George Santayana (Ppr)

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.

McCormick (comparative literature emeritus, Rutgers U.) provides a new introduction to his biography of writer Santayana (1863-1952), who was born in Madrid and spent 40 years in the US and another 40 in Europe. The 1988 edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Publishers Weekly

Calling the current neglect of Santayana a scandal, McCormick wants us to see him not only as a great philosopher but as an important novelist, poet, literary critic and master of the epigram. Born in Madrid in 1863, Santayana became a leading figure at Harvard where he tired of academic politics; his disdain for Americans' worship of ``material achievement, good humor and football'' drove him back to Europe. This Jamesian personality lived his own philosophy of serene detachment. He saw religion, art and science as a harmonious whole and tried to synthesize Plato and Lao-tsu. His idealistic philosophy upheld concepts like soul and psyche in the age of Einstein without invoking mysticism. The Last Puritan, his only novel, charts the inevitable decline and extinction of its hero with tragic force. What are we to make of Santayana's sympathies with Italian Fascism, his anti-Semitism, total opposition to liberalism and ultra-traditionalism in art, which led him to brand Shakespeare and Browning as barbarians? McCormick, author of four scholarly books, spends much of this intimate 608-page biography acting as an apologist, yet he succeeds in engaging the reader in an active dialogue with Santayana's thought. Photos not seen by PW. (February 16)

John McCormick (1918-2010) taught American Studies at the Free University, Berlin, and later went on to become distinguished professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works, including Bullfighting, American and European Literary Imagination, Catastrophe and Imagination, and Fiction as Knowledge.

John McCormick (1918-2010) taught American Studies at the Free University, Berlin, and later went on to become distinguished professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works, including Bullfighting, American and European Literary Imagination, Catastrophe and Imagination, and Fiction as Knowledge.