Studies in Disillusionment

...Strachey broke with the party at the end of the decade, joined the RAF to fight the Germans, and became an industrious patriot and admirer of Churchill...

...Yet the man who emerges from Hugh Thomas' biography, John Strachey (Harper & Row, 319 pp., $8.50), is a rhetorically clever but intellectually shallow figure who throughout his checkered career never attained the heights of his youthful promise, and who remained something of a coldly aristocratic snob even during the days of his Stalinist dedication to the proletarian masses...

...Instead, he proved himself a competent politician and continued to be an estimable writer...

...Strachey's Whig family was prosperous and prominent (Cousin Lytton, the debunker of Victorian eminence, was an earlier black sheep), and his father, St...

...Together with the lavish doses of contempt is the genuine affection he has felt for so many people who were part of his past —especially his father, an irrepressibly ardent, sell-educated Socialist who became a Labor MP...

...In contrast, the Strachey biography, which Thomas seems to have written under the piously protective vigilance of Strachey's widow, is an irksome chore to read...

...His books, Thomas writes, were "immensely influential...

...Oswald Mosley, in his pre-Fascist days, led Strachey out of Labor, and friendship with the ubiquitous Webbs in turn led him, by the early '30s...

...Hugh Thomas stresses the point that when Strachey abandoned Communism, "a spark went out of him which was never really rekindled," and that he spent his later life searching for a commitment to engage him in the same fiery way as had the doctrines of Marx...

...Loe Strachey, owned and edited the Spectator, which in the '20s was an influential conservative journal...

...For this worst of all possible worlds, he insists, there are no earthly solutions...

...By the time he left "Stalin's horror film" in 1933, press censorship, government-decreed famines, omnipresent fear, and the nauseating credulity of pro-Soviet Western toadies had totally demolished his dream of the green stick...

...Strachey replied, not altogether facetiously, "A bit of all three...

...In their lives and careers they frequently encountered the same people and shared political ideologies, professions, and disillusions...

...Not until he returned to England and got a job on that redoubtable bastion of liberalism, the Manchester Guardian, did he find his true metier—writing...

...Before he came to see the folly of his father's radical optimism, Muggeridge spent some unrewarding years at Cambridge and in India, teaching English literature to hopelessly uncomprehending Asians...

...Moreover, while Strachey was busily converting readers to the Communist view of capitalist oppression, his own style of living remained impeccably bourgeois: He owned stocks and shares, lived in a comfortable country house, and put his son down for Eton at birth...

...Muggeridge is the largely self-made son of a lower-middle-class Socialist father...

...In the "red decade" Strachey became England's most articulate spokesman for Marxism...

...his long years as a journalist trained to hold the fickle reader's attention enable him to give every page of Chronicles a consistently heightened immediacy...

...But Strachey's Marxist assurance did not extend to his private life, for during this period of great public success he was being psychoanalyzed, and as the threat of Fascism grew, he increasingly turned from his comrades to his analyst...

...Strachey (who died in 1963) was a child of the conservative Establishment and the heir to a baronetcy...

...Beside the cantankerous wit and eloquent irascibility of his portraits, his doom-laden declamatory bombast about 20th-century decadence and Christian illusion are so much hot air—precisely what Muggeridge himself has always leapt to scorn and expose...

...Throughout this account of his first 30 years, he looks back on the century with profoundly theatrical disgust, a beardless Old Testament prophet thundering his superbly written jeremiad against the decadence of our time...

...In his youth, however, Muggeridge took the Webbs' view of Russia as gospel, and in 1932, under their august aegis, he and his wife sailed for the Soviet Union, planning to settle there forever and raise their children "in a sane world with a future instead of in our crazy run-down one with only a past...

...Gradually, though, he moved back into the Labor party, and eventually served in Clement Attlee's postwar government, first as Minister of Food, then as Minister of War...

...But how thoroughly this book belies his reiterated declarations of detached composure...

...They could be read by people unable to cope with Marx himself...

...Perhaps the years of legitimacy were not as dubiously gratifying to Strachey as Thomas seems to believe...

...Christian, and he would have us believe that he has reached a tranquility of spirit far removed from the impassioned commitments and betrayals of his youth...

...Although Hugh Thomas—who has written excellent books about the Spanish Civil War and Cuba—diligently tries to elucidate the aristocrat-turned-Communist, he doesn't really succeed, perhaps because his method and style are more pedestrian than analytical, or perhaps because the Strachey he portrays in this authorized life Ls too elusive to be grasped...

...At 70, Muggeridge is a teetotaling vegetarian as well as a fervent, if nondenominational...

...What saves this incurable gadfly from sounding like an overaged Jimmy Porter looking back only in anger is the fascinating story he has to tell...

...During this period Muggeridge married Beatrice Webb's niece, thus entering the Leftist elite, and the portraits he now offers of those friends, acquaintances and relatives are vitriolic and brilliantly funny: Sidney Webb, "a dwarf in pince-nez," and his beautiful wife, complacently churning out their statistical love songs to Soviet Russia...

...Nonetheless, Strachey did not become, like so many other victims of the god that failed, an obsessive anti-Communist...

...Like father like son: At Magdalen, Strachey edited the leading Oxford conservative paper...

...Kingsley Martin, "a man for all causes...

...As he portrays himself in the first volume of his projected three-part autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (Morrow, 284 pp., $6.95), he is capricious, witty, monumentally cranky and outrageous, scrupulously honest about the stupidities of his younger Communist self, and scathingly intolerant of the frauds and fools he has known...

...Still, it would be hard to think of two British intellectuals of our time who seem more fundamentally dissimilar in both origin and temperament...

...The twin ideal of socialism and progress was drummed into Muggeridge from his earliest years...

...he now likens it to Tolstoy's idea of a green stick, buried in the forest, "on which words were carved that would destroy all the evil in the hearts of men and bring them everything good...

...Unlike Strachey, who kept the faith until 1939, Muggeridge, as the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, began to take the true measure of the Webbs' New Civilization within a few weeks of his arrival...

...Indeed, he orchestrates his memoir with unmitigated loathing of the modern world and its vaingloriously rotten fruits of progress: "It has long seemed abundantly clear to me that I was born into a dying, if not already dead, civilization...

...a heap of rubble . . . echoing with the hyena cries of Freudians looking for their Marx and Marxists looking for their Freud...

...But he soon came under the first of the many influences that, throughout his life, were to push him in surprising political directions: He fell in love with an older Frenchwoman who convinced him of "the vileness of my British bourgeois-dom" and urged him into the Labor party...

...Educated at Eton and Oxford, he became a leading workhorse apologist for the British Communist party in the 1930s, and later an influential intellectual and Labor-party politician...

...the imperial fatuity of the great Guardian editor C. P. Scott...

...Yet Muggeridge's genius as a writer lies not in these prophetic revelations but in the noisome, corrupt, self-inflated, occasionally even lovable human beings he remembers...

...to believe that social democracy was "the deadliest enemy of the British workers," that Communism was their only hope...

...Muggeridge's memoir, often provocative and splenetic in the extreme, is always lively and absorbing...

...Muggeridge ends his devastating account with a black Christian vision of the apocalypse to come, "a monumental death-wish, an immense destructive force loosed in the world...

...Well-intentioned, middle-class women could read them under the hair-dryer...

...When the Conservatives were returned to power, he devoted himself to writing, publishing what was generally agreed to be his best book, The End of Empire, and also some first-rate literary criticism...

...The absurdity of such simple-mindedness is the core of Muggeridge's chronic disenchantment...

...Bertrand Russell once asked John Strachey why he became a Socialist: "Did you hate your father, your childhood, or your public school...