[In the following essay, Regnery reminisces about the events that contributed to Kirk's political, moral, and social views.]

The publication of Russell Kirk's memoirs, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, marks a distinguished and fitting conclusion to a literary career that began in 1953 with the appearance of The Conservative Mind. The Conservative Mind was not Kirk's first book, but it was the book that launched his literary career and established his position as a major author. It provided a masterful account of traditional thought and lasting values. The Sword of Imagination, which was published posthumously and, like The Education of Henry Adams is written in the third person, provides us with an illuminating and fascinating account of the author's years as an active participant in the intellectual life of his time.

A singular man, Kirk was reserved, deferential, even shy, but he was a warrior for what he thought and believed. He seemed to have sprung fully armed into the arena of conflicting ideas. Possessed of a fine mind, he had achieved a superb education, mostly through his own efforts; he wrote in a clear, compelling style, enriched by his own learning and remarkable memory; and had seemingly endless energy. His body of work over nearly half a century attests to his range of ideas and his productivity—twenty-four volumes of history, politics, biography, literary and educational criticism; six books of fiction; hundreds of periodical essays; introductions and forewords; innumerable major book reviews and miscellaneous articles. In addition to the journals he founded and edited, he was for several years a widely syndicated columnist, and for 25 years contributed on a regular basis thoughtful and critical articles on education to a national magazine.

Kirk was a young man of 35, an unmarried college history instructor, when The Conservative Mind appeared, but it soon became one of the most influential and widely discussed books of the time, and after more than 40 years is still in print, currently in its ninth printing. This book at once established his reputation as a major author and launched his career. Now The Sword of Imagination marks a distinguished and apt conclusion to his life and work.

Born October 19, 1918, in Plymouth, Michigan, Kirk begins his story by saying it was “A good town to be born into … old as civilization goes in Michigan, founded by New Englanders in the 1820s. Although only 20 miles by rail to the west of Fort Street station in Detroit, Plymouth in 1918—and indeed until the Second World War—remained a tranquil place with handsome old houses (nearly all of them vanished today), tree-shaded streets, and a square on the New England model.”

Of his family background, Kirk tells us that his father was a locomotive engineer, and his mother, as he describes her, “tender and romantic, a reader of poetry, had been a waitress in her father's railroad restaurant, which stood between their house and the railroad line.” “Little Russell,” he goes on to say, “was born into a realm of domestic orders, happy in marriages, generous toward its children, close-knit in families, and conscious of their continuity. His family's quick and its dead prepared him to encounter the antagonistic world.”

Kirk also tells us that his grandfather had been president of the Plymouth school board and that his great-grandfather had laid out the town of Mecosta in northern Michigan where Russell was to spend many happy vacations and his most productive years, building and living in a spacious house he named “Piety Hill.”

The pages describing his early schooling, “When Public Schools Taught Discipline,” speak highly of the public schools he attended. Not only did the teachers teach discipline, but they also were competent, serious about their profession, and well trained. The school he attended offered six years of literature, three years of history—ancient, modern, and American—a year of physics and one of chemistry; two years of Latin; a year of speech, a term of first aid, typing, and business law.

The American public school at that time must have been at its best, before the days of John Dewey, the American Civil Liberties Union, radio and television. Kirk asks, “what was taught at Plymouth schools in the twenties? Why, essentials by teachers who knew their discipline. It was printed in Russell's sixth grade reader, ‘the foundation of the book must be the acknowledged masterpieces of American and British authors.’” He concludes, “By the time he entered junior high school, he could write well and on serious subjects. How he acquired this skill, which astonished the majestic Miss Edna Allen, chief teacher of English literature, he did not then know; it was probably because of his critical study at an early age of how Hawthorne, Cooper, Scott, Twain, Dickens and other great novelists went about their business. …”

From grade school upward Kirk won literary competitions. In 1932 the Detroit Times awarded him a gold medal for an essay on the bicentennial of George Washington's birth; in 1936 he won first prize for the best essay in the national competition sponsored by Scholastic, the high school weekly. This effort, subsequently reprinted in an anthology and later in a composition textbook published by Ginn & Company, marked Kirk's first appearance as a published writer.

Not long before he was to be graduated from Plymouth High School, the principal stopped him and asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” Kirk replied that he did not know. The principal then suggested that he apply for a scholarship to Michigan State College, which, much to Kirk's surprise, was granted. It was not one of the great universities, but Kirk's four years there would be a rewarding and developing experience.

He was much influenced, Kirk says, by John Clark, a witty, helpful professor of English, who urged him to submit articles to serious journals, such as College English and The South Atlantic Quarterly, both of which accepted papers by the young undergraduate. He also joined the debating team, which provided him with the opportunity to explore the world beyond the boundaries of Michigan, visiting colleges and universities in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

College years in the thirties were hard times for a scholarship student from a family of limited financial resources. To make ends meet, Kirk had to try for every cash prize offered for the best essay or story, for the best oration or declamation. These efforts served to sharpen his wits and develop his facility with language, in addition to supplying much needed funds.

Upon graduation from Michigan State College, Kirk was granted a scholarship for graduate study at Duke University. As this was his first experience in the South, he decided to use the opportunity to study Southern history and literature. For his M. A. thesis he chose as his subject the politics of John Randolph of Roanoke, “the most interesting and unusual man,” as he says, “ever to be empowered in the Congress of the United States.”

Kirk had first become acquainted with Randolph in a high school textbook and while studying at Duke had come across a cache of Randolph's letters in the library. His study of Randolph was to become his first published book, issued in 1951 by the University of Chicago Press. “The daunting eloquence of John Randolph, and his power of pathos, helped to form Kirk's mind and style and to invigorate his political imagination” is the tribute Kirk pays to John Randolph.

When the Roosevelt Recession, as Kirk always refers to it, was ended by the attack on Pearl Harbor, which also gave President Roosevelt his long-sought opportunity to intervene in the Second World War, Kirk, like most of his generation, found himself in uniform. Considering what could have happened to him under the circumstances, one can appreciate why Kirk quotes Arthur Koestler with seeming agreement: Koestler, he points out, “argues that coincidence is an illusion; that everything which occurs is an incident in some tremendous scheme as yet impenetrable by human intelligence.”

Upon his induction in the army, Kirk was sent to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the center for testing two deadly wartime experiments: development of the gel bomb and the beginnings of bacteriological warfare. “The gel bomb,” as Kirk notes, “was employed very near the end of the war in Europe to wipe out Dresden and its population, this in a war to vindicate the democratic and humanitarian way of life.”

Kirk's task at Dugway was keeping the records, for which, of course, he was ideally suited. “Of Kirk's four years in the army, three would be spent here in the heart of the Great Salt Lake Desert—the famous Bonneville Salt Flats sprawling a few miles to the west—surely one of the most desolate and most salubrious spots in the world.” “While millions of men were slaughtering one another upon the Ukrainian steppes and in the Papuan jungles, Kirk lay enchanted, like Merlin in the oak, amidst a desert so long dead that it seemed nothing was permitted to die any longer. Occasionally Kirk might be blistered by mustard gas or temporarily choked by phosgene, a mere small mishap; but such diversions aside, the Great Salt Lake Desert was a wholesome place for body and soul—once the initial shock of its emptiness was diminished.”

The more than thirty pages of his book that Kirk devotes to his years in the desert, which he entitles, “A Stoical Sergeant in the Wasteland,” are a striking demonstration of his phenomenal talent for writing—for putting words together effectively and for a purpose. During his years at Dugway, Kirk continued to write for publication. In 1944 Michigan History featured his piece, “A Michigan Soldier's Diary, 1863,” drawn from the journal of his ancestor, Nathan Frank Pierce, who served at Gettysburg. In 1945 an essay, “A Conscript on Education,” appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Kirk's rejoinder to an article by George Boas published in the Atlantic Monthly, advocating that in wartime the teaching of the humanities and the arts should be put aside in order that students might attend to the business of learning what was needed to win the war.

In his reply to Boas, a famous professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Kirk wrote, “In this war, fought in the name of liberalism, very few think of liberalism of knowledge. We need an Epictetus to remind us that freedom of the mind is more important than freedom of the body. If our thoughts are not liberal, we shall not know how to rule, once we find ourselves masters of the world's destiny.” This essay, he tells us, was the first of many that were to follow on the subject of education.

While in Dugway, word came that his mother had died of cancer. Still young, Kirk had lost, he says, “the two creative beings—his grandfather and his mother—that he loved passionately.” At the time of his mother's death, he relates, “he knew next to nothing about any religion.” “Perhaps the vanishing of Marjorie Pierce Kirk began to awake him to some awareness of the eternal, that is, of the idea of the holy, and it entered his mind that the Great Salt Lake Desert, though blasted beyond belief, might not be God forsaken.” He continues: “Kirk had commenced to move, very languidly, beyond stoicism to something more. It was not toward pantheism that he shifted, for the rattlesnake, the grey sagebrush, and the bitter juniper did not inspire in a soldier Wordsworth's love of divine handiwork.” “Yet some consciousness of a brooding presence stirred in Kirk something of the desert prophet Amos whose name Kirk bore” as his middle name.

Clearly Kirk's four years in the army had not been wasted. As he observes, “the greatest of all wars had passed by; Kirk had scarcely heard a voice raised in anger.” The assignment to keep the records of his outfit he had done conscientiously and had otherwise used his time to read good books, but also, as noted, to write for publication.

After leaving the army, Kirk found himself, almost by force of habit, back at Michigan State College. There a former professor of his, one of whose best students he had been, offered him a position teaching the history of civilization to first-year students. Accustomed to public speaking as he was, and well-stocked with historical anecdotes, himself a discharged soldier, he did not, Kirk reports, “encounter half as much difficulty with his students as did most instructors.” Still, college teaching as it was practiced at Michigan State, had no great appeal to him. Nor was he inspired to go on to acquire the Ph.D., which was more or less required of all young instructors if they wished to remain on the staff.

While considering all the possibilities before him, but aware that it was not within his power alone to restore higher learning, Kirk finally decided to open a good secondhand bookstore with a friend, as an oasis in the intellectual desert he felt East Lansing to be. He and his associate did succeed in buying two fine libraries—one having been owned by a former state supreme court justice and the other from the estate of an early pioneer in the automotive business. This gave him the sense of a civilizing mission, but the bookstore did not prosper and he was still without a purpose, a focus for his young and restless spirit.

Kirk realized that he had taken up college teaching only because at the moment he seemed to have nothing better to do, even as earlier, for much the same reason, he had gone to college and then on to graduate study. As he says, “the tenure track” did not attract him, and neither did the acquisition of a doctorate. American graduate schools, he writes, “pedantic, bureaucratic, and given to excessive supervision, seemed repellent to Kirk.”

At this time of uncertainty, Kirk happened to come upon a small book describing St. Andrews, the oldest university in Scotland. It was a charming essay, he says, on both the university and the town, most appealing to him with his Scottish ancestry and his admiration of the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

It became clear to Russell Kirk that he was exactly right for St. Andrews and he wrote to the university inquiring whether he might be admitted as a research student. After filling out a brief application he was informed that he had been accepted as a candidate for the highest arts degree, doctor of letters, awarded by St. Andrews.

All the necessary arrangements then fell into place. “He was to write a book on Edmund Burke's thought,” for which undertaking a grant for his subsistence was obtained from the American Council of Learned Societies, while veteran benefits on the GI bill would provide for payment of his fees, some books, and serve as an additional monthly stipend.

He arrived in St. Andrews in September 1948 at the age of thirty, bearing the title of Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, owning little else than the contents of the suitcases he carried, his portable typewriter, and a few books. From the railway station he found his way through unfamiliar streets to a handsome Victorian house in the terrace called Queen's Gardens, where he was to lodge in the former parlor on the first floor. As he says, “The town and its people promptly enchanted him; he would be drawn back there, most years, for the rest of his life.”

Kirk's account of the writing of his doctoral thesis at St. Andrews is instructive, the contrast of the procedure there with the usual practice at an American university being most revealing. The professor assigned to supervise his work lived at the Roundel, the residence in medieval times of the cathedral's archdeacon. While the high-paneled rooms were drafty, Kirk tells us “coziness triumphed” with Sunday afternoon teas that were “cultural and gastronomical” events.

He would bring his manuscript, page by page, to his learned mentor, and chapter by chapter they would be gradually placed on the drawing room piano and their contents discussed. But his advisor told Kirk that he hated to read typescript pages, preferring to read the book when it was finished. “In any American graduate school,” Kirk writes, “even at the relatively humane Duke University, Kirk would have been compelled to waste his energies upon a congeries of graduate courses and examinations, but St. Andrews cared only for the end product, upon the excellence of which, the professors would insist.” In his frequent sessions with his mentor J. W. Williams, Kirk concludes, he thus learned “what it is to be a scholar and a gentleman.”

One gains the impression, however, that the greatest friend of those happy, productive years at St. Andrews, the man who meant the most to Kirk, was George Scott-Moncrieff, whom he always refers to as “Scomo.” Kirk had read Scott-Moncrieff's books and admired them while he was still involved in his bookstore and had initiated a correspondence. “It was Scomo, warmhearted Scomo, with the wisdom of the heart and the blemish of the cleft palate, who received the young American at James's Court; introduced him to no end of writers and gentlefolk, in clubs and country houses; set him an example of cheerfulness in adversity; became his friend forever.”

Scott-Moncrieff, Kirk says, “contended against the vandalism of purposeless ‘Progress.’” He came from an old Scottish family and considered it his mission, Kirk says, “to enrich the present through knowledge and preservation of the past.” He quotes from Scott-Moncrieff's essay, “Scotland's Dowry”: “The world about us is not merely ours. We possess it only because our predecessors appreciated and cherished it.”

Beginning in 1948 Kirk was to see Scotland through his friend Scomo's vision, and “through the undismayed eyes of that generous friend, he came to see much else besides.”

Russell Kirk died on April 29, 1994, in Mecosta at the age of seventy-five. It seems especially appropriate here to compare the style and approach of two of his books—the first, The Conservative Mind, written at the beginning of his literary career, and the last, The Sword of Imagination, published posthumously.

In his introduction to the first edition of The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote, “If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.”

Kirk obviously hoped that his book would help restore conservative ideas. The title he first gave his manuscript—“The Conservative Rout”—indicated the state of the conservative movement at the time, if it deserved the name movement at all. His book was meticulously organized, proceeding thoughtfully from chapter to chapter, until at the end, he had established conservatism as a solid, intellectual position. Now, forty years later, there is indeed a vigorous conservative movement and Kirk must be recognized as its leading spokesman.

Kirk's final book is quite different from the former one. To begin with, it is a memoir of a full and productive life. It is rich in its descriptions of place, most arising from impressions gained by walking—Kirk was a great walker and had wandered from one end of Europe to the other. There is much else besides—vivid impressions of dozens of individuals, Herbert Hoover, T. S. Eliot, Lyndon Johnson, Bernard Iddings Bell, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, among many others. There are also wonderful descriptions of old houses—Russell loved old houses and their inhabitants.

The Sword of Imagination is nearly 500 pages long and it is impossible here to describe all that it covers. However, the depth and the richness of the book can be suggested by a chapter that is most characteristic. It is an account of how Kirk happened to meet and become a close friend of B. A. Smith, who was then rector of St. Martin-cum-Gregory, a medieval church in York.

Kirk had been attracted to the ancient city of York, “Roman before it was English.” While walking about, he had come upon St. Martin-cum-Gregory and stopped to admire its medieval stained glass window. Inadvertently he left his walking stick behind. He later wrote to ask that if it were found, it be kept for him to recover at some subsequent visit. He was not only to regain his walking stick but to meet Basil Smith and become a close friend. What this friendship meant to Kirk is made clear in the chapter entitled “Belief Will Follow Action”:

Once, when Basil Smith said his evensong office “in the draughty church that smokefall,” Kirk sat in a dark pew before him, the Canon's whole congregation that evening. This was a moment out of time, Canon Smith and Dr. Kirk seemingly lodged at what Eliot calls “the still point of the turning world,” enfolded in the eternal community of souls. That timeless moment has heartened Kirk ever since. He never told the Canon so; yet perhaps Basil Smith knows now, if he did not know before. … More than books, one learns from exemplars. Kirk learned more from Basil Smith than Smith ever guessed. In the fullness of time, Kirk would become a Christian communicant though not of the Church of England. In no small part, it was B. A. Smith who converted Kirk by example.

Kirk's account of the life which began in the Sears, Roebuck house of his parents in Plymouth, Michigan, is an inspiring story. It is remarkable not only in how it all seems to fit together, but even more by how Kirk took advantage of the gifts he had been granted and the many opportunities that came his way, from writing and winning essay contests in high school, or debating in college, to studying and writing for publication while keeping army records at Dugway during the war. Not finding graduate work in America to be what he was looking for, when he finally did find it at St. Andrews he took full advantage of that opportunity and made his doctoral thesis into a major book.

The last chapter of Kirk's last book is called “Is Life Worth Living?” and it should come as no surprise to his readers that it is a stirring affirmation of his faith and confidence in life. He begins by pointing out:

At an early age, Kirk had learned from the discourse and examples of his mother and his grandfather that life is well worth living. He had learned also that life ought to be lived with honor, charity, and prudence. Those and other enduring principles he had accepted on authority: “Believe what all men, everywhere, always have believed.” Somewhat to his surprise, his adherence to those precepts brought strength and happiness into his life.

He then goes on to detail the aims of his existence:

At the age of seventy-five, Kirk had come to understand that he had sought, during his lifetime, three ends or objects. One had been to defend the Permanent Things, in a world where “Dinos was king, having overthrown Zeus.” He had sought to conserve a patrimony of order, justice, and freedom; a tolerable moral order; an inheritance of culture. Although rowing against a strong tide, in this aspiration he had succeeded somewhat, certainly beyond his early expectations, in reminding people that truth was not born yesterday.

A second had been to lead a life of decent independence, living much as his ancestors had lived, on their land, in circumstances that would enable him to utter the truth and make his voice heard: a life uncluttered and unpolluted, not devoted to getting, and spending. In his antique vocation of man of letters, he had achieved that aspiration at Piety Hill.

A third had been to marry for love and to rear children who would come to know that the service of God is perfect freedom. In his middle years the splendid Annette had given herself to him and then given him four children, pleasantly endowed with the unbought grace of life. Annette and he helped to sustain the institution of the family by creating a vigorous example.

Thus his three wishes had been granted; he was grateful. Power over others, and much money, he had never desired; he had been spared those responsibilities.

Both on authority and through his own insights and experiences, Kirk had come to understand that there exists a realm of being beyond this temporal world and that a mysterious providence works in human affairs—that man is made for eternity. Such knowledge had been consolation and compensation for sorrow.

To few men have been given such a life-experience and such life-affirmation. Few indeed have gone on to write so well their own life story, their own epitaph. In The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk capped his remarkable career with an eloquent and equally remarkable book.