Book: Chronicles of Wasted Time

Overview
Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time is a two-volume autobiography (The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove) that traces his journey from Edwardian childhood through journalism, war service, and postwar celebrity to a profound disenchantment with politics and modernity. Written with aphoristic wit and caustic clarity, it is both a witness-account of the 20th century and a confession of illusions pursued and abandoned. The title’s bitter irony encapsulates his belief that much of what he strove after, ideology, status, sensual gratifications, proved hollow, even when publicly garlanded as progress, enlightenment, or success.

Early Life and Ideals
Raised in a nonconformist, socialist household in Croydon, Muggeridge absorbed the Fabian optimism of his father, a Labour activist and parliamentarian. He evokes a drab yet earnest milieu animated by faith in education and reform. The first volume’s title nods to Tolstoy’s childhood myth of a buried “green stick” containing the secret of human happiness, a symbol Muggeridge recasts as the mirage of earthly perfectibility. Cambridge, early teaching posts abroad, and marriage to Kitty Dobbs, niece of Beatrice Webb, drew him into the orbit of Britain’s progressive intelligentsia, whose high-minded hopes for a rational, just society he initially shared.

Moscow and the Collapse of Utopia
As a foreign correspondent in the early 1930s, Muggeridge went to the Soviet Union expecting to find a brave new civilization. What he found was hunger, fear, and pervasive lying. Travelling beyond Moscow into the countryside, he encountered the famine in Ukraine and the apparatus of coercion that sustained the regime. His dispatches, challenged by the credulous or complicit, set him at odds with Western fellow-travelers who preferred a redemptive myth to observed reality. The episode stands at the memoir’s moral center: a lesson in how ideology recruits language to conceal suffering, and how hard-won truth is marginalized when it offends fashionable convictions. His satirical novel Winter in Moscow grew out of this rupture with the Left.

War, Intelligence, and Disenchantment
During the Second World War he served in British intelligence, stationed in outposts where clandestine work mixed with absurdity. He recounts shabby intrigues, bureaucratic tangles, and the farcical underside of grand strategy. The experience deepened his skepticism about the edifying narratives nations tell themselves, even in a just cause. He emerges from the war with sharpened eyes for propaganda, its allure for the virtuous and its use to flatter power.

Media, Fame, and the Sense of Waste
Postwar, Muggeridge became a prominent journalist, editor of Punch, and eventually a television presence. His portraits of editors, politicians, literary lions, and showmen are beautifully etched and pitiless. Yet the harshest scrutiny falls on himself: a man skilled at epigram and exposure, drawn into the very spectacle he distrusted. Journalism and television, he suggests, reward performance over truth; he detects in permissive, prosperous Britain a cheerful nihilism masking spiritual emptiness. Private failures and public applause together feed the book’s refrain, that he squandered time on false gods while missing the one thing needful.

Voice and Significance
The prose mixes barbed comedy with Augustinian self-accusation. Muggeridge skewers utopians like the Webbs and their heirs, but he refuses the comfort of simply blaming others; the confessional mode keeps satire from curdling into mere rancor. As a record of the century’s intellectual temptations, communism, technocracy, media celebrity, the book is unsurpassed in candor and style. Beneath the scorn runs an intensifying religious current, a hunger for transcendent meaning that would later find explicit expression. Chronicles of Wasted Time stands as both social history and spiritual anatomy: the story of a mind learning, painfully and hilariously, how easily cleverness becomes a mask for credulity, and how truth must be loved more than the consolations of belonging.