The Patriotic Russell Kirk
Like any great and influential writer, Russell Kirk has often suffered from being misread, even by those sympathetic to him—not to mention his being breezily dismissed or underestimated by those who are not sympathetic, and have never read him with care, or at all. Among other common misconceptions, there is the tendency to typecast him as someone whose life and work are somehow worlds apart from the American intellectual and political tradition. In this view, his formation as a student at the storied University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his affinity with writers like Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, Orestes Brownson, and G. K. Chesterton, as well as statesmen like John Adams, Fisher Ames, and Joseph de Maistre, marked him as a dispositional reactionary and romantic who took his stand in the prescriptive and class-conscious conservatism of Europe, rather than the energetic democracy of America.
It is a little difficult to understand how a man who chose to spend his adult life rooted in the soil of his ancestral Michigan, and fully owned its tangled history, its local legends, and its humble beauties, could be seen in this way. But in any event, this fascinating collection of Kirk’s writings about America, assembled with care and intelligence by the brilliant young scholar Michael Lucchese, should put paid to all such misconceptions.
Taken together, the essays in this collection have a distinctly American air, but one spiced by the enlivening spirit of a much longer historical consciousness. Unlike his distinguished contemporary, the historian John Lukacs, Russell Kirk did not write a great deal about the subject of historical consciousness. But he didn’t need to. His entire life and work were nothing less than an extended elaboration of that very theme. Historical consciousness seemed to have been infused into the air he breathed and mixed into the soil of the land in which he chose to live. No place or thing, however ordinary, was too humble for him to grant it the dignity of a story.
Although his Gothic and Romantic tastes drew him to old European cathedrals, Roman ruins, and other such haunted sites, he was not prone to sigh, in the perennial complaint of American writers such as Hawthorne and Henry James, that America was too new or raw or commerce-minded to be the stuff of art. On the contrary, Kirk knew how to see monuments, and ruins, everywhere he looked.
Read more from Wilfred McClay in The University Bookman.
