Simone Weil
Francine du Plessix Gray Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 246pp, £14.99
ISBN 0297646273
The blurb of this biography claims that Simone Weil was "one of the 20th century's most unusual women whose passionate beliefs profoundly shaped modern French and English thought". I have tended to see her the other way round, as an exemplar of the left-wing and religious ideologies that the last century threw up - as marked by these profoundly, but as an intellectual who was more of an astonishing, eccentric individual than a driving inspiration to philosophers. Presumably that is a sign of my ignorance. Perhaps of my sexism, too. After all, Simone de Beauvoir, whose posthumous reputation took a nosedive in France, has had to be rescued by Toril Moi as the radical and original thinker she undoubtedly was. Perhaps du Plessix Gray is performing the same service for Weil. Certainly, although this book is deliberately and frustratingly short, it does sketch an intriguing picture of this complex and contradictory woman.
Weil, like de Beauvoir, excelled at philosophy from an early age. She wanted to change the world, however, rather than describe it; she became involved in practical politics and tried to gain direct experience of workers' lives. When she met de Beauvoir, the two women disagreed over the respective claims of existentialism and Marxism. Weil does not seem to have pursued an analysis that concerned itself with the particular struggles of women. Where de Beauvoir later courageously and unfashionably developed a feminist analysis of why and how women were thought of as the second sex by philosophers and politicians alike, Weil's strategy was to deny the problem, by eschewing feminine dress and behaviour and ignoring the force of sexuality in her life. Nowadays, we can think of femininity itself as a form of disguise or masquerade: Weil repudiated those carnavalesque meanings by looking as grubby and shabby as she could. Also by starving herself to boyishness. She was anorexic, and died of this.
Radical thought cannot, and must not, be simplistically reduced to psychopathology, but it is easy to see where the pressures in Weil's life began, and how they inspired her lifelong identification with those who suffer materially, physically and spiritually. Her parents banned all toys and dolls, hothoused their son and daughter in the pursuit of genius. They seem simultaneously to have distrusted and discouraged expressions of strong feeling. As a result, Simone learned to value solely the cerebral: to chat to her brother in Greek and to recite whole scenes from Racine and Corneille.
Denied the chance to interact with the world through her imagination, in play, she was deprived of metaphor. Instead, she acted out dramas through her body. A child who cannot express wants, fears and rages through his or her words and play falls back on the secret world of physical signs. Only their author can decode them. Anorexics are frequently enraging because of their stubborn self-sufficiency, their difficulties with accepting presents. By refusing their gifts of food, Simone puzzled the peasant and working-class people she thought to befriend. As a young graduate, working near Bourges, she offended her proteges, a farmer family called Belleville: "Not only did she never change her clothes, they complained, but she failed to wash her hands before milking the cows, and when they offered her a fine cream cheese she pushed it away, saying that the Indochinese were hungry. 'The poor young girl,' they commented. 'Too much study has driven her out of her wits.'"
At the same time, her love and compassion for others existed indubitably on the spiritual plane, and endeared her to her students and colleagues. For some, she was a kind of lay saint, while for others, she was a moral coward who betrayed her Judaism when she converted to Christianity. Perhaps the cruelties and deprivations of her childhood made her reject her parents' religion as well as their bourgeoise culture.
She gradually stripped herself of isms, becoming disillusioned in turn with Marxism, revolutionary syndicalism, trade unionism, Spanish Republicanism. Du Plessix Gray has no choice but to gallop through this journey. Weil's agile and complex mind dived into politics, spirituality, philosophy, history, ethics, poetics and psychology. She wrote and published copiously. Her biographer has tried to put all these works in context by stressing the socio-historical conditions of France between the two world wars. She is sympathetic to Weil's quest for aesthetic purity and martyrdom, linking them to her striking insights into domination and oppression.
Weil died in exile in England. Struck down by tuberculosis, which was greatly exacerbated by her anorexia, she ended her life at Ashford in Kent. Some of her last and saddest journal entries concerned sumptuous memories and fantasies to do with food.
Michele Roberts's latest book is Playing Sardines (Virago, £9.99). She is a 2001 Booker Prize judge
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