Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana: Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana

By George Santayana

The concerted efforts of three respected Santayana scholars have coalesced in this book that includes the transcription of the philosopher's letters to Charles A. Loeser and to Albert von Westenholz. Daniel Pinkas discovered and analyzed them only recently and they are published here for the first time, in English and Spanish, translated by Daniel Moreno and presented by José Beltrán. The volume comprises the letters Santayana sent to his two friends over five long decades, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth century.
This collection of epistolary writings constitutes a surprising mosaic-like jewel made up of a constellation of life episodes that pulsate in each and every letter and resonate suggestively in the echo-chamber of Santayana's body of work.Pictures and books, persons and places, landscapes and voyages. So many comings and goings, so many departures and arrivals, crossing countries on trains and oceans on ships, staying in hotels and university residences, stopping off at memorable cafés, giving lectures here and there, reading and writing incessantly. By partaking, under the philosopher's guidance, in the experience these pages offer, we will somehow make our own Santayana's words at the end of these letters: 'I saw things I shall never forget'. Este volumen recoge la transcripción de las cartas del filósofo George Santayana a dos de sus numerosos amigos, Charles A. Loeser y Albert von Westenholz, recién descubiertas y analizadas por Daniel Pinkas, traducidas al castellano por Daniel Moreno y presentadas por José Beltrán, tres reconocidos estudiosos del autor. La correspondencia intercambiada durante cinco largas décadas entre el siglo XIX y el XX constituye una suerte de sorprendente mosaico, un microcosmos de piezas de vida con sus latidos en cada mensaje, en cada palabra, con ecos muy sugerentes que resuenan en el resto de su obra. Cuadros y libros, personas y lugares, paisajes y pasajes. Tantas idas y venidas, tantas partidas y llegadas, atravesando países en trenes y cruzando océanos en barco, alojándose en hoteles y residencias universitarias, con paradas en cafés memorables, pronunciando conferencias aquí y allá, leyendo y escribiendo sin cesar. De alguna manera, al participar de la experiencia que ofrecen estas páginas, guiados de la mano del filósofo, también podremos hacer nuestras sus propias palabras: "Vi cosas que nunca olvidaré".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9788491349068

George Santayana

George Santayana, born Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana (1863–1952), was a Spanish-American philosopher, novelist, poet, and essayist. He is best known for his witty aphorisms, especially the phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana was born in Spain, but was raised and educated in the United States. He attended Harvard College and later taught philosophy there. During this time he wrote many of his seminal philosophical works, including The Sense of Beauty, The Life of Reason, and The Realms of Being. In 1912, Santayana moved to Europe, where he devoted his life to writing both fiction and nonfiction.

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Introduction

Daniel Pinkas

Among the countless challenges facing the truly monumental and still ongoing publication of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana, none could have been greater than that of gathering, annotating, and contextualizing the more than three thousand letters that Santayana wrote throughout his life to his family, friends, colleagues, publishers and admirers. This collection ranges from 1868 (a letter to his sisters when he was only five) to 1952, the year of his death. The outcome of this stupendous task is housed in the eight books of letters, edited by the late William Holzberger, that constitute Volume 5 of the critical edition, published between 2003 and 2008.

At the outset of his introduction to The Letters of George Santayana, Holzberger provides an answer to the question: «Who was George Santayana?» that can hardly be improved upon as a succinct presentation of the author:

George Santayana (1863-1952) was one of the most learned and cultivated men of his time. Born in Spain and educated in America, he taught philosophy at Harvard University for twenty-two years before returning permanently to Europe at age forty-eight to devote himself exclusively to writing. He knew several languages, including Latin and Greek. Besides his mastery of English, he was at home in Spanish and French (though he modestly down-played his knowledge of those languages). As a young man, Santayana studied Italian in order to read Dante, Cavalcanti, Michelangelo, and other Platonizing poets in their own language; and, in later life, as a result of his long residence in Rome, he acquired facility in speaking Italian. While a student in Germany during 1886-88, Santayana lived with Harvard friends in an English-speaking boardinghouse in Berlin, thereby missing an opportunity to learn to speak German properly. However he could read the original versions of German literary and philosophical works. He also knew the world, having lived for protracted periods in Spain, America, England, France, and Italy. A true cosmopolitan, Santayana nevertheless always regarded himself a Spaniard and kept his Spanish passport current. He possessed many talents and had a multifaceted personality, and each of those facets is reflected vividly in his letters. World famous as a philosopher, he was also a poet, essayist, dramatist, literary critic, autobiographer, and author of a best-selling novel.²

It is hard to overstate the importance and usefulness of The Letters of George Santayana to Santayana scholars, wherever their focus of interest may lie. The more philosophical letters shed light, often in unexpected ways, on Santayana’s fundamental philosophical tenets: his materialism, his naturalism, his theories of essence and truth, his doctrine of animal faith, his ideal of the «life of reason» and his conception of the spiritual life; they are filled with mordant comments on the views of other philosophers, classical and modern. Many letters state his views on religion, science, literature, history, politics and current affairs. Obviously, the letters are full of crucial biographical information, sometimes sprinkled with delightful gossip. For a less specialized audience also, Santayana’s letters can be a wonderful source of information, inspiration and fun. They offer an unforgettable, and most enjoyable, opportunity to hear, so to say live, the unique voice of a supremely smart and wise philosopher who is at the same time, fully, a human being with a very distinctive history and intellectual background. Santayana’s flair for finding the most appropriate word is everywhere on display, from the briefest thank-you note to the most extensive metaphysical discussion.

The publication of the critical edition was preceded by the publication, in 1955, of about 250 letters that Santayana’s friend and secretary, Daniel Cory, had managed to assemble. In order to locate these letters, Cory published advertisements in leading journals and reviews, he visited the main libraries housing Santayana’s manuscript materials and he wrote to people he thought had been his correspondents. As he undertook this task, he was, as he recounts in the foreword, «a prey to certain misgivings». First, the sheer size of the correspondence of someone who had been an established writer for over sixty years would probably turn out to be forbidding. Secondly,

Santayana was such an accomplished artist in so many fields […] that I wondered if in the more spontaneous rôle of correspondent he might fall short of the very high standard he had always set himself. I knew that he had never sent anything to his publisher in an untidy condition, but always dressed for a public appearance. Above all, I did not want his friends or critics or general audience to say of him what has unfortunately been said of other distinguished writers: What a pity his letters were ever published!³

But as he started receiving letters, Cory’s anxieties were mostly assuaged. Admittedly, the volume of correspondence would be enormous, and everything would have to be sorted in order to eliminate «polite» or banal letters. On the other issues, however, there was nothing to worry about. As Cory wrote: «this large collection of letters soon proved a fresh and exciting adventure. They are essential as a revelation of his life and mind, and a further confirmation of his literary power.»⁴

Although the critical edition of The Letters of George Santayana aimed painstakingly at comprehensiveness (the editors sent letters of inquiry to sixty-three institutions reported as holding Santayana manuscripts, they ran advertisements in leading literary publications and contacted more than fifty individuals who were potential recipients of Santayana’s letters, and as a result were able to add over two thousand more letters to Cory’s initial set of about a thousand) the ideal of absolute completeness was clearly out of reach: not only because, as we know, Santayana himself destroyed his letters to his mother, but because the editors were unable to locate many letters whose existence could be inferred from Santayana’s or his correspondents’ allusions. Thus, at the end of the editorial appendix of the critical edition, there is a «List of Unlocated Letters» comprising almost one hundred entries. It should be noted that these unlocated letters do not include those, recently discovered, which we are pleased to present in this volume.

The editors of the critical edition of the Letters, however, did mention that none of Santayana’s letters to von Westenholz had been located, just as they comment on the relative scarcity of letters (only six) to John Francis Stanley («Frank»), the second Earl Russell, given the significance of this relationship to Santayana⁵. In retrospect, therefore, the absence of any letters addressed to Charles Loeser and Baron Albert von Westenholz in the critical edition points unequivocally to the possibility that such letters could exist somewhere. These are two persons to whom Santayana devoted several pages in his autobiography, leaving no doubt as to how much they had meant to him. Let us begin with Charles Loeser.

At the beginning of chapter XV («College Friends») of Persons and Places, Santayana recounts his first meeting with Loeser, at Harvard, in a passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

First in time, and very important, was my friendship with Charles Loeser. I came upon him by accident in another man’s room, and he immediately took me into his own, which was next door, to show me his books and pictures. Pictures and books! That strikes the keynote to our companionship. At once I found that he spoke French well, and German presumably better, since if hurt he would swear in German. He had been at a good international school in Switzerland. He at once told me that he was a Jew, a rare and blessed frankness that cleared away a thousand pitfalls and insincerities. What a privilege there is in that distinction and in that misfortune! If the Jews were not worldly it would raise them above the world; but most of them squirm and fawn and wish to pass for ordinary Christians or ordinary atheists. Not so Loeser: he had no ambition to manage things for other people, or to worm himself into fashionable society. His father was the proprietor of a vast «dry-goods store» in Brooklyn, and rich—how rich I never knew, but rich enough and generous enough for his son always to have plenty of money and not to think of a profitable profession. Another blessed simplification, rarely avowed in America. There was a commercial presumption that man is useless unless he makes money, and no vocation, only bad health, could excuse the son of a millionaire for not at least pretending to have an office or a studio. Loeser seemed unaware of this social duty. He showed me the nice books and pictures that he had already collected—the beginnings of that passion for possessing and even stroking objets-d’art that made the most unclouded joy of his life. Here was fresh subject-matter and fresh information for my starved aestheticism—starved sensuously and not supported by much reading: for this was in my Freshman year, before my first return to Europe.⁶

The question of whether, or to what extent, this paragraph is redolent of antisemitism has been discussed at length by John McCormick in his biography of Santayana⁷, and I propose to leave it aside⁸, in order to concentrate on «the keynote» of the Santayana and Loeser connexion: «pictures and books». Indeed, Loeser immediately became for Santayana a mentor in the field of art appreciation, and later showed him Italy, in particular Rome and Venice, and «initiated [him] into Italian ways, present and past», making Santayana’s life in the country where he chose to reside from the 1920s onwards «richer than it would have been otherwise»⁹. Even in his early college years, Loeser was, in a small way, what he later became on an international scale: a refined and shrewd art collector. Santayana readily admits that «Loeser had a tremendous advance on [him] in these matters, which he maintained through life: he seemed to have seen everything, to have read everything, and to speak every language»¹⁰ A comparison with the eminent art critic Bernard Berenson (who was also Jewish but converted twice), whom Santayana later frequented, immediately springs to Santayana’s mind: Berenson enjoyed the same cultural advantages, and soon gained a public reputation through his writings, which Loeser never did. But the comparison is not at all favorable to Berenson: Loeser, says Santayana, had a sincere love for his favorite subject (the Italian Renaissance) while Berenson was content to merely display it.

Wealth was another big advantage that Loeser had over Santayana. During their early university years, when the two friends went to the theater or the opera in Boston, it was Loeser who inevitably paid; and when, later, they traveled together in Italy, Santayana would contribute a fixed (and modest) daily sum to their expenses, leaving Loeser, who spoke the language, to make the arrangements and pay the bills. Loeser untied the purse with as few qualms as Santayana had in accepting this generosity, because «it was simply a question of making possible little plans that pleased us but that were beyond my unaided means.»¹¹

Aside from a common interest in «books and pictures», one of the factors that obviously brought the two young students together was their status as outsiders, due to their religious origins, respectively Catholic and Jewish, in an overwhelmingly Protestant institution. For Santayana, this marginal status was somewhat compensated by his association, through his mother’s first marriage, with one of Boston’s prominent Brahmin families. But not only was Loeser unashamedly Jewish, his father owned a «dry-goods store», two facts that «cut him off, in democratic America, from the ruling society.»¹² This seemed strange to Santayana, considering how much more cultivated his friend was than «the leaders of undergraduate fashion or athletics.» ¹³ A somewhat ambivalent portrait follows this remark about Loeser’s isolation at Harvard:

He was not good-looking, although he had a neat figure, of middle height, and nice hands: but his eyes were dead, his complexion muddy, and his features pinched, although not especially Jewish. On the other hand, he was extremely well-spoken, and there was nothing about him in bad taste.

The ambivalence is reflected in Santayana’s overall judgment on his relationship with Loeser: «To me he was always an agreeable companion, and if our friendship never became intimate, this was due rather to a certain defensive reserve in him than to any withdrawal on my part.»¹⁴ Loeser’s «defensive reserve» and the asymmetry it introduced in their relation, is a constant theme in the pages devoted to him in Persons and Places. When he lived in Florence as a rich bachelor, notes Santayana, Loeser seemed also to be oddly friendless, in spite of knowing the whole Anglo-American colony; and Santayana complains that, in the 1920s, when he regularly stayed at Charles Strong’s Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, next to Florence, Loeser, who had a car, never visited him or invited him to his house: «this made me doubt whether Loeser had any affection for me, such as I had for him, and whether it was faute de mieux, as a last resort in too much solitude, that in earlier years he had been so friendly».¹⁵ But this melancholic doubt is quickly dismissed by the ever-realist Santayana: «circumstances change, one changes as much as other people, and it would be unreasonable to act or feel in the same way when the circumstances are different.»¹⁶ All in all, Santayana’s gratitude to Loeser for having shown him Italy and for his guidance in the visual arts, is unqualified.

After their college years, in the 1890s, Santayana and Loeser met several times in London. Santayana reports that his friend had become «very English, much to [his] taste»¹⁷ and that he was both vastly instructed and amused by Loeser’s «expert knowledge of how an English gentleman should dress, eat, talk, and travel.» Yet those meetings didn’t relieve Santayana of «the latent uneasiness [he] felt about [his] friend»: he actually suspected «a touch of madness in [Loeser’s] nature,»¹⁸ to such an extent that he wondered whether, when Loeser boasted of having two original works by Michelangelo in his collection, he was not indulging in wishful thinking. But no, the Michelangelos were authentic, and Loeser had got them cheap. He was a truly terrific collector.

It was in 1895, and with Loeser, that Santayana first visited Rome and Venice. Loeser turned out to be quite the ideal cicerone: «His taste was selective. He dwelt on a few things, with much knowledge, and did not confuse or fatigue the mind.»¹⁹ The first impressions upon arriving in Rome may have played a role in Santayana’s ultimate choice of residence:

We reached Rome rather late at night. It had been raining, and the wet streets and puddles reflected the lights fantastically. Loeser had a hobby that architecture is best seen and admired at night. He proposed that we should walk to our hotel. […]. We walked by the Quattro Fontane and the Piazza di Spagna – a long walk.²⁰

In the autobiography, Santayana does not tell us in what year he and Loeser undertook a walking tour of the Apennines, from Urbino to San Sepolcro; but one of the newly found letters (June 8th, 1897) allows us to date the trip. As promised, I will not dwell on Santayana’s stereotyping reflections that accompany his account of this excursion (they concern «the modern Jew» and his purported inability to «apprehend pure spirit»²¹), and I will limit myself to quoting the memorable exchange the two friends had when they reached the top of the pass:

… after deliciously drinking, like beats on all fours, at a brook that ran down by the road, we looked about at the surrounding hill-tops. They were little above our own level, but numerous, and suggested the top of the world. «What are you thinking of?» Loeser asked. I said: «Geography». «I», he retorted, «was thinking of God.

Loeser died in New York, during a visit in 1928, and was buried in the Cimitero degli Allori in Florence, which welcomed the graves of non-Catholics. By then, his collection comprised over 1’000 pieces, mostly works of Italian Medieval and Renaissance art, but also contemporary works, most notably an impressive collection of fifteen Cézanne paintings. Loeser bequeathed his collection of Old Master prints and drawings to Harvard University’s Fogg Museum of art, eight of his Cézannes to the President of the United States, and a selection of thirty works of art and furnishings to the Florence city council, which are housed in the Quartiere del Mezzanino of Palazzo Vecchio (where one can admire Bronzino’s superb portrait of the poetess Laura Battiferri). The Cézannes were initially shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, until the Kennedys took notice of the gift and decided to hang a few of them in the White house. In a letter dated May 2 1961, the First Lady wrote the following to Loeser’s granddaughter, Mrs. Philippa Calnan:

Dear Mrs. Calnan:

I hope you will be as pleased as the President and I are that we have arranged to have the superb Cezanne paintings which you and your father so generously presented to the United States Government hung in the Green Room of the White House. We have selected «The Forest» and «House on the Marne» to be brought here first. We plan to exchange the paintings so that eventually all of them will hang for some time at the White House. The ones not at the White House at any particular time will be in the safekeeping of the National Gallery of Art and on exhibition to the public there. All eight paintings will, of course, while at the National Gallery and while here continue to bear the label «Presented to the United States in memory of Charles A. Loeser».

This arrangement is particularly gratifying to me because I have often admired your father’s paintings at the National Gallery of Art. Please let me know if you come to Washington. I would be delighted to show the paintings to you in their places here at the White House.

With best wishes.

Sincerely yours,

Jacqueline Kennedy

Indeed, Philippa Calnan responded to the First Lady’s invitation and visited the White House at the end of June 1961. Photographs taken during that visit can be seen at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website.²² Today, three of the Cézannes hang in the National Gallery and five in the White House family quarters, but the eight paintings have never been installed together as an ensemble, as the Loeser bequest directed.

Despite these various donations, a substantial part of Loeser’s collection remained in the estate of the family. At some point between the promulgation of Mussolini’s anti-Jewish racial laws (1938) and the German occupation of Italy (1943) Loeser’s widow, the German pianist Olga Lebert Kauffman, their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter left Florence, leaving behind valuable works of art, and ultimately settling in the United States. Several works from the Loeser collection were on the authoritative list of Nazi-plundered art compiled by the art historian Rodolfo Silviero (aka «the 007 of plundered art»), and at least two have been returned to the family. The Middle and High Schools of the International School of Florence are housed since 2003 in Loeser’s Villa Torri La Gattaia, situated on a hill overlooking Florence.

***

The long early letters (1886-1888) of Santayana to Loeser contain extensive and captivating philosophical passages, while the later (and shorter) ones concern mainly the logistics of the meetings of the two friends in Europe. The last dated letter of the collection (October 26th, 1912) is a beautiful letter of congratulations on the occasion of Loeser’s late marriage to Olga Lebert Kaufmann.

But how did this fine and long-forgotten set of letters come to light again? Like the discovery of penicillin, X-rays or rubber, though admittedly not quite as consequential, locating Santayana ’s letter to Charles Loeser was a matter of serendipity. Following Irving Singer ’s suggestion, who had written that the «Santayana-Cory-Strong triangle»²³ (was «almost worthy of Proust or Henry James in its subtlety,» I began searching for Charles A. Strong’s letters to Santayana, so as to gain a fairer appreciation of the (at times acrimonious) philosophical discussions that took place, for decades, between the two old friends. Strong kept Santayana’s letters, which are included in The Letters of George Santayana, but Santayana hardly ever kept any letters addressed to him. Strong, however, took with utmost seriousness his debates with Santayana, so he made copies of some of his letters to his friend.

In the midst of my research, I came across the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, hosted on the Frick Collection website. One of the entries indicated that Houghton Library at Harvard had received in 2012 a box of documents labelled «Letters from William James and George Santayana to Charles Alexander Loeser, 1886-1912 and undated.» The entry also mentioned that it was a donation in memory of Charles A. Loeser made by his granddaughter, Philippa Calnan. Given the importance Santayana granted to his friendship with Loeser in his autobiography and the absence of any letters to this recipient in the critical edition of the Santayana’s letters, I knew right away that I had chanced upon something interesting. The librarian I contacted at Houghton Library informed me that the documents had not yet been scanned, but that they could do so quickly. In September 2018, by an amusing coincidence, I was at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence where I had just visited the rooms dedicated to the Loeser bequest, when I received the compressed files of Santayana’s letters to Loeser.

***

To date, we have not been able to ascertain the precise origin of the second batch of letters published in this book. We only know that in 2016 the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University reported that a collection of 60 letters written between 1903 and 1937 by Santayana to Baron Albert Wilhelm Freiherrn von Westenholz, had been added to their George Santayana Papers archive.

Santayana talks about Westenholz (from here onwards I will drop the «von», following Santayana’s practice) in the first chapter of the second part of Persons and Places, titled «Germany». Between 1886 and 1888, Santayana spent two semesters studying in Berlin. After that he made several holiday visits to Germany, the last of which

[he] called a Goethe pilgrimage, because [he] went expressly to Frankfort and to Weimar to visit the home of Goethe’s childhood and that of his old age.[He] was then preparing [his] lectures on Three Philosophical Poets, of whom Goethe was to be one. Even that, however, would probably not have induced me to revisit Germany had I not meantime formed a real friendship with a young German, Baron Albert von Westenholz.²⁴

The Baron, born in 1879 in Hamburg, was the son of a banker («originally perhaps Jewish») and of the daughter of a Bürgermeister (mayor) of that city («with the most pronounced Hanseatic Lutheran traditions»).²⁵ Westenholz spent his apprenticeship at the London branch of the bank where his father was a partner, and learned to speak English, «perfectly» according to Santayana. However, he was never appointed by the firm, for, as the reader of Santayana’s letters is soon made aware, Westenholz’s mental health «was far from good; he suffered from various forms of mental or half-mental derangement, sleeplessness, and obsessions.»²⁶

Around 1900, Westenholz turned up at Harvard. Santayana recounts the beginnings of their friendship as follows:

I was then, in 1900-1905, living at No. 60 Brattle Street, and had my walls covered with Arundel prints.²⁷ These were the starting-point of our first warm conversations. I saw at once that he was immensely educated and enthusiastic, and at the same time innocence personified; and he found me sufficiently responsive to his ardent views of history, poetry, religion, and politics. He was very respectful, on account of my age and my professorship; and always continued to call me lieber Professor or Professorchen; but he would have made a much better professor than I, being far more assiduous in reading up all sorts of subjects and consulting expert authorities.²⁸

We do not know how long Westenholz stayed at Harvard, nor whether he ever graduated. But after he left Cambridge, Santayana visited him three times in Hamburg, where he met his invalid mother and his older sister Mathilde; the two friends also met in London, Amsterdam and Brussels, but never in Italy, despite Santayana’s numerous attempts to lure Westenholz to a country «where we should have found so many themes for enthusiastic discussion.»²⁹

Santayana considered Westenholz one of the three best educated persons he had known,³⁰ none of whom, as he remarks, had ever gone to school. He can best be described as a Privatgelehrter (private scholar) who wrote and translated poetry (notably Santayana’s sonnets) and, who, like Loeser, was an avid collector.³¹ The admiration and affection Santayana expresses towards his German friend in Persons and Places are fully corroborated by the newly found letters, amply confirming the statement with which Santayana begins the section dedicated to this relationship: «Westenholz was one of my truest friends. Personal affection and intellectual sympathies were better balanced and fused between him and me than between me and any other person.»³² In passing, they provide a stinging rebuttal to Bertrand Russell’s impression that Santayana was «a cold fish».³³ The tone of Santayana’s letters is uniformly affectionate, sometimes confessional, with frequent and delightful humorous touches. Santayana’s concern for the Baron’s mental condition is a recurring theme, which he addresses with profound empathy and admirable tact. The topics range freely from personal, occasionally intimate, matters to extensive and always lively discussions of philosophy, religion, culture, politics and literature. This is one of those cases where one can only regret not having at one’s disposal the letters that make up the other half of the correspondence.

There is no better way, I believe, to get a sense of Westenholz’s torments and personal qualities than to read the last two paragraphs devoted to him in Persons and Places, respectively titled «His obsessions» and «His unclouded intelligence»:

As for him, his impediments were growing upon him. Fear of noise kept him awake, lest some sound should awake him; and he carried great thick curtains in his luggage to hang up on the windows and doors of his hotel bedrooms. At Volksdorf, his country hermitage, the floors were all covered with rubber matting, to deaden the footfalls of possible guests; and he would run down repeatedly, after having gone to bed, to make sure that he had locked the piano: because otherwise a burglar might come in and wake him up by sitting down to play on it! When I suggested that he might get over this absurd idea by simply defying it, and repeating to himself how utterly absurd it was, he admitted that he might succeed in overcoming it; but then he would develop some other obsession instead. It was hopeless: and all his intelligence and all his doctors and psychiatrists were not able to cure him. In his last days, as his friend Reichhardt told me, the great obsession regarded bedding: he would spend half the night arranging and rearranging mattresses, pillows, blankets and sheets, for fear that he might not be able to sleep comfortably. And if ever he forgot this terrible problem, his mind would run over the more real and no less haunting difficulties involved in money-matters. The curse was not that he lacked money, but that he had it, and must give an account of it to the government as well as to God. And there were endless complications; for he was legally a Swiss citizen, and had funds in Switzerland, partly declared and partly secret, on which to pay taxes both in Switzerland and in Germany; and for years he had the burden of the house and park in Hamburg, gradually requisitioned by the city government, until finally he got rid of them, and went to live far north, in Holstein, with thoughts of perhaps migrating to Denmark. A nest of difficulties, a swarm of insoluble problems making life hideous, without counting the gnawing worm of religious uncertainty and scientific confusion.

The marvel was that with all these morbid preoccupations filling his days and nights Westenholz retained to the last his speculative freedom. Everything interested him, he could be just and even enthusiastic about impersonal things. I profited by this survival of clearness in his thought: he rejoiced in my philosophy, even if he could not assimilate it or live by it; but the mere idea of such a synthesis delighted him, and my Realm of Truth in particular aroused his intellectual enthusiasm. In his confusion he saw the possibility of clearness, and as his friend Reichhardt said, he became sympathetically hell begeistert, filled with inspired light.³⁴

At the end of a letter sent from Cortina d’Ampezzo on July 20, 1931, Santayana takes leave of Westenholz thus: «I wish I could communicate to you the calm, physical and moral, which I enjoy; but I can only send you my impotent good wishes.» And eight years later he announces and comments on the death of his friend as follows:

Hans Reichhardt has given me the belated news that my friend Westenholz killed himself on August 5th […]. We live in old-fashioned tragic times. Westenholz was an extraordinarily well-educated and intelligent person, omnivorous and tireless in following every intellectual interest, but hopelessly neurasthenic and psychopathic all his life, which had become of late a protracted nightmare. At my age the death of friends makes little impression; we are socially all dead long since, for every important purpose; but closing a life is (as Heidegger teaches) rounding it out, given (sic) it wholeness, and in one sense brings the entire figure of a friend more squarely before one than his life ever did when it was still subject to variations.³⁵

Introducción

Daniel Pinkas³⁶

Entre los incontables retos que afronta la edición crítica de la Obras de George Santayana, verdaderamente monumental y aún en marcha, ninguno podía ser mayor que el de reunir, anotar y contextualizar las más de tres mil cartas que Santayana escribió a lo largo de su vida a su familia, amigos, colegas, editores y admiradores. La colección abarca desde 1868 (una carta que Santayana escribió con cinco años a su hermana) hasta 1952, el año de su muerte. El resultado de una labor tan enjundiosa son los ocho libros de cartas editados por William Holzberger (1932-2017), que componen el volumen V de la edición crítica, publicados entre 2003 y 2008.

Holzberger, al comienzo de su Introducción a las Cartas de George Santayana, responde a la pregunta «¿Quién fue George Santayana?» de un modo difícil de mejorar, en tanto que sucinta semblanza del autor:

George Santayana (1863-1952) fue uno de los hombres de su época más sabio y formado. Nacido en España y educado en América, enseñó filosofía en la Universidad de Harvard durante veintidós años antes de retirarse a Europa a la edad de cuarenta y ocho años para dedicarse exclusivamente a escribir. Dominaba varios idiomas, latín y griego entre ellos. Además de su maestría con el inglés, se sentía cómodo con el español y el francés (aunque, por modestia, minimizaba su conocimiento de estos idiomas). En su juventud, Santayana estudió italiano para poder leer en su idioma a Dante, Cavalcanti, Miguel Ángel y a otros poetas platónicos; y, más tarde, por su larga estancia en Roma, adquirió un italiano hablado fluido. Siendo estudiante en Alemania durante 1886-1888, Santayana vivió junto a sus amigos de Harvard en una pensión donde se hablaba inglés en Berlín, con lo que perdió la oportunidad de hablar alemán correctamente. Podía, no obstante, leer en versión original los libros filosóficos y literarios alemanes. Fue además un buen conocedor del mundo, dado que vivió largos periodos en España, América, Inglaterra, Francia e Italia. Siendo un verdadero cosmopolita, Santayana se consideró siempre no obstante español y renovó su pasaporte español. Muchos eran sus talentos y multifacética su personalidad, aspectos ambos que se reflejan vívidamente en sus cartas. Famoso mundialmente como filósofo, fue también poeta, ensayista, dramaturgo, crítico literario, autor de una autobiografía y de una novela de gran tirada.³⁷

Resulta difícil sobreestimar la importancia y la utilidad de las Cartas de George Santayana para los expertos en Santayana, sea cual sea su objeto de estudio. Las cartas más filosóficas arrojan luz, a menudo de modo imprevisto, sobre las tesis filosóficas fundamentales de Santayana: su materialismo, su naturalismo, sus teorías sobre la esencia y la verdad, su doctrina de la fe animal, su ideal de la «vida de la razón» y su concepción de la vida espiritual; las cartas rebosan comentarios mordaces sobre las opiniones de los demás filósofos, tanto clásicos como modernos. Muchas de ellas establecen sus opiniones sobre religión, ciencia, literatura, historia, política o temas de actualidad Obviamente, las cartas abundan en información biográfica crucial, a veces rociada con deliciosos cotilleos. También para lectores menos especializados, las cartas de Santayana son una asombrosa fuente de información, inspiración y humor. Ofrecen la inolvidable, y muy agradable, oportunidad de oír, digamos en vivo, la voz única de un filósofo sabio e inteligente sobremanera que, a la vez, es un ser humano con una trayectoria y una formación intelectual características. A cada paso se aprecia su habilidad para encontrar la palabra justa, desde la más breve nota de agradecimiento hasta la discusión metafísica más profunda.

La publicación de la edición crítica estuvo precedida por la publicación, en 1955, de casi 250 cartas que Daniel Cory, secretario y amigo de Santayana, consiguió reunir. Para localizar esas cartas, Cory publicó anuncios en periódicos y revistas importantes, acudió a las bibliotecas donde están los manuscritos de Santayana y escribió a quienes él pensaba que se habían carteado con él. Al comienzo de su tarea, como recuerda en el Prólogo, él se encontraba «sujeto a ciertos recelos». El primero, que el tremendo número de remitentes de alguien que había sido un escritor activo durante sesenta años llegara a ser inabordable. El segundo, que

Santayana fue un artista consumado en tantos campos […] que me preguntaba si, escribiendo cartas, algo más espontáneo, podía no alcanzar el elevado nivel que le era siempre característico. Sabía que él nunca había enviado nada a su editor que estuviera sin corregir, sino que siempre estaba listo para publicar. Sobre todo, yo no quería que sus amigos, críticos o público dijera de él lo que se ha dicho, desafortunadamente, de otros escritores: ¡Qué pena que se han publicado sus cartas!³⁸

Pero, conforme fue recibiendo cartas, se apaciguó la preocupación de Cory. Lo cierto es que la cantidad de correspondencia fue enorme y hubo que recortar, eliminando cartas banales o escritas meramente «por educación». De lo demás, no obstante, no había por qué preocuparse. Como escribió Cory: «enseguida, coleccionar tantas cartas se convirtió en una aventura prometedora e interesante. Son importantes no tanto por lo que revelan de su vida y de sus ideas como por confirmar también su capacidad literaria»³⁹.

La edición crítica de las Cartas de George Santayana aspiró a ser completa y minuciosa (los editores enviaron peticiones a sesenta y tres instituciones que guardaban manuscritos de Santayana, publicaron anuncios en la revistas literarias de referencia y escribieron a más de cincuenta personas que eran, en principio, receptores de cartas de Santayana; fueron así capaces de añadir unas dos mil cartas más al conjunto inicial de las mil que reunió Cory), con todo, el ideal de que la edición fuese realmente completa era claramente inalcanzable; no solo porque, como es sabido, Santayana destruyó sus cartas a su madre sino porque los editores no pudieron localizar muchas cartas cuya existencia se infería de las alusiones de Santayana o de sus corresponsales. De ahí que el apéndice editorial incluya al final una «Lista de cartas sin localizar» con casi cien nombres. Es reseñable que, entre esas cartas sin localizar, no se incluyan las descubiertas recientemente, que son las que damos gustosamente a conocer en este libro.

Los editores de la edición crítica de las Cartas, sin embargo, sí que mencionan que no se había encontrado ninguna de las cartas de