Tough Enough

Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil

Deborah Nelson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226457949
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories. Yet their work evinces an affinity of style and philosophical viewpoint that derives from a shared attitude toward suffering. What Mary McCarthy called a "cold eye" was not merely a personal aversion to displays of emotion: it was an unsentimental mode of attention that dictated both ethical positions and aesthetic approaches. Tough Enough traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain. Their writing and art reveal an adamant belief that the hurts of the world must be treated concretely, directly, and realistically, without recourse to either melodrama or callousness. As Deborah Nelson shows, this stance offers an important counter-tradition to the familiarpostwar poles of emotional expressivity on the one hand and cool irony on the other. Ultimately, in its insistence on facing reality without consolation or compensation, this austere "school of the unsentimental" offers new ways to approach suffering in both its spectacular forms and all of its ordinariness.

1

Simone Weil: Thinking Tragically in the Age of Trauma

I should not love my suffering because it is useful;

I should love my suffering because it is.

SIMONE WEIL, Gravity and Grace

The Mysterious Appeal of Simone Weil

In 1951 and 1952 three books by a French woman—a writer, teacher, philosopher, labor activist, and Jew turned Christian mystic—were translated into English. Obscure to the English-speaking world and only recently well known in France, Simone Weil had died at thirty-four in London of tuberculosis and self-starvation, having published around fifty essays in small leftist and factory journals over the eleven years preceding her death in 1943.1 Several years before this more dramatic and well-publicized arrival in the United States, Weil’s work had been translated for the first time into English by then little-known novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. In the summer of 1945, as US forces dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, McCarthy brought her typewriter to the beach on Cape Cod to work on her translation of Weil’s “The Iliad, a Poem of Force,” a meditation on violence and its inexorable logic of inclusion: everyone, conqueror and conquered, is its victim, alternately and simultaneously. The essay, which was published in the little magazine politics, remains in print in several editions today.2 McCarthy would later recall that her prolonged encounter with Weil’s essay marked the end of her “thinking in opposites.” Dwight Macdonald, the editor of politics, once remarked that “The Iliad, a Poem of Force” was the best thing the magazine had ever published.3

Weil might have been unknown to a mainstream audience of readers before her death, but she enjoyed an enthusiastic, if coterie, readership among European leftists, many of whom fled to the United States during the war. Her leap from obscurity to renown could hardly have been predicted, but the admiration she inspired among readers of the French literary magazine Les cahiers du Sud certainly makes sense of her appeal to US intellectuals, though it in no way forecasts the surprising scope of her impact nor its international, aesthetic, and political range. Elizabeth Hardwick, reflecting on Simone Pétrement’s biography of Weil published in the early 1970s, noted the profound effect Weil had on Hardwick’s circle of friends, the so-called New York Intellectuals and Partisan Review crowd.4 Some have called Weil the “patron saint” of politics.5 The appreciation of what Hardwick calls her “spectacular and in many ways exemplary abnormality” was hardly confined to this group.6 A short list of those who counted her as an influence includes five winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (André Gide, T. S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Czesław Miłosz, and Seamus Heaney); philosophers Georges Bataille, Michel Serres, and Iris Murdoch; theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich; Catholic writers Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton; two popes (John XXIII and Paul VI); political activists and writers Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, and Adam Michnik; and poets of diverse styles, including George Oppen, Geoffrey Hill, Anne Carson, Stephanie Strickland, Fanny Howe, and Jorie Graham, several of whom (Carson, Strickland, and Graham) have written full-length books of poetry devoted to her.7

Although all Weil’s work would appear in print over the next forty years, these first books, like the Iliad essay, derived from Weil’s postconversion writing. Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace, published by La Colombe and Plon respectively,8 were both assembled and edited by Catholic friends who admired her saintliness. Their appearance and that of her Need for Roots, published under the Gallimard imprint and in the series Espoir, represented the editorial decision of her literary executor, Albert Camus, whose moral stature and literary fame were at their peak in the early 1950s.9 Weil had quickly won an impassioned following in France, and her translation into English generated a similar response in the United States. The nature of these three works does not immediately suggest their potential for wide demand, however. Though Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, a spiritual autobiography that culminated in his vow of silence and entrance into a Trappist monastery, claimed the number 3 spot on the nonfiction list of 1949, the list for 1952 contained a sampling more representative of the era: at number 1 was the Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, an adaptation of the King James Bible that critics and scholars derided;10 at number 2 was a memoir written by the wife of Rev. Peter Marshall, who rose from humble origins to become chaplain of the US Senate only to die at forty-six; at number 6, with a bullet, was Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, a religious self-help book that went on to sell twenty million copies. Waiting for God, by contrast, was a collection of letters and short essays written by Weil to her spiritual adviser, Father Perrin, on subjects like her refusal of baptism, the faculty of attention, and the love of God and affliction. Gravity and Grace was a selection from her notebooks of aphoristic, even gnomic entries on concepts key to her evolving theology. The Need for Roots, the last thing she wrote before her death, was commissioned by the Free French movement in London to provide a plan for the renewal of France after the war.

As David McLellan has argued, Weil was introduced to a broader public as a religious mystic, not a political radical, though she was both.11 While there is a different focus in the early and the late Weil (if one can say “late” about a writer who died at thirty-four), many of her most important ideas germinated in her experience as a laborer and activist on behalf of France’s factory workers.12 Working in factories outside Paris “gave [her] the mark of a slave,” as she says of herself and as all her biographers note, permanently changing her outlook on suffering and fueling her conversion. Her physical frailty and nearly incessant migraines, which made factory work all the more excruciating for her, contributed to her obsession with and clarity on the subject of suffering, but physical pain was only one component—and considered by her the least important—of the myriad forms of suffering to which she attended.

The turn in her later work toward suffering has been mostly taken up by her Christian explicators, no matter how eccentric her thoughts on the subject are to Christian doctrine. Readers interested in her politics have largely avoided this aspect of her work, leaving it untouched (and untouchable) as a symptom of psychological imbalance, her mystic Christianity, or her pessimism in the years following the Nazi occupation of France. The Christian accounts tend to think of Weil’s suffering and her sacrifice on behalf of others as evidence of her saintliness; the political accounts, while usually admiring, tend to set these aspects aside as evidence of her masochism. In other words, Weil’s embrace of and attention to suffering has been something not to explain but to explain away. Taking an agnostic view of her saintliness and her masochism, this chapter will examine Weil’s emphasis on suffering as her infusion of tragedy into both the religious and the political traditions in which she worked. I want to argue that it is not suffering per se, but the tragic view of suffering that scandalizes both Christianity and the leftist political movements in which Weil worked. The bifurcation of her reception over the last sixty years has essentially treated the two passions of Weil’s life—politics and religion—as separable, perhaps at times even opposed. Tragedy puts them back into a mutually illuminating dialogue. Weil’s signature and most scandalous essay, “L’amour de Dieu et le Malheur,” which has always been translated into English as “The Love of God and Affliction,” might also have been translated as the “The Love of God and of Tragedy.” Thinking about the love of tragedy synthesizes Weil’s peculiar theology and politics and elucidates her critique of secular modernity.

It’s worth speculating against her contemporary critics that it was not despite but because of Weil’s tragic outlook that she found an audience in the postwar United States and Europe in the early 1950s. If the publication of her religious writing fed the appetite whetted in both France and the United States by the religious revival of the postwar era, US reviewers were, nonetheless, unanimously baffled by her popularity. No one seemed able to imagine, especially given the religious climate of the time, why a writer who embraced suffering like Simone Weil should find any kind of popular readership. Thinking about Weil’s reception in the context of the religious revival of the late forties and early fifties provides some outline of what was both threatening and mystifying about her and her tragic outlook. Postwar American culture is thought by some historians to exhibit something like post-traumatic stress disorder.13 As one version of this story goes, Americans turned inward toward domesticity in its most conventional form, in what Elaine Tyler May persuasively describes as a bomb shelter mentality.14 The embrace of normalcy—often under coercively normalizing terms—was a post-traumatic effect, the outcome of decades of dislocation, deprivation, and loss during the depression of the 1930s and the mobilization of World War II. Accounts of the religious revival that followed World War II also detect the traumatized inward turn that explained domestic patterns of the fifties. Robert Wuthnow echoes May when describing the surge in church membership in the 1950s. Instead of the bomb shelter, Wuthnow calls the church a “fortress,” but he makes of it the same analogy in order to draw the same conclusions.15 Americans retreated into the fortress of institutional religion in which the house of worship offered the same virtues as the idealized fifties home—strong father (clergy), comforting mothers (welcoming congregations)—to keep at bay dangerous outsiders and protect themselves from a hostile and unfamiliar postwar world. The immediate postwar religious revival, it should be remembered, arose primarily within organized religion (as opposed to the revival of the sixties, which largely eschewed traditional worship for more syncretic and idiosyncratic forms of devotion). Buttressing this fortress was popular religious writing, which sold comforting images of the afterlife, uplifting stories of “positive thinking,” and bromides on the peace engendered by religious practice.

However, as Robert Ellwood suggests, the fifties religious revival was bifurcated into “highbrow” and “lowbrow” (or more accurately middlebrow) forms, with popular religion offering a more saccharine version of religious devotion than more scholarly theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, and, of course, Simone Weil. They, too, enjoyed large audiences of readers, though not the many millions of Norman Vincent Peale.16 The emphasis on personal happiness and success in mainstream religious culture was openly disdained by the leaders of this parallel religious revival.17 When Waiting for God was first published in English, Weil was immediately hailed by intellectuals, most importantly by literary critic Leslie Fiedler, as “our kind of saint”: “the Outsider . . . Saint in an age of alienation.” Encompassed in this “our” were “Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew, agnostic and devout,” and especially those who remained at the threshold of belief—the “unchurched.”18

Weil’s theology was perfectly unsuited to the times if we understand organized religion to offer consolation and comfort. Her personal austerity, her insistence on suffering and the limits of human agency, her embrace of affliction, her uncompromising vision of the obligation of justice, her refusal of compensation and consolation in any form, all remove her from the mainstream of religious thought. Fiedler marked her “Un-Americanness” in his essay on Weil in Commentary, which became the basis of his introduction to Waiting for God. Excerpted heavily in Time magazine and elsewhere in 1951, Fiedler’s essay suggested precisely why Weil would not find an appreciative audience in the United States: “This is a difficult doctrine in all times and places, and it is especially alien and abhorrent in present-day America where anguish is regarded as vaguely un-American, something to be grown out of, or analyzed away, even expunged by censorship; and where certainly we do not look to our churches to preach the uses of affliction. It is consolation, ‘peace of mind,’ ‘peace of soul,’ that our religions offer on the competitive market place.”19 Invariably, reviewers commented on the harshness of her vision, often contrasting it to the “stale smell of sweets” emanating from other religious writing of the day.20 In the New York Times, John Cogley observed that “the notion that religion holds the key to peace of mind . . . would have revolted her,”21 while Anne Fremantle noted that “there is nothing kind or comfortable about her encounters with God.”22 And yet, despite the warning labels that every review carried about Weil’s austerity and extremity, her work did find an audience. While public intellectuals believed that they understood the implications of Weil’s thought, they assumed that mainstream readers did not. This is in part good old-fashioned elitism and in part genuine puzzlement that popular audiences could accept Weil’s message or the form in which it was conveyed.

Unable to account for her appeal, reviewers turned to biography, a far-from-surprising impulse when it comes to women writers of the last century. Pointing to the moments when she demonstrated her radical empathy with some affective intensity, reviewers argued that it was her compassion and her life story that accounted for her “vogue” beyond the more limited circle of professional intellectuals. But this kind of sentimental identification would have been difficult to sustain upon even the briefest encounter with Weil’s work. The coldness of her style and the unwavering hardness of her theology do not nourish expectations of warmth and sympathy. Moreover, Weil’s relationship to suffering, sometimes in its most extreme forms, lies so far outside the conventions of sentiment and sympathy bequeathed by eighteenth-century moral philosophy and brought to life in the American sentimental tradition that contemporary readers, midcentury and now, would have found it utterly alien. Weil’s treatment of suffering is radical and strange to the extent that it systematically eradicates feeling—feelings for oneself or the suffering other—and replaces it with something impersonal, antisentimental, and self-negating.

Whether a reader met Weil for the first time in a mass-market vehicle like Time magazine or the New York Times Book Review, a little magazine like Commentary or the Partisan Review, or a Catholic journal like Commonweal or Catholic Worker, she would have been introduced first to Weil’s biography, second her style, and third her theology. All three seem to me crucial to understanding what Weil represents: the fact of her gender seen in the context of her style and her message; the particular aesthetic choices she made and the philosophy that grounded them; and the embrace of suffering that formed the foundation of her thought. Time’s weekly religion column of January 15, 1951, begins as follows: “By most standards, Simone Weil was an absurd and unattractive woman. Almost constantly ailing, painfully humorless and so intense she was either irritating or ridiculous, she agonized through a short life of 34 years and died in 1943 in a gesture that seemed to typify her gift for fruitless heroics” (48). As mean-spirited as this selection is, it represents only a slightly more contemptuous version of the descriptions found in more serious media, which sometimes also traffic in the stereotypes they pretend to abjure (“features almost like a Goebbels’s caricature of a Jew” or “almost a caricature of the low-heeled high-brow”).23 Nonetheless, the reviews never fail to mention her possible sainthood, her sudden fame and its mystery, and the reverence the reviewer feels upon an encounter with her work. In the general-reader magazines in particular, some of the hostility directed at Weil’s person spun out toward her admirers, including college students who had claimed her for their own, a great many of whom, it should be noted, were not callow late adolescents but veterans of World War II. Time’s phrase “by most standards” suggests that the reviewer’s skepticism and antipathy speak for the magazine’s target audience, who are presumed to be immune from the “fashion” or “rage” for spiritual pessimism.24

That such an ugly woman should be so compelling seemed preposterous, to say the least. Moreover, that this unattractive and physically fragile woman should have expressed herself with such tremendous authority seems to have produced some confusion and irritation. William Barret, the associate editor of Partisan Review writing for the New York Times Book Review, suggests the source of this force. “Brilliant though she was, Mlle. Weil thought like a woman, and a woman intellectual, notoriously, can be more stubbornly opinionated than any man.”25 Isaac Rosenfeld in Partisan Review suggests that Weil’s “stubbornness” was probably as much a form of coquetry as it was of conviction. He surmis...