Author: David Spiech Page 5 of 283

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 20, 1951.

Dear Clemens

Today I have sent back your copy of my “Middle Span”, with an inscription, but not with any compliments to Mark Twain, because having finished reading Huckleberry Finn, I have an idea of a greater adventure, which is to compose an essay, which you may print in your magazine if you like, on the relation of Tom Sawyer to Don Quixote. But for this I must first read the preceding book on Tom Sawyer especially. Robert Lowell, who has been here again during the past week, tells me that it is not so good a book as Huckleberry Finn; but I am not interested in giving marks to works of art or to their authors as if they were being examined for recommendation to office. What I want is to understand whether the love of adventure in Tom Sawyer is a romantic passion, with a corresponding idealistic faith (as in Don Quixote, who was mad) or only a love of mischief, of risk, and of swagger as in every schoolboy. My superficial impression, so far, is the Mark Twain is a thorough sceptic, and not a real prophet of personal independence vs. social convention of every sort. Huck Finn is a string of episodes, like Don Quixote, and a thriller and a farce by turns, with tender emotion thrown in, which Cervantes lacks altogether.

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.

To Benjamin De Casseres
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 19, 1936

Dear Mr. De Casseres

I have read your booklet on Exhibitionism with pleasure, sometimes bursting into a hearty laugh. You have the verve and the transcendental courage of the old American free lances, the Emersons, Thoreaus, Mark Twains, and Walt Whitmans. But is the substance of your doctrine other than the doctrine of Maya?For my part, I agree that we are of imagination all compact, and that our minds clothe or exhibit something else, that alone is active and lasting. You call it ourselves, I call it matter, others call it Brahma. Is there, functionally, any difference?

Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Grand Hotel,
Rome. February 18, 1941

I am in a soft mood, partly due to the long siege of my catarrh. I had a relapse and my heart seems to have become feebler; but I had no fever to speak of, even when the cough was at its worst, and later my pulse got down below 60 and my temperature down to 36; Sabbatucci has been attentive. I had a nurse for six nights. She talked a lot (I coughed less when I talked) and complained that there are troppi bambini: she had to work hard to give her two boys a start in life. I have been reading Terence, Latin with an Italian version on the opposite page. Lovely, lovely feeling, to bring tears to the eyes, but not much wit. If Shakespeare had taken up The Adelphi he would have made something exquisite out of it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 17, 1945

I am now writing this by an open French window in the sun, already springlike here at this season. So that although we are deprived of many old conveniences or luxuries, we are not more uncomfortable than everybody used to be always two hundred years ago. My experience of life in Avila has made the little privations of the war seem quite tolerable.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 16, 1947

We have been having a severe winter with cold rain and little sun since Christmas; but I have kept very well. It is only my work that has suffered because without the sun I felt more like lounging in my chaise longue, well wrapped up, and reading, than like sitting up to write. But there is no hurry about my political book which must last me until my wits give out, as this is the last number in my programme. However, if the lights don’t go out when it is finished, I have an impromptu ready for the audience, who being only future readers, can’t run away visibly. It is a set of afternoon lectures for imaginary ladies on The False Steps of Philosophy: would be better in French: Les Faux Pas de la Philosophie. She began her deviations from the straight path very early, with Socrates, whom I should show not to have been such a sound moralist as he is reputed to be, and really a rogue. After him, I should expose (pleasantly of course) the errors of Saint Paul, in preaching total depravity (while dear Saint John was preaching universal love) and making Christ the Scapegoat instead of the Lamb. Then I should skip to Descartes who misled the whole chorus of modern philosophers, except Spinoza, by making them fall in love with themselves. But all this is a waste of time, because I shall never get to it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.