purpose, if I am to move cheerfully through the strains of advancing age.
There would be “more of Princeton, and more of the loneliness of the Institute,” but this would raise problems. “We’ll have to dream up something, I think, to prevent a complete drying-up of my personality . . . , and to make our life and home sufficiently interesting to hold some attraction for the children—as well as for ourselves.” It wouldn’t be easy, “for our taste in people and in recreations is not always the same.” Annelise’s reply, if she wrote one, is not on record, but the issue was one of which they were both aware. Marriages, like life, go through stages. Some survive the transitions; others don’t. How this happens is often a mystery, since few couples document—and fewer outsiders witness—the inner workings of an intimate relationship.34
Of their love there can be no doubt: the marriage could not otherwise have lasted for as long as it did. How two people love, though, is—as George’s letter gently suggested—not always the same. “I think they must have had a lot of hard times with each other,” a close friend surmised. George acknowledged as much—also gently—in his Princeton chapel sermon: “The path of true love indeed never does run smooth, [given] the inevitability of jealousies, of unrequited affections, of separations and bereavements.”
He had known, as a young man, that he must marry, but he also dreaded the prospect. “[O]nce married,” George informed Jeanette before he had even met Annelise, “very few men ever think at all any more.” Annelise wasn’t his equal as a thinker and never tried to be. “I wonder what it’s going to be like, living here with all these great brains,” she teased Oppenheimer, on the day they were introduced in the spring of 1950. She had been living with George for a long time by then, though, and his brain was still functioning. Some other wife, facing his slides into self-absorption, might have given up on him, Jeanette speculated. But “Annelise would make him go out and buy her a birthday present! She wouldn’t sit and sulk.” She was, George’s older sister Constance observed, totally unlike him, and therefore “[s]he couldn’t have been a better wife for him.”35
Annelise’s resilience, their neighbor Dick Dilworth thought, reflected her Scandinavian origins: an American would not have had the patience. Another Princeton friend, Bill Bundy, admired her skill in getting George to relax: “One has seen matrimonial relations where you feel that it’s too jangly, because they’re both trying to show off to each other.” Annelise had been a Washington wife when Mary Bundy first encountered her: “You talk about your husband. It’s tedious beyond measure.” In Princeton, though, “I began to see the other side, and to think she was just wonderful.” But George might have found Annelise “a little boring at times,” even there.36
“George is more apt to talk about himself with women than with men,” Annelise herself acknowledged. “Much more so.” Shrewdly, she used the plural. She could always discuss with him where to live and travel, what they could afford, and how to raise the children. But George never wrote her the kind of long, self-revelatory letters he sent to Jeanette. Annelise had seen some, and they made it appear “as if he were having absolutely the worst time. I knew it wasn’t like this. I can’t explain to you why always when he took pen in hand—” “Gloom and depression would set in?” “Yes.”37
Dorothy Fosdick, with whom Kennan shared his troubles when they served together on the Policy Planning Staff, attributed his need to confide in women to “deep psychological considerations.” Annelise agreed, pointing out that the loss of George’s mother, and then of Cousin Grace after his father remarried, had changed “his whole feeling about women.” George went even further: his relations with women, he wrote when he was seventy-seven, had been “unfortunately affected by the bewildering succession of female figures who flitted in and out of the house, each taking care of me in her way, through the years of my infancy and childhood.”38
The stability of a long marriage never quite balanced this instability in his upbringing; hence his dependence on Jeanette, as well as on a succession of female friends from whom George sought solace, to one degree or another, at one time or another: Frieda Por, Dorothy Hessman, Juli Zapolskaya, Fosdick herself. Others—more secretly— became lovers in times of loneliness, lapses George explained in Freudian terms without absolving himself of Calvinist guilt.
I’ve noticed over the years what a tremendous difference there can be between what Freud calls the “persona”—the outward personality which we all have to put forward, but particularly to people dependent on us— and the real personality underneath. We all have vestiges of our animalistic existence in us.
The best you could do, when afflicted by such “emotional and instinctual chaos,” was “to learn to act as though you weren’t.” But concealment too had its price: “There’s no use pretending that it’s anything other than what it is.”39
That’s why he used Russian, at times, to chronicle concealments. “I am ringing her up,” George wrote under an English-language entry in his diary on February 14, 1965. “No one is answering. I am calling again. She has picked up but I can hear in the tone of her voice that she is not alone. Embarrassed, I am ending the conversation. I am absolutely devastated and driving home.” Similar passages stretched across the bottom of pages for the next three months. They were to be understood, he explained to himself and to whoever would later read them, as “a story or novel based on fantasies flowing from my own life, representing its [switching back to English]
He even left instructions for his son, not to be passed on “until I am dead,” on how to manage such matters. Marriage could indeed provide “the deepest moments of happiness a man is capable of experiencing and the best conceivable background for the great constructive tasks of life.” But not all marriages were successful, and even those that were did not always fully satisfy “the sexual instinct,” second only to self-preservation in the demands that it made. So what about affairs? If conducted openly, the woman would become possessive, in an effort to demonstrate “her proprietary rights and the security of her status.” If clandestine, the affair risked becoming “the source of endless gnawing shame and apprehension.” If the woman was not married, “you may be fairly sure she wants to be, or will at some point want to be.” If she was married, there was always the possibility “of a sudden and unwanted intimacy with her husband.” If asked which was worse, “the friendship of an unsuspecting husband, or the resentment of a discerning one, I should not be able to tell you. God save you from them both.”41
Domesticity, George griped in another “imaginary” letter, was “children, diapers, illnesses, relatives, tiresome questions of money, [and] the sex-destroying question: ‘Have you remembered the key?’ ” He ought to be able to stroll, “sometimes alone, sometimes in company, through shady
keeping in mind at all times that which is physically absent as well as that which is present: the people, dependent on you, whom you do not at the moment see; the responsibilities that do not at the moment impinge themselves on your life and consciousness; your past failures; the appalling acts of weakness of which you have been guilty; the injustices you have done to people; the tragedies that may not yet have happened, but do happen —and are bound to;—in short, the whole tragic bedrock of existence.
Tragic indeed—until one notes that George began this last diary entry in the transit lounge at the London airport and completed it hours later as his plane was landing in New York: air travel almost always drove him, with pen in hand, into sloughs of despond. During the three weeks he had been away on this trip, he had sent Annelise an affectionate letter every other day. “It will be good to get home,” the last of them ended. “Love, G.”42
