Author: David Spiech Page 221 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
Seville, Spain. April 5, 1914

You are very generous to wish to return to the absolute financial monarchy which you have practically always exercised at the apartment, and I am glad of it, as a sign that the villa hasn’t yet ruined you, and that the fall in American stocks has left you calm like a Stoic. It hasn’t affected me either in practice, and I am still saving money; but on paper it has swallowed up 12% of my capital, so that I feel poor, although I have just as much to spend as before.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Otto Kyllmann
Hotel Bristol
Rome April 4, 1939

Dear Mr. Kyllmann,

We live in an age of propaganda, and must beware of believing the things we hear. There is no Autobiography, nor likely to be during my lifetime, but the rumour from South America has this foundation, that for years I have been scribbling notes and reminiscences that I call Persons & Places, partly about myself and my family, but chiefly about friends and old haunts. There are no confessions or consecutive events, so that, even if ever fit for publication, those fragments will hardly compose an Autobiography. I am at work on The Realm of Spirit, which I hope will be ready to send to you by the end of this year.

Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA

To Charles P. Davis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 3rd 1936

Dear Davis,
I didn’t send you my novel because I felt that you wouldn’t like it. It’s not Catholic enough—really quite pagan and desolating in its background—and then the moral problem for poor Oliver is quite different from what I expect troubled you when you were young. Your difficulties were plain human difficulties and choices between clear-cut contrasted whereas Oliver is a born (and bred) transcendentalist, thinks always from the pure ego outwards, and never can get outwards very far. Then his feelings and passions are mixed up horribly, and helpless: I was going to say “impotent”, but that would be misleading, because he was far from impotent physically, only emotionally and morally inhibited, and without the courage of his inclinations. He was too tied up ever to find out clearly what these inclinations were. That was why he petered out. Meantime he behaved very well, was loyal and generous (as all my American friends have been) and had a great many noble thoughts: but even his thoughts didn’t cohere into anything specific. . . . . . Perhaps there are other incidental things in the book that rub you the wrong way, or leave you cold. But I assure you that the texture of the book is good, and that you would like it if you weren’t expecting something else. It certainly is remarkable how people have taken to it in America. I suppose in part it is curiousity to see how “high-brow” experience expresses itself: but in part it must be that they, or some of them, see the fun in the book, and are really entertained.

It isn’t a professional novel, with the events arranged to make a story. It is just a rambling biography, tossed along from one incomplete situation to another, as in real life. I meant it to be that. The world is not a tragedy or a comedy: it is a flux.

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

To Mary Williams Winslow
Madrid, Spain. April 2, 1912

In England I visited my usual hosts, and went besides to Cambridge where I slept in a medieval dungeon, in the Clock Tower of Trinity College, being the guest of Bertie Russell: I sentimentally evoked memories of the past by walking on the towpath and watching the college Eights practice; I dined in Hall. . . . and altogether drenched myself in diluted emotions. It was terribly cold, particularly in bed.—In Paris I was only a few days, and did nothing worth mentioning, except to visit the apartment where I am to live next month, and after, with my friend Strong. It is very suitable, but I could imagining something more luxurious and Byzantine, if I put my mind to it. Possibly, if I find Strong docile, I may add a few touches of frivolity to the solemn scene.—In Avila, while continuing to suffer from the cold, I found my sister and her family as usual, and stayed nearly a fort-night; whence, I came here, to begin life with my new mate, Mercedes. We get on beautifully, I eat a lot, (having had only one colic so far) walk a lot, and have even managed to do some real work, having had one or two spells of industry and absorption over my books and papers.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To John Hall Wheelock
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 1, 1937

I always thought Denman Ross’s portrait of me rather absurd.1 It makes a giant with a Japanese mask of a poor ordinary Caucasian, far from tall but rather amiable. Ross was an amateur painter and not in any way gifted; but this picture adorns the College, and you were quite right in reproducing it.

1. Ross’s 1909 portrait of Santayana hangs in Emerson Hall at Harvard.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ