George F. Kennan: An American Life (16 page)

He could of course write about colleagues. If Chekhov could describe Russian villagers so clearly that American readers gasped, “how perfectly true,” why couldn’t the Moscow diplomatic community be written up in the same way? But literature was also a kind of history: it portrayed “a given class at a given time, with all its problems, its suffering and its hopes.” Diplomats’ lives, he finally concluded, were “too insignificant, too accidental, to warrant description.”
¹⁵

So too, in George’s opinion, was sex. He read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
that summer but found it “not a very good book.” Its frankness went nowhere and proved nothing: happiness in life was not contentment in bed. Lawrence’s characters shared only a shallow and transitory compatibility. Sex, George insisted, was “not a field for introspection.” It should be “only incidental,” for people “who spend as little time contemplating its pleasures as they do worrying about its results.... [T]here are other things vastly more important.”
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Perhaps so, but what were they? There was of course the world itself. George had seen more of it than most people and since his 1924 European trip had been filling his diaries with descriptive impressions. Now he hoped to get some of them published. One such piece, “Runo—An Island Relic of Medieval Sweden,” did come out in 1935 in the
Canadian Geographical Journal
after having been turned down by
The National Geographic Magazine:
it was George’s first appearance in print.
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But travel writing was not likely to establish a reputation, or to provide an income.

Biography, however, might be an alternative. It allowed seeing beauty, pathos, class, sex, and scenes through someone else’s eyes, an attractive possibility for George, who preferred functioning, as he himself put it, “from a certain emotional distance.” That brought him back to Chekhov. Late in 1932 he sought State Department clearance to send an essay on “Anton Chekhov and the Bolsheviks” to
The Yale Review.
George’s mentors Robert Kelley and Joseph Green (who had moved there from Princeton) liked the article, and the chairman of the department’s publication committee allowed that “[i]f Yale can stand it, I can.” Yale could not, however, and the piece was never published.
¹⁸

There was, though, another possibility: could George F. Kennan write the life of the first George Kennan? The idea originated in Moscow, where he had found a lively interest in his ancestor: even Kalinin had asked about the connection. It had been awkward, George wrote Jeanette, “having the same name and nationality and having so much the same interests, to explain that I know little more of him than the average reader of his works and have never had any association with his branch of the family.” So at some point in the spring of 1934, he asked her to see the elder George Kennan’s widow at her home in Medina, New York, and to raise the question of a biography with her.

The visit went badly. Mrs. Kennan, now eighty, remembered George’s inadequate thank-you letter, written at the age of seven after his only meeting with his famous namesake. She also resented George’s name: convinced, erroneously, that the “Frost” had been meant to honor George A. Frost, the difficult traveling companion her husband had endured in Siberia, she had, she revealed, tried unsuccessfully after young George’s birth to get it changed. “Because George Frost Kennan can speak Russian is no reason that he can do full just[ice] to a man who had spent a large part of his life stud[y]ing different races,” Mrs. Kennan wrote Jeanette. “You see, my dear, you don’t know anything of . . . our life, the world we knew, or our tastes, so extremely different from your father’s or any of the [other] Kennan’s.” The current George Kennan had not fitted himself to be a writer, having neither style nor originality nor personality in expression. “[H]e may get all these things later in life after more experience,” but if the first George Kennan’s life were ever to be written, it would have to be by an “experienced biographer.”

George was stung by the brush-off. “It is no fault of mine—nor is it very important—that my middle name is Frost,” he complained to Jeanette. “I can also not feel apologetic about letters I may have written as a boy. Anyone who can remember the anguish of a child who is forced to try to write letters to grown-ups whom he scarcely knows will not take too seriously the products of these unnatural efforts.” As for not understanding that branch of the Kennan family, he had, after all, managed to understand “many other sets of tastes and ideas and acquaintances.” But with Mrs. Kennan convinced “that we are a strange crowd of backwoodsmen,” and that “we would like . . . to ride into fame on the coattails of an illustrious cousin,” there was little point in pursuing the matter. “I should prefer to make my progress as a Russian specialist independently.”
¹⁹

Whether because of this rejection or not, George admitted to Jeanette at the beginning of August that—despite his summer in Kristiansand—he had been through “a spell of the most miserable nervous depression, which almost made me physically ill.” It had to do with his career, his marriage, and reaching the age of thirty.

George had been struck to learn that Jeanette was having similar problems: “We
are
so alike. It’s almost embarrassing.” And it was “ridiculous” that neither of them had been able to discover what their shared symptoms meant. Perhaps “thwarted ambitions” were “only the scapegoats on[to] which our . . . subconscious minds divert dissatisfaction.” They probably reflected the family inheritance “of repression and sacrifice,” or perhaps “a strange, stiff, motherless childhood.”

The night before, George added, he had written in his notebook of a man sobered by scrapes with catastrophe who was willing to sacrifice much to save a little. There was humor and enjoyment in this, but no great elation: “No fantastic vistas gleam momentarily through the shifting mists.” A price had been paid for peace of mind. It brought him “courage and a concentration of strength which he lacked before. His eyes are clear and his nerves are steady.” However, “I disrigged my sailboat today and it was very sad.”
²⁰

Bullitt asked Kennan not to hurry back to Moscow. There was a long, hard winter ahead, and the work to be done there was less important than his health. But by the end of July George was ready to return: “I really feel that I have gotten all I can get out of my vacation here, and that to stay longer would only mean to get rusty and lazy from inactivity.” The entire family—including Grace and a Norwegian girlfriend of Annelise’s who served as a nanny—were back in Moscow by the end of August. “Kuniholm, Kennan, and Bohlen are all working admirably,” Bullitt reported to the State Department a few weeks later. “[W]e could run this Embassy with the assistance of these three boys and no superior officers whatever.”
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Kennan would have blanched at this after going through the previous winter, but he and his family were at least reasonably comfortable in their apartment on the fifth floor of the Mokhovaya. They shared the building with some forty other Americans who lived and worked there, mostly free of friction, with an intimacy and informality unusual in a Foreign Service post. Grace spoke a mixture of Norwegian and English that George found “fluent for this peculiarity.” She was, he wrote Jeanette, “a sweet, happy child, and a good companion” who enjoyed family activities, including “the scrubbing of my back, whenever she is allowed to.” Dividing her attention between Americans in the Mokhovaya and children in the Kremlin park, Grace “commanded communists and capitalists alike with a queenly contempt for ideological differences.”
²²

Annelise had a Russian cook and maid, although it was a mystery to her how they could work so slowly. She had bought George a guitar and was herself learning Russian. “I understand a lot when I hear people speaking, even more when I read.” One book on her list was Trotsky’s autobiography: “He is a brilliant man, but also very vain.” Family finances were better than they had been for some time, with George having received a promotion and a salary increase—the apartment came free. He was even considering co-purchasing, with Annelise’s father, the island off Kristiansand where they had spent the summer: “It might provide for little Grace—as Nagawicka did for us—the symbol of a home, something which she will otherwise lack sadly as long as we continue our wandering existence.”
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In the privacy of his diary, however, George was as gloomy as ever. He could not help but contrast the Soviet experience with “the neurotic unreality of our own.” Russians lived life “in the raw, . . . good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarreling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere—but all the more simple and direct and therefore stronger.” Their revolution, like nature, was lavish and careless. “Its victims are no more to it than the thousands of seeds which are cast to the wind, in order that one tree may grow.” The survivors, though, possessed a healthy, earthy vitality that attracted him despite the fact that it would quickly crush him, “as it crushes all forms of weakness.” So much for Kennan’s confidence, two years earlier in Riga, that the Soviet system carried within itself the seeds of its own self-destruction.
²⁴

One visitor to Moscow that fall was George’s half-brother Kent, then twenty-one, who spent a month in Bohlen’s temporarily vacant apartment. Kent got to practice on the Spaso House grand piano while the ambassador was away. He relished seeing opera and ballet at the Bolshoi—“lavishly mounted, frequently with a good deal of gimmicky stage business like rising moons and setting suns (in which the Russian audiences seemed to take a certain naïve delight)”—and even managed to get into a performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s controversial
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
before Stalin shut it down. Annelise found it alarming, though, that Kent was even thinner than George, and George worried about his shyness. “I see in him,” he wrote Jeanette, the “restless ghost (and a very gaunt ghost it is) of my former self.” Kent remembered the visit as an exciting experience, with George and his colleagues constantly dropping into each other’s apartments, confusing the maids and the hidden microphones with code words, expecting GPU eavesdropping—that was the current acronym for the secret police—on every telephone call.
²⁵

On November 7, the seventeenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kennans watched the six-hour military parade in Red Square from their apartment windows. The next day George and Annelise attended their first Kremlin reception, mounting a terrifyingly high straight staircase that “made us feel like ants” to enter the great ballroom where Ivan the Terrible had once received foreign emissaries. “America,” Annelise wrote, “seems far away.” Life in Moscow was getting strenuous again, George complained later that month, as much because of social obligations as office work. In a single week the Kennans went to three dinners, three parties, and an impromptu luncheon, while giving another dinner and a tea. One event, hosted by the Russians, began at eleven in the evening and lasted until three-thirty in the morning. “I sometimes have misgivings as to how long I can stand it.”
²⁶

Not long at all, as it turned out. George wrote that letter on December 2, 1934. Ten days later he fell ill with severe stomach pains, together with the inability to keep food down. “Poor boy,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the twenty-first: “He hadn’t had anything to eat for 40 hours.” As a consequence, George missed the most famous party ever held at Spaso House: the Christmas Eve celebration at which Thayer, responding to Bullitt’s instructions to “make it good,” brought in trained seals from the Moscow Circus to slither across the ballroom balancing champagne glasses on their noses. Annelise did not miss it: “I remember that very well.” But George lay in bed at the Mokhovaya, entertained only by Grace, the two of them one “in our preoccupation with the present, our indifference to past and future.”
²⁷

“He looks pretty bad to me,” the embassy counselor, John C. Wiley, reported to Bullitt, who was in Washington. Soviet doctors had recommended a sanatorium in Germany or Austria. “Private means zero,” but “Kennan is a valuable asset to the Service.” Bullitt needed no prompting. “I am so fond of that boy and have such confidence in him that I hate to see him leave Moscow,” but he knew from his own experience the agonies of ulcers. Could Kennan come to Washington for free treatment at the Naval Hospital? “[T]he President’s physician . . . is a good friend of mine and would see to it that you had every possible care.” But George’s Foreign Service superiors decided instead to keep him in Europe, temporarily assigning him to the nearest post so that he would not have to take sick leave. They had been “magnificent,” he wrote Jeanette. “I could embrace the old State Department for that, columns, conservatism, intrigues, and all.”
²⁸

As for himself, “I am not unpleased at this turn of events.” After months of feeling miserable while being told that he was suffering from an imaginary ailment, or perhaps “the lack of another drink,” convalescence would be welcome. And so one night in mid-January 1935 his friends put him on the train to Warsaw. “Many of them, I was later told, never expected to see me again.” He was still sick enough to have to be nursed through the night by the sleeping car porter—all the more so for discovering that he had failed to pack passport, visas, and other necessary papers. That required an extra day at the border and further treatment by the village doctor: the station was the one through which he and Bullitt had passed, with much greater ceremony, a little over a year before. Kennan finally made it to Vienna, where duodenal ulcers were confirmed, probably aggravated by inadequate treatment of the amoebic dysentery that had laid George low on his European trip with Nick Messolonghitis a decade earlier. He was sent off to Sanatorium Gutenbrunn, in the town of Baden on the edge of the Wienerwald and at the foot of the Alps, with firm instructions: “rest and diet.”
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