George Kennan

I've been maintaining this blog long enough (albeit erratically) that certain subjects and motifs have begun to repeat themselves. Yesterday was the second time I've offered up something about John Monro, and today I turn back to George Kennan, whom I wrote about back in 2007. Each time I plan an overseas trip I read from Kennan's incomparably honest and astute Sketches from a Life, a selection from the journals he accrued over his 50 years as a diplomat. In the "Preface," he explains,

The pieces were written, for the most part, only when traveling. For this there was good reason. At home, in the performance of daily professional and personal duties, there was normally no time for this sort of thing; beyond which, this sort of writing required, as mentioned aabove, the novelty and treshness of first impression. You would not write this way about things you saw or experienced every day. Familiarity deprived such scenes, as it did people, of their mystery and their magic. (xi)

Kennan's musings about people and places are worth reading in their own right; I also hope that his descriptions and insights, while far more lucid than mine could be, will prompt me to be a more observant and engaged traveler--not someone who scurries hurriedly from museum to cathedral to monument, brushing across the surface of it all without pausing to think about it. Here is a typical passage, written in 1978:

In Stockholm, throughout the evening, I was being made conscious of touches in the scene--in the light sky; in the ponderous Germanic apartment building that housed W.'s office downtown; in the milling-about of the crowds on the paths of the Tivoli, making the most of the brief northern summer; in the vegetation; in the coolness of the night breezes--touches that reminded me that I was separated only by a relatively small body of water of Riga and Reval and the scenes of my youth. And I was prodded from inside with jabs of nostalgia which no one else could ever understand--nostalgia for that bleak Baltic landscape, for its long dark winters and for the wonder of its brief fleeting summers, for the mystery of the white nights, the sense of proximity of something intensely beautiful and marvelous, the thirst for it, and the awareness that it was not to be.

Lady Bird and Woody

Lady Bird Johnson and Woody Guthrie, both born in 1912

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Here's the Washington Post editorial on Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007), who died July 11. Much has been said about her attention to the environment, her campaign for beautification and the planting of wild flowers along interstates, not to mention her charm and firm grace as First Lady. But perhaps her most lasting contribution to history will prove to be the superb and detailed diary she kept of her years in the White House. Here's the moving, wonderfully written entry for March 31, 1968, the day President Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. I wrote a considerably less articulate diary entry on that topic myself the next day. I was in the Peace Corps in Asamankese, Ghana and I recall lying in bed when I heard the news over our scratchy little Phillips radio.

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Woody Guthrie would have been 95 (about the same age as Lady Bird Johnson) on July 14. Here's the WG website with links to all his lyrics, as well as special WG events and a photo of Guthrie with his guitar labeled "This machine kills Fascists."

A sample of Guthrie's great lyrics from "Grand Coulee Dam":

In the misty crystal glitter

Of the wild and windward spray,

Men have fought the pounding waters

And met a watery grave.

Why, she tore their boats to splinters,

But she gave men dreams to dream

Of the day the Coulee Dam

Would cross that wild and wasted stream.

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Yale professor William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar on depictions of English teachers in film

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Terry Eagleton in The Guardian: "For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life."

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Alan Gilbert reviews Tracy K. Smith's Duende in The Village Voice

(SEE also 3/5/07 blog)

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Joseph Joffe on John Lukacs biography of George Kennan

(SEE also 5/5/07 blog)

George Kennan and Travel Notebooks

I've been planning for our trip to Italy, which begins in a week, in various ways. I've made reservations for each night of our trip except the final few days in Rome. I figure we can take care of that when we get to Rome at first. I've also ordered train passes good for any 7 days of first class train travel in Italy. We get a slight break for traveling together. Cost: about $300 each. Also, I've been reading the guidebooks, esp. Lonely Planet. And I've been boning up on Italian history--now, Robert Payne's Horizon Guide to Ancient Rome.

For a couple months, I've been listening in the car to Italian tapes--a conversational series specifically designed for use in the car, so there's no need to refer constantly to a printed book, though there is a text for each lesson. I'm not sure how much I'm absorbing, but it's helpful that there are so many cognates with French, of which I have a fair working knowledge, and Spanish, of which I know a smattering. For the word "but," for example, you can say "ma"(like the French "mais") or "pero" (as in Spanish).

I also prepare for any extended trip by reading accounts of trips taken by others. I have my favorites, such as John Steinbeck's amiable Travels with Charley and Henry Miller's wonderfully biting 1939 The Air Conditioned Nightmare. I'll read anything Bruce Chatwin wrote about his travels, especially The Songlines. But my favorite traveling journal-keeper is George Kennan, whose Sketches from a Life is a selections from journals he kept during his travels as a statesman from 1927-1988. Unlike his many other brilliant books, which are mostly about diplomacy, this one recounts his observations as a traveler. Most of his observations center on Russia, Germany, and other northern European countries--not locations that I feel the strongest attraction to. But he brings the places he visits to life with a sharp eye and a scrupulous curiosity, a constant probing beneath the seemingly ordinary events of everyday life. Here, he's writing in 1984 about Ischia, an Italian island:

I thought, on the way back, of the qualities of this very Italian place: the incongruous mixture of tolerance, naivete, overcrowding, sociability, family solidarity, localism, acceptance of modernism in its most hideous forms and yet with some sort of an inner self-defense against it--life led, in short, in the small dimension, full of pettiness, no doubt, and not without its small cruelties and injustices, but borne along by the broad, wise, disillusioned charity of the Catholic Church, by the comforting familiarities of family life, and by the unvarying, reassuring support of the Christian sacraments. (327)

Often, he begins his entries with a matter-of-fact statement telling where he is or has been, with maybe a quick note on the weather thrown in. But then, he effortlessly takes us deeper. Here, he begins an account of a 1940 walk in The Hague with a startling juxtaposition.

I took another long walk this morning, only to hear a German military band playing on a square to a sizable audience of placid, politely applauding Dutchmen, and to see a place, only a block or two from the legation, where bombs had wiped out most of the inside of a city block.

When you read Kennan, you know he's a thoughtful traveler, not just a close observer, but also a ponderer, a thinker about what he sees. It's the attitude I'd like to bring to my own travels.

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Review of Kennan's Sketches from a Life by Stefan Kanfer in TIME (1989)