Category: LETTERS Page 48 of 274

To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. May 26, 1940

Dear Mrs. Potter

You don’t know how much I am touched by your constancy in thinking of me in these troubled times, and wishing to let me take refuge in a safe place. But I am afraid that, morally and perhaps even materially, you are suffering more from the war in America than I suffer in Italy. We have three meatless days a week, but “meat” does not include ham, tongue, bacon, sweetbreads, brains, liver, or sausage, so that there is no lack of animal substance provided for us; and coal is going to be rationed next winter, but I shall have a sitting-room with a fire-place where I can burn wood, if the central heating proves insufficient. The summer I expect to spend at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, as far as possible from any military front; and in the winter, as I have no settled abode, I shall see what the circumstances are, and choose my lodgings accordingly. And although it is announced that Italy may come at any moment into the war, people seem perfectly calm and cheerful; and my own state of mind is infinitely calmer than it was during the other war, when I was in England, and so distressed that I couldn’t work—at least in the last two years—but only read Dickens and walked in the country, having bread and cheese and a pint of “bitter” in some country inn for luncheon—there was nothing else to be had—and writing melancholy soliloquies in a small notebook. Now I can go on with my regular occupations undisturbed, and don’t expect to hear any bombs dropping, as I did in London during the first Zeppelin raid. All this is horribly casual and egotistical: yet if I went to America I should be distracted by the hysterical excitement which seems to prevail there, and my work— for I actually have prescribed work to do for a book of joint authorship to be published in America—would be interrupted and embittered. The only danger for me is that the U.S. should come in and I shouldn’t be able to get any money: but there are ways of circumventing even that difficulty, if it arises. My Spanish friends also urge me to join them; but there too I should be terribly disturbed, and the journey alone would seriously upset me. So don’t worry about me, dear Mrs. Potter, but hope for the early return of peace.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

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.

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons New York.
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts.  May 25, 1904

Gentlemen:

I am sending you a first installment of my magnum opus “The Life of Reason”. There are four more Books, which will follow in a few weeks if you are favourably disposed towards the idea of publishing them. I send this part ahead, as I am anxious to have all arrangements for publication made before I leave this country, as I am to be away for fifteen months.

This book is not like my former ones, a mere incidental performance. It practically represents all I have to say of any consequence, so that I feel a special interest in having it done in a way that shall express its own character and suggest the spirit in which I would have it read. My ideas may seem to you wrong, and of course I shall not insist on them if they prove to be really unreasonable; but if objections to them rest only on financial considerations, I should be inclined to run the risk and insure you against loss in any way that seems to you suitable, provided the liability is not beyond my means.

What I desire is chiefly this: that the five books be bound separately, making five small volumes, so that they may be easily held and carried about, and may also, at least eventually, be sold separately as well as in sets. The remaining parts are on Society, Religion, Art, and Science respectively, and might well be independent books. A system runs through them all, but there is no formal continuity; or only such as might well exist between three plays in a trilogy. The page might well be like that in the “Sense of Beauty” (better than in the Interpretations) or even smaller and more closely set: I don’t think large print really attractive: I hate a sprawling page. A compact page with a rather generous margin would be my ideal; and in this margin might be the running summary I have provided. This might also be instead, if you thought it better, at the upper corner of each page, or in an indentation (as in the Sense of Beauty). But in whatever form it appears it is a very important feature, because it is meant not merely to help the eye and carry along the thought over the details, but often to be a commentary as well as a summary and throw a side light on the subject.

The binding might be in more than one form: I should be glad to have the book as cheap as possible so that students might buy it. Why are hardly any books sold in paper covers in this country? Boards surely are a respectable garment, and seem to suggest that the body is more than the raiment. I confess, however, that I don’t know what difference in price would be involved in different sorts of binding, and I should be much interested if you would tell me.

Proof would have to be sent to me abroad; but there is no need of sending the MS with it, and the delay, once the operation has begun, is insignificant.

I shall probably not sail until the middle of July and shall be once or twice in New York in the interval, when I could easily call upon you.

Yours very truly G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. May 24, 1918

Dear Smith

Trivia is hardly a book to be read consecutively and only once: nevertheless I have done so, and I need hardly say with the greatest pleasure. It is not only the style and tone, so familiar and at the same time so exquisite, that delights me, for you know I can’t very well separate style from thought: it seems to me that the form in which a thought is cast is a part of its quality, and that the quality of the idea itself is only a deeper sort of form or style of expression: it too, like verbal form, expresses a reaction of the mind and its habits upon objects, rather the objects themselves; for ideas are not objects at all, but only views of objects. In your manner, therefore, I find and relish your way of thinking. Where did your get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue. And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. But I am afraid you don’t quite think so, are not quite reconciled to yourself and the world as you find them, and feel that it is ignominious to grow old and slant your umbrella against the wind. Now, if what is our inevitable fate is ignominious, I understand what Bridges says of Trivia, that it is the most immoral book ever written, although every word of it can be read aloud. But I don’t think so: it is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental. Yet the devil of it that, if in being that you don’t suggest or keep in reserve a firm background, a religion or philosophy that enables you to face and to judge all these small delights, and say to them [I enjoy] then the thing becomes ultimate and complete for you against your will. That is the danger and the trouble with Trivia: you must have a philosophy, even in fooling, or the fooling will be spoiled and made bitter by having to take the place of the philosophy that is wanting: and the sweet treble will crack. What I wish you would do is to write another Trivia, or two more (since Trivia had three faces) and make your bow to Luna and Hecate also, after having shown us Diana tripping across the flickering glades. Humility is not weak, it is just. Heraclitus said that justice presided over the flux, because such things didn’t deserve to last for ever.

You see I take Trivia very seriously, and I hope you will think it a compliment, and not mere ponderosity on my part.

Yours

G. S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. May 23, 1940

In about a month I expect to move to the Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo, and remain there until September. My passport is being renewed for another year by the Spanish consul at Rome, very obligingly, without my having to present myself, as there is now no Spanish consul in Venice. This makes my official position easy; even if the war extends to these parts, I can always find a quiet comfortable place, if Rome isn’t safe, or warm enough (they are limiting the coal for furnaces) like Sorrento or Rapallo, where I now have a friend, the ultra-modern American poet Ezra Pound. The only difficulty would be if I couldn’t draw money from America. I have thought out all the possibilities in that case. You may remember my solid reasons for not wishing to go to Spain, and indeed the journey may easily become impossible. But it might be possible for you to send money to Spain (which is sure to remain neutral) say to Rafael or Pepe, who might forward it to me in Italy. Or if that is impracticable, and you think the U.S. is coming into the war, you might (in time) send me a largish lump sum, say $6000 or $10,000 to be put in a bank here, or kept in a stocking, to pay my way until peace returned. These may all be crazy and unnecessary fancies of mine; but I report them so that you may be stimulated, if the occasion arises, to think up something better. Or I might simply draw out the whole of my new letter of credit when it arrives.

I am very well and happy (in spite of the war) at having my final book safely in print, both in England and in the U.S. and only an entertaining answer to my critics to finish for Prof. Schilpp’s big book about my philosophy. That done, I shall be free to amuse myself with my autobiography.

I am sorry for the alarm and anxiety that the war is causing to you all in America. Here the atmosphere is different, and I personally have my philosophy (not merely theoretical) to prepare me for such things and make me put up with them. My old friend Mrs. Potter writes and writes that I must take refuge in America, and I daresay Mrs. Toy thinks the same thing although she knows it is useless to propose it.

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.

To Van Wyck Brooks
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1. London
Rome. May 22, 1927

Although I am not sure whether I owe the pleasure of reading your book on “Emerson & Others” to your initiative or that of your publishers, I would rather thank you personally for it, because I have one or two things which I should like to say, as it were, in private. Your pictures of Emerson are perfect in the way of impressions: not that I knew him (he was dead, I think, when I first reached America, aged 8); but that, whether true to the fact or not, they are convincing in their vividness. But just how much is quoted, and how much is your own? Am I to believe—I who haven’t read the Journal and know little of the facts—that Emerson was such a colossal egotist and so pedantic and affected as he seems on your pages 39 and 40? Or have you maliciously put things together so as to let the cat out of the bag? Sham sympathy, sham classicism, sham universality, all got from books and pictures! Loving the people for their robust sinews and Michaelangelesque poses! And for the thrill of hearing them swear! How different a true lover of the people, like Dickens!

You apologize because some of your descriptions applied to the remote America of 1919: I who think of America as I knew it in the 1890’s (although I vegetated there for another decade) can only accept what I hear about all these recent developments. On the other hand, when you speak of the older worthies, you seem to me to exaggerate, not so much their importance, as their distinction: wasn’t this Melville (I have never read him) the most terrible ranter? What you quote of him doesn’t tempt me to repair the holes in my education. The paper I have most enjoyed— enjoyed immensely—is the one on the old Yeats. His English is good: his mind is quick.

Why do the American poets and other geniuses die young or peter out, unless they go and hibernate in Europe? What you say about Bourne (whom again I haven’t read) and in your last chapter suggests to me that it all comes of applied culture. Instead of being interested in what they are and what they do and see, they are interested in what they think they would like to be and see and do: it is a misguided ambition, and moreover, if realized, fatal, because it wears out all their energies in trying to bear fruits which are not of their species. A certain degree of sympathy and assimilation with ultra-modern ways in Europe or even Asia may be possible, because young America is simply modernism undiluted: but what Lewis Mumford calls “the pillage of the past” (of which he thinks I am guilty too) is worse than useless. I therefore think that art, etc. has a better soil in the ferocious 100% America than in the Intelligentsia of New York. It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres, etc that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.