George Santayana: A Biography

by John McCormick

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.

Genres: Biography

638 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A biography that reads like one of those “a life in letters” volumes, as McCormick frames and orders delightful extracts from Santayana’s vast correspondence and hawk-eyed marginalia. To me Santayana’s was an exemplary life, like Yourcenar’s and Nabokov’s. The reserve, the distinction, the unfailing humor; the dandy's insolence mellowed, the egotist's romanticism matured, by a philosophic grace, a sage aplomb.

...of course, in leaving it, I am far from wishing never to see my American friends again. It is only their country that I am longing to lose sight of. (to Susana Sturgis, 1909)

I hadn’t seen an American book of that period for a long time, and it carried me back to the terrible 80’s, I suppose one of the decades in which taste, philosophy and politics were at their lowest ebb. What ugliness! What satisfaction in vulgarity and mediocrity! No wonder the aesthetes had to react, and could do so only absurdly; but the marvel is that they reacted at all, and prepared a little fresh air, even if not very fresh, for us to breathe when we came on the scene. (to Robert Potter, 1923)

My own sense of propriety has been warning me for some time that I ought not to be on view for the public passer-by, when I am half deaf and half blind, and my teeth are dropping out or hanging loose and long, like a ragged row of rogues from gibbets. (to Rosamund Sturgis, 1951)

But when people have no imagination (or take such as they have for true knowledge of fact) they cannot conceive anything of human importance, history, poetry, religion, or art, as anything but true or false reporting of physical events of the world. (to Ira Cardiff, 1951)

But there I saw him yesterday for an instant; and it confirmed me in the theory that time is a great illusion, when it makes us think that it brings or destroys anything. Everything is eternal, except our attention. (to John M. Merriam, 1949)

He was a man with a broken heart and a high resignation. I doubt whether he believed anything, but he had a spiritual nature. (marginal note in his copy of Frank Russell’s My Life and Adventures)

[Christian P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to understand, but very descriptive.

[Frank Spencer]

This is a pretty complete bio.