St Mugg at Christmas

Stuart Reid Charterhouse
There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Advent is over and Christmas is here. Pretty soon it will be the Epiphany and you’ll be able to take it easy for a few weeks before the, er, advent of Lent. It’s early next year. Ash Wednesday is on February 22. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
As I write this, however, there are still 10 shopping days to Christmas, and I am still filled with a spirit of fear and foreboding, which is as close as I ever get to the Christmas spirit. The festive season is one of my least favourite times of the year. It is greed on speed. It is also guilt, resentment and pregnant 16-year-olds. But let’s not get too pious about it. It is surely better and wiser to make room for compassionate understanding, as John Betjeman did in his lovely poem “Christmas”: “And girls in slacks remember Dad / And oafish louts remember Mum...” Perhaps the festive season is more absurd than it is horrifying, and like all absurdities it can be a source of strength and inspiration, not to say comfort and joy.
Malcolm Muggeridge delighted in absurdity, and every year at Christmas or thereabouts the late William F Buckley Jr would re-broadcast a television conversation he’d had with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1980. Naturally, human folly entered the frame, and the old gargoyle spoke fondly of the gargoyles of Chartres Cathedral. “The gargoyle,” he told Buckley, “is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth... He’s laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap – disparity – between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so till the end of time.” Malcolm Muggeridge occasionally wrote the Charterhouse column, and I am therefore, in that very limited sense, one of his successors. It is a humbling thought. To some these days Muggeridge seems a ridiculous figure – that cigarette holder, the tortured vowels, the “My deah boy” – but he was a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s and 70s, and he was a force for good. By mocking worldly vanities from the perspective of a man of the world, he made many of us see that Christianity is the religion of the sceptic, and that secular liberalism is the opium of the people. He believed not so much because it was absurd as because the alternative look around you – was absurd. He was the master of cynical hope, and in 1982, in spite of his strong misgivings about the Second Vatican Council, he became a Catholic.
“It was the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic,” he said later. “The Church’s stand is absolutely correct. It is to its eternal honour that it opposed contraception, even if the opposition failed. I think, historically, people will say it was a very gallant effort to prevent a moral disaster.” I first met Muggeridge at a Festival of Light celebration on Tunbridge Wells Common in, I think, 1972. I was drunk, alas, and told him at great and gushing length how much I admired his work. Later, I made the pilgrimage to Robertsbridge, in Sussex, and interviewed Muggeridge for the Sunday Mirror. He and his wife, Kitty, were wonderfully kind and hospitable. I have long since lost my copy of the interview, but I seem to remember that he said one very striking thing, at least to my young ears: that the sex drive can be more pressing and more appalling in the old than in the young. He also said, however, though not to me, that one of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.
Malcolm Muggeridge flourished in the predigital age. In those days journalists observed certain rules of taste and decency, even when fighting rough. They took care not to libel their opponents. Now anything goes. The spite and venom of some “conservative” Catholics you encounter in the blogosphere puts one in mind of the more primitive American Baptists.
Yes, these people are in a tiny minority, but they make a lot of noise with their mad certainties and barely concealed hatreds. They share a most unCatholic reverence for “freedom of speech”, furthermore, and thus feel free to make outrageous assertions about the beliefs and motives of their opponents. They call their rants “speaking truth to power”, but the people they attack – mostly bishops and their spin-doctors – are about as powerful as a platoon of gerbils. Speaking truth to power no longer requires courage, as it did in the days of, for example, the great Tory radical William Cobbett. All it requires these days is a PC and a rigid belief in your own moral probity.
Of course, in condemning the Temple Police in such sweeping terms, I am merely doing as they do. Oh, well. Nobody’s perfect.
Going forward... This is my last Charterhouse column. I am leaving after almost four years not because I have found other work or because I have fallen out with the editor – on the contrary – but because I want to take a break from weekly deadlines. I was going to spend some time abroad, perhaps see the world before the money runs out and we are reduced to cannibalism and barter, but I’ll probably stay put in Balham. You know where you are in Balham.
I am very grateful to Luke Coppen for having been such a patient and tolerant – and thoroughly professional – editor, and for the support of such brilliant Young People as Anna Arco, Ed West, Mark Greaves and Andrew M Brown. I am grateful, too, to the readers who have been kind enough to send me letters of encouragement – and of rebuke – and I apologise to those I have needlessly offended.
I am grateful also to the Holy Father, whose pontificate has been truly inspiring. The old Mass has been reinstated and the new Mass has at last been faithfully translated. Rejoice. We have reasons to be cheerful...