Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana - George Santayana - Страница 7

José Beltrán Llavador

How stimulating it is to delve into this written exchange between George Santayana and two of his many friends over five long decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The newly discovered letters constitute a small collection compared to the totality of his epistolary activity, which occupies no less than eight books (of volume V) in the Works of George Santayana that the MIT Press has been publishing with exquisite scholarly care. Thus the values of the unexpected, the unusual and the unpublished are added to the gift of the discovery itself: who would have thought that it would still be possible to find new material with which to enrich such an extensive corpus?

In these letters, which are now published and translated for the first time, the most characteristic features of the thinker and the human being are distilled. They mirror and reflect a life told as it is lived, and they simultaneously confirm an endless narrative apprenticeship and negate a way of doing philosophy that is alien to everyday life. They show, instead, life accompanied by its narrative, indeed intensified and conjured up by the constant exercise of writing. And now we have the privileged opportunity to look once again, with the help of materials that provide new vistas, into the fascinating life of reason unfolded by the universal thinker and citizen of the world George Santayana.

The origin of these letters can be traced back to the time when Santayana was a very young student at Harvard, aged 23, and they end when he reached 74, once he had already completed most of his work and was settled definitively in Rome. In terms of chronology, the first group of letters (27), addressed to Charles A. Loeser, began in September 1886 and continued until Santayana’s definitive departure from the United States in October 1912; the second, more extensive (61), addressed to Baron Albert von Westenholz, began at the turn of the century, in July 1903, and concluded in January 1937, fifteen years before Santayana’s death in Rome. Neither of these two singular friends were anonymous figures. Both form part of a certain social lineage and, in spite of their different profiles, the two of them embody a tradition and a cultural heritage to whose distinctive mark Santayana, rather than a direct participant, was a sensitive, receptive and detached witness, as we shall see in not a few of his missives.

If the reading of this constellation of letters is stimulating for many reasons, the account of their discovery in the “Introduction” by Daniel Pinkas is fascinating. Daniel Pinkas is not only a most attentive and insightful reader of Santayana but an internationally renowned researcher who has devoted a significant part of his scholarly interests to the analysis and interpretation of the philosopher’s work.

Pinkas’ recent discovery of these letters, now published for the first time in English and in Spanish, is a testimony to his dedication and perseverance. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Stolen Letter”, Santayana’s letters can be said to have been there for anyone who wanted to see them. Even if the facts are as Pinkas himself describes them, things are not that simple, and it would be unfair to downplay his astonishing discovery. First, it was necessary to know that these letters existed and to feel intrigued by their absence from the volumes devoted to Santayana’s correspondence in the MIT edition of his collected works. Then, what was also needed was to know how to decipher the signs pointing to the place where they were kept. Daniel Pinkas modestly attributes this wonderful finding to a combination of coincidence and causality, or chance and necessity, which he sums up as a result of serendipity. Even if this were so, it is worth remembering that this fortunate concurrence of events was preceded by much previous research and excellent documentation work, for only with constant and conscious attention is it possible to keep track and establish the right connections, which are the preconditions for being at the right place at the right time.

On the other hand, the fact that the Frick Collection website records the existence of Loeser’s correspondence and that the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University also records the acquisition of Westenholz’s letters five years ago, has a noteworthy symbolic significance. I had the opportunity to visit the Frick Collection in 2014 during a stay of just over a week in the Big Apple where I was able not only to breathe the spirit of an era but also to experience the fruits of its unique attitude, that rare disposition that combines art and enterprise, pragmatism and altruism, tradition and modernity.

Both the Columbia University Libraries, which lodge 12 million copies, and the Frick Collection, which holds an impressive artistic and cultural heritage, reveal that the history of the United States is comparatively recent, and perhaps that is why institutions such as these treasure every trace or vestige, and every testimonial document that can contribute to recreating and enriching the foundational stories of its past and the prophetic accounts of its future.

Thus, in these letters we find, threading their narrative, a sort of surprising patchwork, a microcosm filled with forms of life pulsating in each message, within every word, with highly suggestive echoes in resonance with the rest of the thinker’s work. The epistolary genre, as cultivated by Santayana and his contemporaries, is less and less frequent, yet another social practice that is being lost, swept away by the speed and formats of the digital media. For this very reason, these handwritten letters now have the added value of being approached as ethno-texts, noble and unique remains of an anachronistic genre.

On the other hand, Santayana’s letters partake in a rich conversation where profound reflections are intermingled with everyday matters and where a plethora of interests and a plurality of perspectives inhabit the very space they shape. Here we can clearly perceive the deep thinker and the human being, the lucidity of the former and the frailties of the latter, the chiaroscuros that Santayana himself detects in his own persona and to which he applies an enormous capacity for humour, irony and self-criticism. There is a little of everything in this volume, which acts as a kind of mailbox into which messages have been deposited, year after year, over the course of half a century. Alongside the short, instrumental letters, treatise-like letters are also found containing cogent, concentrated arguments reminiscent of the developments found in the thinker’s major works. Read as a whole, they eloquently express his material and vital concerns, intertwined with other speculations and dilemmas that range from his early estrangement at being at Harvard to his long-cherished desire to leave the university in order to practice philosophy as a way of life rather than being a philosophy professor; they also encompass reflections on love and death, contacts with publishers —including their rejection or acceptance to publish his works, the constant planning of his travels and sojourns, digressions on Homeric times, notes on the perception of life as a dream, and asides on his own writing process…

While reading these texts one is easily transported to the thinker’s silent space as he reads or takes notes in the solitude of his study, and when the writer describes the urban landscape of the big cities, the noise and increasing bustle of the streets can almost be perceived. As we read these texts, of admirable plasticity and visual power, we experience a passage through different atmospheres, some denser and some lighter, where the aroma of the classical pervades contemporary experiences and moments, as when he visits the grape harvest in Avila and associates it with the lifestyle of The Georgics. The letters also seem to give us access to a world full of evocations and adventures —adventures pertaining to the realms of intelligence and reason— through the primacy of names that reverberate and stimulate our imagination: those of legendary ships (“I sail in the ‘Lusitania’”, “I sail… in the ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’”, “my passage is taken in the ‘Kaiserin Auguste Victoria’”), those of always temporary residences (Colonial Club, King’s College, Hotel Manin, Hotel du Quai Voltaire, Grove Street…), the almost fictional titles of philosophical societies, or those toponyms so expressive of far away places and distant countries which paradoxically make us feel the world as a domestic space.

And among the names, as Daniel Pinkas points out, those referring to paintings and books stand out. And to painting and reading are added other diverse expressions of art of which Santayana gives a good account by recreating for his friends his frequent visits to museums, and to the theatre and the opera, or to musical concerts and telling them about cultural tours as well as about his walks and observations on architecture (about which he intends to write a book —“if it is ever written”— as mentioned in his correspondence to Westenholz in 1905), one of the professions he would have cultivated had he been endowed, like Pessoa, with heteronyms.

As a polyhedral artefact, this volume of letters also invites different approaches and other reading angles. On the one hand, it lends itself to be read as the catalogue of an imaginary museum, similar to the one conceived by André Malraux, filled with impressionistic notes. In this sense, these pages could very well give rise to another parallel or complementary volume illustrated with each of the works of art mentioned, which would undoubtedly craft a beautiful diptych. On the other hand, this correspondence, which totals 90 letters from 1886 to 1937, could also be considered an extension or appendix to his autobiography Persons and Places, or a collection of notes complementary to the Little Essays. When regarded as variations on a series, even if the contents of these letters are familiar to us because they refer to many of his works, they always offer, in their meditated spontaneity, that which is proper to philosophy: the invaluable opportunity to rethink reality and thus reassess our contract with it throughout our fragile and ephemeral existence.

Pictures and books, persons and places, landscapes and passages. So many comings and goings, so many departures and arrivals, crossing countries on trains and continents on ships, staying in hotels and university residences, stopping off at memorable cafés, giving lectures here and there, reading and writing incessantly. “I have written so many letters”, he told Loeser in 1887, when his epistolary activity was still very recent, “that I never know what I have told one man and what another”… This handful of letters, which adds to the rest of his abundant correspondence, is the material proof that writing, for Santayana, in any of its registers, is one more way —everyday, immediate, full of genial impromptus—, of practicing philosophy. And the philosopher practiced it not only in solitude but also as a genuine expression of intellectual friendship. The best definition of philosophy for Santayana is that which identifies it with the life of reason, a life that can be shared and enriched through the joy of dialogue and conversation. These newly discovered letters are a sensitive, lucid and delightful proof of that conversation. We have now the unique opportunity to join in, thus enriching ourselves as readers, sharing the common purpose of reaching the best version of ourselves, our most human dimension. Somehow, by participating ourselves in the experience offered by these pages, guided by Santayana’s hand, we will somehow be able to use his own words at the end of these letters and make them our own: “I saw things I shall never forget”. And in passing, we will have come to know the author of these letters a little better for, as William James stated in A Pluralistic Universe, “a man’s vision is the great fact about him.”

The original letters are available on the website of the Santayana Edition, section Texts, thanks to the praiseworthy management of its director, Martin A. Coleman. We feel indebted to Megan Young Schlee for the transcription of the letters to Charles A. Loeser, and to Matthew N. Preston II for the transcription of the letters to Albert W. von Westenholz, and we are equally grateful to Martin Coleman for his very fine supervision. The translation and critical editing of this book are due to Daniel Moreno, who has carried out the kind of meticulous and rigorous work we are familiar with. Both Daniel Pinkas and Daniel Moreno shared the wish to publish this volume in the University of Valencia collection Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord-Americans, which includes previous books on George Santayana. This edition would not have been possible without their determination and commitment, nor would it have been possible without the enthusiastic involvement and generous support of Professor Carme Manuel, the director of this unique North American Studies series. We would like to thank them all for having crafted this new volume and for making it accessible in English and in Spanish so that it could reach a wider readership on the two shores of the Atlantic, and beyond.