A Life Paid up
White, George Abbott
done all the way through without interruption. The song is "But the World Goes 'Round," one of the four which John Kander and Fred Webb, composers of Cabaret, have done for this film, and it's...
...After all, as a farmwoman said, All the intellectuals we knew put barriers between themselves and the peasants...
...While Scorsese begins the number like every other in the film, without any special staging, he gradually alters the lighting until Francine stands alone in a key light the way she might in a conventional stage or screen musical...
...If in France today there are those who regard Simone Well as "Sainte $imone" it is worth recalling that A LIFE PAID UP GEORGE ABBOTT WHITE De Gaulle while in London during WWII pronounced her "mad" and likely never read the manuscript of her prophetic Need /or Roots...
...The Times Literary" Supplement has given each of her posthumous collections of essays, journals, and journal fragments respectful attention, yet Cambridge University's George Steiner regards her as "culty" and "perverse...
...Lawrence is a perfect subject for the sensitive psychobiographer...
...regrettably, the necessary balancing of biography must "obscure" and "blur" the exemplary (but hopelessly complicated and essentially inaccessible) life...
...One feminist journal Soundings is sensitive to her pivotal essay, "The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force," while Ms...
...that structural factors act as constraints and catalysts to political movements and to social change...
...With her it is not so much the life as what it meant that has been so very unclear...
...It was this understanding of privilege and its relation to oppression, and injustice, she would deepen and refine, insisting on it to the end of her life...
...Yet even here, what gives the song its wallop, more than any special treatment it get.~, is the place it has in Francine's story...
...headlines her as THE RED VIRGIN...
...Third, one thinks of Orwell and T.E...
...This surely begs the question...
...It is a continuous, long take, and a performance in the true sense of the word...
...Contradictory views, though of course all are correct...
...Avoiding the divisions would be dishonest, understating the polarities would be misleading...
...And like them, in Camus's phrase, she "paid up personally...
...An editorialist in the New York Times recently criticized the "questionable wisdom of telling it all" and lambasted the enthusiasm for private revelations on public figures, a phenomenon the Times correspondent regards as synonymous with pandering to the reading public's baser instincts with the express aim of titillating them and, at the same time, filling the coffers of biographers with hard cash...
...BOOKS i Simone Well: A Life SIMONE PETREMENT Pantheon, $15 Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 and died in Grosvenor Sanatorium just across the English ChannelwAshford, Kent--in 1943...
...Herein lies the great value of Simone Petrement~ biography...
...The historian who decides in favor of utilizing psychoanalytic theory faces several thorny theoretical and methodological considerations...
...thus, A Prince o~ Our Disorder is never "reductionistic"ma charge often leveled against psychobiography...
...Hers was a mind at home with Greek philosophy and mathematics as well as Communist Party reversals and Hiflerian realpolitik...
...22 July 1977:470...
...a plane that transcended the material while allowing her to see the connection between the two: A laborer (she wrote) burns up his own flesh and transforms it into energy like a machine burning coal...
...And the bulk of it, when spoken aloud or actually written, has come from those Simone Weil respected least and mistrusted most, those she endlessly confronted and made uncomfortable: middle-class academics and intellectuals, especially the ones seeking or justifying power...
...On her deathbed Simone Weil would remain uncertain as to why people oppressed one another, but when she stood at her shearing machine in DeCommonweal: 469 cember 1934 it was not "experience" alone she needed, it was, as this biographer persuasively argues, because she had reached a theoretical impasse as to how the machine becomes a part of this world's terrible oppression_9 Nine months and three factories later, burns, filth, cuts, infections, fatigue (but not fear) behind her, Simone Well knew there was a direct line of "reasoning" from our modern division and extreme specialization of labor (Taylorism) to the original separation of intellectual from manual labor Marx inveighed against when he saw it two thousand years earlier in her beloved classical Greece...
...But that alone cannot tell the tale...
...This is the potential Minnelli's performance of the song lives up to...
...Mack recognizes that individual psychology (and thus individual intentions, motivations and purposes) operates in and on history...
...A deeply moral, troubled, introspective man of genius, "he left behind a vast record of achievement and failure...
...Simone Weil threw down these barriers and put herself on our level...
...Perhaps trivial to some but precious to us, this lesson...
...Lawrence in England, F.O...
...Matthiessen and Dorothy Day in America, Silone in Italy, but almost alone among the intellectuals of her time (and our own, sad to say), Simone Weil went beyond brilliant but cerebral insights into oppression by choosing to engage the more fundamental question of injustice itself...
...He transforms his own flesh and blood into the fruits of his labor, food and wine . . . . Manual labor is either a degrading servitude or a sacrifice...
...The capital fact is not the suffering but the humiliation," she wrote, agreeing with Marx that the liberation of the workers must be accomplished in the work itself, and that the work, in order to become that of a free man, must be pervaded by thought, invention, and judgment...
...She could not agree with him, nor could additional manual labor convince her that injustice was exterior to man, rooted in material conditions alone...
...The results are at least fourfold...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, .JR...
...Friends and foes may persist in this spectacle...
...Simone Weil was also ridiculous, abrasive, extreme...
...Finally, when she wrote to a former iycee student in 1934 Culture is a privilege t h a t . . , gives power to the class that possesses it . . . let us try to undermine this privilege by relating complicated knowledge to the commonest knowledge, she was carrying the engagement a a step further...
...Second, given a clean English translation, it is clear for those who wish to see that the meaning of her life is neither blurred nor obscured by the particular events of her life, which in Platonic fashion she herself regarded as intimations and finite though quite real all the same...
...Formerly, Simone Weil's life was paraded as a series of conversion experiences: initially we have youthful involvement in studies, then Marxism-Leninism, trade unionism, pacifism, the Spanish Civil War, at end some intense but shadowy mysticism...
...Moreover as Elizabeth Hardwick suggests from the front page of the N.Y...
...Yet disagreeing with' Marx's belief in the "liberating powers of the revolution," even more with his theory of the "infinite development of the productive forces after the revolution"--as though either would uproot injustice...
...First, in spite of a silent abridgment of slightly less than half of two volumes published in Paris in 1973, Simone Weil's early, original, remarkably penetrating insights into each of our oppressive 20th century isms--colonialism, imperialism, totalitarianism, state socialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, scientism, secularism---emerge in all their intended provocativeness...
...He must, first of all, defend why he believes an appreciation of the motives and purposes of historic actors, their private wellsprings of action and emotion, is important to a compelling historic account that aims at interpreting and understanding the complex intersection of a human life with others in history...
...Manual labor righted an experiential balance to be sure, opening Simone Weil to the absolute correctness of certain of Marx...
...The contemporary historic biographer must take a stand, therefore, on whether or not he considers a treatment of individual psychology an essential and constituent feature in the analysis of historic figures or an inessential and trivial dimension...
...Mack defends his enterprise with skill, elegance, and genuine modesty...
...The meaning is simply unbearable to accept, because accepting those insights and accepting that meaning would likely result in nothing less than our radically changing our lives...
...Given the reciprocal relationship between private motivations, fears, and fantasies and public action, a psychological understanding of an "individual 'public' figure who characteristically lives out elements of his inner life in the public arena can . . . provide yet another valuable source of information about the psychology of action...
...She and those of similar privilege were not mere spectators in the vast industry of injustice...
...Of course, with such sharp divisions and such striking polarities how could it be otherwise...
...A Pri~e of Our D4sorder: The L i f e o t T . E . L a ~ e JOHN E. MACK Little, Brown, $15 The Revolutionary A s e e t | e : Evolution o f a P o R t l e a l T l p e BRUCE MAZLISH Basic Books, $11.95 JEAN BETHKE EI~HTAIN Psychobiography, a species of history which deploys psychoanalytic concepts and insights to the study of human beings (usually 'great' human beings) in culture, remains a controversial enterprise...
...Learning it she knew at last what working people have known and accepted, through faith, all their lives, including the ultimate residence of injustice...
...Of course...
...Simone Petrement, however, has had the good 22 July 1977:468 sense to present contradictions dlalectically...
...The Times' somewhat exercised commentator concluded that there was, after all, no sex in Plutarch's Lives yet his portraits "are among the world's more sophisticated...
...If their privilege was a self-deprivation, it was also, she now understood, "part of the problem...
...Mack is well aware that there are shifting historic contexts and circumstances outside the control and domination of any person or group of persons...
...thus "history is often the result of individual choice and motive, and of human responsibility, both individual and collective...
...The song is "But the World Goes 'Round," one of the four which John Kander and Fred Webb, composers of Cabaret, have done for this film, and it's sung by Francine at a recording studio...
...That is, linking Simone Weil's extensive work experiences in factory and field to her extraordinary encounters with the Catholic Church, the one having been minimized or patronizingly misunderstood, the other castigated or mystified...
...Fortunately for Simone Well and for those who wish to learn a measure of what she struggled so long and so hard to learn, her second biographer refuses to accept this contemporary American, academic intellectual, tough-minded liberal, pseudo-psychoanalytic, coolly objective, notion of biography-as-balanced-contradictions...
...Reprinting her penetrating essay "Factory Work" in Politics magazine immediately after that war, Dwight Macdonald also felt it necessary to editorialize in a postscript, "the remedies suggested appear as superficial as the evils previously analyzed are profound...
...Lawrence stands out as exemplary: one of the finest works of the genre...
...It was the Church, on three memorable occasions (the Blessing of the Fleet in a poor village in Portugal, kneeling in Saint Francis's little chapel at Assisi, attending services from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday at Solesmes), that righted a balance on another plane...
...This was the most difficult lesson of all...
...To ask toward what end only highlights what Simone Petrement underlines...
...Hers was a body at home with ascetic detachment and discipline as well as assemblyline engagement with chaos...
...Hers was a spirit at home with Benedictine plainsong as well as Baptist spirituals...
...unclear and troubling enough to have provoked over the quarter century after her death a discussion characterized by extraordinary claims and extraordinary denials, by inaccuracy, hagiography, violence, inappropriateness, and outright nonsense...
...By now Scorsese can afford to indulge himself, and after Minnelli does this spectacular song, he works in a couple of full-scale production numbers...
...Times Book Review, the narrative of a personality in such contradiction ("breaking intensity") can only result in a certain soft confusion...
...New York, New York has enough momentum to keep going on its own terms no matter what...
...While the recording studio seems at first just another episode, the song she sings there is really a consequence of all that has gone before in the film...
...At this point he has revamped the musical sufficiently that he can trust such show-stoppers not to stop the show...
...Plutarch did not have available for his use what the twentieth century uniquely has to offer the historian, namely, a critical depth psychology...
...Now the experiences are not denied, though presented dialectically, they appear less as gaudy conversions and more as impressive transmutations, less wild oscillations, more a steady progression...
...John E. Mack's painstakingly researched, exhaustive study of the life of T.E...
...We have always been clear about those dates and reasonably clear about many others in her brief, searching, painful life...
...Even this biography's jacket must make us aware that "she was as illuminating in her thought and in her quest for spiritual purity as she was unrelenting in her need for martyrdom...
...His moving tale of a single man's life links the public and the private, the individual and the social, at every point...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
