When Muggeridge met Chesterton

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) at work; GK Chesterton (1874-36) reading in Brighton, 1935

Yesterday at our local used book store I snagged a one-volume copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography. It’s rare to find any Muggeridge books—at least at the bookstores I most often visit—so I was excited to run across this one. And in leafing through it I found this marvelous anecdote near the very beginning, in which Muggeridge describes his childhood encounter with GK Chesterton:

Chesterton, complete with pince-nez, about the time of the scene described by Muggeridge

[A]s a child, a writer was in my eyes a kind of god; any writer, no matter how obscure, or even bogus, he might be. To compare a writer with some famous soldier or administrator or scientist or politician or actor was, in my estimation, quite ludicrous. There was no basis for comparison; any more than between, say, Francis of Assisi and Dr Spock. Perhaps more aware of this passion than I realised, when I was still a schoolboy my father [Labour politician HT Muggeridge] took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained. I remember that the proprietor of the restaurant presented me with a box of crystallised fruits which turned out to be bad. As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory. I observed with fascination the enormous bulk of the guest of honour, his great stomach and plump hands; how his pince-nez on a black ribbon were almost lost in the vast expanse of his face, and how when he delivered himself of what he considered to be a good remark he had a way of blowing into his moustache with a sound like an expiring balloon. His speech, if he made one, was lost on me, but I vividly recall how I persuaded my father to wait outside the restaurant while we watched the great man make his way down the street in a billowing black cloak and old-style bohemian hat with a large brim.

This child’s perspective is wonderfully evocative. And it also reminds me of a passage from Chesterton’s own work—The Man Who was Thursday, when undercover policeman Gabriel Syme reaches the meeting of the highest anarchist council and encounters the terrible and mysterious Friday:

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

There is a great deal of wink-wink self-parody in Chesterton’s work (cf. Innocent Smith in Manalive), but it had never occurred to me that those parodies might include the gargantuan—and ultimately quite surprising—Friday. Something I’m going to consider next time I read it.

Muggeridge concludes his anecdote on a note of nostalgia tinged, as all real nostalgia is, with melancholy:

I only saw him once again. That was years later, shortly before he died, when on a windy afternoon he was sitting outside the Ship Hotel at Brighton, and clutching to himself a thriller in a yellow jacket. It, too, like the pince-nez, seemed minute by comparison with his immensity. By that time, the glory of the earlier occasion had departed.

As it happens, I’ve seen two photos of Chesterton in Brighton from 1935, the year before he died: one of him walking down the seafront across the street from the Old Ship Hotel and one that closely matches Muggeridge’s description of Chesterton reading (see also the top of this post).

Like I said, two wonderful and vividly realized reminiscences. Looking forward to reading more in this book.