One visitor to Moscow that fall was George’s half-brother Kent, then twenty-one, who spent a month in Bohlen’s temporarily vacant apartment. Kent got to practice on the Spaso House grand piano while the ambassador was away. He relished seeing opera and ballet at the Bolshoi—“lavishly mounted, frequently with a good deal of gimmicky stage business like rising moons and setting suns (in which the Russian audiences seemed to take a certain naïve delight)”—and even managed to get into a performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s controversial Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk before Stalin shut it down. Annelise found it alarming, though, that Kent was even thinner than George, and George worried about his shyness. “I see in him,” he wrote Jeanette, the “restless ghost (and a very gaunt ghost it is) of my former self.” Kent remembered the visit as an exciting experience, with George and his colleagues constantly dropping into each other’s apartments, confusing the maids and the hidden microphones with code words, expecting GPU eavesdropping—that was the current acronym for the secret police—on every telephone call.25
On November 7, the seventeenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kennans watched the six-hour military parade in Red Square from their apartment windows. The next day George and Annelise attended their first Kremlin reception, mounting a terrifyingly high straight staircase that “made us feel like ants” to enter the great ballroom where Ivan the Terrible had once received foreign emissaries. “America,” Annelise wrote, “seems far away.” Life in Moscow was getting strenuous again, George complained later that month, as much because of social obligations as office work. In a single week the Kennans went to three dinners, three parties, and an impromptu luncheon, while giving another dinner and a tea. One event, hosted by the Russians, began at eleven in the evening and lasted until three-thirty in the morning. “I sometimes have misgivings as to how long I can stand it.”26
Not long at all, as it turned out. George wrote that letter on December 2, 1934. Ten days later he fell ill with severe stomach pains, together with the inability to keep food down. “Poor boy,” Annelise wrote Jeanette on the twenty-first: “He hadn’t had anything to eat for 40 hours.” As a consequence, George missed the most famous party ever held at Spaso House: the Christmas Eve celebration at which Thayer, responding to Bullitt’s instructions to “make it good,” brought in trained seals from the Moscow Circus to slither across the ballroom balancing champagne glasses on their noses. Annelise did not miss it: “I remember that very well.” But George lay in bed at the Mokhovaya, entertained only by Grace, the two of them one “in our preoccupation with the present, our indifference to past and future.”27
“He looks pretty bad to me,” the embassy counselor, John C. Wiley, reported to Bullitt, who was in Washington. Soviet doctors had recommended a sanatorium in Germany or Austria. “Private means zero,” but “Kennan is a valuable asset to the Service.” Bullitt needed no prompting. “I am so fond of that boy and have such confidence in him that I hate to see him leave Moscow,” but he knew from his own experience the agonies of ulcers. Could Kennan come to Washington for free treatment at the Naval Hospital? “[T]he President’s physician… is a good friend of mine and would see to it that you had every possible care.” But George’s Foreign Service superiors decided instead to keep him in Europe, temporarily assigning him to the nearest post so that he would not have to take sick leave. They had been “magnificent,” he wrote Jeanette. “I could embrace the old State Department for that, columns, conservatism, intrigues, and all.”28
As for himself, “I am not unpleased at this turn of events.” After months of feeling miserable while being told that he was suffering from an imaginary ailment, or perhaps “the lack of another drink,” convalescence would be welcome. And so one night in mid-January 1935 his friends put him on the train to Warsaw. “Many of them, I was later told, never expected to see me again.” He was still sick enough to have to be nursed through the night by the sleeping car porter—all the more so for discovering that he had failed to pack passport, visas, and other necessary papers. That required an extra day at the border and further treatment by the village doctor: the station was the one through which he and Bullitt had passed, with much greater ceremony, a little over a year before. Kennan finally made it to Vienna, where duodenal ulcers were confirmed, probably aggravated by inadequate treatment of the amoebic dysentery that had laid George low on his European trip with Nick Messolonghitis a decade earlier. He was sent off to Sanatorium Gutenbrunn, in the town of Baden on the edge of the Wienerwald and at the foot of the Alps, with firm instructions: “rest and diet.”29
IV.
George knew European “cures” too well, he assured Jeanette—and, he might have added, his Thomas Mann—to see any Magic Mountain glamour in the Gutenbrunn. His treatment was “a beneficial form of torture.” Except for his doctor’s visits and the delivery of scanty meals, George was left alone and required to stay in bed, a jarring contrast to the hyperactivity of the past year. “Just think of it. Who else could contrive in these harassed days to set aside [even] one hour… to no further purpose than the contemplation of three walls, a ceiling, two cupboards, a washbowl, a mirror, a coat rack, and the fading, shifting universe of his own memory?”30
The doctor was Frieda Por, a Hungarian Jew who became a lifelong friend. “Believe me,” George later recalled, “for a Jewish woman to become a staff physician in Gutenbrunn in those days—a very conservative old Austrian sanatorium with all the other doctors real Viennese—that was quite an achievement.” Her therapy was as much psychological as physical. Whether at her behest or on his own, George read Freud for the first time. “I talked with her many times about this,” the debates extending “high and wide” into the night. She defended the power of human will and the possibilities for happiness, but only, he suspected, as someone who was neither free nor happy and “dares not admit it.” He complained that “your idea of what to do with a patient who has problems like [mine] is to wrap them in soft blankets and tell them not to be ashamed of anything they ever did. That it’s all their parents’ fault.” George preferred the grimmer Puritan tradition, which was “that you jolly well bite the bullet if you have problems…. I think will power has got something to do with it.” But his diary shows him wrestling with himself:
George #1: You feel the need of unburdening your soul to the Frau Doktor. You are anxious to tell her that you are depressed. You had not, after all, coped with life successfully in the past. That was clear enough from the very fact that you, a young man, in the prime of life, should be lying in this sanatorium together with a lot of old syphilitics and anemic women.
George #2: Whence this urge to confession? Did you really think that she could help you? You know she couldn’t. You know no woman could, unless she were beyond the last trace of femininity and treated you with the unsparing frankness and the contempt which you deserve.
George #1: Well, after all, she is in charge of my treatment. Should she not know the state of mind of her patient?
George #2: Oho, you goddam hypocrite! None of that stuff! No sir! None of your limp excuses! You are in a sanatorium, not a psychopathic clinic. It’s your stomach that is being treated, not your head. If you think your head needs treating, then go to a psychiatrist, but don’t come sneaking around to lady stomach doctors with your little intimate confidences. Learn to take it, Kennan. It’s your problem.