Judy Tudor picks paperbacks

Personal choice: Judy Tudor picks paperbacks

Malcolm Muggeridge is not the sort of fellow anyone can be apathetic about. You either like him or loathe him. For the former, Tread Softly For You Tread on My Jokes, will be Muggeridge at his demagogueish, acidulated best. It should be, because he chose the pieces himself.

They are mostly of the era after he gave up being editor of Punch and, through exposure on television, became the epitome of the free-think ing, educated Englishman cleaving his way through the ranks of op posing forces in the sweetest of reasonableness and the politest of manners.

Television appears to have turned Muggeridge from another literary middleweight into a national institu

tion. I am a determined Muggeridge watcher, myself, although some of his long-winded parlour-pieces get my antipodean goat. I have seen TV unkind to him only once—at the meeting between clergy, intelligentsia and science, on the one hand; and Dr. Christian Barnard, on the other.

Mr. Muggeridge was against organ transplants but his clanger was in a question to the Professor in which he expressed suprise that it was in South

Africa that a human heart transplant was first performed and wondered if this wasn’t somehow mixed up in South African politics and that country’s attitude to the sanctity of human life.

The scientific section of the audience thereupon metaphorically rose up and said “shame”; Dr.

Barnard remained impassive as always; and Mr, Muggeridge sank back into the ranks of clergy and journalists. Deflated? Probably not.

I’m a Barnard fan, not because of his skill with the scalpel but because of the way he can handle an audience, hostile and otherwise. If all South Africans were as sure of themselves as Professor Barnard, then South Africa might have made a better job of selling apartheid to the world—so it is probably as well that they are not.

Good bedtime stuff

But back to Malcolm M. Tread Softly is a magnificent bed-side book.

A chapter on sex (American style), “My Life with the BBC”, “The Queen and I”, or snippets about his journalistic junketings in Moscow or India—or even Melbourne; his sketches of the institutions and persons, including the late Lord Beaverbrook, for whom he has worked—all are good bedtime stuff, calculated to distract you from the troubles of the day.

Although Mr. Muggeridge has some sacred cows himself—such as retaining the organs one was born with—-he does a magnificent job of demolishing other people’s, including the monarchy, Kennedyism, even Winston Churchill in his failing years. Therein perhaps lies his charm. He looks on society with a cynical and interested eye, portrays it as he sees it and, thank God, does not attempt to reform. A Muggeridge reformer would be too much to con template with equanimity. (Fontana; 90c).

THANKS to front-page treatment of it, we are inclined these days to think of sex as something that was invented by the boy next door; or, anyhow, by the Americans. A previous generation knew that it was the French who had all the answers and Jean Renoir’s first and, as far

as we know, only novel restates France’s claim.

Jean is the son of the Renoir, author of the biography, Renoir, my Father, which was reviewed in PIM several years ago, and a producer of films. His novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges is a very sexy book, indeed.

Its message, if it can be said to have any message at all, is that sex was once regarded as a fairly un complicated business and that nothing the Sunday newspapers can currently cook up for the titillation of their weekend readers really matched the reality of the plushy years between the last decade of the 19th century and 1914.

The only difference between then and now is that Then there were more rules about who did and who didn’t; and that Now everyone spends far too much time chattering about it. I was told recently—by a 22-year old who already blames my genera tion for the mess the world is in, for bad politicians, for Vietnam, for conscription, and for World War II and the one before that—that we are also responsible for the growing generation’s interest in sex.

He thinks that we’ve advertised it, debated it, been so broad-mindedly clinical about it in church, home and school, that it has been forced down their throats, whether they wanted it or not.

I gather that the generation that comes after will be quite differently indoctrinated.

Born to wealth

Captain Georges, at any rate, was much better served in the early years of this century. He was born into a family that had wealth and a minor title, which still amounted to some thing in republican France, and his education was superintended with only one object in mind—that he should grow up to be a gentleman.

At the right time he was taught to ride and shoot; and, also at the right time, so that there should be no slip-ups in his sex life, Georges was passed over to his father’s ex mistress and, in very civilised fashion instructed in the “arts of living”.

Because Georges was very good

with horses, he joined a cavalry regiment and it was during this time, just before World War I, that he met Agnes, the love of his life. The meeting took place in a brothel; but this is no ordinary story of a man who falls in love with a prostitute.

Captain Georges, in fact, went on to become something of a hero of the World War II Resistance; and Agnes—well, read the book and find out.

It is in quite a different key to Peyton Place, the Carpetbaggers and all the other epics of sex-in-our time, and is all the better for it. ( Fontana; 80c).

TOM NEALE’S book, An Island to Oneself, in which he describes his life on uninhabited Suwarrow (or Suvarov) atoll in the Cook Group, has been published in paperback. It was originally published by Collins, in 1966, and reviewed in PIM in March 1967. (Fontana: 80c).

NOW, for a change in tempo. A specialised book for, I fear, a very specialised audience— Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick, H. G. Wood Professor of Theology in the University of Birmingham.

The problem that Dr. Hick deals with in this book is a theological one—can the presence of evil in the world be reconciled with the existence of a God who is supposed to be unlimited in both goodness and power.

It is, says the author, a problem “equally for the believer and the non believer. In the mind of the latter it stands as a major obstacle of religious commitment; while for the former it sets up acute internal tension to disturb his faith and lay upon it a perpetual burden of doubt”.

Beginning about the time of St.

Augustine, the author thrashes the problem to its knees and comes up with a solution that should be of some assistance to those Christians who finally win through to page 400.

This is not Sunday-school stuff but more suited to post-graduate students in theology who are used to grappling with such onslaughts on the intellect.

Laymen divide fairly easily into believers and non-believers and pos sibly the believers are happier when theirs is a blind faith. Few, I think, could withstand 400 pages of argument on the subject.

When published first in 1966 the book received lavish praise from reviewers much more erudite in things theological than yours truly. (Fontana; $1.15).