The great American thinker and writer Russell Kirk (1918-1994) has been a powerful influence on American intellectual conservatism. Today the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan (Kirk’s ancestral home at Piety Hill) keeps his legacy alive.
Like many others, I regard Kirk as a hero and an exemplar. I first read his political writings and only much later discovered his well-regarded ghost stories and then finally his three novels. His first novel, the Old House of Fear was a surprise best seller in 1961 and was recently reprinted. Kirk’s two other novels, the 1966 ‘baroque romance’ A Creature of the Twilight and the 1979 ‘mystical romance’ Lord of the Hollow Dark were less commercially successful. Creature was never reprinted, while Hollow Dark was printed in a revised paperback edition in 1989.
Bestriding, like a colossus, the later two novels and two of his ghost stories is Kirk’s fictional character Manfred Arcane. Writing to Ray Bradbury in 1967, Kirk wrote “I think I’ve grown rather fond of Manfred Arcane, my picaresque hero.” In 1988 he answered in another letter “Manfred Arcane haunts me, urging me to bring him to life and to the attention of the public again.” In an introduction to a collection of stories, Kirk lamented that Manfred “insisted upon returning in the flesh and I had not the heart to say him nay.”
Who is Manfred Arcane? Using the details scattered through four of Kirk’s works of fiction, one can assemble a kind of biography. Arcane was born in Vienna, before the First World War and the fall of the Habsburgs. He was the bastard son of a British Army officer “among other things” (we later learn that his father was a Scottish laird with a dubious backstory) and a dark-haired gypsy dancer who was “born in the mountains south of Spalato (Split).” Despite his illegitimacy, he received a quality English education. At some point, he was “commissioned in the cavalry of a native prince in India.” He fought on the “illiberal” side in the Spanish Civil War. While one might say that both sides were illiberal, Kirk clearly means that the Arcane character fought for Francisco Franco, similar to someone like the real-life British soldier of fortune Peter Kemp.
Like Kemp, Arcane plays a colorful role in the Second World War, serving as a double agent for the British, using at times a Spanish passport, and working inside both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. At one point he is tortured by the Croatian fascist organization Ustache. He loses a beloved at the hands of the Gestapo. At another point he serves undercover in the Waffen-SS and meets up with troopers from the retreating Spanish Blue Division, the storied infantry unit Franco sent to fight against the communist hordes on the Eastern Front.
After the war, Arcane became “a European condottiere in Africa,” a soldier of fortune who served, among others, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Living in Rabat, he was sought out by the traditional ruler of Hamnegri, a Kirk concoction combining characteristics of Nigeria—oil rich with a Muslim north and Christian south—with North Africa—Francophone and mostly desert. Hamnegri’s medieval capital, Haggat, we are told, was “taken from the weary Spaniards three centuries ago.” As the French withdraw from their colonial empire, Arcane is recruited to serve as the Sultan’s Praetorian Guard, “Ali’s Richelieu, his Albornoz, his Gattamelata, his Wallenstein.” Arcane reported, “I have been a kind of mayor of the palace in one of the more turbulent African countries since a year or two after the Second World War ended.”
The first Arcane novel, A Creature of the Twilight, was written in a decade when Western mercenaries propping up regimes in Africa was a reality; this was the time of Mad Mike Hoare and Bob Denard, of Moïse Tshombe’s Katanga. Less well known were figures like the German Rolf Steiner, a former French Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Biafra and South Sudan. Kirk was an open critic of Western anti-colonial policies that abandoned African and other people to communist-led ‘national liberation movements.’ In 1962, he criticized the Kennedy Administration’s failure at the Bay of Pigs and the “insane policy” of “destroying the only anti-communist group in the Congo.” He derided “America meddling” in Rhodesia and Southwest Africa. Today Kirk would surely have mocked the Western ideologues who seek to abort African babies and pervert African mores in order to make the continent more amenable to the latest Western progressive fashions. Kirk expressed his contempt for those policies in his novels; non-aligned Hamnegri wisely uses its oil wealth to buy its weapons from Yugoslavia, avoiding both the American and Soviet yokes.
Kirk’s Hamnegri precedes other imaginary African states like John Updike’s Kush (in The Coup) and Lawrence Sanders’ Asante (The Tangent Objective and The Tangent Factor) by a decade. It is perhaps an offspring of Evelyn Waugh’s Ishmaelia in 1938’s Scoop. Like Scoop, the object of derision is less African than it is someone closer to home. Where Waugh used Africa to mock sensationalist Western journalism, Kirk used Africa to mock the naivete of American foreign policy and American progressive media in regards to Third World revolutionary regimes. In Hamnegri, Arcane and the reactionaries triumph over the Soviet, Egyptian, and American-supported leftist rebels. As in so many places, the rebels made promises to the gullible Americans that they broke while aligning with the Soviets.
A “somewhat English, somewhat Austrian, somewhat African grandee,” Arcane is a man of many disguises and identities. With a dark skin from his Romany mother and a gift for languages, he confesses to having passed for “Greek, Austrian, Egyptian, Algerian, U.S. colored gentleman, Turk, Spaniard, Sicilian, Liberian, Europeanized Abyssinian, Levantine Jew, Portuguese colonial, even Indian.” He is as much a spy as a soldier, this “knight of the devious ways,” who uses espionage, deception, and propaganda to achieve his ends.
Arcane’s mercenaries as described are a counter-revolutionary’s delight: Algerian Harkis recruited in Marseilles, pro-French native troops who lost in their country’s war of independence; exiled anti-communist Poles and Hungarians; former French and Spanish legionnaires. They are nicknamed “Arcane’s Lambs” or more pointedly, the “International Peace Volunteers,” a fine, progressive name for members of the reactionary Army of Legitimacy pitted against the Peoples’ Army of the Left. Arcane’s chief henchmen, the Spanish Blue Division veteran Pelayo Fuentes y Iturbide and the grim Hungarian Arpad Nemo, are vividly drawn.
Arcane, having commenced as a “brutal and licentious soldier” and as a man who has “done much evil” in his life, changes over time. He self-deprecatingly describes himself as “the pillar of righteousness that in recent years I’ve tried to become.” His victory in battle over the communists in Hamnegri is coupled with a return to the Church and the joyous domesticity of marriage.
In Lord of the Hollow Dark, Arcane the counter-revolutionary has become Arcane the fighter against supernatural evil. Already in two short stories, The Last God’s Dream and the Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion, Arcane encounters and overcomes the forces of darkness. Hollow Dark, a fine and sadly neglected novel reminiscent of Charles Williams’s supernatural thrillers, finds an older but still spry Arcane deep in Kirk’s beloved Scotland. Arcane must use all his skills—his deception, the leadership and assertiveness of “the most dangerous man in Africa,” and his faith—to overcome a demonic anti-human cult of Satanists. One of the Satanists exults that “the Khmer Rouge have pointed the way for us!” At one point Arcane admits that “the only means of resistance against these powers is prayer – at which the male members of our party are rusty.”
For today’s conservatives enduring the assaults of the constant neo-Jacobin revolution of today, the adventures of Arcane are seductively reactionary. The more wrong and out of kilter he would seem today by our political and literary maters, the more attractive he is, a man out of time who is a man for all time. The almost 60 years of contemporary history since this character first appeared between book covers have added a strange patina to these tales. Kirk’s Arcane was the literary successor of Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau, also a counter-revolutionary adventurer who fought Satanists. However, Arcane is more sensitively written. Kirk was a better writer, if less prolific, than the once massively popular Wheatley.
How much of Russell Kirk was in the character of Manfred Arcane? Some, perhaps, but there were so many other obvious real-life characters at hand that Kirk knew personally that he could have drawn from and who could contribute some traits to his greatest fictional creation. There was Kirk’s Scottish life-long friend, Major Ralph Christie of Durie House, “a “seeker after occult knowledge,” Otto von Habsburg, Roy Campbell, the Orientalist and soldier Sir Ronald Storrs, and many more. But when Arcane bemoans the destructive path of what “we call the devastation Progress” in which “like a torpedo, modernity benumbs us,” this is certainly the voice of Kirk speaking, Kirk the prophet.
