Author: David Spiech Page 263 of 283

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Via S. Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. July 19, 1946

Dear E. P.

I am glad to hear directly from you. What people told me when I inquired was meagre and contradictory. Now that I have your address I can ask Scribner to send you my new book, or any other obtainable book that you may want. In an anthology sent me I find your ballad about Christ quà gangster: it is a nice contrast to my new book on the idea of Christ as pure spirit in the flesh. Mine would perhaps turn your stomach, yours only makes me laugh.

My copy of the Realm of Spirit has not been returned, or was lost on the way, but now it doesn’t at all matter because I have another version in the big single edition of Realms of Being that Scribner has issued and which is a success both as an imposing volume and as a means of diffusing my speculations, now precisely when so much romantic nonsense has lost the hypnotic power.

I hope your health and prospects of returning to Italy are improving.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941–1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To George Sturgis
9, Avenue de l’Observatoire
Paris. July 18, 1927

Dear George,

I have your letter of July 6, and a previous one also, and have seen with pleasure that all goes well with you. As for me, I am as usual. I arrived after the excitement about Lindberg; found Strong here, who left for Switzerland not long after; and later Margaret Strong has been here, but we lead a strange life together in this apartment, hardly ever seeing each other. I believe she is moving into her new house at Saint Germain in a day or two, but her ways, like the Lord’s, are past finding out. Don’t think I say this in any spirit of complaint: she gives me no trouble, and supplies me with food and service, which I don’t pay for when she is here; but she hides in an odd way; it is suspected that she is secretly engaged to be married, and altogether she is a puzzle to her friends.

. . . A German friend dines with me (at restaurants) every evening: he is a friend of my friend Baron Westenholz of Hamburg, and my guest in Paris, although I had to get a room for him at a hotel near by, as I couldn’t put him up in the apartment, occupied by Margaret, her dog, her maid, and sundry bales and heaps of carpets, stuffs, blankets, antique furniture, and bandboxes in ever corner, on all the chairs, and behind every door. My own room, I need hardly say, is sacred, and I live happy in it, like a monk in his cell.

It is decided that I shall not go to Avila this summer. Your aunt Susie and Celedonio wrote giving me a formal invitation—too formal, perhaps–but it seemed to me safer not to accept it, as it was at least possible that I should have been in their way and given them too much trouble. This decision leaves me free to remain here quietly until the middle of October when I shall doubtless return to Italy, either directly to Rome, or stopping on the way to pay a visit to Strong at Fiesole.

Love to all from

G Santayana

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.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Oxford, England. July 17, 1901

Dear Susie

I have been in England a week or ten days, waiting to make definite plans for the summer before writing to you. They are hardly made yet, but on the point which most concerns you, whether I shall get as far as Avila or not in my wanderings, I may say that I don’t think it likely. I must absolutely do some solid work, and unless I get fagged and bored, so that work becomes impossible, I mean to stay here and keep at it all summer . . .

. . . I staid in America unusually late this year and had a horrid time. The heat was unspeakable, and after my lectures were over I was bored and restless, longing to get away. What kept me was a function at the Phi Beta Kappa, where they had asked me to read some verses, and as that is locally regarded as an honour, I was obliged to accept and stay. But it will never happen again, so that in future years I may hope to have a longer vacation and more time for a visit to you.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, Ss.W.1
Cortina, Italy.  July 16, 1939

Dear Mr. Wheelock

The title Triton Edition has become historical in an unexpected way. I don’t mean that the whole edition has been sold, although I understand that such is practically the fact. I mean that Pinchetti, the proprietor of the Hotel Bristol, who is a personage of note and said to be rich, has decided to pull the house down and rebuild it in the latest style—no doubt seven or eight storeys instead of three, and severe concrete, brass, and glass architecture, to suit the spirit of the age. So that I shall no longer see the Triton of Bernini from my windows; at least, not for two years, because Pinchetti says that he hopes (unless heaven is then my permanent mansion) to welcome me back as the first guest in his new establishment.

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

To George Sturgis
Hotel Savoia,
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 15, 1937

If I were superstitious, I might now attribute to divine interposition my odd reluctance to sign that will prepared last year. Here, quite unexpectedly, an occasion presents itself to use the $25,000 coming from the novel for purposes of the same friendly or public-spirited sort as those of my proposed will, but far more concrete and pressing. Let us annul the legacies to Mercedes, Mrs. Toy, Onderdonk, and Cory, as well as the added gift of $10,000 to Harvard for my Fellowship fund. A perfectly ideal incumbent for that Fellowship appears in Bertie Russell, old and almost penniless, but still brimming with undimmed genius and suppressed immortal work’s!

You know, I suppose, who Bertie is: a leading mathematician, philosopher, militant pacifist, wit, and martyr, but unfortunately addicted to marrying and divorcing not wisely but too often. He is now Earl Russell—that is his legal name—being brother and heir to my late life-long friend (the original, in part, of Lord Jim in my novel). They are grandsons of Lord John Russell, the reforming prime minister, and both ultra-radical in religion and politics. . . . Bertie for a long period was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where I used to see him almost daily in 1896-7; but he had to resign during the war, having been put in prison for pacifist agitation, as his brother had been put in prison for bigamy. Jail-birds! but only out of pure aristocratic freedom of thought and conduct.

. . . I don’t agree with him in politics or in philosophy, yet we are good intellectual friends; our minds are too different, also our fields, for much friction, and we can enjoy each other’s performances without envy. Now, as to what I should like to do. It is to send Bertie £1,000 or $5000 a year for three or four years, but anonymously. This anonymity is important, because he and his friends think of me as a sort of person in the margin, impecunious, and egoistic; and it would humiliate Bertie to think that I was supporting him. And all [his] bevy of relations—especially the Smiths who are great gossips—would exaggerate and misinterpret everything in a disgusting way.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.