Simone Weil - Waiting on God

Interest in the life and writings of Simone Weil has gone on steadily increasing since her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four. At the time of her death her only published work consisted of a few articles in obscure periodicals and, apart from some leftist trade unionists and Gaullists she worked with at their war-time headquarters in London, she was unknown outside the circle of her friends and family. From one of her letters to Fr Perrin, the Dominican priest who became her friend and counsellor in 1942 when she was waiting in Marseilles for a boat to take her and her parents to America, it is apparent that this obscurity troubled her; she writes to him that if no one consents to take any notice of the thoughts which, though I cannot explain why, have settled in so inadequate a being as myself, they will be buried with me. There follows a strong hint that Fr Perrin himself should act as her literary executor; at the same time, characteristically, she felt bound to make it clear to him that if he undertook this responsibility, he must not suppose that he would thereby be serving his Church, which, she explains at some length, she has no intention, or indeed possibility, of joining, except perhaps on her deathbed.

As things turned out, she and Fr Perrin were never to see one another again, but he scrupulously preserved all her writings that came into his possession, and in due course made them available for publication, thus performing a signal service to Simones memory, as well as to all seekers after truth, to allas she likes to call themfriends of God. The Perrin papers, all included in this volume, are themselves of inestimable value, constituting, as they do, far the most interesting and revealing of her writings about herself, and it is difficult to believe that in any circumstances they would have been lost to posterity. Her fear that they might disappear without trace recalls how Pascals sister, Gilberte, in her charming memoir of her brother, bewailed the fact that, owing to his early death, his life work, his great apologia for the Christian faith, was never to be realized, since only a confused pile of scribbled notes relating to it were found among his papers. These notes were the Penses, which for three centuries now have edified and delighted successive generations of readers precisely because they are so succinct, spontaneous and luminous. It is quite possible that, had Pascal lived to work them up into a long, considered thesis, the impact might have been much less.

Simones life story is brief and rather tragiceven at times tragi-comic. Essentially, she was a characteristic product of a time like ours, in which the term displaced person has been devised as a bleak bureaucratic version of the Biblical phrase, a stranger in a strange landa description of what all mystics at all times have felt themselves to be. The essential facts are contained in Jacques Cabouds Simone Weil, A Fellowship in Love, and, in greater detail, in her friend Simone Petrements full-length biography, recently published in English. In doing the commentary for Vernon Sproxtons BBC television programme on Simone Weil, Pilgrim of the Absolute, I had occasion to visit the Weil familys apartment on the Rue Auguste Comte overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, kept still very much as it was when Simone lived there. I also had the great pleasure of making the acquaintance of Simones brother Andr, now a mathematician of international reputation at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He gave me a vivid account of his and Simones very happy childhood, in the process exploding a number of mythical anecdotes; for instance, one to the effect that during the First World War he and Simone had volunteered to forego their allowance of sweets to contribute towards sending food parcels to a soldier at the Front. Nothing of the sort happened, he insists. In my experience, pretty well all anecdotes are mythical or apocryphal. Another example in Simones case is the often-repeated anecdote that she and Simone de Beauvoir passed first and second into the cole Normale Suprieure. Actually, Simone de Beauvoir never attended the cole Normale; Jacques Soustelle who was a fellow-student there with Simone Weil, told me this, and even showed me a list of students in his and Simone Weils time, with no Simone de Beauvoir among them. The only encounter in the flesh between the two Simones was by chance, in a lift, at which neither uttered.