RUSSELL KIRK PART TWO: THE NEVER-ENDING TORY
In his second and final study of the American conservative thinker and writer of ghost stories Russell Kirk, SD TUCKER travels to Kirk’s unquiet Michigan home to meet the dead souls acting as its spiritual cement.
BOTH GHOSTS ARE DIFFERING ASPECTS OF HIS IMMORTAL SOUL
Last month, we saw how Russell Kirk (1918–1994), the American conservative philosopher, self-styled “Bohemian Tory” and writer of ghost stories, was inspired by both a childhood encounter with spirits one snowy Christmas night, and by a time-slip during 1949, to develop his own unique political outlook on life. Further influenced by his reading of Anglo-Irish Tory philosopher Edmund Burke’s highly conservative 1790 book Reflections on
the Revolution in France, Kirk set out to create a form of ‘democracy of the dead’, in which the past, present and future generations of mankind would be linked via a kind of imaginative abolition of time itself, unusual theories he placed into his textbooks and ghost stories in symbolic form. Kirk’s most celebrated non-fiction book, 1953’s The Conservative Mind, was an attempt to encourage policymakers to pause for a moment from their frenzied building of a New Jerusalem, and enjoy communication across the centuries with great thinkers from the past. By reading their books, or about their ideas in précis in Kirk’s own book, you effectively entered into occult communication with their spirits. “A truly humane man [or politician],” Kirk liked to say, “is a person who knows we were not born yesterday.” 1 His book was a series of elegant potted biographies and summations of the thought of a number of men whose characters and philosophies Kirk admired, running (as some editions of the book had it)
From Burke to Eliot. Eliot, of course, was the Anglo-American poet TS Eliot, a personal friend of Kirk’s, whose works came to occupy a central position in his political and supernatural worldview.
Eliot’s most famous work, his long 1922 poem The Waste Land, is a deliberately confusing and obscure representation of mankind living in a meaningless, grey, post-Christian world, in which all men are rootless and their actions pointless. In a parched and fragmented cultural landscape, people have, as Burke once predicted, become “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality... dispersed to all the winds of heaven”. It is a disturbing prospect; as Eliot has it: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, this dust being fallen modern man. Shorn of tradition or purpose, broken links in the Great Chain of Being, such soulless modern zombies really did rise from out of dust, and back to mere dust they would return – no afterlife for them – a fearful prospect indeed. However, by the time of Eliot’s even greater work of 1944, Four
Quartets, mankind’s situation seems to have improved somewhat. An extremely complex and beautiful meditation upon the nature of time, the poem holds forth the possibility, through intense religious contemplation, of discovering the “point of intersection of the timeless with time”, as Kirk himself had once done during his 1949 time-slip or when he had seen Christmas ghosts at his window. By wilfully ignoring our past, however, and becoming too caught up in current woes and fancies, Eliot warns that our modern society is in danger of being trapped forever in the eternal present: “A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/Of timeless moments.”
TIMELESS TALES
Kirk agreed. It is noticeable how many of his ghost stories feature souls caged within some kind of earthly, Waste Land- like purgatory; as spirits trapped within time, they are analogues of ourselves, or of how Kirk himself felt when attacking televisions (an occasional hobby of his, as we saw last time). Only by restoring the link between the generations once hymned by Edmund Burke is it possible for us to redeem ourselves from time; one of Kirk’s more poignant ghost stories, 1984’s An
Encounter by Mortstone Pond, is a parable of this idea. In the tale, a small boy, wandering sadly by a pond after his parents’ death, encounters a friendly unseen ghost who comforts him. Walking by the same pond as an adult many years later, the same person then encounters an invisible ghost-child in mourning and comforts him in his turn, using the same words which had been spoken to him by the unknown spirit during his own childhood experience. It is only once he has done so that the protagonist realises both ghosts are but differing aspects of his own immortal soul, and that through his act of thoughtful charity the nourishing Burkean
link between the generations has been restored at last. Significantly enough, the story begins and ends with lines from Four Quartets.
In a preface to the anthology in which this tale appeared, Kirk described his ghost stories as being “experiments in the moral imagination” and “instruments for the recovery of moral order”. Some of them were based upon actual experiences which he or his friends and family had undergone themselves, spun out into more coherent literary forms. After all, in reality most ghosts simply appear, seemingly at random, and carry within them no apparent explanatory narrative. It was the job of the Burkean ghost story writer like Kirk to “piece together into a pattern those hints and glimpses offered fragmentarily by mystical visions, second sight, hauntings, dreams [and] wondrous coincidences”. 2 This paralleled the way that the broken fragments of culture found in the lines of Eliot’s Waste
Land – where snippets of Shakespeare mix uneasily with lines from music-hall songs and garbled conversations overheard in pubs – had become somewhat healed into a more coherent poetic whole by the time of
Four Quartets. By lending narrative order to chance supernatural experiences in this way, Kirk suggested a method of redeeming these often history-less real-life ghosts from time by, as he put it, “finding a continuity to join them”, 3 thus helping mend the yawning gap which had arisen between the present and the past – a product of the disruptive modern ‘Enlightenment’ patterns of thinking which Kirk so despised.
THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
This project had both its metaphorical and its more literal side, thanks to the fact that Kirk felt his spooky ancestral home of Piety Hill in the rural village of Mecosta, Michigan, was a gateway to another world. To say simply that Kirk’s home was haunted would be a gross understatement. Several generations of ancestral spirits kept Kirk company in the old house, given such names as ‘The Crying Baby’ and ‘The Man in the Checked Coat and High Collar’, assumed to be the shade of Kirk’s greatuncle Raymond, who had been murdered by a madman with a hammer some decades earlier. 4 This was not just some passing fancy of Kirk’s self-professed ‘Gothic mind’. Guests at Piety Hill often experienced ghostly phenomena for themselves, with one visiting academic being woken in the middle of the night by a spirit eerily whispering “Amos... Amos...” to her. Told of this event over breakfast the next morning, Kirk pointed up to a portrait of one of his ancestors hanging on the wall. “That’s just my uncle Amos,” he explained, blithely. 5
Why was Kirk’s home so haunted? Kirk considered the area in which it lay, Mecosta County, to be a John Keel-style ‘Window Area’, where the boundary between the worlds was as thin as the notoriously poor soil. According to him, “the genius loci is malevolent” in Mecosta. His 1957 essay “Lost Lake”, named after the apparent epicentre of this evil, lays out the history of various macabre incidents from the region’s past, involving horrors such as frozen dead babies being given to children as makeshift dolls by irresponsible and sick-brained parents, toys which their equally twisted children then took out sledging through the winter snow. Kirk felt such abhorrent true-life crimes were ultimately the doing of local demons whispering the temptation to sin into people’s ears. 6 Much of his fiction is set in this region, redubbed ‘Potawattomie County’, where it becomes a ‘hauntological’ locale every bit as sinister as Point Pleasant and WestVirginia were to Keel in his
Mothman Prophecies. However, presumably because his own family had lived morally in Piety Hill ever since it had been built in 1878, Kirk began to think his house itself was a “place of power”, infused with the ability to repel the escape of further demons into the haunted land, and that he himself had inherited the role of ‘landscape guardian’ from his ancestors. 7 As such, the benign ghosts lurking in his home reminded him of his responsibility to live up to their godly ideals, and to pass on such values to his own children, thus maintaining the Burkean link between the generations.
According to Kirk, “the dead alone give us energy”, and whatever energies he had, both imaginative and moral, “came from those beloved dead of Piety Hill”. Much of the knowledge he had acquired throughout his life, he declared, came “from the old books in that high-ceilinged house”, and, given his later public success, it was knowledge he did well to have absorbed. Not only the books, but even the inherited family furniture of the place was infused with the benevolent spirit of the past. His great-grandfather’s “splendid immense tall walnut bed”, apparently, had a haunted headboard upon which “the dead were heard to knock, now and again, over the decades.” 8 Kirk seemed to think Piety Hill was some kind of gigantic TC Lethbridge-style ‘Stone Tape’, writing of how “the continuity of family, building, and even furniture in my Mecosta house presumably favours the faithful survival of traces of a vanished consciousness, and reminds one of [the Spanish-American philosopher George] Santayana’s theory that emotion may embed itself in matter, to be detached long after by another consciousness under peculiar conditions of receptivity.” 9 Santayana’s most famous saying was that “Those who do not know their history are condemned to repeat it.” Kirk’s ancestors did know their history, though, and were highly respectful of it – so why were they currently trapped within time inside Piety Hill, like souls in an endless purgatory, or the dust-like moderns wandering through Eliot’s Waste Land?
SECRETS OF THE STONES
Whatever the answer to this conundrum, Kirk made good use of the phenomena themselves whilst developing his own political philosophy. By not quite leaving the presence of the living, Kirk’s ancestral spirits provided a visible confirmation of Edmund Burke’s desired quality of social continuity. During the French Revolution so criticised by Burke, many grand old mansions belonging to the aristocracy were looted and vandalised as concrete symbols of the hated ancien regime. This was not a fate Burke desired to befall the stately homes of England, which he viewed not as symbols of unjustifiable aristocratic privilege, but as elegantly-built metaphorical Stone Tapes, preserving the spirit of the nation and its long history within their very bricks. What was wrong, asked Burke, with the owners of such magnificent buildings spending huge fortunes on them when such expenditure “takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of ancient records, medals and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation; [and] through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the regards and connections of life beyond the grave?” 10 If such ancestral houses were indeed pleasantly haunted by the past in this way, then what the fanatical Jacobins of Burke’s day were doing to them over in France was some kind of politically motivated mass exorcism – and exorcisms were not something Kirk would have wished for his own family pile. “I have no desire to exorcise,” he once wrote. “If shades tolerate me, I tolerate them.” 11
Kirk came to Britain as a graduate student in 1948, and it was here that the young American at last found “the metaphysical principle of continuity given visible reality. British society and the face of Britain were for me the expression... of Burke’s principles of social immortality and of social reform: the past ever blending with the present, so that the fabric continually renews itself, like some great oak, being never either wholly old or wholly young.” 12 The needlessly violent upheavals and iconoclasms of the French and Russian Revolutions, for Kirk, had unleashed genuine demons of violence and terror upon the world, for, whilst busy toppling statues and tearing down buildings, the Jacobins and Bolsheviks alike had thrown out much that was worthwhile in society alongside that which was corrupt and in need of reform, and replaced the old imperfect rulers and methods of government with far worse ones. The Tsar had no gulags, the Sun-King no guillotine.
SCOTLAND THE GRAVE
Whilst studying in the ancient Scottish town of St Andrews, Kirk speculated that the many ghosts local legend said haunted its streets had been unleashed into the world through the evils of unnecessary social, religious and political upheaval. In the words of his recent biographer Bradley J Birzer, Kirk viewed St Andrews as a kind of “living palimpsest”, in which visible traces of the place’s pagan, Catholic and Protestant past lingered on in a patchwork quilt of architecture, place-names and customs. However, during the 16th century, thought Kirk, a tide of Jacobin-like barbarism had swept through the picturesque old town in the shape of the hardline Protestant reformer John Knox and his followers, who
had destroyed the old Catholic cathedral and pulled down monuments like crazed Reformation-era predecessors of ISIS, leaving the place a ruined shell. In breaking the stones of the past, Knox’s men had inadvertently also broken the place’s ageold Catholic Stone Tapes as well, releasing a cavalcade of “spectral priors... pickled cardinals, monks buried in dunghills... damned nuns and worse horrors” to roam St Andrews’ streets. This, thought Kirk, warned us to resist the urge to simply smash up the past in the name of building a supposedly better future. 13
Not only destruction but also insensitive urban regeneration could have detrimental consequences for a town’s ghosts, potentially banishing the good ones forever – and, for Kirk, a town without its ghosts quite simply had no soul. Decrying what he called in an essay-title The Architecture of Servitude
and Boredom, Kirk’s most directly tangible political successes perhaps came against big land-developers and city planners, whose distressingly utilitarian designs to pull down characterful (and potentially haunted) old neighbourhoods in favour of highway-building and the construction of supermarkets he helped defeat more than once. 14 Modern architecture, he felt, was not good for ghosts. On Hallowe’en night 1948, not long after arriving in St Andrews, Kirk made plans to keep a nocturnal vigil, seeking an apparition that was meant to haunt a particular archway he knew of, which, in the days before Knox, had been part of an old priory. However, he found to his annoyance that the spot had recently been fitted with a new streetlamp, which he theorised might put the phantom off appearing. “Modern lighting does spectres no good,” he lamented in his diary. “We see them in our time seldom only because we have so altered the physical and moral atmosphere of man that he seldom sees his own soul, let alone someone else’s. Who could see a ghost in an electrically-illuminated parlour of a flimsy new bungalow? To have ghosts, one must have a past for ghosts to emerge from; and one must believe in a spiritual world to recognise spirits.” 15 However, despite Kirk’s veneration of his own past, Kirk’s elders were not to haunt his own ancestral home forever.
ASHES TO ASHES
One of the most unexpected (living) inhabitants of Piety Hill was a wandering hobo and much-imprisoned petty-criminal named Clinton Wallace. Wallace later found himself immortalised in Kirk’s Gothic fiction in the guise of one Frank Sarsfield, yet another spirit trapped within time. Wallace’s main criminal speciality in real life was stealing money from poor-boxes in Catholic churches; he never touched those found in Protestant ones as, being Catholic himself, he believed such money to have been gained under false pretences. As this foible suggests, the physically hulking Wallace
was not quite right in the head but, being somewhat autistic, had the unexpected ability to quote large amounts of classic poetry on-tap, something the Kirk family found so appealing they invited him to move in with them. 16
One of Wallace’s household odd jobs at Piety Hill was tending the main fire throughout the cold winter nights. However, on the night of 10 February 1975, the hobo fell asleep during his duties, awakening sometime later to find the blaze had got out of control. The ancient chimney had crumbled under the heat of the unwatched fire, causing it to collapse; perhaps some old things should be replaced after all. As flames spread, the house and its haunted contents were quickly reduced to dust and cinders. “Where will the ghosts go now?” wailed the Kirks’ neighbours, in distress. Apparently, they moved on to Eternity, their Stone Tapes destroyed. Some of those present claimed they could see a long line of ancestral spirits fleeing the house through its burning windows; other onlookers took photographs, which did apparently show “strange shapes and faces” passing amongst the flames. Piety Hill, much against Kirk’s wishes, had been exorcised at last. 17 Fortunately, Kirk had recently had a separate brick wing built at Piety Hill, and was able to move into this straight away with his wife and daughters – although the ghosts never followed them. As for the fire itself ... well, it almost seemed to have been fated. Familiar as he was with the works of CG Jung and Arthur Koestler, Kirk could hardly have failed to notice the various meaningful coincidences clustering around the event. For one thing, the house had burned to ashes upon Ash Wednesday, a Catholic holy day which the Roman convert Kirk had had much cause to ponder that particular year as, that very same evening, he had been booked to give a college lecture upon his friend Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. Years later, in 1994, suffering from heart trouble, it was upon Ash Wednesday that his doctor gave him the news that he had only a month or two left to live. 18
The coincidence was certainly striking, and seemed somehow meaningful to him; were his ancestors trying to tell him something? If so, what? It was hard to tell, perhaps impossible. Upon the newly rebuilt Piety Hill, Kirk had a plaque erected, containing the following lines from Eliot’s
Four Quartets: “And what the dead had no speech for, when living/They can tell you, being dead: the communication/ Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” Maybe, once he had passed beyond the bounds of earthly time, as he did on 29 April 1994, Kirk would have understood the flame-tongued message of the immortal dead at last. Until then, the following lines, culled from an obituary he wrote for the old Piety Hill not long after it had burned down, represented his best guess: “There is an eternal contract that binds society together, Edmund Burke tells us: it joins the dead and the living and those yet to be born. When I too am dust [like Piety Hill] our children and our grandchildren may love the New House as we loved the Old; for what is new today will be venerable then, God willing. Ash Wednesday comes to us all, but after that comes Easter.” 19 And with Easter, of course, comes rebirth. In demonstrating to the young Kirk tangible proof of the idea that dead souls would indeed be capable of one day returning to life upon the Day of Resurrection, it seems that the ghosts of Christmas past he encountered at his window that auspicious snow-filled night during childhood were in a sense simultaneously the ghosts of Christmas future – how could they be otherwise, for one who knew that past, present and future were but mere illusory outfoldings of the one immortal, timeless, transcendent Christian God? Unlike Eliot in his Waste Land, Kirk could show you not fear, but hope, in a handful of dust.
NOTES
General information about Kirk is taken from an excellent recent biography: Bradley J Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Unreferenced general points about Kirk’s ghosts and ghostly fiction are taken from Chapter 8: ‘Ghosts in the Machine ... and the House’ (pp.283-323) An edited version of this chapter is online at http:// www.theimaginativeconservative. org/2015/06/russell-kirk-and-thehaunting-of-piety-hill.html
1 Bradley J Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, University Press of Kentucky, 2015, p18.
2 Russell Kirk, ‘A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale’ in George A Panichas (Ed.), The Essential Russell Kirk, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012, p241.
3 www.nationalreview.com/ node/215817/print. 4 Birzer, p289. 5 Birzer, p283. 6 Birzer, pp292-3. 7 Birzer, p387. 8 Russell Kirk, ‘An Old House Dies with Love and Honour’; 1975 To the Point column, online at www. theimaginativeconservative. org/2013/04/russell-kirk-an-old- house-dies-with-love-and-honour.html 9 Birzer, p289. 10 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Oxford World’s Classics, 1999, p162. 11 Birzer, p.289. 12 Kirk, ‘Confessions of a Gothic Mind’ in Panichas, p302. 13 Birzer, pp94-95. 14 Russell Kirk, ‘The Architecture of Servitude and Boredom’ in Panichas, 2012, p331. 15 Birzer, p288. 16 Birzer, pp388-389. 17 Birzer, pp289, 391.
18 Birzer, pp391-392.; Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, when the Catholic priest would anoint worshippers with a handful of dust upon their foreheads, saying something like “Remember, man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return”, whilst urging them to consider and repent their sins. A movable feast, it can fall anywhere between 4 Feb and 11 Mar, making these coincidences seem even more striking to Kirk. See Steve Roud, The English Year, Penguin, 2006, p66.
19 Kirk, ‘An Old House Dies with Love and Honour’.