For a girl raised in the outback of North America, Willa Cather, once out of Nebraska, quickly took on the cosmopolitan qualities of the highly cultivated writer. She worked eight years for McClure’s, the New York magazine where Ida Tarbell and other muckraking writers of the day regularly wrote. Cather herself ghost-wrote for the magazine the biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. She made a number of trips to Europe. Her experience widened, her insights deepened.
Willa Cather’s tastes in literature, music, food, travel were all impressively refined. She favored Balzac, Tolstoy, and Henry James, and claimed the last two as influences on her own writing. She preferred French over English novelists, because they dispensed with congeniality and their range of interests was much wider. Her love of music ran strong, and she later befriended the Menuhin family, whose son Yehudi was the great violin prodigy of his day. Food was important to her, in and for itself and for what it conveyed about civilized culture. In a scene in Death Comes for the Archbishop, the novel’s main character, Bishop Latour, is served an onion soup by his assistant Father Vaillant, about which the bishop remarks:
I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph, but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Willa Cather hated vulgarity, in art and in life. She wrote to Alfred Knopf, on the death of his father, of “that delicate instrument inside one which knows the cheap from the fine. The recognition of the really fine is simply one of the richest pleasures in life.” In life so in art: “As one grows older,” she wrote to the Nebraska editor Will Owen Jones, “one cares less about clever writing and more about a simple and faithful presentation.” She chose not to have her novels published in school editions, for she didn’t want them to be “assigned to students as part of the grind”; forced to read her in school, she felt, they would be unlikely to do so in later years when they were mature enough to appreciate her.
Cather had published five books—a volume of verse, another of short stories, and three novels—before My Antonia (1918), the novel of life on the prairie as told by Jim Burden, who arrives in Nebraska on the same train as the novel’s heroine, the Bohemian immigrant Antonia Schimerdas. Randolph Bourne, one of the powerful critics of the day, said of the novel: “Here at last is an American novel, redolent of the Western prairie, that our most irritated and exacting preconceptions can be content with.” Not all the criticism of the novel was positive; nor was its commercial success immediate. But its achievement as a work of art convinced Willa Cather of her own standing as an artist of high seriousness.
The rest of the world soon followed her in this opinion. Her World War I novel, One of Ours, a book that peters out sadly in its second half, won a Pulitzer Prize. (Pulitzer Prizes in the arts, as everyone knows, go to two kinds of people: those who don’t need them and those who don’t deserve them.) Universities began lining up to give her honorary degrees, a queue that lasted throughout her life. Her novels, under the publishing orchestration of Alfred A. Knopf, had a reliably steady sale.
Sarah Orne Jewett, the author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, had once advised the young Willa Cather to
write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. . . . And to write and work on this level, we must live on it—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.
“To write well,” Cather wrote to her brother Douglas, “you have to be all wrapped up on your game and think it awfully worthwhile.” For her there was no better game. She steered clear of politics in her writing, feeling that those with “zeal to reconstruct and improve human society seem to lose touch with human beings and with the individual needs and desires which make people what they are.” Not even Tolstoy could win through as a reformer, she notes in one of her letters, and “certainly no one ever took the puzzle of human life more to heart or puzzled over it more agonizingly,—not even the New Republic.”
“People say I have a ‘classic style,’” Cather wrote to Roscoe, another of her four brothers. “A few of them know it’s the heart under the words that counts.” A feeling for the English sentence, she felt, was “the beginning of everything.” Style, she believed, was “merely the writer, not the person himself; what he was born with and what he has done to himself.” Admiration and love for her subjects were strong ingredients in her writing. “I can write successfully only when I write about people or places that I very greatly admire; which, indeed, I actually love.” Real feeling was at the heart of great writing for her, though of course it took “skill to get that feeling across to many people in many languages, but the strong feeling that comes out of the living heart is the thing most necessary—and most rarely found.”
The toughest thing to arrange in life is a smooth exit. The Selected Letters shows that Willa Cather could not arrange one. Illnesses kicked in as she grew old. An inflamed sheath of the large tendon in the thumb of her right hand kept her from writing for months at a stretch. The death of friends and members of her family threw her off course to the point of near-nervous breakdown, for she felt things deeply. As she wrote to Thomas Masaryk, the founder and president of Czechoslovakia, she felt, as people of a certain age will, that “the times are out of joint.” Elsewhere, in the preface to Not Under Forty (1936), her collection of essays, she wrote that no one under the age of 40 was likely to understand her essays, for “the world changed in 1922, or thereabouts,” by which she meant that the world was no longer producing men and women with the solidity of character of the immigrant generations. The world seemed a more garish yet dreary place than the one she grew up in, filled with such vulgarians as Ivy Peters, a character whose coarseness she described in A Lost Lady.
A note of complaint works its way in the late-life letters; the editors note that she could sometimes play the “drama queen.” But this tends to be blotted out by the many passages of insight and good sense. She is wonderful on child-raising, and the penalties attaching to too much mother love. There is also the solace of accomplishment recognized. She is delighted to find herself the subject of an article in Encylopaedia Britannica. When she learns that Thomas Hardy and J. M. Barrie thought well of her novels, she writes to William Lyon Phelps, the Yale professor and literary critic: “I think there is nothing so satisfying as having given pleasure, in their old age, to some of the writers who fascinated one in one’s youth.”
Skeptical of modernity, Cather had a low view of “the cold pride of science [which] is the most devilish thing that has ever come into this world. It is the absolute enemy of happiness. The human mind, not the spirit, has disinherited human nature.” In The Professor’s House, she formulates this precisely when she has the novel’s eponymous hero Professor Godfrey St. John tell a student:
No, Miller, I don’t myself think much of science, as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for the distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science . . . hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed it takes the old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. . . . I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance—you impoverish them. . . . The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end, of cours
e) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
In one of the last of her letters, she writes to E. K. Brown, one of her early biographers:
. . . we learn a great deal from great people. The mere information doesn’t matter much—but they somehow strike out the foolish platitudes that we have been taught to respect devoutly, and give us courage to be honest and free. Free to rely on what we really feel and really love—and that only.
When Willa Cather wrote that, did she know that she herself had become one of those great people? One hopes so, for she indubitably was.
George Kennan
(2014)
The career of George F. Kennan (1904–2005), the diplomatist whose name is chiefly associated with the Cold War, peaked when Kennan was in his early forties. On February 22, 1946, working at the time as a foreign service officer at the State Department, he wrote a “long telegram” of 5,540 words explaining the motive force behind the behavior of the Soviet Union and how best to deal with it. The gist of the telegram was that the Soviet Union, pressed by economic failure and hemmed in by Marxist-Leninist ideology, needed and found a perfect enemy in the United States, and therefore was uninterested in diplomatic negotiation or compromise. This being so, the best way for the United States to deal with the Soviet Union was to build up the still free countries of Western Europe and do all it could to contain Soviet expansionism. This policy became known as “containment,” and its immediate result was the massive aid program to post-war western Europe known as the Marshall Plan, in whose organization Kennan had a major hand.
In a 1947 article signed “X” in Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Kennan expanded upon and consolidated these views, declaring that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Despite the anonymity under which the article was published, it became known that George Kennan was its author, and this lent added luster to his reputation. He would soon be made head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Committee, and in 1952, he was appointed the United States ambassador to Moscow by Harry Truman. Puffing on power and fame, George Kennan was riding high.
Kennan’s best days were under Harry Truman, who respected his advice, if he didn’t always follow it. His worst days were under John Foster Dulles, who as secretary of state during the Eisenhower presidency was dismayed at Kennan’s recommendation that the United States accept Soviet domination of eastern Europe, instead of attempting to roll it back. Dulles failed to appoint Kennan to a serious post and left him dangling without work for months. In 1953, after twenty-seven years in the foreign service, Kennan retired from government and moved to Princeton, where he was given a place at the Institute for Advanced Study. Apart from his brief stint as Ambassador to Yugoslavia (1961–1963), he remained at Princeton for the remainder of his long life, writing and lecturing but chiefly seeking influence for his views on foreign policy.
Influence was the name of George Kennan’s desire. After the Truman years, he never regained it. Once out of the foreign service, he had nearly fifty years to complain about the loss. The foreign policy for which he sought influence was, with qualifications, essentially isolationist. For Kennan, foreign policy was never a moral but always a practical matter. Apart from honoring treaties and alliances, foreign policy, he held, ought to be “guided strictly by consideration of national interest.” Our entanglements in other nations, in this reading, ought to be limited only to “those aspects of [their] official behavior which touched our interests—maintaining, in other words, a relationship with [them] of mutual respect and courtesy—but distant.” Government generally, he wrote in Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, “is simply not the channel through which men’s noblest impulses are to be realized. Its task, on the contrary, is largely to see that its ignoble ones are kept under restraint and not permitted to go too far.”
As for the United States, Kennan believed it had no business following an aggressive foreign policy. As a foreign service officer stationed in Moscow and later as an ambassador there, he had a close view of the brutalities of the Soviet regime. But the eradication of human rights in one country were not, he believed, the business of any other country. Whole continents and vast territories—Latin America, Africa, most of the Middle East—seemed to him not yet arrived at a state of civilization such as admitted of complex diplomatic negotiation. Foreign aid, most likely to be wasted and never really appreciated by its recipients, was little more than a foolish error of false generosity on the part of the donor nation, for which read the naively virtuous United States. Proper distance, mutual respect, non-interference, above all the avoidance of war—these were the pillars on which Kennan thought foreign policy ought to stand.
The Kennan Diaries is a generous selection from the 8,000 pages of diaries that George Kennan kept, with inconstant regularity, from the age of eleven. Edited by Frank Costigliola, a historian at the University of Connecticut, with helpful footnotes and a minimum of scholarly barbed wire placed between the reader and the text, the book affords a more intimate view of George Kennan than any biography is likely to provide. The emphasis in the diary’s entries, naturally enough, is on international relations, but the reigning principle behind Costigliola’s selections has been to favor Kennan’s “most vivid prose while including representative examples of his various experiences, moods, concerns, and ideas.” Professor Costigliola admires George Kennan for his political consistency, his unflagging energy and endurance, and his literary skill. But he doesn’t allow his admiration to prevent his including diary material that, in an age of political correctness, might disqualify him in the eyes of the great virtucrats of our day, or subject him to two-penny psychoanalysis.
The Kennan Diaries reveal the inner struggles of the man who fought for his ideas on foreign policy without success and the dark views that came in the wake of his failure. They correct the view of George Kennan as the ultimate State Department insider. Neither there nor anywhere else was Kennan ever among the inner circle of the select and the privileged. He refers to himself as a WASP, but, in the strict sense of the term, he wasn’t. Scottish and English in his lineage, from a family that first arrived in America in the eighteenth century, he grew up not on the eastern seaboard but in Milwaukee. His family had none of the standard WASP connections, social or financial. He did not attend prep schools but public schools until, at thirteen, he was sent off to military school in Delafield, Wisconsin. His father was a tax attorney, upstanding and well-regarded but, owing to ineptitude in business, not wealthy; his mother died, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, when George was two months old. The Kennans were not among the social elite, not even in blue-collar Milwaukee.
Kennan went to Princeton but his admission there was far from assured. His biographer John Lewis Gaddis reports that he was “the last student admitted,” and no one else from his military school found acceptance in an eastern college. At Princeton he was neither a dazzling student nor entirely at ease socially. Aboard ship on his first trip to Europe, he speaks of cutting fellow passengers who try to communicate with him with “true Princeton snobbery,” which suggests that he knew what it was like to have this snobbery turned on him. His diary records his planning an essay on “Princeton and Democracy,” which is to be both a defense against the charge of endemic snobbery at Princeton and an attack on those “who make social prestige during undergraduate years the sole aim in life.” Money was a problem for him at Princeton. He did clerical work at his eating club, the undistinguished Key and Seal, to help reduce his bills there.
After deciding not to go to law school, Kennan ended up in the foreign service. Despite his successes, even here he was something of an outsider. “Like a character out of Dostoyevsky,” Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas write in The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, “Kennan enjoyed the alienation th
at came from being a detached observer.” As a young foreign service officer, he was earnest but awkward; among colleagues at the State Department he was often the odd man out. As early as twenty-eight, he wrote in his diary that he was “condemned to a rare intellectual isolation . . . my mental processes will never be understood by anyone else.” He was never part of the Georgetown set of Joseph Alsop, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Dean Acheson. At a State Department outing, he played baseball in a three-piece suit.
Kennan’s talents suited him for foreign service. He acquired foreign languages fairly easily, and was said to have spoken a pure and aristocratic Russian. His scholarly instincts drove him to read up on a subject with thoroughness and in depth. He was an effective lecturer. So brilliant a prose writer was he that many of his colleagues in the State Department did not always take his reports quite seriously. Eugene Rostow, according to Isaacson and Thomas, put Kennan down as “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”
The Kennan Diaries are sometimes used to set out ideas, sometimes to record historical events or meetings, often to fight his depression. He claimed his diary was useful to him in sorting out his confusions and aiding him in gaining perspective on his defeats: “If this writing will help me to gather and order my spiritual forces again (and writing sometimes does) it will be worth the time,” he notes. “He kept the diary as a way of keeping himself together,” Frank Costigliola notes.
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