This “life,” written by her friend, Simone Pétrement, is a work of the most serious kind of affection and the most serious dedication. And yet the result of it all is to obscure and blur by detail and by a wish, no doubt unconscious, to retain memories and moments of the normal and natural in a character of spectacular and in many ways exemplary abnormality. Those who live with a breaking intensity and who die young have a peculiar hold upon the world’s imagination. The present fashion of biography, with the scrupulous accounting of time, makes a long life of a short one. It is not the careful gathering of facts or the mere length—a year is a long book—but the way the habit and practice work upon the grand design, turning form into bricks. Short lives that sum themselves up in final explosions of work and action are especially vulnerable to amiability, discretion, and accumulation. (Sylvia Plath is another example of reduction by expansion—high school, tennis lessons, dates.)
Simone Weil was born in 1909 into a Jewish family with little interest in Jewish religion or Jewish culture. The parents were unusually attractive because of their elevated traits of mind and patient sympathies. Both Simone and her brother, André, a distinguished mathematician, were clearly gifted from the beginning, having talents that revealed themselves in inspired concentration. The family was a close one and Simone’s frail intensity and her ingrained refusals—luxuries of all kinds, personal comfort in the manner of living, indifference to girlish ways—caused the parents anxiety which did not, however, take the form of denunciation. Throughout her life, her parents are to be found urging people to give her decent food without her knowing it, worrying about the unheated rooms she invariably discovered, taking her for vacations, visiting her in factory towns, tracking her down among the dangers of Spain during the Civil War, where she had gone as a volunteer and where she had suffered a terrible burn on her leg which they were anxious to have properly treated. The daughter’s letters to her parents are noble, loving, and real. The cover of Seventy Letters reproduces an envelope addressed to these now uprooted Europeans, then living at 549 Riverside Drive, coming from the daughter in London and written during her last week of life; it is extraordinarily moving.
Simone Weil was a student of the philosopher Alain (Émile Char-tier). Alain was a special figure as a writer and teacher in Paris in the 1920s—one of those arresting French academic stars who throw the light of their ideas and the style of their thinking over young intellectuals and have a dramatic fame quite unusual here. His Propos, essays on many aspects of culture, very likely confirmed Simone Weil’s own genius as a philosopher working in the form of passionate essays rather than in theoretical explication of positions and arguments.
Alain’s attention was given to morality, good deeds, the exercise of will by which one becomes free, to pacifism and to suspicion of the need to exercise power over others. In many ways these thoughts pre-figure the great themes of Simone Weil’s writings. Her own nature was, of course, much more extreme; that is, she was determined to live out truth, not as an example which would have involved the vanities and impositions of leadership, but as a dedication marked by obsessive discipline.
She appeared odd and, to some, rigid and forbidding, giving “the impression that some element of common humanity was missing in her, the very thickness of nature, so to speak.” In her revolutionary youth she was a striking, intransigent, awkward figure. Simone de Beauvoir tells of meeting her when they were preparing for examinations to enter the Normale. “She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits. . . . A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept. . . . I envied her for having a heart that could beat round the world.” When the results of the examination in general philosophy were posted, de Beauvoir says, “Simone Weil headed the list, followed by me.”
The “saintly” shape of Simone Weil’s life grew amidst the unbelievable density of left-wing politics in the Europe of the 1930s. The various parties, the strikes, the violent factionalism in unions, the eschatological intensity of theoretical disputes, Russia under Stalin, the challenge of Trotsky, the nature of Marxism, the ruthlessness of colonial rule, and the anguished clinging to pacifism with its horror of conscription as a central theme of radical thought—all of this Simone Weil took part in, writing a prodigious number of pamphlets and political letters, giving speeches, organizing meetings.
Trotsky had been allowed asylum in Paris under the Daladier Government, with the condition that he refrain from political activities of all kinds. Nevertheless, Simone Weil convinced her parents to allow a meeting to be held with Trotsky in their apartment house. Trotsky arrived with his family and armed bodyguards, all of them entering “with their hats pulled down over their eyes and their coat collars raised to their noses,” looking exactly like what they had wished to disguise, like conspirators. Simone took advantage of the chance to have a discussion with Trotsky. “The discussion quickly turned into a quarrel; in the adjoining room, where they were seated, the Weils heard a series of loud shouts.”
This period, with its organizations and counterorganizations, its cells and splits, is almost impossible to return to its genuine context because of the simplifications of thought and possibility finally brought about by Nazism, the war, the atomic bomb, the cold war, and the devastation of serious left-wing hopes in Europe and America under the power realities of postwar existence.
For Simone Weil, peculiar and “eternal” as her profound concerns were, it is impossible to imagine that she would have remained on the outside, quietist, contemplative, unpolitical. Oppression, exploitation, liberty, national prestige, force, dignity, history, faith: in her reflections upon these conditions rest her claims upon our minds and feelings. Without the common political life of her time surrounding her writings with its urgencies, her essays would be different. They would be literature rather than prophecy, a tone they clearly have and by means of which her language achieves its beauty and uniqueness.
Her reading of history and her culture were enormous. But she read history without objectivity, meaning that she read the past in a mood of violent, agitating partisanship, believing that it mattered not in the sense that an educated person must know the past but with the conviction that the legacy of the past was as much a part of life as airplanes, automobiles, or armaments. Thus her dislike of the Romans and the Hebrew tradition of the Old Testament and her love of the Greeks and the Gospels.
“The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism” maintains that the Roman Empire was the model upon which the iniquitous, militarized, centralized states of Europe developed their totalitarian policies. Louis XIV lacked the true spirit of legitimacy, she thinks.
The miseries of his childhood, encompassed by the terrors of the Fronde, had induced in him something of the state of mind of those modern dictators, sprung from nothing and humiliated in their youth, who have thought that their peoples must be tamed before they can be led. . . . The degradation of hearts and minds in the second part of his reign, when Saint-Simon was writing, is as sad a phenomenon as anything of the kind that has been seen since. . . . Domestic propaganda . . . reached an almost unsurpassable degree of perfection. . . . base flattery . . . or cruel persecutions and the silence that surrounded them, foreign policy conducted in the same spirit as Hitler’s, with the same ruthless arrogance, the same skill in inflicting humiliation, the same bad faith. . . . Louis XIV took Strasbourg in exactly the same way as Hitler took Prague, in time of peace, amid the tears of its helpless inhabitants.
About the Romans: the sacking of Epirus, the destruction of Carthage, Caesar’s “bad faith” in his negotiations with Ariovistus, Cartagena, Numantia, on and on. The sacrificing of peoples to the concerns of Roman prestige. “They knew how to undermine by terror the very souls of their adversaries, or how to lull them with hopes before enslaving them by force of arms.” She connects the uprooting of peasants in her own day with the lines from Virgil’s first “Eclogue”: �
�We are leaving our country’s bounds and our loved fields. . . . We go to parched Africa.” Elsewhere she says, in comparing the Aeneid to the Iliad: “God would be unjust if the ‘Aeneid,’ which was composed under these conditions, were worth as much as the ‘Iliad.’ ”
Her attitude about Hebrew history in the Old Testament rested upon the same ferocious objections. Yahweh, “the god of armies”; God’s rejection of Saul because he did not exterminate the Amalekites down to the last man; Elisha dismembering forty-two children who had called him “Baldhead”; subjugation of the people of Canaan. In answer to the objections that the Canaanites themselves were immoral, she would have answered that we were not brought up to honor them. Also, in her feeling about “historical perspective” and its tendency to understand cruelties of the past as part of the sanctions of earlier cultures, she seemed to believe that morality did not improve and to hold with Plato that all people, at all times, had knowledge of the ideal “good.”
Catholicism was attractive to her spirit, although in her dealings with priests and Catholic friends she was contentious, vehement about certain doctrines such as no salvation outside the Church and, as always, inclined to look upon history as alive. “What frightens me is the Church as a social structure. . . . I am afraid of the Church patriotism that exists in Catholic circles. . . . There are some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong.” In any case, she was never baptized.
The 1945 publication of Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force,” in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine Politics, in a translation by Mary McCarthy, was, it is no exaggeration to say, an event of great importance to those of us who read it. This is one of the most moving and original literary essays ever written. “For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the ‘Iliad’ could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the ‘Iliad’ is the purest and loveliest of mirrors.”
In the Iliad the afflictions of force grow and grow, and each side weaves back and forth under the dominion of suffering.
At the end of the first day of combat . . . the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e., Helen and her riches . . . That evening the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions: (For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris; nor Helen; . . . He spoke, and all the Achaeans acclaimed him.) What they (the Greeks) want, is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children; for corpses, all the men.
The losses fall upon everyone, without mitigation and finally without meaning. “The death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans.”
In 1942, Simone Weil came to New York with her parents. Her whole mind was taken up with returning to Europe, with ideas for getting back into France to participate in the suffering and the resistance of her country. That was her mind at least insofar as action was concerned. Otherwise this was a period of intense religious contemplation. She did succeed in making her way back to London at the end of the year, saying as she left her grieving parents: “If I had several lives, I would have devoted one of them to you, but I have only one life.”
Her will to undertake dangerous missions in France was frustrated. Instead she wrote her celebrated The Need for Roots, a group of very personal and typical essays that must have bewildered the Free French who had asked for a sort of government report, filled with the usual bureaucratic “recommendations.” Instead Simone Weil addresses herself to “the needs of the soul.”
In this work and in others, the peculiarity of her vocabulary arises from the fact that she is occupied with the expression of distinctions, with definitions not of much interest to most thinkers. The difference between affliction and misery, for instance. Affliction is the suffering that separates one from others, causes in them dread and repulsion. “It is the mark of slaves.” It is “anonymous” and does not arouse the emotion of pity. “The same incapacity for paying attention to affliction that inhibits compassion in someone who sees an afflicted man also inhibits gratitude in an afflicted man who is helped. Gratitude presupposes the ability to get inside oneself and to contemplate one’s own affliction, from outside, in all its hideousness. This is too horrible.”
In London her health vanished, even though the great amount of writing she did right up to the time she went to the hospital must have come from those energies of the dying we do not understand—the energies of certain chosen dying ones, that is. Her behavior in the hospital, her refusal and by now her inability to eat, annoyed and bewildered the staff. Her sense of personal accountability to the world’s suffering had reached farther than sense could follow. She died young, like so many of the wretched in history whose misery had haunted her throughout her rare and noble life.
1977
DOMESTIC MANNERS
HOW ARE we living today? Of course, there is no “we” except for those who address us, advise us, praise us in the round, as “the American people.” The phrase is a signal for the wary, doing as it so often does more honor to the exhorter and his plans than to those millions gathered in under the grand title.
Only the forgetful can easily ignore the duplicity practiced upon the defining imagination by the sudden obsolescence of attitudes and styles just past, styles that collapsed or scattered into fragments just as one had felt free to identify them as facts, changes, alterations of consciousness, shiftings of power, or threats to power. These elements, at least at the moment of identification, had the shape of reality, of historical presence, of genuine displacements; and even though they could not be asserted as eternal they still could not be experienced as mere historical moments soon, very soon, to be reversed or simply erased. It is with some perturbation that one has to learn again and again that the power of external forces is greater than style, stronger than fleeting attitude.
“Confidence in the future” is a peculiar phrase, although in frequent use. It is not meant to signify the mere expectation of continuing existence, but rather to signify hope—perhaps for the stock market, for relations with recalcitrant and truculent foreign countries, for our own life as a whole, or for small groups, rich or poor, protected or beleaguered, who are in need of reassurance. It seems to mean that it is reasonable to assume the future will not diminish rewards in some cases or that the future will augment rewards in others. Most seriously it imagines that the future will, with all its attendant inequities and surprises, remain open to the understanding and to the effort of those leaders and advisers we have grown accustomed to and from whom, given the nature of things, we have generously not asked very much. These assumptions about the future are in grave disorder and “confidence” is merely a sentiment.
There is always the question of the will to understand first and then the greater will of society to undertake even the most reasonable alleviations, for alleviations on the one hand are the cue for disgruntlements elsewhere. Lacking the will, society waits for events to which it must respond, often in a final condition of fear and crisis and anger; or, in long, drawn-out, hopelessly tangled injustices and dangerous defaults it simply waits not to respond at all. Things reveal themselves in an atmosphere of grotesque folly. The persons exploiting oil in Arab countries are the same persons theatrically throwing pound notes on the ground in London rather than on the parched land of the poor of their own regions. The waste of Western capitalism is not always different, but America at least is used to the waste and looks upon the reduction of it with alarm.
To speak of persons as the “product” of their decade, or half-decade in some cases, is a severe telescoping of history, and yet it has an obvious descriptive usefulness, a co
nversational meaning that is measured by the clear recognition others give to the terms, a recognition coming out of the very grossness of the designations.
Certain persons and certain aspects of our society appear to be a product of the 1960s. The legacy of the period is intractable morally and socially in the manner of all history and it bears the peculiar opacity of its closeness to the present—that is, the period is experience, and its transformation into history is somewhat a work of the subjective imagination, a work close to autobiography in the way it reenters the memory.
There is sadness and regret in the memory of the sixties. For those who reached the age of eighteen in the last years of the decade the temptations to self-destructions were everywhere, bursting forth from what was called the “counter-culture.” The hallucinations of LSD, deformations by drugs that lingered on in apathy, addiction, aborted education, restlessness; the deprivations and fantasies of numerous torpid “communes,” the beginnings of hysterical youth cults—this still lies there behind us, for it seems that historical rubble is no more easily disposed of than the stone and steel and concrete of misbegotten highways, shopping centers, overweening towers for habitation. For those who in the sixties were “revolutionaries,” it meant hiding, police records, death, exile, the delusions of youthful power that took little account of the brutal rebukes the genuine power of society can command. It meant disillusionment with “infantile leftism,” with postures that time and the sluggishness of history outmoded.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 30