To Robert Shaw Barlow
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 19, 1935
You will see in my novel . . . some sketches of what, as I now imagine it, youth was in your day: in your day rather than in my own, because, as you will see, my leading personages are not drawn from my own experience but rather from what I fancied to have been potential in my friends. Everybody who is in the know at all will recognize some of my originals. I could easily name several of our friends who have contributed something to my hero . . . The ladies are also renderings of certain sides of people who have counted a good deal in my life: but the setting is so transformed that perhaps the likeness is rather an intention in me than a reality. “Rose”, for instance, is a picture of what I imagine my mother to have been like when a young girl. I don’t remember how much I said in that sketch of her life about her romantic adventures when all alone among the Indians in her tropical island: but she had a wonderful coolness and courage, and a quiet disdain for what she didn’t feel was quite up to the mark. For that reason she wasn’t very affectionate to her children: we were poor stuff.
Naturally, we are living under a war-cloud: but I hope it won’t burst. My sympathies are anti-English now: gradually, since the war, all my Anglomania has faded away. The British bully is traditional, and the English prig is familiar: but the two were never before so well combined as in Mr. Eden.1 I prefer the Bolschies; and perhaps everywhere, through one approach or another, it is to State socialism that we are bound.
1. Robert Anthony Eden (1897-1977) was British foreign minister from 1935 to 1938. A staunch supporter of the League of Nations (1934-35), he resigned in opposition to the “appeasement” of the Axis. He again served as foreign minister in Churchill’s war cabinet (1940-45) during the alliance of Great Britain, the USSR, and the United States, and the building of the United Nations. Knighted in 1954, he became prime minister in 1955.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA