Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  May 10, 1964

  Delhi

  I was so overjoyed to get your telegram and then letter. For some reason I’d got into a state of panic about you, and was homesick. There’s something so bizarre about this expedition that I keep on wondering why I should be here and what I’m supposed to be doing. So far everything that could go wrong has.The camera crew were held up two days en route, and now the chief cameraman is sick. Things keep breaking (including, today, the weather), and every appointment is at the wrong time in the wrong place. It’s a bit like all the Tutankamen disasters. Perhaps one isn’t meant to delve into one’s life on the telly; sacrilegious or something. You’ll have gathered from Jean that the ES job has come to an end. I’m very relieved. Now I want to get out of these regular journalistic assignments and concentrate on other writing. The big, indeed the only, dividend in what I’m doing now is the great impetus it’s given to thoughts about my Autobiog.

  May 22, 1964

  Calcutta

  Today thank God we leave Calcutta for Alwaye, and the last lap of the programme. It’s been pretty arduous but I feel that the worst is over. All the while I keep saying over to myself what the old beggar in Roquebrune said when his dog died: ‘Le Chagrin ne sert a rien. ’However, Le Chagrin occasionally boils up, I regret to say.

  October 15, 1964

  Chicago

  If only I were with you! The moment you can get away make for Toronto, and then we can join up wherever I happen to be. If you can’t get away I shall try and abbreviate my stay and leave on November 20th or thereabouts. I’d leave before, tomorrow, if I could; but I can’t with this camera crew here and these lecture engagements. I only want to be with you.

  October 25, 1964

  New York

  I got two letters today, to great relief and delight. They brought good news – that V was better, that you’d weathered the storm. No one but you would have. All my love, all my hopes, all my prayers, all my everything are with you all the time, but you’ve had to tackle this terrible experience of V out of her mind on your own. I should so love it if you could get away for a bit. How about going to Toronto early in November, and then joining me in New York on the 8th for a few days; then back to Toronto and with me again on the 20th. It would be so wonderful as it now appears I shall now have to be over here till Dec 6th when I do a Paar programme. Your sweet company would break up the exile. How about that? Only you can decide, of course; but if it’s at all possible, for your own sake as well as mine, you should come.

  October 30, 1964

  California

  How marvellous that I shall probably be seeing you soon in New York. I’m leaving Los Angeles today with relief. It’s not a nice place. How I long and long and long to be with you. The only thing for me has been work, and I’ve done a lot and earned a fair amount of dough. But it’s not the work I want to be doing; at least not altogether. Never mind, I feel, terrifically ready for my real work, which is yet to be done, and am looking forward more then I can say to being in Roquebrune with you and V, and going for those lovely walks.

  April 18, 1967

  Nunraw

  My Own Sweet Darling, how delighted I was to get your letter today. I really miss you more and more, and hate every day you’re not with me. Although all here are as nice as they could be I’m rather longing for the whole thing to be over. Towards the end of next week I’ll be back in Robertsbridge. I should think it would probably be Friday, or even Saturday, but I’ll telephone nearer the time.

  On Friday the 5th I find I took on an Any Questions programme in Gloucester, and on Sunday the 7th I have to speak in the University Church at Cambridge. Then all my commitments are over, and I’m going to stay in Robertsbridge without stirring till we go to the Holy Land in September. The country round here is marvellous in a way, but swept by a chill wind most of the time. As for the Abbey itself - I love the monks, but find them somehow tragic. What they’re doing is heroic, but it’s like a cavalry charge against an armoured division; they sing their offices very sweetly, but the sound is thin. They’ve built their fine new Abbey, but I think they wonder -as I do -whether they’ll ever move into it. The most cheerful and robust among them are the Irish peasants. One of these - Brother Oliver - told me yesterday how he’d heard a tinker woman in Ireland say: ’When you’ve lost your flower you must hawk your bran.’ What a splendid sentence!

  Aug 2, 1967

  Jerusalem

  We’ve made a start, and have already met Dr Tester of Nazareth, who turns out to be a delightful man. I’ll be driving to Tel Aviv with him to meet you and the Frazers on your arrival. On Tuesday I’m going to Nazareth to see the flat. This hotel is delightful; in what was the Arab part of the town, and I shall hope to spend a night or so with you here during your stay. Chris and I have already started looking around; please have a read of the NT before you come so as to get some ideas. Study the life of Christ as though it were a biog. that you were going to write, as you did B’s. This could be invaluable to us. The weather is pleasant, but fairly hot; just about like Egypt. No need for warm clothes, but one sweater for the evenings if one sits outside.

  Sep 4, 1967

  Jerusalem

  My Darling, As I hear the posts are bad I’m taking advantage of a man here going to London to send this. The Christian shrines are quite horrible; so ugly and fraudulent. Why bother to set up anti-God museums when there’s the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

  So far the programme’s a bit stagnant, but I’m hoping to see things more clearly after visiting the Nazareth people. We go there tomorrow. I miss you horribly, and our quiet life at Robertsbridge which I love so much - the reading, the music etc etc. Just now I’m sorry I ever took this on, but no doubt that mood will change. I’ll telephone you anyway before you leave, so any last-minute thoughts can be exchanged then.

  Oct 9, 1967

  Jerusalem

  The time passes quickly now, and I’ll be back before we know where we are. As plans are at present we finish the Life of Christ film round about the 28th and then Ben Gurion for three or four days. I’d expect to be back on the 3rd or fourth. There’s a new man coming out to direct the BG programme and I’m going to ask him to bring out a warm jacket - the new tweed - as it’s getting very fresh in Jerusalem. He’ll get in touch with you about it.The film seems to be going well, but there are the usual camera-crew angsts; nothing serious. I’m going down to BG’s kibutz to see him tomorrow; then we’ll film round about in the weird desert country you saw. After that to Nazareth again, and then we’ll be getting towards the end. I expect you’ve got your book now in all its newness; I long to see it. Graham was here for some days, and in Galilee; rather woebegone, and fond as I am of him I was rather glad when he went. He saddened me so, whereas at the Nazareth hospital they always cheer me up to the skies; especially the German Mother - what an enchanting woman!

  March 11, 1968

  New York

  Here I am with all the lecturing done on the last lap, and wishing more than ever that I was back in Robertsbridge with you. This place is very weird just now, with a curfew and troops still patrolling the streets at night. Now I have to switch my mind and grapple with this subject of news-gathering - the pursuit of a fantasy; very difficult on the telly. On my long air journey yesterday I read St Augustine, and underlined this: ‘I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.’ Good, don’t you think?

  April 30, 1968

  Washington

  I got your dear letter yesterday, and it made me more than ever long to be back in Robertsbridge with you. I keep on thinking of my darling Valentine; we’ve had such unspeakable good fortune apart from this one sorrow. Curiously enough this time I don’t f
eel any kind of savage grief; I just know that pain and suffering are an essential part of the experience of living, and that this is our pain and suffering. I’m happy to say that I love Val more than ever and that I think of her as a particularly exquisite person. Why the poor darling should be called on to suffer these descents into the pit I don’t know, but I do know what is expected of us, and this we’ll accord her in the fullest possible measure to the day of our deaths. Anyway, my sweet darling, of all my good fortune the greatest was you, and I think of you at this moment with inexpressible gratitude and inexpressible love. This prayer of St Augustine’s appealed to me: ‘Let me offer you in sacrifice the service of my thoughts and my tongue, but first give me what I may offer you.’

  April 5, 1969

  India

  I loved getting your letter and hearing about Valentine. What you say is so true; she has the immense spiritual strength of someone who has fallen into the Slough and then pulled herself out. I had a letter from her full of plans and happiness; quite different from any I’d ever had before. It gives me a feeling of contentment so overwhelming that I feel that if I were to die I should scarcely notice. I’ve just got back to Delhi from Gandhi’s Ashram in Ahmedabad where we recorded a long conversation with his grand-daughter; a jaunty, bouncy little creature rather like an Indian Thelma Cazalet. The Gandhi legend doesn’t really bear examination as now purveyed, but I’m doing my best with it out of respect for the basic principles involved. It’s hard going; there’s throughout an undertow of sententiousness which I find very unpalatable. As usual, one turns for comfort to comedy; he had a strong sense of the absurd - rather like Picasso’s. In fact I think he and Picasso in some weird way were rather alike; even in appearance for that matter. The screw is always being turned a little harder, I find, and on Tuesday I have to open an exhibition of cartoons about Gandhi, many of them from Punch. This is something - as Hughie would have said - which Dante hadn’t thought of. Immediately after we go to Calcutta to deal with Mother Teresa, which I’m looking forward to. She’s got a children’s home here which we filmed, and I found it very touching. Young Indian nuns with these kids picked up from the streets, some of them batty; one little girl quite off her head, but with a winning smile which never deserted her. I’m ticking off the days as usual to when I get back to Robertsbridge and you; I only feel about a quarter alive when I’m away from you. So I can’t tell you how inexpressibly dear to me you are; you have to know.

  Love

  Malcolm

  19

  The Holy Land

  In the general upheaval caused by the recent Arab-Israeli fighting, one consequence, not in itself world-shattering, perhaps, but still highly significant, is that the Christian holy places are now for the first time in the history of Christendom in Jewish hands.An Israeli soldier armed with a sub-machine gun is on guard at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which contains Christ’s alleged tomb; another stands outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem beneath which is Christ’s alleged birthplace. Coinciding with the exoneration of the Jews by the Papacy of responsibility for the Crucifixion, they have become custodians of Christianity’s most sacred shrines and relics, and at the same time - as I discovered, particularly, among professors at the Hebrew University, not to mention Mr Ben Gurion - obsessively interested in Christian theology and the person of Christ. It is as though the accumulated suppressed curiosity of two thousand years about one who is, after all, on any showing the most famous Jew of all, had at last found an outlet.

  Reflecting on the strange turn of fate which has brought about this state of affairs, it occurred to me that a conversation on the subject between Ciaphas, Pilate and Herod - supposing they all three find themselves within hailing distance of one another -would be most interesting. In exploring the theme, I decided, they would surely cast an eye in the direction of the so-called Wailing Wall -all that remains of the magnificent Temple of their time - where, also under Israeli military supervision, bearded Rabbis in fur hats and shawls and long black flapping coats gather in strength to address their prayers and lamentations to Jehovah. It was a scene that had a powerful attraction for me; wailing, as a response to human life, increasingly seems to me highly appropriate. I loved the Rabbis’ faces, so serene, so remote from the hateful twentieth century, so utterly unlike a with-it clergyman trying to popularise the Gospels among the young by topping them up with pop music and four-letter words.

  Being in Israel for the purpose of participating as commentator in the making of three half-hour films on the story of Christ for BBC Television, I had every reason to interest myself more in the holy places and even the Wall than in the Jordan West Bank or the Syrian Heights or any of the other ticklish situations resulting from the war.As a matter of fact it was for me personally a new and agreeable experience to be in a place where news was emanating without having any occasion to take a professional interest in it - like, if I may make the comparison without indecorum, Maupassant’s Maison Tellier off duty for a pious occasion.

  What a relief to be able to reply, when asked whether I’d care to meet, say, the Mayor of Jerusalem to discuss with him the problems which had arisen in taking over the Arab part of the city, that as it happened on this particular occasion I was exclusively concerned with events twenty centuries before, and with persons long since dead - with one possible exception, and there not even the efficient and resourceful Press Department of the Israeli Foreign Office could hope to be of any help. (No reflection, by the way, on His Worship, who is by all accounts a most capable and estimable man.)

  Actually, of course, one was involved, willy-nilly, in the Israeli situation. Twenty centuries ago or now makes very little difference where news is concerned; history is only news strategically, rather than tactically, slanted. As in chess, though the games seem at the time to be all different, the moves are invariable from generation to generation. It is one of the illusions of an age of scientific credulity like ours that changes of unique significance are taking place, and we like our prophets - a Marshall McLuhan, and Edmund Leach - to tell us so, with a wave of the hand abolishing our social institutions and values, and, metaphorically speaking, fitting us out with new ones; or, alternatively, in the manner of a Bertrand Russell, apocalyptically pronouncing the end of the whole human story. In either case, our sense of being unique is bolstered up, whether as the privileged initiators of a brave new world, or as the positively last denizens of a doomed old one.

  To go and film by the River Jordan (how delectable a river, by the way, and so tiny to be so famous!) we required a military permit procured from the Israeli Military Governor in Jericho. It was the same old set-up, so familiar in the 1939-45 or any other war - the requisitioned house with its battered furniture, the ricketty typewriter, the cyclostyled forms, the self-important officer condescendingly granting or withholding favours according to his mood, the cigarette smoke, the army blanket covering a trestle table, even down to the frowsty ATS, secretary-vivandieres who also serve.

  It seems that military occupations are invariable whenever and wherever they take place; I bet the Disciples had to apply at just such an office to get the Roman countersign on their passes to go from Caperneum to Jerusalem. The officer at Jericho who dealt with us failed to kindle at the notion that our purpose in wanting to go to a restricted area was solely concerned with Christ’s baptism. Didn’t all that happen a very long time ago? he seemed to be saying. And anyway, why bring it up now, when there were so many more serious matters afoot - like exchanging shots across the Jordan, and ensuring that Arabs take the Allenby Bridge to leave Israel rather than for coming in. In the end, rather grudgingly, he gave us our pass and a patronising nod; by waving it we managed to pass various control-points and a couple of tanks, and found ourselves at last on the river bank, at the traditional place of baptism.

  Victory brings out the worst in everyone, and this applies to the Jews no less than to others. Yet somehow in thei
r case it is more shocking. Is this because we expect more of the Jews than of others in the way of resisting the baser impulses? Or - as they think - because we’re so used to seeing them at the receiving end of persecution that we can’t bear them in the role of victors? Whatever the reason, I was quite abnormally horrified to see in Jerusalem two Arabs, one of them very youthful, being arrested, beaten up, and then, with black bags over their heads, driven away at top speed in a jeep. I wanted to rush after them, shouting impotently: ’It’s like Berlin; you shouldn’t be doing this!’

  Another disagreeable incident happened when we were filming by the Lake of Galilee. We had with us five Arabs from Nazareth who were to walk in front of our camera. A middle-aged Israeli in a flowered shirt, obviously on holiday with his family, spotted them, and came across self-importantly to tell us that they were not entitled to be in that area. His malignancy - somehow accentuated by the flowered shirt and sun-baked face with its gleaming spectacles - was horrible. Of course, in the circumstances, it is all perfectly understandable. Yet how sad, I reflected, if the most gifted race the world has known should succeed in transforming itself into a second-class, and perhaps second-rate, Middle-Eastern nation!

  The great function of the Jews has surely been to provide an incomparable running parody of the ways of power. This is what the Hebrew prophets were about, and all those incomparably brilliant Jewish clowns and cartoonists; as also - at the sublimest level - the hero of our film. When He said that His kingdom was not of this world, all earthly kingdoms were abolished forever. Now the Jews have a kingdom - Israel - where they have no recourse but to parody themselves. Were the Israelis, perhaps, I wondered, the very last Sahibs? Was Israel the positively last version of the White Man’s Burden?