Suicidal Hunger Artist

By R.Z. Sheppard

SIMONE WEIL: A LIFE

by SIMONE PETREMENT

577 pages. Pantheon. $15.

Simone Weil died Aug. 24, 1943, in a Middlesex, England, hospital. The death certificate satisfied the requirements of science: "myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis." The needs of the law were fulfilled at the official inquiry: "The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed." Neither statement could satisfy those who knew Simone Weil as a philosopher, teacher, factory worker, soldier, writer and friend. Her mind was not a scale to be tipped between sanity and insanity but a fixed crystal that gathered every crucial political and spiritual crisis of her time into a point of devouring intensity. She shattered at the age of 34 attempting that most difficult of 20th century feats--living in the service of an absentee God. For her sufferings and self-denials, Weil has been canonized as a secular saint by contemporary intellectuals. This biography, by her friend and academic colleague Simone Petrement, should ward off potential devil's advocates. It reveals Weil not only as a unique intellect whose thought spanned thousands of years and many cultures but also as a child of her time and place--France after World War I, sapped yet still adventuresome. Weil's mind belonged to the classics but her emotions owed much to 19th century romanticism, especially the aspect that substituted the sufferings of the artist for the anguish of the martyr. Simone was born into the French upper-middle class in 1909. Her father--a physician--and her mother had Jewish backgrounds, though they observed no religious ritual or custom. The child never regarded herself as a Jew. Later she rejected the God of the Old Testament as the sanctioner of cruelty and declared, instead, that her tradition was Christian, French and Hellenic. She also regretted having been born female. Her style of dress was the antichic of radical intellectuals of the '20s and '30s--drab, flappy and mannish. Her biographer gives no indication that Weil ever had lovers of either sex. Her single vice was cigarettes, and she suffered throughout her life from severe headaches. Red Virgin. Biographer Petrement tightly knits the facts of Weil's life with the development of her thought. While still a philosophy student, Weil became convinced that evil lay exclusively in a failure of the will. She amended Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" to "I can, therefore I am." She refused to separate her psychological consciousness from her moral consciousness, and it followed that her words could not be divided from her acts. She became a teacher, but her ideas about justice found their most vital expression outside the classroom. After school, she threw herself into the trade union movement, believing with the Marxists that social revolution must come through the efforts of the working class.

Those who derided Weil as "The Red Virgin" were off the mark. She distrusted all forms of political organization, and shrewdly saw that Marxism was not superior politics but inferior religion. As a writer of rigorously reasoned essays, she stripped rhetoric down to cold realities. Most of her opinions were out of fashion with the European liberals of her generation. Like the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, she early on proclaimed the naked truth that there was not a sou's worth of difference between Stalin and Hitler.

The brutal bureaucratization in the Soviet Union and the congealing madness in Germany gave Weil a grim view of the future. She steadily turned from politics to religion and the belief that a sense of human misery was a precondition of love and social justice. In 1934 she took a leave from her teaching post to work in a factory. Weil was a sorry candidate for the working class. Awkward and weakened by migraines and bad diet, she struggled to meet her production quotas. The machines tore and punctured her hands, but the physical stigmata of the industrial age were not as painful as having her mind and body rhythms processed by the production line. In 1936 she joined a Loyalist brigade to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. But before she could share the pain of combat she clumsily stepped into a pot of boiling cooking oil and had to leave the front with severe burns. Most Durable. Weil's flesh healed but her spirit continued to fester. She eagerly embraced the moral and ascetic principles of Roman Catholicism but refused to be baptized. She would not give up her idea of an impersonal God who had abandoned the world. Besides, she said, baptism would cut her off from the sufferings of nonbelievers. World War II cut her off from France. She traveled with her parents to New York and then recrossed the Atlantic to London, where she vainly tried to organize nurses to risk their lives attending the wounded where they had fallen. Instead, the Free French delegation in England found her a job writing articles on politics and culture. The life that Weil could not sacrifice at the front she exhausted at her typewriter, composing dozens of pieces and her book The Need for Roots. Her immaculate philosophical conceptions and her stubborn refusal to render unto Caesar, God or even the nutritive needs of her own body seem unworldly. Yet her writings show that she was among the most pungent and durable aphorists of her generation. On the politics of oil, for example, she wrote: "What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict." There is also her haunting comment on personal commitment: "Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it--except in the case of the very purest, and they are rare. For the idea of a cause doesn't supply the necessary energy for serving it." What then spoiled Simone Weil's own appetite for life? Perhaps the answer depends on whether one believes she belongs on the cross or the couch. In either case it would not be the complete answer. As her faithful biographer demonstrates with anecdote and analysis, Weil's mind was too restless, turbulent, obstinate and strong to fit convenient categories. If she resembles anyone in her purity, dedication and pride, it is Kafka's Hunger Artist, the man who refused to eat not only because denial was his nature but because he could not find anything in this world that he wanted to eat. R.Z. Sheppard

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