The Memory Chalet (2 page)

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 should not be underestimated. The alm-uncle, glowering from beneath his furrowed brow at all comers, is not a happy man: his gloom only occasionally dispersed by nights spent stocking closets and drawers, shelves and corridors with the byproducts of retrieved memory.

Note that the alm-uncle, my perennially dissatisfied alter ego, does not just sit at the door of a chalet frustrated of purpose. He sits there smoking a Gitanes, cradling a glass of whisky, turning the pages of a newspaper, stomping idly across the snow-strewn streets, whistling nostalgically—and generally comporting himself as a free man. There are nights when this is all he can manage. An embittered reminder of loss? Or just the consolation of the remembered cigarette.

But other nights I walk right past him: everything works. The faces return, the examples fit, the sepia photographs come back to life, “all connects” and within a few minutes I have my story, my characters, illustrations, and morale. The alm-uncle and his dyspeptic reminders of the world I have lost weigh as nothing: the past surrounds me and I have what I need.

B
ut which past? The little histories that take shape in my head as I lie sheathed in nocturnal gloom are unlike anything I have written before. Even by the ultra-rational demands of my profession I was always a “reasoner”: of all the clichés about “History,” the one that most appealed to me was the assertion that we are but philosophers teaching with examples. I still believe this is true, though I now find myself doing it by a distinctly indirect route.

In earlier days I might have envisaged myself as a literary Gepetto, building little Pinocchios of assertion and evidence, given life by the plausibility of their logical construction and telling the truth by virtue of the necessary honesty of their separate parts. But my latest writings have a far more
inductive
quality to them. Their value rests on an essentially impressionistic effect: the success with which I have related and interwoven the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt.

I don’t know what sort of a genre this is. Certainly the resulting little wooden boys seem to me both more loosely articulated and yet more fully human than their deductively constructed, rigorously predesigned forebears. In more polemical form—“Austerity,” perhaps—they seem to me unintentionally to recall the long-forgotten
feuilletons
of Karl Kraus’s Vienna: allusive, suggestive, almost too light for their urgent content. But others—in a more affectionate vein, recalling “Food” or perhaps “Putney”—serve the contrary purpose. By avoiding the heavy abstractions so familiar from the prose of “identity-seeking” narrators, they may succeed in discovering precisely such buried contours without claiming to do so.

Reading over these
feuilletons
I suppose I am struck by the man I never became. Many decades ago I was advised to study literature; history, it was suggested to me by a wise schoolmaster, would play too readily towards the grain of my instincts—allowing me to do what came easiest. Literature—poetry in particular—would force me to find within myself unfamiliar words and styles to which I might yet discover a certain affinity. I can hardly say that I regret not following this advice: my conservative intellectual habits have served me well enough. But I do think something was lost.

Thus I realize that as a child I was observing far more than I understood. Perhaps all children do this, in which case what distinguishes me is only the opportunity that catastrophic ill health has afforded me to retrieve those observations in a consistent manner. And yet I wonder. When people ask me “But how do you remember the
smell
of the Green Line bus?” or “What was it about the detail of French country hotels that so stuck with you?” the implication is that some sort of little memory chalets were already under construction.

But nothing could be further from the truth. I just lived that childish past, perhaps connecting it up to other bits of itself more than most children are wont to do, but certainly never imaginatively repositioning it in my memory for future use. To be sure, I was a solitary child and kept my thoughts to myself. But this hardly renders me distinctive. If memory came back to me so readily in recent months, I think it is for a different reason.

The advantage of my profession is that you have a story into which you can insert example, detail, illustration. As a historian of the postwar world, recalling in silent self-interrogation details of his own life as lived through it, I have the advantage of a narrative which both connects and embellishes otherwise disjointed recollections. To be blunt, what distinguishes me from many others who—as my recent correspondence suggests—have comparable memories is that I have a variety of uses to which I can put them. For this alone I consider myself a very lucky man.

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: full of recyclable and multipurpose pieces of serviceable recollection, readily available to an analytically disposed mind. All that was missing was a storage cupboard. That I should have been fortunate enough to find this too among the trawlings of a lifetime seems to me close to good fortune. I hope I have put it to some use.