George F. Kennan : an American life

tender, sometimes earthy and brutal, sometimes classically severe—that was . . . an unfailing source of strength and reassurance in the drearier and more trying reaches of later life.”³⁶

Kennan’s fluency became sufficient that he could spend Christmas at the remote fifteenth-century monastery of Pskovo-Pechorsky, then located on the Estonian side of the Soviet border. “I damn near died of hunger, because these monks didn’t have anything to eat, except barrels of salted herring and black bread. [But] they were nice to me.” In Narva, farther north, he found equally ugly Orthodox and Lutheran churches glowering over the miserable huts that surrounded them: a clash of Russian and Scandinavian cultures. The same was evident in Helsinki, a strikingly more modern city than Tallinn, where within the magnificent new railroad station stood “the box-like passenger cars of the old Russian railway system, with their crazy, chimney-like ventilators protruding from their roofs,” a reminder that “for hundreds of miles beyond there stretches the bleak melancholy expanse of northern Russia . . . ageless . . . unconquerable.”³⁷

While trying to fathom what lay to the east, Kennan brooded about Europe’s fragility and his own superficiality. “Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body,” he concluded with youthful certainty. “If the Old World has no longer sufficient vitality, economic and cultural, to oppose these new barbarian invasions, it will have to drown in the flood, as civilizations have drowned before it.” The only escape lay “in depth rather than breadth,” for in a world in which anyone with health and persistence could travel anywhere, the only unexplored territory lay “deep[e]r down in our own selves, about which we know everything, and understand nothing.” That was a lofty way of addressing a lower problem: George’s own self-absorption, from which flowed intellectual accomplishment and—increasingly—the ability to write compelling prose, but also still behavior echoing “my neurotic student youth.”³⁸

There was, for example, the August weekend he spent at the dacha of Harry Carlson, the American consul in Tallinn and his only immediate superior. He began it in a bad humor: “I hate the world, and the world hates me.” While sharing a train compartment with a British officer who had also been invited, they quickly decided that they disliked each other and needed to make no effort to conceal the fact. Their host was well-meaning, earnest, and nervous, yet what right did he have to “force on me” his “timorous, middle-class standards?” George sulked through dinner, refused to play bridge, and woke the next morning “stuffy and bilious.” Sensing this, Mrs. Carlson suggested “that I amuse myself as I see fit.” So he hired a boat and set off rowing vigorously across the bay against the wind: after a while, with blistered hands, it was time to turn back. Upon his arrival, however, the British officer proposed a paddle-boat outing, during which both were drenched by a large wave. But both were stubborn. “He is not going to complain, and [n]either am I.” So they grimly made their way to the other side and back, chilled, soaked, aching, and miserable. Aware at once that he had not been a good guest, George remorsefully recorded the details of the unhappy weekend. Long afterward he would remember his bad manners as having merited “the general ostracism I received thenceforth in the little diplomatic-consular community.”³⁹

Kennan moved to a larger community—the Riga legation—early in 1929. That city resembled, as none other did, prerevolutionary St. Petersburg: “The copy had survived the original.” He also had colleagues now whose job it was to watch the Soviet Union. He listened carefully to their endless arguments “rising and falling with the hours.” He was not in the “Russian Section,” but his reports—mostly on Baltic issues—were winning respect. Four days after George’s twenty-fifth birthday, a visiting State Department inspector noted that

Mr. Kennan . . . studies well all of his subjects and treats them intelligently, comprehensively and at times almost with brilliance,—certainly with flashes that indicate considerable promise as to his development into a reporting officer of considerable ability. He has assurance, a far-seeing eye, follows details unerringly and is usually on the lookout for anything that may turn up. His alertness is commendable, [but] his assurance may, until mellowed by further experience, lead him afield.⁴⁰

There were few signs now of the petulance Kennan had displayed in Tallinn. He still patronized elders, but in the company of youthful contemporaries, and with self-critical empathy.

“Poor M——,” he wrote in his diary of an older colleague who was leaving Riga, “always dignified even in his weakness, and now we assemble on this winter night, to bid him farewell.” Each shook M——by the hand, talking volubly “to conceal our uneasiness,” trying to “make him feel that we like him, that we are sorry to see him go.” But the train stood still, and the minutes dragged on. “We are not accustomed to playing the part of solemnity for more than a few moments.” Suddenly the train started to move. “Like a group of hysterical children, we laugh, we shout ‘Hurry up, M——, hurry up,’ and we push him to the door of the car.” Standing there, “waving his arm, smiling his sad, courteous smile, M——disappears and leaves us . . . , a trifle embarrassed to find ourselves all together at this late hour, waving senselessly at the black emptiness of the Baltic night.”⁴¹

Kennan’s diaries were not available to the inspector from Washington, but his comments about alertness to detail, promising “flashes,” occasional “brilliance,” and a “far-seeing eye” could well have characterized the writing George was now regularly doing in his spare time:

Riga, February 2, 1929: A furtive, fitful wind, smelling of dirty snow, and deserted wharves, sneaks in from the harbor. It rushes aimlessly through the empty streets, muttering and sighing to itself, seeking it knows not what, crazed and desperate, like a drunken man, lost in the dawn.

Dorpat (Tartu), Estonia, March 29: From the sight of these drab peasants, staring at the ikons, crossing themselves, shuffling the balsam twigs under their feet, as they wait for the commencement of the service, on[e] can sense the full necessity for their presence here.... They do not understand the service, but they see the gilt and the robes and the candles; they hear the chanting and the singing; and they go away with the comforting feeling of there being a world . . . somewhere and somehow . . . less ugly than their own.

Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, April 9: Threads of Fate, leading to all parts of Europe and America, are responsible for the fact that this scrawny Jewish village lying by its frozen river in the morning sun, may call itself the capital of the muddy, impoverished country-side which stretches out around it. It has accepted [this] . . . as a hungry animal accepts an unexpected meal. When the tide of fortune turns, when the officials and diplomats go away, leaving the government buildings as empty as the shops of the little Jewish merchants, there will be snarling and recrimination, but there will be no real sadness, for there has been no real hope.

But why this profusion of extracurricular prose? Maybe to practice observation, a useful skill in a diplomat. Probably in imitation of the German journalist, poet, and playwright Alfons Paquet, whose travel writings had made a deep impression on Kennan. Certainly out of an extraordinary sensitivity to landscapes, environments, and moods, in a way that he found difficult to explain. Kennan speculated, late in life, that he might have done better as a poet or a novelist, but only at great cost, “because art is open-ended, and I didn’t have a balanced enough personal life to have gone into this expression of the emotional without being torn to pieces by it.”⁴²

Kennan’s life seemed sufficiently balanced, by the spring of 1929, for his superiors to send him on to greater things. From Tallinn, Carlson, despite the unfortunate weekend at his dacha, praised Kennan as “unquestionably the most gifted of any of the subordinate officers who have been under my supervision.” He had applied himself assiduously to learning Russian, had high moral standards, and was in good health, even though his only exercise appeared to be “long walks with his dog.” F. W. B. Coleman, the minister in Riga, endorsed this assessment, adding that while “Mr. Kennan might [earlier] have been charged with being too serious, too loath to leave his books and to make social contacts, ... [the] charge is no longer sustained. He . . . commands the confidence of all people whom he approaches.” These accolades were enough for the Department of State, which in July congratulated Kennan “on the successful conclusion of your probationary period for language assignment. It is hoped that an equal measure of success will attend your studies at Berlin.”⁴³

VI.