Russell Kirk’s Conservative Gothic

The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination, by Camilo Peralta (Vernon, 222 pages, $78)

R ussell Kirk is known today principally as one of the founders of the American conservative movement, but in his lifetime he found considerable success also through his imaginative writing, especially ghost stories. Other masters of the craft, including Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Madeleine L’Engle, have hailed the Michigander as one of the genre’s greatest writers. Each of his stories (some of the best were most recently collected in a volume titled “Ancestral Shadows”) are deeply atmospheric and suffused with enough of the eerie and spooky to make for excellent fun reading aloud at Halloween with a group of friends.

Kirk’s fiction, however, offers much more than mere chills and thrills. In The Wizard of Mecosta, Camilo Peralta, a professor at Joliet Junior College, uncovers the deep relationship between Kirk’s ghostly tales and his conservative philosophy. Kirk’s literary efforts were an expression of what he called the “moral imagination” or an appreciation of the “permanent things.” Through these stories, he casts a kind of spell on his readers — not to deceive them but rather to arm them with a new vision, a better way of understanding reality.

While Kirk’s life and thought have been assessed by scholars in numerous books, Peralta’s is the first focused primarily on his output of creative writing. Earlier works such as Gerald Russello’s study The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk and Bradley Birzer’s magisterial biography Russell Kirk: American Conservative tend to focus more on the man’s political ideas and influence. The Wizard of Mecosta seeks to understand Kirk’s conservatism through the ghosts and supernatural forces in his fiction.

Kirk’s conservatism began with a rejection of modernity’s bloodless rationalism. “Mine was not an Enlightened mind: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure,” he wrote in a famous passage of his memoir The Sword of Imagination, which Peralta quotes; “I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.” Kirk believed that science could never explain away the supernatural; the world remains enchanted, even haunted, whether we choose to believe it is or not.

That a great conservative wrote such delightful ghost stories should come as no surprise, then. It was in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that Edmund Burke wrote that society is “the great mysterious incorporation of the human race” and “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” For Kirk, these spiritual links beyond time and space mean that the barriers between this life and the next are quite thin.

Peralta argues that Kirk expressed these metaphysical principles in his stories. Blending the philosophic mysticism of Eric Voegelin and the poetic imagery of T. S. Eliot, Kirk sought to capture certain “timeless moments” in his writing. He believed that, through the faculty of imagination, human beings could perceive and even begin to understand what he often called the “transcendent order” of the universe. Each of his books — especially his fiction — should be interpreted, therefore, as a sort of window into that ultimate mystery.

But in a 1962 essay titled “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” he also made it perfectly clear that he believed in ghosts not as a mere metaphor. “A mass of evidence, of all ages and countries,” he wrote, “informs us that strange things beyond the ordinary operation of life and matter have occurred at irregular intervals and in widely varying circumstances.” Kirk noted that spectral apparitions were particularly common among those he called “men of letters” and that the “literary art,” above all, is suited to understanding the “significance in these manifestations.”

Peralta’s thesis is that Kirk found the genre of Gothic fiction particularly well suited both to articulating his metaphysical convictions and to exploring spiritual mysteries. Though Gothicism dates back to English novelists in the 18th century, Peralta argues that Kirk’s conservative spin on the genre directed it away from its typical romantic individualism and toward a more traditionalist end. “Conservative Gothic,” for Peralta, “refers to any imaginative work that employs Gothic tropes in defense of the ‘permanent things,’ the enduring norms, values, and beliefs of Western civilization.” With its conventions and tropes of “haunted houses, ghosts, and other apparently unexplainable phenomena,” Gothicism enabled Kirk to explore the mysterious connections between the visible and the invisible worlds in a way that affirmed the West’s moral order.

This enduring concern for moral order translated to an urgency in Kirk’s search for the meaning of the “good life.” He came to believe that the “wisdom of our ancestors” (another Burkean phrase) is our best guide to discovering that meaning and living well. He believed that literature, insofar as it is an ark of tradition, must foster the “moral imagination” of readers. The old virtues of the West — the spirit of religion and the spirit of the gentleman — needed revival in these desiccated modern times, and Kirk believed that his ghost stories could play a role.

Some of the stories explicitly reflect how Kirk perceived moral order in politics. In “Behind the Stumps” and “Ex Tenebris,” for example, arrogant bureaucrats become enemies of the permanent things and the common folk still loyal to them, Peralta writes, because “it is on the ruins of enduring values and ancient belief systems that they intend to erect their perfectly planned societies.” In both stories, spiritual forces from beyond the veil of life intervene to punish the central planners. Their progressive ideologies represent a certain kind of soul sickness, and Kirk clearly hoped that his imaginative tales could inoculate readers against the delusions.

His fiction is also deeply rooted in the American literary tradition. Peralta argues that the Romantic author Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, was a major influence on Kirk’s short stories. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote that Hawthorne “influenced American thought by his perpetuation of the past and by his expression of the idea of sin” — two spiritual principles at the heart of Gothicism. Those themes would permeate Kirk’s fiction in turn. One can even detect certain stylistic similarities between Hawthorne tales such as “Young Goodman Brown,” with its terrifying perception of the reality of evil, and Kirk’s stories such as “Balgrummo’s Hell” and “The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost,” with their depiction of demonic forces threatening this mortal realm.

Many of his stories were set in the eerie landscape of his native Michigan, some even taken from the uncanny experiences of the people in his own life. The “Mecosta” of Peralta’s title is the small village in rural Michigan where Kirk made a home with his wife, Annette, and their four daughters. It is the Kirk family’s ancestral seat, and their old house there was supposedly haunted until a freak fire that broke out on Ash Wednesday, 1975. These environs served as inspiration for several of his stories, including the truly terrifying “Princess of All Lands,” which he based on an actual attempted kidnapping in the Michigan backwoods.

Kirk’s favorite of his stories was the purgatorial tale “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” (You can listen to the author himself read here.) Frank Sarsfield, an ex-convict and drifter inspired by Kirk’s real-life friend Clinton Wallace, seeks shelter from a blizzard in a seemingly abandoned house. During the night, he begins having dreams about a family that used to live there — dreams that make it seem he has some sort of a history with them.

At the climax of the story, just as what is real and what is memory becomes most hazy, Frank must save the family from home invaders. He sacrifices himself in the process. But then, the twist — as the mortally wounded man crawls out of the house, he discovers his own grave. It turns out that Frank has been reliving these horrific events every night, caught in a sort of purgatory to atone for past sins. It is perhaps Kirk’s most shockingly violent narrative, but in that sense it is somewhat reminiscent of the short stories of his friend Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, Kirk used this haunting tale to explore the meaning of grace, much as O’Connor used the grotesque. In the end, the message of “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” and of his fiction more broadly, is that mankind is “made for eternity.”

Peralta concludes that Kirk was not just a wizard but indeed a prophet “capable of leading misguided pilgrims through the wasteland of the contemporary world.” In his fiction and nonfiction alike, he aimed to teach the jaded souls enduring desiccated modernity that “the object of life is Love.” To be a conservative is to embrace the permanent things, not only to defend them but, more important, to enjoy them.

Kirk’s turn to the ghost story was no quirky diversion from that mission. Rather, it came from the burning conviction that, as his favorite poet Eliot wrote, “what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead.” Indeed, as Kirk had engraved on his headstone, “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”