To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 11th 1951
Your letter of May 7th with the first three reviews of Dominations & Powers arrived yesterday; Cory has received his three copies of the book and I am expecting mine at any moment. The reviews are inadequate but satisfactory in spirit. The critics had no time for really taking in so complicated a treatment of things which are habitually judged by one’s feelings, not by any analysis of their origin or interplay. The best compliment I have got so far came from Cardiff at Yakima, Wash, who says: “You have produced a monumental work.” Sidney Hook, whose early books about the Russian Revolution instructed and pleased me, disappoints me a little by developing his own current opinions instead of considering mine. The other two reviews are what was to be expected, and contain good quotations. I do not care, as you are right in thinking, to see all the notices in the press; but I should like to see any notable ones, whether favourable or hostile, more to feel the pulse of America than to read my own doom. . . . I expect that my book will be better appreciated in Europe, and I include certain British circles, than in the United States, where there is naturally a strong current of patriotic emotion that cannot help disliking unattached opinions. I am quite content with merely being tolerated as a curiosity.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ