Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 05 Fall 1987

              Persons and Places ~
Hold the Events
Most literary genres provide opportunities for second thoughts: if your
novel or poem or newspaper editorial is not what you had hoped, you can
revise or write another. But autobiography usually offers no reprise,
being itself one. Written generally late in life, and often published
posthumously, it offers less to tempt the author seeking responses or
royalties. (I pass by the "celebrity" autobiography, often written by
someone else, and invariably intended to build bank balances, not
monuments of brass.)
What remains to motivate an author? Posthumous fame, yes,
particularly for those, unlike Santayana, whose faith in an afterlife
includes the perusal of the mundane — or even for those, a mighty horde,
who take pleasure in imagined future moments. How often have we
heard (or said): "Oh, I could tell a tale!" So arises the itch to set the
record straight, to have the tale told by the only one who knows how it
really was, to give the proper evidence, whether straight or ironic,
eulogistic or confessional. There is also the driving curiosity about
oneself, the bitter-sweet urge to face the self that can be found only
through examining and expositing the record of origins, growth,
behaviour, reflection, interaction, and reputation.
It is well for a reader to take some heed of the author's motivations
when opening an autobiography, for the matching off expectations with
intentions is essential to a happy contract. And in modern times, when
editors too have their intentions, the reader should also have some
understanding of what motivates the midwife. These ruminations are
occasioned by the welcome appearance of the first volume of the
projected critical edition of the works of George Santayana, Persons and
Places, Fragments of Autobiography, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman
J. Saatkamp, Jr., with an introduction by Richard C. Lyon (Cambridge,
Mass.:  MIT Press, 1986 [1987]).
First, the author. Santayana presents problems - that is an understatement, of course, even with reference to the matter in hand, i.e.,
trying to grip his intentions. (In one sense that word plagues editors, as
will be evident below; here it is used in the sense that plagues those
literary critics who are so paralyzed by the fear of committing the
"intentional fallacy" that they try to bootstrap idiosyncrasy into reality.)
In his all too brief introduction to this critical edition of Persons and
Places, Richard Lyon properly dwells on possible false expectations: it is
"not a work whose every image and episode subserves a central
vision ... . Nor is it a chronological narrative designed to demonstrate
the autobiographer's advance on chaos and dark night." Though there
are "telling accounts of crucial turns in his development, the book as a
whole does not find a focus in rites of passage or the evolution of a mind.