It must be admitted that at this stage Kennan cut a slightly absurd figure. Other diplomats in Moscow adjusted themselves to the freezing atmosphere with professional resignation and made rather a joke of it. But Kennan felt personally hurt. He did not mix even with his own staff, but shut himself up to write home long, sad, perceptive memoranda, though doubting, with some reason, whether anyone in Washington would ever read them. On his return he found refuge from the rude winds of politics at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a kind of super-All Souls, from which his rare forays into public life were not always happy. In 1957 he came to England to deliver the Reith Lectures, in which he espoused a then fashionable but quite unrealistic proposal for the neutralisation of Germany. I had just written a book on the subject, and at a private dinner meeting criticised him with some vehemence. I received in return a look so hurt, so wretched, so deeply unhappy that I can hardly bear to remember it. He was not one to stand the heat of the Washington kitchen during the Cold War, or perhaps any other time.
Kennan did not even quite fit into the convivial atmosphere of the Institute, happy though he was there. In Washington he had been regarded as a thinker (by some as a rather dangerous one) out of place in public life. At Princeton he was seen as a public man not entirely at ease among scholars. Lukacs describes the figure he cut there as ‘a solitary patrician among groups of successful middle class’; a description I would have found unkind if I did not have my own memories of him, dressed in an immaculate three-piece tweed suit, sitting at a table by himself reading a book in the hurly-burly of the Institute cafeteria. But while there he wrote some splendid books: among others a classic on American diplomacy, a definitive account of Russo-American relations in 1917, and an equally definitive, if rather self-indulgent, study of the making of the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1890.
But these were only the tip of the iceberg. From early youth until almost the day of his death he poured out his thoughts and impressions with Mozartian facility in a flood of writing that was never less than mellifluous and often of classic wisdom and beauty. We can gain some impression of it from the brief extracts that he published in 1989 in his Sketches from a Life; enough to make us long for more. But as Lukacs warns us, there was almost too much. One day perhaps some university press will render mankind a service by providing us with a multi-volume edition of the writings of this sad, wise, civilised, deeply unhappy man. There are all too few of his kind left.
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