REVIEWS BY ERIC PILCH
Essays from the brink
THE MEMORY CHALET By Tony Judt (Penguin Group, Inc. $25.95)
From his deathbed, a historian reminisces
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magine for a moment that you are completely immobilized, save for the ability to speak with some difficulty. Every movement you wish to make—from scratching the itch on your leg to readjusting your glasses—is not possible without the help of another. Now consider this predicament if you retained complete control over your mental faculties. This was the position of famed historian Tony Judt shortly before his death from ALS, more commonly called Lou Gherig’s disease. “The salient quality of this particular neurodegenerative disorder is that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present, and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting those reflections into words,” Judt writes. As a prolific communicator of ideas— Judt calls historians “philosophers teaching with illustrations”—this posed nearly an insurmountable challenge. Yet, Judt responded by constructing The Memory Chalet, a moving memoir of short reflections that usually address an idea or theme from his life. Each of the chapters was composed fully in Judt’s mind, often while lying sleeplessly at night, and then communicated verbally and transcribed. The resulting portrait reveals a man who not only had intimate involvement with momentous events of the twentieth century, but who would also come to be regarded a leading public intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic from his post at New York University. Like Christopher Hitchens’ celebrated memoir that provides firsthand accounts of the evening when Bill Clinton did not “inhale” at Oxford, Hitchens’ sheltering of Salman Rushdie after the Iranian fatwa, and Hitchens’ travels to Iraq with major architects of the invasion, Tony Judt seems to have a remarkable ability to be present at
Judt opens the essay with a description of his own budding relationship with a graduate student, thirty years his junior. This is buttressed by the cautionary tale of a tenure-track professor ruined by accusations of sexual harassment. Judt openly questions the decision to spend time with his student. But the initial anecdote is left hanging as he transitions to comment on the profound changes that resulted from the sexual revolution and their impact on romantic relationships. Then, in a bold and unexpected move, Judt returns to the opening scene of the essay, in a manner that is astonishing. “So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?” he asks. “Reader: I married her.” Despite the shocking nature of Judt’s conclusion, the essay highlights his ability to effortlessly blend memoir and social commentary—a feat that makes the book a tremendously gratifying read. While each of the chapters of The Memory Chalet paints a picture from Judt’s life, one animating theme runs throughout the pages—namely, the author’s fervent belief in public goods and services and the erosion of their provision in both England and the United States over the past thirty years. Judt was born and raised in the aftermath of the Second World War, during the creation of the British welfare state. He recounts a fascination as a young boy with the London tube that serves as a vehicle to discuss the virtues of public transportation and the unfortunate privatization of the British railway system. Similar fondness is evoked for the more egalitarian British society of his youth, when rampant materialism was much less prevalent. The defense of social democracy became an animating theme of Judt’s work
“We never doubted there would be an interesting job for us and thus felt no need to fritter away our time with anything as degrading as ‘business school.’” TONY JUDT
major historical moments. As a young Zionist, Judt worked on a Kibbutz during the Six-Day War, although he would not give up the opportunity to study at Cambridge, as he was urged to do by Israeli settlers. While studying as an undergraduate, he would travel to Paris for the famous 1968 student protests. In later life, Judt learned Czech to cope with a failed marriage and mid-life crisis. This new skill allowed him to conduct seminars in the Soviet bloc, where he would befriend many of the dissident figures who liberated and led Eastern Europe in the 1990’s. Yet, the personal is illuminated along with the historical in The Memory Chalet. Many of the essays explore the fragility of human interactions, the nature of academic life, and Judt’s unending fascination with the United States, his final home. Among them is the brilliant “Girls, Girls, Girls.”
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late in life—not the typical outcome for an academic who was hardy known outside the ranks of modern French historians in his younger years. His 2005 magnum opus Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is considered to be not only a standard-setting book on the subject, but as literary critic Nikil Saval explained, can “be seen as one long paean to the construction of welfare states across Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II.” Toward the end of his life, Judt’s alarm about the total erosion of these institutions that protect the common good was articulated in both a compelling and increasingly public manner. The book lll Fares the Land, also composed as the effects of ALS ravaged Judt’s body, provides a bracing critique of the “overwhelmingly materialistic and selfish quality of modern life” and urges young people to focus on careers that serve the
Counterpoint
Photo by Eric Pilch
public interest. This is a theme taken up in The Memory Chalet, as Judt reminisces about Kings College, Cambridge contemporaries who disproportionately worked in the arts, education, public service, and journalism—what he terms “the unprofitable end of the liberal professions.” In The Memory Chalet Judt writes, “Unlike young people today we never doubted that there would be an interesting job for us and thus felt no need to fritter away our time with anything as degrading as ‘business school.’” The power of Judt’s overarching critique, articulated in many forms, comes not only through the conventional focus on greed and inequality but in the distinctive way he ties these concerns to the health of society as a whole. Drawing on a plethora of comparative data in Ill Fares the Land—ranging from social mobility to the incidence of mental illness—he makes the case that the rightward turn in both England and the United States has led to profound consequences. “As recently as the 1970’s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich … would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders,” he writes in Ill Fares the Land. As the profits of the modern economy have been channeled overwhelmingly to a privileged few and the public sector suffers from neglect, Judt’s warning from the verge of death should not be overlooked. The posthumously published collection of essays that became The Memory Chalet is a fitting tribute to a man overflowing with ideas, and serves as a testament to the power of his mind until the final moment his body failed.
APRIL 2011