Kirk & Powell; the Ingersoll prizes.

KIRK & POWELL

The Ingersoll Prizes

CHICAGO. Late autumn. Weather uncharacteristically lovely. The mayor remains peculiar. City Council members complement him. The governor, who much prefers Chicago to Springfield, has begun to look longingly toward Washington. In the city, teachers are on strike, howling semiliterately on picket lines. The business community is edgy over tax-reform proposals. Christmas shoppers are out in record droves, with at least half the women in the world packing themselves into Marshall Field's, where males do not dare to tread. And the Chicago Bears, having won their division, proceed to fall into a protracted swoon, as all good Chicago teams do.

Meanwhile, against this backdrop, the prize committee of the Ingersoll Foundation held its annual banquet at the Ritz-Carlton to confer the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing on novelist Anthony Powell and the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters on philosopher Russell Kirk.

These two writers, as Leopold Tyrmand put it, "bring light to us.' One of them does so by "diagnosing the ulcers of vulgarity, cynicism, despair, and viciousness that dominate our awareness of our age, the other by chronicling them.'

The eloquent Mr. Tyrmand--vice president of the Rockford Institute and editor of Chronicles of Culture--goes on in one of those rolling series of which he is a master to describe the purpose of the awards: "What we wish to encourage, elevate, advance, is a style of cultural impulse, a style of social sensibility, a style of political thinking that safeguards the successful transmission of the most valuable imponderables from one historical formation to the next.' Or, to put it in Russell Kirk's words, to protect and pass on "the permanent things.'

The crowd at the awards banquet was somewhat smaller this year. The newcomers included Frank Gannon, a former associate of President Nixon who has undertaken to revive Saturday Review, and Andrei Navrozov, who has at least temporarily brought the Yale Literary Magazine back from the dead. The celebrated dancer Rebecca Feinstein attended again this year, as did Henry Regnery, who as publisher of Kirk's The Conservative Mind in 1953 could legitimately be called the founder of the feast.

Anthony Powell, who is 79, could not make the trip from England; his acceptance remarks--largely a lecture on the art and craft of fiction--were read by Robert Conquest. Powell, best known for his 12-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, is not widely read in the United States. His coevals were Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and George Orwell, and he shares certain of the idiosyncrasies common to this group. As one critic put it, "His books are very much an acquired taste for Americans.'

Russell Kirk, who gave a brisk and eloquent acceptance talk, needs little introduction to the readers of this magazine. Since 1953, he has been the author of some 25 books. But no book published in the past three decades has had a more profound social, cultural, and political effect than The Conservative Mind.

When it appeared, what passed for conservatism in the United States was fractured and adrift. The sea was littered with splinters--old America-Firsters, Taftites, McCarthyites--all floating in a variety of directions. Kirk's book --seen by many of its most perceptive critics as an attack on ideological fragmentation --helped change all that.

In his splendid autobiography, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, Henry Regnery sums it up: "It would be too much to say that the postwar conservative tradition began with the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, but it was this book that gave it its name, and, more important, coherence.'

It is that coherence, more than anything else, that has led to the current conservative revival. Kirk would no doubt take strong issue with certain actors in that revival--New Rightists, New Populists, neoconservative economic ideologists. As he put it in NATIONAL REVIEW's 25th-anniversary issue, what is needed is not "a politics of ideology' but "a politics of imagination,' rooted in ethics and culture.

Nevertheless, he remains one of the staunchest keepers of the flame. For that we all owe him a debt of gratitude, just as we owe a debt of gratitude to the Ingersoll Foundation for recognizing his central contribution to our nation. Last year it was Burnham and Borges, this year Kirk and Powell. Given the quality of the first four recipients, as the Chicago Tribune put it, "The Ingersoll Prizes seem certain to become one of the most significant awards on the literary-cultural landscape.'