Simona Weil: A Life

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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 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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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 three together were not...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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