Simona Weil: A Life

...Unfortunately, however, he does not develop this enormously weighty proposition but returns instead to the kind of semantic querulousness that occupies most of the book...

...For in fact it was quite the reverse, at least in the United States and probably elsewhere as well: the Federal government's e a r l i e s t altruisms were directed toward the "vested interests," in the form of what we have come to call "distributive benefits" (primarily subsidies...

...All very strenuous The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977 25 for a frail woman who ate almost nothing, suffered from crippling migraines, and smoked a lot...

...Simone Well's a r d e n t spirit craved the fullness of experience beyond theorizing...

...Whatever was responsible, it was clearly a current that ran deep...

...While Simone P~trement does not think her friend willed her death, she admits that it was the logical outcome of years of not eating, coupled with other self-imposed hardships...

...This was why she went to Spain as a journalist, why she worked in the factory and on the land, why she tried to take an active role in the French resistance in World War II...

...Like many a high-spirited girl of conspicuous intelligence, she wished she had been born a boy...

...Or, for that matter, in the years since 1943, when Simone Well died at 34...

...The only hint of them is to be found in Simone Well's statement that she was readier to die for the church than to enter it because "dying doesn't commit you to anything...

...Take away the necessity for work, she said, and people will take up the one sport that really inflames them--struggles for power...

...He directed the early approaches to truth through self-discovery which freed her to go on beyond his rational deism to the more mystical understandings of her later life...

...Then she became an agricultural laborer on the same grounds...

...By the measures it takes it will produce opinions and set standards which will force it to continue on the course on which it has embarked...

...Simone de Beauvoir replied that the problem was not to make men happy but to explain their existence...

...The enterprising soul manifested itself as early as the great intelligence...

...Born into a Anne Crutcher is an editorial writer for the Washington Star...

...My disgustingness," she called it...

...It made her too respectful of other people's individuality to accept communism's inhuman social engineering...

...One assumes he figures that philosophical treatises of the sort at hand may help to persuade men of the desirability of abandoning their present course and returning to the disciplined way of the market...

...Any two of these characteristics might be compatible," Hirsch insists...

...Simone Weil began as a lyc~e student to dress in a style that can only be described as masculine-neuter...

...cultivated Parisian Jewish doctor's family in 1909, she had to find 20th-century substitutes for the self-immolations the medieval Christian world would have made so convenient...

...Indeed, for those inclined to psychiatric condescensions, Simone Weil was a clay pigeon...

...Was it some subtlety of innate biological endowment...

...It is] certain to be driven on by the principles implicit in the precedents it sets...

...But her mortifications, serving private purification needs, were never obvious or sentimental...

...He found her a hopeless reactionary, bent on what he called "defending your personality...

...It made her shrink from many kinds of food, from much food of any kind, and from food that was in any way marred...

...actually the Well parents and children were all exceptionally harmonious throughout Simone's life...

...And she, the pacifist, the willing sufferer, admitted that she would kill to avoid rape...

...Interestingly enough, her employer when she worked in the vineyard cutting grapes summed up his impressions of her by saying simply "She had a lot of selfrespect...

...Simone Weil declared that the only thing in the world that mattered was the revolution that would feed the starving...

...What scruples kept her from it even Simone P~trement, her longtime friend and biographer, does not know...

...She was in despair when she lost out in competition with her equally gifted brother...

...From her lyc~e days on, she was as much of a cafd talker as any French intellectual, but, unlike her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, she never became entirely a creature of words...

...Had she been the neurotic martyr some people would like to make of her, what easier way to do it than by allying herself with the fate of the Jews in World War II...

...So the sense of Hayek's proposition remains true --once a democratic government starts handing out goodies it will find it almost impossible to refrain from widening the circle of beneficiaries--but the actual historical process he has got backwards...

...Among the ironies of her biography is the fact that a person as unusual as Simone Weil never got into any family conflicts about being different...

...As it was, a temperament from an alien moral milieu animated the mind and will, and it was given to Simone Well to see and bear witness to verities not commonly understood by the best people during her lifetime...

...The question remains: is the free market compatible with democratic government...

...In another recently published book, The Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch argues that the three great commitments of nineteenth-century bourgeois society-to private property, to expanded participation in democratic government, and to income inequalities deriving from a market economy--were an inherently unstable set...

...Some of that self-respect Simone Weil owed to the superior intellectual training she got at the Lycee Henri IV, where the great Alain taught philosophy...

...Anorexia" would take care of her eating pattern and "masochism" could be brought into service for the rest...

...Was it physical or psychic conditioning...

...Whatever she did, she wanted to take it to the frontiers of possibility...

...Ironically, it was only in the last two years that she began moving toward the church that would have been so natural a context for her preoccupations in another era...

...At one point he even permits himself the pious belief "that 'social justice' will ultimately be recognized as a will-o'-the-wisp"--a recognition which would then presumably permit us to return to a much freer, if not altogether free, market...

...The point seemed to be to make sure no manor, for that matter, woman--ever thought of her as a sexual being...

...It was our good fortune that this extraordinary being was born out of her time...

...The rejection was so strong, however, that one is tempted to look further...

...These began t'o appear as Public Laws in our earliest Congresses...

...Perhaps she made too much provision, but, for an age as confused as ours about the values of any kind of restraint and discipline, her experience has something to say...

...Perhaps that was the best summing up of her differences from the other communists of the time: her self-sacrifice, even her way of submitting to disciplines of mind and body always left that untouchable core of selfhood...

...in even greater despair when she decided for her own reasons that she did not have first-rate talents...

...But it was not until the Great Depression of the 1930s that Washington began to concern itself with the poor and to enact income support programs of one sort or another...

...She spent a year working in an automobile factory...

...It made her too sure of herself to be swept away by the tides of fashionable doctrine...

...When a child in an affectionate family is reluctant to receive even a mother's kisses, it is less of a surprise to discover what might be called pathological chastity in the young woman she becomes...

...She could not explain why she slept on the floor when there was a bed available...

...the three together were not...

...And then there will be compulsory labor again in the arms race...

...First the non-eating was explained as a desire to share the sufferings of the oppressed around the world...

...As a small child, Simone Weil dreamed of greatness--never mind what kind...

...There was also the matter of her sexuality, or lack of it...

...The one shortcoming of Alain's philosophy, she said at the end of her life, was that he made too little provision for pain...

...When she was a baby, her mother had an illness that disturbed her feeding routines and, for a time, the infant Simone became so frail that doctors did not expect her to survive...

...Hayek seems unwilling to confront it squarely...

...None of your fancy unisex coquetries--the word is " n e u t e r . " On one occasion, she did have a sort of skirt version of a man's tuxedo made to wear to the opera, but, most of the time, she wore nondescript proletarian garments, flat shoes, wild hair, and big, round glasses that dominated her small face...

...The coroner ruled it suicide by voluntary starvation...

...There is no greater measure of Alain's influence on Simone Weil than a letter she wrote to the official in charge of Jewish affairs during the Occupation...

...He taught her to balance intelligence and will in refining judgment...

...The present work, instead, a hodge-podge of s c a t t e r e d aper~us amidst a desert of tedious semantics, will only bore the uncommited and exasperate the faithful--who, Lord knows, have quite enough to be exasperated about in the darkening world...

...Precocious intellectual development and a conviction that she was ugly were the ostensible reasons for her to decide she would postpone indefinitely any thoughts of love...

...Challenging his ability to define a Jew, she said of herself that she had no cultural ties with Judaism but considered herself entirely a product of French, Hellenic, and Christian traditions...

...It is even possible to discern linkages between Simone Weil's inhibitions about eating and the revulsion sex aroused in her--sex for herself, anyway...

...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977...

...Hayek appears to understand this, especially in the following passage: But a government dependent on public opinion, and particularly a democracy, will not be able to confine such attempts to supplement the market [i.e., minimum welfare for the needy] to the mitigation of the lot of the poorest...

...The overwork which undoubtedly contributed to Simone Well's early death began as an understandable and attractive aspect of her radicalism...

...Then it became a determination to eat no more than the ration in Nazi-occupied France...

...Later, as a little girl, she showed an extreme form of the squeamishness many children feel about food...

...Thanks to the multiplicity of detail Simone Petrement has amassed about Simone Well's life, it's possible to look a little more deeply into these patterns and to see, if not causes, at least provocative sequences of development...

...BOOK REVIEW Simone Well: A Life SimonePdtrement / Pantheon / $15.00 Anne Crutcher In a sense, it is because she was such an anachronism in her own time that Simone Well is still news in ours...

...The difference between her and Simone de Beauvoir came through in an exchange when they were both students...

...My own view, to the contrary, is that if indeed Hayek had any such instrumental aim in mind he would have done far better to give us a fully revised edition of The Road to Serfdom...

...Having a congenial older brother was undoubtedly a contributing factor, but family partiality does not seem to have been involved...

...She showed the same preternatural sensitivity to being touched...

...For all the power of her mind and personality, she might have been no more than another Simone de Beauvoir, full of trendy glooms and grievances, had she not been so out of phase with her surroundings...

...She was in no way trying to deny her technically Jewish origin, but it was clear that her education as well as the secularism of her family had made her wholly non-Jewish in outlook and psychology...

...Juxtaposed with a strong will and an enterprising soul, it was the stuff of saintly self-denials...

...The subtitle of the preceding section reveals the fallacy: "From the care of the most unfortunate to the protection of vested interests...

...The child of a profoundly secular environment, she had never prayed until 1941, and, even though, from then on, her intellectual and spiritual life was increasingly Catholic, she never actually entered the church...

...It made her too humble to believe human intelligence could make utopia come true...

...she was entirely tolerant of what other people did in that area...

...She was, of course, cast in the mold of a 14th-century saint of the more intellectual sort--a Catherine of Siena, if you will...

...Elsa continuing the work to the foot of the scaffold...

...Finally, it was to live on as little as the prisoners in concentration camps...

...Here again, Simone Weil's strength and individuality transcend the easy categories...

...Simone Weil finished the encounter by saying " I t ' s easy to see you have never gone hungry...

...No wonder Simone Well, the young philosophy teacher and political agitator, was known as "the red Virgin...

...She was inclined by nature toward discourse on eternal abstractions, toward mortifications of the flesh, and toward an overpowering concern for human suffering...

...Elsa, forbidden to speak while she wove the shirts that would free her brothers from the enchantment that had turned them into birds...

...Particularly since the same out-ofseason inclinations and capacities made her so perceptive about aspects of human nature and society that our times are myopic about...

...Liberal idealism as well as communist idealism was punctured by her casual observations of human nature at leisure...

...And the problem with that is that defenders of the free enterprise system are all too likely to draw the wrong moral from a story that has not quite yet arrived at its ddnouement...

...She expressed the unique blend of striving and self-sacrifice that suited her character when, at 16, she wrote an essay on the story of Elsa and the wild swans...

...She wanted to know what it was like to be one of the factory workers she and her communist friends were so eager to help...

...The lumpy sauce, the apple with a spot on it, the soup with a drop of grease floating on top--her whole being cringed...

...That is true and important, though I should have been happier if he had at least sketched in the dynamics of the process rather than merely referring to the driving force of principles, a highly speculative agent at best...

...Yet even this insight is marred by the faulty, clearly aprioristic, historical account which leads up to it...

...She did not try to explain why she continued to wear sandals that made her feet and ankles bleed...

...It's our further good fortune that she had a friend like Simone P~trement to give us the details with such painstaking completeness...

...But of course he offers no evidence or reasoning to support that gentle hope...

...Actually, Simone Well was enough of a talker to take on Trotsky himself...

...A combination of radical politics and French patriotism supplied the framework through most of her life...

...The 14th-century saint again, reserving the soul for God...

...The death she did die may or may not have committed her to anything, but it was rich in medieval overtones...

...Present-day medicine, needless to say, has words for this...

...The closest approach to a factually relevant sustained argument comes in the final chapter when he raises what must really be the fundamental question for inquiries of this sort: can the free market survive in a democratic system of government...

...That was Simone Weil's way...