To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, May 11, 1951.
Dear Clemens,
Many thanks for your letter of May 4th with the good-humoured review in Time, which is the best I have seen so far, much better than those by the Professors Hook and Krutch in the New York Times and Herald Tribune. My new book is too complicated for a hasty reader to take in at once, and people are accustomed to be guided in public affairs by their feelings, without considering origins or tendencies in the actual events. I am content, for the moment, to be regarded as a mere curiosity.
Tom Sawyer arrived in due time and has been religiously read from cover to cover. It is hardly as suggestive of Don Quixote as the latter part of Huckleberry Finn, but I will consider both books together and in that respect only in my paper, which is partly written but not quite finished even in the written part. You are not in a hurry and I am very slow now at everything. I have not had the “flu”, but only a recrudescence of my catarrh, and general fatigue, so that I have given up receiving visitors, except old friends. Please don’t send me cheques for $1. We are not in business. I will send Tom Sawyer back at once.
Yours sincerely,
G.S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC