Category: LETTERS Page 173 of 274

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. December 15, 1936

I quite understand that arranging the Triton Edition, with so many disparate parts, must have been a troublesome task. I am not sensitive about small omissions, such as the sub-title or the Greek motto to the Life of Reason. The origin of such details is often an accident, and sometimes, as in rhyming, an accidental compulsion may yield a happier result. I think, for instance, that transforming my marginal summaries, as you have done, into titles for the paragraphs may be a positive improvement, giving these summaries more importance; and they have cost me a good deal of thought.

Little, Brown & Co have sent me a copy of The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand. The book seems a sort of parallel to The Last Puritan. Is it so intentionally or by accident, I wonder. It reflects well the artificial way in which some people spoke; a sort of careful school-master’s language and clergyman.s sentiments; but it seems to me more provincial in spirit. I mean, the hero’s mind, than my old Boston friends were, who knew and understood everything (like my Peter Alden) while maintaining a great restraint in their actions. Is the book liked?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ

To Laetitia Bolton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. December 14, 1936

Dear Miss Bolton,

The Late George Apley, at once excited my interest, as certain parts, beginning with the sub-title, suggested that it might be a parallel or corrective of to my Last Puritan. At first the hypocritical style puzzled me a little: Was the real author laughing at the fictitious author, a prim biographer discreetly leaving out everything interesting,or was he that prim biographer himself? I see now, on finishing the book, that the intention is tenderly satirical. Life consists of learning how to be unhappy without worrying too much about it. I don’t believe he ever liked half of what he did, but simply everlastingly carried on, like the British Army. Everything people like seems to be a substitute for what they really would have liked; and they talk, or rather write (since the book is composed chiefly of letters) as if they were speaking or writing an acquired foreign language. In comparing this picture with my memory of Boston society, it seems to me not so much exaggerated as too external, too verbal. Nice Boston people often talked like this, but they had more sense and more heart: they knew and understood everything, while keeping themselves personally under conventional restraints. Mr. Marquand’s hero seems to me not so much Bostonian as provincial. However, the book is a document, and I am much obliged to you for having sent it to me.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
New York Hotel
Nice, France. December 13, 1922

I am a little less satisfied with Nice than I was when I last wrote. My cough has come on again, and although I hope to stave it off by taking every precaution at once, I think the rapid changes here from the hot sun to the cold and damp night air are rather bad for my sort of complaint: and also for comfort, because I have seldom felt so wretchedly cold as I do here in the evening, in spite of all winter clothes and a great-coat. There is central heating, but not very efficacious at all hours, and I have to wrap up even when the window is closed. However, I am going to stick it out, as I am not sure that I could find anything better, and in a few weeks doubtless the more balmy weather, which I remember at Monte Carlo years ago, will come upon us. Meantime, I am going to try not going out at all at night, but having a light supper in my room, or in the café which there is on the ground floor.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 12, 1928

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen’s copy of Lucifer arrived yesterday, and after examining it with curiosity, I sent it back to him this morning duly decorated with my autograph. There is a supposed portrait of me in India ink, looking very perfect and professorial in a coal-black beard, like this; and there are water colour sketches in the margin of the different personages in the play. The artist is not modern: he makes for the pretty, naturalistic, and conventional, but on the whole less absurd than might have been expected. Christ, Lucifer, and Zeus were the worst, and the ladies looked like opera-bouffe goddesses, but the Hermes was nice, like the flying Mercury, and the little devils like characters in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. But they had rebound the volume in a vulgar red, and cut down the margins! What folly!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 11, 1938

One of the great disadvantages of wisdom, at least of my sort, is that it is useless except for keeping wise, especially when wisdom is combined with advanced age. If I were forty years younger there is nothing I should like better than to take Bob about myself all next winter, not to Sweden and Norway, he could go there in summer with other friends, but to France, Switzerland, Southern Germany, Italy, and Greece. I could, at that age, have gone about with him so that he shouldn’t have got into trouble, and given him hints or even lessons in French or Spanish or Italian, enough for a beginner, to help out what he would pick up for himself among the natives. As it is, however, I can’t move, never go out at night, and must keep my time and mind free for finishing my last book of philosophy. You understand that, of course.

A curious thing . . . has happened to my Last Puritan. It has been translated into three languages; but which do you suppose? German, Swedish, and Danish. Why, I asked the Swedish editor who came here with his wife to see me, why do you, who all know English so well, need to translate such a book of mine into your language? Because, he said, English books are too dear for us to buy. A translation in paper covers is much cheaper, and can be sold. But that is only one point. There is also the problem why these Nordic people alone are interested in the Last Puritan. And my inquiries lead me to think that it is for two reasons. First, they are interested in America politically and sociologically, and they think my book is a document. Second, they are interested in the Nordic soul, their own, which they can’t understand; and they wonder if a semi-outsider, like me, mightn’t throw some light on the subject. And one or two German reviewers have actually taken my poor Oliver Alden as a scientific or psychoanalytic problem, growing hot about it, and even angry with me for not really understanding him, or understanding him too well!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA