Tony Judt, 1948-2010

Just this morning I was reading "Meritocrats," the latest in Tony Judt's memory dispatches in the New York Review of Books and idly and hopefully thinking that he might be with us, composing those distilled little pieces, for some time. But this morning I learned that by the time of my speculations the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that had left the historian almost completely paralyzed for the past year had already taken him, last Friday.

Judt will likely be remembered for many things, but two of them almost certainly. His massive history of Europe in the second half of the 20th century, Postwar, was a gratifyingly surprising hit when it came out in 2005, and it's only become more admired since then: the Toronto Star went so far as to call it "perhaps the most astonishing feat of synthesis ever achieved" for the way it sums the stories of an age and a continent. And then over the past eight months the NYRB has regularly published a series of short autobiographical pieces Judt dictated based on the restless nighttime reveries he devised to help him endure the isolation and immobility of the "iron suit" of his paralysis. He described his situation in his first NYRB entry, "Night":

Imagine for a moment that you had been obliged instead to lie absolutely motionless on your back—by no means the best sleeping position, but the only one I can tolerate—for seven unbroken hours and constrained to come up with ways to render this Calvary tolerable not just for one night but for the rest of your life. My solution has been to scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased. These mental exercises have to be interesting enough to hold my attention and see me through an intolerable itch in my inner ear or lower back; but they also have to be boring and predictable enough to serve as a reliable prelude and encouragement to sleep....

I suppose I should be at least mildly satisfied to know that I have found within myself the sort of survival mechanism that most normal people only read about in accounts of natural disasters or isolation cells.... But the satisfactions of compensation are notoriously fleeting. There is no saving grace in being confined to an iron suit, cold and unforgiving. The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

In the recollections he had published so far he often looked back at his education (an excellent one, which he feared was far less available now than it was in his time), and on matters from his memories of food to his identity as a Jew to changing sexual mores in the academy. As you can tell from the passage above, he would have looked witheringly on the cliches of terminal illness--the courage of the sufferer, and the supposed gift of being able to appreciate life more clearly and intensely--but it's hard to read these brilliantly clear and moving essays without thinking of the urgency and compression behind them (and of the concentrated labor required to produce them).

The NYRB has all of the published essays listed, and many of them available to non-subscribers, and I hope and expect that we'll see them in book form soon. Judt also left behind a political testament earlier this year, Ill Fares the Land, a manifesto for the sort of social democracy that, it seems, can hardly speak its own name, in the United States at least, these days. It was based on his last public lecture, delivered from a wheelchair. You can also find his recent essay collection, Reappraisals; a group profile of three of his intellectual heroes, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century; and the earlier scathing account, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956.

You can read obituaries and appreciations in the Guardian, the New York Times, the LA Times, and again in the LA Times. The Guardian also links to this unsentimental account from Judt himself of his disease, "like being in a prison which is shrinking by six inches each day":

I knew Judt only as a reader, but had one brush with him, through intermediaries, when he was one of the first authors to contribute a list to our now mostly dormant Grownup School feature, his Top Ten Books to Read on 20th Century Europe. It was such a well-chosen list, with succinct, thoughtful, and convincing notes that made me want to read each book--exactly what we had in mind when we thought up the feature--that it made me an immediate fan. Here is his list in full:

• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain: A poignant account by a privileged young upper middle-class Englishwoman of the shattering impact of war and loss, unusual for its 'home-front' perspective and as moving today as it was when first published seventy years ago.
• Wartime by Milovan Djilas: Djilas fought at Tito's side in the bloody, internecine partisan warfare of World War Two Yugoslavia--before breaking with the Communist leader in peacetime and being imprisoned for his dissent. His war memoir captures better than any other single book the historical background to the tragedy of modern Yugoslavia.
• The Passing of an Illusion by Francois Furet: A brilliant essay on the political illusions of the age under the guise of a history of the Communist idea in the twentieth century. For Furet, like Eric Hobsbawm, the story of twentieth-century Europe is in large measure the story of the rise and fall of Communism: in Hobsbawm's case as hope, in Furet's case as hallucination. This subtle book is a model of polemical history writing.
• Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman: Vassily Grossman's great novel, banned by Soviet censors, was only published many decades after its author's death. Grossman served as a war reporter with the Red Army during World War Two and his account of life under Stalin and during the 'Great Patriotic War'--notably his description of the epic Battle of Stalingrad--is unmatched in fiction and historical writing alike.
• The Age of Extremes by Eric J. Hobsbawm: "The Age of Extremes" is the best single history of the twentieth century, at once illuminated and shadowed by its author’s life-long allegiance to Marxism. Eric Hobsbawm, the most naturally gifted historian of his time, writes with rare clarity and elegance; he distills and explains a huge body of information with deceptive, unmatched ease. This is first-rate history for intelligent readers.
• The Trial by Franz Kafka: The most important work by the twentieth century's most original writer, "The Trial" is more than a disturbing and unique work of fiction. It is also terrifying in its uncanny prescience, offering an eerily precise portrait of the workings of totalitarian systems that did not yet even exist when Kafka died in 1924.
• Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw: Kershaw's two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler is unique not only in its exhaustive account of the German dictator's life and works but above all in the skill with which the author balances attention to individual moral and political responsibility with a grasp of the context and circumstances without which Hitler would have remained a nonentity. By far the best biography of the most influential individual of the century.
• Under a Cruel Star by Heda Kovaly: The recollections of a Czech Jew, who survived Auschwitz only to lose her husband to the show trials of Communist Czechoslovakia in 1952 and her country to Soviet tanks in 1968. Neither apologetic nor embittered, Kovaly's clear-eyed account of the tragedy of Eastern European Communism is unique.
• Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi: The memoirs of a Jewish doctor from Turin, exiled by Mussolini to a village in the impoverished uplands of southern Italy, describe a remote and backward world now vanished beyond recall, unknown and unrecognizable to today's Europeans.
• Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi: Of all the memoirs, recollections, and analyses of the destruction of Europe's Jews, Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz is the most thoughtful, the most observant, and--in the calm precision of its description of Hell on earth--the most devastating of them all.

--Tom