A Rebel Transfigured

...Weil even resembled Orwell in her manner of dying...

...The second section, a series of 10 articles that appeared in L'Ecole émancipée between December 1932 and March 1933, is called "The Situation in Germany...

...If she was not like him wounded by a bullet, she did sustain an injury in a frontline accident...

...And it echoed in my mind as I read this collection of Simone Weil's less familiar writings...

...The third and most powerfully impressive part of Formative Writings is Weil's "Factory Journal...

...for, you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend...

...But just as Orwell turned from revolutionary defeatism at the time of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, so did Weil have a change of heart once the War began...

...Weil's analysis displays the same radical intensity and freedom from party orthodoxies that characterized Orwell's criticisms of the Left a few years later in The Road to Wigan Pier...

...She kept it during the winter of 1934-35, when she took a leave of absence from her teaching and went to work in a manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Paris—an exercise similar to Orwell's descents into the depths of his own society...

...She furnishes a meticulous and depressing series of statistics: piecework done, hours worked, wages received...

...Their deeper differences can be gauged by comparing Weil's "Factory Journals" with Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and the diary the latter was based on...

...He was always the outsider, the vicariously experiencing writer who put his time and pen at the service of the poor while gathering grist for the literary mill...

...the Communists were paralyzed by their subordination to Russian interests...

...She writes of fatigue, of the satisfaction of performing well, of relations with coworkers and foremen...

...More significant still, the process never made clear Weil's lifelong vocation of philosopher/ teacher or connected her to the training that prepared her for it...

...She too went to fight at the Aragon front in the Spanish Civil War...

...Formative Writings frees one from the grip of this view by showing that, whatever her ultimate differences from her contemporaries, Weil's early experiences at least were quite in the Spirit of the Age...

...I am reminded of John Donne: Batter my heart, three-person'd God...

...Her journal entries have none of the style that shaped Orwell's diaries...

...They were libertarian Socialists dedicated to human brotherhood...

...Although a collection of hitherto overlooked fragments, the book has an undeniable developmental unity...

...Weil had spent a month in that country just as the Nazis were starting to tighten their grip, and her pieces speak with a sad realism of the inability of working-class movements to halt the triumphal progress of the "Hitlerites": The Social Democrats were stymied by their monstrous bureaucracy...

...certainly William Hazlitt used it as the title for a book of his essays as early as 1825...

...The hagiographical tone of much Weil scholarship reinforced the idea of her separation from the rest of humanity—at once the privilege and burden of sainthood...

...It is necessary to forge another one for oneself (although exhaustion wipes out consciousness of one's ability to think...

...That I may rise, and sland, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force lo break, blow, burn and make me new...

...Moved partly by guilt over his involvement with British imperialism, Orwell went to live among tramps, yet he never really identified with them, and he felt still less fellowship with the working people he met when he went north to Wigan...

...Weil's decision to join them meant enduring physical exhaustion as well as the indignities of working under capricious male supervisors...

...I even saw, accompanying Weil in this early stage of her journey, the shadowofafamiliar companion...

...As World War II drew nearer, she vacillated between pacifism and revolutionary defeatism...

...Weil and Orwell emerged from the War with virtually the same set of political convictions...

...Try to hold on to this other kind.' Clearly, Weil saw her factory stint less as a political radical's education in working-class life than as a personal breaking and making anew...

...Simone Weil submerged her literary ambitions when she went among the workers...

...There is little sense of a life outside...

...Her commitment to the working community was complete...

...Her objective is intimated in a telling passage toward the end: "The feeling of self-respect, such as it has been built up by society, is destroyed...

...Reading them, I felt I was walking not through the lonely Thebaid of the religious thinker but through the crowded landscape of the 1930s political rebel...

...It is the perspective of this " new Descartes," this unexalted individual armed merely with faith in his humanity, that Weil sought to adopt in the writings that make up the rest of the book...

...at one point she advocated sacrificing Czechoslovakia to the Nazis as the lesser evil vis-à-vis a general war...

...Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness explain why in their Introduction: "Weil became known primarily as a religious writer in the period immediately following the War as the result of a publishing process that tended to popularize the religious writings of her last three years in a partial form and in isolation from her prior life and thought as a Leftist political activist...

...From this point on, I think, the religious trend in her thought was assured...

...Her method is to reinterpret Cartesian thought through the mind of a "new Descartes" who would have "neither genius, nor knowledge of mathematics and physics, nor force of style...

...30.00...

...Her companions, after all, were driven by the need to survive, to make a living, wretched as it might be...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock "The Spirit of the Age" is a phrase that originated, I think, among the Romantics...

...In subsequent years Weil's and Orwell's rebelliousness continued on parallel cour ses...

...Nevertheless, Weil had to be an anomaly on the shop floor...

...hence they were increasingly hostile to Russian Communism, which they regarded as a mechanical tyranny and a betrayal of the traditional aims of working class movements...

...Weil is a student of philosophy attempting, somewhat in opposition to her teacher Emile Chartier (more famous by his pen name "Alain"), to make Descartes relevant to the contemporary lives of plain men...

...Both succumbed to tuberculosis, and in each case there was a touch of self-immolation: Weil's end was hastened by deliberate undernourishment, Orwell's by his insistence on going to live in the unfriendly climate of the Hebrides...

...He never believed he could speak as a representative of the proletariat...

...She became a backer of violent resistance to the German invaders and joined the Gaullists in London, pleading in vain to be sent on perilous missions in Occupied France...

...Indeed, agooddealof what is recorded in these pages echoes the career of George Orwell during the same period...

...What drove Weil, the reader of this book cannot help suspect, was the need to suffer...

...For all their affinities, however, Weil and Orwell were not mental twins...

...For in recent years she has mistakenly been seen as a figure standing apart from her time...

...It begins with a section entitled "Science and Perception in Descartes...

...he would have in common with the historian Descartes "only the fact of being a human being and of having resolved to believe only in himself...

...Unskilled women were the lowest, most despised workers in French factories, toiling long hours in poor conditions for scanty piecework wages...

...Weil returned from Spain with the somber conviction that revolutionary wars could never succeed: The brutal discipline that military action required was irreconcilable with the goals of freedom and brotherhood...