My Life in Pictures, by Malcolm Muggeridge (Morrow, 244 pp., $20.95)
Newcomers to Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiographical enterprise would do well to start here, while those already familiar with it will not want to miss this book either. It consists of photographs of people and places taken over seven decades, as well as a prose commentary that summarizes the pilgrim’s progress so wonderfully written up in the great two-volume Chronicles of Wasted Time, now also available from Morrow in paperback. Those disappointed by the non-appearance of the third volume of the autobiography will be at least partly placated by the spirited text that Muggeridge has contributed to this book. His autobiographical writings contain some of the greatest and sanest writing in English in our time. After talking with his friend Hugh Kingsmill in May 1945 about the lives and ends of Mussolini and Hitler, Muggeridge wrote in his diary: “I felt a great desire to describe it all, to write contemporary history.” In the autobiographical writings he has done this, with unique and unforgettable literary power. My Life in Pictures gives us many of the dramatis personae of our terrible century: Churchill, de Gaulle, Truman, MacArthur, Montgomery, Kim Philby, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, Solzhenitsyn. There are close-up views of relatives, friends, and acquaintances such as the Webbs, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Mother Teresa. But Muggeridge has never been a mere celebrity-hunter; he knew from early on that the world is, in Keats’s words, “the vale of soul-making.” The wit is a witness too, one who has written beautifully and for high stakes: to touch and move the souls of his readers. Among the most affecting of the photographs in this pictorial journey through our century are the last, simple ones taken of the Muggeridges in and around their home in the Sussex countryside. In them one feels the gratitude, peace, and Godliness expressed in Paradiso III by Dante’s Piccarda:
Comments