Readings: Simone Weil - Conclusion

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Below is the concluding installment of Paul West's biographical sketch of Simone Weil from his book, Portable People:

What we make of her—this Jew, born a stoic and raised an agnostic, who gravitated to the godhead by using her magnificent brain to construct what George Herbert in her favorite stanza calls “a full consent”—depends on how far skepticism erodes our tolerance of experiences so private they cannot be appraised at all. Whereas the “system” of Teilhard de Chardin seems an inane wish fulfillment garbed as optimism, Simone Weil’s embraces the whole pain of being—not just of bureaucracy (it “always betrays”), of war (never a means of liberation), humiliation (the worker enslaved to a mass-producing machine), and force (“It makes a man a thing”), but of man’s total biological, chemical, and metaphysical state. She seems a Cleopatra, hugging the asp. Her best books (Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Need for Roots) constantly shock us with their sustained oblique obviousness.

She could not always be reached. She was too busy reconciling poles expressed in these two statements:

We wish to uphold not the collectivity but the individual as the supreme value.

[We} owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.

And when she was not doing that she was pursuing her own ascêsis, asking to become as defective “as an old man in his dotage” and, like Samuel Beckett, linking up with “the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” When she died, “Alain” would not believe it. “It’s not true,” he said, “surely she will come back!” Simone Weil herself said: “If there is something in afterlife, I shall come back. If I don’t come back, it will mean that there is nothing.” Which, really, is the endgame to beat all.

Beside her spirituality--what I consider to be her sainthood, upon which West hardly touches in his sketch--what is most attractive to me about Simone Weil is hinted at in the two statements that West quotes above. Simone Weil, in addition to walking the talk, was radically conservative where conservatism most elevates the human spirit; and she was unrelentingly progressive where brother-love demanded that kind of orientation to real-life situations. Persons about whom that can be said are few and far between.
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Readings: Simone Weil - Part VI

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Below is the penultimate installment of Paul West's biographical sketch of Simone Weil from his book, Portable People:

What else can we do, however uneasy or inferior we feel, but admire her passionate, sometimes maladroit devotion to the working class, her intense and unsectarian religious zeal, her capacity for self-denial, her attempt to convert pain into something wholly fruitful, her brilliant disruptive mind and painstakingly trenchant prose, her audacity in teaching the young, her almost peasant simplicity in aphorism, her refusal to defer to evil wherever she found it, her will, her guts, her crabbed truthfulness? We admire, but with a hunch that much of it amounts to a frenetic displacement of womanhood. Some thing crackpot emerges alongside what is her evident genius and her almost pernicious goodness.

Not that we don’t respect the person—whether writer, say, or doctor—who uses the self as raw material. But Simone Weil, ostensibly on the side of life to the extent of justifying all of it, was really on the side of death; and her achievement, such as it is, implies the abandonment of the last, inalienable human privilege: the privilege of saying, “I loathe such and such a part of being human—say the small child with cancer of the clitoris, the child born deformed, the ugly and hardly quellable agony in which many people die, the obvious lack of divine justice—and I will not, much as it might be comfortable to be able to do it, involve myself in schoolmen’s casuistries just to praise a pattern I did not invent.”

She was on the side of death, yes--in the sense that only by submitting to death, in humble obedience to Necessity, do we take part in the ultimate defeat of death by Love. West has trouble throughout with pattern recognition. My admiration is not nearly so conditional as is that of Mr. West.
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Readings: Simone Weil - Part V

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Below, Part V of Paul West's sketch of Simone Weil from Portable People:

She returns to Europe, playing volleyball on the way over and even dressing up on one occasion as a ghost. Finally she discovers a haven, during the thick of the air raids, at 31 Portland Road, London, and lives on black coffee; coughs all the time; refuses to look after herself or be looked after; strews papers all over her room; commends the good humor of the British, the pubs, the police system; wanders regularly into Hyde Park; and even elects to sleep out in the rain on the grounds of a convent. She tried to learn to drive; she deliberately upsets herself and Simone Deitz from their boat into the Serpentine. She sets herself a Benjamin Franklin-Jay Gatsby type of regimen: “avoid all loss of time…sleep on the floor or on a table in order to limit the hours of sleep to four or five…” Desperately eager to be parachuted into France, she occupies herself with the English metaphysical poets, her work for the Free French Ministry of the Interior, and the composition of The Need for Roots. At last, too weak to lift a fork, and refusing a pneumothorax as well as deciding against baptism, she is moved from the Middlesex Hospital to Ashford. The death certificate said, “Cardiac failure due to myocardial degeneration of the heart muscles due to starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis. The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.” Perhaps, though, her mind’s disturbance balanced for the first time. The certificate of burial reads, “Conducted own service—Catholic—French Refugee—Depth: 6 feet.”

West over-simplifies this part of it. The introduction to The Need for Roots, which he barely mentions, is written by T.S. Eliot, of all people. It is a significant, radical, and somewhat paradoxical, work concerned with how better to structure Western Civilization.
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Readings: Simone Weil - Part IV

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Below is Part IV of Paul West's sketch of Simone Weil from Portable People:
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Among action shots these are the best: Simone Weil picking plums in the country and getting stranded on a high wall; hiding herself and her cigarette behind a Russian newspaper at staff meetings in school; on paydays at the Renault works treating herself to a package of cigarettes and some stewed fruit; digging potatoes for ten hours a day; insisting on carrying bundles of thistles in the wheat fields; helping (?) Marcel Lecarpentier on this thirty-foot, eight-ton fishing boat; exclaiming over the photo of some brawny tough, “That my kind of man!”; giving away so much of her schoolteacher’s salary that she went a whole winter without heat; burning herself while welding; asking a peasant if she might drive his plough and at once overturning it; scalding herself with oil while cooking for the CNT in Spain; aiming her rifle at an airplane that dropped a small bomb; neglecting to wash hands before milking cows; refusing a cream cheese because Indochinese children were starving; actually becoming a member of a résistance group that was a German trap; and, later, on her way to New York by way of Morocco, handing Gustave Thibon her notebooks on the station platform in Marseilles with a kind of absent-minded abruptness; thanking Father Perrin, her spiritual mentor, for never humiliating her; wandering in Harlem and attending a Baptist church there every Sunday (I’m the only white person in the church”); studying folklore and quantum theory at the New York Public Library; asking Simone Deitz, who acceded, “Would you like to be my friend?”

In this, we begin to get a hint of those aspects of Simone Weil's personal make-up which attracted me to her; for instance, her courage of conviction.
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Readings: Simone Weil - Part III

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Below is the third installment of Paul West's biographical sketch of Simone Weil, from Portable People:

The photographs mutely record the decline from her second year, when she was chubby-cheeked, with curly black hair the color of her almond-shaped eyes—a pensive, cute doll—to thirty-four, when she starved herself to death in order to share the sufferings of the French. Her face in 1936 (at twenty-seven) is handsome, firm, full-mouthed and rather appealing; and in the uniform of Confederación Nacional del Trabajo she looks like an Arab youth dressed up for a baggy-trousered prank. But five years later she has an expression of intent vacuity. She has become the headmistress type, owl-eyed through excessive perusal, her expression an odd blend of hennish timidity and impatient pity. And there is a general look of—well, dryness. A sad little gallery of pictures indeed.

Astute and tomboyish, she chain-smoked and even rolled her own cigarettes. Because she did this carelessly she often had shreds of tobacco in her mouth. She wore large horn-rimmed spectacles for myopia, walked awkwardly in a forward lean, preferred clothes of masculine cut and low-heeled shoes. She “had a sharp, restless glance” and spoke in a staccato monotone, aspirating almost all her h’s. She played women’s rugby and would return from the fray covered with mud and bruises; and it was on her return from a game in 1930 that she had by far the worst attack, up to then, of her migraines (later attributed to sinusitis).

To this point, we have yet to discover how this sketch, which has dwelt here on her physical ungainliness, made Simone Weil so attractive to me that after reading it I went straight to the library to find books about her.
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Readings: Simone Weil - Part II

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What follows is the second installment of Paul West's biographical sketch of Simone Weil from Portable People:

Such an odd combination of masochism and affabulation (fantasticating a mystical experience) is bound to provoke even in the most open minded a few harsh misgivings about frustrated spinsters, algolagnia, and hatred of the flesh. And it is possible to read Simone Weil’s account of Christ in person (“Sometimes we stretched out on the floor of the mansarde and the softness of the sun came down upon me”) in almost the same way as we would one of Moravia’s studies in adolescent eroticism. Irreverent as it may be to say it, she had a crush on Jesus. Yet, of course, as Gustave Thibon and others noted, she winced away from physical embrace—at least until the day she forced herself to declare, with rather dotty braggadocio, “I like being kissed by men with moustaches. It stings!” Remove the sting and the kiss is nothing for Simone Weil. After she had told friends about actually being kissed by a coal trimmer in Barcelona, she burst into tears when one of them asked if the man was drunk. This tireless intelligence, who beat Simone de Beauvoir into second place in the Ecole Normale entrance examination, belonged to her own version of the human condition. Frustrated, ill at ease as a woman and disconsolate at being human, she was reassured only by extra suffering and convinced only by what she thought God had told her. It is no wonder she became a kind of amateur saint and a successful suicide.

It is noted that West goes out of his way to present her as grotesque here. Still, he finds her fascinating enough to contemplate. In my experience, most people are either too conventional, or too orthodox, to deal with thinking about Simone Weil at all.
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Readings: Lost and Found

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Off from work today, resting a bit of a bad back, I was afforded ample time to finally finish Roberto Bolaño’s massive posthumous novel, 2666. When I carried the box containing its three volumes into the family room to put it away on a shelf, I spotted on a shelf above it, misplaced, a book I have been looking for off and on since we moved to this house—Portable People by Paul West.

I don’t remember where I acquired the book. I am quite sure that I bought it because of having previously read West’s novel, The Rat Man of Paris. But Portable People, while highly imaginative, is not exactly fiction. It is, in fact, a rather strange little book. It is a small paperback—5 ½ “ x 6 ½”—and what it contains are very brief biographical sketches—ranging in length from a single paragraph to several pages—of approximately 85 people, each of which is accompanied by a pen and ink sketch of the subject by somebody named Joe Servello.

There is no apparent rhyme or reason to the persons chosen for inclusion. A random sample of those included would list: Samuel Pepys, Helen Keller, Jack the Ripper, George Gershwin, Carl Sagan, Sir Edward Elgar, Martin Bormann, Yvonne Goolagong (remember her?), Pelé, and William Empson (about whom I’ve recently been posting below). Quite a mix.

But of primary importance to me—and the reason why I am so happy to have located this misplaced book—is that it is the primary source for my knowledge of, and the genesis of my interest in, Simone Weil. It was the biographical sketch in this weird little book that set me to acquiring books by and about Simone Weil—a collection which now takes up about two feet of shelf space and a study which has spanned nearly two decades.

The Servello drawing of Simone Weil is not a good likeness, and the biographical sketch is not in any way flattering. Nonetheless, my interest was seriously piqued. Such is the importance of this little biographical sketch to me, that I intend, over the next few days, to post the entire thing here. If I post anything else during this period, it will be in addition to the next installment of Simone Weil. So, without further ado, Simone Weil – Part I:

Dogs bark at cripples and ghosts and in some ways Simone Weil was both. Not content with the pain she had from recurrent migraines, she sought out for herself starvation and heavy manual labor (both industrial and agricultural); she prayed for extra pain and even to become a total paralytic. One of the least earthly of women, she increasingly fixed her attention—that sapping, inductive, inventive field of force—on God and death, managing to experience epiphanies (“Christ came down, and He took me”) and even to make death do her bidding in the Ashford Sanatorium in Kent in 1944.

End of Part I.
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