The Sword of Imagination: Memories of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 25, 1995 by Forrest McDonald

A DECADE or so ago, I wrote in NATIONAL REVIEW that the most impressive thing about Russell Kirk was his continuing capacity to grow, and I adduced in support of that proposition the way he had enlarged his understanding since his first masterpiece -- The Conservative Mind, originally published in 1953 -- by delving deeply into the Scottish Enlightenment. I repeat that assessment now, for his memoirs, his thirtieth and final book, record that growth and may be his best work.

The genre has certain formulae, and Kirk follows them admirably. After the example of Caesar, Henry Esmond, and Henry Adams, he narrates his story in the third person, that mode, as he puts it, 'being less embarrassing to authors who set at defiance the ravenous ego.' A good memoir will be liberally sprinkled with anecdotes, and Kirk supplies them by the score. Some of my favorites concern his grandfather, a banker who was robbed at machine-gun point by the notorious 'Machine Gun' Kelly; his wife, Annette, who gained admission to the White House by presenting a tarot card with her first name scribbled on it, the guard mistaking her for Annette Funicello; and a fake student demonstration Kirk saw being staged for television in California during the late Sixties. Also mandatory are descriptions of encounters with the famous and the infamous. Of the former, Kirk on Richard Nixon and Eugene McCarthy is engrossing; regarding the latter, Kirk's descriptions of debates with the likes of Tom Hayden, William Kunstler, and Dick Gregory are delicious.

Knowing Kirk, one would expect periodic plunges into deep philosophical waters, and one gets them; but with the craftsman's keen feeling for how much the reader can take at a time, he intersperses them with lighter personal matters that most readers would not expect of the man. For example, he tells us that Old House of Fear, a Gothic romance that he wrote as a lark, sold more copies than all his other books combined. Or, we learn that Kirk was a tireless walker, having trod bypaths in Scotland, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, often covering thirty miles in a day and sometimes as many as forty. (One of his beefs about the relentless march of 'progress' was that superhighway systems destroyed many of the best walking trails.)

The narrative, in addition to being a personal story and an informal history of much of the century, is the intellectual and spiritual saga of a philosopher and man of letters. As for Kirk's philosophy, we have encountered it in The Conservative Mind, Randolph of Roanoke, Roots of American Order, and other masterworks. This is the man of the permanent things, the one who rejects (and persuades us that we must reject) the claims for the superiority of the modern. But it is fascinating to behold the processes by which he arrived at his conservatism. Let me offer some glimpses.

When Kirk was an undergraduate, he worked summers at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village near Detroit. The Village was originally conceived as a museum that would portray the history of American technological progress, but then, sensing the destruction the automobile had wrought, Ford increasingly gathered simpler things, as if trying 'to save from extinction the rural society of his boyhood.' The automobile, Kirk perceived from his experience at the Village, was 'a mechanical Jacobin, overthrowing dominations and powers, breaking the cake of custom, running over oldfangled manners and morals, making the very air difficult to breathe.' When Ford built his first car in the 1890s, Detroit was 'rather a pleasant city'; when Kirk worked at Greenfield Village, from 1938 to 1941, it was still safe for him to walk the streets of Detroit at night, unarmed; 'later, he walked armed; later still, he found it prudent not to walk there at all.' By 1994, Detroit was 'mostly ruin and dereliction.'

Another glimpse: during the war, Kirk served at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Chemical Warfare Service's vast experimental field -- observing 'progress' of a different sort. There, 'upon the dunes that were the beaches of a forgotten sea,' he thought a good deal about time and eternity, and 'moved farther toward a proper understanding of his own nature.' When he had thought of such matters before, he had admired the intellect of the Enlightenment; now he began to realize that he had 'drifted the wrong way.' The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been splendid, but Kirk now understood that 'he did not in truth sympathize with the chief currents of thought and feeling in those ages.' Rather, what he genuinely respected in the Enlightenment 'was the men who had stood against the whole tendency of their epoch -- such men as Johnson and Burke.'

The spiritual saga unfolded in a complex way. Kirk's parents were not churchgoers, and apart from an occasional visit to a Sunday school and the generally Christian morality of the small community where he grew up, he had only minimal exposure to religion. On the other hand, his kinfolk on both sides were mystics -- they conducted seances, saw ghosts, talked with the dead -- and Kirk believed in ghostly things all his life. Some of Kirk's admirers, upon learning of his interest in ghosts, might be disposed to write this off as a quirk, but it was no quirk: belief in the otherworldly was central to his being, as he casually but repeatedly attests throughout The Sword of Imagination.