George F. Kennan: An American Life (4 page)

Of Scotch-Irish extraction, the Kennans had emigrated to New England in the early eighteenth century. Like most Americans at the time, they were farmers, digressing occasionally into other professions—the Presbyterian ministry, Revolutionary War military service, the Vermont state legislature, ownership of a sawmill and tavern—but “[t]here was not one who did not work long and hard with his hands.” Moving through upper New York and northern Ohio, they had settled, by the mid-nineteenth century, in rural Wisconsin. Kossuth Kent Kennan had been born in Oshkosh and had grown up on a farm near Packwaukee, which was still functioning when George visited it, a few years after his father’s death. “I lay there through the summer night, in the guest bedroom, listening to the chirping of crickets in the grass outside, and breathing the smell of hot, warm hay and manure from the barn; and I felt closer to home than I have ever felt before or since in my wandering life.”

The Kennans shared a certain temperament, George believed, an almost mystical self-awareness, across generations. They lacked the capacity for “gaiety, phantasy, humor, the courage to be honest with yourself, and the self-discipline to learn to sin gracefully and with dignity, rather than to try unsuccessfully not to sin at all.” They passed neuroses along “like the family Bible.” But they never begged, cheated, lost their pride, or were mean, “except to themselves.” Indifferently educated, they were nonetheless intelligent; “[t]errified . . . of beauty, they were not impervious to it.” And there was somewhere deep within them a tenderness “which will take them all, I hope—and myself included—to the heaven they always believed in.”

It was important to George that, although the Kennans were often poor, “they never became proletarianized.” They had come closest, he thought, during his father’s generation, when several of Kent’s siblings had “disappeared into suicide, madness, or the romantic dissolution characteristic of the American west.” Kent himself, however, did not give up. He began life as a plowboy, educated himself, and became “a cultured, though painfully shy, gentleman.”

Florence’s family had been more colorful. They had emigrated from Scotland early in the nineteenth century, settling first in Massachusetts, and then in Illinois. George’s grandfather, Alfred James, ran away from home at thirteen, became a barge hand on the Erie Canal, and in a series of hair-raising adventures as a sailor worked his way around the world. It fascinated young George that when Alfred returned, seven years later, his family did not at first recognize him. Alfred built an insurance career in Chicago following the great fire of 1871, and then moved to Milwaukee to run the Northwestern National. Still vigorous when George’s older sisters were growing up, Grandpa Alfred would row them out on Lake Nagawicka, have them write messages to Neptune to be dropped over the side, and then regale them with sea chanteys. George was too small to have remembered the old man, who died a year after he was born. But he heard all the stories, developed a lifelong fondness for boats, and when in middle age he got one of his own, he named it
Nagawicka
.

The Jameses, he thought, were “more dashing, and more full of fight,” than the Kennans. They lacked sentimentality, a good thing because the Kennans had too much of it. They were self-confident aristocrats, whereas the Kennans saw their worth “in the obscurity of their own consciences,” demonstrating it only “in the eye of their relentless God.” James family loyalties “were few but fierce and passionate.” If feudal lords, they “would have gone down fighting for their privileges in the face of the rising power of kings.” They might not survive “if the coming order of society demands the subordination of the individual to the mass.”
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That was the family, and as the much younger George was coming to know them, he was himself becoming an individual. This was often a matter of figuring out how things worked. One of his earliest memories was of receiving, on his third birthday, the gift of a locomotive molded out of ice cream. But locomotives, he had been told, were very hot: how could this one be cold, and how could he be expected to eat it? On another occasion, George saw his cousin Charlie James fall into the lake at Nagawicka. Instead of trying to rescue him, George ran to announce tearfully to the grown-ups that “Charles is drowned,” only to have them laugh as the sopping sputtering Charlie staggered up the hill behind him. Milk delivery horses, George discovered, had to be anchored with heavy weights, like boats, to keep them from straying. Bicycles required falling off in order to learn to stay on.
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Another mystery, for young George, had to do with relieving himself. He recalled being astonished, upon entering first grade, at seeing “little boys piddle standing up.” His trousers had no fly, so he cut his own slit, and his stepmother was furious: “I think she spanked me for it, or scolded me very severely.” The injustice would rankle for decades to come. So too did the discovery, two years later in Germany, that mothers there allowed little boys to pull their pants down and go, on the grass in the park. He remembered thinking “how wonderful it would be if you had a mother to whom you would admit—you would tell her—when you wanted to do this.”
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A weightier matter that worried Jeanette and George was how you would know that a war was about to break out. Kassel, where they spent six months in 1912, was a military town, and the children had picked up rumors of naval buildups, war scares, even the possible need for an early return to the United States. They were alone in their room one day when a military band marched up the street. “We were sure,” Jeanette recalled, “that this was the way a war would start.... Would we ever get home? We had heard a lot about Germany’s wars and even about one called the Thirty Years War. I don’t know how long we waited until Mother and the girls came in and said the band was serenading a General and his bride. We felt a little silly then.”
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Self-confidence slowly came, though. Both children learned German easily: George would pride himself on his fluency for the rest of his life. German boys would occasionally harass him for being an American but he held his own, “flailing away with my fists.” Faith in Santa Claus fell victim to the absence of a fireplace in the pension where the family was staying: “I knew damn well he couldn’t come down the stove.” And George asked his father’s permission, “when I am big,” to join the United States Navy.
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After returning with his family to Milwaukee, George wrote his first surviving poem, entitled “My Soldier”:

It was a respectable literary effort for a child of nine, and George carefully preserved it—it remains the earliest document in his papers.
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George portrayed childhood, in his memoirs, as existing along an “unfirm” boundary between external and internal reality. He lived in a world “peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes, and places—qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror—for which there was no external evidence visible, or plausible, to others.” At the end of Cambridge Avenue was a grimy brick building with a gloomy entryway, behind which lurked something with “a sinister significance all its own.” There may, or may not, have been fairies in Juneau Park. And George was “absolutely scared green” of his grandfather Kennan’s Victorian mansion on Prospect Avenue: when left alone there one day, he turned all the gaslights on and cowered in the corner, where nothing could get behind him until rescuers arrived .
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Jeanette, who knew him better than anyone else, thought him preoccupied with death when he was little. She did not find it funny when George and his cousin Charlie took to jumping off the porch at the Nagawicka house, joking that they might die, then rolling on the ground laughing. Even more disturbing was a conversation on a sleepy afternoon under a tree overlooking the lake. Jeanette was nine and George was seven, but what he said stuck in her mind so clearly that she could repeat it word for word decades later:

Jeanette later understood this conversation as a brother trying to spook his sister by discussing the practicalities of committing suicide, but she did not take it that way at the time. George was insisting then, she thought, on “the freedom to die if one really wanted to.” It was “too awful to talk about.”
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And yet George did not recall his boyhood as being unhappy: “I was a very normal boy.” Among his fondest memories were the wrestling matches with Charlie : “two grubby little fellows, grunting, pushing, straining, and squirming—both being too stubborn (after all, we were both Scots) to admit defeat, and both of us returning, mussed and dirty, for dinner, only to be sent upstairs first . . . and told to make ourselves more presentable.” George remembered being “a little bit timid, a little bit of a sissy,” but this did not show up in the diary he began keeping on New Year’s Day 1916, at the age of eleven.
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It opened with another poem:

What followed reflects, on the whole, an average boy’s life—including the tendency to treat ordinary and extraordinary events in much the same way:

George did have one physical reminder of “unfirm boundaries” between external and internal reality. He was color-blind, a fact that showed up in school drawings, to the amazement of his classmates. And the onset of puberty left other boundaries uncertain: “If at that time I’d had a mother to help me, I think it might have been easier.”
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On the whole, though, George’s childhood was, considering the sadness with which it began, cheerfully unremarkable.

George and Jeanette were fortunate to attend Milwaukee State Normal, a grade school used to train teachers. Founded in 1885, it had moved in 1909 into a new and well-equipped building two miles north of the neighborhood where the Kennan children grew up. George entered first grade the following year, making his way back and forth chiefly by streetcar, a mode of transportation he found “thrilling.” His 1916 diary records him also doing so, however, by bicycle, roller skates, and on foot, the latter being the only method when it snowed too much for the streetcars to run, but attendance was expected anyway. After classes were dismissed in the afternoon, George would often stop off at one of the other boys’ houses to play: “As long as I got home by suppertime it was all right.”
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The school was progressive, requiring no homework, but “we were fully as prepared as any other children.” Grammar was emphasized, especially the diagramming of sentences, and German was taught from the first grade. There was also theater: George played an elf, in
Rumpelstiltskin
, when he was nine. Both children had, as their fourth-grade teacher, the formidable Miss Emily Strong. She was, as George described her, “a great big strong New England woman, who had no difficulty keeping discipline in her class.” Jeanette thought she “looked like—and excessively admired—Theodore Roosevelt.”
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