What Book to Read?

Tony Judt died in August 2010 and this memoir was published posthumously in November of that year. He suffered from the motor neuron disease ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which progressively paralyzed him.

Judt was a historian and self-avowed public intellectual. But he didn’t write the memoir for publication. Rather he composed it – in his head – to keep himself sane through the long nights of ‘isolation and imprisonment’ inflicted by the disease, and dictated it to an assistant next morning. That it should have been formulated at all is amazing. Judt describes how he was ‘prepared’ for bed, where he lay ‘trussed, myopic and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts’. That he should under these circumstances have had the discipline to reflect coherently is itself a major achievement. He explains that he used a memory system similar to that developed by early modern thinkers and travelers such as Matteo Ricci to store and recall detail. Ricci devised a palace; Judt was content with a chalet, a place in Switzerland where he had spent happy childhood holidays. In such memory systems the information you want to remember is somehow attached to a physical object in a room, so that you need only to think your way around the room to remember what you want to retrieve. At least that’s the theory. Judt makes it seem easy, but I think that’s because he was already a clear and logical thinker who had sensible and interesting things to say.

Judt explains that this collection of memories – feuilletons as he calls them – are not traditional ‘History’; rather they an impressionistic interweaving of ‘the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt’. In other words, he gives context to his recollections, which in my view is essential for a successful memoir. There are twenty-five short pieces covering his childhood, adolescence and a little of his career (as well as his illness). And he has had an interesting life to recollect. As he says: ‘Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler [in an Israeli kibbutz]: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.’ After some years at Cambridge and Oxford he moved to the United States, and there are reflections on some of his experiences there.

Inevitably not all of these pieces appeal equally. I like best the ones with a political edge – though actually that is most of them. Judt rejects orthodoxies and isms, but remains a committed social democrat. One of his strongest pieces is a reflection on ’captive minds’, where he laments failure to think for one’s self. The ‘true mental captivity’ of our times, he believes, lies in our faith in ‘the market’. Even in his defence of Switzerland he can’t help questioning why what Swiss banks do ‘in servicing a handful of wealthy foreign criminals’ is any worse that ‘what Goldman and Sachs has done with the proceeds of millions of honest US tax dollars’. He is often angry about policies and practices that undermine the egalitarian public ethic he thinks once animated Western democracies. The failures of urban planning and public transport in London, the dumbing down of education, consumerism and a modern society where ‘all human relations are … reduced to rational calculations of self-interest’ come in for a serve alongside Judt’s more particular recollections of Putney, Green Line Buses, Emanuel School and King’s College Cambridge.

Judt has excited hostility in some quarters for his criticisms of Zionism, but he doesn’t shy away from that position here. He reflects – adversely – on his time in a kibbutz, and considers more broadly what it means to him to be Jewish. He loved kibbutz life at first, but later came to find it smug and self-regarding, reinforcing ‘the worst kind of ethnic solipsism’. ‘Judaism for me’, he says, ‘is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth telling’ and he praises ‘awkwardness and dissent’. He has certainly carried those qualities into his life and work.

Reading this memoir has inspired me to seek out some of Judt’s other work, in particular Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) in which he sets out to ‘integrate Europe’s two halves into a common story’. You can read my review here of another short polemical work he wrote during his illness, Ill Fares the Land, a plea for recognition of the importance of collective action through the state in the face of rampant- and failing – market fundamentalism. As a historian and a public intellectual he will be sadly missed. You can read more about him here.