The Memory Chalet

I

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 Chesières, 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 skiing—or in my case, sledding—cannot 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 après-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 Chesières 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 language—she was raised within earshot of the old West India Docks—she 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 young—and, as I later surmised, unemployed—actors 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 Chesières’s 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 floor—the 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 Chesières 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 again—indeed, would be very fortunate if I were even in a position to write about my travels—it was the Chesières hotel that came insistently to mind. Why?

The salient quality of this particular neurodegenerative disorder is that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present, and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting those reflections into words. First you can no longer write independently, requiring either an assistant or a machine in order to record your thoughts. Then your legs fail and you cannot take in new experiences, except at the cost of such logistical complexity that the mere fact of mobility becomes the object of attention rather than the benefits that mobility itself can confer.

Next you begin to lose your voice: not just in the metaphorical sense of having to speak through assorted mechanical or human intermediaries, but quite literally in that the diaphragm muscles can no longer pump sufficient air across your vocal cords to furnish them with the variety of pressure required to express meaningful sound. By this point you are almost certainly quadriplegic and condemned to long hours of silent immobility, whether or not in the presence of others.

For someone wishing to remain a communicator of words and concepts, this poses an unusual challenge. Gone is the yellow pad, with its now useless pencil. Gone the refreshing walk in the park or workout in the gym, where ideas and sequences fall into place as if by natural selection. Gone too are productive exchanges with close friends—even at the midpoint of decline from ALS, the victim is usually thinking far faster than he can form words, so that conversation itself becomes partial, frustrating, and ultimately self-defeating.

I think I came across the answer to this dilemma quite by chance. I realized, some months into the disease, that I was writing whole stories in my head in the course of the night. Doubtless I was seeking oblivion, replacing galumphing sheep with narrative complexity to comparable effect. But in the course of these little exercises, I realized that I was reconstructing—LEGO-like—interwoven segments of my own past which I had never previously thought of as related. This in itself was no great achievement: the streams of consciousness that would carry me from a steam engine to my German language class, from the carefully constructed route lines of London’s country buses to the history of interwar town planning—were easy enough to furrow and thence follow in all manner of interesting directions. But how should I recapture those half-buried tracks the following day?

It was here that nostalgic recollections of happier days spent in cozy central European villages began to play a more practical role. I had long been fascinated by the mnemonic devices employed by early-modern thinkers and travelers to store and recall detail and description: these are beautifully depicted in the Renaissance essays of Frances Yates—and more recently in Jonathan Spence’s account of an Italian traveler to medieval China, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.

Such would-be memorizers did not build mere hostelries or residences in which to house their knowledge: they built palaces. However, I had no desire to construct palaces in my head. The real thing had always struck me as somehow indulgent: from Wolsey’s Hampton Court to Louis XIV’s Versailles, such extravagances were always intended to impress rather than to serve. I could no more have imagined in my still and silent nights such a memory palace than I could have sewn myself a star-spangled suit of pantaloon and vest. But if not a memory palace, why not a memory chalet?

The advantage of a chalet lay not only in the fact that I could envisage it in very considerable and realistic detail—from the snow rail by the doorstep to the inner window keeping the Valaison winds at bay—but that it was a place I would want to visit again and again. In order for a memory palace to work as a storehouse of infinitely reorganized and regrouped recollections, it needs to be a building of extraordinary appeal, if only for one person. Each night, for days, weeks, months, and now well over a year, I have returned to that chalet. I have passed through its familiar short corridors with their worn stone steps and settled into one of two or perhaps three armchairs—conveniently unoccupied by others. And thence, the wish fathering the thought with reasonably unerring reliability, I have conjured up, sorted out, and ordered a story or an argument or an example that I plan to use in something I shall write the following day.

What then? Here is where the chalet transforms itself from a mnemonic trigger to a storage device. Once I know roughly what I want to say and a sequence in which it is best said, I leave the armchair and go back to the door of the chalet itself. From here I retrace my steps, usually from the first storage closet—for skis, let’s say—toward ever more substantial spaces: the bar, the dining room, the lounge, the old-fashioned wooden key rack pinned under the cuckoo clock, the rather random collection of books straggling up the back staircase, and thence to one of any number of bedrooms. To each of these locations has been assigned a staging point in a narrative, say, or perhaps an illustrative example.

The system is far from perfect. Overlaps persist, and I have to be sure that with each new tale a significantly different route map must be established lest it be confused with similar features of a recent predecessor. Thus, first impressions notwithstanding, it is not prudent to associate all matters of nutrition with one room, of seduction or sex with another, of intellectual exchange with a third. Better to rely on micro-geography (this drawer follows that closet on that wall) than to trust in the logic of the conventional mental furniture on which we depend.

I am struck by the frequency with which people comment on the perceived difficulty inherent in arranging one’s thoughts spatially in order to be able to retrieve them a few hours later. I, admittedly from within the unusual constraints of my physical imprisonment, have come to see this as the easiest of devices—almost too mechanical, inviting me as it does to arrange examples and sequences and paradoxes in tidy ways which may misleadingly reorder the original and far more suggestive confusion of impressions and recollections.

I wonder whether it doesn’t help to be male: the conventional sort of male who is on the average better at parking cars and recalling spatial arrangements than the conventional kind of woman who does better on tests requiring recollection of persons and impressions? As a child I had a bit of a party piece which consisted of map-reading a car through a strange city whose configurations I had only ever studied once, and that briefly. Conversely, I was and remain useless at the first requirement of the ambitious politician: the capacity to navigate a dinner party, recalling the domestic arrangements and political prejudices of all present before bidding them farewell by first name. There must be a mnemonic device for this too, but I have never chanced upon it.

At the time of writing (May 2010) I have completed since the onset of my disease a small political book, a public lecture, some twenty feuilletons reflecting on my life, and a considerable body of interviews directed towards a full-scale study of the twentieth century. All of these rest on little more than nocturnal visits to my memory chalet and subsequent efforts to recapture in sequence and in detail the content of those visits. Some look inward—beginning with a house or a bus or a man; others look out, spanning decades of political observation and engagement and continents of travel, teaching, and commentary.

To be sure, there have been nights when I have sat, comfortably enough, across from Rachel Roberts or just an empty space: people and places have wandered in only to wander out again. On such unproductive occasions I don’t linger very long. I retreat to the old wooden front door, step through it onto the mountainside of the Bernese Oberland—bending geography to the will of childish association—and sit, somewhat grumpily, on a bench. Here, transformed from Rachel Roberts’s guiltily entranced little auditor into Heidi’s introverted alm-uncle, I pass the hours from wakeful sleep through somnolent consciousness—before awakening to the irritated awareness that I have managed to create, store, and recall precisely nothing from my previous night’s efforts.

Underproductive nights are almost physically frustrating. To be sure, you can say to yourself, come now: you should be proud of the fact that you have kept your sanity—where is it written that you should be productive in addition? And yet, I feel a certain guilt at having submitted to fate so readily. Who could do any better in the circumstances? The answer, of course, is a better me and it is surprising how often we ask that we be a better version of our present self—in the full knowledge of just how difficult it was getting this far.

I don’t resent this particular trick that conscience plays on us. But it opens up the night to the risks of the dark side; these