A Brief Note on Simone Weil

Simone Weil, the Jewish writer, mystic, and activist who converted to Catholicism and starved to death at the age of 33 by insisting she eat no more than the rations allotted to her countryman in Occupied France, is one of those polarizing figures who attract almost equal degrees of cult-like devotion and awe on the one hand, and barbed accusations of fuzzy-headed idealism and anti-Semitism on the other.

T.S. Eliot gave her a strong, if somewhat guarded, endorsement, noting that “a potential saint can be a very difficult person: I suspect that Simone Weil could be at times insupportable.” But he also thought her possessed of “a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” Leslie Fiedler, Robert Coles, and Francine du Plessix Gray, among others, have been drawn to her work, while Albert Camus, perhaps moved by her efforts with De Gaulle for the French Resistance, called her "the only great spirit of our times.”

Among her detractors, the non-nonsense Kenneth Rexroth disparaged the political program advanced in The Need for Roots as “egregious nonsense,” accused her of a “sick kind of agonized frivolity,” and pointedly wondered if “she was ever aware of the smell of her own armpits.”

Susan Sontag, in a somewhat similar vein, held her up as the exemplar of “an age that only believes in the reality of sickness,” finding in her “fanatical asceticism … and contempt for pleasure” a morbid and hysterical spiritual imagination. “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her,” she wrote. Yet she found something to admire in Weil all the same: “in the respect we pay to such lives we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.”

That sense of mystery which Weil both projected and inhabited has compelled several prominent American women poets to write about her work. Stephanie Strickland’s Red Virgin is a sensitively rendered suite of lyrics that incorporate substantial details from her life to give us a vivid sense of her difficult and thorny personality and the cost of her struggle to articulate her astringent, uncompromising philosophy. More recently Fanny Howe has written movingly about Weil’s life and work in prose poem pieces like “Doubt” (from Gone) and “Love and Work” from The Wedding Dress.

Howe acknowledges Weil’s intransigence, her fierce, even quixotic, commitment to an austerity that bordered on annihilation. What draws Howe to Weil – what draws anyone who has found sustenance in her work – is her willingness to risk, her gnostic abandonment to abjection, an absolutist faith in negative theology, a kind of totality that opened an abyss Sontag was rightly frightened to gaze into. So would anyone desirous of a normal, i.e. more repressed, life. Sontag was writing at the height of the neo-Freudian moment in America, when so much of the intellectual discourse was concerned with fomenting models of healthy interiority and combating the perceived plague of postwar neurosis. Weil’s extremism was simply too much for her. It’s too much for most people. But for some, it offers a way out – which is to say a way further in.