George understood later—whether at the time is less clear—that Volodya was homosexual. “I always had these curious friends,” he would recall many years later, “people who are a little unusual—the Bohème—they understand me, better than do the regular ones. This has nothing to do with physical relations.” Meanwhile Shura, Volodya’s younger sister, had fallen in love with George, something she didn’t admit to him until after her brother’s death: her mother had ruled out the relationship on the grounds that George was too pozhivzhie—he had “lived a little too much.” “I was much more sophisticated,” he admitted, “and I had had my ladies, too.”52
VII.
By early 1931 Kennan’s professional success seemed assured. The Russian language, he explained to Walt Ferris, a Foreign Service friend, had come “so naturally (if not easily) that I hope in time to know it about as well as my own.” Given the family interest—the first Kennan—becoming a specialist for that part of the world “fits in very conveniently with my preferences.” More significantly, George was developing his own views on the country in which he lived, and the one he would spend most of his life studying.
The Germans, he wrote Ferris, were “a strong, coarse people, with a tremendous capacity for physical and intellectual labor and a total inability to comprehend the finer and the (for them) stranger elements of human psychology. Their only god is personal strength, and their only conception of the relation between human beings in essence that of slave and master.” All of their thinking on love, friendship, enmity, education, and politics proceeded from this; even their humor was “obscene without being witty,” and their language “involved without being delicate.” Their sentimentality was dangerous because it contained no smile: “They are the final hope.... they are now the final despair of western European civilization.”
As for the Soviet Union, its system was unalterably opposed to that of the United States. It followed, therefore,
that there can be no possible middle ground or compromise between the two, that any attempts to find such a middle ground, by the resumption of diplomatic relations or otherwise, are bound to be unsuccessful, that the two systems cannot even exist together in the same world unless an economic cordon is put around one or the other of them, and that within twenty or thirty years either Russia will be capitalist or we shall be communist.
This was not, Kennan was careful to add, a judgment on the respective virtues of either ideology. It was simply to say that the two, like oil and water, could never mix. And if they ever came to blows, American liberals, “who now find the Soviets so pleasant, will be the first ones to be crushed in the clash.”53
But he soon abandoned this neutrality on ideology. He found himself developing to Volodya “certain ideas which I had not formerly known were in my own mind.” Communists, George now saw, combined “innate cowardice” and “intellectual insolence.” They had “abandoned the ship of western European civilization like a swarm of rats.” Having done so, they had grasped for a theory with which they could leap across the gulf through which the rest of mankind had been foundering. They “credited their own intelligence with powers far greater than those of all previous generations.” They regarded their forefathers, and most of their contemporaries, as “hopeless fools.”
This struck George, “not a religious man,” as a form of “cultural and intellectual sacrilege.” Maybe communism would work as a purely Russian phenomenon. For the West, though, it could only mean retrogression, and that required resistance. “Was it for us to stand aside and stop fighting because things were going against us? Did a football player leave the field when the score turned against his team? Did a real soldier stand anxiously watching the tide of battle, in order to decide whether or not to fight?” There were principles of decency in individual conduct which offered hope for the human race. They required defense, not abandonment just because they were in danger. It was a stirring rejection of realism, as George himself recognized: “Enter Kennan, the moralist.”54
With all that was going on, he wrote Jeanette, it seemed almost criminal to complain about his own situation: “A young man of twenty-six, with fundamentally good health, tolerable appearance, plenty of money, an incomparably advantageous official position, an active mind and an adaptability to every known form of culture, and a knowledge of English, French, German and Russian, has no right to be bored in the very vortex of the most intense intellectual and cultural currents of the world.”
And yet he was bored: a raucous Christmas with American friends in Riga left him despairing of accomplishing anything “until I bring some peace and order into my private life.” If he were a private citizen, he could “become a Boheme and attempt to think.” Being a Foreign Service officer, he could only choose “between marriage and stupidity on the one hand, and nervous exhaustion, boldness and futility on the other.” He would seek the first, “as soon as I can.” But “I shall never be completely happy at it, for I shall never be able to do much thinking myself—and I have been just clever enough, in my youth, to mistrust everyone who tries to think for me.”
By April he was losing patience with Volodya, who was failing to keep appointments, patronizing “hermaphrodite” dance performances, and taking opium—although George was still lending the Kozhenikovs money. “Essentially,” he explained to Jeanette, “it is nothing more or less than my puritan origins rising in relentless revolt against the non-puritan influences of the last few years.” So what would happen? “Perhaps I’ ll get religion. Perhaps I’ ll fall in love, for the first time in my young life. Or perhaps I’ll get broken on the wheel, like Hemingway and others of the expatriates.” One thing was clear: “Prolonged and intimate association with the devil does not lie in the Kennan character.” Perhaps the tale should be titled “The story of the man who tried to sell his soul and couldn’t.”55
Three months after writing this last letter, Kennan wrote another to the secretary of state in Washington, using the formal language in which he had been trained: “Sir: . . . I should like to request that I be allowed to take 6 weeks leave of absence beginning approximately August 10, 1931.” He had been in poor health for some time and needed several weeks of complete rest in order to get back into shape. “Furthermore, I am expecting to be married.”56
FOUR
Marriage—and Moscow: 1931–1933
“COME RIGHT ON. LOVE, ANNELISE.” THE TELEGRAM FROM KRISTIANSAND reached George in Berlin on August 5, 1931. Three days later he boarded a ship that would take him—along with his elegant but unreliable Nash roadster—on the first leg of a journey to Norway. Volodya Kozhenikov and his sister Shura came to Stettin to see him off, laden with flowers they could ill afford: “They take it very seriously, this departure,” their benefactor wrote in his diary. “Instinct . . . tells them that while we may meet again soon, this day and this departure mark the termination of my residence in Berlin and that this is the real good-bye.” He assured Jeanette, though, that “I am very happy, and am entering marriage with none of the qualms which I understand to be usually attendant upon this stage of development.”1
Anna Elisabeth Sørensen, who had just turned twenty-one, had only a few qualms herself. “I am afraid you will have to be very patient in bringing me up to be an American girl,” she wrote from Kristiansand, “they are all so clever, in all directions.” She was, however, sure of herself. “I am glad I came here to think things over, but even here I miss you every minute.... Just can’t help it.... I know you understand me as I understand you.” She had shared news of the engagement with her astonished mother, who would need time to get used to the idea. “Have not had opportunity to tell daddy yet. I am curious to know what he will say.” She had, however, let a former boyfriend know: it was strange that “when people lose a thing they realise how much they liked it.”2
Annelise was born on July 23, 1910, in Kristiansand, where her father, Einar Haakon Sørensen, ran a building materials business. In a country facing the sea young people were expected to lea
ve home, and at the age of seventeen Annelise went to Paris to study language, literature, and history. She had already learned English and, after several more months of tutoring, was speaking it well. There had been talk of becoming a doctor, but “I knew myself well enough to know that I didn’t have seven years in me just to study.” She expected to marry before that.3
After more schooling in Kristiansand, Annelise went to Berlin, “ostensibly to learn German.” It was there that she encountered George Kennan, at a Sunday lunch arranged by a cousin who had hoped to rent him an apartment: the date was March 22, 1931. The plan succeeded, and that allowed them to meet from time to time at parties. George struck Annelise as “rather serious.” On one early date, he brooded about America. “It was hardly the kind of thing that you’d think you would sit and talk to a young girl about—your worries about a country which I had never been to.” They decided to marry after only a few weeks, a fact Annelise kept from her parents. Even so, “they were not pleased.” But she was determined. “I finally just put my foot down and said that if I heard another sigh from my mother, I was going to scream!”4
George left for Kristiansand exhausted from overwork: Annelise had asked him to try to get there “without the black rings around your eyes!” He had planned to rest for a few days in Copenhagen, but the Nash needed work and he caught a cold. He left there “a complete wreck.” Sitting miserably in the driver’s seat of his car, which was lashed to the deck, he nursed his fever by reading Tolstoy until the islands of the Norwegian coast came into view. George later wondered what impression “the thin, slightly uncouth, very nervous, and rather unwell apparition of an American” must have made—the Sørensens’ feelings, he sensed, “had not been exactly those of confidence or elation.” But he spent several weeks with them before the wedding and that helped, as did Annelise’s steely resolve. “So I don’t think that it was really very awkward.”5
The wedding took place in the Kristiansand cathedral on the afternoon of September 11, 1931: Annelise noted the event in her appointment book with the single Norwegian word “Bryllup.” Cyrus Follmer came from Berlin to be best man, and the Kennans honeymooned in Vienna, where—Annelise’s passport not corresponding with his—George labored to persuade the hotel porter that they were really married, only to have him look paternally over his spectacles to say, “We understand.” A few weeks later George wrote Jeanette to say that concerns he had had six months earlier were all now nonexistent. “I might almost say that this letter comes from a completely new brother and not the one you have known before.”6
I.
The marriage coincided with the end of Kennan’s postgraduate studies in Berlin and his first assignment as a fully qualified Russian specialist. The Foreign Service sent him back to Riga—still, in the absence of diplomatic relations, the chief American observation post for the Soviet Union—and Annelise accompanied him. But his illusions of glamour as an unattached bachelor faded with a young wife. George made it no easier by warning Annelise that this or that colleague didn’t like him. “[I]t wasn’t really quite true,” she recalled, “but I had to discover it in my own way.”7
The Kennans chose not to live downtown among inquisitive diplomatic colleagues but instead leased the top two floors of a factory owner’s house in the suburb of Tornakalns. It was cheap enough for them to have a cook and a chauffeur, who doubled as a butler. Unfortunately, though, there was a park across the street with a summer bandstand whose brass ensemble knew only five songs, endlessly repeated for months at a time: “You could retire to the innermost clothes closet of the house and bury your head in the clothes, it made no difference—the sound reached you.”8
It was, George explained to Jeanette, a “new and strange world.” For despite the fact that he was well trained, generously paid, and in no danger of losing a job that was sometimes interesting, “I, together with my wife, am lonely.” The problem was not that marriage precluded thinking, as he had thought it might before meeting Annelise. It was rather that having a wife magnified his uneasiness with the lifestyle of his Foreign Service friends. People who once seemed interesting “stand before me now in a state of complete moral nakedness, and I see all the selfishness and cruelty and cowardice and emptiness which lies beneath their cordiality and their veneer of culture.”
Loneliness, to be sure, could not be too serious for a married couple in love and living comfortably. But the future was very uncertain. The worsening economic crisis was worrying: George had not “the slightest faith in my money and property” because too many fortunes had already been lost “through inflations, revolutions, and confiscations.” The Soviet frontier was only a hundred miles away, which meant that the Red Army could overrun Latvia whenever it wished. If that were ever to happen, “I think I should prefer to dispose of myself and my family in my own way before they got here. I have seen too many photographs of the corpses they left here twelve years ago.”
But even if these dire events did not happen, “I don’t want to stay in the Foreign Service.” The United States had no foreign policy, only the reflections of domestic politics internationally. There was no satisfaction in representing that. The country was succumbing to a consumerism in which people equated charm with the absence of halitosis, balanced competing claims about toothpaste, and fretted about whether their refrigerators ejected ice cubes or required an ice pick.
The America I know and love and owe allegiance to is Father’s America—the America of George Kennan the elder, and John Hay and Henry Adams and Roosevelt and Cleveland and the Atlantic Monthly and the Century. That is the world we were brought up in on Cambridge Ave., after all, and it stood for certain ideals of decency and courage and generosity which were as fine as anything the world has ever known.
“I am not expatriated, Netty,” he added. “I am very homesick—for the autumn in Wisconsin, for football games, for Sunday morning waffles, for loyal, generous people, and for a thousand memories of the U.S.” If only Americans “could have their toys taken away from them, be spanked, educated and made to grow up, it might be worthwhile to act as a guardian for their foreign interests in the meantime. But when one can do none of these things?”
So he would stick with the Foreign Service for another two or three years, then become a student again and eventually “a pedagogue.” Professors could survive almost anywhere: even the Bolsheviks had killed only a few. He would do Russian history seriously, writing something “so dull and so specialized that no one will ever dare to try to read it and everyone who sees it will be convinced that I know something about it.” George ended this long letter, contradictorily, with a consumerist plea: could Jeanette please send a toaster, three cans of maple syrup, a dozen boxes of graham crackers, a dozen pairs of silk stockings, and subscriptions to Good Housekeeping and The Yale Review?9
Annelise, in the meantime, had become pregnant. “I can hardly believe it myself,” she wrote Jeanette. “A year ago and I did not even know George!” She had already caused a “scandal” by fainting at a dinner given by the Belgian ambassador, just as dessert was being served. “They say I did it very nicely, and poor George took it like a man, but you can imagine what a shock he got!” The young husband had to carry his wife out, before the astonished guests, “as though I were abducting her.” Grace Kennan—named for George’s surrogate mother, “Cousin Grace” Wells—arrived, in Riga, on June 5, 1932 : “The nights were again white, and the river,” George recalled, “lay bathed in the golden reflections of an early sunrise as I drove back from the clinic.”10
The rearing of Grace, as was customary in those days, was left to her mother. “Never mind George,” she wrote him from Kristiansand, “it is not more boring than I expected it to be.” George, for his part, juggled fatherhood with other concerns. His sister Constance remembered him pushing Grace in a baby carriage one day, thinking about everything but her, when he hit a bump, and she bounced into a snowbank: “It’s so typical of George.” But Annelise, when asked about this, doubted the s
tory: “I have no recollection of George ever pushing the baby carriage.”11
There was, in George’s defense, much to think about, because the global financial catastrophe had by then hit home. His father, who had never accumulated much wealth, had seen his legal practice dwindle and an iron mine in which he invested shut down: by the early 1930s, he was struggling to pay for young Kent’s education at the University of Michigan, and Louise was taking in boarders so they could keep the Cambridge Avenue house. In January 1932, shortly after his eightieth birthday, Kent senior sent a sad letter advising George to save as much money as possible and “hold fast to your job, for it might be a long time before you could get another.” These recommendations came, he acknowledged, “with a poor grace from your old father who never saved anything and hasn’t even made any provisions for his old age. Let us hope that the younger generation will profit by the mistakes of their elders!”12
Two months later Eugene Hotchkiss, Jeanette’s husband, sent George “the most difficult letter I have ever written.” George and Jeanette had entrusted Gene, a bond salesman at the respected investment bank Lee, Higginson, with managing the inheritance they had received from their mother. The money was in Northwestern National Life Insurance stock—the James family firm—but Gene had used it as collateral to buy shares on margin in Kreuger and Toll, the international holding company run by the Swedish “match king” Ivar Kreuger. George’s father, Jeanette recalled, had advised against this on the grounds that matches were “unsafe,” and so they turned out to be. With bankruptcy looming, Kreuger committed suicide on March 12, 1932. Eight days later Gene had to inform George that both his and his sister’s inheritances were lost. Gene’s job followed when Lee, Higginson also went under. “My first mistake,” he admitted, “was to ever start to speculate, but my greatest was to ever speculate for you. . . . [M]y optimism . . . has been a curse rather than a blessing.”13
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