Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  But this was in fact an unlikely ending for a notorious libertine; for most of his life it was the world of the flesh that Muggeridge inhabited, and in which he dazzled. The son of a socialist factory clerk in a London suburb, Malcolm Muggeridge was a brilliant student at Cambridge who developed by his late twenties into a formidable writer and commentator of sharp intelligence, admirable originality (“never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream,” he once remarked), and coruscating wit (Prime Minister Anthony Eden “was not only a bore, he bored for England”). Muggeridge wrote plays, published novels, and reported on pretty much every event of worldwide importance from the 1930s to the 1970s. He did so, of course, in print, his byline appearing in virtually every English newspaper we have ever heard of in India, from the Guardian and the New Statesman to the Listener and Punch (which he edited for five years). But he was also a famous radio broadcaster on the BBC from the 1940s, and an early television celebrity, so famous in Britain that Madame Tussaud's immortalized him in wax in 1968 alongside such other cultural icons of the day as Elizabeth Taylor and the Beatles.

  Muggeridge also produced a remarkable amount of personal reflection, scribbling frank and perceptive dissections of his contemporaries into his diaries (for the delectation thereafter of a wide readership), and authoring two volumes of memoirs with the delicious title Chronicles of Wasted Time. Much of Muggeridge's appeal, it must be said, lay in his irreverence. Visiting Tokyo after World War II, he attended a public appearance by Emperor Hirohito and described him as a “nervous, shy, stuttering, pathetic figure, formerly god.” He began an interview with Salvador Dalí not with some pretentious question about modern art but by asking what happened to the painter's famous upwardly pointed mustaches at night (“they droop,” Dalí replied). Muggeridge was so contemptuous of the soap-opera conduct of the British royal family in the 1950s that the BBC briefly exiled him from the ether (he was too popular for them to banish him altogether). This was in reaction to the relatively decorous affair between Princess Margaret and the gentlemanly Group Captain Peter Townsend; one shudders to think what Muggeridge would have made of Princess Di and Fergie.

  But if he was famously contrarian, it was in the service of a larger cause — the preservation of a society in which “everything should be subject to criticism,” authority was always suspect, and conformism was to be avoided. Though brought up as a socialist, and married to the niece of the famous Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Muggeridge was wary of the socialists’ starry-eyed idealism, and fierce in his denunciations of Stalinism. Reporting from Moscow, he was amongst the first to broadcast exposés of Soviet tyranny, at a time when the Communist experiment was still idealized by the Left; and he was equally early to denounce Fascism and Nazism in his journalism from Berlin. Within a decade of World War II he was scathing about the dangers of liberalism, calling it “the destructive force of the age” because it assumed a willingness on the part of individuals to live amicably “seeking one another's good” — a “fantasy” that “in human terms, cannot be.” Hence Muggeridge on the welfare state: “a kind of zoo which provides its inmates with ease and comfort and unfits them for life in their natural habitat.”

  It is clearly a long way from such robustly individualist views to the softly glowing halo Muggeridge placed on Mother Teresa. A chain-smoking, hard-drinking philanderer who was notorious for his advances to every passing woman (and whose own wife matched him in the frequency and variety of her adulteries), Muggeridge seems an unlikely convert to religious faith, let alone one as rigorous and doctrinaire as Catholicism. “His enemies, and even his friends,” according to the critic Roger Kimball, “saw in him the aging reprobate who, stymied by flagging appetite, rails against the sins of his youth and cravenly turns to religion.” Many would prefer to remember the Muggeridge who, when told on TV by the preacher Billy Graham that only God could answer one of his questions, responded tartly: “And we haven't got Him in the studio — or,” he added, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, “have we?”

  Malcolm Muggeridge is largely forgotten today, but his life is not his only legacy. “From earliest childhood,” Muggeridge once recalled, “it always seemed to me that the only thing worth doing in life was to write.” What words will endure no writer can know, but for those of us who have to struggle to find the time to write, that motto remains an inspiration.

  9

  Blood and Bombast:

  Winston Churchill

  IT IS POSSIBLE, I HAVE RECENTLY DISCOVERED, to admire a biographer even when one dislikes the subject of an admiring biography. Having met and spoken with Roy Jenkins, the octogenarian parliamentarian best known in India for splitting the British Labour Party in the 1970s in the name of social democracy, I feel doubly admiring of his massive, 1002-page biography of that overweening imperialist, Winston Churchill.

  Jenkins, an active Liberal Democratic peer in the House of Lords until his death in 2003, was unusually well qualified to write a biography of Winston Churchill. Both were politicians whose convictions triumphed over party loyalty; both dedicated their remarkable intellects to a combination of politics and literature; both earned superb reputations as parliamentarians, leavened by a well-advertised fondness for the good life (burgundy was to Jenkins what champagne and brandy were for Churchill); and both served the crown as home secretary and as chancellor of the exchequer. That Churchill was on the right of British politics and Jenkins on the left does not seem to have impeded the biographer's enthusiasm, though Jenkins takes care to construct a case that Churchill was no mere aristocratic conservative: he “was far too many-faceted, idiosyncratic and unpredictable a character to allow himself to be imprisoned by the circumstances of his birth. His devotion to his career [was]… far stronger than any class or tribal loyalty.”

  Both also, it must be said, have a remarkable gift for words, and the biographer's style is fully worthy of his famous subject. Jenkins first, since we have all heard much more of Churchill: on Churchill's father, Randolph, he writes, “He had the gift of insolence, which can be defined as the ability to think up memorably amusing phrases and the nerve to deliver them without fear.” Jenkins is not much kinder to Winston's other parent, his notoriously promiscuous American mother, Jennie: “George Moore, the Anglo-Irish novelist, said she had 200 lovers, but apart from anything else the number is suspiciously round.”

  This tone of learned but irreverent wit is undoubtedly in keeping with his subject, for few historical figures have been as defined by their use of language as Winston Churchill. Churchill's reputation as what Harold Evans has called “the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization” rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric during World War II. Churchill had nothing to offer but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” And, of course, an exceptional talent for a fine phrase. “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end…. We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets…. We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as “sublime nonsense.”) Churchill never flinched from bombast: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” Such extravagant oratory helped steel the British at a time of great adversity, but its effect was only of the moment. Yet Churchill believed that “words are the only things which last forever.” The hagiology from which he has benefited in the last fifty years suggests that he may well have been right.

  And what words they were! “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us…. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” That victory, as Charmley has pointed out, result
ed in the dissolution of the British Empire and, more immediately, in Churchill's own defenestration by the war-weary British electorate in the elections of 1945. But Churchill cheerfully said that history would judge him kindly because he intended to write it himself. (The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on the war led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to give him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill's self-justifying embellishments.)

  To be fair to Jenkins, his authoritatively researched, marvelously written tome goes well beyond the words to paint an inspired portrait of the man who straddled the great events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here is Churchill the cavalryman of the Boer War and the Sudan campaign, Churchill the defiant bulldog who kept the British in World War II when so many of the establishment wanted peace, and Churchill the parliamentarian of rapier wit who dominated its politics at a time when Britain was the epicenter of a worldwide empire. At the end of his research, Jenkins, a highly regarded biographer of Herbert Henry Asquith and William E. Gladstone, concludes: “When I started writing this book I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man, certainly the more remarkable specimen of humanity. In the course of writing it I changed my mind. I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”

  I do think that Jenkins makes the best case that can be made for this conclusion, but he conceded, when I asked him directly, that Churchill's greatness was deeply flawed by two major failings. One was his disastrous judgment on military matters, going back to the horrendous defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, a plan he hatched when first lord of the Admiralty, and reflected again in Norway in 1940, as well as in his decision to delay the planned 1943 invasion of Europe in favor of a pointless diversionary campaign in North Africa in 1942 (which in turn led inevitably to the great Allied losses in Italy, where the topography overwhelmingly favored the defenders). Jenkins addresses these errors un-sparingly. The second major failing, which Jenkins does not adequately address in his book, was that Churchill's notions of freedom and democracy, his defense of which led Time magazine to hail him as the “Man of the Century,” faltered at the frontiers of empire. My blood still boils when I hear teary-eyed British friends describe him as a great fighter for freedom, when I know him principally as a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of nonwhite peoples, a man who fought to deny us freedom. (And he did so with a pettiness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: after presiding over one of the worst famines in human history, the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, while ordering the diversion of food from starving civilians to well-supplied Tommies, Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about the people perishing in the famine was to ask peevishly why Gandhi hadn't died yet.)

  That story is not told in the Jenkins book; nor are the numerous other tales of Churchill's supremacist bigotry. When I asked Jenkins about this, his answer was honest: Churchill, he admitted bluntly, “was a racialist.” It is, alas, a judgment that does not figure in the book, but Lord Jenkins's candor and willingness to qualify his own admiration of his subject is testimony to his intellectual integrity. In his egotistical, arrogant, and unsympathetic inability to rise above the crippling prejudices of the worst of his race, Churchill was a lesser man than his biographer.

  10

  The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold

  OF THE MANY UNPREDICTABLE, AND SOMETIMES CALAMITOUS, consequences of the end of the Cold War, the one with the most impact on the world's readers has been the sudden collapse of the rich lode mined for four decades by the world's spy novelists. The shadowy, sinister, and occasionally explosive shenanigans of secret agents contending on the margins of the superpower standoff provided page-turning grist to many a literary mill. Entire reputations were built on Cold War fiction. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the more anxious questions that arose amid the rubble was, “What will John Le Carré write about now?”

  The Night Manager and The Secret Pilgrim provided part of the answer, but they were still in the genre, a coda to the last kick of the cold warriors. Le Carré’s next novel, Our Game, offered a more conclusive response. Not only was it Le Carré’s first truly post–Cold War book, but its release was accompanied by a flurry of nonfiction articles and interviews in which the author explicitly spelled out his own view of the new world order. The presumed distance between narrative fiction and the politics of the narrator has thus been eliminated. Our Game is about Le Carré’s game, what one might call his new word order. And that is both its most intriguing feature and its most crippling handicap.

  Timothy Cranmer, Le Carré’s protagonist, is a retired British counterespionage agent living in sybaritic luxury in the Somerset countryside with a beautiful young musician, Emma Manzini. The end of the Cold War has made him surplus to requirements, as it has the “joe” he used to run as a double agent, Larry Pettifer. Larry, an agent of passion and reckless charm, is now a professor at Bath University, giving lectures on such subjects as “The Squandered Victory: Western Foreign Policy since 1988.” At the novel's beginning, Larry has disappeared; so, we soon discover, has Emma, whom Cranmer had reluctantly introduced to the irresistible Larry.

  The plot thickens like Yeltsin's waistline, and at the time of Le Carré’s writing, it was just as topical. Larry's old KGB contact Checheyev, a Muslim from the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia in the northern Caucasus, has milked his ex-Soviet employers of $37 million and is apparently using it, with Larry's help, to acquire arms to finance an Ingush rebellion against Moscow. Cranmer, suspected by his former colleagues of involvement in Larry's misdeeds, sets out to find his friend and his ex-lover, a journey that returns him to the spy's life of death and double-dealing.

  At one level, the device of Cranmer's quest for Larry and Emma keeps the pages turning, drawing the reader into the chase that is a classic staple of the genre. But Cranmer is a maddeningly elusive spy-hero: he cannot remember whether he has killed Larry in a fight, he cannot guess what the money might have been stolen for, he stretches out deductions he might have made much earlier from clues already in his possession. When is a thriller not a thriller? In this case, when it has no surprises, when it eschews action, when it even sidesteps a climactic battle toward which it seems to have been building, and when its principal leitmotif is not the gripping yarn of the blurbs but a political harangue from the op-ed pages.

  For it was, in fact, in a philippic in the New York Times op-ed page the previous December that Le Carré nailed his colors to the mast: “Having won the cold war, the West can't afford to walk away from the consequences of its victory: whether we are speaking of Bosnia today, Chechnya or Ingushetia tomorrow or Cuba the day after.” His fierce assault on the West's current policy toward Russia was followed by an article in the New York Times Book Review describing the spirit in which he had embarked on this novel. “The West, it seemed to me, had dishonored every pledge we had made during the Cold War. We continued to protect the strong against the weak. When small nations were butchered, the best we could manage was the tutting of an anxious bystander.”

  Compare this to what the narrator defensively describes as Larry's “turgid expositions” about his political choice: “It happens to be the Ingush because they exemplify everything most shabby about our post–Cold War world.” Instead of “defend[ing] the underdog against the bully… the West made common cause with the bully in favor of what we call stability.” Larry goes on: “The Ingush refuse… to be ignored, devalued or dismissed. And what they are fighting against… is a whorehouse alliance between a rotten Russian Empire marching to its old tunes and a Western leadership that in its dealings with the rest of the world has
proclaimed moral indifference to be its decent Christian right.”

  Back to Le Carré: “I picked on the North Caucasus for the setting of my novel because… I wanted to say something bitter about the repression of small nations, and about the unfashionable wars that politicians may safely ignore.” This thesis animates the novel: Cranmer's search for Larry is that of the soulless professional looking for the idealist of principle. “I don't think you wish to find your friend, only to become him,” a minor character (inserted, it seems, only to utter that line) tells Cranmer. If and when the Ingush are crushed, Checheyev says to Cranmer, “part of you will die. Because what we have is what you used to fight for when you were men.” It is hardly surprising that Cranmer soon “begged to be allowed to take the Caucasus into my protection.”

  Ever since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold nearly three decades ago, I had thought of John Le Carré as the author who had deromanticized the spy novel. He had created a grim and gray world of petty routine and grand betrayal, a world so gloomy its chief protagonist preferred to die on the Berlin Wall than to continue its amoral battles. With Our Game, a title deliberately reminiscent of the “Great Game” that the British imperialists of a century ago thought they were playing against czarist Russia, it is clear that Le Carré has made of disillusionment merely another kind of romanticism.