Chronicles of Wasted Time: A Review

A writer's memoir, a strange man, fatalism, writing as "truth telling"

‘A truth that’s told with bad intent/Beats all the lies you can invent’, William Blake

A eulogy for Malcolm Muggeridge: here lies M____, great carver of tombstones. A master of epithets, a skilled tweeter born before his time. The irony of writing an epitaph for such a man is that the entirety of his Chronicles of Wasted Time feels like a string of epitaphs. A paragraph for every soul. And oh, how evocative these descriptions are:

“[Churchill’s] physical condition was vastly inferior to Scott’s; flabby and puffy, and, in some indefinable way, vaguely obscene. Like an inebriated old sea lion, barking and thrashing about in shallow water.”

Chronicles is this sort of thing, page after page of it, like walking down the aisle, rubbing dirt from the tombstones of a generation of faintly celebrated British aristocrats to find short, searing indictments of their temperament. Muggeridge practices a very particular (and very British) style of writing, writing as Truth-telling, one I first found intoxicating as a young man reading Orwell’s celebrated essay, Politics and the English Language, and later in Graham Greene. To Orwell, the writer’s mandate is to find new metaphors, words so forceful in their novelty that they stop the reader and shout “Here, here is a person, a place, a thing you’ve never seen before. Notice it!” Muggeridge has an astonishing gift for gouging into his pages the souls of the many half-famous people who cross his stage. “Seal-like”, “somnolent-eyed, heavily moustached, nicotine-stained”, “granitically austere”.

Only after several hundred pages of this did my amazement fade enough to wonder how even-handed these portraits might be. Finding myself filled with contempt for, in their turn, Churchill, Gandhi, Nehru, it became hard to tell whether that was really my contempt, or whether Muggeridge had simply solved writing, had found a way to make any belief seem self-evidently true and, moreover, like it was my own. Inception. In some ways, Muggeridge seems to embrace a limiting form of the Orwellian ethos: each sentence says so much, with such originality, that it pulls the reader inexorably into a world without subjectivity, in which their judgment is totally supplanted by Muggeridge’s.

Chronicles of Wasted Time follows Muggeridge’s life from his childhood at the turn of the 20^th century in England, raised by an intellectual family with socialist leanings, to his early career as a journalist in London, on the eastern coast of India, revolutionary Russia, the Middle East, and later an amusing interlude as a spy in the second World War. During a career writing for a half dozen magazines and papers in the tempestuous final years of the British Empire, Muggeridge crosses paths with many household names: Churchill, Graham Greene, Stalin, Gandhi, and as many other names that feel, in his portrayal, like they should be. Chronicles is an autobiography that doubles as a history of the 20^th century, crossing so casually across strange and unspoken rooms where history roiled and turned, filled with aristocrats in the decline of aristocracy, revolutions that betray their aspirations, the banality of events which are told reverently in history books.

Muggeridge presents a rather bitter, misanthropic picture of himself; in his own words “I have never cared greatly for the world, or felt particularly at home in it”. He turns his clinical eye towards himself only sparingly, but even this comes across as calculated, giving off the impression of a kind of blithe self-hatred. Muggeridge describes, at regular intervals, abandoning his pregnant wife to pursue his writing (and a number of other women), so openly and without deceit that it becomes hard to feel more contempt for him than he seems to feel for himself. He cuts like a scalpel, barely human, unfeeling, journalistic. I am reminded of Fowler in A Quiet American, keen-eyed but pridefully impotent, too cynical to sully his hands defending himself or any particular dogma.

But what is truth? Muggeridge ends his introduction with one of the most earnest homilies to writing and journalism and the pursuit of truth I have ever encountered:

“The hazards in the way of telling the truth are, indeed, very great. Seeking it, one can so easily become enmeshed in lies…Yet even so, truth is very beautiful; more so, as I consider, than justice – today’s pursuit – which easily puts on a false face…Again, that still small voice - if only one could catch it.”

Even after reading the book for a second time, I cannot decide if he has succeeded at catching it. Is this truth? He has, at the very least, caught the Truth according to Malcolm Muggeridge, a thing so intimate it’s hard not to love him by the end, love him and hate him.

Muggeridge is uproariously funny at times; he tells a hilarious anecdote about H.G. Wells discovering how to deprive young aristocratic women of their virtue (“almost with the excitement of Archimedes”). He is profoundly irreverent, speaking rather openly about sex and the pathetic spasms of great men in decline, old lords, powerless viceroys, retired prime ministers lording it over small country estates in their dotage. The book is also unexpectedly dramatic: Muggeridge moves to the nascent Soviet Union in a fit of youthful idealism, only to flee it a few years later after writing an indictment of its genocidal agrarian policy. Later, nearly the entire last act is dedicated to his abortive career as a spymaster in Africa, filled with intrigue, intercepted messages, excellent fodder for a series of detective novels he surely wrote at some point. It is hard to believe that one person could have seen so much of history. In a beautiful interlude, he describes several years spent on two separate occasions in India, first as an English teacher to a set of idealistic young Indian boys in the 20s, then later as a spectator to the fall of the British Raj, reporting for local papers on the politics of the new government while sleeping with a rather famous young Indian poet. In these moments, I find myself admiring him so profoundly, so desperately wanting to live his life. I could even go as far as to say that I come to love him. But he has a streak of cruelty and self-hatred that it is hard to ignore. He abandons his frequently pregnant wife so many times it scarcely registers (all the while exhorting his eternal love for her). He himself expresses admiration for almost no one and rarely seems content. He lives so much in his head that it seems hard to imagine him at peace, or as a friend. About halfway through the book, I was struck with the idea of meeting him, seeing him fix his knowing and calculating eyes on me, exchanging a few pleasantries, perhaps, a glass of whiskey, knowing I was being reduced to a short snippet in a journal somewhere. “A pleasant young man, carelessly moustached, irresolute”. I don’t think I’d like him.

Chronicles of Wasted Time feels like an important book; a powerful history of the last century, truly, as the cover declaims, “one of the great memoirs of our time”, the work of a master. Muggeridge feels like someone who started slipping through the cracks of the world early and never struggled very hard to stay in it, accepting his role as a watcher and chronicler of truths, but not as a human, not as part of the world.

You can read a New York Times review of the memoir from 1973 here. I wrote this review in 2023 and I’m posting it here, a few years later. Thanks to A for turning me on to this book.