The Factory of Genius

Simone Weil
by Francine du Plessix Gray

Francine du Plessix Gray's biography of the Marquis de Sade, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a "boldly imaginative retelling" of his life and garnered the critically acclaimed author a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four prematurely after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foresaw many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence philosophy today. Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. In this thoughtful and compelling biography, du Plessix Gray illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience of readers.

Chapter 1

Growing up in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century were two contented children from whose household all toys and dolls had been categorically banned. It had been their mother's intent to nurture their intellectual skills, and the gambit had obviously worked. The older child, Andrè Weil, born in 1906, was solving the most advanced mathematical problems by the time he was nine; by the age of twelve he had taught himself classical Greek and Sanskrit and become an accomplished violinist. His sister, Simone, three years his junior, a strikingly beautiful girl with dark, limpid eyes, was reading the evening paper aloud to her family when she was five, and would master Greek and several modern languages in her early teens. The siblings often communicated with each other in spontaneously rhymed couplets, or in ancient Greek. When reciting scenes from Corneille or Racine they corrected each other with a slap in the face when one of them made a mistake or missed a beat. Theirs was a hermetic, rarified world-the young Weils' conversations, though never meant to exclude anyone, were so laced with literary and philosophical allusions that they were barely accessible to outsiders. Who could have guessed, for instance, that Simone's recitation of the lament for Hippolyte from Racine's Phèdre was meant to inform her brother that she had completed her Latin composition and was ready to study Aeschylus with him as soon as he was finished with his differential calculus?

The Weils' saga begins, as so many do, with the myth of the perfectly happy family. The uncommon brilliance and talents of their son and daughter may have been the crowning glory of the Weils' cosseted lives, but it was hardly the only one. Dr. Bernard Weil's practice as an internist had thrived ever since he had opened it. His wife, Selma, was a dynamic woman who radiated intelligence and joie de vivre, and their mutual devotion was legendary. As for the early flowering of the Weil children's genius (how could one have wished for more amazing children?), Mme Weil was almost totally responsible. Dr. Weil-kind, loving, and thoroughly enlightened, but taciturn and easily overwhelmed by his forceful spouse-was far too busy with his medical practice, and let his wife make the major decisions concerning their children's education. Selma, also known in the family as "Mime," had much desired, in her youth, to become a doctor. Her father having forbidden her, for the usual patriarchal reasons, to go to medical school, she seemed to have rechanneled her vast energies and ambitions into her children's success. Because few educators were skilled enough, in her judgment, to stand up to her son's and daughter's formidable gifts, within a span of five years Simone and Andrè would attend more than a half-dozen schools and be instructed by scores of private tutors. One might well say that the dominating Selma Weil was a genius factory of sorts, masterminding every move in her children's intellectual training, tapping every available educational resource to assure the fulfillment of their talents.

Mme Weil was as scrupulous about her children's physical well-being as she was about their education. A phobic dread of microbes ruled her household. The Weils were close friends of the eminent Russian-born microbiologist Elie Metchnikoff, a director of the Pasteur Institute, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his pioneering research on infectious diseases. Having picked up from the scientist, as Andrè Weil later wrote, "a dread of germs which [Simone] would carry to an extreme," Mme Weil ruled that her children should not be kissed by anyone outside the immediate family. When she took her son and daughter onto a Paris bus she had them sit on the top deck so as to minimize any chance of infection. Compulsive hand-washing was another habit she imposed on her children. At mealtimes, if Andrè and Simone needed to open a door after having washed their hands, they had to shove it open with an elbow. These phobias about food and germs would strongly affect Simone's psychic makeup. The word dégoutant, "disgusting," seems to have been frequently used by the Weils, and from the time she could talk she often said, "I am disgusting." By the time she was four she disliked being kissed, even by her parents, and for the rest of her life she displayed repulsion for most forms of physical contact. When she was five, a friend of her parents, a doctor, was so touched by her beauty that he leaned down to kiss her hand. Simone burst into tears and cried, "Water, water! I want to wash!!"

Simone Adolphine Weil was born on February 3, 1909, in her parents' apartment on the Rue de Strasbourg, just south of the Gare de l'Est (since destroyed, the street was rebuilt as the Rue de Metz). When she was five her family moved to a larger flat on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Her mother, née Salomea Reinherz (she had shortened her first name to "Selma"), came from a wealthy family of Jewish businessmen who had prospered in the import-export trade in many countries. Selma spent her first few years in Russia, which her parents left in the wake of the 1880s pogroms to move to Belgium. Hers was the more artistic side of the family. Her father wrote poetry in Hebrew, and her mother, who would live with the Weils until her death, was a gifted pianist. As for Dr. Bernard Weil, who was addressed by his children as "Biri," he came from a family of Jewish merchants that had been settled for generations in Strasbourg. His politics were mildly left of center, and he was an extreme secularist. He disliked talking about his Jewishness. This reluctance must have had its share of complexities, for his mother, who lived on in Paris into the 1930s, remained very pious. She kept a kosher kitchen and proclaimed that she would rather see her granddaughter die than marry a Gentile. When visiting her son's family, she would follow her daughter-in-law, Selma, into the kitchen and scold her for cooking foods that were contrary to Jewish dietary laws.

In this ritualistically hygienic family, Simone, who had been born a month premature, spent a very sickly infancy and childhood. When the baby was six months old, her mother continued to breast-feed her while recovering from an emergency appendectomy. Simone began to lose a great deal of weight and grew very ill. When she was eleven months old Mme Weil was persuaded to wean her, but Simone, in an early struggle of conflicting wills, refused to eat from a spoon. She became so thin that several doctors gave her up for lost; until the age of two she did not grow in height or weight, and had to be fed mush from bottles into which increasingly large holes were pierced. Reflecting, as an adult, on these early crises (which might have played a role in the severe eating problems she developed in adolescence), Simone sometimes speculated that she had been "poisoned" in infancy by her mother's milk: "C'est pourquoi je suis tellement ratée," she'd say, "That's why I'm such a failure."

Simone continued to be delicate throughout her childhood. At the age of three she took months to recover from her own appendectomy, which so traumatized her that for many years the sight of the Eiffel Tower, which she and her mother had had to pass on the way to the hospital, made her cry. Whenever a stranger came to visit her family, she even left the room in fear that he was a doctor. Her mother grew all the more obsessive about her daughter's health, pampering and cosseting the hypersensitive, moody child. "She is indomitable, impossible to control, with an undescribable stubbornness that neither her father nor I can make a dent in," she wrote a friend when her "Simonette" was five. "I certainly have spoiled her too much ... .I can't help but fondle and kiss her much more than I should."

Although they never rebelled overtly against their coddling parents, the young Weils clearly became very gifted at manipulating them. As they grew older they occasionally derided their exceptionally protected childhoods. One of their favorite pranks was to get on the bus without their socks on a cold winter day and go through their "neglected children" routine. Teeth chattering, shaking with mock shivers, they announced to concerned passengers that their neglectful parents did not even buy them any socks. ("You wretch!" a woman once shouted accusingly at Mme Weil.) Another good game was to go knocking at strangers' doors to beg for food, pleading that their parents were letting them "die of hunger" (they especially asked for sweets, which were forbidden in the Weils' home). On hearing of such jests Dr. and Mme Weil were overcome with shame and indignation, and their offspring continued to act out their psychodramas all the more gleefully.

The advent of World War I, which put to rest the complacent myth of progress that had prevailed for over a century among Europe's liberal bourgeoisie, was the first pall cast on the young Weils' life. It was the critical event that thrust Simone out of the smug cocoon of her affluent childhood and gave her an inkling of what would become a central theme of her work-suffering or "affliction." The principal impact of the war on her own family was constant relocation. Mme Weil and her children followed Dr. Weil, who had been drafted into the army medical corps, to the towns of Neufchâtel, Mayenne, Laval, Chartres, renting spacious houses in each community to be close to his army quarters. It was during these war years that Simone's precocious political consciousness and her bent for self-sacrifice first became pronounced (at the age of three she had already turned down a wealthy relative's gift of a jeweled ring on the grounds that she "disliked luxury.") In 1916, when she was six years old, she decided that she wished to go without sugar because "the poor soldiers at the front" did not have any. That same year she adopted a "godson" at the front, a French custom during World War I, whereby families signed up to send food and clothing to underprivileged soldiers. By gathering and selling bundles of wood, Simone earned her own money to buy provisions for "her soldier." He came in 1917 to spend a leave with the Weils. Simone grew immensely fond of him. He died in action the following year, and she grieved greatly over this loss.

By the age of ten the intense little girl with the mass of tangled black hair, who already read several newspapers a day, began to display her sensitivity to issues of justice and her sense of history. In 1919, at the Great War's end, she was appalled by the manner in which the Treaty of Versailles "humiliated the defeated enemy." A few years later she would write to a friend, "I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted upon her," noting that the Versailles Treaty cured her once and for all of any "naïve patriotism." A superdiligent student who displayed a particular fascination with world events, she seems to have followed the course of the Russian Revolution fairly closely and talked about it in school, for, upon being accused by a classmate that year of being a Communist, she defiantly replied: "Not at all; I am a Bolshevik." Issues of domestic justice were equally urgent. During a summer vacation, Simone, increasingly uncomfortable with the sense that she belonged to a very privileged elite, assembled the bellhops, chambermaids, desk clerks, and porters at the hotel where her family was staying, chided them that they worked too hard, and urged them to form a trade union.

From Simone Wiel (Penguin Lives) by Francis du Plessix Gray. © 2001, Viking, used by permission.

About the Author

Francine du Plessix Gray is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of numerous essays and books, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She lives with her husband, the painter Cleve Gray.