Category: LETTERS Page 270 of 274

To George Sturgis
Savoy-Hotel, Rue de Rivoli
Paris. June 5, 1936

I arrived here yesterday from Rome, and though the hotel is dingy and evidently has known better days, the view from my windows, over the Tuileries Gardens and the river is magnificent, and the breakfast (the only meal I have had here so far) very good, so that I shall probably stay here the whole summer. Politically and in general aspect, Paris at this moment seems far more unhappy and stricken than Italy, where everything is buzzing. There were no regular papers published yesterday, and the restaurants I went to—the Régence & Poccardi’s—seemed deserted. But I daresay nothing tragic will occur for the present.

You are held up in regard to my domicile. No domicile is indicated in my passport, but I have a separate Certificado de nacionalidad in which I am described as residing at the Hotel Bristol in Rome, which is the truth, in so far as the question is relevant to a fox that hasn’t a hole or a bird that hasn’t a nest. When Onderdonk years ago made investigations about my legal status—he is a timid and fussy person about legalities—he decided that my domicile was Avila, because that had been my father’s residence and I was still in possession of the house he had lived in, although it was let. Now that house has been “sold” to the Sastres. Perhaps my last regular domicile was my mother’s house in Longwood. I forget the name of the Street—was it 75 Monmouth Street? I know I called that my domicile and not my rooms in Cambridge, when it was a question of town taxes.

Perhaps, if that holds over after 25 years residence nowhere else in particular, the fact would facilate making an American will.

You send me the latest reports about the sale of my novel, also reaching me from Scribner’s directly, to the effect that it is still selling well—after being first for 3 months and a half—and having reached 148,500 copies. The English sales have been nothing in comparison, about 7,000 up to April 1^st including about 2,000 for Canada. Mr. Kyllmann of Constable’s says he hoped for much more. On the other hand, it is being printed in raised letters for the blind which seems to put it on a par with the Bible in soul-saving power. The blind shall read it!

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 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.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. June 2, 1916

There seems to be a lull in despatching my proofs, and I am reading Pascal’s Pensées—they are very wrong-headed—and MacDougal’s stupid book on mind and body.

McDougal loquitur:
It would give me a pain
To have merely a brain:
I get all my stamina
From having an anima

S. respondet:
Though that might be less trying
When it comes to dying,
When it comes to thinking
Your anima’s stinking.

The fact is he hasn’t the least idea what mind, spirit, or intelligence is. He looks for it in the wrong place, with the wrong categories, in a sort of psycho-physical materialistic way. It is as if a man trying to conceive beauty looked for it among the kinds of precious metals.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Rome. June 1, 1927

Let us not discuss the question of essences or “the spiritual life.” I have said all I feel—and perhaps more than I feel when I am not warmed up to the subject—in the little book, and I quite understand that it can appeal only to those who are predisposed to that sort of sentiment. You would agree with Abbot (an old classmate of mine at Harvard) who writes me that he has often found heads without ideas, but never ideas without heads. What more is needed to damn all Platonism?

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.