Russell Kirk
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political philosopher, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, lecturer, author, and novelist who influenced 20th century American conservatism. In 1953, he authored The Conservative Mind, which traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition and Edmund Burke. The book helped establish the intellectual framework for a religious and humanistic understanding of conservatism in the postwar era. Kirk was the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism.
Scholars have identified Kirk as an important twentieth-century proponent of Christian humanism, placing him in conversation with figures such as T. S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, and Romano Guardini.
He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction.
In 1953 Clinton Rossiter said that thanks to Kirk, "the so-called 'new conservatism' of the postwar period takes on new substance and meaning". In 2013, Alfred Regnery called The Conservative Mind "the catalyst that began the transformation of a band of disparate conservative critics into the political, cultural, and intellectual force that it is today."
Early life and education
Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan, on October 19, 1918, the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk. Kirk attended Michigan State University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts, and Duke University, where he was awarded a Master of Arts.During World War II, Kirk served in the United States Armed Forces and corresponded with Isabel Paterson, a libertarian writer who helped to shape his early political thought. After reading Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock, Kirk engaged in a similar correspondence with Nock. Following the end of World War II, Kirk attended University of St Andrews in Scotland, where, in 1953, he became the university's first American to be awarded a Doctor of Letters. Kirk "laid out a post-World War II program for conservatives by warning them, 'A handful of individuals, some of them quite unused to moral responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; we must make it our business to curtail the possibility of such snap decisions.'"
Career
Michigan State University
After obtaining his degree at the University of St. Andrews, Kirk secured an academic position at Michigan State University, his alma mater. He resigned in 1953, after growing disenchanted with the rapid growth in student number and emphasis on intercollegiate athletics and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts. He subsequently referred to Michigan State as "Cow College" or "Behemoth University", and later wrote that academic political scientists and sociologists were "as a breed—dull dogs".Following the success of The Conservative Mind, Kirk resigned from his teaching position and relocated to Mecosta, Michigan, where he established himself as an independent writer and lecturer. From Mecosta, Kirk maintained an extensive publishing and speaking career, producing a steady body of work in political theory, cultural criticism, history, and humane letters over several decades.
Editor and author
After leaving Michigan State, Kirk moved permanently to the village of Mecosta, Michigan. From there he exerted his influence on American politics and intellectual life though many books and articles, as well as the syndicated newspaper column, which was published for 13 years. In his entire career he published nearly 3,000 newspaper columns, hundreds of essays and books reviews, and over 30 books.''The Conservative Mind''
In 1953, Kirk authored The Conservative Mind, the published version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation. It contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival, drawing attention to:- Conservative statesmen, including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, Joseph de Maistre, Benjamin Disraeli, and Arthur Balfour;
- Conservative authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, George Gissing, George Santayana, Robert Frost,T. S. Eliot, and G.K. Chesterton.
- British and American authors, including Fisher Ames, John Randolph of Roanoke, Orestes Brownson, John Henry Newman, Walter Bagehot, Henry James Sumner Maine, William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, William Hurrell Mallock, Leslie Stephen, Albert Venn Dicey, Robert Nisbet, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt.
Journals
Other works
Kirk's other important books include Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, The Roots of American Order, and the autobiographical Sword of the Imagination: Memoirs of a Half Century of Literary Conflict. In addition to his works of cultural criticism and intellectual history, Kirk also wrote extensively on education, addressing the role of moral formation, liberal learning, and the transmission of tradition in books and essays such as Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning. As was the case with his hero Edmund Burke, Kirk became known for the prose style of his intellectual and polemical writings, which emphasized historical continuity, moral imagination, and literary expression.Fiction
Beyond his scholarly achievements, Kirk was talented both as an oral storyteller and as an author of genre fiction, most notably in his telling of consummate ghost stories in the classic tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Oliver Onions, and H. Russell Wakefield. He also wrote other admired and much-anthologized works that are variously classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and political satire. These earned him plaudits from fellow creative writers as varied and distinguished as T. S. Eliot, Robert Aickman, Madeleine L'Engle, and Ray Bradbury.Kirk's body of fiction, encompassing three novels and 22 short stories, was written amid a busy career as prolific non-fiction writer, editor, and speaker. Like other speculative fiction authors G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, each of whom only wrote non-fiction for their day jobs, there are conservative undercurrents, social, cultural, religious, and political, to Kirk's fiction. In 1984, Kirk described the purpose of his fictional stories:
The political ferocity of our age is sufficiently dismaying: men of letters need not conjure up horrors worse than those suffered during the past decade by the Cambodians and Ugandans, Afghans and Ethiopians. What I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imagination. Readers will encounter elements of parable and fable...some clear premise is about the character of human existence...a healthy concept of the character of evil...
His first novel, Old House of Fear, was written in a self-consciously Gothic vein. The plot is concerned with an American assigned by his employer to a bleak locale in rural Scotland—the same country where Kirk had attended graduate school. This was Kirk's most commercially successful and critically acclaimed fictional work, doing much to sustain him financially in subsequent years. Old House of Fear was inspired by the novels of John Buchan and Kirk's own Scottish heritage. The story of Old House of Fear concerns an young American, Hugh Logan, a World War II veteran who is both brave and sensitive, sent to buy Carnglass, a remote island in the Hebrides. Upon reaching the island, he discovers that the island's owner, Lady MacAskival and her beautiful adopted daughter Mary are being held hostage by foreign spies, who are presumably working for the Soviet Union, out to sabotage a nearby NATO base. The leader of the spies is Dr. Jackman, an evil genius and nihilist intent upon wrecking a world that failed to acknowledge his greatness and whom reviewers noted was a much more vividly drawn character than the hero Logan. Dr. Jackman appears to be a prototype of Kirk's best known character, Manfred Arcane, with the only difference being the former has no values while the latter does.
His later novels include A Creature of the Twilight, a dark comedy satirizing postcolonial African politics; and Lord of the Hollow Dark, set in Scotland, which explores the great evil inhabiting a haunted house.
A Creature of the Twilight concerns the adventures in Africa of a reactionary, romantic mercenary Mandred Arcane, a self-proclaimed mixture of Machiavelli and Sir Lancelot, who is an anachronistic survival of the Victorian Age who does not belong in the modern world and yet defiantly still exists, making him the "creature of the twilight". Kirk has Arcane write his pseudo-memoir in a consciously Victorian style to underline that he does not belong in the 1960s. Arcane is both a dapper intellectual and a hardened man of action, an elderly man full of an unnatural vigor, who is hired by the son of the assassinated Sultan to put down a Communist rebellion in the fictional African nation of Hamnegri, which he does despite overwhelming odds. In 1967, Kirk published a short story "Belgrummo's Hell" about a clever art thief who unwisely tries to rob the estate of the ancient Scottish warlock, Lord Belgrummo, who is later revealed to be Arcane's father. In another short story published in the same collection, "The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion" concerned a wizard, Archvicar Gerontion, who tries to kill Arcane by casting deadly spells.
The Lord of the Hollow Dark is set at the same Belgrummo estate first encountered in "Belgrummo's Hell" where an evil cult led by the Aleister Crowley-like character Apollinax have assembled to secure for themselves the "Timeless Moment" of eternal sexual pleasure by sacrificing two innocents, an young woman named Marina and her infant daughter in an ancient warren called the Weem under the Belgrummo Estate. Assisting Apollinax is Archvicar Gerontion, who is really Arcane in disguise. Inspired by the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, Kirk in the Lord of the Hollow Dark has Arcane survive a "horrid chthonian pilgrimage" as he faces dark supernatural forces, confronts his own family's history of evil, and refuses the appeal of a "seductive, hubristic immorality". The novel concludes with Arcane's own definition of a true "Timeless Moment" which he states: "it comes from faith, from hope, from charity; from having your work in the world; from the happiness of the people you love; or simply as a gift of grace". During his lifetime, Kirk also oversaw the publication of three collections which together encompassed all his short stories. Many of Kirk's short stories, especially the ghost stories, were set in either Scotland or in the rural parts of his home state of Michigan.
Among his novels and stories, certain characters tend to recur, enriching the already considerable unity and resonance of his fictional canon. Though—through their themes and prose-style—Kirk's fiction and nonfiction works are complementary, many readers of the one have not known of his work in the other.
Having begun to write fiction fairly early in his career, Kirk ceased fiction writing after the early 1980s, while continuing his non-fiction writing and research through his last year of life.
In 1982, The Portable Conservative Reader, which Kirk edited, included writings by many of the conservatives Kirk featured in The Conservative Mind.