Prophetess of the Real:
DAVISON, PETER H.
Prophetess of the Real Simone Weil. By E. W F. Tomlin. Yale. 64 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by Peter H. Davison Editorial staff, Harcourt, Brace SIMONE WEIL is not only one of the most baffling of...
...The best-known fact about her is that she died in England of tuberculosis, after a period of working for the Free French Government during which she refused to eat more than the official French ration and seriously damaged her already undermined health...
...Was she a brilliantly endowed masochist, or a saint, with all a saint's unpleasantness...
...If she was a visionary, it was reality she saw in the visions...
...What, in the end, do we think of her...
...Now she is described as "the most truly spiritual writer of this century" (by Andre Gide, whom she called the "dupe of life"), as "a woman of genius" (by T. S. Eliot), and as a saint (by any number of people...
...It will, however, be more useful to those who already are well acquainted with Simone Weil than it will be to those readers who have yet to discover her...
...To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love...
...In The Need for Roots, which I consider one of the most searching modern books I have read, she takes up society in itself, whereas in the above-mentioned books she had dealt with society mainly as it affected the relationship between the individual and God...
...Tomlin's closely-written essay will help us answer this question, but her work itself will help us more...
...In spite of her identification with the worker, she hated the crowd (the Great Beast) ; but she hated worse the kind of government that makes crowds possible...
...Nevertheless, it is a helpful little book, because it collects in one place, for the first time so far as I know, the principal facts of Simone Weil's life, and it adds to these facts a thoughtful and incisive analysis of her work...
...Finally, it is again by her constant return to realities that she convinces us--by her example more than by her insistence, for no one person could find all her arguments applicable...
...As T. S. Eliot said of her, she was "at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialists...
...In her writings (e.g., Gravity and Grace and Waiting for God), she dealt with the relation between man and God,which she described (and I do injury to both her subtlety and her rigor by summarizing in this way) as a suspension between the weight (or gravity) of the world and the light from an infinitely distant God...
...again, prophetic...
...It is not an object at all...
...Here, at the request of the unsuspecting Free French, who had asked her to write recommendations for the postwar educational system, she constructed an attack on nationalism and modern social institutions which must have surprised her superiors if it was ever submitted...
...She is never importantly deceived...
...Reviewed by Peter H. Davison Editorial staff, Harcourt, Brace SIMONE WEIL is not only one of the most baffling of writers...
...in fact, the idea of nationhood, the idea of national glory, of imperialism and cultural uniformity that appalled her...
...it is my opinion that she is one of the most profound...
...Born a Jew, she was, in all but the most theologically literal sense of the word, a Christian, but aggressively refused to join the Roman Church...
...It was...
...Tomlin admirably emphasizes in his thoughtful essay this astringent power in Simone Weil and cites one of her most jolting statements: "Truth is not an object of love...
...In every conflict of interest, she favored the underdog as a matter of stated principle...
...She rejoiced in self-denial to an almost absurd degree: During the Depression, she lived on the equivalent of poor-relief and gave the rest of her school teacher's salary to those who queued up at her door...
...if she was a radical, she could be satisfied with nothing less than real roots growing in real soil...
...There is something woefully wrong with the health of a social system when a peasant tills the soil with the feeling that, if he is a peasant, it is because he wasn't intelligent enough to become a school teacher...
...Her answer she sometimes described as a "spirituality of work"—an attempt to recover a social system meaningful to the worker...
...She worked as an industrial laborer in one of the poorest quarters of Paris, and as a farm worker during the war...
...Yet, the truly astonishing thing about her writing is that this is no formula, that, even at its most absurd and contentious, her language transparently shows reality on the other side of her thought...
...For she sees supporting the French Revolution the same glittering false ideas that the absolute monarchs had introduced, and she sees in every succeeding change in form of government a change in form only...
...and her analysis of the corruption of the French nation since the sixteenth century is inexorable and...
...Her primary concern, naturally enough, was with labor...
...All the measures that are proposed, be they given a revolutionary or reformist label, are purely legal, and it is not on a legal plane that working-class distress is situated, nor the remedy for this distress...
...For her prophet-like insistence on the real, and her inspired ability to detect illusion, led her to question every stone in the foundation of the modern state...
...Man's hope lies only in an attente, a waiting or attendance upon God to bridge the distance between Him and us--an attente which, through affliction, humility and genuine emptying oneself of the world, eventually allows Grace to seep through...
...To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality...
...a friend said of her, after her brief period in New York in 1942: "It's quite certain that, if Simone had remained in New York, she would have become a Negress...
...And a radical she was...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 48
