Windows on Worlds

As with a familiar story,I can open the book at any page,and no matter where James is at in his inquiry into the English classics,cricket’s founding icons,the politics of the game or its relation to other team sports or the arts,that page is a prompt to a memory — of the text,of a match recently played,of another passage in the book,or of something even totally unrelated to the author or his masterpiece. Yet the entire experience carries the same backdrop in my mind: a young boy at his window,always — always — watching a local cricket match. No matter what argument of race or politics the grown-up James is conducting,in the background that boy is there and a game of cricket is on.

That’s,of course,how the book begins: “Tunapuna at the beginning of this [20th century was a small town of about 3,000 inhabitants,situated eight miles along the road from Port of Spain,the capital of Trinidad. Like all towns and villages on the island,it possessed a recreation ground. Recreation meant cricket,for in those days,except for infrequent athletic sports meetings,cricket was the only game. Our house was superbly situated,exactly behind the wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other limited the view of the ground,but an umpire could have stood at the bedroom window. By standing on a chair a small boy of six could watch practice every afternoon and matches on Saturdays — with matting one pitch could and often did serve for both practice and matches. From the chair also he could mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for the books on the top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of my life was set.”

That easy movement from first person to third and back to first again has looked to be a most crafty way of setting the book on its many layered way. But this week,upon reading another memoir that I know I shall return to in many Novembers,I find that perhaps it was not so much a deliberate ploy after all. Perhaps that setting of the little boy,observing the cricket field was necessary for James’s recovery even of his later self.

Trinidad is a long way from Switzerland,and circumstances attending Tony Judt’s writing of these essays are far different from James’s. Yet to read Judt’s posthumously published The Memory Chalet is to find a curious affinity between the two,in the way they use a childhood vantage point to understand the selves they became and those they didn’t. Judt,a historian especially of post-war Europe,passed away this August at the age of 62 after a long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),a motor neuron disorder. Imagine,he writes,not being able to move a bit,and at night-time in deference to his caregivers’ need for rest,he’d be alone,with a mind that’d wander. He’d scroll through his life,but how to remember the next day for dictation the elegant structure he’d give those thoughts? Where to store them and how,so they could be easily found the next morning?

He adapted from the so-called “memory palace”,a way of memorising by spatially laying out one’s material. As befits a memoir that reaches back to a post-war survival through austerity,Judt would visit humbler lodgings,his “memory chalet”,each night,the chalet in question being a budget Swiss inn he visited as a boy of 10 with his family on a skiing holiday. It’s pointless to question why a particular space from our past retains a stronger hold on our memory,he suggests. What is of uncommon value is how in this ALS-afflicted immobility,yet possessed of a sharp and clear mind,he’d visit that chalet each night,running through those passages and rooms familiarised by his boyhood self,“writing whole stories in the course of the night”,working out route maps to recover the next day.

The essays in The Memory Chalet are as much about the historian’s vocation as about a single life story. Judt doesn’t allude to these mnemonic techniques casually: it’s the recovery of a childhood site as a staging ground for a larger story and world view with all the discipline of a historian literally in his bones. Like James at his window?

mini.kapoor@expressindia.com