Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  And the wine they sell is the best around.

  -What’s that? You complain your sales are poor?

  But then, you will keep the place full of vicious dogs!

  No sooner has a fellow come in for a drink

  Than they snap at his heels and drive him away.’

  (Translation: Burton Watson)

  In our own time, in addition to the shortcomings of some clergy, the espousal of Jesus by people who can appear somewhat over-confident of their own salvation and to have much in common with the Pharisee at the front of the temple thanking God he was not like the sinful publican at the back has had the unfortunate effect of not only driving people away from the Gospels but of making the very word ‘Christian’ represent, to some, an innocuous and sanctimonious view of life. In books such as Jesus Rediscovered, Jesus the Man who Lives, and The Third Testament, Muggeridge spoke to many who were alienated in this way and who recognised that here was someone with genuine insight who spoke to them directly and honestly.

  In 1967, Malcolm visited the Holy Land where he wrote and narrated a film for the BBC on the life of Christ.About this time he began to question his non-denominational stance after meeting two Catholics who were each exemplifying in their own way, what Jack Kerouac has called the ‘seed soul’ of Christianity: ’Care and Reverence’- Fr Paul Bidone,an Italian priest working with handicapped children and the aged, and Agnes Bojaxhiu, known as Mother Teresa.

  Muggeridge travelled to India in 1968,to make a documentary about Mother Teresa and the order of nuns that she had founded. The film, Something Beautiful for God and its accompanying book of the same name are both moving documents that have made their work amongst the poorest of the poor, amongst victims of leprosy, and abandoned children, known all over the world.

  The subject matter, one would have thought, was of a sort least likely to arouse controversy. Eventually however, the respect and renown that Mother Teresa was accorded worldwide, proved too much of a temptation to a few individuals who -perhaps thinking to emulate Herostatus, the man in Ancient Greece who burnt down the Temple of Artemis (one of the seven wonders of the world) in order to immortalise his name -began to attack her. Muggeridge, naturally, was hit by some of the fall-out from these attacks and, beneath contempt as such behaviour obviously is, one example might be worth mentioning: In the course of filming Something Beautiful for God, some footage shot in Nirmal Hriday, the Home for the Dying, which the crew were convinced would prove unusable because of the poor visibility - footage shot in similar conditions in Cairo shortly afterwards, with the same film-stock, and by the same cameraman, proved completely unusable - turned out, when processed, to be bathed in a particularly beautiful light.

  Malcolm saw it in this way: ‘I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn. - Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying is overflowing with love, as one senses immediately on entering it. This love is luminous, like the haloes artists have seen and made visible round the heads of the saints. I find it not at all surprising that the luminosity should register on a photographic film. The supernatural is only an infinite projection of the natural, as the furthest horizon is an image of eternity, Jesus put mud on a blind man’s eyes and made him see. It was a beautiful gesture, showing that he could bring out even in mud its innate power to heal and enrich. All the wonder and glory of mud - year by year giving creatures their food, and our eyes the delight of flowers and trees and blossoms - was crystallised to restore sight to unseeing eyes.’

  To quibble with this enchanting passage and to try to ridicule Muggeridge for it, as some people have done, seems to me to be wilfully obtuse. I am reminded of how Charles Lamb, who when a son of Robert Burns was expected at a gathering, remarked that he wished it was the father instead of the son and was confronted by four of the company jumping up to say that that was impossible because he was dead. Malcolm’s response was essentially an artistic and imaginative one. To question the light in the Home of the Dying factually, is to miss the point. Muggeridge (who had once interviewed a rather back-sliding bishop on location, whose every second word was punctuated by a cock crowing) accepted that God’s hand could stoop to ripple even the muddy waters of television, and felt that the light Mother Teresa was shining was so bright that it could impinge itself, even on film, if not make the very stones cry out. He of course realised, that as Simone Weil once wrote: ’A gift of alms out of pure charity is as great a marvel as walking on water’ and would have happily concurred with the producer of the film, Peter Chafer’s statement, that if there was a genuine miracle in Calcutta, it was walking around in sandals and was in fact the subject of the documentary.

  From a personal point of view I can say this - that during the time that it was my good fortune to know Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge, I found them to be anything but fanciful, remarkably down to earth and completely unpretentious. To give one example: When I turned up unexpectedly at their cottage in Sussex one afternoon in 1981 - having corresponded briefly with Malcolm - I was invited in and treated with wonderful courtesy. They were so relaxed in fact, that I did not realise that they were in fact in the middle of an important photo shoot for a forthcoming Observer newspaper front-page spread, and that the celebrated photographer Jane Bown was outside investigating possible locations.

  Only when, a half hour later, someone came in the front door and Kitty went out to speak to her, did I realise that something was going on. Malcolm, however, carried on chatting completely naturally, giving no indication that he had more important things on hand. It was not until I stood up and said that I would not take up any more of their time, that Malcolm too, got up and taking me out into the hall, introduced me to Ms Bown, saying that I was an old friend of theirs, and how glad they were that I had dropped in to see them. It was beautifully done, and kindly done. A day or so later, I received a letter from them both, asking me to come and see them again with my wife and family. It was crystal clear on that first afternoon and on our subsequent meetings, that not a hint of that self-importance, that surreptitiously seems to envelop almost everyone in the public eye, had touched them.

  In 1982 Malcolm and Kitty were received into the Catholic Church, citing Mother Teresa as a major influence in their decision. In his last book Conversion (1988) Malcolm wrote that he had found her insistence on treating all human beings as if they were Jesus, irresistible, adding that there had been no book that he had ever read, or transcendental experience that had ever befallen him, that had brought him nearer to Christ or made him more aware of what the incarnation signified, than listening to Mother Teresa and observing her, had done. Malcolm died on the 14th November 1990, and is buried in Whatlington churchyard in East Sussex. Kitty, who died in 1994, is buried with him.

  ***

  ‘It is impossible to scan any periodical,’ Charles Baudelaire wrote in the 1860s,’of whatever day, month or year, without finding in every line of it evidence of the most appalling human perversity, together with the most surprising boasts of probity, goodness and charity and the most shameless assertions concerning progress and civilisation.’ In the nineteenth century, as W G De Burgh pointed out, when society seemed to be ‘on the upward grade, the humanistic creed could offer a certain plausibility; but today in the light of the widespread disintegration of the bonds of human fellowship and social order, it is surely a paradox that it should retain its power to inspire thinking men.’

  ‘The basis of liberal-humanism,’ Muggeridge once wrote is that ‘there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation.- Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound -to induce the megalomania of which we’ve
seen so many manifestations in our time.’

  Malcolm’s conversion to Christianity was erroneously seen by many people, as a sea change. He himself put it this way: ‘It is generally assumed, by those who know me only through the media, especially television, that for the greater part of my life my attitudes were wholly hedonistic and my ways wholly worldly, until, in my late sixties, I suddenly discovered God and became preoccupied with other-worldly considerations - The fact is - I have never cared much for this present world, and have found its pleasures and prizes, such as they are, little to my taste.’

  Muggeridge’s earlier, supposedly secular writings, reprinted here, from his denunciation of Stalin’s organised famine in the Ukraine, to his assessments of D H Lawrence, Havelock Ellis and other luminaries, all have a distinctly religious flavour. The journals and letters that I uncovered amongst his private papers are manifestly those of a spiritual disposition. The totality of his work displays an acute disquiet at the growing arrogance and apostasy of western men and women and of the disastrous effects of their attempts to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth!

  The road Malcolm travelled was a long and sometimes torturous one - stretching from his encounter in Russia with the darkest side of human nature in all its cruelty and horror, to the bright legacy of Mother Teresa and Jesus’ Kingdom not of this world. But, as the essays that follow reveal, Mother Teresa was right: ’It was God he was looking for and he was never satisfied with less.’ Those of us who would follow in his footsteps can take comfort, as Malcolm often did, in Pascal’s words: ’I look for God, therefore I have found him.’Looking back later, in the 1950’s, to the land where his journey had taken such a decisive turn, Malcolm’s overall feeling was one of gratitude:

  ‘When I think of Russia now I remember, not the grey, cruel set faces of its present masters, but rather how kindly and humorous the people subjected to them managed to remain despite the appalling physical and mental suffering they had to endure. I remember a little painted church standing in the moonlight like an exquisite jewel, someone having managed in inconceivably difficult circumstances to keep its bright colours fresh and triumphant. - Above all, I remember going to an Easter service in Kiev - the crowded cathedral, the overwhelmingly beautiful music, the intense sense which, as they worshipped, the congregation conveyed of eternity sweeping in like great breakers on the crumbling shores of Time.’

  1

  The Collectivisation Of The Ukraine

  Living in Moscow and listening always to statements of doctrine and policy, you forget that Moscow is the centre of a country stretching over a sixth of the world’s surface and that the lives of a hundred and sixty million people, mostly peasants, are profoundly affected by discussions and resolutions that seem, when you hear or read of them in the press, as abstract as the proceedings of a provincial debating society. ‘We must collectivise agriculture’, or ‘We must root out kulaks’ (the rich peasants). How simple it sounds! How logical! But what is going on in the remote villages, in the small households of the peasants? What does this collectivisation of agriculture mean in practice in the lives of the peasantry? What results have the new ‘drive’ produced? What truth, if any, is there in the gloomy reports that have been reaching Moscow? That is what I wanted to find out. I set out to discover it in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine.

  If you fall asleep in Moscow and then wake up and, looking out of a railway carriage window, find yourself in the Ukraine you suddenly feel gay and light-hearted. There are great sweeps of country, and you realise that Moscow is sombre and shut-in. Now you breathe again; now you see a horizon. Only, the way to go over the glistening snow would be not in an overheated railway compartment, with a gramophone playing stale jazz music, but in a sledge drawn by swift horses with silver bells round their necks and with the cold wind against your face.

  A little market town in the Kuban district of the North Caucasus suggested a military occupation; worse, active war. There were soldiers everywhere, - Mongols with leaden faces and slit eyes; others obviously peasants, rough but not brutal; occasional officers, dapper, often Jews; all differing noticeably from the civilian population in one respect -they were all well fed and the civilian population were obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as for instance most Oriental peasants are undernourished or some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out there had been no bread at all in the place for three months, and such food as there was I saw for myself in the market. The only edible thing there of the lowest European standards was chicken - about five chickens, fifteen roubles each. No one was buying. Where could a peasant get fifteen roubles? For the most part, chickens - the few that remain - are sold at the railway stations to passengers on their way to the mountains in the South for a holiday or for a rest cure in a sanatorium.

  The rest of the food offered for sale was revolting and would be thought unfit in the ordinary way to be offered even to animals. There was sausage at fifteen roubles the kilo; there was black cooked meat which worked out I calculated at a rouble for three bites; there were miserable fragments of cheese and some cooked potatoes, half rotten. A crowd wandered backwards and forwards eyeing these things wistfully, too poor to buy. The few who bought gobbled their purchases ravenously then and there.

  ‘How are things with you?’ I asked one man. He looked round anxiously to see that no soldiers were about. ‘We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away’, he said, and hurried on. This was what I heard again and again and again. ’We have nothing. They have taken everything away’ .It was quite true. They had nothing. It was also true that everything had been taken away .The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them - and the peasants know this quite well - is still being exported to foreign countries.

  It is impossible adequately to describe the melancholy atmosphere of this little market town; how derelict it was; the sense of hopelessness pervading the place, and this was not just because the population was, as it were, torn up by the roots. The class war has been waged vigorously in the North Caucasus, and the proletariat, represented by the G.P.U. (State Political Police) and the military, has utterly routed its enemies amongst the peasantry who tried to hide a little of their produce to feed themselves through the winter. Despite hostile elements, however, the North Caucasus distinguished itself by being 90 per cent collectivised, and then this year by fulfilling its grain delivery plan. As a result, this double effort has turned it into something like a wilderness - fields choked with weeds, cattle dead, people starving and dispirited, no horses for ploughing or transport, not even adequate supplies of seed for the spring sowing. The worst of the class war is that it never stops. First individual kulaks shot and exiled; then groups of peasants; then whole villages. I walked from street to street watching the faces of people, looking at empty shops. Even here a Torgsin shop; good food offered for gold; useful for locating any private hoards that organised extortion had failed to detect.

  The little villages round-about were even more depressing than the market town. Often they seemed quite deserted. Only smoke coming from some of the chimneys told they were populated. In one of the larger villages I counted only five people in the street, and there was a soldier riding up and down on - a rare sight now in the North Caucasus - a fine horse. It is literally true that whole villages have been exiled. In some cases demobilised soldiers have been moved in to the places of the exiles; in some cases the houses are just left empty. I saw myself a group of some twenty peasants being marched off under escort. This is so common a sight it no longer even arouses curiosity. Everywhere I heard that the winter sowing had been miserably done, and that in any case the land was too weed-ridden to yield even a moderate crop. Though it was winter, in some places weeds still stood - taller than wheat and growing thickly. There were no cattle to be seen, and I was assured that in that part of the N
orth Caucasus at least, there were none at all. They had been killed and eaten or died of starvation.

  Occasionally along the road I met with little groups of peasants with rifles slung over their shoulders; men in fur caps, rough looking; a kind of armed militia that has also been mobilised on the kulak front. I wanted to find out about future prospects; whether the change from forced grain collections to a more moderately assessed tax-in-kind was going to make things better; what chances there were even now of retrieving the blunders of the last two years. It is difficult, however, to get people who are starving and who know that whatever happens, they must go on starving for at least three more months, and probably five, to talk about or take any great interest in the future. To them the question of bread, of how to get the food to keep just alive today and tomorrow, transcends all others. Starving people are not in a general way loquacious, particularly when to talk may be to qualify as a kulak and so for exile or worse. I was shown a piece of bread from Stavropol. It was made, I was told, of weeds and straw and a little millet. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could eat such bread; actually in the circumstances a rare delicacy.

  The peasants in this region had to provide exports to pay for the Five-Year Plan; they had to be - to use an expression of Stalin’s in a lecture on the peasant question - ‘reserves of the proletariat’; and the ‘reserves’ had to be mobilised, made accessible - that is collectivised. It was not difficult for the Soviet Government to make collectivisation, in the quantitative sense, an enormous success - so enormous that even the Communist Party grew a little anxious and Stalin issued a public warning against ‘business from success’. In the event about 60 per cent of the peasantry and 80 per cent of the land were brought into collective farms; Communists with impeccable ideology were installed as directors of them; agronomes were to provide expert advice, tractors to replace horses, elevators to replace barns, and the practice of America combined with the theory of Marxism was to transform agriculture into a kind of gigantic factory staffed by an ardently class-conscious proletariat.