The journey inward

Of Simone Weil, Ludwig Wittgenstein and David Jones, only one was fully Catholic, but all three dipped into monastic life

The World Within:
Why Writers, Artists and Thinkers Retreat
GUY STAGG
(SCRIBNER UK, 320 PP, £20)
tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

The third ashrama, in Hindu teaching, is the stage in life when the believer leaves friends and family and retreats from society and, like Philip Larkin with his bicycle clips (in the poem “Church Going”), discovers “a hunger in himself to be more serious”. In the traditions of monasticism, there have probably always been those who retreat altogether, and those who, for whatever reason, dip into the monastery at some pivotal point of their lives, before returning to the world.

This remarkable book is structured round three retreats by travel writer Guy Stagg. He goes to Klosterneuburg, the palatial Augustinian monastery near Vienna, where Ludwig Wittgenstein once lived in a potting shed and helped with the garden. He visits Caldey Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast, in the footsteps of the artist David Jones. And he finds himself at Solesmes, the Benedictine monastery where the Divine Office has been chanted so perfectly since the 1830s. Innumerable are the pilgrims in whose footsteps he was treading in Solesmes – but he chose to concentrate on Simone Weil, who spent a transformative Holy Week there in 1938 and began the five-year love affair which ended with her death (of starvation) in a hospital at Ashford, Kent, in 1943, when she was just 34. “The only great spirit of our time” – that was how Albert Camus described this beautiful, crazy, Greek-obsessed and completely original person.

“Ideas come and settle in my mind by mistake,” she wrote, “then, realising their mistake, they absolutely insist on coming out.”
Stagg has chosen well with his three ­twentieth-century outsiders. Wittgenstein transformed philosophy in two totally self-contradictory books – the Tractatus – which seemed to reduce the limits of human thought to what could be known empirically; and the later Philosophical Investigations which realised that, though we are imprisoned in “language games”, we are also compelled, by something like mysticism, to recognise the inadequacy of these games.

David Jones, poet and painter, immortalised the experience of being a soldier in the First World War with In Parenthesis, a prose-and-verse description of the deadly Battle of the Somme. There followed the conversion to Catholicism, the involvement with Eric Gill and the Ditchling community (later he followed Gill to Capel-y-ffin) and the lonely years in a bedsit near Harrow, painting some of the most haunting watercolours since the time of William Blake. And then there was Simone – to my mind the most compelling of the three.

Stagg has interesting things to say about all of them, seen from the perspective of their retreats in the three named monastic houses. It is interesting that, of the three, one – Wittgenstein – was raised a Catholic and became a sort of Tolstoyan Christian agnostic (as far as one can tell); Weil was brought up as a secular Jew but, after Solesmes, was in love with Christ, while refusing baptism. (Her grounds for doing so were that Homer had not been baptised, and she was really at one with Yeats when he wrote “Homer be my example, and his unchristened heart”. If you haven’t ever read her, you could do worse than by starting with her extraordinary essay on the Iliad, as a poem of “force” – the merciless anguish of war, the reduction, by warfare, of human beings to things.)

While she was on retreat at Solesmes, Simone met a young Englishman who introduced her to the poetry of George Herbert. She learnt the poem called “Love” (“Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back …”). As she told Fr Perrin, a Dominican priest she had befriended in Marseilles, “I learnt it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it, the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations, that Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

Yet she continued to refuse baptism, and saw Catholicism as essentially the religion of slaves. One of her earliest English admirers and translators, Richard Rees, made the valuable point that her journey from Marxism to transcendentalism was not an abandonment of common sense: “Her feet were always on the ground.” Her mystical experiences persuaded her that such simple glimpses of truth were available to everyone. When she became, all too briefly, a Londoner (working for the Free French), she loved pubs and became a passionate Anglophile.

Stagg tells the story of her life and death with great sensitivity. Almost everything about this beautiful outsider makes me cry, but one of the most moving things in his narrative is Stagg’s account of her stunned parents, ­following their return to Paris from Brazil after the war, patiently transcribing her notebooks, thereby making their genius daughter available to the world.
In two out of these three cases, retreats did not lead to a settled path within the Church. Jones, alone of the three, remained fully Catholic, wrestling with the torment of ­agoraphobia and the memories of the war. Stagg, too, is on a journey, which is what makes his books so attractive and accessible.