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A Philosopher's Life and Death
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13939 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1988 |
5,434 Words |
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
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GEORGE SANTAYANA: A BIOGRAPHY
John McCormick
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
612 pp., $30.00
PERSONS AND PLACES: FRAGMENTS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
George Santayana
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
761 pp., $35.00
George Santayana suffers the odd distinction of being at once exceptionally well known and almost completely unknown. In places as remote as Allagash, Maine, Truckee, California, and Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, one is liable to run across a newspaper reporter, radio announcer, or village idiot who can glibly quote Santayana. A curious thing, though: It is always the same quotation. Surely you know which one. Haven't you, with studied nonchalance, insinuated it into a cocktail-conversation? And the name Santayana itself: How wonderfully it rolls off the tongue with a concatenation of musical syllables! All together: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Fame and obscurity
Did Santayana do nothing more than utter these imperishable words? Students of American cultural history associate him with the concept of the Genteel Tradition, but how many of them have read his book of 1931, The General Tradition at Bay, much less his earlier and more acerbic swipe at our country, Character and Opinion in the United States? Santayana's name is at least recognized among practitioners of the discipline of philosophy (after all, they reason, he did have the good sense to be William James' junior colleague at Harvard), though one suspects that the total number of professors who have read the five-volume Life of Reason and the four-volume The Realm of Being could handily convene in the backseat of a Ford Escort. Mainly, Santayana evokes a vast cloud of unknowing.
In the last two decades of his life Santayana was perhaps the most widely read philosopher in the Untied States. Not only did enthusiasts devour his strictly philosophical works, but they read his poetry, essays, literary criticism, social commentary, and religious writings as well. An admiring public boosted two of his books--the lone novel, The Last Puritan, and the first volume of his autobiography--to best sellerdom. Throughout his career he enjoyed the advantages of publishing with what was America's most distinguished house, Scribner's. Popular cultural journals such as the Atlantic Monthly begged for his articles. After World War II, his rooms in the convent clinic in Rome magnetized young American writers, philosophers, and peripatetic culture hounds, on the Roman tour, a visit with Santayana was as de rigueur as a jaunt to the Sistine Chapel or a scroll down the Spanish Steps.
His fame crested at the time of his death in 1952, but then, in one of those strange turns of fashion, his reputation sank into an obscurity so dense that John McCormick, author of a splendid new biography of Santayana, writes in all seriousness of "a conspiracy to forget" the man who had once been a cultural icon. How to account for such a precipitous drop in renown?
Cynics would reply that
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