supernatural has attracted writers of genius or high talent: Defoe, Scott, Coleridge, Stevenson, Hoffmann, Maupassant, Kipling, Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, F. Marion Crawford, Edith Wharton; and those whose achievement lies principally in this dark field, among them M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Meade Falkner, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Arthur Machen. Many of the best are by such poets and critics as Walter de la Mare, A. C. Benson, and Quiller Couch. Theirs are no Grub Street names. The genre has in it something worth attempting.
Regrettably, Kirk went on, “since most modern men have ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale has been out of fashion, especially in America.” Self-taught and self-read, Kirk called himself the “last remaining master of ghostly stories,” something he lamented as a “decayed art.” Still, unfashionable as they may be, it did not mean ghost stories went unread. Beneath our rationalist feet, as Kirk knew, there remains haunted ground, which explains how his own supernatural fiction brought him such widespread popular success.
Kirk began publishing ghostly tales in the early 1950s in small periodicals, such as World Review, Queen’s Quarterly, London Mystery Magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Southwest Review. Many of these stories have now been anthologized several times over. Kirk’s ghostly achievements form their own creative legacy, one not necessarily advantaged by Kirk’s more prominent political associations as a founding father of the American conservative movement. Yet they were all of a piece. The writing quality and studied interest of this ghostly fiction were not ancillary to his conservative mind but central to his Gothic sensibility, which identified conservatism in the revenant spirits of America’s literary and cultural traditions. Quoting Edmund Burke, Kirk wrote, “art is man’s nature.” And ghost stories were Kirk’s nature.
In “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” Kirk writes: “Tenebrae ineluctably form part of the nature of things; nor should we complain, for without darkness there cannot be light.” His early stories, such as “The Surly Sullen Bell” of 1950 and “Ex Tenebris” of 1957, can be darkly illuminating, as old believers escape the clutches of new-age academics and conjure up revenge against progressive urban planners. Reviewing Kirk’s first collection of stories, Virginia Kirkus’s Service took note of how the ghosts of Kirk’s tales “generally work for the good to defeat the modern evils of city planners, hoodlums or census takers.” At the same time, “there is perhaps too much commonsense reality in these tales for them to be truly terrifying.”
Set in the haunted Western Isles of the Scottish Outer Hebrides, Old House of Fear quickly does away with terra cognita for a landscape charged with dark spirits. Kirk was a son of Michigan. Born in the small town of Plymouth in 1918, along the old Ann Arbor Trail leading to Detroit, Kirk grew up poor in creature comforts but rich in books and stories. After graduating from Michigan State and earning a master’s degree from Duke, and following his service in the Second World War, Kirk studied at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, where he was the first American there to earn the degree of Doctor of Letters. His time abroad charged his imagination and his output. A year after Kirk earned his degree from St. Andrews, Henry Regnery published his doctoral dissertation, updating Kirk’s title from The Conservative Rout to The Conservative Mind.
Released some eight years after his Stateside return, at a time when he was already known as a founding figure of the post-war American conservative movement, Old House of Fear returned Kirk to his Scottish sojourn and his early interest in fiction writing. In his story, Duncan MacAskival is an Andrew Carnegie–like industrialist who wants to return to his ancestral Scottish home. “Look at it all,” he says of his Iron Works. “I made it. And what has it given me? Two coronary fits…. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” He taps Hugh Logan to travel to Carnglass, where the old Lady of the MacAskival clan still lives, to purchase the island and its castle, called the Old House of Fear. The name is Gaelic, we learn, and Fir means “man,” just as Carnglass means “gray stone.”
The first half of the book concerns Logan’s efforts to get to the island; many conspire to keep him away – just as Kirk, famously resistant to editorial intervention, no doubt conspired to thwart any efforts at elision. On the island Logan meets Mary MacAskival, a red-haired ingenue. Together they face off against Dr. Edmund Jackman, a mystic who has the island under his own mysterious control.
Kirk’s novel follows the pattern of his short stories, where lingering old superstitions battle against the false faiths of our modern age – Kirk even adds a Cold War twist to his haunted plot. Here in Kirk’s remote setting, “to preach the Gospels among the Pequots or Narragansetts is a facile undertaking by the side of any endeavor to redeem from heathen error these denizens of the furthermost Hebrides.” As Kirk luxuriates in the maritime Scottish scenery, his writing is possessed of specific beauty. Just consider the following passage, one of many that stand out for their evocative sense of place:
At six o’clock the “Lochness” steamed away from the pier toward the Sound of Mull. They crossed the Firth of Lorne; and then, to the south, they skirted the great rocky mass of Mull, while the wild shores of Morven frowned upon them from the north. Several islanders were among the passengers, and for the first time in years Logan heard the Gaelic spoken naturally, that beautiful singing Gaelic of the Hebrides. It went with the cliffs, the sea-rocks, the ruined strongholds of Mull and Morven, the damp air, the whitewashed lonely cottages by the deep and smoothly sinister sea.
In the last year of his life, Kirk spoke about ghosts at length from Piety Hill in Mecosta, his “ancestral home” in Michigan that he came to occupy upon his marriage to Annette in 1964. He was convalescing from bronchitis, “an illness I contracted for the first and, I trust, the last time in my life,” he declared. Still, he had gathered a small audience in order to tell “some ghostly tales.”
Before he read one of his ghost stories, he elaborated on what he called the “true narration” of the ghosts in his life and the life of his family. Kirk converted to Catholicism at the time of his marriage, yet he maintained much of the mystical sensibility of his ancestors, who were followers of the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. A New York lumberman from the burned-over country of the Finger Lakes, Kirk’s great-grandfather came for the trees of Michigan and brought Swedenborgism with him, building a spiritualist church across from his settlement in Mecosta. After the church burned, the family conducted séances in their home. “My great-aunt Norma told tales of those days,” Kirk said. “A rocking chair levitated toward the ceiling. A great round mahogany table floated up.” Before his own Old House burned in 1975, Kirk observed an increase in its spiritual activity. He remembers sleeping on the parlor sofa aged eight or nine, seeing two figures looking back at him through the bay window one winter’s night. They left no footprints in the snow, but years later he learned that his Aunt Fay reported seeing similar figures, with whom she would play. Kirk’s eldest daughter, Monica, also saw these men. “Three generations had some sort of experience,” Kirk concluded. “One of the more pleasant ghost stories of the house.”
“Mine was not an Enlightened mind,” Kirk famously said of himself. “It was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”
Directed not by ideology, but rather a prudential anti-ideology – a disposition – Kirk’s pathways were sinuous. There is no single key, no one access point or unobstructed promontory to give way to his worldview. Instead he left many clues, often medieval in temper and structure. And for this we are fortunate. He saw the modern age with a time-traveler’s remove. He surveyed the world with idiosyncratic fascination, looking for lost connections between the timely and the timeless: the past, the present, and the future. In his writing, he was his own poltergeist or “rattling spirit,” making critical noise to remind us of lost ties and of the subterranean spirits of culture just below the rubble at our feet and the theories in our heads. With his own Third Eye, Kirk saw through the many false beliefs of the modern age: “The primary error of the Enlightenment,” he wrote, “was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism. But deprive man of St. Salvator,