To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoy
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 26, 1935
I am sending you the £5 extra which you want for your golf-clubs, and am glad that you have found another sport like billiards, and unlike tennis or swimming, that will do for your old age: but I am counting these £5 as half your eventual Christmas present, because I don’t think you should expect other additions to your allowance. I doubt whether you will get anything from Eliot, but your novel might bring you something next year, especially if it is suitable (as I should think it might be) for a film. I say this because I have got a request for the film-rights of The Last Puritan! I sent the letter to Wheelock, as a sort of joke, and this is how he answers: “It may interest you to know that we have had several requests from moving-picture corporations for proof-sheets of The Last Puritan. The Paramount Corporation, in particular, has been much interested.” And then, in the contract with Scribner, which Wheelock encloses, they declare themselves entitled to 15% of the sale for moving-picture rights. Presumably, I should get 85%. But I can’t think what episodes of such a talky-talky, sedentary story could be shown on the screen, unless it were the murder in College Chapel, or Jim making love to Mrs. Bowler and shoving her first husband into the lock. Oliver’s dream about this would really be excellent for dissolving views, if only the guiding motives were not so unconventional.
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