Detective fiction, as we know here, often has been called an inherently conservative form; and so has been termed supernatural fiction. One of the most interesting pieces in Kirk's first supernatural short fiction collection, The Surly Sullen Bell (originally published in 1962 and reprinted in 1966 as Lost Lake, arguably a more appropriate title), is its afterword, "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale," which makes precisely this assertion. It was originally published in The Critic in 1962.
As for crime fiction, Kirk manages to get off a shot against the hardboiled stuff, which he sees as providing the readers the spiritually banal thrill of "real horrors":
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| no one who tries to live beside Lost Lake lives very long.... |
In his Note Kirk argues, as others have, that ghostly fiction derives its frisson from the reader's susceptibility to a belief in the supernatural. Materialists, so this argument runs, will be far less inclined to feel shivers from the specter of, well, spectres. Yet even purely materialistic people want to believe in something, a fact reflected in their escape reading. If one rejects God and His Heavenly Host, one perforce turns to the likes of hard-boiled dicks and little green men. Saith Kirk:
To most modern men having ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale is out of fashion, especially in America....Perhaps the cardinal error of the Enlightenment was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism....Credulty springs eternal, merely changing its garments form age to age. So if one takes away from man a belief in ghosts, it does not follow that thereafter he will concern himself wholly with Bright Reality; more probably, his fancy will seek some new field--possibly a worse realm.
Thus stories of the supernatural have been supplanted by "science-fiction"....[M]any people today have a faith in "life on other planets" as burning and genuine as belief in a literal Heaven and literal Hell was among twelfth-century folk, say--but upon authority far inferior....Having demolished, to their own satisfaction. the whole edifice of religious learning, abruptly and unconsciously they experience the need for belief in something not mundane...they take up the cause of Martians and Jovians. As for Angels and Devils, let alone bogles--why, hell, such notions are superstitious!
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| On the covers of Sixties Gothic paperbacks heroines have always lived in castles. |
The august schools of Mr. Dashiell Hammett and Mr. James M. Cain provide for appetites that find phantasms not sufficiently carnal.
I'm not sure what Kirk, a confirmed Anglophile, made of classic, genteel detective fiction of the type associated with the English Crime Queens, which flourished between the wars right along with the sort of classic supernatural fiction which MR James wrote. I suppose at mid-century it did seem for a time in the field of escape fiction that the carnal ashcan realists and the imaginative sci-fi scribes were carrying the day, but I don't believe that the classic frights and thrills epitomized by writers like MR James and DL Sayers ever really went out of fashion.
But that's Kirk as the intellectual theorist. How was he as a practitioner of that dark art which he preached? The Surly Sullen Bell, or Lost Lake as I shall shall call it henceforward, collects ten pieces, one of which, "Lost Lake," is not fiction (purportedly). Ironically it's one of the best pieces in the collection. Kirk was a natural essayist.
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| Russell Kirk, man of the people |
"Lost Lake" is all about Mecosta County, Michigan (where the author lived), as he sees the place. Mecosta is a county in north central Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids, with a population of about 40,000 people, 93% of that white and 4% black. (It's about double today what it was back in 1960.) The largest habitation is the county seat, Big Rapids, with about 8000 people.
Median income is about $34,000, with 16% of the population living below the poverty line. Barack Obama came within 137 votes of carrying the county in 2008, but since then it has gone increasingly Republican in every presidential election, with the Nameless One taking about 62% of the vote against Joe Biden in 2020, even with all the Democratic election fraud that MAGA says rampantly occurred all across America, but particularly in swings states like Michigan. (Guess in that state it all took place in Detroit.)
Recently, the county has been engulfed in controversy over the planned building of an electric car battery plant with Chinese connections. In August JD Vance showed up in Big Rapids to denounce the plan.
So opens Kirk's essay about the place:
A fatality clings to some places: not merely to historic houses or to battlefields, but to obscure corners recorded only in the short and simple annals of the poor. One such place--almost at the back of my old house in Mecosta, Michigan--is Lost Lake, with the derelict fields and neglected woods around it. The genius loci is malevolent.
...Mecosta is an impoverished and forgotten village, set in a township that has only two real farms cultivated. A mile-long stretch of wide street, faced with false-fronted white frame buildings as in a western movie set: that is Mecosta. There are more gaps than buildings along the streets nowadays, and our biggest store burned recently.
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| Mecosta: a village of false fronts and great gaps |
This is a terrifically well-written and deeply evocative piece about what the author deems a magnificently creepy region. If you want to commune with witches and hants come to macabre Mecosta, he could be saying. But it's also kind of horror porn-ish? The jury roll includes "the names of indigent persons, as a means of poor relief," Kirk tells us. But he treats the appallingly ignorant poor of Mecosta as ghostly material for our entertainment. It feels like the Midwest version of Deliverance.
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| Kirk at Piety Hill before it burned down in 1975 |
I wouldn't harp on this except for the fact that as a traditionalist conservative Kirk, I gather, idealized feudal European society, with its fixed hierarchies and social structures.
Certainly he disliked modern, progressive, "big-government" do-gooders, brimming with ambitious plans to upset the social order and help out, even raise up, the people in "backward" parts of the country.
Kirk himself had a family home in Mecosta: Piety Hill, built by his mother's grandfather in 1878. (Another source says 1868.) To Piety Hill he retreated after he quit his job teaching at Michigan State University, to much newspaper fanfare contemptuously denouncing the college as nothing more than a degraded diploma mill that had reduced its professors to the status of multiple-choice testing "menials." Kirk did not intend to be a mere cog in an academic machine, even a brightly polished one.
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| out of the ashes: Piety Hill II |
With the success of his classic book The Conservative Mind (1953) and his thriller Old House of Fear (1961), Kirk was able to establish himself, like a veritable gentleman dilettante, as an independent scholar and public intellectual and practitioner of idiosyncratic aristocratic noblesse oblige. Piety Hill was referred to as Kirk's "ancestral home," as if he were some sort of European feudal lord, an American seigneur.
When Piety Hill--which appears originally to have been a modestly Italianate, rambling, if not ramshackle, frame structure--burned to the ground in 1975, Kirk replaced it with a modern building, rather synthetically archaic. Perhaps he meant it for a Scottish keep out of the romantic tales of Sir Walter Scott, apparently a favorite author of his. The Kirks of course were of Scottish descent.
That's the thing about Kirk; there's something synthetic to him. As he freely admitted his maternal great-grandfather was a lumber baron who despoiled the countryside and his maternal grandfather was a banker. He was born and grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where his father was a railroad engineer. Banks and mills and irons rails--one can't get much more of a capitalist bourgeois background than that.
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| Born to be brainy Russell Kirk was a bookwormish young man. |
Kirk has been called a "northern agrarian" (to distinguish him from the Southern Agrarians), but his own family helped industrialize Gilded Age America and deforest the Michigan countryside. Kirk may have fancied himself a genteel agrarian, but his privilege was obtained through rapacious modern industrial capitalism. Only settled on the eve of the Civil War, had Mecosta with its sandy soil ever been a utopia of sturdy, ruggedly independent farmers before the lumber mills came along in the postbellum period? In any event, what was afterward to be done for the dispossessed people of Mecosta, besides using them as local color in rural fright tales? Of those earnest men and women from the government who wanted to help, I suppose Kirk would have said that "I'm from the government and I want to help" are some of the most terrifying words in the English language.
In Kirk's stories these impudent government interlopers invariably come to bad ends, and it seems that the author believes this is just what they deserved for their humanistic folly. Kirk seems to want Mecosta to stay just as he sees it: a dark breeding ground for loathsomely lovely horrors.
It's really rural horror porn like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, albeit much more tasteful and refined. And the way Kirk portrays it, the lesser people in Mecosta--the peasant class, if you will--despises the interlopers just as much as Kirk does, if not more. They may roll around in the ghastly muck but they like that muck just the way it is, thank you. Progress? I'm agin' it!
This is most obviously indicated in "Behind the Stumps," where nosy census taker and general human mediocrity and waste of space Mr. Cribben comes to a bad end in the country, and "Ex Tenebris," which is actually set in an ersatz England, but carries the same message. Then there's "Uncle Isaiah," where the title revenant materializes to rescue his WASP-ish, genteel nephew from the clutches of a nasty, ethnic rackets gangster demanding protection money.
One of my two favorite stories in the collection, "What Shadows We Pursue," breaks out of this confining ideological framework. In it the author rides another of his hobbies, this one bibliomania. What happens when Mrs. Corr and her daughter sell off Dr. Corr's 11,000 volume book collection? Read and see. This one is for the bibliophiles out there. And I do know you're out there. Book collecting as far as I know has no ideological component.
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| library at Piety Hill (Kirk did not watch television) |
My favorite story, however, is "Off the Sand Road." This one supposedly draws on a real-life case of suicide (?), which Kirk mentions in the "Lost Lake" essay. In the late Forties (I presume) a recently-married World War Two veteran and tenant farmer supposedly hanged himself from a great sycamore tree on the property.
In the story a Mecosta visitor from Chicago goes out for an afternoon of berry picking with two local boys, sons of his host. They enter the "House of Death" as it's charmingly known, and therein the visitor finds, as the sun loses its intensity, clippings that shed grim light on the sycamore hanging affair. This is a beautifully written, subtle and poignant ghost story (if a ghost story at all) that also feels like it could have come out of the pages of a true crime magazine. Indeed, it could fittingly find a place in crime fiction anthologies. So it just figures (sigh) that Kirk's biographer, Bradley J. Birzer, gave it scant attention in his biography.
I was reminded not of MR James for once but rather of New England author Mary Wilkins Freeman, especially her classic story "The Wind in the Rose-Bush" (reviewed by me here). This is the one tale from the collection that I would place in the pantheon of great ghost stories.
Kirk has no real ideological axe to grind against modernism here, merely taking some glancing blows at tacky consumerism and evangelical religion, to him indices, seemingly, of shallow minds. (Like so many conservative intellectuals, he converted to Catholicism, after marrying a Catholic in 1964.)
Movie magazines, confessions-pulps, evangelical tracts, mail-order novelties--all these sorts of frivolous things distracted the juvenile mind of the vet's new wife, a member of the Followers of God church who has no appreciation or the rural, contemplative life. The author himself didn't take a wife until he was 46 years old.
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| Russell Kirk letting his hair down, for him. |
Russell Kirk died thirty years ago at the age of 75. I don't know what he would have made of modern conservatism (if "conservatism" is the proper term for it), with its bizarre blend of apocalyptic evangelicals, billionaire tech bros, old-fashioned snake oil salesmen and grifting internet influencers. Talk about a witch's brew! They make the Gilded Age tycoons and their tyros gleam like 24 karat gold. Are tarnished people like Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Laura Loomer avatars of the Permanent Things which Kirk so venerated?
The Kirks didn't even own a television set, so I can't imagine what he would have made of social media. Yet, setting these quandaries aside, at least Russell Kirk's ghost stories can be enjoyed by the spiritually agnostic, despite what he himself argued, and the politically disengaged, if not downright disgusted. The best of these tales stand as genuine art in this form.
Would it make bibliophile Kirl happy that little Mecosta, a village of just a few hundred people, has a bookstore with an inventory of 90,000 volumes? Knowledge is power and power to the people! Deliver us from abject ignorance. Say what you will about Mecosta, I just wish there was a bookstore like this in Memphis where I live.
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| located at the former drugstore, behind the false front, a bookstore with 90,000 volumes just watch out for ghosts jostling you in the aisles |
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