SOURCE: Genovese, Eugene D. “Captain Kirk.” New Republic 213, no. 24 (11 December 1995): 35-38.

[In the following review, Genovese favorably reviews Kirk's memoir, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict.]

When Russell Kirk died last year at the age of 76, America lost one of its most respected intellectuals and strongest conservative voices. Just before he died, Kirk completed his memoirs. They provide a delightful account of his extraordinary and idiosyncratic life, and a valuable introduction to his voluminous writings—essays, reviews and thirty books, on John Randolph of Roanoke, Edmund Burke, T. S. Eliot, the Constitution, political theory and much else.

Kirk's reputation was launched in 1953 with the appearance of The Conservative Mind, which has gone through edition after edition and continues to serve the conservative movement as an exposition of principles and a history of ideas. Kirk conceived The Conservative Mind as “a lesson in normative Politics,” which would “open eyes to a central concept of politics, not born yesterday, by which the claims of freedom and the claims of order may be kept in healthy tension, avoiding extremes.” He was especially influenced by Burke, who provided a kind of baseline for the discussion of conservative principles, and a wide array of British and American conservative thinkers.

In the final chapter of his memoir [The Sword of Imagination]—called “Is Life Worth Living?”—Kirk describes the three ends that he sought in his life: to defend “Permanent Things”; “to lead a life of decent independence, living much as his ancestors had lived”; and “to marry for love and to rear children who would come to know that the service of God is perfect freedom.” Kirk accomplished what he set out to do. And yet he never reified “permanent things.” He wished to guide change, not to prevent it. He made his share of errors in judgment, notably his stubborn refusal to appreciate the centrality of slavery to the development of Southern conservative thought. Still, he could fairly say of himself that, on balance, he was “more skeptical of Rationalism than of Tradition.” For Kirk never let his skepticism draw him into irrationality. Throughout his life he defended a living “tradition” while eschewing a dead “traditionalism.”

In The Sword of Imagination, Kirk writes of himself in the third person, in the Henry Adams manner; and the tricky device works. These memoirs might easily have become pompous and stilted, but they radiate the charm of a man at peace with himself. As his title suggests, Kirk extolled “imagination” in politics as well as in literature. He directed his most biting criticism of leading American politicians, conservative as well as liberal, at their lack of imagination, castigating both Herbert Hoover and Norman Thomas for their failure to exceed their respective ideological constraints. Clearly, he saw himself as a man who brought imagination to his own life and work. You have to read this book to grasp his meaning, for at first glance, he seems to have been kidding himself. He was by reputation a dull speaker, and his books display an edge of pedantry. Yet he had his own kind of imagination, born of his conviction that the end of human work and action is “to know God, and enjoy him forever.”

When, in 1953, Kirk produced The Conservative Mind, he had no way of knowing that he had picked a golden moment. America had barely recovered from the Great Depression and World War II, both of which cast doubt on the long-reigning assumptions of liberalism. The cold war swung public opinion to the right, but without a guiding theory, or even a clear sensibility. Kirk's book, an intellectual history and a guidebook of political principles, was not meant to offer a practical program, but it did provide an orientation and a rallying point. The more honest precincts of the liberal community recognized it not only as an admirable work of scholarship and interpretation, but as a formidable challenge to their own worldview.

Shortly thereafter, William F. Buckley—young, brash, talented—launched National Review and accomplished what had been deemed impossible. He united a fractious right, or most of it, from its libertarians and free-marketeers to its traditionalists; and with anti-communism as a common denominator, he drew together right-wing neo-evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews and even atheists. In the early 1950s conservatism was regarded as obsolete, and a little ridiculous. “Conservative thought” seemed an oxymoron. Eisenhower Republicanism was about as far to the right as the country was expected to go and, contrary to the liberal jeremiads, that was not very far. Eisenhower Republicanism sought to rationalize, to manage and to restrain New Deal liberalism, not to overthrow it. National Review, by contrast, became a catalyst for those who believed a reversal of national fortunes possible. Without Buckley's aggressive yet patient work, the eventual triumph of Ronald Reagan would not have been possible. The contribution of Kirk's book, as well as Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community (1953), to both of which Kirk pays tribute, could hardly be overestimated. Indeed, if Buckley had had his way, Kirk would have left his quiet study to assume the editorship of National Review.

The Sword of Imagination contains a chapter-long sketch of Kirk's brand of conservatism. He was an old Tory who never cottoned to free-market ideology, which he always recognized as an invitation to social atomization. He is acerbic on Ayn Rand and other libertarians who attack “altruism,” which he defines as the “theological virtue of charity.” He replies to Rand's exaltation of self-interest: “Literally, she would have put the dollar sign in the place of the cross.” In contrast, like other traditionalists, Kirk pits conservatism against all ideology. He cites, approvingly, H. Stuart Hughes's characterization of conservatism as “the negation of ideology.”

On economics, a subject to which he paid less attention than he might have, Kirk prefers Wilhelm Röpke to Ludwig von Mises, since Röpke sought a Third Way of “humanized” economic activity between free-market capitalism and socialist regimentation. For Kirk, that meant “restoring property, function, and dignity to the mass of folk.” To put it another way, Kirk prefers the spirit of Rerum Novarum (which, curiously, he does not discuss) to the spirit of radical individualism and the cult of marketplace rationality. (In On the Conditions of Labor, which was produced in 1891, Pope Leo XIII condemned socialism, affirmed the natural right to property, blistered the callousness of capitalism and demanded that state power protect the poor.) “Really,” he writes, “the world is governed, in any age, not by rationality but by faith: by love, loyalty, and imagination.” Although Kirk much admired Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, he criticized it sharply for asserting an absolute right in private property, “a notion that cannot be sustained in any society.”

Kirk worked for the Ford corporation for a while and he came to admire Henry Ford. His brief account is memorable for its sympathetic treatment of the man and his achievements, combined with an acute criticism of Ford-like capitalism for its consumerism and its destructive effects on community. Not surprisingly, Kirk identifies avarice as the greatest sin of the twentieth century, and he lashes out against “the same infatuation with rationalism that terribly damages communal existence also produces unquestioning confidence in the competitive market economy and a heartless individualism.” To counterpoise to Marxism “another abstraction called ‘capitalism’ is to deliver one's self bound to the foe.”

Conservatives must defend a free economy, he argues, but only as it is “bound up with a complex social structure of order and justice and freedom, founded upon an understanding of man as a moral being.” Neither Kirk nor his fellow traditionalists could devise a coherent economic program to steer between socialism and the moral anarchy of the free market. The resultant tension in their politics has surfaced again recently, in the efforts to bring to power a coalition of “social conservatives” and “economic conservatives.” To Kirk's credit, he never let his readers forget that the tension exists, and that it must be overcome if the Right is to wean the American people from its adherence to the chimeras of the Left.

Personal experience as well as voracious reading shaped Kirk's views. He lived for a while in the South, where he discovered a conservative sensibility much to his taste, and his service in the Army during World War II also left a mark on his thinking. Like many American conservative intellectuals, Kirk came from the working class. His account of the travails of his father, a railroad worker, and of the white and black workers in a small community in Michigan, has much to teach about the resistance of the workers of the American heartland to the siren calls of left-wing and right-wing radicalism during the terrible depression of the 1930s. “The boy Russell scarcely understood how the sparse surviving population of Mecosta subsisted.” Yet the people of Mecosta, including some blacks from pre-Civil War times, pulled together despite much reduced incomes, and “were not so desperate as certain school textbooks would have the public believe.”

Kirk made his mark as an undergraduate at Michigan State, publishing in the South Atlantic Quarterly and other journals that assumed they were receiving manuscripts from a professor. At Duke University, when he was 24, he wrote a master's thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke. It was published as Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought and republished in later years in expanded versions. One of the best studies of its subject, it provides a strong antidote to the bigoted nonsense peddled by Henry Adams, among others, according to which the typical Southerner does not have a mind, but only a temperament. He disappointed his professors' expectations that he would go on to doctoral work at Duke, but he went off to St. Andrews in Scotland, where he did the work that led to The Conservative Mind.

A good part of Kirk's income came from a nationally syndicated column, which he used to promote the fortunes of Barry Goldwater's bid for the presidency and the conservative cause generally. But Kirk also wrote novels, especially reveling in his Gothic romances; and in 1961 he scored a critical and financial success with Old House of Fear. His experiences as a student and then a professor at Michigan State University soured him on higher education, which he regarded as largely a sham and a particularly damaging manifestation of the cult of radical leveling; and so, when The Conservative Mind sold widely, and he found that he could support his family by writing and lecturing, he fled academia. Yet he saw himself primarily as a teacher.

Kirk refused to make concessions to the semi-literacy of his age. He writes on many subjects as if his readers were as well-read as himself; but he also knows better, and so he spells out matters he would have been able to take for granted in the age in which he might have preferred to live. Thus the first two pages of his autobiography contain references to no fewer than nine authors or texts, from the ancients to Pico della Mirandola, from Gustave Le Bon to Flannery O'Connor: all of which may seem a bit much, but Kirk somehow manages to make his prose flow, so that what might have become pedantry turns into graceful instruction. When he invokes the Bible, he proceeds as if his readers will recognize the passages to which he alludes. A hundred years or so ago, he would have been right.

Religious faith loomed large in Kirk's life. “The doctrine of the soul,” he writes, “which old Plato proclaimed his principal teaching, is denied by many today—especially by those styling themselves intellectuals—and uneasily neglected by many more. When he was still a child, he writes, he “became aware that he was more than a person: the persona, after all, means a mask merely. He was a soul; if a soul in a fleshly prison, still a soul.” That conviction, he observes, “sweeps away the ‘identity crisis’ so much written about in recent years.” And that conviction “gave the boy whatever strength he was to possess in later years.” The “whatever strength” turned out to be a rock.

Kirk did not grow up in a churchgoing family, but his mother and his aunts read a child's version of the Bible to him and encouraged him to pray. His mother was a Spiritualist, and he imbibed from her and from others the mystical streak, and the fascination with the occult, that remained with him throughout his life. (Of the many honors that came his way, he seems to have taken special delight in being dubbed by the Count Dracula Society of Los Angeles a “Knight Commander of the Order of Count Dracula.”)

The young Kirk respected the Christian churches and their teachings, but he seems to have been one of those deluded souls who think that being a Christian means solely to be a person who tries to live a good life. A long time went by before Kirk accepted Jesus as his savior rather than as a gifted moral philosopher. His conversion came slowly; there was no spiritual crisis, no road to Damascus. Indeed, his account stresses the intellectual conversion so strongly that a reader might wonder where the Holy Spirit fit in. In any case, he seems to have felt himself in grace by 1953, when he took instruction to enter the Catholic Church and wrote The Conservative Mind. (For reasons that remain unclear, he did not receive baptism and confirmation in the Church until 1964 when he married Annette Yvonne Cecile Courtemanche, a devout Catholic.) In 1952, as his faith was deepening, he remarked that “we must begin with the principle that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” A startled colleague replied, “You mean the love of God, don't you, Russell?” Kirk held his ground, citing Scripture as commanding the one rather than the other. He had a point, but I doubt that he was reading Scripture as carefully as he might have read it. In any event, it is the inseparability of the fear of God and the love of God which informs his work.

Kirk's discussion of education in his memoir may strike his readers with special force. He takes dead aim at modernism. “Modernism,” he writes, “is not confined to any especial party, faction, or class; rather, it is a cast of mind and character. The Modernist mentality, aspiring to universal dominion, ranges from cosmology to sexuality; and everywhere it is overweeningly arrogant.” Long before Allan Bloom and the present generation of educational critics came along, Kirk was a stern critic of American education. He entered the lists against John Dewey and “progressive education” and, in the days when few were listening, warned about the loss of nerve and the dumbing-down that has produced the educational catastrophe in which we are now living.

The Sword of Imagination also includes judicious and incisive sketches of the extraordinary figures whom Kirk encountered in a busy life, especially T. S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor. It is not surprising to find loving portrayals of Ronald Reagan and other men and women of the Right, nor to find a mixed review of Richard Nixon, whose abilities Kirk admired but whom he apparently did not trust. But neither is it surprising to find this well-tempered man writing generously about some of his adversaries, most notably Norman Thomas, Eugene McCarthy and Dick Gregory. He saw Thomas as a good, principled man, who was just about unbeatable as a debater. He considered McCarthy a conservative and supported his presidential campaign in 1976. And Gregory, he says, was “a man of real courage and honesty,” who was “sufficiently humorous and good-natured to restrain crowds, through the power of persuasion, from turning into mobs.”

Then there is Kirk's love life. He spares us an account of the more intimate details, though his mode of expression suggests that he may well have remained celibate until he married. Whatever agony his sexual restraint may have caused him he passes over in silence, as a matter between himself and his God. He must have known, moreover, that the story of his courtship and marriage to the young, beautiful, intelligent Annette Courtemanche would invite scorn in our twisted times. In a previous century, it would have ranked as a great love story.

Courtemanche was only 19 when he first saw her, and he seems to have fallen in love with her at first sight. To his astonishment, as they became friends, she preferred him to the younger men who were courting her. He could not bring himself to propose to her, since he assumed she would refuse and he would lose her friendship altogether: “It did not enter Kirk's head … that one day Miss Courtemanche might choose to marry him.” As he explains, “Kirk was forty-two years old, not handsome, totally unaccomplished in the arts of dancing and swimming, proficiency in which usually is expected of men by pretty girls.” Finally, on what came to be known as the Letter Day, the exasperated Miss Courtemanche wrote to him, “I have decided that our marriage is inevitable.” Russell and Annette Kirk and their four daughters made their home, “Piety Hill,” in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, and their home became a refuge for countless friends and strangers.

Kirk led his life in his own way, but his way did not include the pretense that he could have done it without God, family and friends. It is a measure of the man that these memoirs pass over the unsavory personal attacks that were heaped upon him by intellectuals who were often his lessers. To the suggestion that his life seems quixotic, he fairly replies that “unlike Don Quixote de la Mancha, Kirk generally kept a cheerful countenance, to the vexation of certain reviewers of his books.” In so many ways, Russell Kirk seems like a creature in mothballs. As we survey the wreckage of a century that he did his best to civilize, let's hear it for the mothballs.