Russell Kirk, who passed into eternal life thirty years ago today, is best remembered for his landmark book The Conservative Mind, though he wrote countless columns and essays, and over thirty books on literature, culture, political philosophy, and education. His best and most neglected body of work is his Gothic fiction — like the novel Old House of Fear (recently republished in a fine Criterion edition) and the short story anthology The Surly Sullen Bell, which the Southern literary critic Andrew Lytle once praised for restoring in a secular age the real terror of the threat of damnation. The effect of these stories, Lytle notes, “goes beyond punishment for the violation of moral laws,” and actually “renders up the mystery” behind those laws.
Moral law and mystery: Kirk somehow managed in his work, as he managed in his life, to communicate a deeply Catholic vision of moral order and what he called, echoing Edmund Burke, “the unbought grace of life.”
Several years ago, in an essay in The Atlantic, Ross Douthat defended Kirk from shallow detractors, but still observed that “there is something faintly irritating, to me at least, about his constant self-presentation as a humble landowner, ‘best content when planting little trees at Mecosta.’” The same thing bothered Douthat about Wendell Berry: “The romanticization of one’s own authenticity, which in turn makes the authenticity seem faintly fraudulent.”
But Kirk, like Berry, was no fraud. Kirk’s return to the land of his ancestors, like his constant lyrical evocation of that return for his readers, was intentional — as all such efforts at reversing the tide of decadence and isolation in our modern age must be. But it’s no less authentic for that, and clearly not mere conservative virtue-signaling.
When your reader is deaf and dumb to the Permanent Things, you must, as Flannery O’Connor put it, shout and “draw large, startling figures.” But the truth is that Kirk doesn’t overstate things. He really was most content planting little trees in Mecosta, at his ancestral home Piety Hill. Successive generations of assistants who were graced to live and work there know this. During my time there, while also being courted by a fellow assistant (later my husband), we spent nearly two hours daily — after research and correspondence — pulling up weeds, trimming lilac bushes, hoeing and planting. It was an integrated, healthy, authentic existence.
Things certainly didn’t have to play out that way for Kirk. In Confessions of a Bohemian Tory – an early work with the passage about “planting trees” – Kirk mused:
To plant a tree, in our age when the expectation of change commonly seems greater than the expectation of continuity, is an act of faith. Also, it is an act of historical penance, restoring the fairness of the land. . . .According to John Henry Newman, Toryism is loyalty to persons. I venture to add that it is also loyalty to places. In fancy, I can see myself settled in a strange old house in the windy Orkneys, or established in some little palazzo near the Cathedral of Orvieto, above the Umbrian plan. But only in fancy: for, no matter how far a man strays, it is well that his home should remain a place where his ancestors lie buried.
Re-reading such passages, I find it hard not to sense a bit of envy in Kirk’s detractors, which confirms the urgency of Kirk’s project. If he seems to say, “Look at me, planting trees and living the life of a Man of Letters. Don’t you wish you were me?,” it’s precisely because he wants to instill in a rudderless rising generation the desire for a life of stability and meaning. Instead of giving readers dead abstractions or chasing a succession of visiting professorships in exotic places, Kirk lived out first principles by doing the hard, dutiful work of staying home.
“Redeem the time.” “Little platoons.” “The moral imagination.” “The unbought grace of life.” “The rising generation.” “The Permanent Things.” These expressions have not entered the public lexicon because of wide reading of Burke or Eliot. They now belong more fully to Kirk than to their original authors. For it was Kirk who took these often dense and abstract concepts and imbued them, in his writing and in his life, with flesh and blood.
One of my favorite essays by Kirk is a lyrical sketch of Uigg, a remote and inhospitable island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It first appeared in a volume entitled Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, and chronicles the all-but-certain destruction of the island in the face of modernization: “Survival of people like the crofters is a standing criticism, however feeble, of centralized and industrialized society. . . .Once the city man is deprived of the admonitory contrast which remnants of an earlier rural civilization provide, he sinks deep into self-complacency, materialism, and boredom.”
In the absence of Kirk’s synthesizing conservative vision, we are left with extremes: a rarified, irrelevant intellectual conservatism and a dangerous populism void of first principles. The rising generation know this; they know that they deserve something better, and they would do well to turn to Kirk for that better vision.
I am currently directing a Senior Thesis on Kirk’s Gothic novel Old House of Fear — the novel and topic were chosen by a young woman, Emma Anderson, without any urging on my part. She considers the novel “an exhortation for man to reflect on his life and order it according to its proper end,” especially the many people “still desperate for the transcendent.” There are, of course, many modern impediments to recognition of this transcendent order: “Ghosts can hardly come out of the cardboard and plastic walls of a newly-built condominium. History begins when man creates with his own hands; and when that chestnut wardrobe is handed down to the heirs, the past and the memory of family are handed down with it.”
Indeed. You won’t find a student at Columbia University — where the current platoons are neither little nor Kirkean — writing that.
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