Author: David Spiech Page 82 of 283

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 21, 1945

Dear Cory:

I am distressed to find, by your letter of Dec. 28, that you have received none of my letters. I have not written you many, but they covered all the essential points about the book and the royalties and also congratulated you on your marriage. I said, I remember, that long ago when I heard that your books were at Mrs. Batten’s, I foresaw that your future was there also. But will it eventually be in England or in New York? I see you are faithful to the shadow of Columbia. Is there any substance in that shadow?

As to George Sturgis, it is one of those numerous blows not to my heart but to my peace and sense of security which events have inflicted on me in these last years. I tell the Sisters that I was never happier than in their house, and this is true in the sense that I was never more at peace with myself and with the world, speculatively considered. But in action, dynamically, the world has inflicted some rebuffs on me that I hardly expected, making me trouble about money, trouble about politics, forbidding me my little comforts and indulgences: sitting in the sun, asking people to luncheon, getting interesting books, and living in a well-ordered country. Having George Sturgis to look after my money was a feature in this little garden of Epicurus; a hedge that cut off the vista over the dung-hills and the cabbages. All that is sadly fallen, and I hardly expect to live to see it restored: perhaps that sort of thing is not destined to return to earth for a thousand years. That is a bit sad, but good for me. It forces me to lift my eyes a little higher, to a more distant horizon. Incidently, it has made me thin, and very much older. You may have seen some of the photographs that these Army men have been taking. They have come to see me in great numbers, most of them very simple and kind, some real treasures, like Freidenberg, who got vol. II of Persons & Places to Scribner; and that is not the only favour he has done. He has made me presents of good things to eat, and of tea! And the religious book (very insidious!) that I have been writing also has raised my spirits. We must see heaven in the midst of earth, just above it, accompanying earth as beauty accompanies it. We must not try to get heaven pure, afterwards, or instead. Christ is essentially a spirit of the earth. He is a tragic hero. Basta.

Yours affly,
G Santayana

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 Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli
Venice. January 20, 1940

Dear E. P.
This mustn’t go on for ever, but I have a word to say, in the direction of fathoming your potential philosophy.

When is a thing not static? When it jumps or when it makes you jump? Evidently the latter, in the case of Chinese ideograms, you being your thoughts. And these jumps are to particulars, not regressive, to general terms. Classifications are not poetry. I grant that, but think that classifications may be important practically; e.g. poisons; how much? What number? There is another kind of regression towards materials, causes, genealogies. Pudding may not suggest pie, but plums, cook, fire. These are generalities that classify not data but conditions for producing the data. When you ask for jumps to other particulars, you don’t mean (I suppose) any other particulars, although your tendency to jump is so irresistible that the bond between the particulars jumped to is not always apparent. It is a mental grab-bag. A latent classification or a latent genetic connection would seem to be required, if utter miscellaneousness is to be avoided.

As to the Jews, I too like the Greek element in Christendom better than the Jewish; yet the Jews, egotistically and fantastically, were after a kind of good, milk and honey and money. That gives them a hold on reality that can’t be denied. Reality is not miscellaneous sensations, but matter generating everything else under specific conditions. The Jews made a mistake in putting Jehovah instead of matter at the top: but now they have corrected that.
Yours, G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Sylvia Hortense Bliss
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London
Rome. January 19, 1935

My dear Miss Bliss,

I should have thanked you sooner for “Sea Level” if I hadn’t followed your injunction to read it by bits; after which I have reread it more or less as a whole, in search of your philosophy. You must have felt that I should sympathize with this, else you wouldn’t have thought of sending me the book. Your perfect freedom from religious or mock-religious presumptions—and also from hostility to religion—your clear view of truth, and your sound naturalism do appeal to me very much. I have always felt, what you express in regard to trees especially, that our relation to the rest of nature is fraternal, and that the possession of consciousness or (if we possess it) of reason doesn’t justify us in regarding plants, animals, or stars as unreal, or as made for our express benefit. And the sea, though you speak little of it, has always been a great object lesson to me, a monitor of the fundamental flux, of the loom of nature not being on the human scale. So far, if I don’t misrepresent you, we agree. But I am ill conditioned to appreciate your knowledge and love of flowers and of the countryside generally; and I have been so immersed all my life in religious speculation, in literature, in history, and in travel; I have lived so exclusively in towns and universities, and amid political revolutions and wars, that your simple idyllic world, and your intense individualism, leave me rather with a sense of emptiness. And haven’t you that sensation yourself? I don’t know what trials you may have had to endure or what misfortunes; your individualism is wholly philosophical, it touches the Ego in its transcendental capacity, and you tell us nothing of your own person; but your tone in speaking of death, of cities, and of the mediation of other minds between you and nature, seems to me overcharged with distaste and melancholy. Aren’t men also a part of nature? And if we could really penetrate into the life of matter, shouldn’t we find it everywhere essentially as wasteful, groping, and self-tormented as is the life of mankind? And on this fundamental irrationality, human society builds so many charming things—music, for one, which you appreciate—but also material and moral splendours of every description. The refraction of truth in human philosophies, for instance, is no mere scandal: it composes a work of human art, and partakes of the force both of truth and of imagination. It seems to me a pity, therefore, to leave it out of one’s field of interest.

Let me add that I appreciate the level dignity of your style and diction. You are doubtless aware that you often lapse into blank verse, and that, if you chose, you could print your book in that form with very little alteration. You have preferred a more modern arrangement, doubtless for good reasons; but you will deceive nobody into mistaking you for a real modern, like Mr. Ezra Pound, for instance, whose Quia Pauper Amavi I had been reading immediately before receiving your book. But though your restrained voice may not attract attention so scandalously, I am sure that you will give more pleasure to those who do hear you, and will be more gratefully remembered.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John Berryman
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 18, 1951

Dear Mr. Berryman,

It is seldom now that I read a book from cover to cover, as I have done yours; but your note mentioning Stickney as representing the opposite horn in the division of American letters from the one represented by Stephen Crane, interested me from the beginning, and still more the fact that you are a friend of Robert Lowell whose enigmatic person and career have preoccupied me strangely during the last few years. Might not your analysis of Crane (of whom I knew nothing) throw light on the problem of Lowell?

As to Crane, you have given me a clear impression, with which I am content for the purpose. He was a sensitive, half educated moral waif with a burdened imagination, proper to a Puritan in rebellion. Had he been well educated, like Stickney and like Oliver in my “Last Puritan,” he might not have drawn inspiration, as you show that Crane did, from primitive savage feelings, and his verses (which please me more than what “seem to” be his prose works) might have lost their power, as Stickney’s did. For Stickney was not at heart on the classic side. Classicism, and his French accomplishments and insights took the place for him of Puritanism in Crane. They disturbed and annoyed him, and incidentally, I suspect, made him afraid of me in his last period as a dangerous influence. He wanted to be a pure unpolluted whole-hearted American, tied to the mast like Ulysses; Europe and classicism were his Scylla and Carybdis. Now Lowell is well educated, self-educated in a great measure, and rebellious, but rebellious at the modern conventional America, yet getting his inspiration and his images, so far, exclusively from the American landscape and, as it were, from its margins, like French Canada and the Catholicism of W. 32nd Street. That he should have taken to Catholicism at all, a Boston Lowell, astonished me, and I was not surprised that he should have weakened in that direction. What Europe and native Catholicism will mean to him, I don’t know. I am myself an unbeliever and ready to resign everything that I care about, and clear the field for the next civilisation; but I was never passionate or angry with anything, so that the storms of the Crane and Lowell characters do not seem to me normal or likely to inspire important works. It is the ensuing calm, if we survive, that yields the true vision.

I am greatly obliged to you for your book and should like to learn more.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: University of Minnesota Libraries, St. Paul, MN.

To August H. Wagner
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 17, 1937

In my Reason in Religion, in the chapters on A Future Life and on Ideal Immortality, you will find all I have to say on the subject of your letter. You are free, as far as I am concerned, to quote from those chapters.—The only new light that I have seen since that now distant date comes from the German philosopher Heidegger, who defines death (which can be nothing for experience) as the wholeness of life. Death is only the fact that, like a piece of music, a life has a particular character and limits. You will find this elaborately set forth, on idealistic grounds, in Heidegger’s works.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Robert Scheuermann, Beverly Hills, CA