IN January of 1993 Russell Kirk learned that he suffered from congestive
heart failure and, realist that he was, understood that his remaining time
was short. He took the news as no more and no less than an artifact of the
human condition, and in his last year and a half neither despaired in his
spirit nor flagged in his Herculean literary feats. After all, this was a
man who planted trees throughout his life as a symbol of our duty to strive
for good we may not live to see.

Well into his seventies, Dr. Kirk would canoe on the rivers of Mecosta
County or walk the hills of the Scottish Borders, only to sit down later at
his typewriter and engage in learned disputation. This past December 19, he
wrote me that "I fear that my days of canoeing and hillwalking are over,"
and then proceeded to outline a series of literary projects that daunted me
even in the reading. Since the onset of his illness, he had produced two of
his most important works: America's British Culture, a consummate defense of
our common patrimony against the destructive sallies of the
multiculturalists; and The Politics of Prudence, a series of essays
instructing the rising generation in the essence of conservative thought.

One month before his death, confined to bed, Russell Kirk prepared a second
edition of The Politics of Prudence (proudly published by ISI) and did the
same for a new edition of his first book, Randolph of Roanoke, now published
by Liberty Fund. In his final weeks, he prepared for publication a
particularly fine ISI lecture on natural law, which has just appeared in the
Notre Dame Law Review. He also edited the latest number of The
University Bookman, a quarterly review he founded over thirty years
ago.

Incredibly, Dr. Kirk continued as the active General Editor of Transaction
Publishers' Library of Conservative Thought, now comprising over thirty
volumes. During the last year, five of the volumes he had edited were
published, and an additional eight are to be released through 1995. In all
these projects he kept his several assistants famously busy. They were the
latest fellows at what will continue to be a Kirk Center for activities
literary, historical, and cultural at that most Kirkian of places, Piety
Hill.

His final literary gift to us is The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half
Century of Literary Conflict. This 874-page treasure of a manuscript is
currently being prepared for publication by Eerdmans and, according to Dr.
Kirk, is a memoir humbly penned in the tradition of Julius Caesar and Henry
Adams.

To those who know him principally as the scholar who inspired the
conservative intellectual movement, it may come as something of a surprise
to learn that Russell Kirk is even more widely read among the new generation
than he was among the formative generations of the conservative movement.
The Washington based Leadership Institute conducts an ongoing poll of its
young graduates, asking them to name one statesman or author they greatly
admire. Predictably, Ronald Reagan is first; not so predictably, Russell
Kirk is currently vying with Lady Thatcher for second-far outdistancing any
number of high-profile authors, radio personalities, and politicians. This
finding is confirmed by the fact that over the years Dr. Kirk has been the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute's most requested campus speaker and the
largest selling of the dozens of authors whose books are handled by ISI.

The influence he has exercised on more senior conservatives was evident at a
series of celebrations last fall honoring the 40th anniversary of The
Conservative Mind and the 75th birthday of its author. The special
Philadelphia Society session on his life's work, the ISI Fortieth
Anniversary Gala, and the birthday dinner given by Crisis magazine turned
out to be valedictory appearances.

During his last weeks, Dr. Kirk would gather his daughters around him to
tell stories of his youth and of their family history-as well as an
occasional Gothic tale. He mustered the energy to read aloud to his family
Scott's Tales of a Grandfather and, on his last Easter Sunday, Chesterton' s
Ballad of the White Horse. At the end, Dr. Kirk sat up in his bed at Piety
Hill, and sank back with eyes closed. As Annette went for the nurse, two of
his daughters took his hands and sang the songs he had sung to awaken them
from their childhood slumbers. He opened his eyes once more to their sweet
voices and then was gone. His life was gentle in the old sense; his death,
in all senses.

The final works and days of Russell Kirk were at one with his long life.
From across the ages the best minds of the West spoke to Dr. Kirk of
permanent things which eclipsed the paltry preoccupations of our time, and
he made those thinkers our contemporaries. It is across the ages that
Russell Kirk's own voice will be heard by future voyagers embarked on the
reflective journey toward order in the soul and order in the commonwealth.

PHOTO:Russell Kirk and his family

~~~~~~~~

By T. KENNETH CRIBB JR.
Mr. Cribb, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, was chief of
domestic affairs in the Reagan White House.

Copyright 1994 by National Review Inc. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of National Review Inc.

Cribb Jr., T., At the end, new beginnings.., Vol. 46, National Review, 06-13-1994, pp 59.