Subject: sufferin' suckatash (?)
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Nov 24 2000 - 06:25:25 GMT
'... pretty low of you to expose him ...'
Ah wait now, Nick. We mustn't over react.
A modest boast that I'd once exchanged views
with the chap seems hardly an 'exposure'.
(Unless my very touch is itself a source of scandal.)
There were 'inaccuracies' in my account - partly explained
by the fact the my brain sadly dosen't improve with age &
that the original brief exchange took place when that same
brain was chronically addled with drink. And that it all
took place almost twenty years ago.
First of all, my reference to 'Ladybridge' was an honest
misremembering of his home address in Robertsbridge -
which you, as an afficionado, must have recognised.
Second, the letter was not exactly in agreement with my own
views but a clarification of his, as expressed in some television
programme or other that I'd been watching & which had struck
me as mistaken.
This programme had made reference to the value of suffering.
I can't, as I say, remember the details but it may have been about
someone like Mother Theresa who, as you know, became a great
focus of interest in his later life. I had written to say that while
human growth sometimes demanded learning experiences which
were, by their nature, painful I could not agree that suffering
IN ITSELF was anything other than diminishing & destructive.
I have now unearthed his reply - which I reproduce verbatim:
________________________________________
Park Cottage
Robertsbridge
Sussex
8th August 1982
Dear Robert Bowman,
Thank you for your letter.
No, I was not suggesting that, as you put it,
suffering has a glory in its own right. Only that
it is a necessary & enriching element in human life.
If it were possible - & there are some maniacs who
think it is - to eliminate suffering altogether this
would not make life a more wonderful experience,
only a more banal one.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Muggeridge
_________________________________
I was not the only one who greatly enjoyed the earlier
Muggeridge. There was something infectious about
that gleeful, really rather sadistic, wit as he debagged
the gullible, the self-important, the established. But there
was also something saddening at the sight of the old devil
as he turned pious with one of the most widely publicised
of conversions, those gaga encounters with mystical lights,
that insistence - from one of the better tables at The
Gay Huzzar - on the vanity of all human endeavour.
As you very well know, not a few called him a life-long
fraud. I don't agree with them, but there WAS
sometimes a suspicious whiff in the air.
Incidentally, I think - in the letter I quote - that he
WAS asserting the value of suffering for its own sake.
And I still think that's a load of balls.
Scottie B.
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