To Miriam Thayer Richards
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. May 18, 1936

You ask about my childhood in Spain. A clever novelist might put in a good deal of melodrama between the lines of my childish experiences, showing what was happening in the minds of my elders. But I was unconscious of it at the time, and there were no conflicts or compulsions affecting me to my own knowledge. The relations between my father and mother were not unlike those of Peter Alden and his wife in my book, although the circumstances and the persons were entirely different. My mother, who had a little money, thought it her duty to bring up her three Sturgis children in Boston; but my father, who was over 50 and spoke no English, although he read it easily, couldn’t think of living in America himself. It came to a friendly separation: and from the age of 5 to 8 I remained in Spain with him, after my mother and the girls had departed: my brother having been sent ahead two years earlier. My father and I lived in a large house in Avila, with an uncle and aunt and their daughter, Antonia. Antonia was married from the house: afterwards returned there, and died there in childbirth. In the confusion of that tragedy I saw and heard a good many things that made an impression, including the green, but perfectly-shaped body of the still-born child.

My parents were not young when they were married and more like grandparents to me in many ways. The warm relation I had in the household, after my father took me, in despair, to Boston and left me there with my mother, was with my sister Susana Sturgis, who was twelve years older than I. It was from her that I learned about religion: also about architecture: because Johnny P (Putnam) who was a beau of hers, was an architect. . . . the Ruskinian enthusiasm of Johnny P. stuck to me, and probably had some effect on my philosophy.

I could go on like this for pages. You can see from this sample that I had grounds for some childish cynicism in my early surroundings. But there were no troubles in my own life, except the troubles inseparable from being a spirit living in the flesh. I tried to describe them—abstracted from my own person—in my Oliver.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

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.