Even here, though, there was rejection. George Frost Kennan met George Kennan only once, shortly after this letter was written, when Kent took his son for a visit. Young George interested the old man, but his wife Lena resented the boy’s sharing her husband’s name, as well as that of their only son, who had died at birth. “She didn’t like my coming. She thought that this was another branch of the family trying to horn in on his fame.” Years later George learned that Mrs. Kennan had taken his thank-you note as an indication of inadequacy: “‘Any boy who writes such a stupid letter, nothing’s ever going to come of him. We should never see him again.’ And indeed they didn’t. So he never knew that I was going into Russian studies.”33
“How sad it was,” Jeanette would later reflect, “because George Kennan died in 1924, and George would have been twenty, so that he would have been old enough to have been interesting.” It’s not clear that the rejection affected George much at the time, although he would surely have been aware of it. As he grew older, though, and as his own career in Russian studies began to develop, identification with his famous but inaccessible relative became unavoidable. Despite the memory of his own father, “whose son I recognize myself very much to be, I feel that I was in some strange way destined to carry forward as best I could the work of my distinguished and respected namesake. What I have tried to do in life is, I suspect, just the sort of thing the latter would have liked for a son of his to try to do, had he had one. Whether he would have approved of the manner in which I have done it, I cannot say.”34
III.
Some solace came, therefore, from these extensions of George’s immediate family across space: from the Frosts next door and the Jameses at the lake to another George Kennan and the wider world he inhabited. As the young George grew old enough to place his family in time—to understand that he had ancestors he would never know—their legacies provided a kind of refuge. “I wonder whether you will ever feel that panic[k]y urge to run for help,” George wrote his daughters while interned in Nazi Germany in 1942, to “dim, gnarled, pioneer forefathers. They would have received us unceremoniously, made us work from morning to night, ascribed all our sorrows to dyspepsia, and driven us to distraction. But they would never have disowned us or thrown us out.”35
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.”36
IV.
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.37
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.”38