Old House of Fear, the conservative writer’s most famous gothic tale, is more than just that.
Old House of Fear, the conservative writer’s most famous gothic tale, is more than just that.
R ussell Kirk, a mainstay of National Review during his life, was not simply a conservative. In his 1953 work The Conservative Mind, he gave us the term itself, thereafter applied to him and to the burgeoning movement of which he became an essential part. That work and that word were hardly Kirk’s only contributions to the conservative movement. He became one of the ablest exponents of the traditionalist tendency on the right. “Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power,” Kirk writes in The Conservative Mind.
Given Kirk’s stature, and the esteem in which conservatives hold his work, one could reasonably expect The Conservative Mind or some other Kirkian political or philosophical treatise to have been his most widely read. Not so. That honor belongs to Old House of Fear, which isn’t an academic work at all. It is, rather, a kind of gothic adventure, and a fitting read for Halloween. Those who read it will discover, moreover, that it is more consistent with Kirk’s other work than it at first appears.
Kirk, a man of many intellectual gifts, moonlighted as a teller of ghost stories. Our own John J. Miller has argued that “Kirk deserves a place alongside the classic authors of supernatural fiction, such as Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allen Poe.” The most successful of these tales was Old House of Fear, which outsold all of Kirk’s published works — combined. Its setup is simple enough. Duncan MacAskival, an aging rich industrialist, charges Hugh Logan, an attorney, with a mission: to travel to Carnglass, the mysterious Scottish island from which the former’s clan originated, and negotiate its purchase.
More complications ensue than those that Hugh Logan encounters on his journey to the island. Upon reaching it, Logan discovers that hardly anyone bearing the MacAskival name remains on the “tattered top of a drowned mountain,” whose central feature is the book’s titular ancient castle. Those who do linger are subject to Dr. Edmund Jackman and his assorted ruffians, who are scheming to inherit the island and what is left of the MacAskival fortune (now largely attached to Mary, a young woman trapped by Jackman there with her aged aunt) to advance their own schemes.
A storm-battered island, an ancient castle, a scheming villain — Old House of Fear has some of the classic trappings of its genre. Kirk adds others as well, enlivening Carnglass with ancient myths and a vividly imagined geography that fully inserts the reader into Logan’s adventure there. But that Jackman displays, thanks to an injury from the Spanish Civil War, an inauspicious physical trait highlighted in Carnglass’s mythology is one of the first suggestions that Kirk is up to something more than just a haunting tale. Jackman, we further learn, is a “political through and through,” an expert in both radical politics and the occult, a “Marxist, or a variant thereof.” His schemes set dead against the “ancestral wisdom” that Kirk dedicated his life to cultivating. The “Party” to which Jackman belonged “meant to destroy a great many people to bring about peace every where, and meant to make everybody precisely alike so everyone could be perfectly happy forever, and ever,” as Mary puts it.
Jackman, though a canny threat, has by the time Logan encounters him already been corrupted by ideology. “Ideological fanaticism had made of Jackman the goat-man, mastered by lust: but not the lust for women’s bodies,” Kirk’s description reads. “Jackman’s was the libido dominandi, the tormented seeking after power that ceases not until death.” His fate is consistent with Kirk’s denunciations of ideology in other works as a fearsome and essentially demonic force. “Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution,” Kirk writes elsewhere. Jackman himself seems to realize this. One of his heresies from “Party” doctrine, inspired by his lingering in the eerie atmosphere of Carnglass and its Old House, is to admit of Hell’s reality. “There is no Heaven,” Jackman says, “but there is Hell.” And it beckons him ominously.
In this and in other aspects of Old House of Fear, the tale becomes more than a well-crafted gothic affair. It is also a kind of meditation on the most pernicious forces of the modern world, and on how more ancient and venerable virtues — patrimony, chivalry — may contest and even defeat them. With its island setting, bookish protagonist who rises to heroism, an antagonist whose embrace of modernity has rendered him an infernal vessel, and a young female character over whom they vie, Old House of Fear somewhat resembles C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, his science-fiction allegory of Eden on another planet. That Carnglass is thought of as Eden in its own mythology, and that the “Fear” of the title is an anglicized rendering of the Gaelic “fir,” for “man,” reinforce Kirk’s grand intentions with this simple tale. It serves as a vindication of the “transcendent order” of which he wrote, and that is implied by horror tales marked by even the most insidious evils. That conservatives have a “healthy concept of the character of evil,” as Kirk put it, makes us well-placed not just to enjoy horror, but even to write about it.