Author: David Spiech Page 99 of 283

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

To Henry Seidel Canby
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. January 16, 1930

Dear Canby,

That opiferous cheque for $100 which you said you had directed your secretary to send me has never arrived. Isn’t it yet ripe, or has it gone astray?

I was a little surprised at the tone of Lippmann’s reply to my article. I thought he would be pleased, and certainly I had liked his book very much; but apparently he requires us all to share his vague hopes of “high religious” worldly organization, and is angry if we are attached to some different political ideal. I am sorry. And I was also a little vexed at the preliminary anecdote, not for the tone of it this time, but because it was historically inaccurate and missed the point of the story. I remember the incident very well: it must have been in 1907-8, when I had the beard which you have immortalized in your Review, but which was shaved off some 20 years ago. I enclose my official portrait, in case you wish to exhibit me again when I die, or before. But to return: I said in my lecture that if some angel without a carnal body appeared to me and assured me that he was perfectly happy on prayer and music, I should congratulate him, but shouldn’t care to imitate him. Some of the class laughed: and at the end of the hour, Lee Simonson (what has become of him?) showed me a caricature of myself, looking very dissipated and very French, repeating those words to a vast female angel of a very insipid sentimentality in the heavens. These particular youths seem to have found it comic that I should always carry a stick and gloves, and no coat: but I was a good pedestrian in those days and that was natural to me. The point of my lecture was not, as Lippmann says, absorbtion in pure Being, but the relativity of ethical ideals: which I wish he had taken more to heart. But Simonson’s sketch was amusing, and has made me remember the incident.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 15, 1931

Dear Strong,

Cory arrived three days ago, giving me rather a shock with his thinness and weakness. He seemed yesterday decidedly firmer on his legs, and he seems to eat well and with relish, so that we may hope that he may recover, with time, his normal energy, which is not very great; and the fact that he uses it up so intensively at certain moments, makes him all the more liable to run down afterwards. I think—and he says his doctor in Florence thought so too—that he needs a long and complete change, and rest from all persistent work. I am proposing to him that he stay here for the rest of the winter; of course, if he preferred to go to Rapallo or elsewhere later, he would be free to do so; but I should like you to let me take over the responsibility for looking after him for six, or at least three, months, because with me he will know that he isn’t expected to do anything but vegetate. Also the climate is more favourable here for a convalescent, and while he remains at this hotel he will be well looked after in the matter of food, hot baths, etc.

I am sorry if this plan interferes with the discussions which you have been carrying on; but in any case Cory isn’t fit for carrying them on at present. If you obliged him to do so, I am afraid it might have consequences for him, nervous and religious, which you would deeply regret.

He is getting desperate about technical details, and inclines to becoming a Catholic. He needs to be left free to recover his balance. Irwin Edman is here, very enthusiastic. I have caught a cold, and am staying in the house to try to avoid complications.

Yours ever,

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.