tony judt_ the last interview
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7/29/2019 Tony Judt_ the last interview
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Judt: the last interview Prospect Magazine
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W eb exclu s iveTony Judt: the lastinterviewPETER JUKES 21st July 2010 Issue 173
Exc lus ive t o Prospect on l ine , the fu l l
ransc r i p t o f Pe te r Jukes 's i nte rv iew w i th
h is to r ian and au thor Tony J udt
Peter J ukes ( r igh t ) w i th J udt
(middle), 2007
Tony Judt d ied, surrounded by h is fam i ly ,
on the t he evening o f August 6 th , 2010. The
New York T imes obi tua ry can be read here .
Th is i s the fu l l t ranscr ip t o f Peter J ukes s
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BY PETER JUKES
Peter Jukes writes
for print, stage,
television, radio, and
now online
Tony Judt: a man of
his word
Peter Jukes
discusses history,
life and justice with
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7/29/2019 Tony Judt_ the last interview
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n te rv iew w i th Tony J udtconduc t ed
ear lie r th is year v ia emai l , due t o t he
progress o f J ud t s mot or neurone d isease.
The fu ll tex t o f Juk es s por t ra i t o f Tony
Judt i s fea tured in the August i ssue of
Prospect, and c an be read onl ine here .Peter J ukes : Ill start with a confession. Before we
irst met 12 years ago at the Remarque Forum [a
conference Judt sponsored as professor of history at
New York University] a joint friend of ours sent me an
example of your worka chapter I think from your
1979 book Socialism in Provence 1871-1914. I must
admit my heart sank. Im sure it was compelling and
well documented, but it gave no indication of theiveliness and relevance of the discussion at that
Forum, nor of the range of your writing. I think you
must have been half way through your compendious
history of the whole of post-war Europe at the time.
So my question is: how did you move from the micro-
analysis of the French left between two wars to the
often global historical issues you address today?
Tony J ud t : Remember it was a long process. I
started work on my first French history book in 1969;
on Socialism in Provence in 1974; and on the essays
n Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely,
my first non-academic publication, a review in the TLS,
did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until
1993 that I published my first piece in the New York
Review. So thats a 25 year learning curve. Moreover,here was a transitional book: Past Imperfect. This was
real intellectual history, but it was also a political
ntervention and its often unclear even to me which
way I was leaning in any given chapter.
dont think that English historians of my generation or
he immediately preceding one were incapable of the
the late Tony Judt
a master of morally
charged rhetoric
Why Britain can't do
The Wire
The critically
acclaimed US
television drama
could not be made
here. We have
writing talent in
abundance, but its
output is controlled
by a stifling
monopolythe BBC.
Plus, an interview
with The Wire's
creator David Simon
Flaming for Obama
This year's
Democratic
primaries weren't just
fought on the
hustings and in the
television studios.
Some of the fiercest
battles took place in
the blogosphere
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bigger picture, whether in form or content. But there
was (no longer is) a deep prejudice against
popularization. Some people did it wellHobsbawm
or Trevelyanand many people did it badly; but there
was no academic reward for it. Recall that AJP Taylor,
a truly first-rate historian, diminished his reputation by
spending too much time on radio and TV shows, not tomention reviews in the Beaverbrook Press.
Popularizingmuch less venturing beyond ones
secure turfwas frowned upon for many years. I think
probably internalized the prohibition, even though I
wasand knew I wasamong the best speakers and
writers of my age cohort. I dont mean I was the best
historian, a quite different measure.
PJ : Was the training you had part of the problem here,
given that you took your degree and then your
doctorate in Cambridge, and then wrote from a
university position in France? Youve often regretted
he lack of public intellectuals in modern lifeis this
because of issues with modern academic systems?
TJ : The problem of dformation professionnelleis real
but mostly American. It would be suicide in the
American academy to show too early an interest
beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of
everything from charlatanry to ambition would be
evied and tenure denied. Ive seen this first-hand. This
s because the American graduate school universe
was created by Germans (refugees) and echoes many
of the worst as well as the best features of its model:
deep academic research, carefully limited range of
materials, engagement in internally-referential debates
and utter unconcern for the market. These are not all
bad qualitieswithout them we would not have had
some of the worlds greatest historical monographs.
But they inhibit people for decades from putting their
nose above a parapet. I have always loved sticking my
a month in Tripoli
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nose about a parapet, so long as I had a decent
weapon to hand. Thats partly an English trait, partly
an Oxbridge trait and probably mostly a recessive Judt
rait. John Dunn, my favorite Kings supervisor, once
described me as the silver-tongued orator: a barbed
compliment, since it suggested that I spoke before I
hought and seduced rather than convinced, but I like itall the same.
The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-
speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written
media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was
at home in both media, but his successors and
mitators know only the camera. This forces sound
bites upon even the most complex material: see
Schama, Ferguson e tutti quanti. Also, and
paradoxically: public intellectuals are best when they
are grounded in a particular language, culture, debate.
Thus Camus was French, Habermas is German, Sen
s Bengali, Orwell was deep English. This made their
cross-frontier ventures plausible, in the same way that
Havel or Michnik today have street cred because they
started out as courageous dissidents in a very
particular time and place. The opposite is the
ridiculous Slavoj Zizek: a global public intellectual
who is therefore of no particular interest in any one
place or on any one subject. If he is the future of public
ntellectuals, then they have no future.
PJ : This love for sticking your nose above the parapet:
s that what drew you to Israel in 1967, or Paris in
1968? Youve written you knew you wanted to be ahistorian from an early age: so what made you march
owards the sound of (water) cannons: the desire to be
an observer or a participant?
TJ : I am not sure I know the answer. I never thought
of Paris in 1968 as nose above the parapetif
anything, it was a rather conventional thing to do!
srael in 1967 was a bit different, but in that case I was
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7/29/2019 Tony Judt_ the last interview
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Judt: the last interview Prospect Magazine
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ollowing my ideological nose where it led, rather than
poking it up for the sake of it. Im not sure that I am
nearly as controversial or awkward as my reputation
suggests: I didnt even drop out of high school until I
had a place at Kings College, Cambridge.
That said, its true that periodically from the early1970s through the present I have published something
hat put the institutional or professional noses out of
oint. I think this comes from a mischievous disposition
already in evidence at primary school where I was in
constant trouble: a distaste for humbug, rules and
undeserving authority. It may also be a result of never
having been part of a school of historians but always
being something of a lone wolf. And, lastly, it wasclearly facilitated by early adoption into the Oxbridge
elite, which bought me status and security from which
o be a difficult boy.
PJ : Your work abjures the messianism of both the
right and the left. And your latest book, Ill Fares the
Land, emphasises this, explaining how the collapse of
Communism in 1989 and the Reagan/Thatcher
paradigm undermined all these narratives of a future
when history would end. In a way, its a classic tragic
vision. But somehow how, you rescue some kind
optimism out of thisespecially in regard to a revival
of social democracy. How do you square that?
TJ : I see what you mean about the tragic vision. But
you cant have a tragic vision in politicsnot if you
wish to intervene and convince (with the exception ofgrand turning points, from which one should not
generalize). What I am against is false optimism: the
notion either that things have to go well, or else that
hey tend to, or else that the default condition of
historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in
he long-run. I think that in order to sustain such irenic
visions one has to have been born at very particular
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exactly, does this
word mean?
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historical moments and in fortunate places. Just now I
hink we have very good grounds for pessimism. And
as you noted, Ive tried to write an intervention that
urns pessimism into a political program rather than adespairing sceptical dismissal of all possible
programs.
One of the very few things that I know I believe
strongly is that we must learn how to make a better
world out of usable pasts rather than dreaming of
nfinite futures. Its a very late-Enlightenment view that
says that the only way to make a better future is to
believe that the future will be better. Smarter people
han me used to believe very differently and I think it is
ime to listen to them once again.
PJ : Before we discuss Ill Fares the Landin more
detail, it seems to me that your decision to move to the
US in 1987 was a vital transition or self translation. Not
only did New York welcome intelligent pontification,
but it gave you the distance and perspectivenot tomention time and resourcesto complete your vast
book, Postwar, on modern European history.
TJ : All true: but we must not mix up causes and
consequences. My motives for leaving Oxford in 1987
were interwoven with personal stuff (girlfriend in
Stanford) and English politics: the horrible Thatcher
years and the beginnings of financial and bureaucratic
strangulation of higher education in the UKthe
catastrophic long-term consequences of which are
now becoming clear.
came to New York with no particular plans to stay
ong term. I was attracted by the French Institute at
NYU, but by the early 1990s I was already moving
away from French material. Moreover, I did not do any
Private view
SEBASTIAN SMEE
Sebastian Smee hasjust been awarded
the Pulitzer Prize for
Criticism. He has
written over 20
articles for Prospect
on everything from
the aesthetics of
sport to Gaugin's
sexiness
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public intellectual stuff for at least five years: my first
New York Times piece was in 1990 I believe and my
irst NYRB essay in 1993. I nearly left the US on
various occasionsoffers from Oxford in 1993,
Chicago in 1994, Oxford again in 1999 and more
recently Princeton and EUI. But each time something
about the city and the wonderful flexibility of NYU keptme back.
agree on the resources: both academic and financial,
which made Postwarpossible. But above all it was the
Universitys willingness to let me travel and live abroad
or long periods which made the book feasible. I could
never have done that from Oxford. And yet, curiously,
NYC felt closer to Europe than Oxford itself: more
urban, more cosmopolitan, more international.
PJ : Yet for all that, it wasnt long before the moeurs of
US academia grated on you. Im thinking particularly of
your dislike of cultural studies and your rubbing up
against the political correctness of identity politics.
TJ : I always hated that crap: I left Berkeley for Oxford
n 1980 in part because of it. And things were worse a
decade later. But the great thing about my
ndependent status at NYUand above all the
ndependent status I insisted upon for my Institute and
ts activitieswas that even while the pollution was
rising all around us, we were free to do whatever we
wanted and ignore it. I could protect students and
colleagues from it, offer jobs to people who could
otherwise never find them because of it, and say
hings that no one else dared say. For a brief while, as
Humanities Dean here at NYU in the early 1990s, I
was even able to push money in unconventional
directions: medieval studies, minority language
earning (minority here meaning Slovenian, not
Cherokee), and above all build the countrys number
one philosophy department, a counter-cultural
achievement of which Im proud.
-
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All that said, had it not been for the Remarque Institute
would certainly have gone back to Europe. But being
allowed to do everything I wanted and invite anyone I
wanted to say anything they wanted, I experienced
more freedom here as an academic than would have
been possible in any other country or perhaps even
university in the world. When I explained back in 2000
at a lunch in St Johns College Cambridge how
Remarque worked, how much cash we had and how
ree I was to spend it as I chose, you could see them
gagging
And then of course there was the NYRB.
PJ : And yet, for all your dislike of the personal being
political, it seems to me that this strong strand of
English moralism requires a notion of the personal
voice. Certainly, when it came to your controversial
writings for the NYRB from 2003 on the Israeli
Palestinian conflict, you partly stood up because you
knew it would be harder to impugn you on personal
grounds, given your background working as translator
or the Israeli Defence Force during the Six Day War in
1967.
TJ : But this is not about the personal being political.
This is invoking the personal to create space in which
o be political. But you are right that this is not
something that came easy to me. I used to avoid the
irst person and personal memoirs like the plague. But
t became clear that if I wanted to say unpopular things
n large public places, I needed street cred. BeingJewish is not enough. Being an ex-Zionist is not
enough. But being an ex-Zionist who wore the Israeli
army uniform (and has a pic of himself complete with
cutie and sub-machine gun): that helped. And in this
case the end justified the means. No one can shut me
up on this subject, so they are forced to resort to
clichs about self-hating Jews and the like: evidence
-
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of failure.
All the same, it does irritate me when I am described
as a controversialist and commentator on Israel. I see
myself as first and above all a teacher of history; next
a writer of European history; next a commentator on
European affairs; next a public intellectual voice within
he American Left; and only then an occasional,
opportunistic participant in the pained American
discussion of the Jewish matter
PJ : I dont want to go about this at length, because it
does seem unfair that youre identified with this one
ssue. However, the controversy surrounding the one
state solution piece took a while to die down. Your op-
eds seemed to disappear from The New York Times,and you no longer wrote for The New Republic. This
was soon followed by the cancellation of a talk at the
Polish Consulate in 2006. I recall there were Rabbis
hreatening to picket your lectures with holocaust
survivors.
TJ : Again, all true. The rabbis of Riverdale
(approximately the Golders Green of New York) got
me banned from one talk and picketed another at a
ocal high school, with picket-liners dressed as
concentration camp inmates.
This ought to hurt a lot: some of my family
disappeared into the camps and a large part of my
childhood was side-shadowed by this memory. But all
can do is find it stupid. The influence of extremist
Rabbis and the Anti-Defamation League worries memuch more as a broader cultural phenomenon of (self-
censorship. As I have pointed out ad nauseam, I
dont lack platforms for my opinions so the problem is
not the silencing of Judt. It is the closing of the
Jewish mind here in America.
PJ : Around the same time, you also broke with
prevailing US opinion on the issue of Iraq, taking both
-
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he Neocons to task, as well as their Liberal
apologists. Like Obama, you seemed to recognise it
was a dumb war of choice early on. However, if I recall
rightly, you wereunlike much of the US or European
Leftnot opposed to liberal interventions in Bosnia
and Kosovo.
TJ : In the 1990s, I was fully in favour of what is rather
azily called liberal interventionism. I prefer to think of
t as taking seriously the UN Charter mandating
protection of minorities extending into repressive
states rather than stopping at their borders. But I
recognize and always recognized the limitations.
Politics, especially international politics, is about what
s possible. You can intervene in Rwanda or Bosnia,
you cant in Chechnya (you in this case being the
benevolent West). The reasons are obvious. But the
charge of hypocrisywhy intervene only where you
can and not where you should?seems to me less
weighty than the charge of opportunism: using the
excuse that you cant do everything in order to do
nothing.
But just because I know that we could have intervenedeffectively and quickly in the Balkans or the Great
Lakes, it doesnt mean that I think there arent
problems. However, I see a huge difference between
sending in a couple of battalions of paratroops to
smash Serbian irregulars on the hills outside Sarajevo,
and inventing grounds for a pre-emptive war on an
Arab statewhose murderous chieftain was until very
recently our best friend in the region.
My objection to all my liberal friends who ran with the
raq hawks is that they were not making the case for
iberal interventionism but for exemplary war. On
Afghanistan, I took the view in 2001 that a rapid
response directed at a police-style operation to
capture Osama was both politically prudent and legally
-
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ustifiable. The longer it went onthe more it became
a war and less a police operationthe less justifiable it
was. And, of course, extending it into Iraq discredited
he whole exercise.
On the general question: I dont believe that one
should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for
nternational political action. Thats what misled Adam
Michnik and Michael Ignatieff and others into saying
hat because they believed in truth and beauty and
rights for Poles and Czechs, they had to believe in
hem for Iraqis as well and therefore could not oppose
plans to liberate the latter. That isnt how the world
works. George Bushs motives were not those of his
ntellectual apologists, with the result that the latter
ose their autonomous ethical credibility and pollute
heir own pure purposes. Back in 1988, I wrote an
essay about The Dilemmas of Dissidence in which I
said that Havel and his friends were perfectly adapted
o moral opposition under conditions of political
mpotence (late Communism); but that in later years,
hey would need to understand the very different terms
n which political calculations get made in messy liberal
worlds. They failed to do this, and their embarrassing
subservience to Dick Cheney was the result.
Where does that leave me? Trying, as usual, to square
general truths with particular circumstances. Thats the
difference between pure ethics and political theory; but
t isnt resolved by simply abandoning the tension and
sliding to one end of the pole.
PJ : Isnt there a danger here that the contemporary
historian gets pulled into cursory judgments and
cloudy polemics. For example, while your diagnosis of
he ideological dangers of Clintons triangulation or
Blairs New Labour have been vindicated over the
years, you seem to already despair of the Obama
administration in Ill Fares the Land. Isnt itmuch like
he French Revolution according to Mao/Ho Chi Minh
-
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a bit early to tell?
TJ : Excuse me, but it was Zhou Enlai who said that!
Okay: anyone who opens his mouth in the present
ense risks being proven wrong in retrospect. And of
course I am free to be right or wrong about Obama
depending upon how many years in the future you pick
or your point of reference.
But: it was a distinctive quality of the Obama campaign
hat it offered not just particular legislation or
programs, but a radical recasting of the mood of
politics in a democracy dangerously detached from its
own founding virtues. His complete failure to vindicate
hat promiseindeed, his abandoning of nearly all the
erms of innovative political approach that got himelectedis far more serious and devastating than his
particular failure to follow through on health policy, the
Middle East, etc. He has raised and dashed hopes in a
way that no one has done here for two generations.
That seems to me grounds for despair. What would
you have me say? That he may yet do better? That he
nherited a tough situation? That all politics is the art of
compromise? All true. And all secondary to the scaleof lost hopes.
PJ : The scale of lost hopes could be an apt
description of Ill Fares the Land, which must be your
most political book to date: an impassioned attempt to
revive the exhausted language of social democracy
made all the more urgent, it seems to me, by two
extraordinary circumstances. The most obvious is the
credit crunch of 2008. But the second extraordinary
hing is the personal circumstance under which you
made this intervention. Because of the sudden onset
and fast advance of Lou Gehrigs disease, it must
have taken an enormous act of will to imagine,
mentally compose and then dictate this book.
TJ : I suppose so, though in retrospect things always
-
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seem tidier. Actually, what happened was that I was
planning a sort of valedictory seminar talk at my own
nstitute last autumn, precisely on the lines of what
became the lecture/book. The Dean of NYU talked me
nto doing it as a public lecture, which I undertook as a
sort of personal and intellectual challenge: something
between an effort of will and a determination to provehat what I had been saying about this diseasethat it
doesnt affect your mindwas externally verifiable.
The next stage came when the New York Review
offered to publish a polished version of the recorded
ecture and various people, beginning with my agent,
urged me to think of it as a book. Initially I declined,
put off by the prospect of the work. Then I began to
see a shapeand, of course, another challenge. The
atter proved both huge and quite manageable: the bit
hat I thought would be harddictating a whole book
rom coldbecame surprisingly familiar thanks to a
antastic assistant; the organization took shape thanks
o nocturnal mental exercises as I have described. I
suppose the book would have been a little tighter and
maybe more methodologically consequential if I had
done it the old way. But it would surely have lacked the
energy and anger.
PJ : The other thing I notice about Ill Fares the Landis
a sense of a generational handing over. The book
often feels like a primer for thoselike your sonsin
heir teens, who have little idea of the Keynesian post-
war consensus (i.e. the state saves capitalism) that
obtained both in Western Europe and the US in thehirty years after World War II. You then follow the
neo-liberal dismantlement of those ideas of
ntervention, basically from the late 1970s onwards,
and the social, political and even historical costs of
his, especially in the former communist countries of
Eastern and Central Europe.
TJ : Yes. I was conscious of this: having had to back-
-
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and-fill for my sons Daniel and Nicholas when
explaining aspects of my lecture after the fact. And it
really is the case that for the last decade on and off I
have been talking these things through with students
or whom all of that is, if not completely news, then
certainly ancient history. And I do think that one of the
original aspects of the book is my insistence on theback to the future aspect: that sometimes the best
uture entails recovering good pasts.
PJ : But theres one question I have about this
generational handing over. It was your generation, the
baby boomers, the children of the 1960s, who felt the
real benefit of social democratic security who also
oversaw its dismantling. One could say the last thirty
years have been accompanied by the grating sound of
a whole generation pulling up the ladder behind them.
feel the anger, range of reference and intelligence in
your response to this. But Im not sure I detect an
acknowledgement of any complicity.
TJ : Okay, okay. But I do say, again and again, that we
1960s people threw it away. Yes, the sound of a whole
generation pulling up the ladder is not inaudible to meeither, but I dont feel complicit. I dont recall ever
being swept into the vortex of the me generation, nor
did I ever believe that the personal is political, much
ess that we can afford to throw away the security
blankets of the postwar years and just indulge.
God knows I can think of enough things that I did
wrong both personally and as part of my cohort. But I
never abandoned what I thought of as the benefits of
he postwar consensus in favour of sectional
advantage. Actually, I was always a bit awkward in this
as other respects. As you know, I was against root-
and-branch school comprehensivization on the
grounds that the postwar arrangements combining
meritocracy with opportunity, while imperfect and
-
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ogically indefensible, were better than the radical
schemes on offer which have trashed much of the
pedagogical gains of the early postwar decades.
n the same way, I never liked New Labour
something about the smug enthusiasm for success
and wealth and public celebrity grated on my austerity-
raised postwar personality. I recall a dinner party back
n 1998 I believe, full of New Labourites and the more
socially fashionable liberals. I hated it and felt old and
Michael Footish. At the same time, the Labour party of
Tony Benn always seemed provincial and deluded to
me, for the obvious reasons. So Im just an awkward
customer, I guess.
PJ : You said earlier that you tended to avoid the firstperson in your writing. But in the last few months that
nhibition has gone and youve published some very
personal pieces in the NYRB, about Revolution, Girls,
Cars, Trains, even Putney. These arent memoirs in
he traditional sense of preserving individual identity for
uture record. Indeed, they feel more like something
else: where in the awful nocturnal immobility of the
night you use your memory to make new connections,connections so dense, rich, often comic, sometimes
ragic, that they go beyond narrative to something
almost poetic.
TJ : Thanks! It really doesnt always feel like that, but
ooking back I see a few good phrases
PJ : I know you dont write these in the traditional way,
but compose them in your head using the classic arsmemoriain the long empty hours of the night, and then
dictate them in the morning. My sense is that these are
not elegiacsetting yourself down for posterityor
angry ravings against the dying of the light, but a
matter of more urgent personal survival: making sense
of things, now, for you,
TJ : Yes. Certainly not Dylan Thomas. More a sense
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hat I see better now than I could have done before the
shape of all the little wholes of my life, even though I
am seeing them now from the perspective of one very
arge incomplete. I dont think I enjoyed living as much
as I should have donetoo busy thinking about it all
he time. So now I am enjoying thinking about it (which
s a different sort of thinking) and getting as close toenjoying it in the moment as retrieved memory will
permit.
do, though, note an occasional temptation to slip into
analytical moralizing via past memoryanother
dformation professionnelle. I dont altogether resist it,
ust try to keep it under control. Its also, of course, my
way of making sense of things. Not the only possible
wayperhaps not even the only way that I might once
have gone (in school I was better at literature than
history and was urged by various interested parties to
go in that direction, but something pulled me back).
PJ : Now that youve finished the book, will the disease
allow you to compose more?
TJ : In one sense, yes. Its getting a little harder to
dictate, but only because of the irritating secondary
symptoms: phlegm mostly. But if I wanted to write
something, I certainly could. What will be an issue will
be energy and concentration versus alternative claims
upon them (e.g. boys); and also perhaps the difficulty
of writing non-urgent texts, where huge bursts of
mental energy are less forthcoming and sustained
concentration is the problem. I truly dont yet know the
answer.
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Judt: the last interview Prospect Magazine
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Constance Ellis says:FEBRUARY 10, 2011 AT 11:36 PM
am a late reader of this superb interview. Peter, what
a sensitive and
preceptive job! You got Tony at his best in the face of
dire circumstances.
Your description of his memoire pieces in NYRB is
spot on. I am grateful that Tony had the benefit of your
admiration and your friendship.
Vive le Forum!
Connie Ellis
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