Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY MAGAZINE February 24, 1977 February 20, 1977 THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUNDAY MAGAZINE :otes . .. When E. Y. 'Yip' Harburg abandoned his career as an electrical engineer in New York City the depression was already barreling Bwn good and hard on just about everybody in just about all walks --4 life. But down the block from Yip lived a young Ira Gershwin who saw the engineer's unemployment as a godsend. Now's the time to concentrate on your writing, he told Yip. He heeded Ger- shwin's advice and before long had penned the lyrics to the song that became synonomous with the era he began his writing in- "Brother Can You Spare A Dime." But the lyrics to April in Paris, The Wizard of Oz and Finian's Rainbow belong to Yip as well, and there's at least one person in Ann Arbor who won't forget the words to any one of those songs. That's Ernie Harburg, Yip's son. Co-editor Ann Marie Lipinski recently spoke with the younger Harburg, a University psychology professor, and found out what life was like with the venerable Yip-see next week's Magazine. sunday magazine CO-EDITORS- Susan Ades Elaine Fletcher BOOKS EDITOR- Tom O'Connell Y ADVERTISING- Don Simpson COVER PHOTO courtesy of Southern Africa Liberation Committee contents: FEATURES The Arb Murder: Why? Bantu Schools .. . DOWNTOWN SERIES . HAPPENINGS . * * BOOK REVIEW . . . . 5 . .4 R * . . ... Sunday magazine acrostic puzzle -T 3 4 a 4t V 6 Q 7 K23 K24 52s L 26 1270 28 S 45 Rl . 47 E48 =I4 0 5 K 67 G 60 69 U70 G 71 8 V 1 S6E k1 1 ~13 S157 V 72 Y 2P53 Q 54 C -73 Y 74 G7 _ W 6O By STEPHEN POZSGAI J. Lt. r I -711 MZI ~ - A Min ,14 I'd MI -1 -A 5 .~~ !J 13E Y i3~ 14 141 I4~ !3 T 1S F l aG .--J- -t- I - L _ -I, , 1 .. _ A. Sonnets From The Portugese author ....... B. Vindicate; avenge ...... C. Crush; burden........ D. Chief breadstuff of temperate climates ... E. Rousseau's ideal (2 words) .............. F. Gynecocracy ............ G. One who makes changes or is in the vanguard .......... H. Release; freedom..... 1. Random chance (4 words)............. J. Margaret Atwood novel The - (2 words) ..... . K. A sharp, hard cheese of pale color and granular texture..... L. Rub out ............ . ... . 29 41 59 102 14 145 175 183 3 25 110 120 162 55 60 73 119 129 144 178 10 168 118 184 100 35 48 80 85 104 111 177 193 137 146 47 53 84 125156 160 171 43 4 140 8 62 68 79 128 131 141 163 71 49 89 136 143 164 176 185 165 192 200 92 15 150 27 69 159 167 117 23 77 86 103 191 2 105 34 138 148 158 130 121 198 95 188 24 67 114 151 76 135 5 12 26 33 39 63 93 166 194 M. Once known as the Gold Coast ............ N. "It's -," movie pan (2 words) ......... 0. - of yore; formerly (3 words) .............. P. Maiden; initial....... Q. Temporary stay ......... R. Office boy, often, among clerical staff (2 words) ........ 32 142 154 195 199 11 180 189 106 196 97 78 20 14 50 123 87 28 153 58 65 96 83 126 7 101 181 107 152 54 99 INSTRUCTIONS Guess the words defined at the left and write them in over their numbered dashes. Then, trans- fer each letter to the corres- pondingly numbered square in the pattern. The filled pattern will contain a quotation reading from left to right with the black squares indicating word end- ings. Meanwhile, the first let- ters of the guessed words will form an acrostic, giving the author's name and title of the work the quote is extracted from. WelL SIMONE WEIL: A LIFE By Simone Petrement Pantheon,577 pp., $5 By CYNTHIA HILL (IGLUMNIST George Will des- cribed Simone Weil as "a fa- natic in search of a mania; a nuisance and worry to those around her." "How could someone so learn- ed, and so determined to be vir- tuous, behave with such futil- ity?" he asked. Weil, whose 34-year life of in- defatigable political involvement ended in 1943 with her voluntary starvation, had her own answer: "There are things that I would not be able to say if I had not done these things." In death as well as life she had the last word: her works as a writer and a philosopher have survived, and far outweigh in importance the seemingly silly gestures of her life. Weil was a woman who defied categorization, and perhaps that is why scholars and historians, both inveterate catgorizers, have felt uncomfortable with her. "Philosopher", "political activist", "mystic" and "writ- er" have all been the inadequate epithets attached to her life. Yet pigeonholing dies hard with those accustomed to sim- ple yes-no, true-false categori- zations of life. George Will dis- misses Weil as a fanatic, while Simone Petrement, her friend and author of her latest biogra- phy, Simone Veil: A Life, ex- cuses her as a saint. -ETREMENTS BOOK, all 577 pages of it, is a commend- able effort, but it is more ex- haustive than thorough. Petre- ment patiently explores notes to the family, labor letters, and laundry lists - but with more awe than insight. hero worship is a luxury that only the best biographers can afford. Rather than the necesary subjectivity of an in-depth character explora- tion, Petrements sticks to safe ground and we get the flat, two- dimensional objectivity of a fan. What the work ultimately serves as, is a series of candid snap- shots when we could use the re- lentless zoom-in focus of a mo- vie camera close-up. It is ironic that despite Petre- ment's obvious adoration of her subject, her prose often as- sumes a chatty intimacy, al- most as if she were trying to make Weil appear to be the girl-next-door. She is quick to dismis, excuse, contradict, con- done or gloss over Weil's faults before she's adequately viewed them. Sometimes her commen- tary so obviously belies the facts she describes that the effect becomes ludicrous. Did Petre- ment really listen to herself when she wrote these lines? But even in these circum- stances she did not forget men's misfortunes and her de- sire to share them. On the beach at Villaneuva she said to Patri: "It is quite possible that one day we will be tor- tured; so we should prepare ourselves for it. Do you want to drive some pins under my nails?" SHE CONTRADICTIONS in Weil and in her life are too deep-seated to be written off un- der the excuse of her presumed sainthood. Petrement tries aw- fully hard to wow her readers with the sort of anecdotes that can be explained much more di- rectly as masochism or guilt. Even as a child Simone did not like to eat and touch certain things because of what she termed their "disgustingness." In her later years she consid- ered eating at all to be base and repulsive. Why, then, does Pet- rement repeatedly attribute Weil's voluntary starvation only to noble motives? Her fixation with poverty hurt and often embarrassed her fam- ily and friends: she insisted on paving her parents for meals while visiting them, and, as a guest, she inconvenienced her hosts by refusing to sleep on anything but the floor. Even a sympathetic witness, the noted historian Gustave Thi- bon, who was a friend of Weil's comments: Finding our modest house too comfortable, she refused the room I was offering her and wanted at all costs to sleep out of doors. Then it was I- who became vexed, and after long discussions she ended by giving way. The next day a compromise was reached. At that time my wife's parents had a little half-ruined house on the banks of the Rhone and we settled her in there, not without a few complications for everyone. It would all have been so much simpler other- wise! INDEED, HER self-abnegation often exceeded the limits of mere inconvenience. Sometimes it literally endangered the lives of those around her. During the Spanish Civil War, she insisted on partaking in expeditions she had no qualifications for: ... this group . . . decided to cross the Ebro in a boat so as to burnrthree enemy corpses that were lying on the right bank. On this bank, a Franco column was in the vicinity. The leaders who commanded the group at first did not want to take Simone with them. They had noticed her clumsi- ness (during target practice, her comrades had avoided walking anywhere near her rifle's line of fire). In the opin- ion of these leaders, her short- sightedness was a defect that automatically eliminated her. But she protested, got angry, insisting so much that they ended by taking her along. This is the mission which Weil, who had been a dedicated pacifist a short time before, was to write about in a letter: "Sud- denly I realize that we are on a mission. ... Then I'm very ex- cited (I don't know how useful all this is, and I know that if you are captured, you're shot.)" The myth. By refusing to offer anything but the most benign and fatuous interpretation of these events, Petrement forces the readers to their own inevitable interpreta- tion: Weil was a pushy, offic- ios, obnoxious woman totally indifferent to anything but her own concept of heroism. Petrement attempts to per- suade us of Weil's innate great- ness without ever exploring her darker side (as if its truths were too terrible to explain) and that is where she is wrong. For Simone Weil VS, reali ing. She at last provides us with a personalized view of Well. It is a portrait of Weil which only a friend could have described. And Weil abruptly emerges as something more than a queer enigma, when Petrement des- cribes her as an oddly medieval saint in sandals and homespun. What struck me most of all at this meeting was a gentle- ness and serenity that I had never known in her to this ex- tent. She could still become indignant, but so much less than before. With a more ten- der, wiser goodness she had become a person whose com- pany was, more than ever, extremely charming. PUT IF THESE chapters are a success, it is also largely due to the captured-time lyri- cism of Thibon, whose own ob- servations on Weil, Petrement quotes extensively. Thibon's vi- sion of Weil takes the reader completely by surprise, .for where Petrement has given us fragments of Weil's character, Thibon gives us a concrete pic- ture. I don't want to talk about her physical appearance-she was not ugly, as has been said, but prematurely bent and old looking due to asceticism and illness, and her magnificent eyes alone triumphed in this shipwreck of beauty. Nor will I dwell on the way she was outfitted and her incredible baggage-she had a superb ignorance not only as to the canons of elegance but extend- ing to the most elementary practices that enable a person to pass unnoticed. I will mere- ly say that this first contact aroused feelings in me which, though certainly quite differ- ent from antipathy, were nonetheless painful. I had the impression of being face to face with an individual who was radically foreign to all my ways of feeling and think- ing and to all that, for me, re- presents the meaning and sa- vor of life . . . The quotations, incidentally, are borrowed from Thibon's own biography Simone Weil As We Knew Her. QIMONE WEIL: A Life makes difficult reading. Weil's thoughts are often profound, oc- casionally obscure, and some- times hard to absorb. Weil's writing was as graceless as her body, and much of the reader's time is spent unravelling wind- ing sentences. Petrement moreover, tends to exacerbate rather than amelior- ate this pr no doubt. all to eat most of th being sub in this spI lated that not to eat people we inaccurate more luci Whateve book, it's Its subjec its appeal ing charac under-stud twentieth Even in production is impres and beaut almost str wreckage. So does V exhaustive grade sc Petrement phrases lib a bird - o pigeons: It is nec save ones oneself, o inanity is is the ac refusal to oneself, a suffering tary suffe poured o saint haf being tha from the Many of have nev some hav lished. I I off these and somet a more le And I ir to theme fo S. Extemporaneous; ad lib (3 words) 13 122 44 46 82 112 19 94 170l 45 51 116 18 61 161 182 56 190 T. Arrogant; presumptious....... U. Float; large collection ............ V. Equal pay for equal work (2 words) ..... W. Sir Walter Scott novel............. X. Short-horned grasshopper........ Y. Super-relaxed Colloq) (4 words) 42 1 133 172 17 113 31 37 70 40 36 57 147 52 6 72 134 174 Answer to Last Week's Puzzle Time and again over the current century, a remarkable pattern of discovery has repeated itself. A lucky guess based on shaky arguments and absurd ad hoc 21 assumptions gives a formula that turns out to be right, though 197 at first no one can see why on earth it should (be). Robert H. March from "Phy- sics for Poets." it is this shadow that may have propelled Weil into sainthood- if she is, indeed, a saint. jETREMENT PROCEEDS as if sainthood were not an evo- lutionary process, but a quality one is born with, rather like Cal- vin's elect. If we are to accept this explanation of genius, we negate the purpose of a biogra- phy: to chronicle the exception- al as an example, not to provide fan-magazine anecdotesor sate the merely curious with back- stairs gossip. Fortunately, not all of Petre- ment's analysis is this faulty. The biographer performs admir- ably in the chapter "Encounter with Alain", which describes We-il's relationship with one early mentor. Here Petrement folows Weil's development and its origin in Alain's teaching, with remarkable detail and clar- ity. It becomes apparent that Petrement has, in many ways, a forceful intelligence of her own, when she chooses to use it. She is capable of depth and in- sight; for example, when she explains the often tenuous dis- tinction between psychosis and sainthood. The final chapters of Petre- ment's work also prove satisfy- 186 157 81 90 22 115 169 Cindy editor. ,J 88 109 91179 66 9 139 98 124 16 64 30 38 75 173 155 149 127 187 132 74 s N KEEP IN MIND WE/~ R-A'VE A LOT OF APfLc-AN T.5 FOR THE j POS fT ION. 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