Category: LETTERS Page 15 of 274

To Rosamond and George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 28, 1936

I am being treated very kindly by the world in my old age. Even an unknown friend I have in the Michigan State prison, called Wayne Joseph Husted, No 35571, sent me a Christmas card. Years ago he honoured me with a psychological essay, really very good, on prison life, and since then we occasionally exchange civilities. I am now sending him The Last Puritan. I hope it won’t be stopped by the authorities as dangerous to convict morals.

The reception of this book has been curious. I don’t think many people really like it, yet it has had, as you know, a vast success. The other day I received a Swedish translation. The German version, with the nasty things I say about Germans and Goethe left out by agreement, announces that it is translated by two ladies, aus dem Amerikanischen. Fancy that, when I am so proud of my Received Standard English. But I gathered from what I could make out of the Swedish wrapper, and from other hints, that the interest taken in the “novel” by the Nordics is entirely scientific. Style, humour, etc, are beneath their notice: but they say the book is an important document on American life; and as America, I mean the U.S, is important for them commercially and racially, they wish it to be studied in their country. Perhaps it will be quoted, as a warning, by the Nazi professors of sociology. This, like my convict friend, falls to me by divine grace, with no effort or merit on my part. We have uses we never intended.

I have had a touch of catarrh, very slight, as the injections my Italian doctor gives me seem to keep off the worst; I am now quite well and working with gusto, as I almost see my plans as to books completely carried out. Here is an egotistical letter, all about trifles interesting only to [across] myself: but the great questions like the war in Spain, and the Simpson affair, are too sad to write about.

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 George Sturgis
New York Hotel
Nice, France. December 27, 1922

If my health doesn’t play me false, I hope to have time for finishing all my half-written works, before the end comes. I shall turn out to have been a prolific writer; and if there should ever be a complete edition of my works it will look like one of those regiments in uniform that stand on the shelves of libraries which are not disturbed except to be dusted. However, I have no hopes of rivalling Voltaire whose complete works in 69 volumes I possess in Paris, having got them second hand in a very nice edition (1793, I think) for 400 francs.

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 Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 26, 1910

Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me…. No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit”  which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. Christmas Day, 1933

What you say about Eliot’s lectures is exactly what I felt. He wasn’t inspired. He didn’t make the subject personal enough. If he had explained why Ezra Pound is “magnificent,” and why he himself would prefer an illiterate public for his poetry, it might have been enlightening: and he would have had plenty of occasions to show how this newly discovered essence of living poetry, which had been running underground from Guido Cavalcanti to Ezra Pound, was suppressed or possibly occasionally burst out unintentionally even in the interval. But Eliot is entangled in his own coils. How can he publish such an indecent article as that of Ezra Pound in this number of the Criterion, which I send today? And how can he suffer the crudities and absurdities of the article by Hoffman Nickeson to pass uncorrected? This article is interesting as a picture of Babbit; but grotesque as an exhibition of critical judgement.

Fourteen more chapters of The Last Puritan are finished and being typed. Shall I send you one copy to Bournemouth, or will the MS merely encumber your luggage, which must already be rather a nuisance? When the whole is done, I count on reading it all over with you, or asking you to send me your notes on it, before finally sending it to Constable and getting his opinion about immediate publication. There is therefore no need that you should bother about it now, if other things are on your mind I haven’t forgotten your comment on my “whiskered” phrases, like “acquatic exercise.” I am trying to humanize them: but sometimes they are meant humorously, [across ] and sometimes justified (when the author is speaking) for the sake of variety, rhythm, or colour. After all every word has a proper use sometimes.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas Eve, 1938

My dear Clemens,

All you do and say seems to illustrate a theory which, in my intention, applies only to the last and highest reaches of the Spiritual life, and which I myself am incapable of practising. The truth no longer interests you unless you can turn it into a pleasing fiction. This interview with me I suppose is the same of which, years ago, you sent me a rough draft, where I suggested some corrections in view of that lower and servile criterion, truth. But probably in the interval the force of inspiration has been again at work, and you have produced a sheer poem . . .

I return your Foreword, as I keep no files, the extreme modesty of my apartment (it’s not very cheap) precludes anything but a waste-paper basket.

I am at work on my last volume of formal philosophy, The Realm of Spirit; but if life lasts even longer, I daresay I shall find it impossible not to keep on writing something or other.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.