Memory Chalet: Tony Judt's Long Goodbye to "ALL THAT"

Tony Judt is/was more than a great historian. After learning that he had ALS ["Lou Gehrig's Disease"], he demonstrated that as his faculties slowly waned until he was hardly able to move that his well-stocked mental cabinet was still full of brilliant asides on the strangeness of the Twentieth Century---about which his magisterial book Postwar remains the principal memoir I have read about how a continent which in thirty-one years [1914-1945]destroyed itself tried like the legendary Phoenix to rise from its own ashes.

We are now witnessing the Eurozone in the throes of an economic meltdown which may mean the ejection of Greece, which was rashly admitted into said monetary compact through the deceptive manipulations of Greek banks and government officials---all bearing witness to Virgil's famous line from the Aeneid, "Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes." The Trojan Horse referred to is one of the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece & Spain] now dragging the rest of Europe [and to a certain extent, North America & other parts of the EU] into some sort of fiscal/monetary black hole. Postwar should have won the Pulitzer for History, but Victor Navasky and the other leftist fascisti at the Pulitzer Board couldn't allow quality to outweigh ideology. And in his latter years, Tony Judt outgrew ideology just as somewhere in Memory Chalet he notes that "By the age of twenty, I had outgrown Marxism, Zionism and communitarian egalitarianism---no mean feat for a kid who grew up in Putney." Or words to that effect.

Judt's characteristic humanity and humility shines from every page. He is able to evoke his years at Ecole Normale Sup with effortless ease, in one case, dismissing the insufferable buffoon Bernard Henri-Levi with a diffident shrug. He reminds us of Arthur Clarke's long-ago comment in Childhood's End that, "in sum, the French are the world's best second-raters."

His years at Cambridge, coming from a background as lower class and humble as any student at that prestigious school, are similarly not remembered with elegiac intensity. And his childhood trips to the humblest chalet in Switzerland, where down-and-out British actors used to spend a month skiing during the off-season in London, are the source of the title. I would have loved to meet Rachel Roberts, then a struggling youngish actress, as described by young ten-year old Tony.

A sort of long wave from the rear platform of a train as it leaves a station to which it will never return, Tony's book is moving and wonderful, with the painful knowledge that it was published posthumously after his death in August 2010 the saddest elegy one can leave for oneself.