Santayana's attack on American puritanism is anything but crude. It is conducted through a long character study of the most noble and admir-able American puritan it would be possible to imagine. Oliver Alden is the wealthy scion of a leading Bostonian family - beautiful, intelligent, gifted and kind. He is thoroughly good, but, as becomes increasingly clear, incapable of happiness. A brilliant student and heroic footballer and oarsman, he has no idea how to live - or perhaps, too many ideas.
Santayana finally nails Oliver with his complete incompetence in the area of sexual love. Rejected by the two women he imagines to love him, but who clearly discern his priggish lack of élan vital, Oliver becomes neurasthenic and then dies in a senseless road accident days after the 1918 armistice. The saddest thing is not his early death, in his 20s, but the fact, as his cousin Mario points out, that he was played out and had nothing left to live for.
For Santayana, religion and poetry are essentially the same, celebratory expressions of what it is to be human, born out of the arbitrary and contingent facts of life and death in the midst of circumstance and history. They are the cries of consciousness.
Seen this way, "poetry loses its frivo-lity and ceases to demoralise, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive". There is an answer both to militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, and to fundamentalists prepared to sacrifice life, both their own and others, to a creed.
Fanatics, for him, are those "who have lost sight of their goals and redoubled their efforts". This definition could apply just as well to those caught up in the frantically short-sighted, materialistic world of the west - and especially America - as to benighted religious zealots.
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A life worth living for
By Harry Eyres
Published: August 18 2007 03:00 | Last updated: August 18 2007 03:00
I've just come to the end of one of the slowest novels I've ever read.
It's astonishing to think that The Last Puritan was once a Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller. The only novel by the Spanish-American philosopher, poet and cultural critic George Santayana now seems like an expansive product of the Edwardian era, though it was published in 1935. Leisurely as it is, it packs a surprisingly hard punch - at least at the end. A more sustained attack on the American puritan ideal has never been penned.
Santayana was the man equipped to do this because of his unusual background. He was born in Spain to Spanish parents, but when he was eight his mother moved to Boston, the home of her first husband, and Santayana, who spoke no English when he arrived in America, lived there for the next 40 years, becoming a professor at Harvard.
Though in some ways thoroughly Americanised, Santayana never assumed American citizenship. After becoming increasingly disillusioned with institutional academic life, taken up with nit-picking and bureaucracy and devoted to producing muscular administrators, not enlightened celebrators of life and art, he resigned his professorship.
He spent the last 40 years of his long life in Europe, as a freelance writer, and the last 27 in Rome, where he ended his days in a hospital-clinic run by nuns.
Since his death in 1952, Santayana's intellectual stock has plummeted. Although he was once considered one of the intellectual giants of the first half of the 20th century, teacher of the poets Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken and Wallace Stevens, he is now little read and little remembered. The Last Puritan has been out of print for many years.
Santayana's attack on American puritanism is anything but crude. It is conducted through a long character study of the most noble and admir-able American puritan it would be possible to imagine. Oliver Alden is the wealthy scion of a leading Bostonian family - beautiful, intelligent, gifted and kind. He is thoroughly good, but, as becomes increasingly clear, incapable of happiness. A brilliant student and heroic footballer and oarsman, he has no idea how to live - or perhaps, too many ideas.
Santayana finally nails Oliver with his complete incompetence in the area of sexual love. Rejected by the two women he imagines to love him, but who clearly discern his priggish lack of élan vital, Oliver becomes neurasthenic and then dies in a senseless road accident days after the 1918 armistice. The saddest thing is not his early death, in his 20s, but the fact, as his cousin Mario points out, that he was played out and had nothing left to live for.
Deployed as the antithesis to Oliver is the half-Italian, Catholic Mario, a charming, easy-going Cupid, later Don Juan, who sees no need for metaphysics but delights in plucking every rose that grows in every hedgerow. Santayana's subversiveness shows in his decision to punish not Mario (as happens in the faux- virtuous finale of Don Giovanni) but Oliver, condemned to the fate worse than death of living with a perpetual "moral cramp, a clog in the wheel of every natural passion".
Oliver's failing, with which Santayana symbolises the wider failing of America, is his inability to live naturally, to go with the flow. He inherits the puritan insistence on living a higher life, setting a moral example to the world, finding a reason for everything. Sent to Paris for some rest and recreation by his army doctors, he finds no light or joy in la ville-lumière. "He had a transcendental mind, like a duck's back: it shed and rejected everything that merely happened to flow by. Nothing existed for him save that which his moral tentacles were ready to seize." Or nothing that did not pass the test of his positivist education, which dismissed religion as delusion and poetry as fairytale.
For Santayana, religion and poetry are essentially the same, celebratory expressions of what it is to be human, born out of the arbitrary and contingent facts of life and death in the midst of circumstance and history. They are the cries of consciousness.
Seen this way, "poetry loses its frivo-lity and ceases to demoralise, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive". There is an answer both to militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, and to fundamentalists prepared to sacrifice life, both their own and others, to a creed.
Santayana offers little consolation to those who would divide the world into religious fanatics and enlightened rationalists. Fanatics, for him, are those "who have lost sight of their goals and redoubled their efforts". This definition could apply just as well to those caught up in the frantically short-sighted, materialistic world of the west - and especially America - as to benighted religious zealots. "What is needed," he said in his autobiography People and Places published in 1944, "is a life made free by a capacity to have a vision of the good life". Not such a different recipe as that proposed long ago by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but none the worse for that.
harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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