To Robert Burnside Potter
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Nice, France. December 21, 1922
It is very nice of you to take so much trouble about the yacht in my Novel, and your explanations after Pomeroy (whom I must thank also) come in places very near to the critical point, and will be useful. If the novel is ever done, the chapter on the “Black Swan” shall be sent to you for revision before I reveal my landsman’s ignorance to the ocean wide. But really, I have misled you about the importance of the yacht in the book: there is to be no cruise (except a trial trip for the engines in Massachusetts Bay) and no description of any voyage. The one important point is the “sailing master”, a character for which I have many adequate models in my English experience. The yacht and the owner (my hero’s father) are American: but the sailing-master is a young Englishman with a shady past, through whom my young hero, at the age of 16, when he first goes to the yacht (his mother ordinarily keeping him in leash) discovers all the family secrets and many unmentionable things about human nature and the ways of the world. The yacht is merely a background for that momentous episode, which itself has nothing to do with yachting: but I need the setting. The Black Swan is not a big yacht: not meant for social gatherings; rather a floating hermitage, in which to escape from society. I do not need to go into the question of the crew: but I want to have a picture of the facts in my own mind, and what you tell me of the Apache is far, far too elaborate. The story is conceived from the hero’s point of view, everything merely as it enters into his experience, and transforms his Puritanism into a Hamlet-like perplexity. He does not himself know anything about yachts: and his experience on that single occasion need not enlighten him more than I was enlightened by the day I spent on Mr. William Forbes’s yacht in Buzzard’s Bay, an occasion which is the more pertinent as Cam Forbes and his father are among the models for my personages. I once spent several weeks in a yacht, but it was a smaller one, a steam-yacht, and in inland waters.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.