The Sword of Imagination
Kirk, Russell
ancestral Scotland and earned the prestigious D.Litt. at St. Andrews University. He was offered dozens of academic posts in America, but he wanted "a field for his imagination to plow." Taking...
...THE SWORD OF IMAGINATION: MEMOIRS OF A HALF-CENTURY OF LITERARY CONFLICT Russell Kirk William B. Eerdmans / 497 pages /$35 reviewed by FLORENCE KING A t the age of seven, unbaptized but very precocious, Russell Kirk worked out a belief in the soul's existence and concluded that Descartes had gotten his famous axiom backwards...
...Ayn Rand: "If one will concede that selfishness is a virtue, one will concede anything...
...His father worked on the railroad, but his mother was a product of upstate gentry who had lived in faded grandeur on an estate in the bleak hamlet of Mecosta after losing their money in the Panic of 1893...
...Box 933, Dayton, OH 45342 800-227-4908 K irk was nothing if not a consistent gadfly...
...T]his prisoner in Plato's cave where insubstantial shadows were taken for reality [was] little more than a walking and talking phantom, a deadly negation that could pull a trigger...
...NEXIS® For Complete Access to ************ The full text of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR® is available on-line as AMSPEC in the NEWS library of LEXIS-NEXIS...
...But he never took a professorship, nor any of the political posts offered by Nixon and Reagan, heeding always the aphorism "Politics is the preoccupation of the quarter-educated...
...His was a Gothic mind, he decided, "medieval in temper and structure," seeking mystery, tradition, faith, honor—what he would later call "the Permanent Things...
...The exchange took place during an Oval Office visit made memorable by his young bride's faux pas...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...Martin's...
...Taking Marcus Aurelius's advice to "live as upon a mountain," he moved into his family's run-down country seat in back-of-beyond Mecosta...
...He considered Herbert Hoover "perhaps the best qualified man in the 76 The American Spectator December 1995 whole history of the Republic," but condemns him for blocking Archduke Josef von Habsburg's attempt to assume power in chaotic Hungary in 1919, thereby creating a vacuum that Nazism filled...
...For reasons he never understood, his success as a horror author attracted the attention of General Features syndicate, who asked him to do a column...
...It went through six editions and led to the republication of the writers he had discussed: Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, W.E.H...
...Nixon is not a crook," a line that became immortal when Nixon stole it.silly, often" and supported Pat Buchanan...
...Armed with unswerving principles, Kirk made pronouncements that resound with the unequivocality of words carved in marble...
...The men of the Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads," and now their descendants were imposing on the world "a dreary conformity, with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords...
...LEXIS-NEXIS P.O...
...I am," Kirk contended he should have said, "therefore I think...
...Peepers, Kirk married at 44 to a beautiful girl half his age and promptly fathered four children...
...As Nixon opened the drawer where he kept souvenirs to give White House visitors, Annette Kirk, trying to match her husband's gift for the perfect quotation for every occasion, blurted out James Russell Lowell's "At the devil's booth, all things are sold...
...Surrounded by weapons of destruction and trapped "upon the dunes that were the beaches of a forgotten sea," Kirk abandoned his allegiance to the rationalism of the Enlightenment...
...He liked socialist Norman Thomas for his good manners and thought Eugene McCarthy "might have turned into the most imaginatively conservative of presidents" because he admired Edmund Burke, opposed the popular election of senators, and shared Kirk's nay-saying temperament: "He might have saved the Democratic party from its increasing perversity...
...In summers he worked as a guide at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, that ironic monument to America's pastoral past which Ford himself had done so much to destroy...
...By 1992, Kirk had concluded that he was "merely The American Spectator December 1995 77...
...0 LEXISe...
...When George Bush scorned the "vision thing," Kirk tried to tell himself that it was a disavowal of political utopianism—but no...
...In 1953 he published his masterpiece, The Conservative Mind, "the first book to have broken the barriers erected by America's liberal dominations and powers...
...So liberal, so democratic, so naive," he laments...
...Only one political figure ever forced him into denial...
...It was here that Kirk formed his low opinion of the automobile, "a mechanical Jacobin, overthrowing dominations and powers, breaking the cake of custom, running over oldfangled manners and morals . . . an instrument of civic and familial undoing...
...Alone and celibate, ensconced in shabby-baronial splendor, he read and wrote for more than a decade...
...He credits Nixon for being the first president to voice the opinion that America might be decadent...
...Like Henry Adams, Kirk chose to write his autobiography in the third person to achieve distance and objectivity, yet his account of his wife's abduction by a glue-sniffing teenager captures in exquisite prose the horrific threat by doomed youth that the movie Kids strives for but loses in a morass of uninspired obscenity: It came to her that this girl, murderous and sentimental, had her being in a fanciful world of television soap operas and thrillers, evanescent shadows, flickering and maudlin and bloody, to be snapped off upon impulse...
...To the Point," as it was called, ran from 1962 until it was spiked out of existence by editors offended by his unwavering support of Nixon during Watergate...
...Florence King's latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...Kirk, who died last year at 75, was America's first post–World War II conservative intellectual and our last full-time man of letters...
...Born in a small town near Detroit, he began life with nothing but his brain and a family situation that virtually forced him to be sui generis...
...This may have been in the back of Kirk's mind when later he wrote in his column, "Mr...
...To everyone's surprise, for he looked like Mr...
...To make ends meet he entered every scholastic competition and essay contest with a monetary prize—and won them, writing on all manner of topics for five dollars here, ten dollars there...
...He signed on with National Review to do his "From the Academy" page, which he wrote for twenty-five years, served as editor of the University Bookman, and—putting his surroundings to good use—wrote a best-selling Gothic novel, The Old House of Fear, which sold more than all his other books combined and launched the paperback Gothic craze...
...Libertarianism: "a genteel form of anarchism...
...After the war he escaped to hisH is bibliography is endless...
...As once he had worked his way through college by entering writing contests, he now contributed a steady stream of learned essays and short stories to every conceivable periodical...
...His Army hitch in World War II found him stationed at the Chemical Warfare Center in the Great Salt Lake Desert...
...Once Kirk had broken with the conservatism of growth and progress, other philosophical turning points soon followed...
...Kirk campaigned for Goldwater, but being in agreement with Walter Bagehot's axiom "Conservatism is fun," he suspected that bona fide conservatives like Goldwater do not really want to take on the miseries of the presidency...
...Lecky, and Fisher Ames...
...He attended public schools and won a scholarship to Michigan State, then a cow college...
...for once Bush said exactly what he meant and meant exactly what he said...
...This is an incomparable memoir of Catholic faith and catholicity of tastes that gives "values" new meaning and enshrines Russell Kirk as the voice of the thinking man's Christian Right...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
