Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk.

• Author: Bradizza, Luigi
• Position: Book review

* Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk

Edited by James E. Person, Jr.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018.

Pp. 421. $39.95 cloth.

With this volume of Russell Kirk's letters, James E. Person Jr. fills a gap in our knowledge of Kirk. The letters collected here span nearly the full length of Kirk's adult life and are organized by decade, beginning in the 1940s. Person introduces each letter, helpfully setting each one in context. Unfortunately, few letters from the 1940s survive; those that do are for the most part written to Kirk's mother, Marjorie Kirk, and his friend William C. McCann. Subsequent decades are much better represented. Collectively, these letters give us a portrait of Kirk's character, his loves, his likes and dislikes, his development into a mature public intellectual, his political commitments, and the progress of his literary life. There are no surprises in these letters that would contradict the very strong impression communicated in his other works that he was a man of civility, decency, great intellectual seriousness, and deep cultural conservatism. The letters confirm him in these fine qualities while permitting us a closer look at his personality and daily life.

The early letters show us Kirk as first a spirited student (pp. 17-18) and then a soldier during World War II. Kirk never saw action; he remained stationed at Dugway, Utah. Moreover, he never participated in the antics of his fellows soldiers (pp. 29, 33). Thus, he escaped the war with his life and dignity intact. In place of either strife or merriment, Kirk offers us delightful sketches of the land around the base (pp. 24-28, 38). He was clearly a young man sensitive to beauty, including natural beauty.

As Kirk matured into his forties and beyond, he wrote to a broad range of people, and these letters are well represented. The letters likely to draw the reader's immediate interest are those written to public figures, including conservatives such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Henry Regnery, and Ray Bradbury. Kirk's letters to Eliot have a special note of respect and even deference (p. 83). His interest in Eliot culminated in the publication of Eliot and His Age in 1971. The letters to Buckley (addressed to "Dear Bill") offer us a window into what developed into a long and comfortable friendship. In Kirk's reply to one of Buckley's letters, we gain insight into Kirk's religious sensibilities. Asked to answer a series of questions...