HIDDEN IN A GROVE OF WORDS

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 20

HIDDEN IN A GROVE OF WORDS

Chronicles of Wasted Time. Volume 11, The Infernal Grove. By Malcolm Muggeridge. Collins. 280 pp. (Reviewed by J.M.C.)

In die beginning was the word, and even in the middle the word continues, but it may take a third or even a fourth volume before it is made flesh, and Malcolm Muggeridge allows the follower of his fascinating autobiography, “Chronicles of Wasted Time”, to glimpse the reality of this most literate of self-constructed enigmas. Like the first volume, “The Green Stick”, the second volume. “The Infernal Grove”, which covers the period from 1933 to 1945, allows an absorbing, vicarious indulgence in the pilgrimage of one of the great egos of our time; of a man who cherishes the word and uses it with fastidious exactitude; a dedicated magnifier of pores and revealer of warts in those he has met. But it leaves the same sense of incompleteness, because, through the beguiling web of words, little of what Muggeridge, himself, is like shows through. He is content to describe exquisitely passing people in a passing scene, but shows little of himself. Affairs are alluded to, but glossed over; his relationship with his wife. Kitty, is unexplored; the essential contradiction, between his spontaneous love and willingness to help those whom he knows and his obsessive contempt for anyone who attempts to improve the earthly lot of humanity, remains unexplained. Of Muggeridge, himself, we learn little more than in “The Green Stick”. Occasionally, he scourges himself for his infidelity, his being always attracted to the ephemeral, his fascination with the unworthy — but not with much revelation. Journalists follow authority as sharks do a liner, hoping to feed off the w’aste it discharges, with perhaps someone occasionally falling overboard to make a meal — Muggeridge has many a meal, according to this, his own, description. But he remains wary of presenting himself up fully for consumption.

However, he shows no such diffidence in serving up some of the most famous of the 30’s and 40’s, eloquently, elegantly, and often very funnily.

In 1933 Muggeridge is where “The Green Stick" left him; disillusioned (or, as usual, smugly pitying the delusion of others) with the new dawn of Stalinist socialism, sheltering for a while with a job in the 1.L.0. in Geneva. In 1945, the second volume leaves him describing with typically impish wit the ceremonial removing of the ashes of Sydney and Beatrice Webb — at the urging of Bernard Shaw — from their garden to Westminster Abbey. In the 30’s, in his self-imposed role as the articulator of the minority view and the castigator of the prevailing wisdom, he predicted and waited for the war, whose arrival he greeted with the savage joy of one proved right against the general flow; he passed through the war years, for others the “phoney war”, in just the first few months, but for him always farcical, even as his telegrams from his Ml 6 job in Laurenco Marques brought him a certain respect among the spymasters he so eloquently mocks; finally, he arrived in Paris, in the midst of liberation and revenge, and found himself protecting the victims of the new peace, Wodehouse among them.

Scores of the famous passed into the orbit of the ever-departing Muggeridge in these years, constantly setting up Kitty, now in a country cottage, now in a London flat, as off he went, like some latter-day Sir Richard Burton, to explore an age that has now passed; cast-iron ego shining bright, typewriter and dinner-jacket neatly packed and

readily accessible; not above the odd vision (the words accompanying, in Latin, of course), the occasional debauchery (remembered with distaste rather than regret); even a suicide attempt, soon abandoned. So many names — “names to conjure with in their day, but who remembers them now?” Muggeridge does:—

Beaverbrook, for whom he worked as a contributor to the Londoner’s Diary in the “Evening Standard”, who read and believed all his own newspapers, even though many of the more cheerful and less realistic items had been inserted at his order with the express intention of reassuring him — as Bernard Levin put it, the only conjurer in history’ to be amazed at the appearance from a top hat of the white rabbit he himself had so carefully hidden there. Kim Philby, stammerer, double agent, and ultimately defector, whom Muggeridge met frequently during the war, Philby the doyen of Section Five, Muggeridge moving from being a strangely spit-and-polish private in the Field Security Police to an Intelligence major.

Philby he saw as an inveterate admirer of buccaneers and buccaneering in all its forms — be it boozers, womanisers, violence, recklessness, or even in the form of Guy Burgess, whom Muggeridge regarded as malodorous and sinister (interestingly, Muggeridge felt similarly offended by other pederasts, from Andre Gide to Samuel Butler, about whom he failed to produce a successful biography for Jonathan Cape). Montgomery “an instinctive camerasoldier”, a tiny, ferret-faced comedian chasing another cowboy-style soldier, Rommel, up and down the Western Desert; and later, pathetically preserving his twin-badged cap and his battle maps in his fossilised mobile command post, memorabilia of a past relevance, as he waited for the world Wise but lonely child The Night Daddy. By Maria Gripe. Drawings by Harald Gripe. Translated from the Swedish by Gerry Bothmer. Chatto and Hindus. 143 pp.

An eccentric young writer who lived in a small room filled with books, furniture, and an owl, applied for a night-time baby-sitting job after his myriad volumes overflowed on to his bed thus leaving him with no sleeping place. To “sleep while you work” afforded him an opportunity to resolve his problem. At first, Julia, his charge, bitterly resented the idea of a night daddy; she preferred her mother’s unmarried status and her own fatherless existence. Her friends’ reports of their fathers had not made male parents seem anything other than bossy creatures with unreasonable rules.

Gradually Julia warmed to her night daddy and, rather to his dismay, they embarked upon a book; each wrote separate accounts about their growing relationship and their shared adventures. Smuggler, the owl, was an immediate bond. Then there was the beautiful, mysterious Queen of the Night bud whose splendid opening must be patiently awaited. With this very simple story, Maria Gripe has conveyed Julia’s hidden loneliness, her slow acceptance and pride in her night daddy which made her a little like other children. The author depicts the man emerging from his sheltered world as he became acquainted with the child. This is a delightful book which succeeds very well in delineating the fragile, delicate affinity that developed between a wise child and an unworldly young man.

to call upon him, which it never did. He is particularly interesting on ’’the twilight of empire” in India, superbly amusing on his induction into army life and thinking, and hilarious in his description of his attempts to learn invisible writing. He is, as always, very good at capturing the feel of places, Lisbon, Paris, Calcutta, dozens of other cities.

Perhaps the most interesting note in the book comes in his description of “H”, a Lithuanian woman he met in Geneva. He suspected her of duplicity even then, and later when he heard of her being imprisoned for spying, he comments “So in the end her true allegiance came out. I wonder if mine ever will. Or if I really have one.” The question remains unanswered at the end of the second volume, but anyone who has had the pleasure of reading this totally absorbing, superbly written piece of high journalism is sure to want to pursue the solution in the third volume.