Abstract
Sometime in the late 1970s I did a little pro bono mentoring for students on the City University post-graduate journalism course and recall recommending this memoir to one with whose work I was particularly involved. I must have read the two books not that long before, probably soon after they were published (in 1972 and 1973), because my copies are hardback first editions. I remember how much I loved them, how funny and clever they were, and how much they told me about the life of a journalist.
Or I thought I did. That, anyway, is the memory that has remained through the years. And I imagine it was why I not only urged the aspirant journalistic scholar to read the books to understand the trade she was anxious to join, but also lent her my copies.
And now I eagerly pick up the opportunity to revisit this memory and I am astonished to discover that I have ventured into the mists of history The second book ends before I was born and the world of journalism portrayed is as remote today as Dickens' days in the parliamentary press gallery Of course, journalism as practised in my lifetime in the business has changed utterly Anyone remember how web offset was going to be the technological wonder of the industry's future?
Well, it was when I took the NCTJ proficiency test; yet here I am, writing on a laptop on my knees in the departure lounge of a Greek airport, having just checked on my phone that the inbound flight is still somewhere over the coast of Croatia. And there is Malcolm Muggeridge, sending copy from abroad by telegram, much in the fashion still of William Boot. “SUGGEST TELLING THIS MARINES STOP” is one cherished phrase for introducing scepticism while subverting censors in a report from Moscow in the early 1930s.
The Muggeridge memoir is more an account of a personal journey than a book about journalism. Indeed, journalism doesn't get a look in until more than halfway into the first volume, when he strolls into a job as a Manchester Guardian leader writer, a newspaper he has never seen, having sent it one article and been recommended by Arthur Ransome, its man in Cairo, where Muggeridge was teaching at the time. On his first day, charged with writing a leader on corporal punishment and having no idea of the newspaper's line, he asks advice from someone who, without looking up or stopping typing, replies: “The same as capital, only more so.” Muggeridge brilliantly describes Ransome as what he subsequently realised was the epitome of a Guardian writer: “amateurish, literary, opinionated, conceited, eccentric, immediately recognisable in any gathering of journalists, however large, by virtue of a certain self-righteousness of expression and bearing; the firm mouth and chin saying that news is sacred, the bright left eye that comment is free.”
It still reads as deliciously It is an elegant, charming, self-deprecatory account of an extraordinarily busy life in which he seems to have met every known politician, author, journalist, philosopher, statesman and celebrity, at home and abroad, who drew breath in the 20th century. That is what it reads like anyway The pages are littered with observations and anecdotes, often hilarious, sometimes poignant, always perceptive. Sometimes quite unexpectedly so. (How wonderful that he could write the phrase, 45 years ago, “… a majestic voice on the telly – a voice, though, that is for ever Dimbleby”.)
The section about his time on the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary – at £20 a week in the 1940s – is a particular joy. There's his fellow diarist, Randolph Churchill, on the phone to Duff and Bobbity and Rah There's Howard Spring, turning in literary paragraphs, a man who had also moved from The Guardian. Muggeridge relates that Spring had referred disparagingly in a Guardian piece to Beaverbrook as a “pedlar of nightmares”, a phrase changed by a timorous WP Crazier, editor of The Guardian (whom Muggeridge disliked) to “pedlar of dreams”, thus producing an immediate offer of employment from the man in question. There is a caustic and revealing portrait, too, of Beaverbrook himself: always on the phone, dictating the line, “You've gotta say …”. The true doom of media barons, Muggeridge writes, is to believe what they read in the media, having fashioned it specifically to convey their own prejudices “thereby infallibly encompassing their own ultimate destruction”.
Muggeridge leaves his story at the end of 1945, aged only 42. While there is a fragment (which I haven't read) of the projected third volume, it is for all of us to regret that he did not complete it before his death in 1990, aged 87. Meanwhile, I can't wait to read his novel, Picture Palace, a satire on The Guardian that was, outrageously, suppressed and pulped by a threat of injunction from the newspaper when due to be published.
