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.”29
IV.
George knew European “cures” too well, he assured Jeanette—and, he might have added, his Thomas Mann— to see any
The doctor was Frieda Por, a Hungarian Jew who became a lifelong friend. “Believe me,” George later recalled, “for a Jewish woman to become a staff physician in Gutenbrunn in those days—a very conservative old Austrian sanatorium with all the other doctors real Viennese—that was quite an achievement.” Her therapy was as much psychological as physical. Whether at her behest or on his own, George read Freud for the first time. “I talked with her many times about this,” the debates extending “high and wide” into the night. She defended the power of human will and the possibilities for happiness, but only, he suspected, as someone who was neither free nor happy and “dares not admit it.” He complained that “your idea of what to do with a patient who has problems like [mine] is to wrap them in soft blankets and tell them not to be ashamed of anything they ever did. That it’s all their parents’ fault.” George preferred the grimmer Puritan tradition, which was “that you jolly well bite the bullet if you have problems.... I think will power has got something to do with it.” But his diary shows him wrestling with himself:
George #1: You feel the need of unburdening your soul to the Frau Doktor. You are anxious to tell her that you are depressed. You had not, after all, coped with life successfully in the past. That was clear enough from the very fact that you, a young man, in the prime of life, should be lying in this sanatorium together with a lot of old syphilitics and anemic women.
George #2: Whence this urge to confession? Did you really think that she could help you? You know she couldn’t. You know no woman could, unless she were beyond the last trace of femininity and treated you with the unsparing frankness and the contempt which you deserve.
George #1: Well, after all, she is in charge of my treatment. Should she not know the state of mind of her patient?
George #2: Oho, you goddam hypocrite! None of that stuff! No sir! None of your limp excuses! You are in a sanatorium, not a psychopathic clinic. It’s your stomach that is being treated, not your head. If you think your head needs treating, then go to a psychiatrist, but don’t come sneaking around to lady stomach doctors with your little intimate confidences. Learn to take it, Kennan. It’s your problem.
George did acknowledge, though, at least some relationship between his stomach and his head. “I must lack independence of character,” he wrote Bullitt, “because I react so strongly to the confidence or mistrust of others.” Loy Henderson, who supervised his work in Moscow, saw a direct connection between Kennan’s ambition and his health: when things got difficult, he would get sick. Years later Kennan saw the connection as well: “I was too tense, too anxious to please my superiors and to measure up to the responsibilities I had. I noticed that when I left government, the ulcers stopped, because I was no longer responsible to anyone but myself.”31
For the moment, though, George was using his Gutenbrunn time for self-analysis. Physical sickness, he thought, might provide a path to spiritual recovery. But he had no normal spiritual life, only the pressures of responsibility. So “I dare not relax.... I am like a man on a bicycle: as long as I keep going, I can balance; if I stop, I fall.” What if the body could not stand it? What if there were more physical collapses, each worse than the other? There might be refuge in sleep, sport, and spartan life, but where would that leave Annelise? “Who is going to give her companionship in youth, gaiety, and human society?”
Communion with the past might be another way to heal. George’s diary from these months contains detailed accounts of being dragged in sullen stubbornness to dancing school as a child, of being lonely at St. John’s and looking forward to the liberation of holidays, of then spending them by himself at home sulking, reading “the dirty poems” in his father’s edition of Robert Burns, snatched furtively from the living room bookshelf. Perhaps he had been trying to warn the grown-ups that they were raising “an unruly, neurotic child,” who was appealing for help. George sent Jeanette a sixteen-page unfinished account of his life as a fledgling diplomat in Geneva and Hamburg, “the unhappy little adjustments of a scared young American, who cracks up now and then with a loud thud.” And he wrote elegia-cally to Cyrus Follmer about “associations of other days” in Berlin, where there were “rare friends in whose eyes and words the world and life were once so nicely mirrored.” There had been none like that in Moscow or Riga. “Never since has life glowed so richly and so deeply. It probably never will.”
Dreams became vivid enough to record, if not to analyze. The Foreign Service, irritated by George’s messy accounts, tells him it has no further need for his services. Thinking of his family, he pleads for his job, offers if necessary to become a typist, but finds that his superiors have only been giving him “a good scare.” Jews parade along the Riga Strand holding coffee cups to their mouths—but they could also be thermometers. A Doberman follows George out of a St. Petersburg restaurant where the murdered tsar lies on a bier, surrounded by his security men sitting at tables. The animal rears as if to attack, but then turns to show a sign on his back indicating that he is “an imperial watch-dog, with full official status.” George bows in acknowledgment, introducing himself formally as “Kennan, . . . of the American Embassy.”32
By mid-February, Annelise and Grace had joined George in Baden. “They take too much time,” he groused to Jeanette in a letter on March 6. “Don’t idealize our marriage. It’s been near enough the rocks on more than one occasion.” But the same letter devotes four pages to a rhapsodic description of the island off Kristiansand that he and Annelise’s father hoped to buy. And when his wife and daughter left in April for a visit to Norway, George wrote wistfully, in his diary, of their departure:
Annelise and Grace leaned out of the [train] window.... Annelise tried hard and unsuccessfully not to cry. Grace ran her lips dreamily along the metal rim of the window. I stared hard, for a while, into the blue glaze of the side of the car. Annelise could not reach down far enough to kiss me, so she gave me her hand, and I kissed it. Then Grace took off her woolen glove and held her hand out, too, for the same purpose. That saved the moment—if not the day.
“You can’t come back to[o] soon for me,” George wrote Annelise on the twentieth. A few days later he told Jeanette that “we are just sentimental enough to abandon our brave plan of staying separated until July.” The family would be back in May.33
George was still searching out paths—however tortuous—to recovery. He must “pretend” to be interested in life
