The memory chalet

Tony Judt

Book - 2010

"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution.' A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt's attention; ...but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet-a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory"--Dust jacket flap.

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BIOGRAPHY/Judt, Tony
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Subjects
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Tony Judt (-)
Physical Description
xiv, 226 p. ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781594202896
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IMPOSSIBLE - and not even desirable - to disassociate this book from the circumstances of its composition. Tony Judt's plight before his death last August was not as extreme as that of Jean-Dominique Bauby (who communicated "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" a letter at a time, by blinking an eye), but by any reasonable standards, it was devastating. In 2008, three years after the publication of "Postwar," his magisterial history of Europe since 1945, Judt learned he had a form of motor neuron disease. A peculiarity of the affliction meant that while he was "effectively quadriplegic" - able, with "extraordinary effort," to move his right hand a little and to lift his left arm about six inches - he was in no pain and his head was clear: a blessing-curse that left him acutely conscious of how his dwindling supply of days was destined to be spent. One might think that the nights, in such circumstances, must have brought relief. Actually, they were even worse. Once his nurses had tucked him up, Judt lay as he was, unable to move a limb or scratch an itch, entombed "like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts." And so, night after night, before the blissful interlude of sleep - before waking in exactly the same position he had assumed hours earlier - he ranged back over his life, shaping little incidents into short, plangent memory-excursions, each tied to a particular place, theme or object. Over the course of the following day or days he would, with increasing difficulty, dictate the night's mental excursions to an assistant. (Awkward though it was, this way of proceeding was perhaps not as difficult for an academic and teacher, used to articulating his thoughts orally, as it might have been for a writer habituated solely to the physical act of writing.) "The Memory Chalet" bears little resemblance to the densely researched works of history that preceded it, but some of its preoccupations were hinted at in "Ill Fares the Land," Judt's post-illness overview of the state of contemporary politics. His trenchant analysis was supported, naturally, by statistics and citations, but there were a couple of places where the book moved into warmly personal focus. One was where he reflected on the diminishing importance of "visual representations of collective identity": London's black taxis, school uniforms, postmen's uniforms. This last struck a chord with me in a way that statistics rarely can, perhaps because a few days previously, I had seen one of my local postmen, dressed like an undercover cop, rummaging in the trunk of his car, arranging the day's deliveries into a bunch of plastic supermarket bags. More than half a century ago, the cultural theorist Raymond Williams reminded us that Britain was "a nation, not a firm." Insignificant it may be, but my glimpse of life at the sharp end of the mail service suggested that, having thoroughly privatized itself, the firm had now subcontracted itself almost out of existence. The other similarly evocative passage in "Ill Fares the Land" was a flashing encomium to the joy of trains and the way they remain "perennially contemporary." Both of these concerns re-emerge as essay subjects in their own right here. As a schoolboy, Judt frequently rode the Green Line bus from the southwest London suburb of Putney, where he grew up in the 1950s. Its distinctive livery - and smell - transports him back to the days before England became a firm: "The conductor, paid a little less than the skilled driver, was usually but not always a younger man (there were hardly any women). His function was ostensibly to keep order and collect fares; but since large tracts of countryside were often covered with relatively few passengers and stops, his task was hardly preoccupying. In practice he kept the driver company." These days "the conductors are long gone and the drivers, now insulated from the interior . . . have no dealings with their customers beyond the purely commercial," and the Green Line is "owned and run by Arriva, the worst of the private companies now responsible for providing train and bus services to British commuters, at exorbitant prices." If there is a certain inevitability about this (where, in the developed world, does one still find conductors on buses?), then the parlous state of Britain's railways is so anomalous, when contrasted with the sleek, state-funded services speeding through Continental Europe, as to be inexcusable. As a boy Judt would take his bike down to Clapham Junction with its "luxuriant choice of some 19 platforms" and use the railway network to roam all over southeast England. If the great railway stations are "the very incarnation of modern life," then the ambition and reach of "Postwar" is partly the product of hours spent "staring aimlessly out of train windows and inspecting rather more closely the contrasting sights and sounds of the stations where I alighted." Then, inevitably, comes the realization that he will "never again ride the rails," a knowledge that weighs on him like "a leaden blanket" - and we are back once again in the sentient tomb that his body has become. In this way the pieces in "The Memory Chalet" - most of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books - form a mosaic of autobiographical fragments and a restatement of views more or less familiar from his earlier, less personal writings. We learn of his father's love of cars (Citroëns, to be precise); the food served in the London home of his lower-middle-class Jewish parents (in contrast to the flavorless English stodge dished up in neighboring houses); the teacher at school who crammed German down the young Judt's throat (thereby laying the foundations for a linguistic facility that led to his learning Czech in middle age); life as a student and fellow at King's College, Cambridge, in the 1960s and early '70s; evangelical interludes on a kibbutz followed by rapid consciousness of what the state of Israel was becoming. This capacity to shed illusions, crucially, about the reality of Communism in Eastern Europe, was fundamental to Judt's intellectual project - and it came early: "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." LATER in life he begins teaching in the United States and settles in New York. The book's later passages on Manhattan - the home for people who have no wish to feel at home - are rapturous, of course, but, frankly, they could have been written by anyone who has spent a couple of months in the city. It is another, slightly larger island, that lies at the bleeding heart of the book: Britain, more specifically England, that infuriating wreck of a country. (Nothing could be more English than the ferocious pride with which - from his death bed practically - Judt responded to a letter in The New York Review of Books unthinkingly assuming that he had been to a fancy school.) With his own life drawing to a close Judt sees the era of social mobility, of which he was the beneficiary, and uncompromisingly high standards, of which he was the embodiment, coming to an end. The elegiac tone is more than simply personal: it's a reminder that England, for all its failings, will never lose its capacity to generate lament. With its vivid haze of detail, "The Memory Chalet" is the work of a historian forced to do without many of the tools on which he had placed the greatest reliance. It used to be said - maybe still is - that in the instant of death, your life flashes before your eyes. By prolonging Judt's life the miracles of medical technology effectively extended the process of his dying over several grueling years. So what we have is that instant of compressed recollection expanded and expounded upon. It is the furthest cry imaginable - not a cry at all - from "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." You can almost sense the soul of the historian leaving his body, leaving the still-living body of work behind. Night after night, Judt ranged back over his life, shaping little incidents into plangent memory-excursions. Geoff Dyer is the author, most recently, of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi," a novel.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 9, 2011]
Review by Library Journal Review

In 2008, historian Tony Judt (Ill Fares the Land) was handed a death sentence. Lou Gehrig's disease would progressively deprive him of mobility, leaving him encased in the prison of a hostile body, robbing him of the life he'd led with such grace. Unable to continue with research-requiring assistance even to breathe-Judt was forced back on the one source of historical data still accessible to him, his memories. To "store" them, he resorted to the classic mnemonic technique of the memory palace, housing recollections in the rooms of a Swiss chalet he'd visited as a child. In these separate essays, most of them originally published in the New York Review of Books, he details his life and preoccupations in short, poignant sketches: childhood food, riding buses across London, his father's love affair with Citroens and his own with trains, working on a kibbutz (and hating it)-in a stunningly effective blend of the personal and political. Verdict Elegiac and thought-provoking, these essays provide a final glimpse of a first-rate historical intelligence. Tony Judt died in August 2010 at the age of 62. He was a mensch. This is one of the best books of the year.-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.