I HAVE BEEN READING, with immense pleasure, the first four volumes of The Letters of George Santayana in the handsome edition published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. I read them with my first cup of tea before breakfast, usually in short takes, between ten and twenty pages at a go. They give my day a bit of tone, elevating me just a touch above the torrent of mundanities that are to follow.
The letters thus far published are from 1868 to 1932–Santayana’s birth and death dates are 1863 and 1952–and four more volumes are planned. Santayana’s prose was richly aphoristic and as elegantly cadenced as his name. He was one of those sensible people who, to save time, became extremely smart when young. The level and ratio per page of amusing, often profound observations is impressively high. On a fellowship studying in Germany, he notes the utter incapacity of Germans for boredom, which to me explains a lot.
No one was more happily detached than Santayana. At 48, he had finally come into enough money to flee, with unalloyed delight, his job in the philosophy department at Harvard. He lived out his days alone (“I find solitude the best company”), in various temporary quarters in Europe (“To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography”). A victim of what he called “the contemplative disease,” he wished to observe the world and as clearly as possible, which, he understood, is finally not all that clearly. “My philosophy,” he wrote, “has always been that disillusion is the only safe foundation for happiness.”
Reading along one morning, I came across the following passage in a letter to Santayana’s wealthy Harvard classmate, Charles Augustus Strong, who allowed him a room and the use of his apartment when in Paris: “I have bought an arm chair–blue and grey striped velour, walnut frame, warranted genuine Directoire [made, that is, between 1795 and 1800]–which suits me very well for writing (although most people would find it too low). It doesn’t jar with the other furniture, I think, but it can always be relegated to the petit-salon if you think it de trop.”
Sometime in the middle 1960s I had written a review of a number of reissues of Santayana’s books for the New Republic. Not long after, I received a letter from Austria, on chambray-blue stationery, from a man with a Dutch-sounding name. He announced that he was one of Santayana’s last students at Harvard and was in possession of an armchair that once belonged to his professor and wondered if I might like to have it.
I wrote back to say that I would be honored to have Santayana’s armchair, and that I hoped that my correspondent would allow me to pay whatever shipping charges were entailed in sending it to Chicago. Not only would he allow me to pay for shipping, he revealed, but he also wanted $800 as the purchase price for the chair. At the time eight hundred dollars was rather a big ticket, at least for me, and then doubt crept in: How could I know the chair really belonged to Santayana? Maybe this man sold lots of Santayana–and perhaps not a few Henry Adams and Mark Twain–armchairs to culture-gullible Americans.
Thanks to the MIT edition of Santayana’s letters, I now know that my correspondent, a man named Andrew Joseph Onderdonk who was a Wall Street lawyer and expert in international law, was offering me the real goods. With World War I about to break out, Santayana, hoping to lighten the load of the small number of his possessions in Strong’s Paris apartment, wrote to Strong, “Onderdonk writes that he will be glad to relieve me of the chair.”
Santayana writes to Strong that Onderdonk is among those former students who, after a few years “in the world,” seem “to have no intellectual interests or clearness left.” He notes that his mother is “a Viennese Jewess of sixty, very flirtatious and friendly but a good soul.” A sister is mentioned. Onderdonk visits Santayana from time to time in Paris. Elsewhere he writes that Onderdonk has grown “so fat that he can’t open his eyes.” Yet Onderdonk wrote Santayana’s will, and was, briefly, his literary executor.
Whether Onderdonk, like Santayana, remained a bachelor I do not know. Considering that he was a Jew, his shoring up in Vienna seems an odd fact. One assumes that he didn’t remain there during the Nazi era. Where, through that period, did he store Santayana’s chair? Having graduated Harvard in 1910, he must have been in his late seventies when he offered to sell me the chair. Was he broke? By 1966 what condition was the chair in? And where is it now?
But for $800 (plus shipping) and a want of faith in my fellow man, I could be sitting in George Santayana’s armchair, and writing, I somehow feel, much better than I do now.
–Joseph Epstein
