I first met Russell Amos Kirk in l984, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia. He had cheerfully consented to an interview about the history of American conservatism in the 1950s and 1960s generally and about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and its impact on “the conservative mind” of the early postwar era in particular. Kirk (1918–1994) behaved graciously, with a courtliness and generosity familiar to all those who knew the man. He invited me to lunch with him periodically during his visits to Washington, D.C., where he was regularly giving lectures at the Heritage Foundation.¹ Through his kind introductions, I also made the acquaintance of others who were attending the Heritage Foundation symposia, including several contributors to Modern Age.

This was my first contact with conservative intellectuals, and I was impressed by their mutual respect and support, their intellectual rigor, their openness and breadth of mind, and their strong sense of community. It was an unforgettable experience for a young scholar in his mid-20s. Soon thereafter, Kirk kindly invited me to write for the University Bookman—the other journal that he had founded (and which he continued to edit until his death in 1994).

I tape-recorded portions of my interviews with Russell Kirk, and I came across this material as I was completing a book to commemorate the centennial of Orwell’s birth in June 2003. So it occurred to me to share these memories of my encounter with Kirk two decades ago. They not only enrich our understanding of the historical connections between two great “books that changed the world”—Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953)—but also possess biographical value by providing fresh insight into the mind and temper of Kirk himself.

Before I met him, I had read and studied his work. To me as a young scholar, Kirk seemed the personification of the title of his first and best-known book: The Conservative Mind. By the early 1980s, when I began to interview him, he stood as the nation’s most profound and ardent student of historical conservatism. Since the publication of his seminal work, Kirk had devoted the greater part of his distinguished scholarly and literary career to exploring, chronicling, and explaining conservatism to the American public. That there had occurred a serious revival of intelligent conservatism in America was due, in part, to his work. The Conservative Mind identified a line of thought stretching back to eighteenth-century England and established conclusively that there was an intellectual tradition of Anglo-American conservatism.² By the time of Kirk’s death, The Conservative Mind had gone though seven editions. It was—and still is—widely considered the single most influential modern work addressing cultural conservatism.

In the spring of 1981, when he was still recovering from a heart attack a few months earlier, Kirk wrote to me about his years in postwar Britain as a doctoral candidate at St. Andrews University (1948–52) and his encounter with British conservatives and socialists.³ In a series of interviews with me in the 1980s, he declared that he credited Orwell with having been a key figure responsible for shifting Anglo-American intellectual opinion to the right, thereby creating a favorable climate for the reception of The Conservative Mind on its appearance in May 1953. Kirk placed that contention in the context of his remarks in Enemies of the Permanent Things (1969), where he had opened his Orwell chapter with a lavish claim for Orwell’s impact less than a decade after his death in January 1950 at the age of 46: “No novelist has exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion in Britain and America than Orwell.”⁴ Or as Kirk wrote in his essay, “The Path to Utopia,” collected in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (1956): “Orwell has been incalculably influential since his death in turning the minds of Englishmen against collectivistic utopias, more influential by far than he was when he lived.”⁵ In language that echoed, perhaps ironically, the criticism of some of Orwell’s fierce critics within the British New Left (especially E.P. Thompson),⁶ Kirk elaborated on that observation in our interview in March 1983:

That influence was, generally, a chastening one. Orwell was, in the mid-fifties, a dramatic force for turning people away from socialism and progressivism. This was a period of painful reflection for Americans who no longer believed left-wing ideas about the much-promised benefits of bigger government or the welfare state. Orwell’s disillusion with socialism assisted such reflections. He contributed very considerably to the abandonment of the call of progress in the West, whose results are not entirely fortunate.⁷

As Kirk had expressed it in The Conservative Mind: “Orwell succeeded in wakening the dread of the British and the American public against the conception of state socialism in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” ⁸

But Kirk also noted in another interview in 1983 that Orwell did not equate his critique of socialism with a new allegiance to conservatism:

In Orwell’s case, of course, many conservatives were happy to welcome a convert to the ranks. Orwell was not a conservative, but an anti-collectivist. Not all anti-collectivists are conservative. So it was with Orwell. There are, obviously, strongly traditional elements in his personality and his writings. Still, his general attitude was that of a socialist. Even if he subscribed to nothing resembling Soviet collectivism, he nevertheless did anticipate rather gloomily a future of equality as uniformity.⁹

Kirk went on to emphasize the postwar context in which both his and Orwell’s writings were received. Just a handful of significant contemporary conservative works existed: Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), the work of Nazi refugees Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951). It all seemed to bear out Lionel Trilling’s statement in The Liberal Imagination (1950) that there was virtually no intellectual expression of conservatism “in general circulation” at mid-century.¹⁰ Indeed, to most members of the Anglo-American intelligentsia, the collocation “conservative intellectuals” seemed like a contradiction in terms. Both in Britain and in America, there seemed to be no conservative movement in the early 1950s.¹¹

Acknowledging these historical facts in an interview in 1984, Kirk explained why he believed that Orwell’s work exerted such “dramatic force” on intellectual opinion in the mid-fifties. The renaissance of what would be hailed as “the new conservatism” in 1953 coincided with Kirk’s book on conservatism that spring and the BBC-TV adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in December 1954 (a program that reached millions of Britons and had the largest viewing audience of any BBC production up to that date). As Kirk later recalled:

Orwell’s influence was paramount around that time. No doubt his influence accounted in part for the favorable reception of my book. It was a period of sober reflection. The geopolitical picture had been heading in the wrong direction: What came out of World War II was nothing like the Federation of the World. People were foolish to expect that. I argued that we needed to take up conservative views once more and examine their spirit. That was made possible in part by Orwell’s influence. And Orwell’s great reputation among neo-liberals, like the Partisan Review circle and intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling, also set the climate and contributed favorably to my book’s good reception. In fact there were two reviews of mine in PR. Neither of them accepted my doctrines, but they were willing to talk about things.¹²

The germ of the substantial essay on Orwell in Enemies of the Permanent Things is traceable to an event that occurred almost two decades earlier: the Fall 1952 debate on Orwell at Michigan State between Elwood Lawrence and Kirk. Lawrence was a senior professor at Michigan State University and was in charge of the literary competitions there, which Kirk had often won when he was an undergraduate. Kirk had been living in Scotland in 1952; Lawrence was on an academic sabbatical in London and Kirk visited his house in Paddington.¹³

My friend Warren Fleischauer at Michigan State conceived a debate between us on Orwell. Lawrence was an American liberal who was enthusiastic about British socialism. That, of course, was a common position in 1950. Lawrence had gotten free health care under Britain’s new socialized medicine program, lived for a year in London, and had a great experience abroad. So he didn’t see anything really wrong with socialism. He very much resented Nineteen Eighty-Four as an attack upon socialism. I said that Orwell was a socialist only nominally. I argued that Nineteen Eighty-Four could indeed happen if the socialist mullahs triumphed throughout the world.¹⁴

The encounter did not have a happy ending for the two men’s personal relationship:

Lawrence was angered by the exchange ever after. He had been teaching an edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty with an introduction by me. And he had the students cut out my introduction! So I never really saw him after that.

Kirk also argued in the debate—as he later did in his 1956 essay—that conservatives in America and Britain were strongly sympathetic to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Brown, the Liberal M.P. from Belfort, came back around then [1952] from a visit to Poland and said that Poland is “Nineteen Eighty-Four realized.” In general, that was the attitude of many Britons and most Americans. As a result, there were persons who looked on Orwell as both a fierce anti-socialist and a thoroughgoing conservative because they were unacquainted with his previous writings and background. I suppose that the average American reader thought: “Now here’s someone who speaks up for American principles against communism.” It was that kind of naive attitude. Among persons of some education on the liberal-Left, the prevailing view was: “This is the true British socialist.” To them Orwell represented the socialist resistance to totali-tarianism.¹⁵

Observing that most Americans casually and erroneously conflated support for British Labour with socialism, Kirk added:

Most Americans failed to distinguish between Labour with a capital L and socialism. The relationship was always sort of tenuous. George Brown was a Labour man rather than a socialist per se. Orwell would have liked to have been a wholehearted Labour man, but he couldn’t be. He thought he was a socialist, but he wasn’t. He was always trying to make himself into a member of the working classes and failing to do so. I think of the episode in one of his essays, in which he is traveling around with the hop-pickers. He comes to a hostel to stay the night. There is a former sergeant-major in charge of the hostel for migrant laborers. The sergeant-major says, “You are a gentleman, aren’t you, sir?” Orwell says, “Yes, I went to public school.” “Oh, what a pity you’re in such circumstances; here, let me show you to a better bunk.” Orwell is furious at this because he wants to be taken as a man of the people and he can’t get away from being taken for a gentleman.¹⁶

Kirk was aware that British conservatives who had been familiar with Orwell’s work did not conceive him to be a conservative convert or a socialist heading toward conservatism. But American conservatives had generally been unfamiliar with Orwell until the publication of Animal Farm (1945): the majority of them thus regarded him as a disillusioned socialist; other American conservatives said that Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four turned away from socialism completely and was no longer a politically engaged man in any sense. Still others viewed his emphasis in Nineteen Eighty-Four on old books, nursery rhymes, and venerable London churches as an urge to embrace a version of conservatism, though he did not formally do it.

All these views differed from what Kirk held, which was that Orwell was indeed a socialist, but that socialism was a faith he could no longer believe in. He was a socialist “only nominally,” repeated Kirk.

Really it was a despairing form of socialism that he was finally led to. But most people were not clear on that. The average American reader knew nothing about the man… .¹⁷

Kirk considered Nineteen Eighty-Four not so much a warning but rather a reflection of Orwell’s own inner struggles and personal beliefs:

Orwell died, as many people do, of pulmonary diseases and the lack of will to live. The disease gains on those who really have no desire to go on…. He would be considered a disillusioned socialist or pessimist if you interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four as a direct statement of his belief. He said in a letter that he meant Nineteen Eighty-Four clearly as a warning about the dangers to which collectivism was leading…. I consider Nineteen Eighty-Four a veiled declaration of despair. The power behind INGSOC and the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is thoroughly diabolical. Orwell couldn’t admit that to himself because it was in conflict with his freely professed contempt for theology and reli-gion.¹⁸

Those thoughts elaborated an important contention in The Conservative Mind: “When faith in God, duty to family, hope of advancement, and satisfaction with one’s task have vanished from the routine of life, Big Brother remains.”¹⁹

Characterizing Orwell as a disillusioned prophet, Kirk elaborated on this theme soon thereafter in a commentary on the 1954 BBC-TV adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four upon public opinion goes far to refute the argument that ideas merely reflect the great social and material currents of an age. Orwell’s novel reflects his own disillusion. But his prophecies are of the order that create subsequent events. It has been said that Orwell influenced everyone except the people he wanted to move, the intellectuals of the Left, yet they too now are confessing the truth of his indictment. The BBC’s presentation of Nineteen Eighty-Four was generally commended by socialists…. Indeed, the only people who protested against the program were certain persons who felt that such disagreeable possibilities ought not to be discussed in public.²⁰

Orwell’s example and vision were much on Kirk’s mind in the mid-1980s, especially during the ballyhooed “countdown to 1984” in late 1983 and early 1984.²¹ Kirk averred that, although he admired Orwell strongly, he accepted that sharp political differences separated them. In an interview in March 1985, Kirk stressed his broad cultural, indeed spiritual, affinities with Orwell. He saw Orwell and himself as allies against the enemies of “the permanent things,” in his beloved phrase of T.S. Eliot’s. Kirk’s identification with Orwell did not lead him to minimize his ideological differences with Orwell: Kirk regarded Orwell as a socialist who ultimately, in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, lost hope in a worldly utopia yet harbored a longing for a transcendent order. In Enemies of the Permanent Things, Kirk had called Orwell “a Leftist by accident” whose socialism “scarcely can be called a position at all, but only an agonized leap in the dark, away from the pain of consolidated, uniform, industrialized modern existence.” Orwell was a “desperado, a man who has despaired of grace,” concluded Kirk, “because he could bring himself to believe in no enduring principles of order, or in an Authority transcending private rationality.”²²

In that same 1985 interview, Kirk— who had by then converted to Roman Catholicism—developed this argument in a new direction.²³ He argued that Orwell’s fiction revealed him to be “a closet believer”:

There was an argument that Orwell, in his later work, became a militant atheist. But that really meant that he was a closet believer. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he couldn’t admit the existence of a diabolical power since he couldn’t admit the existence of a beneficent divine power. He had to accept that some terrible force existed beyond man, which is driving people like O’Brien, a force that causes the destruction of the human personality. Orwell was really seeking God. Of course Orwell couldn’t profess it.²⁴

Kirk concluded: “I took up the other side of the coin, arguing that he accepts the existence of God by accepting the existence of a diabolical power.”²⁵

Conservatives such as Christopher Hollis, an Old Etonian classmate of Orwell and later a British M.P. and prominent Catholic convert, focused on Orwell’s intimations of divinity and incipient faith, which led them to pronounce Orwell a conservative and would-be believer, rather than a disillusioned socialist.²⁶ By contrast, Kirk discerned the demonic theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four and saw Orwell as a self-condemned pagan, a socialist in despair. He agreed with Hollis that Orwell wanted to believe, but held that Orwell’s skepticism proved stronger than his faith:

Orwell’s fascination with the demonic is reflected in his attitude toward the supernatural. In one of his letters, he describes drawing a sketch of a ghost in a churchyard. He recalls that he probably had a hallucination. I quote that in my preface to my new volume of ghost stories [ Watchers at the Strait Gate, 1984.]. I believe that it wasn’t necessarily a hallucination. But that was the explanation Orwell had to give himself. The only way he could account for that vivid experience was by saying it was a hallucination. That illustrates his yearning for the supernatural and his suppressed faith.²⁷

Kirk called this letter to the attention of Robert Aickman, the distinguished British ghost-story writer who had harshly reviewed Animal Farm in Horizon. Kirk recalled:

Aickman didn’t like Orwell at all. Aickman replied to my letter with a tart remark: “Well, Orwell is just the kind of person who would see a ghost.” Aickman, you see, who wrote all these uncanny stories, professed to be a complete materialist, and also didn’t believe in any divine power. His stories are intended to frighten, but also represent a kind of total disorder in which anything may happen. They symbolize the decay of British soci-ety.²⁸

Kirk said that there was an “evasiveness on Orwell’s part in coming to terms with religious faith,” as if (in Kirk’s words) he had secretly lamented: “Oh, how I wish the price were lower so I could subscribe!” He also noted that Orwell often expressed “a vicious contempt, even hatred, for Catholics.” Kirk attributed that antipathy to the British upper-class tradition in the boarding schools Orwell attended. “The schools were Anglican, in the sense of being against popery: Resist the wicked papists. Look with contempt upon the sinners, but with fear upon the papists.” Unlike Irish Catholic workers, noted Kirk, British Catholic intellectuals tended toward conservatism. “Catholic intellectuals are a far cry from the Irish proletarian Catholics of the cities. That gulf fueled Orwell’s contempt for Catholicism.”

Orwell was “especially vitriolic toward converts,” Kirk noted.

It was bad enough to be Catholic to begin with, but to convert to Catholicism! I wonder what Orwell would have thought of me! My conversion in 1964 was a long intellectual and emotional process that began in the mid-1940s…. I had written for Catholic magazines for a long time, so it was generally assumed that I was already a Catholic. I really did share their convictions. So I concluded: I might as well declare myself one.²⁹

Nonetheless, Kirk also noted that some of the people who were close to Orwell took rightward turns or even embraced religious faith—such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Arthur Koestler. Kirk speculated that Orwell might perhaps have changed in a similar way:

Koestler turned not to orthodox religion but to genuine religious mysticism. His political turn to quietism was connected with that. But I wonder if Orwell might not have been drawn like Muggeridge to religion. He was one of Orwell’s closest friends and was a socialist of sorts in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I know him well. He’s a gadfly, of course, and feared by some conservatives because of his unorthodox stands.³⁰

Kirk also drew a political comparison between Orwell and George Gissing, the nineteenth-century British novelist:

One reason I’m so interested in Orwell is that he and I have a Gissing root. Gissing was a socialist and became politically conservative. Orwell never went that far, but it’s the same trajectory.³¹

While drawing such comparisons, Kirk pointed out the dangers of anachronistic interpretation. Indeed, he remarked on the similarly politicized receptions of Edmund Burke and Orwell, both of whose work had suffered distortions and misinterpretation:

It’s an abuse of Burke to claim him for the Left, or certainly the far Left. And it’s an abuse of Orwell to claim him for the Right. But what complicates the case with Orwell, even more so than Burke, is that these interpretations are based not only on his straightforward writings, journalism, and essays, but on an interpretation of his novels. The tricky thing is to decide whether he himself is speaking directly through his protagonists or if he’s even speaking partly through them. That is very different from looking at Reflections on the Revolution in France and asking, “Is Burke sincere?” In Burke’s work, we’re not dealing with a fictional creation.

Let me give you one example. In Coming Up for Air, George Bowling is pretty much a mouthpiece for George Orwell. Critics on the Left insist that Orwell is mocking Bowling, that the emphasis on Bowling’s preoccupation with his childhood points up Bowling’s permanent adolescence. In other words, they insist it is a novel and that Orwell is no more George Bowling than Theodore Dreiser is Sister Carrie. But that seems unconvincing to me. Orwell wasn’t all that subtle; he was pretty direct in his fictional characterizations.³²

Kirk asserted that there was no significant change in the conservative image of Orwell in the 1960s and 1970s—nor in his own response to Orwell—unlike the case on the Left. ³³ Conservatives really were not looking at Orwell in relation to contemporary events as the Left was doing, Kirk noted. But on the Left—after Suez, certainly after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and even during the Vietnam War—Orwell was thought of as a revolutionary or a reactionary, “depending on which leftist you were talking to.”

On the Left a question that kept coming up again and again in the early 1980s was: “If Orwell were alive today, what would he say?” Not content to speculate in general terms about Orwell’s possible political and spiritual trajectory in the decades following his death, Kirk weighed in with his own quite specific prediction during an interview in 1983:

I think he would stand with the present Social Democratic Party—with Shirley Williams and her Liberal colleagues. In 1958, a Liberal Party platform proposed to base some of its policy proposals on Orwell’s image of the future.³⁴

Kirk considered it misguided, if not absurd, to link a political program to any utopian—let alone anti-utopian—notion about the future. Kirk was no believer in utopias or in futuristic blueprints for social betterment. As he wrote in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (1956) about Nineteen Eighty-Four: “How much courage does Winston Smith have in Nineteen Eighty-Four? The bravest act he performs is to drink to the past. He is living in a realized utopia, which like all realized utopias is hell upon earth. Against such a future as this our chief protection is knowledge of the past.”³⁵

Russell Kirk sought to safeguard the “Permanent Things”—the standards of proper conduct derived from revelation, tradition, and reason.³⁶ And though he and Orwell differed on the means, each of them took up his “sword of imagination.” Each of them fought that common enemy, the nightmare of anti-utopian utopian-ism, from whatever direction—right or left, past or future—that they perceived the threat to come.³⁷ Kirk recognized that he and Orwell were in that respect, however profound their political and spiritual differences, comrades-in-arms. Or as Kirk expressed it in Enemies of the Permanent Things:

In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Orwell’s was that [form of] radicalism which is angry with society because society has failed to provide men with the ancient norms of simple life— family, decency, and continuity…. Take him all in all, Orwell was a man, and there is none left in England like him.³⁸

1. Kirk’s lectures were collected in Reclaiming a Patrimony (1982). A second collection of lectures appeared in 1987. Kirk delivered four lectures annually at the Heritage Foundation during the early and mid-1980s.
2. Kirk’s influence on the direction of conservatism was felt throughout the early postwar era, with the publication of several more books on similar themes: A Program for Conservatives (1954), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (1957), Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (1967), Eliot and His Age (1971), and others. Before Kirk, conservatism and extremism were one and the same to most liberal intellectuals. The Conservative Mind made conservatism intellectually respectable.
3. Kirk wrote in his autobiography, The Sword of Imagination (1993): “The oldest university in northern Britain, St. Andrews conferred upon Kirk its highest arts degree—which was then held by only one other living scholar.” And later: “When Kirk returned to the US in August 1952, it was clear that the American electorate was turning conservative—even if most people entertained only a vague notion of what the word ‘conservative’ meant” (134, 139). Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, (Grand Rapids, Mich.,1995).
4. Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1969), 133.
5. Russell, Kirk, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (Chicago, 1956), 191.
6. See E.P. Thompson, “Outside the Whale,” in Out of Apathy (London, 1960).
7. Kirk, interview, March 16, 1983.
8. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 533.
9. Kirk, interview, February 10, 1983.
10. As Trilling wrote in the Liberal Imagination (1950): “It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation….The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
11. This is not to say, of course, that the Conservative Party in Britain or the Republican Party in the United States were not successful (nor even that conservative intellectuals such as Kirk did not prefer them to the alternatives)—but rather that they were not really “conservative” in the eyes of cultural conservatives. They did not “conserve,” did not consistently champion “the permanent things,” but rather supported (or at least colluded with) big business and the atheistic, secular trends of modernity. Kirk welcomed the re-election of Winston Churchill in 1951 (and the ouster of the British Labour Party); the Conservatives would remain in power until 1964. Moreover, although he was an advocate of Senator Robert Taft for the Republican Party nomination, Kirk supported the election of Eisenhower that November (and his 1956 re-election). But neither British Conservative nor American Republican leaders stood before cultural conservatives such as Kirk (or William F. Buckley and the National Review) as worthy tribunes for an authentic cultural conservatism. Not until Senator Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964 did American cultural conservatives have a standard bearer about whom they enthused—and not until Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election did they have a victorious one.
12. Partisan Review discussed the book at length in the review by Ralph Gilbert Ross, Vol. 20, No. 5 (1953): 568.
13. Elwood Lawrence was also the author of Henry George in the British Isles (1957), among other books.
14. In The Sword of Imagination, Kirk discusses his relationship to Warren Fleischauer, whom he met in 1941 and who became an English professor and colleague of Kirk at Michigan State College.
15. Kirk met the English trade union M.P. George Brown in autumn 1957, at a conference on promoting North Atlantic cooperation in Bruges, Belgium, attended by political scientists, journalists, civic leaders, and men of business.
16. Kirk, interview, February 10, 1983.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 536.
20. Kirk, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, 193.
21. The same was true for other Modern Age contributors. See for instance, Arthur Eckstein, “1984 and George Orwell’s Other View of Capitalism,” Modern Age, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Winter, 1985); and Leslie Mellichamp, “George Orwell: Terrible ‘Simplificateur,’” Modern Age, Vol. 28, No.s 2/3 (Spring/Summer, 1984), 121.
22. Enemies of the Permanent Things, 139.
23. Kirk converted to Catholicism in 1964, the year he married Annette Courtemanche. They had met in New York in 1960, when she, then a nineteen-year-old student at Molloy College, a Catholic institution for women on Long Island, appeared on a panel devoted to one of his books, The American Cause, at a conservative conference.
24. Kirk, interview, March 22, 1985.
25. Ibid.
26. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (London, 1956). Hollis reviewed Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought (Chicago, 1951) in the London Tablet, which brought Kirk to the attention of some of the most influential Catholic thinkers in Britain.
27. Kirk, interview, March 22, 1985.
28. Ibid. Before his death, Robert Aickman (1914–81) was generally deemed the most accomplished writer of classic supernatural tales in English. Aickman’s “strange stories”—his preferred term—are not the ghost stories of an antiquary, but rather enigmatic, disorienting spiritual journeys. Kirk himself wrote two Gothic novels: Watchers at the Strait Gate: Mystical Tales (1984) and The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky (1987). He also penned The Princess of All Lands, a science fiction collection, along with a number of works of mystery, suspense, and fantasy in publications such as the London Mystery Magazine and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
    Orwell and Kirk shared common ground here: Orwell’s interest in the “demonic” or supernatural bears some affinities with Kirk’s fascination with the Gothic tradition. The resemblance manifested itself in the two men’s enthusiasm for popular culture: Kirk’s popular fiction and Orwell’s popular culture criticism reflected similarities of temperament, vision, and values. Both men appreciated high culture but were not “spooked” by lower culture.
29. Kirk, interview, March 22, 1985.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. Or, as Kirk wrote in The Sword of Imagination: “Kirk had a hand, along with a larger hand of George Orwell, in bringing about fresh attention to George Gissing. In 1950, Kirk published an essay on Gissing and talked of writing a life of Gissing.”
32. Kirk, interview, March 22, 1985.
33. See Leslie Mellichamp, “George Orwell and the Ethics of Revolutionary Politics,” Modern Age, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1965), 272.
34. Kirk, interview, February 10, 1983. Kirk was speaking in the interview at a short-lived moment of possible political realignment in Britain. But the Social Democratic Party soon disintegrated after shocking British political observers in the early l980s. In December 1981, a Gallup survey placed support for the Liberal-SDP alliance at more than 50 per cent, with the Conservatives and Labour languishing behind at 23 percent each. By 1987, the SPD had died, and its leaders (including Shirley Williams) had moved on.
35. Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (Chicago, 1956), 186.
36. Religion, in Kirk’s view, is the very basis of culture, and civilization. When Richard Nixon asked him in the late 1960s to recommend him one book to read which might throw light on modernity’s disorders, Kirk recommended T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
37. Although staunchly conservative throughout his life, Kirk never endorsed the radical Right. He once called Robert Welch, founder of the right-wing John Birch Society, a “likeable, honest, courageous, energetic man” who nevertheless was “the kiss of death” for the conservative cause because of his “silliness and injustice of utterance.”
    Both Orwell and Kirk were fiercely independent. Just as Orwell defended socialism from Stalin and his apologists, Kirk resisted McCarthyism. When Senator McCarthy’s activities were treated as the work of a conservative, Kirk demurred, arguing that conservatism was a coherent tradition that predated anti-Communism. Kirk, like Orwell, was an intellectual outsider who scrutinized his own side as vigorously as he attacked his ideological foes.
38. Enemies of the Permanent Things, 133. Kirk even used Orwell to defend Eliot against charges of anti-Semitism. Kirk admitted that Eliot was insensitive when he referred slightingly to “free-thinking Jews” in After Strange Gods (1934). But he argued that Eliot himself disavowed both anti-Semitic intent and the book itself. (Eliot never reissued After Strange Gods after its first edition and denied permission of any writer or publisher seeking to quote from it.) Kirk quotes a letter from Orwell to Julian Symons (October 29, 1948): “In the early ‘twenties, Eliot’s anti-Semitic remarks were about on par with the automatic sneer one casts at Anglo-Indian colonels in boarding houses. On the other hand, if they had been written after the [Nazi] persecutions began, they would have meant something quite different….” Kirk, Eliot and His Age (New York: Random House, 1972).