Tony Judt’s eloquence as an exceptional historian

Writers as good as Tony Judt are rare; when they leave behind something extra, we, the living, celebrate.

Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. Pic copyright John R Rifkin.

When the British historian Tony Judt died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, he had published 10 books, including a masterpiece, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. His reputation was made. Since then, an additional book has appeared, Thinking the Twentieth Century, written in collaboration with Timothy Snyder as Judt became increasingly paralysed.

Now a final offering: When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010, edited and introduced by Judt’s widow, Jennifer Homans. Writers as good, prolific and diverse as Judt are incredibly rare; when they leave behind something extra, we, the living, celebrate.

When the Facts Change will be familiar to Judt’s readers as many of the pieces were reviews for magazines. The book is divided into five sections: the Cold War and 20th century European history; Israel and the Holocaust; the US (Judt’s adopted home) and 9/11; the future of social democracy and generational change; and the thinkers Francois Furet, Amos Elon and Leszek Kolakowski, three of Judt’s heroes.

This division is synthetic, and certain pieces could belong in more than one section, but in every instance Judt brings the same insistent sincerity and compassionate erudition to his subject.

As a writer, Judt’s greatest strength was that he was a brilliant historian; as a historian, his greatest strength was that he was a brilliant writer. He not only shone the light of the past on to the bewildering present, illuminating current affairs with germane history, but also brought history into the present by way of an irrepressible style.

He avoided jargon and had an eye for the academic conformity it often conceals. In “Freedom and Freedonia”, his review of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination andDerek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Judt laments Goldsworthy’s argument as ‘‘cultural studies meets late Marxism in an unhappy marriage of convenience’’.

For their possessed sobriety and accuracy, the essays on Israel stand out. Judt, whose parents were secular Jews, is never more relentlessly convincing. He has an almost erotic desire to understand certain problems and to make that understanding manifest.

In a 2002 essay titled “The road to nowhere”, with what now seems like prescience but probably was (and still is) common sense, Judt writes: “ ‘Terrorist’ risks becoming the mantra of our time, like ‘communist’, ‘capitalist’, ‘bourgeois’ and others before it.’’

In “Israel: The alternative”, he goes the furthest, arguing:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not — as it is sometimes suggested — that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late 19th-century separatist project: individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state” ... is rooted in another time and place.

It is common, especially for people on television or when speaking to small children, to describe in relative terms something seemingly unknowably large. (‘‘The heart of a blue whale can weigh as much as an automobile.’’) The scale of Judt’s learning makes such a device seem tempting (‘‘one Judt essay can contain as much knowledge as 500 hours of TED talks’’), but there would be few subjects worse served by such a shortcut.

In her introduction, Homans explains that Judt spoke ‘‘French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Czech [and] some Spanish’’, and goes on to describe how he wrote his essays: “First, he read everything he could on a subject ... Then came the outline, colour-coded A, B, C, D, with detailed subcategories: A1 i, A1 ii, A2 iii etc (more legal pads). Then he sat for hours on end, monklike, at the dining room table assigning each line in his notes, each fact, date, point, or idea, to a place in the outline.’’ This meticulousness expresses itself in a tone of serene originality. Judt proves the better organised a writer’s thoughts, the more they are his own.

Judt once said, ‘‘I don’t know whether I write better English than others, but I know that I write it with genuine pleasure.’’ He did, and it shows. His prose is dapper, admirably tactile and implicitly reliable, like a pair of handmade leather boots.

Of course, a few stylistic ticks emerge across the collection. Judt is fond of rhetorical questions and the first person plural: ‘‘Why have we been in such a hurry to tear down the dykes laboriously set in place by our predecessors? Are we so sure that there are no floods to come?’’ Writers, even the best, recycle, and a handful of great ideas pop up more than once, with diminishing returns each time. But repetitions are intrinsic in essay collections.

The world is poorer without Judt. When a writer dies prematurely, as he did at 62, it is easy to mourn the books and articles that will not be written.

Two pieces from When the Facts Change, “The glory of the rails” and “Bring back the rails”, make it impossible not to do so. They were treatments for a book on the history of train travel, working title Locomotion, which Judt had started researching and writing, but had had to abandon when he fell ill in 2008.

Pithy, personal, genial and high-minded, touching on architecture, cinema, and economics, they symbolise the polymathic best of Judt’s writing. Locomotion would have been an excellent book.

Yet the most affecting piece is not one of Judt’s fearsome displays of knowledge, but a brief interview with his son Daniel from June 2010. Daniel was 16 and Judt had two months to live. The piece is framed as conversation across generations about how to remedy the world’s economic and environmental problems.

‘‘If you want to change the world, you had better be willing to fight for a long time … Do you really care enough or are you just offended at disturbing pictures?” Judt challenges his son. ‘‘We have no choice but to care enough,’’ Daniel replies. The world may miss Judt, but it can never miss like a son.

William Heyward is a writer and bookseller.

When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010

By Tony Judt

Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans

William Heinemann, 400pp, $65 (HB)