Mr. Kirk-Our Man of Letters

There is a scene early in Russell Kirk's posthumously published autobiography that foreshadows his future role as the "father of post-war American conservatism." The teenage Kirk is working as a summer guide at Henry Ford's historical park, Greenfield Village. Surrounded by the artifacts of the industrial age from a transplanted English artisan's cottage and Newcomen's steam engine to the machine shop where Henry Ford had perfected his first automobile, Kirk spends his time absorbing vast amounts of social and scientific history.
At the same time, he is gradually becoming aware that Ford's invention is playing a major role in undermining historical continuity and the cohesion of communities. One day Kirk and two friends encounter Ford himself in Greenfield Village. After showing them his earliest inventions, Ford looks out the window toward the glowing coke-ovens of the enormous Rouge plant. Meditating on his invention, he says, with a sigh: "It don't seem long since I made it."

No intellectual in recent times has been more profoundly aware of the tension in American culture between innovation and preservation than Russell Kirk. Or, as he often put it, the tension between order and freedom. If Kirk never lost sight of the value of freedom-it made possible, for example, such magnanimous gestures as Henry Ford's Greenfield Village-he devoted most of his energy in his long career to cultivating the roots of American order. But what made him the consummate champion of the "permanent things" was his belief that any valid conservatism must be grounded in the moral imagination. The antidote to ideological abstraction, he held, is an imaginative awareness of the world as it really is, a vision that reaches back into history and deeply into the human heart.

For many readers, I suspect, the most intriguing chapters in The Sword of Imagination will not be the chronicles of "a half-century of literary conflict," but the story of Kirk's early life, prior to the public career that commenced with the publication of The Conservative Mind. The shaping of Kirk's own imagination began soon after his birth, in 1918, in a little bungalow beside the railroad tracks in Plymouth, Michigan.

Kirk' s parents and immediate family came from "a class of Americans who worked with their hands and never had indulged in higher education but early acquired good manners, good morals, and good taste." Just as the name of his birthplace looked back to the Pilgrims, so Kirk's family remembered its roots in the history and culture of New England. A shy, introverted boy, Kirk was fiercely devoted to his mother, who in turn lavished her attention on him. He was also deeply attached to his maternal grandfather, Frank Pierce, who was a restaurateur, bank manager, village commissioner, and president of the school board. Kirk was educated in public schools, before the traditional curriculum had been devastated by Deweyan pragmatism. By the time he entered junior high school, Kirk had read most of the major works of Hawthorne, Cooper, Scott, Twain, and Dickens. He also developed a passion for history, reading the popularized works of H.G. Wells and Hendrik Willem van Loon.

By the time he became a tour guide at Greenfield Village, Kirk was becoming aware that communities like Plymouth were threatened not only by the automobile, but also by the larger forces of industrialization and urbanization. Like his beloved Walter Scott, Kirk became a romantic reactionary, with a taste for the Gothic. With its love of complexity, mystery, and the distant past, Gothic romanticism provided a natural refuge from the glowing coke-ovens of the Rouge plant. Kirk modeled his prose style on the nineteenth-century masters; his anachronistic mannerisms would become his literary trademark.

His experiences as a student at the Dewey-influenced Michigan State College (as it was then called) and as a sergeant during World War II at a chemical weapons site did little to endear him to modern education, technology, or the power of the centralized state. Kirk's conservatism, however, was not rooted in religious faith. His pilgrimage to the Catholic Church was slow and intuitive; he was not received until he was 45.

Eventually Kirk made the trip to Europe, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation at St. Andrew's University in Scotland. His American dollars enabled him to travel extensively through post-war Europe. He befriended some of Britain's leading writers, including T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, and George Scott-Moncrieff. The aristocrats of Scotland's Fife country welcomed him into their castles and Georgian mansions. The chapters in The Sword of Imagination describing these episodes are among the liveliest and most engaging in the book.

The dissertation, of course, became The Conservative Mind, the seminal work that forged the modern American conservative movement. It embodied all of Kirk's virtues and limitations. It was not so much a work of political philosophy as it was an exercise in imaginative history. By tracing a varied but coherent intellectual patrimony, Kirk gave modern conservatives a venerable tradition. Since the prevailing view in 1953 was that conservatives were little more than fanatics, The Conservative Mind infused conservatives with a level of self-confidence they desperately needed. If Kirk never wrote a book to equal The Conservative Mind, his many works of fiction, literary criticism, history, and educational theory were extended and necessary appendices to the original masterpiece.

Like all autobiographies, The Sword of Imagination reveals and conceals. Kirk's passionate love for his wife Annette is touchingly evident throughout the book, as is his pride in his four daughters. His delight in storytelling (especially of the ghostly variety) and in his own community of Mecosta, Michigan shines forth from these pages. But many other mysteries and paradoxes remain. He was a shy, lonely man who nonetheless craved human company. Indeed, few of Kirk's closest companions felt that they really knew him intimately. Despite his strictures on egotism and the cult of personality, he surrounded himself with legions of young devotees and admirers. He writes extensively of his "literary conflicts" with those on the Left, but never mentions that in his last years the conservative movement underwent a series of divisive convulsions. He justifies writing about himself in the third person as an effort to avoid egotism, and yet the result seems more self-congratulatory than if he had stuck with "I" and "me."

Paradoxes and quibbles aside, The Sword of Imagination is a rich, vivid narrative, a portrait of an intellectual whose life and thought were radically consistent. Throughout his life, Russell Kirk wielded that sword with the "unbought grace of life" so cherished by his hero, Edmund Burke. He was "The Last Man of Letters" in our increasingly unimaginative age of information.