Category: LETTERS Page 1 of 274

To George Sturgis
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall
London, S.W.1
Venice, May 13, 1924

Thank you for your letter of April 28 with its enclosures. I am answering Scofield Thayer’s inquiries. I hardly think my autobiography would be interesting, as there have been no events in my life and I have known few distinguished people. My novel will contain most of my observations on human nature, freed from personalities; and besides I am writing something which I call “Persons and Places” in which I mean to give some account, historically accurate but selective, of some scenes and characters that have remained in my memory.  I tremble to think what nonsense Miss Munsterberg may be writing about me and my father and mother: and Thayer will not be much nearer the mark. Perhaps I will after all follow your suggestion in composing if not an autobiography, at least a chronology of my life, with a few notes about the leading facts, so as to correct the inventions that may see the light in the impertinent press. I foresee that when I die there will be a crop of stories, most of them sentimentally benevolent and reminiscent, and some a little spiteful, about my supposed life and character: and although all this will blow over in a few weeks, it may be as well that there should be an authoritative document to which anyone may appeal who may be really interested in the facts. If I write such a chronology I will send you a copy, because (as this incident shows) you too are not very well informed about this branch of our family history.

I came to Venice from Rome about a week ago, accompanied by two of the Chetwynd children, a boy of eighteen and a girl of sixteen. Their mother, formerly Augusta Robinson of New York, and sister of a great friend of mine, was detained in Rome by the illness of another child, and was glad to have me take charge of the two elder ones, so that they might not miss seeing Venice. It is rather a curious experience to stand in this way in loco parentis to two young persons, and I find it pleasant enough, especially as they look after me much more than I look after them: but I shall not be sorry when, in two or three days, I regain my usual bachelor solitude.

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 Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, May 11, 1951.

Dear Clemens,
Many thanks for your letter of May 4th with the good-humoured review in Time, which is the best I have seen so far, much better than those by the Professors Hook and Krutch in the New York Times and Herald Tribune. My new book is too complicated for a hasty reader to take in at once, and people are accustomed to be guided in public affairs by their feelings, without considering origins or tendencies in the actual events. I am content, for the moment, to be regarded as a mere curiosity.

Tom Sawyer arrived in due time and has been religiously read from cover to cover. It is hardly as suggestive of Don Quixote as the latter part of Huckleberry Finn, but I will consider both books together and in that respect only in my paper, which is partly written but not quite finished even in the written part. You are not in a hurry and I am very slow now at everything. I have not had the “flu”, but only a recrudescence of my catarrh, and general fatigue, so that I have given up receiving visitors, except old friends. Please don’t send me cheques for $1. We are not in business. I will send Tom Sawyer back at once.

Yours sincerely,
G.S.

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 Mary Annette Beauchamp Russell
Hotel Bristol
Rome, May 10, 1932

It is very kind of you to encourage me to visit you in your new garden.  This summer, unfortunately, I have been roped in by the professional philosophers, and have promised to read papers at The Hague and in London, at the celebration of the tercentenary of Spinoza and Locke respectively. I tremble—with a pleasing terror, as if I were to begin my first travels—at these last journeys and last, positively last, appearances in public.

The idea of going to live near you is firmly lodged in my sub-consciousness, and it will not take any great revolution in the state of my anchorage here for me to try that new port. But for the moment I am rooted and busy, and can’t pull myself out.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript:  The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino CA