Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 20 Fall 2002

              The Letters of George Santayana
Santayana's letters are the most beautiful I know. To scholars and other
aficionados, of course, his every syllable has value. Yet I also know that not
everyone reads a great thinker's "collected correspondence" and that the
enthusiasm of less riveted students can be numbed by a skein of entries that stretches
across four score years. The full sweep of the single writer's lifelong postings,
assembled chronologically, may appear to sacrifice grandeur: too much is ephemeral;
too much is dross. This is why a narrowly identified exchange often proves popular:
the give-and-take of such worthies, say, as John and Abigail Adams, Freud and Oscar
Pfister, or Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky.
The reviewer's challenge, then, is to give the reader a sense of the writer's
setded mind. The case of George Santayana (1863-1952) is somewhat different from
that of the "typical" genius, for he both did and did not participate in the great
debates of his time. That is, after his early retirement from the professoriate at age
forty-eight and his pronounced drift into semi-reclusion, Santayana removed himself
more and more from the public forum and the quotidian hurly-burly. For a time
during the Great War, he accepted opportunities to lecture in London and Cambridge
but gradually his disengagement from even these performances became more
noticeable. Yet from his workshop for the next four decades, he critiqued the ebb and
flow of philosophical and religious thought and the changing standards of taste in
western culture — those intellectual currents he called winds of doctrine. But
Santayana's preference for solitude and fewer commitments did not keep him from
the museums or the theater. Moreover, he cultivated his friends and relatives for long
years, often through letters, documents beautifully written and alive with wit,
sophistication and acute awareness of the major intellectual ground-shifts. He
remained au courant.
Yes, psychological tensions attended Santayana's life, but they did not prevent
his achieving a place in the pantheon. Still we need to know something of this
"complex personality," as William Holzberger has called him, if we are to appreciate
the impact of his spiritual extirpation and transplantation into what seemed to him a
zone unfriendly to his Spanish soul. In this we find ample evidence of his often
strong feelings of alienation. We know that he never took U.S. citizenship. And we
know that he developed a bristling contempt for American intellectual vacancy, an
animus that carried far beyond his student years in New England. In 1911, making
his only journey to the American West, Santayana spoke at Berkeley of the lethal split
between America's clanging Babbittry and its underweight feminine fastidiousness.
Neither geography nor natural vistas could satisfy his demand for the blessings of
civilization. As he wrote to Horace Kallen, his sometime graduate student:
"California, on the whole, disappointed me, ... [T]he people are all... from Newton
Centre, Mass."1
The Letters of George Santayana makes up Volume V of the ongoing Santayana
Edition: i.e., publication of the authorized canon and approved by the Modern
Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. As readers of this Bulletin
know, that enterprise operates under the general editorship of Herman J. Saatkamp,
Jr., and is published by the MIT Press.   Four volumes have already been issued:
1   William Holzberger, ed., The Letters of George Santayana, Vol. V, Book 2 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002), pp. 59-60.