To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 21, 1932
Dear Harry,
The porter of this hotel has just come up in some agitation, holding a letter of yours in his trembling hand, his whitening Jewish beard shaking in tempo; and he protests that he never rejected any book of yours addressed to me. I often send books to myself during the summer, to get rid of encumbrances, and the porter has orders to keep them till my return. But he may have a holiday in mid-summer, or one of the underlings may have been officiating, and may have told the postman–what was quite true–that I was not living in the hotel at that time.
I am sorry this matter has caused you so much annoyance, and am not sure whether, in telling me all about it, your idea was that I should send you the $1.11 required to rescue that book from limbo. I don’t venture to do so, until I get my yearly account, and see how near you come to the truth in suggesting that George Sturgis may have lost most of my savings for me. Last year I inherited enough from my sister Josephine to double the amount of my property: but as the nominal value of the whole had shrunk by about one half, I stood on January 1st just where I stood a year or two before: better, in respect to income, which had not shrunk as much as the nominal capital. I don’t know what has happened since: but if I am completely ruined, it might be an occasion for a fresh spurt in my literary life. I have a lot of unpublished stuff that might do for articles, and I might hurry up with the novel! Yours
G. S.
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