Two Lives Intertwined
Stevens and Santayana
Harvard Days, Harvard Nights
Wallace Stevens met George Santayana, the poet and popular young professor, when Stevens was an unclassified student at Harvard (1896–1900). The undergraduate from Reading, Pennsylvania, would have been nineteen at the time and the cosmopolitan Spanish-American in his mid-thirties. Stevens would later remember those days this way:
While I did not take any of his courses and never heard him lecture, he invited me to come see him a number of times and, in that way, I came to know him a little. I read several of my poems to him and he expressed his own view of the subjects of them in a sonnet which he sent me, and which is in one of his books. This was forty years ago, when I was a boy and when he was not yet in mid-life. . . . I always came away from my visits to him feeling that he made up in a genuine way for the many things that I needed. He was then still definitely a poet. (L. 481–482)
The mentioned exchange of poems has been discussed by Robert Buttel, who has also examined the influence Santayana’s poetry on the younger’s verse.¹ But as other scholars have pointed out that, more than his poetry, it was Santayana’s treatise Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (published in the Spring of 1900) that had an influence on Stevens at both at the beginning and end of his literary career.² As Samuel French Morse observed: “In a proliferation that is almost uncanny, the figures of Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion reappear in the poetry, the essays, and the ‘adagia’ of Stevens, sometimes unaltered, but always in a context which makes them Stevens own.”³
That enthusiasm may have started early; Stevens is likely to have been the anonymous author who favorably reviewed Santayana’s new book in The Harvard Advocate, the student publication then edited by Stevens. In any event, in his last meeting with Santayana before Stevens left Harvard, he commiserated with the philosopher about a poor review the book had received in The Nation (S&P 68). A memory of that meeting was inscribed in the blank pages of Stevens’ copy of Santayana’s Lucifer which the philosopher had given to the departing student:
I [and another student] dined with Santayana last night . . . [and we discussed “Lucifer,” the shallow review of “Interpretations” in “Nation,” the essay on Emerson in that book, and Emerson’s habit of eating pie for breakfast.] After dinner the three of us went to S.’s room [where we debated poetry,] smoked cigarettes, drank whisky, etc. until eleven when we broke up. I shall probably not see him again.” (S&P 68–69)
In fact, Stevens never did see Santayana again.
The Poet in the Gray Flannel Suit
Stevens left Harvard at the end of his junior year. His father, a lawyer in Reading, Pennsylvania, was feeling the financial strain of having three sons in college. Writing to his twenty-year-old son after the young man had announced his plans to become a poet, Garrett Stevens pointed out the difference between English nobility (who were only concerned with how to amuse themselves) and red-blooded Americans (who needed to earn their way in order to support a future wife, house, and family) [S&P 71]. The twenty-year-old was apparently chastened.
In a persuasive and insightful essay, Alan Filreis has argued that during the nine months after leaving Harvard, the young Stevens faced a career choice represented by “the two authorities in his life, George Santayana and Garrett Barcalow Stevens.”⁴ It was a choice between the poetic and the practical, between his mentor and his father. It was also a choice between: the European aestheticism of a thinker and writer in the ivory tower of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who routinely criticized the mendacity of the middle class; and the hale-and-hearty Protestant business ethic of his father in Reading, Pennsylvania. To the young man in his early twenties, it seemed a choice between a life of poetry and the banality of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
In the summer of 1900, Stevens reluctantly signed up for the gray-flannel world of obligations. After a brief stint as a newspaperman in New York, he followed his brothers’ examples and enrolled in law school. He was soon a lawyer and businessman working for insurance companies, and in 1916 he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company where he would remain until his death in 1955.
In the meantime, however, he seems to have realized that his business career need not preclude his poetic ambitions. In any event, this businessman published his first book of poems, Harmonium, at the age of forty-four, in 1923, and went on to publish seven more books of poetry and win numerous awards (including the National Book Award, twice). Indeed, Stevens would become something of a curiosity of Twentieth Century Literature: a celebrated poet who was also an insurance company vice president.
Of course, this issue of how Stevens found a way to balance his careers as nationally famous poet and as an insurance company executive is an intriguing one for his readers. In truth, it may not have been such an issue for Stevens himself since many of his peers had found ways to have a career and remain a poet; his friend and the poet William Carlos Williams, for example, was a physician in New Jersey. On the other hand, this issue may have been an even larger one for Stevens than his writings seem to suggest.
Strangely enough, Stevens’ life as businessman poet seems to have been anticipated by Santayana. In the conclusion of Three Philosophical Poets, published in 1910 (ten years after Stevens left Harvard), Santayana would write that a career in industry, science, or business “need not be servile” because “to do it is also to exercise our faculties.” Talking about the poet of the future, Santayana makes a prediction: “The philosophical or comprehensive poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet of business” (189).
Forty Years Later
There is little mention of Santayana in Stevens’ letters or essays during the forty or so years after he left Harvard. That changes, however, around the time Edmund Wilson published a portrait of the old philosopher in his declining years in Rome in an April 1946 issue of The New Yorker. A year later, Stevens mentions Santayana in letters to two correspondents (L. 635 and 637). And then around this period but no later than Summer 1950, Stevens began composing the poems of The Rock and making use of, as I argue in this study, Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith.
What is interesting about this era of renewed interest in Santayana is that Stevens reverts to career issues. For example, in his 1948 essay “Imagination as Value,” when the grey-flannel poet searches for an example of someone who has integrated his life with his art, he points to Santayana in his Roman circumstances:
There may be lives, nevertheless, which exist by the deliberate choice of those that live them. To use a single illustration: it may be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in any deliberate work of art or letters. We have only to think of this present phase of it, in which, in his old age, he dwells in the head of the world, in the company of devoted women, in their convent, and in the company of familiar saints, whose presence does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a generous and human philosopher. (NA 147–148)
Career issues also come up a few years later in Stevens’ lecture “A Collect of Philosophy” (1951). There, while praising Santayana’s prose style, Stevens mentions almost under his breath the “Santayana, who was an exquisite and memorable poet in the days when he was, also, a young philosopher” (OP 187). This seems a haunting echo of the sentiment expressed in the letter previously quoted, when Stevens recalls their shared Harvard days: “He was then still definitely a poet.”⁵
But in regard to these career issues, what is perhaps most revealing is Stevens letter to Barbara Church sent three days after Santayana’s death:
I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. Fifty years ago, I knew him well, in Cambridge, where he often asked me to come and see him. This was before he definitely decided not to be a poet. . . . It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like law, which is only a form of reason) is a jealous mistress. (L. 761)
There are several revealing things to note in this letter. While previously Stevens had said, “I came to know him a little” (L. 482); now Stevens says, “I knew him well.” And while other accounts leave the impression that the two might have met now and then, this letter suggests something else: “He often asked me to come and see him.”
But a more significant psychological revelation is made in the letter when Stevens equates his own career with that of Santayana, parenthetically referring to his life as poet and corporate lawyer. It may have been that when Stevens was a young man and Santayana a young professor in his thirties, the latter was at an enviable height: “I always came away from my visits to him feeling that he made up in a genuine way for the any things I needed” (L. 482). But now, more than a half century later, they seem more like peers who had faced the same dilemma.
Two Phaedos
George Santayana died in Rome on September 26, 1952. At the time, there was some question whether the mild mannered atheist — who had described himself as an “aesthetic Catholic” and famously said, “There is no God, and Mary is his mother” — would at last be reconciled with his native Catholicism. That would not be the case even though he passed his last hours in the company of the nuns who had cared for him for a decade and who were praying for his salvation.
In a moment of odd synchronicity, that very same month The Hudson Review published “To An Old Philosopher in Rome,” Stevens’ most direct and transparent homage to Santayana. And to continue with these revelations of the uncanny: the tone of that poem has been aptly described as “pre-elegiac”; as if a premonition, Stevens begins his poem by picturing the old philosopher “on the threshold of heaven.”
Stevens, himself, died three years later (on August 2, 1955). He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in April and later spent a month at a convalescent center following surgery. There he was visited by Elias Mengel, a family friend, who was struck by two things: a copy of the New Testament at his bedside and, “what was fascinating to me, he started talking about Harvard and Santayana. He was obviously enjoying this, speaking about the past” (Brazeau, 291).
When his situation worsened, Stevens entered St. Francis Hospital, the Catholic hospital in Hartford where, like Santayana, he was cared for by nuns. He also had occasional visits from Father Arthur Hanley, the hospital chaplain, to whom Stevens expressed the desire to “get in the fold”; and at his request, Stevens was baptized just a few days before he died (Brazeau, 295). Stevens did not have a Catholic funeral, nor was he buried in a Catholic cemetery; but “he had gotten into the fold,” Father Hanley said, “and that was it” (296).
None of his friends knew what to make of Stevens’ deathbed conversion to Catholicism. And few critics have tried to understand it. But Stevens’ biographer Paul Mariani is the exception and has hazarded three possible explanation. The first is an amusing one: Stevens was in the insurance liability business and wanted to ink the contract “just in case.” The second is that, Mariani argues, Stevens wrestled his whole life with issues of belief in poetry and religion, and this issue may have been resolved with his deathbed conversion. But the third explanation that Mariani finally settles upon is that, in his last hours, Stevens may have been aping someone else: “What Stevens assented to is probably what Santayana had wanted, the beauty of the idea of an idealized Catholic Church” (401). If this is true, it adds a certain poignancy to Holly Stevens’ observation in Souvenirs and Prophecies: “It is obvious that Santayana had a lifelong influence on my father” (69).
Notes.
1. Robert Buttel, “Wallace Stevens at Harvard: Some Origins of his Theme and Style,” ELH XXIX (March 1962); rpt. in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore, 1965). Cf. Daniel Fuchs, “Wallace Stevens and Santayana” in Patterns of Commitment in American Literature, ed. Marston La France (Toronto, 1967).
2. The most significant discussion is Sidney Feshbach’s “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning,’” Journal of Modern Literature 23, 1 (Summer 1999), 59–78.
3. Morse, Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life (New York, 1970), xi-xii. See also David P. Young’s “A Sceptrical Music: Stevens and Santayana,” Criticism, VII (Summer 1965), 264, n. 5; and Fuchs, 135, n. 1.
4. Alan Filreis, “Wallace Stevens and the Crisis of Authority,” American Literature 56, no. 4 (December 1984), 560–578.
5. Stevens’ contention (that Santayana gave up being a poet) is debatable, but the following is generally true: “By the turn of the century, Santayana’s interests largely centered on his philosophical inquiries, and although he never abandoned writing poetry, he no longer considered it his central work” (Herman Saatkamp and Martin Coleman, “George Santayana” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/santayana/).
