The Memory ChaletBy TonyJudt, Heinemann, 226pp. £16.99
THIS MARVELLOUS little book is a cause for celebration and for sadness. Although sadly it will be among the last things we shall have from Tony Judt, one of the finest historians of his time, who died at the age of 62 earlier this year from the effects of motor neurone disease, it is to be celebrated for its dash and vigour, its wit, its warmth and its unflagging intellectual probity. It originated in a series of short autobiographical essays written for the New York Review of Booksat the urging of its editor, the redoubtable Robert Silvers. The mere fact that these pieces were done at all is astonishing, given the appallingly debilitating effects of the author's illness, but even more impressive is the undiminished quality of the writing and of the mind that produced it.
Tony Judt was born in east London into a family of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. His parents were both hairdressers, and as their fortunes improved they moved to the west of the city and settled in Putney, a place to which one of the tenderest essays in the book is devoted. It was here, Judt reminds us, at St Mary’s Church, that some of the most trenchant debates of the English Civil War were held, and where in October 1647 Col Thomas Rainsborough made his ringing declaration that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he”. In his life and in his work Judt registered a broad spectrum of influences, from the anti-Stalinist socialism of his parents and grandparents at one extreme to the contrarian strain of English revolutionary politics on the other. He was a man who spoke his mind, even, or especially, when what he had to say enraged his audience.
The young Judt attended Hebrew school, and as a teenager joined a socialist-Zionist youth group and later went to Israel to work on a kibbutz. The Israeli experience was sobering and formative. Most kibbutzniks, he discovered to his dismay, knew almost nothing about the outside world, being “chiefly concerned with the business of the farm, their neighbour’s spouse, and their neighbour’s possessions (in both cases comparing these enviously with their own)”. As a result “I came quite early on to experience a form of cognitive dissonance in the face of my Zionist illusions”. By the time he went to Cambridge to study history he had actually experienced – and led – an ideological movement of the kind most of my contemporaries only ever encountered in theory. I knew what it meant to be a “believer” – but I also knew what sort of price one pays for such intensity of identification and unquestioning allegiance. Before even turning 20 I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.
What better lessons could there have been for a future historian of the 20th century?
Before Cambridge he studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, that extraordinary forcing house for the French intellectual elite. Here he studied the 19th-century origins of French socialism, and also had another lesson in scepticism. The young normaliens that he encountered struck him as “gifted, brittle, and curiously provincial”, and amongst them he discovered that for many French intellectuals there is a “radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles”. Hence, for instance, Sartres’s unwavering allegiance to the Stalinist USSR, or the passionate adherence of critics and even some artists to the jostling succession of -isms that have bedevilled postwar French intellectual life.
After Paris Judt attended King’s College, Cambridge, and gained a history PhD in 1972. In 1975 he and his first wife travelled to the US, bought a Buick LeSabre – “gold, automatic, nearly eighteen feet long and capable of ten miles per gallon with a following wind” – and drove across the states to the University of California campus at Davis, where he was to teach for a year, at the end of which
I retreated cautiously to the Olde English familiarity of Cambridge. But nothing was quite the same. Cambridge itself felt somehow reduced and constricting: the pancake-flat Fenland as remote as any rice paddy. Everywhere is somewhere else’s nowhere.
Later he moved to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he taught for most of the 1980s, before returning to the US. He went to New York, he tells us, “on a whim” yet wound up settling there. He clearly loved the place, not least for its curious and vital marginality – it is, he writes, “a city more at home in the world than in its home country”, and as such it suited this hybrid spirit whose true place is among what he calls “edge people”:
As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for “Jewishness” in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of “rootless cosmopolitan”. But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages.
No doubt this sense of being at home among contrasts was a help to him in the writing of his magnum opus, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was published in 2005 and became an international bestseller, but his vision of himself as a contentedly deracinated sceptic has led him into some bitter controversies, too. In particular, his 2003 essay in the New York Review, "Israel: The Alternative", provoked a bitter outcry, particularly among the "Israel lobby" in the United States, as did a subsequent piece, "The Country that Wouldn't Grow Up", again on Israel. He also holds trenchant views on the place of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish life. Pointing to the irony that "had Hitler never happened, Judaism might indeed have fallen into deliquescence . . . by migration, marriage, and cultural dilution", he poses a hard question: "Are we really Jews for no better reason than that Hitler sought to exterminate our grandparents? If we fail to rise above this consideration, our grandchildren will have little cause to identify with us."
Judt is that increasingly rare phenomenon, a public intellectual, and he has many things to say that it behoves all of us to attend to. In a fine piece on Czeslaw Milosz he comments on the curious ease with which otherwise sensible people allow themselves to succumb to the dictates of an irrational and frequently violent authority, and goes on to consider the “captive minds” of our own day:
Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical 19th-century doppelgänger – the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History . . . But “the market” – like “dialectical materialism” – is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question).
In 2008 Judt was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which gradually destroys all the muscles in the body while leaving the mind unaffected – “In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease, one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.” He bore this terrible affliction with great fortitude and, it would seem, an utter lack of self-pity, but on the other hand he offers no comforts or cheery assurances for those of us who, for the moment, are able-bodied. He describes clearly and matter-of-factly the progress of his day – “I am utterly and completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers (and anyone else)” – “but then,” as he writes, “comes the night”.
Tony Judt was a courageous man and a brilliant historian, as well as a fearless polemicist, and his death is an incalculable loss for all of us. He was also an untiring worker: only a few weeks before his death he completed, in collaboration with Timothy Snyder, what Snyder describes as "a long book about [Judt's] life and the life of the mind in the twentieth century'', aptly entitled Thinking the Twentieth Century, a work that will be eagerly awaited by Judt's many admirers and, most probably, by his detractors too.
At the close of The Memory Chalethe writes a wonderful paean to one of his favourite countries, Switzerland, and its delightful mountain refuges. His favourite of these was Mürren, "an unspoilt village halfway up the Schilthorn massif attainable only by rack railway or cable car", which in his illness became for him a vision of release and tranquillity.
There is a path of sorts that accompanies Mürren’s pocket railway. Halfway along, a little café – the only stop on the line – serves the usual run of Swiss wayside fare. Ahead, the mountain falls steeply away into the rift valley below. Behind, you can clamber up to the summer barns with the cows and goats and shepherds. Or you can just wait for the next train: punctual, predictable, and precise to the second. Nothing happens: it is the happiest place in the world. We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever.
One can only wish him bon voyage.
John Banville's most recent book is Elegy for April, written under the name Benjamin Black
