Fat Pickings

By Stefan Kanfer

SKETCHES FROM A LIFE

by George F. Kennan

Pantheon; 365 pages; $22.95

Dr. Anton Chekhov once remarked that medicine was his wife and literature his mistress. Ambassador George F. Kennan, 85, acknowledges that his own situation is "analogous, except that the mistress was far less beautiful than Chekhov's and had to content herself with much smaller pickings."

Kennan's statement contains his typical amalgam of self-effacement and presumption. The diplomat and historian has written 17 books on 19th and 20th century foreign policy; he knows very well that his current "pickings" contain 61 years of incomparable observations. He was in Germany when the Nazis rose to power, and in the U.S.S.R. during Stalin's purges. Since his departure from the Foreign Service in 1953 he has visited almost every dry surface of the globe, and he has never forgotten his notebook. From it he has now culled Sketches from a Life, which brims with diverting character analyses, appraisals of nations and even attempts at fiction and poetry.

As early as 1927, the young vice consul senses an approaching malaise in Hamburg: "The city talks with a thrilling breathless strength through the restless machinery of its harbor, and yet talks with the voice of unutterable horror, through the lurid, repulsive alleys of St. Pauli." Kennan watches a 23-year-old pianist who is "Jewish, from Russia, and evidently is rumored to be near to death with tuberculosis . . . When he played . . . it seemed as though he himself were being played upon by some unseen musician -- as though every note were being wrung out of him." Many things have altered in six decades, but not the performance of Vladimir Horowitz.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kennan is imprisoned by the Nazis. Released, he goes on to serve in Portugal, London and then, as the war winds down, the Soviet Union. In the early days, the writer regards the country less as a diplomat than as a romantic novelist manque. Leningrad is "one of the most poignant communities of the world . . . I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there had nevertheless been deposited by some strange quirk of fate -- a previous life, perhaps? -- a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love."

But Kennan says little in Sketches about the great distress the Soviet Union caused him. In fact he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. in 1952 for criticizing the government. "I was interned . . . in Germany for several months during the last war," he complained to reporters while traveling in West Berlin. "The treatment we receive in Moscow is just about like the treatment we internees received then." Soviet officials considered his remarks ! "slanderous attacks . . . in a rude violation of generally recognized norms of international law." Soon afterward Secretary of State John Foster Dulles terminated his career.

Taking up the narrative with his return to the U.S., Kennan allows his wit to twinkle. California reminds him "of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many -- not all -- of one's friends . . . and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realize that now -- the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant -- nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again."

Perhaps that is why Kennan spends so much of his postdiplomatic career at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. There, many terribly interesting things continue to happen, and he remains stimulated -- and stimulating. Only in the last pages does his spirit flag. Sketches concludes with melancholia. Kennan regrets "the blind and helpless way in which each generation of us . . . staggers through life: occupying briefly the little patch of apparent light between the darkness of the past we have so largely forgotten and the darkness of the future that we cannot see." The assessment is too harsh -- on humanity, and on the diarist. As Opus 18 happily demonstrates, every generation has a few individuals who illuminate those darknesses with their own intense candlepower.