Cafe Talk of a Sage

THE LETTERS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA (451 pp.)--edited by Daniel Cory--Scribner ($7.50).

Philosophy was George Santayana's shop, and after hours he liked to linger on at the cafe tables of the mind, sipping moments of beauty and watching the passing show with its persistent drama and recurring vanities. Even if building towers of systematic truths had been congenial to him, Santayana banished it with his basic premise, i.e., "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." His letters, edited by his longtime confidant and disciple, Philosopher Daniel Cory, cover 66 years, from the year of his Harvard graduation through the teaching days and European travels to the comfortable room in the hospital retreat in Rome, among whose ministering nuns Santayana died in 1952 at the age of 88. Skeptical, epigrammatic, gracefully literate, the letters are not so much the adventures among masterpieces of a soul as of a finicky cultural palate.

Hasty-Pudding Lady. Just how finicky, the 22-year-old Santayana makes plain in the collection's very first letter, as he announces to a friend that he is starting out "avowedly with no other purpose but that of living in order to observe life." Perhaps this spectator role might not have appealed to Santayana so much if a New England chill had not entered his Latin blood when he was transplanted as a boy of eight from his home in Avila, Spain to Boston, Mass. Boston seared his youthful psyche with the indelible brand of the outcast, so that in his old age he could call himself, half joshingly, "a dago."

He was not treated as a social leper ("I acted in the Institute and Hasty Pudding plays at Harvard, dressed as a leading lady and a ballet dancer"), and Boston paid its respects to the "imported article," as he once tagged himself, by offering him the Harvard philosophy professorship which he held with distinction from 1907 to 1912. But he always sounded as if he wanted his Greek gods to bomb the place. He fumes to William James: "I wonder if you realize the years of suppressed irritation which I have past in the midst of an unintelligible, sanctimonious and often disingenuous Protestantism . . . My Catholic sympathies didn't justify me in speaking out because I felt them to be merely sympathies . . . but the study of Plato and Aristotle has given me confidence and, backed by such authority . . . it is not I that speak but human reason that speaks in me."

Bird in Puritan Cage. In the main, Santayana bit his tongue and bided his time until his savings and a bequest made him modestly independent. In 1912, at the age of 47, he set off to live in Europe for the rest of his life. Escaped from his Puritan cage, Santayana had released himself not only for flitting from London to Paris to Florence to Venice to Rome but for strenuous mental flights in the bulk of his 30-odd works. The delight of the letters is that Santayana is always ready to stray off the course of his philosophic thought into detours of personalities and opinions. Some pithy detours: P:"Germans as far as I know have no capacity for being bored. Else I think the race would have become extinct long ago through self-torture." P:"The material world is a fiction; but every other world is a nightmare." P: "I think that art, etc., has a better soil in the ferocious 100% America than in the Intelligentsia of New York. It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres, etc., that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands." P:"I have just finished Faulkner's Sanctuary, and I think I have understood all the pornographic part, corn cob, etc ... I found myself also absorbed in the story as a whole, without exactly following the thread of it, which it would have taken me a second reading to disentangle . . . Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent, and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog, and require my dog biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony."

P:"The sea . . . has always been a great object lesson to me, a monitor of the fundamental flux, of the loom of nature not being on the human scale."

"I Must Stop Scrawling." Himself the monitor of a philosophic flux--materialism, rationalism, idealism, skepticism--Santayana reveals in the letters not the direction but the drive behind his thinking. To him, philosophy seems to have been a kind of verbal finger painting. As the nuns of the Little Company of Mary padded about him during the last decade of his life, he drew an appealing sketch of old age which also sums up much of his carefully Epicurean philosophy: "The charm I find in old age--for I was never happier than I am now--comes of having learned to live in the moment, and thereby in eternity; and this means recovering a perpetual youth, since nothing can be fresher than each day as it dawns and changes."

The book's last letter, written two months before his death, might have been addressed to the international company of his readers: "I must stop scrawling, although I have various other things that I should like to tell you."

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