Book: The Infernal Grove

Overview
Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Infernal Grove (1973) is the second volume of his autobiographical sequence, tracing his passage from the early 1930s through the war years and into the postwar media world. The narrative marries pungent satire with penitential self-scrutiny, as Muggeridge revisits the great ideological enthrallments of his age and the smaller, more intimate deceptions of his own career. The title evokes a tangle of temptations and delusions, political, professional, and personal, through which he stumbles, alternately complicit and appalled.

Moscow: famine and self-deception
A central section recounts his time as the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in the Soviet Union. Arriving as a young left-leaning journalist eager to witness socialism in action, he finds instead a regime sustained by fear, mendacity, and famine. Defying official constraints, he slips into the Ukrainian and Kuban countryside and encounters skeletal peasants, silent trains, and shuttered villages, the physical grammar of the Holodomor. Back in Moscow and then London, he struggles to convey what he has seen, filing grim dispatches that collide with editorial caution and the zeal of Western fellow-travelers. He records the atmosphere of denial, contrasting euphoric visiting intellectuals and accommodating foreign correspondents with the mute testimony of the starving. The episode becomes his parable about modern credulity: how cultivated minds will prefer slogans to suffering when reality threatens their cherished schemes.

War: intelligence and absurdity
The Second World War draws him into the clandestine world, where he serves in British intelligence under flimsy diplomatic covers in outposts on the imperial fringe. His chapters on espionage are mordant rather than dashing, emphasizing not derring-do but the bureaucratic farce of memos, rivalries, and improvisation. He sketches shabby offices, baroque acronyms, and the moral fog of propaganda, necessary, perhaps, but corrosive. His brush with Free French politics, the intrigues around Vichy and de Gaulle, and small operational fiascos supply set pieces in which the vaunted machinery of war reveals its human, comic joints. Beneath the comedy sits a darker observation: grand causes do not rescue participants from pettiness, and victory does not annul the compromises solicited along the way.

After the war: press, broadcasting, and celebrity
Returning to journalism, Muggeridge moves through Fleet Street and into the nascent world of television. He anatomizes the press as a theater of vanity and timidity, alternately abasing itself before power and inflating trivia into importance. Television, he suggests, amplifies these tendencies, democratizing illusion, making fame cheap and ubiquitous. He remembers rowdy editorial conferences, proprietors with crusades, and publicists staging reality. The postwar mood of optimism and permissiveness appears to him both understandable and hollow. He is candid about his own part in the spectacle: the hunger for attention, the cleverness mistaken for wisdom, the ease with which outrage can be converted into a career.

Portraits and self-portrait
The book is crowded with quick, cutting portraits, politicians, editors, spymasters, literary celebrities, drawn with a satirist’s relish and a penitent’s unease. He revisits earlier encounters with eminent admirers of the Soviet experiment and later entanglements with media luminaries. Yet the most sustained portrait is of Muggeridge himself: an ambitious, sensual, often melancholy ironist who comes to distrust the ideologies and appetites he once courted. He presents his infidelities, professional expediencies, and bursts of self-righteousness without pleading, as symptoms of the same malady he diagnoses in institutions: the preference for comforting fictions over uncomfortable truths.

Style and aim
The narrative is digressive and aphoristic, stitched from set pieces, travel scenes, and moral asides. Its power lies less in chronology than in X-rays of illusion, political utopianism, wartime romanticism, postwar celebrity, each exposed by experience to be flimsy and yet persistently attractive. The Infernal Grove thus becomes a memoir of disillusionment that refuses cynicism, using scorn as a diagnostic tool and humor as a shield against despair, while searching for a more durable ground of meaning beyond the snares of the grove.