To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 9, 1933
Mrs. Van Meter Ames, wife of a young prof. of phil. in Cincinnati, has sent me an account of my conversations with them at lunch at the Castello dei Cesari and elsewhere: a sort of Boswell to this Johnson. It makes me out rather like a red-faced old Major in Bath spluttering his damn-mes and don’t-you-knows about things in general: but I have no objection, and have only corrected the English which good innocent Mrs. Ames imagines that I speak.
I have received, from an objectionable friend in Boston, an objectionable book by Bernard Shaw, called A Black Girl in Search of a God. There are amusing turns, but as a whole it is trash. Do you care to have it?
The novel is advancing slowly but solidly. I feel that I have solved the greatest difficulty in the earlier part, viz., the yacht episodes. . . . I feel greatly encouraged in my own mind, and have hopes of really finishing it. I have rewritten a few pages of the Prologue, making more marked the difference between my talk and Mario’s. This was one of Strong’s objections, which I thought well grounded. Fas est ab hoste doceri.
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.