George F. Kennan: An American Life (6 page)

Back on campus, George found his teachers sympathetic and the amount of work to be made up less than he had expected. He found a place in the freshman commons orchestra and tried out for—but did not stay with—the
Daily Princetonian.
He even began to have fun, breaking into the Junior Prom with other freshmen to steal sandwiches, helping a friend get out of a lease by harassing a landlady with as much noise as possible at four A.M., and pursuing a new hobby of shooting at magazines, in the fireplace, with a revolver. Money, however, continued to worry him. His friends treated him well, “considering my lack of personality.... But I just can’t go much with their set unless I spend a little more money.” It was worth doing this, “because if there’s any one thing that isn’t good for me it is to be alone, and it’s a choice of going with them or with no one.”
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With April came “soft days, and still softer nights.” Victrolas played through open windows each evening. The campus was overrun with girls on weekends, making it impossible to play tennis “because we can’t swear.” But he did get himself to a prom without doing anything “absolutely wrong, outside of wearing the same soft shirt with a borrowed tuxedo, two nights in succession. I got along on about $31, having that amount when I started and three cents when I ended.”
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And then there was—alluringly—New York. George’s oldest sister, Frances, who had long since left Milwaukee to become an actress, lived there and generously offered the use of her sofa on occasional weekends. “I was absolutely neurotic with [the] excitement of this city,” George recalled many years later, “to me it seemed just like fairyland.” But Frances and her friends weren’t interested in college students. She remembered it differently: “I’ll tell you what my friends thought: ‘Oh, how darling! Pink cheeks!’ ”

George did seem shy, though, so on one visit Frances and her roommates brought home a girl they thought he would like. “I think they expected more to happen than did because I wasn’t prepared to go to these lengths yet.” Sensing that he had disappointed, “I wrote her afterwards a passionate love letter and she wrote me very sensibly back and said that that wasn’t the way it was.” He did, however, fall in love with New York. “I thought it was absolutely marvelous.”
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George did not recall being depressed at Princeton, but he was indeed shy, and if anybody did talk to him, he tended to talk too much: “I think many Middle Western boys had this experience when they went East to college.” There weren’t many at Princeton in the 1920s: the university drew its students chiefly from wealthy families and elite prep schools on the East Coast. There were no women, no blacks, few Jews, and—somewhat surprisingly for an institution strongly shaped by its former president Woodrow Wilson—few foreigners. The emphasis in admissions was on “homogeneity,” but that did not mean democracy: Princeton was as class-ridden as the society from which most of its students came.
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“[I]f you were from some place that you didn’t think was ‘the’ place to be from,” a friend recalled many years later, “you felt like a hick. You didn’t think your clothes were right, and you didn’t think what you said was right, and you didn’t know the right people, and you held back in a corner and tried to hide all that part of yourself.” George himself, half a century later, remembered asking a fellow freshman at the first student assembly what time it was. The young dandy took a puff on his cigarette, blew some smoke, and then walked away, searing himself into George’s consciousness: “I was just proud enough not to suck up to those boys. And wouldn’t have known how to do it anyway.”
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For this reason, getting into Princeton was not nearly as difficult as
fitting
into Princeton once he was there. During his first year, of course, all freshmen were inferiors. They wore beanies (“dinks”) and were banned from walking on certain sidewalks or patches of grass. The class stood disgraced if one or more of its members did not, at some point during the year, steal the bell-clapper from atop Nassau Hall. They expected to be photographed in front of Whig Hall while sophomores pelted them from above with unpleasant substances. This form of class consciousness was good-natured enough, though, and when George got to be a sophomore, he himself harassed freshmen. “We certainly did those boys up right,” he wrote Jeanette, “with water, flour, eggs, tomatoes, fish, green paint, cement, alabaster, and every other conceivable concoction.”
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There was, however, a more complex consciousness of class at Princeton, to which George alluded early in his sophomore year. “Last Sunday I was [at a] dinner in Trenton. . . . The other Princeton boy down there was a man who plays varsity football, is on the senior council, and belongs to Ivy, so you can see the eliteness.”
¹⁵
“Ivy” was the Ivy Club, and George’s boast reflected multiple meanings of the word
class
. It referred not only to individual courses, or to the collective experience of a common graduating year; it also signified membership—or lack of it—in Princeton’s distinctive eating clubs, and that for many of its undergraduates was the most important thing of all.

Princeton had abolished fraternities in 1875 but neglected to replace them with adequate dining facilities for upperclassmen. This encouraged the construction and generous endowment of privately owned clubs, mostly along Prospect Avenue, which offered elegant dining, ample drink, and opulent facilities for parties, dances, and alumni reunions. Admission was by the vote of the members, and with few other places to socialize on campus, getting into a club became the prevailing preoccupation from the moment freshmen arrived. Since not all clubs were equal in prestige, joining the “right” one was at least as vital. Everything depended on “bicker,” the critical spring week when sophomores waited anxiously for the all-important knock on the door that would tell them they had made it in—which is to say, that they had been deemed to have
fit
in. It all amounted, one professor later complained, to “a religious frenzy over the choice of a restaurant.”
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By the time his own bicker week rolled around, George had decided that the process was beneath him: “In a veritable transport of false pride, self-pity, and thirst for martyrdom, I absented myself every afternoon from the campus, lest somebody ask me to join a club.” In the end, though, somebody did. Bill Oliver, whose sister had roomed with Constance at Vassar, sought George out: “You’re making a great mistake. This is going to damage your upper-class years—you’ll be happier if you join.” Moved that anyone had taken the trouble, he accepted membership in Key and Seal, which he described to Jeanette as “neither the best nor the worst” but “the wildest club in Princeton.” He then took a job as assistant manager there to cover the costs.
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Even in his own club, though, George was uncomfortable. Its chief vice was drinking, but “since I don’t like to drink, I’m not in fear of temptation on that score.” He later acknowledged not having many friends in Key and Seal. By the end of his junior year, he was brooding about the “super-sensitiveness” that had led some of his classmates to “make social prestige during undergraduate years the sole aim of life.” So he resigned when he returned to campus.
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He thereby saved, George wrote his father, $300. But it had been “no small sacrifice,” because “[a] non-club man is quite generally snubbed and looked down upon, takes a very small part in college life, and misses out on practically all of the things that men have in mind when they talk about ‘the grand old college days.’ ” For the rest of his senior year there was no choice but to eat with the “rejects,” the students who had gotten into no club, and that, George later recalled, was terrible. Each of them “was afraid that the fellow next to him would think that he couldn’t take it and was trying to butter him up to make friends, so we usually ate in a sort of proud silence.”
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George drew from this unhappy experience the lesson that “one had to make one’s own standards, one could not just accept those of other people; there was always the possibility that those others, in the very rejection of us, had been wrong.” But it had been he who had rejected his fellow club members, not the other way around. George captured his own contradictions in a letter to Jeanette: “My hardest job is to be conventional, for that is something which self-respect and blood often tell [me] not to do,” even though “I believe [conventionality] brought me to Princeton.”
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“There was . . . a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his makeup,” it was once said of another student who wound up at Princeton. “[A] harsh word from the lips of an older boy . . . was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity.... [H]e was a slave to his own moods.”
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That student was Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine
before
he entered Princeton: he eventually got over it. George, for whatever reason, never quite did.

Academics, fortunately, came more easily than social life. George’s most challenging freshman course was Historical Introduction (known to the students as “hysterical interruption”), which sought to show the effects of climate, geography, and resources on civilizations. The professor was the young Joseph C. Green, “a stern, vigorous, and relentlessly conscientious scholar, placing no demands on us that he did not meet to the fullest degree himself.” Young George had this course in mind when he wrote his father that “my future rests chiefly on how much studying I do in the next week and a half.” But he passed everything—no small achievement given his bout with scarlet fever—although he did have to repeat freshman English literature in his sophomore year.
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That requirement provoked an early outburst of intellectual independence. George disliked the course and began cutting classes. He thought it silly to have to identify plots and climaxes in Shakespeare—“you either felt these plays as aesthetic and intellectual experiences or you did not.” Called in by his instructor, who wanted to know, “bluntly but not unkindly, what the hell was the matter with me,” George professed repentance. He then submitted a paper on what was wrong with the teaching of English in American colleges. It got the highest grade possible, and “I was taught an unforgettable lesson in generosity and restraint.”
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George knew none of his teachers well, but he appreciated what some of them did. Like several generations of Princeton undergraduates, he relished the legendary Walter P. “Buzzer” Hall—so called for the sound his hearing aid made—who would arrive in a horse and buggy to teach modern European history, thunder through his lectures, and then end the semester with a masterpiece on Garibaldi that pulled in students from all over the campus. There was a philosophy professor who gained George’s respect by allowing students to argue with him after his lectures: “Anyone who can ex[c]ite three or four hundred blasé easterners so that they emerge from their frigid cells . . . has got to be good.” And then there was a German professor, short, stout, with close-cropped hair and a red mustache: “When he starts to speak German, he swells up, raises his head, glares at the class, draws a deep breath, and then bursts out in stenatorian [
sic
] tones, punctuated by a full measure of the spluttering and gurgling [which] accompanies the pronunciation of good German.”
²⁴

Literature, inside and outside of class, sparked the greatest interest, especially contemporary American novels: “I was thrilled with these books.” Princeton may not have lived up to the reputation Fitzgerald had given it, but Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
put George back in touch with his midwestern roots. “[I]t was an enormous eye-opener to me that one could look at our lives and see drama.” And then, as George was graduating,
The Great Gatsby
came out, “went right into me and became part of me.”
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History, apart from “Buzzer” Hall, was disappointing. Too many instructors contented themselves with assignments like: “Read Chapter Twenty-Three, and be prepared to recite on it next week.” It made a difference when the students encountered what
they
found interesting. Charles Seymour’s
Woodrow Wilson and the World War
was “fortunately small enough to be read conveniently in chapel,” where attendance was mandatory, “and I covered some fifty pages of it during that ceremony, this morning.” Only one other history teacher held George’s interest: he was Raymond J. Sontag, then a preceptor but later a distinguished diplomatic historian. “[S]keptical, questioning, disillusioned without being discouraging,” he left an indelible impression. Many years later, having himself entered the profession, George recalled of his Princeton years: “I didn’t realize how interesting history was!”
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So too, in a way, were current affairs. George carefully recorded the consensus reached in a Clio debate on Japanese exclusion. He composed, but did not send, a sardonic letter to the
Princetonian
on the Veterans’ Bonus Bill. He wrote an essay on plans for construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He wrestled, in his international law class, with a case involving Soviet claims to property in the United States—an issue he would return to in an official capacity a decade later. He participated in a student discussion on German reparations, which veered off into wild plans for joining the French Foreign Legion, and then ended in “a general row on international politics” lasting much of the night. Princeton left him with “a vague Wilsonian liberalism; a regret that the Senate had rejected American membership in the League of Nations; a belief in laissez-faire economics and the values of competition ; and a corresponding aversion to high tariffs.” Otherwise, there were few “settled opinions, conclusions, or certainties in the field of public affairs.”
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