The Green Stick (Chronicles of Wasted Time: Part 1)

It was a fancy of Tolstoy's that somewhere, buried underground, if you could but find it, was a Green Stick with the secret of everlasting happiness carved upon it.

Malcolm Muggeridge's quest for the Green Stick began under the aegis of his father, an ardent pioneer Socialist, and ended abruptly in Russia in 1933 under that of Stalin. In between he had spent four unprofitable years at Cambridge and another four initiating Indian and Egyptian students into the mysteries of English Literature.

Marriage to the niece of Beatrice and Sidney Webb introduced him to the top social elite of the Left, and a corresponding elevation was attained when he found himself in the sacred corridors of the Manchester Guardian dispensing the pure world of Liberalism at the behest of its great editor, C.P. Scott.

Yet this did not quite satisfy. So off he went with his wife Kitty to the U.S.S.R., where Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Sidney were icons, and the New Civilization they had proclaimed was taking shape - only to retreat, after a season, in through disillusionment.

Mr. Muggeridge's account of this unfulfilled quest brilliantly recalls and illuminate the post-World War I years. It is superbly funny, impeccably well observed and precise, with portraits of his friends and contemporaries shining like beams along the way. And beneath the wit and the epigrams runs a fierce love of humanity - disenchanted often, angry sometimes, despairing never.

"I have always loved words," Mr. Muggeridge observes early in his book, "and still love them, for their own sake. For the power and beauty of them; for the wonderful things that can be done with them." Reading his words, the reader becomes similarly beguiled - and hopes for other Chronicles to follow. View Less