The Memory Chalet, by Tony Judt

I’d never heard of Tony Judt until I read the news of his death, followed by many tributes, then the reviews of this posthumous book. I was intrigued that a writer I knew nothing about could be so sincerely and widely mourned. I read more, and discovered that his work covered ground that is integral to my life, and I marvelled even more that I knew nothing about him. Then I read this very personal book, and conceived a genuine sense of loss, that I’d missed the chance of reading what he wrote as he wrote it and lived it.

I love, love, love this book. However, that may be because in it Tony Judt has said so many things, in such razor-sharp and elegant prose, that I think too, if only muzzily and feebly. This valedictory book is not an academic study, but a memoir disguised as a series of literary essays, or perhaps vice versa. At any rate, he leaves us with a strong impression of his life story, and in particular of what formed him – and so much of what formed him, also formed me. He is of my generation and class (although I do not share his Jewish heritage). His education and the instincts it honed are so familiar to me. I’m spellbound, and made not a little jealous, by how well he tells the story of his life. I could not have achieved this for myself, and what is even more dispiriting, it would never have occurred to me to try. But I can take pleasure in the extent to which he has set down my world for me.

At his death, Tony Judt was Professor of European Studies at New York University and a distinguished commentator on modern Europe. He died in 2010 aged 62, after the rapid onset of the motor neurone condition ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. This rapidly left him physically helpless, but free of pain, and with unimpaired mind. As he said: But if you have to suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head … He movingly describes his existence of just staying alive and thinking in an early chapter, Night, and he claims to have written these essays largely for himself, though not long before he died he put some structure around what he calls these feuilletons for publication, and some had already appeared in the press. There is a sense in which he has little to lose – he can examine himself and his motivation at various stages of his life with crystal clear hindsight. He can savour what made him happy. He can indulge at times in the purest nostalgia. He can formulate his criticism of himself, and of society and events, and debunk myths. He has the time to reflect, and the intellectual firepower to make every word count.

I’ve said that so much that Tony Judt has described in the book seems familiar to me: his description of his childhood homes in South West London that I know so well – Putney and Kingston Hill; his experience of free, selective schooling, and of being the first in his family to go to university; the seminal events of the 60s that furnish my mind with both reality and myth; his appreciation of just how fortunate our post-war generation has been. (I sometimes describe myself as having somehow found a wormhole in space-time that has taken me through to the present in secure prosperity – free schooling, fully funded university education and professional training, a full-time professional career in public service and the choice to retire in comfort ….). Finally, the extent to which our generation have shaped today’s world, which comes down to – what we haven’t learned.

I love the whole sweep of the book, but not necessarily all of the essays that make it up. So many are full of ‘Yes!’ moments, that I’m actually rather grateful for the few that have ‘Hmmm. Really?’ moments as well. After all, what sort of a book is it, when all this reader can do is agree? (Bookfox Kirsty said something similar earlier this week, about Niall Ferguson’s Civilization – but I have to stress that I am coming at this book from a very different standpoint!) Favourite essays cover his childhood home and experience of growing up in the 50s. Reviewers have singled out his essay on Putney, and his love of the public transport that got him out of there, including the long lost and lamented Green Line Bus. It is indeed a beautiful piece, he’s just great on Clapham Junction, but there is so much else beside this nostalgia. He looks back on his young self, and charts his rapid growing up through a period of idealism as a sort of accelerated formation of his political outlook. He reflects on the incongruities of coming from a lower middle-class home to the stratified world of Kings College Cambridge. His essay on the terrifying elite of the École Normale Supérieur enlightened me vastly, and his not so gentle myth-busting of the cult of the French Intellectual is a gem.

I’m spoiled for choice of a passage to illustrate just how witty and forensic his writing can be. He’s at his best at the end of an essay, pulling together his ideas, extracting the point, and wrapping it all up in a single paragraph. Sometimes the writing shows such bravura that I want to cheer. Here he is, encapsulating his political education at the end of the chapter entitled ‘Kibbutz‘:

I don’t regard those [Kibbutz] years as squandered or misspent. If anything, they furnished me with a store of memories and lessons somewhat richer than I would have acquired had I simply passed through the decade in conformity with generational proclivities. By the time I went up to Cambridge I had actually experienced – and led – an ideological movement of the kind that most of my contemporaries only 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 twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a South London teenager.

But maybe this is better – it’s the nearest he gets to describing my ‘wormhole in space-time’ – at the end of his essay Revolutionaries, where he reflects on the 1968 ‘Évènements de Mai’ in Paris, and looks back with guilt at the lack of attention paid to what was going on at the same time in Poland and Czeckoslovakia:

No-one should feel guilty for being born in the right place at the right time. We in the West were a lucky generation. We did not change the world; rather, the world changed obligingly for us. Everything seemed possible: unlike young people today we never doubted that there would be an interesting job for us, and thus felt no need to fritter our time away on anything as degrading as “Business School”. Most of us went on useful employment in education or public service. We devoted energy to discussing what was wrong with the world and how to change it. We protested the things we didn’t like, and we were right to do so. In our own eyes at least, we were a revolutionary generation. Pity we missed the revolution.

I wonder how much of my delight in this book is fellow feeling – ‘it’s your age, dear’? I’d love to hear from someone younger than me who has read this, whether it had the same resonance and brought the same pleasures, or different ones.

Tony Judt is described, with reason, as a ‘public intellectual’. Well, I am so very much in favour of those. But I see a public intellectual as someone who is taking a long view, but also responding to the moment, reacting as well as acting – causing a stir – even, as Richard Dawkins has so spectacularly done recently, putting his or her foot in it. I am so sad to think that his body of work is now complete, and will start to recede into the past. It is there for me to read, and I now can’t wait. But it is frozen in time – he cannot come back to revise or reinforce his ideas. I regret that Tony Judt’s life in public was conducted in places where I was not to be found. I’m sorry I never met him.

Tony Judt: The Memory Chalet. London: William Heinemann, 2010. 240pp
ISBN13: 9780434020966 (hardback)
Also available in paperback, and (verified for UK only) EPUB ebook and Kindle editions.

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