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Tony Judt - The Memory Chalet

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Book:
The Memory Chalet
Author:
Tony Judt
Publisher:
Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2010
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5 / 5
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It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head... -TJ

One of our leading historians, Tony Judt has written extensively about the twentieth century in the bestselling Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land, and Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. A master of historical analysis forced into nights of motionless contemplation, Judt discovered the depths of his own memory. Bolstered by his fierce intelligence and decades of scholarship, childhood sights and sounds grew to take on vast new meanings.

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you...

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY TONY JUDT

Ill Fares the Land

Reappraisals: Reflections on the
Forgotten Twentieth Century

Postwar: A History of
Europe Since 1945

The Politics of Retribution in Europe
(with Jan Gross and Istvn Dek)

The Burden of Responsibility:
Blum, Camus, Aron, and the
French Twentieth Century

Language, Nation and State:
Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age
(edited with Denis Lacorne)

A Grand Illusion?:
An Essay on Europe

Past Imperfect:
French Intellectuals, 1944-1956

Marxism and the French Left:
Studies on Labour and
Politics in France 1930-1982

Resistance and Revolution

In Mediterranean Europe 1939-1948

Socialism in Provence 1871-1914:

A Study in the Origins of the
Modern French Left

La reconstruction du Parti
Socialiste 1921-1926

For Jennifer, Daniel and Nicholas

Preface

The essays in this little book were never intended for publication. I started writing them for my own satisfactionand at the encouragement of Timothy Garton Ash, who urged me to turn to advantage the increasingly internal reference of my own thoughts. I do not think that I had any idea what it was I was embarking upon, and I am grateful to Tim for his confident support of the initial scribblings that resulted.

About halfway through the writing of these feuilletons I showed one or two of them to my agents at the Wylie Agency, as well as to Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books and was heartened at their enthusiasm. However, this raised an ethical question for me. Because I did not write them with the view to immediate publication, these short pieces never benefitted from an internal editoror, more precisely, a private censor. Where they spoke of my parents or my childhood, of ex-wives and present colleagues, I let them speak. This has the merit of directness; I hope it will not cause offense.

I have not altered or rephrased any of the original texts, which were written with the help and collaboration of my long-time colleague Eugene Rusyn. Reading them over, I see that I have been quite open and occasionally even critical of those I love, whereas I was judiciously silent for the most part regarding people of whom I have retained a less-than-affectionate regard. Doubtless this is how it should be. I do hope that my parents, my wife and above all my children will read in these exercises in fond recall further evidence of my abiding love for them all.

The Memory Chalet

For me the word chalet conjures up a very distinctive image. It brings to mind a small pensione, a family hotel in the unfashionable village of Chesires, at the foot of the well-heeled Villars ski region in French-speaking Switzerland. We must have spent a winter holiday there in 1957 or 58. The skiingor in my case, sleddingcannot have been very memorable: I recall only that my parents and uncle used to trudge over the icy foot bridge and on up to the ski lifts, spending the day there but abjuring the fleshpots of the aprs-ski in favor of a quiet evening in the chalet.

For me this was always the best part of a winter holiday: the repetitive snow-bound entertainment abandoned by early afternoon for heavy armchairs, warm wine, solid country food, and long evenings in the open lounge decompressing among strangers. But what strangers! The curiosity of the little pensione in Chesires lay in its apparent attraction to down-at-heel British actors vacationing in the distant, indifferent shadow of their more successful fellows farther up the mountain.

The second evening we were there, the dining room was graced with a volley of sexual epithets that brought my mother to her feet. No stranger to bad languageshe was raised within earshot of the old West India Docksshe had been apprenticed out of her class into the polite limbo of ladies hairdressing and had no intention of exposing her family to such filth.

Mrs. Judt duly marched across to the offending table and asked that they desist: there were children present. Since my sister was not yet eighteen months, and I was the only other child in the hotel, this request was presumably advanced for my benefit. The youngand, as I later surmised, unemployedactors who were responsible for the outburst immediately apologized and invited us to join them for dessert.

They were a marvelous crew, not least to the all-seeing (and all-hearing) ten-year-old now placed in their midst. All were unknown at this point, though some would go on to an illustrious future: Alan Badel, not yet a prominent Shakespearean actor with a respectable filmography to his credit (Day of the Jackal ); but above all the irrepressible Rachel Roberts, soon to become the iconic disillusioned working-class wife of the greatest British postwar movies (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man!). It was Roberts who took me under her wing, muttering unrepeatable imprecations in a whisky-fueled baritone that left me with few illusions as to her future, though a certain confusion regarding my own. Over the course of that vacation she taught me poker, assorted card tricks, and more bad language than I have had time to forget.

Perhaps for this reason, the little Swiss hotel on Chesiress high street has a fonder as well as a deeper place in my memory than other doubtless identical wooden constructions where I have slept over the years. We only stayed there for ten days or so, and I have returned on just one brief occasion. But I can describe even today the intimate style of the place.

There were few excrescences of indulgence: you entered on a mezzanine level separating a small basement area from the business rooms of the main floorthe point of this mezzanine being to segregate the dripping paraphernalia of outdoor sport (skis, boots, sticks, jackets, sleds, etc.) from the cozy, dry ambiance of the public rooms. The latter, set to both sides of the reception desk, had large, attractive windows giving on to the main road of the village and the steep gorges surrounding it. Behind them in turn were the kitchens and other service spaces, obscured by a broad and unusually steep staircase leading to the bedroom floor.

The latter divided neatly and perhaps intentionally into the better-furnished sleeping accommodation to the left and the smaller, single, waterless rooms farther along, leading in their turn to a narrow set of steps culminating in an attic floor preserved for employees (except at the height of the season). I have not checked, but I doubt whether there were more than twelve rooms for rent, in addition to the three public areas and the common spaces surrounding them. This was a small hotel for small families of modest means, set in an unpretentious village with no ambitions above its geographical station in life. There must be ten thousand such hostelries in Switzerland: I just happen to have a near-perfect visual recollection of one of them.

Except as a pleasant reminder of contented memories, I doubt whether I gave the Chesires chalet a second thought for much of the ensuing fifty years. And yet when I was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008 and quickly came to understand that I would most likely not travel againindeed, would be very fortunate if I were even in a position to write about my travelsit was the Chesires hotel that came insistently to mind. Why?

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