To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. June 4, 1951
Dear Clemens,
No, thank you, I think you had better give the Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs to some one else.
My article on Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote (not Mark Twain, except indirectly) was today left to be typed and will probably reach you within a fortnight.
I return the review of my book in Newsweek, which I had already seen; but I have no scrap-book and candidates for such a mausoleum have to choose between my head and the waste-paper basket. There has not been, as far as I know, any serious or adequate review of my book, and that circumstance is intelligible, because it is not a book to read at one sitting or to place at once in the school-master’s list of graded praise and blame, which seems to be what critic’s think their vocation.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
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.