Chronicles of Wasted Time
Grubbs, Kenneth E. Jr.
"Chronicles of Wasted Time" I had a pretaste of this feast, the second course before the first, upon my first trip, last year, to London. Actually outside of London: at the Bromley Court Inn, a lovely place to land after seven...
...Though he had recognized them as the comic characters they were, he perhaps listened too much to his aunt and uncle by marriage, Sidney and Beatrice Webb...
...Then, he does the unforgiveable and lists for the wary several of the "all-purpose cues," good for any orator or editorialist: "On this historic occasion when...
...To clinch and struggle and contend with one another...
...love in order to go on loving...
...So twentieth century...
...Actually outside of London: at the Bromley Court Inn, a lovely place to land after seven weeks of whizzing across Europe, in Kent...
...And so on...
...and went off to Moscow for the Guardian...
...For it is exactly, he reminds us, the detestation of the world, and its tinhorn leaders and reigning ideologies, that permits us patience and tolerance...
...Of course Muggeridge has a field day with our preoccupation with sex—"happiness in true twentieth century style...
...compared, the pop-mysticism of Leary or Ram Dass is but "processed cheese...
...It is idle to think that politicians can...
...The section should, of course, be included in journalism texts, but of course will never be...
...His mystical experiences would never be reported, however, in the National Enquirer...
...that replacing a buffoonish colonial governor with a feathered hat by an equally buffoonish Jomo Kenyatta with a fly-switch, or white bully-boys by black ones, represents any moral or—as the World Council of Churches, that pans asinorum of all Christian endeavor, appears to suppose—spiritual advance...
...Muggeridge is merciless on this century, for we are caught, it is his notion, in mere sensuality: the sweetness of the earth, the love affair with ideologies, the marriage to secular optimism...
...Again Muggeridge senses a literary tool with which to flail away merrily at modern delusions...
...grunting, coaxing, sweating, murmuring, yelling...
...if it were but uprooted and employed wand-like all evil would be destroyed, and happiness supplanted in place...
...Love his style, praise the brilliant sheen, but quietly neglect the truth at its heart...
...This is his remembrance of leader writing days at the Manchester Guardian under C.P...
...Muggeridge's ability to make life—the nuthouse of history—more astonishing, fascinating, and hilarious than fiction has long been a mainstay of Western journalism, print or broadcast...
...not one of them, he is able to be more damning than the cynics at every turn...
...Lawrence any day: "Marriage (whether registered or not) begins, not with setting up house, counting wedding presents, blowing kisses, looking at wedding groups, but with two bodies confronting one another like two wrestlers...
...Velveeta...
...The absurdity is to suppose that self-government, as such, is otherwise beneficent...
...a continuation of creation, a reaching after creativity through the fusion of two beings—the flesh first...
...The only essential difference is that the Sahibs are now brown instead of white...
...Each bodily union is a microcosm of the same process...
...Muggeridge has honed his words on all manner of political animals, clergy, rock 'n' roll stars, et al.—Churchill to Jagger, the cigar thrust into the sky replaced by the new head of empire's, lips thrust into—whatever...
...Indeed he attacks the libertarian arguments for legalized hashish, and uses as his witness India, woebegotten, torn-down, spiritless India...
...Albeit among them, Muggeridge cannot abide much of journalists, who are, he tells us, "sharks...
...It is painful to me now to reflect the ease with which I got into the way of using this non-language...
...I should rather spend a day with Malcolm Muggeridge than I would a seminar with Ayn Rand...
...Muggeridge is good because Muggeridge is a man of heart, and he so loves love that he never ideologizesit...
...I am more penitent for my false words—for the most part, mercifully lost for ever in the Media's great slagheaps—than for false deeds....there was no need for politicians to finish their sentences, the end being implicit in the be ginning...
...I have been a daily editorialpage editor for four years and—yup...
...I can only leave you to guess them...
...He is to that optimism what Voltaire was to the world of Pangloss...
...Thus imbued with rosiness about the Kremlin-chartered Golden Age, Muggeridge packed up his family, sold their earthly belongings (who would need them since the Revolution...
...the expense of passion quickening in its peaceful aftermath...
...He is more curmudgeonly, more thoroughgoing in his affront to temporal pastimes than the cynics...
...The excerpted chapter—from The Infernal Grove (a phrase from Blake), now out in America—was nothing if not transfixing: a spy story surpassing Fleming or Le Carre...
...If that attitude has been the essence of Christianity it has also been the making of one of the giant comic minds of this century...
...It is that sort of weakness that proves Muggeridge's small expectations so hilariously right...
...No thinking man will underestimate the...
...Even we libertarian editorialists have our "all-purpose cues," though I daresay not as many...
...India without the Raj is, in this respect, in no way better, or worse, place...
...I don't know but I've been told (as the blues singers say) that when one of our newsweeklies reviewed this wonderful autobiography the magazine jolted Muggeridge's followers by not once mentioning his Christianity...
...then the soul, the totality, to make a third...
...There he found the ludicrous impracticalities, the stupid censoriousness of the regime...
...His first volume describes how he shook his youthful belief in the Green Stick and how, as a leader (editorial) writer for the Manchester Guardian, he became disabused of his devotion to liberalism and his enchantment with the workers' paradise in Sovietized Russia...
...I hope you didn't read all that at once...
...And what a style it is, a joy to the soul...
...Pure Muggeridge...
...Scott...
...It is not enough to say that Muggeridge has written in nearly every form: newspaper editorials, foreign correspondence, fiction...
...So serenely asleep after the battle, and maybe already ovum and sperm seizing the interlude to enact their own drama...
...Once we "root up the Infernal Grove" we can be worthy, with Blake, "to step into Eternity...
...So, compared with Chronicles of Wasted Time, both volumes, are the memoirs of current politicians and the autobiographies of aging adolescents we are so helplessly glutted with...
...That is England...
...There he found the political breed, especially the ideologized kind, odoriferous...
...these drooling non-sentences conveying non-thoughts, propounding non-fears and offering non-hopes...
...No, this isn't Mencken (though it sounds like him...
...A poll taken recently indicated that the most recognized countenance in the British Empire (oops, ex-empire) is Muggeridge's...
...He is the complete journalist, because he is the maverick journalist, forever pounding away at the "intimations of bogus expertise" offered freely by the waxing writers and chirping panelists...
...the stench only grew stronger throughout his life, sharpening his punditry...
...Words are as beautiful as love, and as easily betrayed...
...This achieved, peace follows...
...all about Young Muggeridge's bizarre experiences in the topsy-turvy world of the English Secret Service during World War II, and embellished with memorable profiles of friends such as Graham Greene ("a saint trying unsuccessfully to be a sinner...
...number two is the Queen's...
...unite to be united...
...Muggeridge has the last laugh on everyone, true mirth...
...So the world began, with vast turbulence in the genitalia of space...
...The Green Stick, Tolstoy believed, and Muggeridge early on believed, was buried in the Russian soil...
...Politics, and sex, make a happy Green Stick—Tolstoy's phrase...
...he uses it brilliantly...
...We exist to continue existence...
...There is scarcely a writer with such mastery of English prose, This sample I would take over D.H...
...While recognizing the reality of...
...Whether as a panelist on BBC (or fixture on the late night American tube) or editor of Punch (or book reviewer, every month, for Esquire), that funny old Englishman with the long white eyebrows and the face etched with laughter lines has become salvation, the grace of humor, for untold people enslaved by the twentieth century with all its grimness...
...Rolling about, now one on top, now another...
...And, more incredulously for me, all true...
...Muggeridge would substitute editorial writers for politicians, make no mistake...
...Muggeridge is by no means a mechanical libertarian, though even John Kenneth Galbraith acknowledges his impulse as rather thoroughly anarchic...
...Muggeridge is Brie...
...the work done, we may sleep, letting an arm grow numb rather than wake a sleeping head cushioned there...
...I had four days, and though the desire burned to see Fleet Street and spend as much time as I could with my new friend Jane, such a place of repose as the Bromley—and the Sunday Times if it is serializing Malcolm Muggeridge's memoirs—has first rights to me...
...But he does so because of all things this century has found to idolize few things can be so preposterous—unless perhaps politics...
...Muggeridge is a mystic who does not hesitate to share his ecstasies...
Vol. 8 • March 1975 • No. 6
