The Surly Sullen Bell,  by Russell Kirk            back to April 2005

Fleet Publishing: New York, 1962

Well, then, yet another dimension to the conservative mind. Said Kirk : ". .. if I am asked whether I have ever perceived a ghost - why, I would be a poor dull creature if I hadn't, considering the places where I have gone and the stock I come from."  Why not ? If nothing else, it's a pencil in the eye of the secularist worshippers of Reason.

This collection of   "Ten Stories and Sketches, Uncanny or Uncomfortable" was published right in the middle of  The Twilight Zone's original 5 - year run ( 1959-1964) on television. The contemporary reader and television scholar (i.e., baby boomer) immediately senses a more-than-coincidental kinship between Kirk's stories and the Serling series, and is quite right. One concrete link between the two is in the person of Ray Bradbury, a regular Zone contributor and, as it happens, most excellent and special friend of Russell Kirk.  Bradbury didn't write all the Zone episodes, more's the pity, whereas Russell Kirk wrote all of Russell Kirk's stories.

Working through the math, the mean quality level of the Zone's writing is, not surprisingly, lower than that of the uniformly Kirkian Bell's. Russell Kirk was simply grand at whatever he did, and on the fiction side his Gothick revival novels and spectral short tales are first-class, every one. The pleasantly serendipitous finding of the comparison with The Twilight Zone is just how bloody good the television writing was.  Held up against the standard set by Kirk, the TV show does not come up miserably short, not at all.

Now, we know that Russell Kirk did not care at all for television, not the content and not the very idea of it. He refused to admit any such device to his home in Mecosta, Michigan, until very late in his life, and then only for screening recorded content.

I revere Kirk. I suppose that's why I feel so guilty when I find the closeted screenwriter in my belfry thinking through the TV adaptations of the ten uncanny or uncomfortable tales from The Surly Sullen Bell.  My guilt is assuaged by my confidence that in time Russell Kirk would have come around to accepting the notion that the television medium is no more than a conduit, one capable of distributing art of the highest order as well as  ordinary commercial drivel. I just don't know whether Kirk could have worked through this change of heart in a lifetime that included both his and mine.