Wormwood, Anyone?

By Christopher Porterfield

THE INFERNAL GROVE by MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE 280 pages. Morrow. $7.95.

British literary intelligentsia, Malcolm Muggeridge once said, may generally be viewed as "priests and religious manques. The Rev. Stephen Spender, Father [Cyril] Connolly, Dom Graham Greene, Sister Brigid Brophy." To this list should be added Muggeridge himself: the Prophet Malcolm.

For nearly 40 years, in journalism, lectures, and radio and TV appearances, Muggeridge has been decrying everything that he finds fraudulent or ridiculous--i.e., virtually everything. Ours is a vulgar and destructive age, he has instructed us. Our arts and literature are a heap of rubble. Our inner Lives are sown with salt. Even now that Muggeridge has converted to an idiosyncratic Christianity (as described in his 1969 Jesus Rediscovered), his cup of wormwood runneth over.

With most prophets who deal in unrelieved raillery, the tedium is the message. But Muggeridge is too canny an entertainer for that. In The Infernal Grove, the second volume of his autobiography, he writes with enough verve and instinct for artful exaggeration to keep a good novel spinning along. His pages are enlivened with provocations to conventional wisdom ("Innocence is often a quality of worldly success, as sophistication is of worldly failure" ... "News like sensuality is a passing excitement; perhaps the ultimate fantasy of all"). His characters--including a Who's Who of English politics, journalism and literature--are wickedly sketched, from the most obscure London banker ("The very texture of his face was like a parchment deed made out in his favour") to General de Gaulle ("The face of a man born to lead a lost cause, with the additional sorrow that it would ostensibly triumph").

Nor does Muggeridge spare himself.

His narrative runs from the early 1930s through the end of World War II, covering journalistic sojourns abroad and in Fleet Street and wartime experiences as a cloak-and-dagger man in Africa and Europe. Among Muggeridge's notable colleagues of that tune were Graham Greene and the double agent Kim Philby. Spying depressed Muggeridge so that he even flirted with suicide one night in Mozambique by swimming out to sea. Unlike Evelyn Waugh, whose attempt to drown himself was foiled by a sting from a jellyfish, Muggeridge simply turned back to shore "without thinking or deciding." Through it all, he affects to find his younger self as vain and misguided as the rest of mankind.

By his own account, Muggeridge seems to be the sort of true believer who cannot forgive the world, and perhaps himself, for failing to live up to his youthful ideals. As he recounted last year In The Green Stick, his first autobiographical installment, he was raised as a devout socialist in a middle-class suburb of London. Later, his Utopian faith was shattered by his experiences as a correspondent in the Raj's India and Stalin's Moscow. Now, as the war ends in The Infernal Grove, he turns away in final disenchantment from the "world's wreck," disgusted equally with the victors and the vanquished.

If the Heavenly City is not to be found on earth, Muggeridge turns his eyes toward heaven itself. Foreshadowing his conversion, he concludes that the quest for "an alternative reality" is the only thing that can redeem what he regards as "a lost life."

This presumably is the meaning of the overall title for the projected three volumes of his autobiography: Chronicles of Wasted Time. Yet here is where Muggeridge does not quite come clean.

His putdowns may be born of an admirable zeal to avoid mouthing hypocrisy and cant. On the other hand, cynicism--or la belle indifference, as Muggeridge would have it--can be a pose too. For the fact implicit in the very act of writing his autobiography is Muggeridge's assumption that the reader will find neither his life nor his account of it a waste of time. And he is right on both counts.

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