To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 31, 1935
Logan . . . [is] very complimentary, “You have displayed new powers of humour and irony and of the presentation of characters. All the few people I know in London with any sense of quality are reading The Last Puritan with passionate admiration, and, to borrow a phrase of Henry James’s ‘the small fry of the day submit to a further shrinkage’.” But the best letter so far is from Lady Russell. She writes: “I have got to the part where Oliver goes on the Black Swan and meets Lord Jim, whose person and conversation seem curiously familiar”. This is splendid: because Jim isn’t externally like my friend her husband, nor in his specific opinions: but it is the same man, the same psyche; and that Elizabeth should have seen it at once gives me the greatest joy. And I am sure she will be even more reminded of her lost illusions—for she must have been in love with him, else why marry him?—(and that when he was nearly fifty!)—when she comes to his gradual deterioration; and I do hope, though I doubt, that she will soften toward him at the end. She didn’t in real life, even when he became a member of the Labour Government. I tell you this because I feel we are Santayana & Cory, Incorporated (not, I hope, Limited) and I want you to see these things from the inside. Here is a real justification for the motto from Alain about “jeunesse sauvée”. Lord Jim is a bit of my youth preserved. I am much more partial to him than to Mario, who is a compound of several other friends of mine, all less important.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY