A conversation between Roy Trevivian and Malcolm Muggeridge

Posted on behalf of a contributor: M.D.

R.T. How have you found this whole business of being married? The mystery of another human being, living with another human being. I have found this one of the most demanding experiences of my life, one of the most valuable and profitable experiences and I would say that marriage is not a thing to be treated lightly or easily.

M.M. Oh certainly not. That is why I am against making divorce any easier; very much against it, because I think that in every marriage there are plenty of occasions when you could easily bust it up. If it had been easy to bust it up I probably should have done so, and then how I should have regretted it! I have been married for over forty years, and I am more contented with my marriage now than when it started. Marriage is very difficult; it has many troubles. Sex, I think, is a frightful trouble, and I consider myself that marriage only becomes bearable when that element is largely eliminated. I think sex for procreation is a marvelous thing, and when one is young passion is a marvelous thing, but not to build on. I don’t think any marriage built on sex can possibly last, because sex doesn’t last and can’t last, and it would be obscene if it did. If there is one thing I completely loathe in the contemporary world it is this unashamed effort to devise means to protract physical desire when in the normal way it has disappeared. Marriage, in any case, is an enormously difficult relationship, particularly if, as in our case, the individuals concerned aren’t Christians. If the Christian scale of values isn’t accepted then all the questions of jealousy, infidelity and so on arise and have to be fought through, and sometimes with great pain and strife.

R.T. When you said Christians weren’t, you mean at that stage you weren’t consciously a Christian?

M.M. Or even unconsciously. I didn’t accept the Christian view of marriage at all when I married. Marriage, in our eyes, was a purely legal arrangement.

R.T. Why did you bother to struggle through?

M.M. Well, because I loved my wife, for no other reason; and if there is one single thing I feel grateful for at this moment it would be that, more than anything else at all; far transcending anything in the way of success (utterly bogus anyway) that I might be considered to have had.

R.T. But there were times when you hated her.

M.M. I don’t know that I hated, but there were times of strife, and this is a terrible thing. Marriage without the comfort of Christian morality is a stormy affair. But it can be survived.

R.T. I believe, when the storms come in my own marriage, because I believe in an eternal reference to this relationship, that it is worth working through; struggling with or being patient with the present situation, because I believe there is an end to work towards and this is part of my being a Christian.

M.M. I entirely agree with that.

R.T. What was your motivation to make your marriage work when you didn’t have this eternal reference?

M,M. Without being a Christian? First of all the simple fact again of poverty, and I would here mention that I belong to a minority who think that the poor really are blessed as the New Testament tells us. There is a great blessing in poverty which is very little realized today. If you are poor, and you have children, and you accept at any rate the idea that you owe a duty to those children to bring them up, that you can’t just jettison them, then to a great extent you are committed to a matrimonial relationship. Now I don’t think this is bad, I think it is good. I approve of it, and I pity the rich who are always in the position that they have no material obstacles to shedding relationships, whether with a wife, children or anyone else. There is, of course, also the fact of love, which is a very real thing, and which endures, contrary to the modern view. I do not at all identify love and sexual desire. I think the two things coincide for a glorious period of youth, but otherwise they are separate.

R.T. What do you say to people who would like easy divorce because of people who are married before they grow up almost, before they understand. They go through the ceremony that locks them together, and yet they are completely unsuitable, and all that can accrue from such marriages will be frustration, hatred, aggressiveness. Don’t you think that people ought to be allowed to break these marriages up?

M.M. Yes, I think that in the last resort they should, but if my advice was sought my advice would always be in the direction of going on trying, of saying that the difficulty is not incompatibility really but vanity, egotism, and the answer to this, as to so many things, is to escape from this prison of the ego. I would also accept the idea that in the last resort there are cases, many fewer than are commonly supposed, in which two people have definitely made a mistake; they bring out the worst in each other, and in those circumstances, with the utmost reluctance and caution, I would say it’s right to break it. But they are few.

R.T. I would say, as a Christian, if only people were Christian very few marriages need to break.

M.M. I agree with that. Very, very few, surprisingly few, but I think there still would be a few. There would be people who would find it impossible to live together, because of a sort of chemistry, but they are few.

R.T. What we are doing with divorce is making it possible to go from one failure to another failure.

M.M. We are establishing a system of promiscuity, a deliberate system of promiscuity, which I think will not make for happiness at all. In fact it will make for great misery, and I try to tell that to young people, but of course they don’t usually listen.

R.T. It can be said of you that it is because physical passion no longer interests you that you are condemning it. People could say, it’s all very well for him, he used to enjoy these things, but now he is telling us that we mustn’t. People could feel that this is a very odd position to take.

M.M. This is frequently said, and I sympathize with the thought. Some people would put it more bluntly than you politely put it. They say: Here is an old debauchee who has got sick of the senses, particularly of sex, and who therefore turns round and says it’s no good. Now, I see the point, but it’s not true. Nor is it true that I no longer appreciate the senses. When you are old you still appreciate the senses, as much as ever really, but in a rather different way. But I have never thought, even in the most ardent moments, that the senses could give one any ultimate satisfaction. I have always thought they were delusive, and I think so now more than ever. The reason that one tends to stress this point more now is not merely because one’s old, but because society itself is so stridently insisting on the opposite proposition—including a lot of Christians and churchmen. They are all insisting that physical sex is in fact a wholly satisfactory way of achieving satisfaction. I contend with St Paul and all the Christian mystics that it’s not, but that doesn’t mean that in itself sex is bad, or in itself undesirable. It is undesirable as an end, not as a means. Everything that we perceive or appreciate involves the senses; this natural scene outside my window that I love so much is connected with the senses. If I couldn’t smell and touch and feel, I shouldn’t be able to appreciate it. But if you say to me that the significance of it is its sensual appeal, and if you go on insisting that is so, as is done with this particular aspect of sensuality which is sex, so that it becomes obsessive, then it is necessary, as it seems to me, to protest, and one protests by saying this is a delusion, a fantasy, which will not even bring the passing satisfaction promised.

R.T. You have said things earlier that have led me to believe that finally for you sex should only be used for procreation. You seem to eliminate the idea of sex as enjoyment.

M.M. Yes I do. I think that the idea of sex as enjoyment is a very dangerous one. The purpose of it is procreation, the justification of it is love; if you separate sex from procreation and love, very rapidly you turn it into a horror.

R.T. But supposing you separated it from procreation but kept enjoyment within love?

M.M. Well yes, I think that is possible, but of course the fact that you are forced, in order to do that, to cut off its procreative function, in other words to sterilize it, will tend, in my opinion, in most cases to produce quite quickly a sense of nausea. Then of course, one’s attitude to this depends upon one’s attitude to marriage, the family and the home. I consider that some form of marriage—and I think that monogamous marriage is probably the highest form—but some form of marriage is essential to civilization and for bringing up children. I think the family is, and ever must be, the basic and true unit of society. If you base a relationship between two people on their achieving mutual pleasure out of it, it will very soon happen that they don’t achieve mutual pleasure out of it at all. This is a fact of life which we all know, and then if they persist, using these various, to me highly disgusting, erotica of various kinds, they will very soon loathe each other, and this is what is going on in our society.

R.T. What about over-population though?

M.M. To me this is a fantasy. You see, when I was young, people used to say the poor had too many children. Or, at the time of the famine in Ireland, they would say that the Irish had too many children. We were taking the food from Ireland, and the Irish were starving, and we said they were starving because they had too many children. Now we who are sated, who have to adopt the most extravagant and ridiculous devices to consume what we produce, while watching whole vast populations getting hungrier and hungrier, overcome our feelings of guilt by persuading ourselves that these others are too numerous, have too many children. They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives! In future history books it will be said, and it will be a very ignoble entry, that just at the moment in our history when we, through our scientific and technical ingenuity, could produce virtually as much food as we wanted to, just when we were opening up and exploring the universe, we set up a great whimpering and wailing, and said there were too many people in the world. It’s pitiful.

From the book Jesus Rediscovered by Malcolm Muggeridge. Copyright © 1969 by Malcolm Muggeridge. Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc.Jesus Rediscovered*

Appeared in September 1982 issue of Ridge Review (pp. 18-20).