George Santayana

A Biography

John McCormick, John Rodden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138524309
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351517621
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve.

Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell.

Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism.

1

Origins

From his birth in Madrid in 1863, to his death in Rome in 1952, George Santayanas life was outwardly placid but inwardly effervescent. Outwardly he conformed, willingly, to the rigid constraints of his time, but inwardly, radical scepticism and libertine speculation dominated. One result of that miscellany was a large and varied body of work, composed from age eight to age eighty-eight. It was not a dramatic life, if “dramatic” should imply Cervantes imprisoned by pirates, Sir Philip Sidneys fatal wound at Zutphen, or Stendhal among the French troops retreating from Moscow. Neither athlete nor warrior nor lover, Santayana preferred contemplation to action, and ironic distance to passionate, blaring immediacy. His life was dramatic, however, in the manner of Henry James’s best fiction; Santayana could have walked living and breathing from the pages of The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl. Forty years of residence in the United States followed by forty years in England and on the continent provided a Jamesian context for his cosmopolitan urbanity, his divided loyalties, and for his sense of where the true center lay, as opposed to easy popular assumptions concerning conduct and value. Yet Santayana was far from an invention of Henry James. His intellectual grasp was far stronger than that of James or of any of James’s characters. However retiring he may have been, Santayanas self-effacement was not that of the weak or the reluctant, but a result of strength and considered decision.

It would be wrong to adopt the attractive tactic of beginning Santayana’s epic life like an epic, in medias res, because that might obscure the fact of his Spanish birth, early upbringing, his lifelong nationality, and his frequent return to the place in which he wrote some of his finest work. Although he is properly considered, and considered himself, to be an American writer, one who deliberately chose to write in English and would always denigrate his command of Spanish (and of Greek, Latin, German, and Italian), to place him in a predominantly American tradition would violate his thought and work. His command of Spanish was such that he would meticulously correct accent marks, diction, and style in the Spanish works he often read; further, his Spanish verse is usually superior to his verse in English.¹ In both verse and prose, he showed affection for Avila, the Castilian town in which he passed the important childhood years from three to nine. In his old age, he noted that he was nearly seventy before Avila had ceased “to be at the center” of his “deepest legal and affectionate ties.”² Yet that legal and affectionate center proves to have been loyalty to family of the ritualistic, Latin kind, and love of his half-sister, Susana, rather than linguistic or national patriotism.

However impressionable, the years in Avila were brief. The entire family lived there from 1866 to 1869, and from 1869 to 1872 the young boy lived there with his father. Thereafter he was mainly a visitor, as he was in the other places on his life-itinerary: Boston; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cambridge, England; Oxford, Paris, Madrid, Venice, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Fiesole, or Rome. The impossibility of associating Santayana with a specific place either characteristically or exclusively reflects his resolution to stick to his own way and his own view, and his reluctance to sacrifice inner peace and habits of work to the imperious demands of a conventional worldly existence. Nevertheless, Santayana was neither unconventional nor other-worldly; he was not out to épater anyone.

Avila was an ancient, small place, but Madrid had some 300,000 inhabitants when Santayana was born there. It was the principal seat of the monarchy, the administrative center of Spain, and in theory, the center of its intellectual life. In 1863 the city was only beginning to spread beyond the confines of the old walled town. Plans to improve the streets and sanitary system, and to expand the water supply, were just taking shape. The city would have no industry to speak of until after 1890; the university functioned but hardly flourished, while the National Library, founded in 1866, was not completed until 1892. The Museum of the Prado with its extraordinary spread of paintings was the city’s chief cultural glory. Never glamorous, Madrid was and remains handsome in a restrained northern way. Cold in winter from the winds of the Guadarrama, the mountain range to the north visible from the center, and hot in summer, the city bred people of character. The Madrileños are restrained, not given to opulence, tough, sceptical, honest, and undevious.

If year of birth has any relationship to eventual literary eminence, then it is worth remarking that Santayanas birth date, December 16, 1863, made him contemporary with A. E. Housman, born 1859; with Anton Chekhov, born 1860; with Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz), born 1861; with his countryman, Miguel de Unamuno, 1864; and W. B. Yeats, 1865. Among the philosophers, Husserl was born in 1859 and Whitehead in 1861. Spain in 1863 was a country still suffering from the wounds of the French occupation of 1808, from the first Carlist War, 1833-40, and from the political uproar attending the dynastic intrigue of the Bourbons and their opponents. The country and its capital were more completely cut off from the rest of Europe and the world than they had been for many preceding centuries. Its resulting provincialism, nevertheless, made for individualism, strong local pride, and the ability to be content with little.

Santayana was born at 69, calle Ancha de San Bernardo, which lay just off a major thoroughfare, calle San Bernardo, in the heart of modern Madrid. San Bernardo is a noble avenue running down the long hill from the Glorietta de Quevedo, briefly crossing the Gran Via (Avenida de José Antonio in the Franco years), and ending in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Agustin Santayana, his father, described his birthplace in a letter of 1883: “The house is a little closed in on both sides, and has large windows on the top floor, like those of a painter’s studio. It belongs to the Marques de Santa Marta, who lives in front, in a big house. You were baptized in the Church of San Marcos, which lies in a narrow street behind the house, some distance off.”³ Both houses have since been torn down. On the site is a bookstore specializing in bullfighting, the proprietor of which, in 1980, had never heard of George Santayana or his books, a small irony that might have amused and surely would not have disturbed its subject It would certainly amuse him to know that on the west wall of the nave of San Marcos a large mechanical dock hangs, as though in an old-fashioned American farm kitchen, ticking loudly throughout all services. On 302 Beacon Street, Boston, where Santayana lived as a schoolboy, there is a plaque to commemorate his residence; the site of his birth has none. Such facts do not affirm the superior piety of Boston, but indicate that just as Santayana shunned his growing American reputation in 1912 by leaving the country, so in Spain he indulged in none of the easy tactics that would have ensured popularity.

Signs of Santayana’s mixed heritage are found early. At his baptism, his half-sister, Susana Sturgis, twelve years his senior, stood as his godmother and insisted that his name be not the Spanish “Jorge” but “George,” in honor of her Bostonian father, long dead. The family added Agustín, for the infants father, and Nicolás for Agustín’s brother, the major, who was godfather.⁴

The circumstance of Santayana’s birth in Madrid cannot be accounted for without awareness of his complex family history. In a letter of 1936, he wrote that “My parents were not young when they were married and were more like grandparents to me in many ways.”⁵ Santayanas father (1812-1893) was fiftyone in 1863, and his mother (probably) thirty-seven.⁶ The first volume of Santayana’s autobiography, Persons and Places, begun as early as 1924 but substantially written in the 1930s and forties, presents a powerful portrait of his mother and of her unconventional young womanhood in the Philippines. In letters and in a memorandum about her of 1926, Santayana further emphasized his mothers position in his life, creating the possible false impression that she was dominant and his father recessive as influences upon him early and late. By contrast the portrait of his father in the autobiography seems just, but slight compared to that of his mother, and shaded with irony.

Zamora, León, where Agustín Ruiz de Santayana,⁷ Georges father, was born in 1812, is a lovely, wrecked place containing some fine Romanesque architecture, but a city in steady decline since the twelfth century. It is appropriate to Agustín Santayana’s character and career that contemporary Spanish wisdom has produced the adage, “Nobody goes to Zamora.” Like much popular wisdom, that adage falsifies reality and deprives the would-be visitor of splendid vistas from the old walled city over the River Duero, as also of the pleasures of Spanish provincial existence. Time, wars, lack of money for maintenance, and carelessness have caused the loss or confusion of documents concerning the Ruiz Santayana family in Zamora. George Santayana alludes to distant distinction in the person of an eighteenth-century forebear who wrote a book about international trade, “advocating the Spartan policy of isolation and autarchy.”⁸ Agustín Santayanas father was a provincial official whose minor rank and twelve children kept him poor. The family probably lived among the other poor of Zamora in the parish of San Ildefonso, the archives of which are not traceable.

Traditionally, ambitious young men travelled the few miles from Zamora to Valladolid for their university education, Zamora having no university of its own. Agustín went to Valladolid both for early schooling, and to study law in the university, according to his son.⁹ The archives of the university fail to include his name among the licentiates,¹⁰ but the Curso de matriculo alfabético de todos cursos: 1834–35 does list “Ruiz Santayana, d[on] Agustín, de Zamora” as a fifth (final)-year student of law, although the lists of matriculation for the four years preceding do not include his name. It is possible that he got up his preliminary law studies in another university or, more likely, on his own. And it is likely that he combined law with an apprenticeship to an unnamed professional painter “of the school of Goya.”¹¹ That Agustín was gifted is clear from his translations of four Senecan tragedies into Spanish,¹² from his extensive library, some of which survives, and from his study and practice of portrait painting, about the results of which his son was unduly critical. When he had completed his formal law study,¹³ he practiced for a time sufficient to establish his lack of aptitude in that profession, and entered the Colonial Service for posting to the Philippines.

George Santayana’s sketch of his mother’s life indicates that Agustín arrived at Batang, a small island unimportant in the economy of the Philippines, to take over the governorship from the recently deceased José Borrás y Bofarull. Borrás was the father of Josefina Borrás, who was to become wife to Agustín and mother of George. The date was about 1845; the record does not say whether the governorship of Batang was Agustín’s first post, nor does it tell us exactly the date of his first meeting with Josefina, but it is clear that they met either in 1845 or shortly thereafter.¹⁴ In a letter of 1887 to his son, who was then studying philosophy in Berlin, Agustín reflected on his early travels, remarking that Jorge (as his Spanish family called him) might be feeling “what we call here nostalgia” for the family in Boston as he contemplates three years in Berlin.

At such times I remind myself that I was never so happy as when I began to travel around the world, and how I did not stop until I got to the Philippines—and this at a time when the only communication with them was via the Cape of Good Hope [sic] and letters took five, six or seven months, and the replies an equally long time. Of course my circumstances were very different, since I gained a great deal in rank and had very good luck in the islands compared with what was offered me in Valladolid with my parents and brothers and sisters. Moreover, I had the satisfaction of being able to lighten their burdens a little when they were down on their luck.¹⁵

The “little book about the Island of Mindanao” which George Santayana attributed to his father survives among Agustín’s books and was read by his young son. It is handwritten and was never published, although the directness and charm of many of Agustín’s observations are far more interesting than those of many published works of the period.¹⁶ Agustín’s last post before his early retirement in 1861 was that of financial secretary to the Governor-General of the Philippines, General Pavía, Marqués de Novaliches.¹⁷

In 1856, when he was forty-four, Agustín Santayana took a ship from Manila for Spain; the tropics had affected his health badly and had exacerbated his tendency to hypochondria. On board he again met Josefina Borrás, her new Bostonian merchant husband George, and their three young children, Susana, Josefina, and Robert. Agustín’s itinerary took him to Boston and environs, which he admired, then to Niagara, to New York City, and by steamer to England. He recovered promptly and returned to his duties in Manila.

By 1861 [1864?],¹⁸ Agustín Santayana had returned to Spain for the third time, ill and determined this time to retire. He did so in that same year on a pension of 15,000 reales ($750) per annum. In Madrid he met Josefina Borrás Sturgis once more, now a widow Agustín and Josefina had in common the Philippines, but not much else. Nevertheless they were married happily enough to produce George, his mothers sixth and final child (two of her children had died in infancy). The marriage was an odd, unpassionate, chilly affair, although probably not so chilly as their son George interpreted it as being. Josefina had really no Spanish roots; her family was Catalan, and she had been born in Glasgow. In 1863 she had long been committed to bringing up her Sturgis children in Boston, their fathers home, while Agustín’s roots and loyalties, to say nothing of his modest income, were entirely to the Spain of León and Castile. The middle-aged man and the no-longer-young woman remained together, however, until 1866, when apparently after a quarrel Josefina departed with all the children, travelling as far as Paris, where Agustín’s letters and perhaps her own second thoughts encouraged her to return.

The family had moved from Madrid to Avila at some point between the end of 1864 and 1866.¹⁹ It was to Avila that Josefina and her children returned, to be joined by an Alsatian tutor named Schmidt whom she had engaged in Paris, her final attempt to reach a compromise between her Spanish marriage and her commitment to the Sturgises about the children’s education. Although Schmidt presented young George with his first toy, “a velvety gray mouse that could be wound up to run across the floor,” the mouse was more of a success than was Herr Schmidt, for “He was full of the importance of German geography, and fell in love with Susana; so that between the difficult names of ‘Hartzgebirge’ and ‘Riesengebirge’ he would whisper ‘Je vous aime avec rage.’”²⁰ Thus Santayana in 1926 described the tutors brief career in Avila, and repeated himself almost verbatim in Persons and Places of 1944.

In 1867 the family determined that Roberto Sturgis, then aged thirteen, should go to Boston without further delay. Agustín would accompany him to London, where his cousin Russell would meet him. Agustín reminisced in a letter of 1885 to his son George, “Today is May 23. On this date I always recall that on the same day in the year ’67 Roberto and I were in London at the fonda de Morijis [sic], 1 Regent Street, awaiting the arrival of his cousin Russell, who was supposed to accompany Roberto to Boston. On that day a great snow fell, but did not prevent half a million Englishmen from going to the horse races. We spent a long while in an arcade nearby where Roberto bought a bow to shoot arrows.”²¹

Agustín favored the handsome medieval city of Avila for its climate, and for the presence of his older brother Santiago. The high pure air suited his Castilian frugality. Madrid was only sixty miles away across the Guadarrama to the southeast, readily available by rail for visits or for necessities unobtainable in Avila, but far enough to relieve his wife’s discomfort at her inability to live up to her idea of her proper social station in the capital. Yet the arrangement proved unsatisfactory to the imperious Josefina, conscientious about her Sturgis children and cut off from her main financial stay, the Sturgis family of Boston. In 1869, accordingly, she and her daughters Susana and Josefina left Avila for Boston, the beginning of a separation from Agustín that was to become permanent. Years later, in 1888, Agustín wrote to his wife concerning their separation: “When we were married I felt as if it were written that I should be united with you, yielding to the force of destiny,” even though he was aware of the obvious difficulties. “Strange marriage, this of ours! So you say, and so it is in fact. I love you very much, and you too have cared for me, yet we do not live together.” He notes that his position in Avila could not counterbalance the “propriety” of the forces that caused Josefina to live in Boston, “when in view of my age and impe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 From Avila to Boston
• 3 Harvard College Class of ’86
• 4 Bachelor of Arts
• 5 Mugging in A Hole: 1887-88
• 6 The Uneasy Apprenticeship
• 7 In Eliots Kingdom
• 8 Santayana, Poet
• 9 The Sense of Beauty: 1896-1902
• 10 Reason in Common Sense
• 11 Reason in Society in Religion, in Art
• 12 Reason in Science
• 13 Professor Santayana
• 14 An Unfond Farewell
• 15 The Dark Riddle 1914
• 16 Mechanic War
• 17 The Fifth Wash of the Tea
• 18 Scepticism and Animal Faith
• 19 The Realm of Essence
• 20 Some Persons and Certain Places
• 21 On the Turn
• 22 Some Turns of Thought
• 23 The Life and Death of Oliver Alden
• 24 The Realm of Truth
• 25 Moral Dogmatism
• 26 1939: War Again
• 27 In the Course of Nature
• 28 Enter Ezra Pound, Followed by T S. Eliot
• 29 Wartime Italy
• 30 The Tiger of the Flesh: 1945-46
• 31 Santayana and Robert Lowell
• 32 Among Crude Captains
• 33 Dominations, Powers, and Unofficial Pupils
• 34 All to the Furrow, Nothing to the Grave
• Appendix A: A Married Couple
• Appendix B: Santayana’s Marginalia to Jean-Christophe
• Appendix C: Santayana as Screenwriter
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations follow page