[In the following review of Chronicles of Wasted Time, Volume I: The Green Stick, Lejeune praises Muggeridge for skillfully showing the failings of the persons and institutions he studied during his long career in journalism and for pointing to faith as the sole answer to life's disappointments.]

Some years ago, seeking to prove the obvious, I listed all the participants in a season of television talk-shows, dividing them into left wingers, right wingers, and nonpolitical. The overwhelming majority, of course, were left wingers. But one name didn't fit into any category—Malcolm Muggeridge. He is that rarest of things, a man who speaks and writes with an absolutely individual voice. During the past few years he has mellowed and ripened (though without losing any of his sharpness), and become a sort of Christian guru, exasperating or admirable according to taste but incapable of being dull.

When the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, was published in Britain last year, it was hailed by almost everybody who reviewed it as a marvelously rich book, fascinating in its highly personal commentary on people and events, corrosively witty, profoundly serious, and beautifully written. Muggeridge bows to none of our modern idols, subscribes to none of the modish doctrines: and yet no one could call him a cynic. He is a man of faith.

This first volume, entitled The Green Stick (from a legend, mentioned by Tolstoy, about a mysterious hidden stick, on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men and bring them everlasting happiness), covers the period from his birth in 1903 to the point, thirty years later, when he returned to Western Europe from being a freelance correspondent in Moscow, whither he had gone, full of doctrinaire confidence, to see the New Civilization taking shape. It is a chronicle not so much of what happened to Muggeridge as of what happened in him; of his spiritual and intellectual education.

He was born into a family of dedicated, lower-middle-class socialists; his father actually became a Labor MP for a while. This background was reinforced by his marriage to Beatrice Webb's niece; a connection which introduced him to the aristocracy of the Left, a nauseating bunch who (then, as now) combined social and intellectual snobbery with theoretical egalitarianism, love of mankind with total ruthlessness about the fate of actual human beings, dogmatic rationalism with breathtaking credulity. Young Muggeridge was dazzled at first (and remains devoted to his wife, Kitty): but closer acquaintance contributed a good deal to his ideological disillusionment.

His education, in a formal sense, was unsuitable. He was sent, in accordance with his father's socialist principles, to a stark local elementary school, and afterward to Cambridge, where he read chemistry, physics, and zoology, because those were the only subjects which had been available, at an advanced level, in his secondary school. As a result, Cambridge, which should have been a place of beauty and liberation, brought him only tedium and distasteful vanity.

Next he went to India, where he taught prospective clerks how to pass an examination in English literature. The futility of this exercise depressed him more than India itself uplifted him. Then, by great good luck, he was offered a job writing editorials for the Manchester Guardian. Under the aegis of its famous editor, C. P. Scott, he dispensed the pure milk of liberal platitude day by day. And some scales fell from his eyes.

Shaking off the dust of bourgeois society, he and Kitty took ship for the Soviet Union. He saw for himself the socialist utopia—the starvation, the cruelty, the utter disregard for truth: and he saw the infinite gullibility of Western intellectuals who believed everything the Communists told them. His dispatches were censored, not only by Soviet officials, but by the Manchester Guardian as well. He left Russia and arrived in Berlin just as the Nazi storm troopers were beginning their work.

He was finished, forever, with liberal platitudes and socialist utopias, with political solutions of any kind. He knew—and it is the main article of his faith—that there is no salvation in this world.

On this biographical thread Muggeridge hangs a glittering succession of anecdotes, epigrams, and meditations. To his recollections of C. P. Scott he adds, by way of analogy, a vitriolic account of a visit he made to the elderly Winston Churchill, a figure whom he considered equally overrated and despicable. The Webbs, Eleanor Roosevelt, Kingsley Martin, Lord Beveridge, and all such progressive persons remind him of a story he wrote as a child about a train going along very fast and, to the satisfaction of the passengers, racing through the small stations along the track without stopping. Their satisfaction, however, turned to dismay, and then to panic fury, when they realized it wasn't going to stop at their stations either. They raged and shouted and shook their fists, but all to no avail. The train went roaring on.

He has no time for men of power, in Washington or Downing Street or the Kremlin. “I have never seen authority,” he says, “that did not give off a whiff of decay.” He has no time for the liberators. “Never in human history have there been so many actual and potential liberators as in the last half-century, and so little liberation; so many and so loud shouts for freedom, and so much enslavement.” He has no time for the social reformers. “Education aimed at producing literates for industry produces illiterates for anarchy. The more motorways the more accidents, the more psychiatrists the more lunacy; hypochondria burgeons with the health service, and delinquency with remedial prisons.” All around he sees people determined to destroy themselves—and the rest of us too. “Just as the intelligentsia have been foremost in the struggle to abolish intelligence, so the great organs of capitalism like the New York Times have spared no expense or effort to ensure that capitalism will not survive.” The perfect epitaph for the modern world, he says, was the label he once saw on a can of film: “Dawn for dusk.”

Only in religion is there hope and satisfaction. “Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.” But this is not to say that we can turn to the twentieth century representatives of organized religion. “I have long been expecting an ecumenical pilgrimage to Marx's grave at Highgate Cemetery, led by a Salvation Army band, with the Archbishop of Canterbury well to the fore, and the Atheist International (there must be one; at any rate there's a branch at the BBC) bringing up the rear.”

This detachment is reflected in his own life. He loves words but never wanted to be a literary man: he pursues God but never wanted to be a priest. “I have no regrets for masterpieces unwritten, for genius unfulfilled. … There are no human causes I wish I had served better, no wonders I wish I had seen, no women I wish I had seduced—or, for that matter, wish I had not seduced; no books I wish I had read, languages I wish I had learnt; no events whose outcome I wish I could know. I have never greatly cared for the world, or felt particularly at home in it.”

Like all such anchorites, he tends to undervalue human institutions and worldly endeavors which, despite their faults, are not wholly lacking in nobility: and there is a certain lack of charity in his book. But most of his targets deserve what he says about them. He is, in every sense, on the side of the angels. And he can write.