The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination
By Camilo Peralta.
Vernon Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 222 pages, $78.00.
Reviewed by James E. Person Jr.
The late Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was one of the wisest yet humblest of men one could ever have had the pleasure of knowing. Like a young boy, he gloried in little things: lively conversation among friends, canoeing, celebrating Halloween, telling ghost stories, and more. He did all this in the midst of a life otherwise spent researching and writing learned works intended to play a part in upholding ordered freedom and what his friend T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”—the timeless truths men and women ignore at their peril.
We are pilgrims in a darkling wood during our short lives on earth, Kirk believed, beset at every turn by spiritual and physical peril. But through it all (he also believed) life is to be lived with joy, hope, and courage. This is the vision of humanity reflecting the moral imagination, a term Kirk borrowed from Edmund Burke, which views men and women as moral agents, not perfect or perfectible by any human course of action: flawed by sin but beloved by God, called to obedience, and made whole only through divine agency.
As Kirk wrote in The Roots of American Order (1974), “We exist here as pilgrims, travellers, knowing that beyond our present weariness and danger is an eternal destination,” and “our sufferings are means for chastening and disciplining us, so that God’s will may be executed in history.” Sufferings and chastenings are part of God’s way of drawing people to himself; with a nod to C. S. Lewis, the Great Lion is altogether good, but He is not a tame Lion.
Kirk saw his own written works, as well as the very life he led during the years of his maturity, as guideposts to help others who might need direction, conviction, or reassurance to avoid the errors that lead to personal and cultural destruction. Admired by many for his role as a sagacious guide and a man of extraordinary accomplishments, Kirk came to be called “the Wizard of Mecosta”—a title he embraced with boyish pride.
It surprises many readers to learn that while Kirk is best known for the landmark study The Conservative Mind (1953) and other learned works of history and cultural criticism, he is also renowned as a master of the ghostly tale and novels of Gothic suspense. During his life, he published three collections of unnerving short stories and sketches along with three novels; and none of Kirk’s fiction has received intensive study until now, courtesy of Camilo Peralta, a rising star in studies of Kirk, conservatism, the Inklings, and the mythopoeic imagination. In The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination, Mr. Peralta offers the first full-length analysis of Kirk’s fiction, noting that it is all of a piece with the overall philosophy of the author’s life and work, all reflecting the moral imagination.
In this well-researched and insightful study, Mr. Peralta examines Kirk’s ghost stories, which are of basically two types. First: In certain of his short tales—“Behind the Stumps,” “The Cellar of Little Egypt,” and “What Shadows We Pursue” come to mind—the emphasis is entirely upon dread and creeping terror: the typical ghost story that might be told by the fireplace on a rainy night with the curtains drawn. In such stories, there is a slow build toward a shocking climax that lingers in the imagination long after the tale has been finished and the story set aside. Why, something like that could happen to me! And what if it did?
In other stories, such as “Saviourgate,” “The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding,” “Watchers at the Strait Gate,” and “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond”—as well as the novel Lord of the Hollow Dark—there is a sense that not only do the dead sometimes walk among us but that there are matters of eternal significance at stake: that utter Joy and utter destruction stand in the balance. It’s the same sensation Tolkien described in The Two Towers where he wrote: “Aragorn felt . . . a strange cold thrill; and yet it was not fear or terror that he felt: rather it was like the sudden bite of a keen air, or the slap of a cold rain that wakes an uneasy sleeper.” To awaken the reader to a clearer vision while telling an engrossing tale: that is Kirk’s intent in such stories, which have an underlying focus on time and the timeless, with an emphasis upon the human soul as a moral agent, choosing life or choosing death.
In this regard, Kirk’s stories of time and timelessness, along with the novel Lord of the Hollow Dark, are thematically of the same family as Charles Williams’s “spiritual thrillers” (as C. S. Lewis called them), such as War in Heaven (1930) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). Kirk’s own works of fiction act not only as instruments of literary enjoyment but—subtly, unobtrusively—as warnings about the serious matters that are at play in human life: the gaining of eternal life or the loss of everything—through foolish choices built upon disobedience to the law that is written in the hearts of men and women and validated by God. In the end, wrote George MacDonald, there are only two types of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.” This is a far step beyond ghost stories whose unspoken essence is:
the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!”
Resounding in the background of this second type of story is the shock and clash of spiritual warfare in the heavenly places, with the eternal destiny of human souls at stake. The battered but salvaged few are provided a vision of hope, having seen at least dimly that “our sufferings are means for chastening and disciplining us,” while the stubborn egoists take the easy downward slope to destruction.
To Kirk, the lost soul is characterized by its selfishness and self-centeredness. Such a person, wrote Lewis, tries “to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish—to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.”
Thus, in terms of writing fiction of the moral imagination, Kirk had much in common with Williams, Lewis, and even Tolkien—authors Kirk himself admired deeply, as revealed in his correspondence, essays, and reviews.
Even in Kirk’s stories and novels where there is no supernatural element—the short pieces “Lost Lake,” “Off the Sand Road,” and “Skyberia, as well as the novels Old House of Fear and the little-known A Creature of the Twilight—there is a sense that people can make a living hell for themselves and others through embracing the way of wielding power over others as their guiding star. For “if the light in you is darkness, how terribly dark it will be!” It is better to drink water from springs in the high places than the low, to embrace life, not death.
Any intelligent new work on Kirk’s accomplishment is worth celebrating. But no work, however well considered and well written, is flawless, and Mr. Peralta’s study is no exception, as it bears signs of an eager mind that can sometimes lose track of certain particulars while masterfully describing the larger picture. Thus, he can write knowledgeably of Kirk’s fiction, offering vistas of insight not previously articulated, but fall short in respect to the basic biographical facts of Kirk’s life. For example, one of the paramount influences upon Kirk’s life, his beloved maternal grandfather, was named Frank J. Pierce, not Franklin Pierce. Kirk did not, as Mr. Peralta claims, attend Michigan State College (later University) while it was under the presidency of John A. Hannah; Hannah became president the year after Kirk graduated.
There are several other such peccadilloes; but to his credit, Mr. Peralta gets the overwhelming share of what he has written on Kirk quite right, resoundingly so. It is bracing to read a claim he makes early in this study regarding Kirk’s Eliot and His Age (1972): “If professors of English still valued their traditional mission to promote the serious discussion of literature, Kirk’s book on Eliot would be a widely-assigned text in courses on Modernist and twentieth-century literature, for a livelier and more knowledgeable account of Eliot’s work has never been published.” All too true—as Eliot and His Age is perhaps the only work on the accomplishment of “Great Tom” that bears re-reading time and again.
Mr. Peralta’s new study is well-considered and altogether worthwhile. As such, it is a most welcome addition to the small shelf of books devoted to a writer who deserves a much wider audience. The Wizard of Mecosta is highly recommended to anyone who seeks to better understand an often-overlooked aspect of Kirk’s accomplishment.
James E. Person Jr. is a Senior Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and a longtime reviewer for The University Bookman and other venues. He edited The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell Kirk (1994), which was presented to Kirk a few weeks before his death. He also wrote Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (1999) and edited Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk (2018).
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