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Courtesy of New York Review of Books

As related in Christopher Benfey’s introduction, Weil and Bespaloff led lives with arresting similarities although they did not know each other: they both shared in the intense intellectualism of Europe’s Jewish haute bourgeoisie, both escaped through Marseille to America (although Weil later went on to England), and both in one sense or another took her own life. In 1949, by that time a professor at Mt. Holyoke, Bespaloff killed herself from the gas of her kitchen stove. Weil died in 1943, having determined, although in fragile health, to subsist on the rations of the victims of Hitler’s oppression eking out their existence in France. She essentially starved herself, dying finally in a tuberculosis sanatorium. When she was younger, still in France, she had at one time determined to work in a factory, at another to join the military forces trying to keep fascism from Spain. Both attempts to share in the physical privations and agony of the working class ended in failure for this constitutionally frail, delicate child of privilege. Bespaloff, by contrast, had the more conventionally realized life, as a lover, mother, wife, published author, and respected philosopher. Nevertheless, it seems that, in the end, separated from her husband, lodged in the provinces far from her émigré friends in the cultural excitement of New York (and no doubt faced with yet another pile of mindless student essays to correct and “sympathize” with), she could not see the point of it.

Both women read ancient Greek and were intimately familiar with the text of The Iliad. By coincidence, they each began research for an essay on the poem. It seems that Bespaloff read Weil’s essay when it appeared in Cahiers du sud in 1940, although she was well on her way to completing her own commentary by that time. Yet, most critics would argue that there is a sense in which she is answering Weil’s arguments. Weil was a pacifist whose essay is a condemnation of the substance of The Iliad, that is, warfare, whereas Bespaloff reads the poem as a heroic struggle against the enemy aggressor. Weil’s sympathy with the working class makes her detest all war, any war, which she sees as so much sloganeering, benefiting the elites while destroying the ordinary men in the trenches. Helen, she claims, was nothing but a specious pretext masking economic and social realities, no different from the twentieth-century cries for “freedom,” “honor,” or “glory” that misled men into battle. A pacifist, Weil openly sympathized with Chamberlain’s Munich gambit, although she came to realize belatedly that peace at all costs was not the solution to the menace posed by Hitler. Bespaloff, however, had been aware of the impending disaster from the start, and read civilized Europe into Troy and Hitler’s barbarism into the opposing Achaean forces. Both Weil and Bespaloff wrote as though they had extracted an eternal truth from The Iliad. Mary McCarthy’s excellent translations from the French bring readers as close as possible to the original texts. One senses that both Weil and Bespaloff were writing as though revealing eternal verities, with a style and perspective that were so much of the time and of their intellectual background. Thus, one might be tempted to dismiss the essays as overly determined by their context. These two intelligent readings of Western civilization’s founding poem, however, require the reader to rethink The Iliad.

Weil begins with the much-quoted proposition, “The true hero, the true subject, the center of The Iliad is force,” foregrounding an abstraction over the claims of masculine heroics (the foundation, one would imagine, of praise-blame poetry), storyline (whether the wrath of Achilles or the battle writ large), or the sheer, luxuriant sensuality of 16,000 lines of dactylic-hexameter Greek. As a philosopher, she no doubt felt compelled to extract a “truth” from the narrative. But literature—particularly long, shifting, complex narratives—rarely offer up truths so easily, and one is perhaps better off simply experiencing rather than analyzing. As someone who has read The Iliad in Greek numerous times, gone through it in seminars with graduate students, and taught it to undergraduates in English translation more times than one can imagine in a 40-odd-year career, I am still never sure that I know what the poem is all about.

Force, as Weil defines it, is the power that annihilates humankind absolutely, even if only psychologically. Homer would no doubt agree, although he would probably call it death, or harsh necessity. Where he and Weil would part company is over the rage and indignation with which she treats force. Weil finds force anomalous, whereas, for Homer, it is in the nature of things. Her furious response to the poem either affected her memory of it or gave her what she thought to be rightful license to alter the text. Consider the scene in which Priam comes to Achilles for the corpse of his son, Hector, and kneels and kisses the young Achaean warrior’s hands. For Weil, this is a supreme acting-out of the annihilation that force works upon a human being. In the event, she has the right to ignore the awe the narrator describes in the witnesses to this scene, the indubitable sense of command, theater, and self-discipline of the old Trojan king, which allow him to enact this obeisance. What is not permissible, however, is to falsify the response of Achilles, who, as Homer tells us, gently pushes the old king’s hands away. Weil excises “gently” in her determination to reduce Priam to nothing and Achilles to the force that creates nothing. Instead, Homer gives us a tentative rapprochement, the intimations of a social moment leading, as it does, to a shared meal. Amid the killing, about which Weil is so eloquent in page after page, come brief glimpses of redemption, and in this scene more than most. Here, at the poem’s close, Achilles—having accepted life’s meaninglessness, first in his humiliation by Agamemnon so many thousands of lines earlier and then in the death of his beloved friend and alter ego, Patroclus—now can guide the bereaved father back into living his life by seating him at the dinner table. The endless parade of deaths on which Weil concentrates is, as she says, a spectacle without the consolations of immortality, or patriotism. Weil calls it “bitter,” a word that has the underlying sense of resentment, which seems altogether absent in the narrator’s world-view. True enough, there was no Christian heaven or nation-state in Homer’s time, but Weil will not consider that every culture finds it own palliative for the horror of existence, and what heroic poetry offers is the consolation of fame and glory. “On the two of us Zeus set a vile destiny, so that so we could be the subject of song in later generations,” says Helen speaking of herself and Paris (6.357ff.). The narrator mentions (11.227ff.) Iphidamas, a Trojan ally, who “g[etting] married, left the marriage bed, looking for glory from the Achaeans” (i.e., in fighting, killing, and being killed). In its own way, Iphidamas’ story parallels that of someone leaving a dustbowl farm in Kansas for the sin and corruption of Hollywood.

Weil’s strenuous condemnation of the active violence in the narrative causes her to condescend to these warriors: “They commence a war,” she says, “as though on a holiday from the confinements of daily life” (p. 21). Weil confuses twentieth-century proletarian soldiers with ancient-epic warriors who are professionals who make their living, and survive, by war and plunder. “Men wielding power,” she claims, “have no idea their acts of violence will come home to them” (p. 14). But she herself quotes both Achilles (p. 25) and Hector (p. 17) predicting their death in battle. Weil then introduces the Gospel (p. 14), saying that he who lives by the sword perishes by the sword. That observation, however, rests upon an entirely new idea to be found in the Gospel narratives, that love is an alternative to violence, with its corollary of everlasting life, and redemption, as an alternative to death. But such belief was not for the men of The Iliad; there were no witness-protection programs, or United Nations refugee camps, for them. In literary terms, they are all stuck in the narrative, prisoners of the formula and of the dactylic, hexametric line, reiterated over decades, and centuries, just as Fred and Ginger are locked forever into the pixels of the images of their dance routines. There is no way out.

“The idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature,” Weil insists (p. 22). That may be true, but it is the essential reality of The Iliad: that we must die is the great discovery already articulated in the Akkadian Babylonian story of Gilgamesh and somehow brought over into early Greek culture. Weil wants to be reasonable (p. 24: “But actually what is Helen to Ulysses?” etc., etc.), but Homer posits a universe in which killing or being killed is entirely reasonable, and nowhere is that idea more powerfully expressed than in the similes comparing the behavior of these warriors to predator animals. Weil considers these similes proof of her proposition that force reduces humans to nothing; she claims that they inspire regret (p. 42). But perhaps they simply reiterate the mournful truth of natural human existence. And just as “mournful” rather than “regret” focuses on the sense of the inevitable that seems to permeate the poem, so, instead of bitter or bitterness, one might rather say “unsentimental clarity.”

Weil sees “a monotonous desolation were it not for a few luminous moments” in The Iliad (p. 27). Somewhere in her fierce concentration on her thesis, however, she has lost sight of the extraordinarily rich panorama of humanity that enlivens almost every scene of the poem: Agamemnon’s haughtiness; Achilles’ rage; Agamemnon’s testing speech; Nestor’s exhortation; Odysseus restraining the troops; Hector rebuking his brother, and Paris’ response; Helen on the walls, or her exchange with Aphrodite, Diomedes, and Glaucus; Aphrodite complaining to her celestial family; or, finally, Hector with his family at Troy. Yes, force lurks in every scene, but it’s the knowledge that we all must die. Homer further redeems this grim thought with the brilliance of his narrative’s verbal construction. In the context of the rise of Nazi militarism, one might say that Weil wages her own war against the appeal and glamour of militarism upon which The Iliad insists. The Nazis’ uniforms, swagger, emphasis on blond good looks, athleticism, Aryan purity, and conscious insistence that they were the heirs to the Achaean heroic ideal, would naturally have made The Iliad suspect in Weil’s eyes. And perhaps the horrors of warfare in the twentieth century—going on without pause into the twenty-first and brought into every home by television, which demands the viewers’ consent in the proceedings witnessed—make it logical that we retire The Iliad from the canon. Weil’s essay has a force of its own that demands that we see the poem as a horrid seduction.

Bespaloff, on the contrary, reads The Iliad from the vantage-point of the war she has escaped in Europe, as well as the great military conflict that underlies Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is the conflict between Trojan and Achaean, not the wrath of Achilles, the self-announced theme of the narrator, which defines Homer’s narrative for her. Among the throng of players in this vast panorama, she focuses on Hector, as the defender of his city and by extension civilization itself, and thus can say, “the duel between Achilles and Hektor forms The Iliad’s true center” (p. 48). Simone Weil compared Helen to Anna Karenina. Whether that inspired Bespaloff to look more closely at Tolstoy, there is no denying that War and Peace seems to be much influenced by the Homeric poem. Nikolai Rostov’s first encounter of warfare, for instance, is one of the great battle narratives in literature, immediately reminiscent of the many vivid scenes of battle in The Iliad. The young count fairly glows with both fear and excitement as his horse carries him through the mêlée, itself a peculiarly Homeric mixture of particularity and mass. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s narrative manner leads Bespaloff to construe the characters of Homer’s poem as if they are Tolstoy’s: detailed, well-realized psychological portraits instead of stereotypes of a traditional, formulaic, storytelling tradition. She talks of Hector’s need “to be brave” and to “fight in the first rank,” and of his “passion for defying destiny,” when, in fact, she is invoking narrative formulas. Having earlier singled him out “in a crowd of mediocrities”—that is, his brothers—she fails to see that the narrator actually sees him as no different from many of his distinguished brothers and kinsmen: Helenus, for instance, or Aeneas, or even Paris, for that matter. It is Priam, rather, in his rage and despair, who curses them all, and more for the fact that they are still living after Hector is dead, an extravagant invocation of survivor’s guilt, one might say. By contrast, Bespaloff singles out Achilles as “gorging himself on complaints,” the man of resentment, when these are actually insults hurled at him by Agamemnon, who is certainly not the stand-in for the narrator. Nonetheless, Bespaloff psychoanalyzes Achilles’ valor, “which has been nurtured on discontent and irritable anxiety” (p. 44).

There are many peculiar observations in this piece, as, for instance, “With Hektor the will to greatness never pits itself against the will to happiness.” What is this happiness? It is not clear at all that the Homeric world accommodates happiness. Having spoken of the horrors of war in The Iliad, Bespaloff can say, “Yet at the same time [Homer] sees warlike emulation as the fountainhead of creative effort.” This poem is about fighting men, so it is only natural that the narrator praises them for what they do well, intelligently and cleverly. In the same philosophical vein, Bespaloff can say, “Achilles and Hektor are beautiful because force is beautiful, because the beauty of omnipotence is converted into the omnipotence of beauty,” which to this reviewer means very little. Bespaloff has that French tendency to generalize and go to first principles, which is alien to the Anglo-American obsession with facts, details, and statistics. Mary McCarthy, a Francophile if there ever was one, was certainly the right translator for this particular essay.

Bespaloff’s love-hate relationship serves up the erotics of masculine violence that we see in a Sylvester Stallone or an Arnold Schwarzenegger, culminating in her observation that, “Without Achilles men would have peace; without Achilles, they would sleep on, frozen with boredom, till the planet itself grew cold” (p. 55). Yes, the warfare in so superbly conceived an epic as The Iliad is exciting, intoxicating, just as Saving Private Ryan and similar films revivify all those of us sunk into our lounge chairs, glutted on Fritos. Still, Bespaloff never had to experience trench warfare at the Battle of the Somme or go in on the Normandy beachhead. Those who did would probably have said that boredom is better.

There is much philosophy in this work, much about ancient error and original sin as though one could tease out a proto-Christian sensibility in the poem, when, in fact, the concept of “sin” is altogether foreign to the Greek mind, not even to be found in tragedy, where hamartia, to miss the mark, is not at all sin. Bespaloff muddies the waters with Christianity’s contamination of ancient thinking. Much that she writes is incomprehensible. For example: “War itself, then, appears as the way to unity through the flux of Becoming that undoes and remakes worlds, souls, and gods. To the life it is forever consuming, it lends a supreme importance. Precisely because war takes everything away from us, the All, whose reality is suddenly forced on us by the tragic vulnerability of our particular existences, becomes estimable.” Hegel and Nietzsche flavor this philosophical stew as much as the Gospels do. It gets harder and harder to recognize The Iliad in all this. One is tempted to rephrase that old “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” as “Those who can make poems, do, those who can’t, philosophize.”

The plan to publish the two essays together when Mary McCarthy first translated them fell afoul of copyright agreements. The Bollingen Foundation undertook to publish Bespaloff alone, but added an essay by Herman Broch, “The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff,” commenting on her essay. On the first page, one encounters, “Homer is on the threshold where myth steps over into poetry, Tolstoy on that where poetry steps back into myth”; it is hard to read on. The rest of the essay continues in this vague, mystical, and impressionistic way, which one would like to excuse by noting that this was the German-speaking Broch’s first attempt at writing English, except that his famous roman à these, The Death of Virgil, reads just the same in English translation. Essentially, the conservative Broch used this piece on Bespaloff to argue for tradition, conventional poetic narrative, the catholic view of things in epic poetry, and, thus, by extension, the Roman Catholic Church as opposed to the Protestant Reformation, which introduced individuality, romanticism, and, presumably, the decline of Western culture and literature. Woolly-headed in the extreme, Broch’s essay reminds this reader of Werner Jaeger’s Paideia, a period piece from the same milieu and time, but, certainly, like so many strange items in yard sales, definitely a collectible.