. Somewhere there's an expression resembling 'media whores' which I can't relocate.]
8 FORGOTTEN IN TRANQUILLITY ['The first school I went to was kept by a Miss Monday.. in 1910.. in Sanderstead.. in process of being absorbed in.. Croydon..' Anecdotes about Inspector of Schools etc. He prefers this to e.g. Eton, which seems to make a lifetime impression on its pupils - or whatever they call them.]
9 I LIKE DWIGHT [About Dwight Macdonald. (NB: Chomsky approved of this man) 'His one-man magazine, Politics, used to delight me when I was fortunate enough to lay hands on a copy..' Seems to have been an I F Stone type; except that he wrote for the New Yorker with 'those [unnerving] ads about men of distinction, Rolls-Royces and Commander Whitehead'. When editor of Punch, M called on William Shawm, editor of New Yorker. Tom Wolfe mentioned. Webster's Third 'torn apart'; analysis of reviews of Colin Wilson's The Outsider. Dwight had a 'spell in Europe'. 1930s; Fortune; Masscult & Midcult; James Agee 'Death in the Family'; 'Amateur Journalism' on Listener, Observer, Spectator; E M Forster, homosexual dons in Alps; Finnegans Wake; Hemingway - M lists Dwight's views with approval for each.]
10 THE WODEHOUSE AFFAIR [P G Wodehouse 'wartime disgrace'; 'Nothing enrages people more.. than unprofitable adulation. .. most sympathetic to.. Duke of Windsor.. most venomous..; strongest supporters.. appeasing Hitler became the most inveterate anti-Germans.. Muggeridge seems to have interviewed him in 1944 as 'liaison officer with the French Services Speciaux'; France at Liberation; Wodehouse in Paris, at the Bristol Hotel; William Joyce hanged etc; told story after Germans in Le Touquet, and Pétain surrender; news of England [i.e. clubs, A A Milne, books. M breaks news of stepdaughter's death; "I thought she was immortal." His wife Ethel; Duff Cooper, British Ambassador in Paris, and Minister of Information at some time, and Waugh 'tribute'] [2007 I hadn't realised Wodehouse was freed on American representations, before US was in the war; in any case such people were released at 60. Mugg often visited Wodehouse and Ethel in New York after the war. With Muggeridge's writing style it's hard to unpick what actually happened. At any rate it seems agreed he made no traitorous comments in his broadcasts.]
11 CHRIST! [Lord Beaverbrook (at the time of M's piece dead) apparently wrote 'The Divine Propagandist'; Beaverbrook newspapers 'strong strain of religiosity in the proprietorial directives.. log-rolling.. endless reiteration of some lunatic proposition.. scraps of scripture..' 'During his lifetime he would not, perhaps, have rated the attention of William Hickey' characteristic comment; Observer, Daily Express mentioned; Life after death headline in the Evening Standard]
12 IN DEFENCE OF RANDOLPH CHURCHILL [In defence of..! Minor figures: Cp Cyrano de Bergerac, Sir Harold Nicolson shows Benjamin Constant more interesting than Napoleon etc. He seems to have achieved fame by not being adopted as a Conservative candidate, and by writing journalism. After four pages we find a reference to a fragment of autobiography, 'Twenty-one Years'. Apparently his father was a close friend of F E Smith, and plied Randolph with verbal wit etc etc; or something]
13 THE LOVED ONE [Debunking chapter on J F Kennedy (and the Kennedys) and the cult that grew - or was constructed - around him. Muggeridge professes himself amazed and bemused. He includes Arthur Schlesinger of 'The Age of Jackson' as one of the hacks. 'Young John Kennedy' by Gene Schoor, and 'The Kennedy Wit' are two works quoted from. J F K wrote a 'Study on the Munich Pact.. published as Why England Slept.' 'Kennedy Without Tears, the Man Beneath the Myth' by Tom Wicker of New York Times/ 'The Founding Father: the Story of Joseph P Kennedy' by R J Whalen, 'now an associate editor of Fortune'/ 120: Joe McCarthy and Joe Kennedy. 'A Day in the Life of President Kennedy' by Jim Bishop. 122: Theodore H White 'The Making of the President 1960'. Theodore C Sorensen and A Schlesinger Jr 'plaster pyramids', in Look and Life and Observer, Sunday Times; followed by lots about these two figures - one who worked with Kennedy, the other in 1947 'one of the sharpest minds' etc] [Added 2007: Joseph Kennedy is mentioned occasionally as (1) heartlessly chucking out people unable to pay mortgages in the 1930s (2) in I think 'Rich Dad' as ?chairing SEC and being instrumental in passing laws benefitting the rich. (3) Here, Muggeridge on him financing kids and getting three elected. NB strikes me that the adulation for Tony Blair is similar; as is also the lack of knowledge displayed by journalists]
14 SENATOR MCCARTHY MCCARTHYISED, OR THE BITER BIT [Jocular 'transcript' of Congressional investigating committee showing McCarthy employed ex-communists, helped 'communist cause' etc etc]
15 MY FAIR GENTLEMAN [F J Stopp's study of Evelyn Waugh with aside on Cecil Beaton, who was beaten up by Waugh at school - born in Golders Green. 'Brideshead Revisited' sold 700,000 in USA, like 'My Fair Lady' with the sexes reversed, Muggeridge suggests, I think. Much of this piece is concerned with Waugh's presumed class feelings [e.g. comparison with Orwell, Waugh feeling piling plates to be 'common', Orwell that saloon bar drinking is unproletarian] as the son of a publisher. Muggeridge condescendingly adds he's one of the few masters of prose etc etc. 137: Royal Marine Commandos in North Africa; Blues (Royal Horse Guards); leave of absence to write Brideshead Revisited/ News of his sudden death]
16 WAYLANDING [Review of a book on sex by someone, a Labour peer, apparently, never appointed by Harold Wilson, called Wayland Young. 'Eros Denied'. (Presumably about censorship, as M says Young also wrote on 'defence matters' and Profumo, and M denies he can find a theme in the book). M says 'he labours under a sense of righteous indignation' that out-of-the-way pornography should be denied to the common people/ Aside on prostitute Muggeridge knew for fucking purposes, the worst clients being clergymen etc, or perhaps Muggeridge? [144: '.. A prostitute, D, whom I got to know well for Waylanding (not documentary, purposes) told me etc' is the passage, punctuation included] Last paragraph typical denunciation of erotic paradise]
17 BORING FOR ENGLAND [(see also chap 20 on Macmillan) Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who wrote his memoirs after being kicked upstairs as Lord Avon. 'Leadership is always apt, even under universal suffrage. .. Anthony Eden.. eminently suitable.. somehow seedy good looks and attire.. tedious, serious Etonian, on whose lips were the last dying echoes of the nineteenth century concept of progress without tears, should have had his moment in the middle of the turbulent and cruel twentieth century.. the simple fact is that nothing in Eden invited either admiration or abhorrence. He was just empty of content, like.. television appearances.. flow of banalities .. manner of an ex-officer trying to sell one a fire extinguisher at the front door.. It was the same with Ramsay MacDonald during the second Labour Government. .."large following in the country,".. "spoke with authority in the counsels of the nations," and so on.. great deal in common.. small but significant detail of referring to us, the public, as "my friends".. roles the same, though in reverse; MacDonald's .. to convince the .. powerful middle and upper classes that they had nothing to fear.. and Eden's to convince the .. lower classes that a Conservative prime minister is really on their side. .. cannot but give a touch of bizarrerie..' 150: 'ludicrous Suez operation.. extinguishing for ever his country's Great Power pretensions. [M says Churchill had contempt for him, and hence promoted him, leaving Eden burning with sense of wanting to prove himself a man of action] .. Hitler had gone, but there was still Nasser. .. memoirs.. bulky and weighty tomes.. weird fascination.. sentences like: "The course taken by the German government in unilaterally repudiating obligations into which they have freely entered, and in simultaneously acting as if they did not exist, both complicates and exaggerates the international situation."'
Note: Muggeridge's insignia for brilliant career: '.. every promise of a brilliant career.. distinguished record in the 1914-18 war, a first at Oxford in Oriental languages, impeccable family antecedents, an elegant appearance and an earnest disposition..'
1930s Foreign Office crises and conferences etc, League of Nations etc; 'If he had been able to exercise full authority in the shaping of foreign policy, he might well have made a better job of it. He could scarcely have a worse.'
18 AN EVENING WITH BODGIES AND WIDGIES IN MELBOURNE [Similar vein to people who wrote about Mods and Rockers, or Teddy Boys; decline of civilization idea, rather than phenomenon of mild interest. 154: 'Their clothing is lurid and basically American - long jackets almost to their knees, jeans or narrow trousers, brightly coloured socks.' 155: 'the insistent Negro rhythm got going..' 156: 'Thomas Mann says.. in a disintegrating civilisation, there are only two possible reactions - that of the saint and that of the gangster. The bodgies have chosen the latter.' (These are people of between sixteen and nineteen]
19 BACKWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS! ['Some future historian, I suppose, will one day survey this curious time of ours.. ironic detachment of a Gibbon..' Then goes on with the chapter such a person would devote to the Christian churches in the mid-twentieth centuries. Seems mainly to be against modernities, though he can't be very intelligent about this; e.g. 'with crazy gallantry they tried to defend the Book of Genesis against Darwin's panzers; and goes on to talk about things like the Health Service and Third Programme and sex ['.. controversial subject of birth-control I find its attitude [Cath church] more convincing than the breast-beating among its opponents over the woes of excessive child-bearing. Far deeper and more ignominious suffering, in my experience, comes of sterility.']
20 ENGLAND, WHOSE ENGLAND? [(See also chap 17 on Eden, though this chapter, which appears to be starting about Macmillan, veers off to consider post-first-world war in journalist's terms) 'Macmillan seemed.. to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be confuting. He exuded a flavour of moth-balls. .. decomposing visage.. our leaders.. represent us all too exactly. The melancholy tale.. from Lloyd George to Baldwin, through Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain, to Attlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Wilson, provides a perfect image of our fate. No one is miscast. Each left the country appreciably poorer and weaker, both spiritually and materially, than when he took over, giving an extra impetus to the Gadarene rush already under way.' [M. seems to think Macmillan 'represents us exactly'] Lots of description of his 'flavour', e.g. in Kiev with Khrushchev, with a crowd of government officials and plain-clothes police in issue suitings. With Selwyn Lloyd as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza./ Survey of England since outbreak of 1914-1918 war: 'vivid recollection of going to Brixton after the first Zeppelin raid..' then Armistice Day; 166: '.. the promises have been all too well kept. .. housing estates.. As for making the world safe for democracy, when has it ever been safer? .. India.. U.S.S.R. .. U.S.A. 167: 1918 'the same war going on still.. Woodrow Wilson etc.. Manchuria.. Abyssinia.. August 1939.. Graves, Hemingway, Aldington; poems, Journey's End, trenchcoats, Herbert Read, Lawrence of Arabia and all his lies.. clergymen of the war, Woodbine Willie, Tubby Clayton, Dick Shepherd.. All Quiet on the Western Front, Old Contemptibles and Old Bill.. [Every single item is English; nothing French, German, American, Indian]/ 168: World War 2; again Churchill, Four Freedoms, Harry S Truman and Clement Attlee and atomic bombs.]
21 WHERE THE VIADUCT ENDS [Samuel Butler: M had written a life 'about thirty years ago' and there's 'Festing Jones's monumental biography' and 'Butler's private account of his relations with his friend Pauli'/ new edition edited by Prof Howard of Rutgers./ M says 'During his lifetime, B's books, apart from Erewhon, made practically no public impact'.. he paid for their publication 'out of his own pocket'. .. after his death.. The Way of All Flesh was an immediate success..' 172: 'Butler's correspondence with his father consists largely of financial wranglings. The Canon's greatest offence in his son's eyes was to go on living, thereby selfishly delaying the blessed moment when Butler would inherit. ... [the Canon] was a heavy-jowled, portentous old fellow, whose inherited physical characteristics .. Butler found little to his taste.' 175: Towneley.. popular.. big.. very handsome.. lively and agreeable countenance etc. M considers this must have been Pauli. 174-5 has amusing account of Pauli bequeathing £8000 to his mistress, and his admirers meeting up at his funeral; Pauli also arranged 'for the transfer of Cleopatra's Needle to London'. 173: 'Canon Butler.. wanted Butler to earn a living, which he resolutely refused ever to do.' How true all this is I can't begin to guess: Harvey says Butler was a successful sheep-breeder; Ernest Pontifex is supposed to cut a striking figure when he eventually has enough money to buy new clothes; and 175: 'a French lady in Handel Street' provided Butler with sex. The homosexual stuff, with Hans Faesch, M's implication that the Alps were an earlier version of Morocco, with compliant homosexual peasant men, are all hard to square up with other scraps of information.
Poor Muggeridge doesn't or can't mention any of Butler's critiques of Christian belief, or of clerical lifestyle, which loom so large; but he does say 173: 'It became as fashionable to detest parents as formerly it had been to revere them.']
22 THE ECONOMICS OF SUNSHINE [Quite a convincing description of the Cote d'Azur, including the name of the man who thus Christened it [Stephen Liégard], an unflattering description of it "entre une montagne sans humus at une mer sans poisson", and sketches of types who went there and ponce types who profited: outline of pre-first war with Victoria, Ruhl's, Negresco, Hotel de Paris, inter war with Aga Khan and apparently the revision of the summer season [which the locals, like Indian natives, had to endure] now more profitable than winter and bourgeoisie arrival in a big way, second war ['1939-45.. disaster.. local population .. nearly a million - left to starve on olives, wine and fruit.. futile American landing in southern France caused.. unnecessary damage'], and post-war experiences, including les campers, plane after plane disgorging passengers and the luxury hotels in the doldrums, 'bespoke tailoring establishments in an era of mass-produced clothing']
23 THE CASE OF KIM PHILBY [Muggeridge knew him. How well? Well enough presumably to compose this insubstantial piece: 1942 'made the acquaintance of..'/ MI6 in wartime/ 'attractive, energetic man with a painful stutter'/ '..naivete .. in MI6 circles.. journalistic achievements grotesquely exaggerated'/ 'We passed many pleasant hour together.'/ 'He never spoke about his father, the Arabist, St John Philby.. Bedouin dress.. even more bogus counterpart, T E Lawrence'/ I was sent abroad, first to East Africa/ '.. argument.. about taking advantage of the collapse of Italy to advance into the Balkans and get to Vienna, Budapest and Prague before the Red Army.. Kim took a contrary view, but on military.. grounds/ 'feeling.. [not] .. a Soviet-addict.. MI6.. in the various Resistance Movements.. tended to favour the Communists.. French and Italian Communists got the money and arms which enabled them to establish themselves so strongly after the war, not from Stalin, but from Anglo-American secret Intelligence sources. .. Mikhailovitch, conservative and pro-western.. got short shrift.. Tito.. enemies were obligingly sent back home to be shot.. fatuous credulity of Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, and the supine obsequiousness .. towards Stalin was to seem a kind of traitor. .. same attitude.. in 1943.. led some fifteen London publishers to turn down.. Animal Farm..'/ Spectator on 'Marxist dialectics and their application to Soviet foreign policy', augmented by a paper 'by an amiable don, Carew-Hunt'/ In Paris: '.. have a look at the Soviet Embassy, newly-installed in the Rue de Grenelle'/ 'We defeated the Abwehr.. learned.. Admiral Canaris had been on our side..'/ '.. trying to save a few of the more innocent French collaborators.. wrath.. furious.. deriving from a sense of their own guilt'/ 'future Namier.. rewarding study in a careful analysis of those who were taken on in the Secret Service and those who we rejected at the end of the war. .. A ruling class on the run.. is capable of every fatuity'/ Kim in Turkey, then Washington 'link between British and American Secret Intelligence'/ Philby's second wife died/ involvement due to financial pressures?/ 187 ff: 'Burgess-Maclean row' as a result of which it's explained 'Kim was guilty of an indiscretion'/ 'As it happened, I failed to get Kim a job'/ '.. he was actually to work again for MI6 in the Middle East. This truly astonishing fact only came to light later.'/ '.. disband the whole show, fumigate its premises..']
24 MY LIFE WITH THE B.B.C. [Note: Hunter in his biog of Muggeridge says in 1957 the BBC told him he#d mnever broadcast again - after an anti-monarch event] [Asa Briggs 'The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom'.. scarcely meets the bill'/ John (now Lord) Reith [197: autobiography 'Into the Wind']/ Sir William Haley - 'like the Indian Civil Service taking over the heritage of Clive and Warren Hastings.'/ succeeded by 'a talented staff officer, Sir William Jacob, skilled in making appreciations and reducing even the wild strategic notions of Sir Winston Churchill to numbered paragraphs of flat.. prose.'/ Sir Hugh Greene, the first Director-General to be chosen from within... He reigns still/ 'The Corporation disposed of enormous patronage, in dispensing which it could be quite arbitrary. There was no obligation to justify, or even to explain, its exclusions, preferences, and imperfect sympathies. .. queer kind of choking misery.. Orwell and idea for 1984'/ Far eastern department's panels/ Billy Graham/ man called Cecil McGivern 'who.. managed to remain a whole man in the sunless land of the BBC hierarchy'/ Alexander Cadogan at the BBC, Ivone Kirkpatrick at ITA, both sometime permanent Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office.'/ Queen 'row.. My agent just received a curt intimation that my contract would not be renewed.'/ etc/ 'one of the great comic subjects of our time.. replaced the dear old Church of England..'] [2007 Muggeridge worked there for some time - an interviewer? - but was dropped not after backing commercial TV, but after references to the Monarchy. He seems to know nothing of the way the BBC was/is governed - there must be some sort of rule book or legal framework; disappointingly Muggeridge is weak on this point - perhaps it's because there are no single individuals on whom blame can be fixed, unlike newspaper proprietors.]
25 FRANK HARRIS: HIS LIFE AND LIES ['My Life and Loves' 'a valuable literary property some three decades after it was written.'/ First volume printed in Germany.. ostensibly for private circulation only/ 'his last years in Nice increasingly penurious, and in the end he was literally on the run, pursued by irate creditors from furnished lodging to furnished lodging.'/ 'a Public Prosecutor's Special on open display.'/ Cimiez, above Nice, rented flat/ Description which may or may not be true, of Harris' appearance/ Harris a liar, embellishing stories 'apart from difficulties over time and place', says Muggeridge, who adds that Harris' daughter told him that 'there was nothing on earth which so scared the daylights out of Frankie as a truly passionate woman.' - How would she know?/ ends with account of Hugh Kingsmill and Harris 'visiting' a Paris brothel together.] [2007 Much of the book is in fact very good, the non-sex parts. NB Muggeridge is highly concenred with manners and appearance, making fun of Harris's supposed tininess, and clothes which he claims looked absurd despite being proper.]
26 WHAT PRICE GLORY? [Gandhi, Stalin, and de Gaulle as 'the three most outstanding men of action of our time']
27 PUBLIC THOUGHTS ON A SECRET SERVICE [Ten pages of not much/ 213: '.. in their own estimation, the central character in a Kiplingesque thriller... This Intelligence folklore used to have a strong Indian flavour. MI5.. and to a lesser extent MI6, were, before the war, largely recruited from retired Indian police and political intelligence officers. They alone had the requisite experience. ..' /216: '.. oddities, misfits and delinquents; all the dons, unfrocked clergymen and schoolmasters.. The basic qualification is linguistic, which, in England especially, is liable to produce almost anyone, from a Baghdad carpet-seller to a professor of Sanskrit. In MI6 these bizarre wartime reinforcements were interspersed with pre-war Secret Service professionals, now, alas, a vanishing race - men with monocles and sometimes spats, who used several aliases, and had exotic contacts all over the place. .. how delightful it must have been to live.. in a foreign capital, with nothing much to do except arrange to collect the contents of ministerial wastepaper baskets, or cultivate ministerial mistresses, at the expense of H.M.G., of course. .. fairly senior officers from all three Services. I.. can only imagine that when, for instance, a Guards officer displayed an interest in.. interior decoration or a naval captain was seen reading Great Expectations, a convenient way out of the consequent dilemma was to wish him on the Secret Service. ..'/ 220: 'The cost of the Secret Service has mounted even more astronomically than that of other government departments. It has the advantage of not having to account to Parliament for its expenditure..'/ 220: '.. the extraordinary thing is.. that any [spies] are ever caught. Just keeping someone under surveillance is extremely difficult, and costly in time and trouble. ..']
28 SONS AND LOVERS RE-READ ['.. freshness, a kind of inward glow.. seemed uniquely alive'/ '.. his best book.. splendidly vivid descriptions of life in a miner's household.. to the incoherence and pretentious inanities of Apocalypse (so reminiscent of Mein Kampf)/ [he] was always writing about himself.. slim, forceful, withdrawn man, to women eerie but irresistible, is bound to make his appearance/ '.. become irretrievably foolish when Lawrence gets on to the sex life of his hero, Paul Morel.'/ 'obsession with sex as.. end in itself.. fornication frequent, but pregnancy rare' Lady Chatterley's Lover and 'hyacinth bell in his navel' with extract from Kingsmill on women film stars/ 'Like Dostoievsky.. a prophetic quality.. it popularises and projects contemporary charlatanry.. Freud and Marx' (though Muggeridge confusingly says that Lawrence holds a mirror up to nature, only there is but one face - his/ Obsession with class: 'common' and 'mater' and passage of conversation of hero with his mother on ideas from the middle classes, life from the 'common people'. 'Lawrence did, of course, marry a "lady.. daughter of Baron von Richtofen/ Lady Chatterley extract: Mellors, the gamekeeper, 'had been an officer in the war and.. could speak like the BBC'/ 227: Mugg suggests this is the 'only begetter' of men from the north who come south to fuck and write plays and novels about working-class life/ 228: 'For Lawrence.. only solution [is] to go somewhere else in the vague expectation that things will be different there. They are all ceaselessly on the move..'/ What a raw deal Paul's father had.. when genteel visitors came he was expected to keep out of the sitting-room. .. image of the actual attitude of well-wishers and improvers of the proletariat to actual proletarians.'/ 'It is the least literary of novels.. naivities.. Nothing can be more delightful than Paul Morel's early visits to Miriam's farm. .. moving.. etc']
29 TWILIGHT OF GREATNESS [Last years of Churchill: Riviera arrival, Onassis' yacht, Maria Callas, '.. preside over the dissolution of the Empire...', his constitution, in the House of Commons as a kind of totem, Mr Emery Reeves his literary agent [NB: this was years before it was revealed on TV in particular that most of 'his' writings had been ghosted; he'd read the stuff, add his own touches, and turn it into English, one of the hacks explained) in what was Mlle Chanel's house/ 235: Simple expedient of living a long time to ensure popularity, he says, stupidly, as of course Churchill was popular during the war. He instances Victoria, detested, he says, in the earlier years of her reign; 'unpleasing Germanic old lady', says Mugg./ 'Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit': Napoleon, Lloyd George, Mosley instanced, in true rule-of-3 style./ 239: His writings: '.. I am not so sure.. rhetorical style..'/ 240: Obsequies at his funeral quoted; rather foolish rhetoric/ 'in 1924, little Indian boys were taught.. that their country was torn with conflicts and prostrate until the English landed..']
30 THE PASSION OF ST EATHERLY [Note: newspaper lies: (Fort Worth paper; Newsweek; NBC 'big story') Review of William Bradford Huie 'The Hiroshima Pilot', about Major Claude Eatherly of the USAF who apparently posed falsely as dropper of atom bomb, with guilt feelings, who turned to crime; much of this revealed apparently to be false/ O Henry story about two con-men who refuse to sell gold bricks to farmers 'compared with the fine flower of Western intelligentsia, farmers are a hard sell.'/ Mugg seems indifferent to press lying; he finds articles about sex for example less pleasant]
NB Kurzman's book on the two atom bombs doesn't have Eatherly in its index. [2007: Tedious close reading: Robert Jungk's introduction to a volume of letters between Eatherly and Dr Gunther Anders, describes how Eatherly commanded the Hiroshima raid, then went to look, was considered battle fatigued, went to a clinic 'and was discharged' etc; was to be feted in Texas home town as a much decorated hero; unable to face this; joined Israeli air force. Forged a cheque etc. Discharged - I'm unsure what from - given a small pension, subsequently doubled. Mugg imaginatively compares synoptic and apocryphal, standard version, tablets of Moses, textual critics etc - or I suppose unimaginatively as of course Muggeridge must have been well acquainted with all this.
Huie looked at his record and found he'd never fired a shot during the war, 'seemed little interested in the war and its larger purpose', etc. He had reported on the weather in the Hiroshima area however before the raid. Petty crime/ drunkenness/ mental hospital at Waco/ divorce.
Reporter on Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote initial story. Then embellished - Newsweek, Parade. Film script of unmade film. Psychiatrists (sic) embellished the story with atonement idea. (All these events are undated - I presume Mugg simply quotes). Dawned on Eatherly he could make money. All he had to do was go along with psychological version.
Why the USAF didn't correct the exaggerations isn't stated.
For some reason Mugg thinks the story shows modern man will believe in anything.]
31 INDIA REVISITED [M went in 1924 to Travancore (now Kerala) college, 'filled.. with inflamed dreams of Byron at Missolonghi, not to mention Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk' and says he wore Indian dress/ 1934 Calcutta/ 1964 Delhi and Simla to be received by and interview Nehru who he says had a 'straddled position'. Ends on Simla: 'a truly English production..']
32 HUGH KINGSMILL LUNN [Related to a travel agent firm which exists in 1992 as Lunn Poly; this seems to be a review of a biography by Michael Holroyd. Kingsmill's books, no titles given, are 'all out of print'. '.. the only human being I have ever known in whose company I never suffered one moment of boredom'. Oh; later we come to titles: 'The Fall', 'The Poisoned Crown', both novels. 267: his father, Sir Henry Lunn: 'began as a Methodist missionary in India; then, as a result of organising a religious conference at Mürren, drifted into the travel business..'/ 270: I am constantly reminded of him since..]
33 THE FABIANS [Review of 'Story of Fabian Socialism' by Margaret Cole. Mugg's family of course met them before they were famous. 274 on power, e.g. 'This unquestioned acceptance of the validity of power was.. the Founding Fabians' basic fallacy. ..'/ 275 turns into another review, 'this Little Band of Prophets' by Anne Freemantle, almost all personal stuff if Muggeridge can be relied on] NB M says in Moscow piece that the Fabians started off bitterly hostile to the USSR
34 THE QUEEN AND I [A scribbled note says: 'Published first in 1961 Encounter. [A notorious CIA outlet - RW]. Some discussion and correspondence followed. (I found in Nairn's 'Enchanted Glass..' notes, Henry Fairlie, 'On the Monarchy: a reply to Malcolm Muggeridge' in Encounter Vol 17, Oct 1961)' Muggeridge once wrote a piece about the Royal Family which 'aroused controversy and abuse', he says. These are his reflections, including remarks on insulting letters and phone-calls he received from the middle classes. He seems to have said the Monarchy is comical: 'with all the appurtenances of supreme authority, as crown, throne, regal address, the Monarch has come to exercise none. ... There is no Empire, but only a holding company - the Commonwealth - set up to dispose of its dwindling residual assets, on whose managerial board the Queen does not sit, though she has inherited a sizeable block of non-voting shares.']
35 OH NO, LORD SNOW [Review, sort of, of 'Corridors of Power'. Muggeridge dislikes ambitious people who want fame and wealth, and thus dislikes Snow. He produces just one sample objection, a quote about gossip drifting out of clubs and into the London streets. He thinks power is to the collectivity what sex is to the individual, or some such formula, and that Snow, with his face pressed to the window, retails what he sees to those who can't get near the window - e.g. Russians, who we're told buy, or get, his books in huge quantities.]
36 FANNY OVER THE COUNTER [Another anti-sex piece, on Fanny Hill - when he wrote such books had become readily available for the first time. Poor Cleland got 20 guineas, [a 'guinea' is one pound, plus one shilling - RW] the publisher £10,000 says MM]
37 CONFESSIONS OF AN EGGHEAD [2007: basically about disappointment - Wilson and Versailles, Germans, French Army, Spanish Civil War; everyone got these things wrong. Liberalism (he has no idea about e.g. Manchester school) cannot work as it means everyone being nice, whereas everyone wants to get a bit richer. Einstein was a rum-looking egghead. Doctor Johnson had odd ideas; Hazlitt liked Napoleon. That's about it - he says nothing much about himself (he treats his journalistic stuff with some apparent contempt) - beyond the titles' implication that, yes, he is a thinker.]
38 BRENDAN BEHAN AT LIME GROVE [Short piece largely on BBC]
39 A HERO OF OUR TIME [Claud Cockburn - includes CC in hospital reading Harnack 'History of Dogma' in 9 volumes. "A great book makes the mind bounce", or something.]
40 LIFE AND THE LEGEND [Overwrought fine-writing piece on publicity and the selection of names from the vast masses]