Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 03 Fall 1985

              An Introduction to
Santayana's
Persons and Places
Reviewing in 1944 the first volume of George Santayana's autobiography,
Persons and Places, Edmund Wilson noted that it belongs to a class which
includes very few examples. "Few first-rate writers," he observed, "have
done stories of their lives which are among their major productions."
Wilson could find precedents only in Yeats's memoirs and The Education of
Henry Adams - although a year later, in his review of the second volume,
he would find another parallel in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
Like those books of reflective reminiscence, Santayana's autobiography
supplies a store of thought, feeling, and observation "that the author had
not got out in his other works: not merely the facts of his career but a
searching and subtle study of the meaning for him of his experience."1
Santayana's turn in his late years to the writing of personal history
was not sudden or surprising. He had already, in 1936, given fictional
form to many of his recollections in The Last Puritan - "A Memoir in the
Form of a Novel." And his philosophic principles seemed almost to
require that sooner or later he should make articulate the form and
meaning of his own story. He had always insisted that understanding
must be, can only be historical understanding. His five-volume Life of
Reason (1905-06), the work which secured his place as a major force in
the philosophy of the new century, had been a survey of the
miscellaneous career of western man - of the forms of his religious,
societies, arts, and sciences - designed to mark within that history, and so
recover for present memory, some of the pitfalls and quandaries and
above all the achieved harmonies discoverable in the past. (In our time
politicians and historians have tirelessly seized on Santayana's words of
warning to those who will not remember the past: they are condemned
to repeat it.) But a long memory, he thought, is necessary not only to
those who judge the present or devise a future for man free of calamitous
surprises. It is necessary to anyone who would discover his own deepest
nature. For Santayana self-definition required - not introspection and
confession, our modern ways to salvation - but retrospection, an attentive
regard for the recurrences, rhythms, and patterns of one's own life
history, a watchful observing of one's affinities and aversions over time.
In the writing of Persons and Places, as during his life, Santayana
looked steadily both ways: toward the circumstances of his personal
career and toward the recorded experience of western man. The facts of
his life - so little known and so often the subject of rumor and gossip
The following three excerpts are taken from the the Introduction to Persons and Places,
Volume I of the complete works of George Santayana, to appear in 1986. The entire edition is
to be published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
1 Edmund Wilson, "Santayana: A Boyhood Between Spain and Boston," New Yorker
magazine, January 8, 1944.