The Eliotic Kennan

...An excerpt early in the book brings Kennan's personality into focus in asurprising way...

...Perfectionist or Utopian schemes held no allure for him...

...They have interests, too, and the wise statesman will know what those interests are...

...an American college boy, with a tremendous physique...

...For his beliefs are prenational, resting upon values of rationality and culture that have no connection to geography other than Europe as a whole...

...Eliot's cities, sterile, unreal, are Kennan's: "All unnatural...

...all activity passive and uncreative...

...One was, in other words, a sort of Nordic cosmopolitan...

...He is an inveterate sketcher, bringing his drawing pad with him whenever he has the opportunity...

...Expect, instead, to pass a few enjoyable hours with a highly civilized, contemplative man who just happens to be one of our foremost foreign policy analysts...

...Sketches from a Life (Pantheon, 369 pp., $22.95), a collection of travel notes spanning more than 60 years, contains passages recounting a bicycle tour through Wisconsin and cruises up the Norwegian fjords that are likely to try the patience of most readers...

...Eliot published Gerontion 11 years earlier than the Kennan entry, but the poet and the diplomat are near-contemporaries, less than a generation apart, and once the connection is made, it vibrates...

...Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room...

...Ideologically, he has been isolated throughout his career, incapable of finding a home in either political party...

...Now, as the world Kennan helped to make comes undone, we must hope the next generation of policymakers will take to heart the dour and sober lessons he has spent a lifetime trying to teach...

...the monstrous stillness of the nights in the deserted buildings and courtyards...

...Elsewhere, he speaks approvingly of monarchical societies, and in his retreat from modernity, romantically finds virtue in the poverty and squalor of an Indian village, where there is "no great sign, anywhere, of unhappiness...

...was the whole great arc of the northern and western world, from Moscow across Scandinavia and the British Isles to Wisconsin...

...After bemoaning the vacuousness and vulgarity of America, he goes on to acknowledge its vitality, declaring, "truly, this country whipsaws you...

...Sometimes it seems to require a leap of faith on his part—just how sincere are those remarks about America's "glorious sides"?—and a reader is reminded that in the Memoirs Kennan explained he entered the Foreign Service as a young man because " I did not know what else to do...

...These are the flotsam of cosmopolitanism, "scraped together," says Kennan, "from the bourgeoisie of four countries," and we have met them before: In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers...

...On a visit to an isolated Greek monastery he imagines what daily existence must be like for the men who live there, and in the process engenders a Fictional universe: "the claustrophobia, the emotional abnormality, the getting-on-each-other'snerves, the gossip, the snooping, theintrigues...

...Power, he insists, is what ultimately determines matters in foreign policy...

...Neither was comfortable with the sloppy, chaotic, rootless democracy of his native land, and Eliot, as is well known, sought refuge in the British Crown and Church...

...The concept of the "wasteland" is not unknown to him...

...A fine end-of-the-world we have created in the American city...

...Our own flag-waving provincials would not be entirely amiss to question the extent of his loyalty, at least as they understand the term...

...national interest with his deeper ideals and concerns...

...Eliot grew up in St...

...Fortunately, Kennan always pulls himself back from this dyspeptic abyss...

...the tense awareness of the slightest strange sound...

...He was not out to make the world safe for democracy or to fight the war to end all wars...

...Though Kennan did not go as far, his temperament suited him for a rather extreme conservatism, and Sketches from a Life is replete with stepping stones on a path to blackest reaction...

...For this reason, Kennan has stressed the need to understand adversaries, not to despise or anathematize them...

...By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles...

...A genuine conservative, anticipating no cure for the human condition, he has viewed foreign policy as process, a chess match without beginning or conclusion, not teleology...

...Here is a description of fauna observed during a trip to Southwest Africa: "We came upon a group of four or five enormous ostriches, who went trotting away into the bush with their curiously soft and springy gait, flouncing their feathery skirts in a way that was both ridiculous and slightly suggestive—like clowning chorus girls...

...In their place has been substituted an all-encompassing banality, aggravated by a welfare state that, at his crabbiest and least gracious, he attributes entirelytoapoliticsof envy...

...And protesting his surprise in an Epilogue at the vehemence of the anti-Americanism displayed in this book, he feels compelled to announce: "I am not oblivious to the fact that the United States of 1988-89 has its glorious sides...

...Yet despite the sporadic longueurs, this is a beguiling book, the most personal Kennan has ever published...

...The alienation, the loneliness, the world-weariness Kennan repeatedly expresses ("lost, lost, lost") is Eliotic, as is the sense that the past weighs upon him and the feeling that he is less a citizen of a country than of a civilization: " Home...

...and one Dutch couple, who stood out clearly among the rest through their breeding and poise...

...But if he is suspect on the Right because of his lack of patriotic fervor and on the Left because of his lack of faith in mankind, he remains precisely the type of thinker who is indispensable in international affairs—cool, lucid, cautious, morose...

...young British women, without their husbands...

...On a 1931 skiing trip, he observes his fellow guests at a Swiss hostelry: "Germans of all sorts...

...Nowhere else does Kennan so openly display his artistic side, not merely his novelist's sensitivity but his broad and variegated impulse toward creativity...

...When practically everyone else was praising the brave Soviet allies for standing up to the Nazi invaders, he was warning that a victorious USSR could be expected to fill the power vacuum developing in Eastern Europe...

...Do not approach it anticipating learned recitations about recent history...

...With his preference for order and hierarchy, and his hunger for spirituality, he would, in another time, have made an outstanding papal nuncio, one locked in combat against the nationalist and secular currents embodied in the French and English kings...

...The ideal of the welfare state, I fear, European or American, is not that more people should live really well, but that no one should...

...KENNAN shows himself to be profoundly antiegalitarian, believing that gentility and good taste disappeared with the 19th-century age of the haute-bourgeoisie...

...by Mr...

...He has always taken the long view, believing that history counts for more than good intentions, and has never had much sympathy for legal agreements, reliance on international law or the United Nations...

...By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians...

...Kennan is a charming and seductive author, a craftsman who would hold his own in the company of those who have made writing their lifelong profession...

...all experience vicarious...

...Throughout most of Kennan's life as a public servant, Washington seemed unable to grasp these points and, as a result, he felt frustrated on both ends of the Cold War...

...The parallels extend to their backgrounds...

...Louis, Kennan in Milwaukee, yet both of these Midwesterners had roots that reached back to New England and they each developed a stern, gloomy perspective on the human condition their Puritan forebears would have appreciated...

...T.S...

...Visions of Armageddon did not dance in his head...

...Then, after his voice was finally heard in 1947-48, the State Department rushed to the opposite extreme and created a Soviet Union that was a mechanical monster bent on global conquest at any cost, this time ignoring Kennan's explanations that the Kremlin was simply pursuing traditional Russian goals...

...He is an ambassador with a novelist's eye, conjuring up depths beneath the surface of things, intuiting psychology...

...I view the United States of these last years of the 20th century as essentially a tragic country, endowed with magnificent natural resources which it is rapidly wasting and exhausting, and with an intellectual and artistic intelligentsia of great talent and originality...

...He writes poetry...

...Kennan's is not the kind of conservatism we are accustomed to encountering in the U.S., where the Right is heir to a philosophy of 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism, and the Republican Party is the vehicle of entrepreneurial self-aggrandizement...

...As the Cold War pendulum swung back and forth, Kennan was able to maintain his balance because he neither feared nor expected too much...

...In the light of such avocations, his unceasing complaints about the trashiness of our age can be understood as the laments of a displaced and wounded esthete...

...For anyone who has followed Kennan's career over the years, however, Sketches from a Life has an additional pleasure...

...rather hard boiled...

...It provides an insight into one of the four or five Americans most responsible for shaping the post-war world we all continue to inhabit, indeed a better picture than was contained in his Memoirs, two volumes written primarily with the aim of justification, not revelation...

...the furtive nocturnal doings—God knows what...

...His patriotism hangs by the slenderest thread, dependent upon his ability to conjoin theU.S...