Book: The Green Stick

Overview
Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Green Stick (1972) is the first volume of his two-part autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time. Taking its title from Leo Tolstoy’s childhood legend of a green stick said to contain the secret of universal love and happiness, the book traces Muggeridge’s early life and the gradual erosion of his youthful faith in political and cultural utopias. It covers his upbringing in an idealistic Labour household in suburban Croydon, his education and literary ambitions, his early marriage, and his formative years as a teacher and journalist abroad, culminating in his searing experiences as a correspondent in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Sarcastic, elegiac, and self-accusing, the narrative draws a map of illusions cherished and shed as Europe edges toward catastrophe.

Childhood, Cambridge, and Apprenticeship
Muggeridge’s opening chapters evoke a Nonconformist, lower-middle-class world animated by his father’s Fabian socialism and municipal politics, a milieu full of meetings, pamphlets, and benign certainties about human progress. The First World War looms over his adolescence as both rupture and revelation, exposing the fragility of those certainties while stoking his hunger to find the “green stick” of lasting meaning. At Cambridge he cultivates literary ambitions and a taste for provocation, absorbing ideas, friendships, and affectations he later treats with amused contrition. He marries young, companionably and precariously, and begins the difficult business of earning a living with words, discovering at once journalism’s excitements and its temptations toward cant and compromise.

Empire, Exile, and the Journalist’s Mask
Teaching and reporting assignments take him to Egypt and India, where the spectacle of imperial life, its rituals, hypocrisies, and accidental generosities, sharpens his eye for the distance between official narratives and lived reality. He sketches expatriate society with comic venom, and himself with no less severity, rehearsing the theme that will run through the book: the mismatch between schemes for human improvement and the recalcitrant human heart. Journalism emerges as both vocation and masquerade, a trade in manufactured appearances whose practitioners, himself included, are easily seduced by fashionable orthodoxies.

Moscow and the Unmasking of Utopia
The book’s moral hinge is his posting to the Soviet Union in 1932–33. Expecting to witness a radiant new order, he instead encounters fear, mendacity, and famine, traveling through a countryside hollowed by collectivization and repression. His attempts to tell what he has seen collide with censorship in Moscow and skepticism or hostility in London newsrooms where the Soviet experiment still holds romantic sway. He writes with a bitter clarity about fellow-travelers and celebrated correspondents who preferred slogans to facts, and about his own cowardices and compromises. The episode becomes a parable of his wider disillusionment: the green stick of political salvation is a lie, and the worship of history’s “right side” a form of idolatry.

Voice, Themes, and Trajectory
Muggeridge’s style is aphoristic, amused, and penitential, moving between set-piece portraits, of family, editors, ideologues, and reflective passages preoccupied with vanity, fame, sex, and the uses of failure. He raids his reading (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky especially) for images to measure the gap between proclaimed ideals and experienced truth. The subtitle’s Shakespearean echo underscores the rueful scope of his reckoning: a chronicle of wasted time in which waste becomes, paradoxically, a teacher. Glimpses of transcendence appear, not yet formed into creed but pressing against the brittle outlines of his secular beliefs. The volume closes as Europe darkens toward war, leaving Muggeridge stripped of utopian faiths yet newly attentive to the clues of grace that the next chapter of his life will pursue.