Spartacus (4 page)

This is an account which clearly draws upon an accumulated reading of Latin or Latin-inspired narrative.
Fortuna belli,
the fortune of the battle, is too prominently placed in the paragraph to be mistaken; and even if the hastae or spears are not recognised, ‘this they could by no means achieve' is recognised for its unfamiliar syntax, even if not recognised as Latin. Retiring to a sleeping-room (S 112), fighting in a slave army which prepared to receive a Roman charge (S 150) and so on – the effect is immersion and participation through words used in a sense slightly or completely unfamiliar.

The weakness of the style is in repetition, occasionally injudicious reliance on one effect. Kleon is too often described as cold; Gershom strokes his beard irritably far too often; the violence and the chilling lack of pity finally can overcome reader squeamishness. On balance, however, the style works triumphantly. Narrow, brutal, shaped by forces beyond its control, continually threatened by sudden death or agonising retribution by a ruthless army of the Masters, the slave experience forming the totality of this narrative is caught with unpleasant but accurate focus. It was a desperate time – and Mitchell realistically recreates that desperation.

Subsequent history of
Spartacus

Even before Mitchell's death the novel had generated interest overseas, and on 5 December 1934 Ostredni Delincke of Prag signed a contract for translation rights into Czech; one royalty payment of January 1935 (£8.16.9) suggested a prompt advance, though no further moneys reached the family. The translation
Spartakus (V Prekladu Jos. Hrusi) V Praze (Krizovatky)
appeared in Prag in 1936, 265 pages, and a copy is listed in the Library of Congress. Some tentative interest in Swedish translations, along with tentative enquiries from the BBC in 1954 and 1956, came to nothing.

The beginning of the revival of interest in Mitchell's
Spartacus
can be traced to 1959 and the film. Jarrold considered but rejected a paperback reissue. Understandably, Mrs Mitchell's feelings were regretful:

Spartacus' reviews, those I have seen, have not been very exciting despite the number of stars in the film. Such a pity Leslie's ‘Spartacus' failed to win the imagination of a producer.
²⁴

The book had been considered once, by Sir George Archibald of Pinewood Studios, but was turned down as too large and requiring too expensive a cast. Thus, with the hardback out of print, the Jarrold Jackdaw paperback series ‘swamped out by the Penguins in 1937'
²⁵
and the film based on Howard Fast, Mitchell's
Spartacus
had to wait till 1970 for a reprint, and till 1989 for a new edition.

Today, though, the book's stature seems beyond doubt. Spartacus has been described as ‘Mitchell's most memorable character – and I include Chris Guthrie in this judgment',
²⁶
and Douglas Young praised the ‘simplicity and precision which convey the action and its meaning powerfully and clearly'.
²⁷
Even with fainter praise from other critics (‘too good . . . to be quite forgotten'
²⁸
) the book has remained in the public consciousness, a ‘haunting poetic idea',
²⁹
and particularly warmly greeted by Francis Russell Hart as a remarkable artistic advance.
³⁰
To Roderick Watson,
Spartacus
is ‘a fine historical novel, which shows his sympathy for the oppressed and the exploited'
³¹
and Cairns Craig has a suggestive discussion
³²
of the relation in Mitchell's mind between the 1926 General Strike and the Spartacist rebellion. Now, with the Scottish fiction and the short stories firmly restored to print,
³³
and a new edition of the
Quair
in the Canongate Classics, excellently introduced, with the Polygon reprints advancing towards a complete range of both Gibbon and Mitchell, the time is ripe for a wider perception of James Leslie Mitchell's talents.

Egyptologist and Diffusionist, fantasist and speculator, Marxist, Anarchist, Scottish and English novelist, Grassic Gibbon and Mitchell are assured of their place. Grassic Gibbon is now a Scottish author of the first rank; James Leslie Mitchell need not stand in his shadow.
Spartacus
is evidence enough of an extraordinary talent, of a biting consciousness of features of past society and life which are easily overlooked or sentimentalised, and of a committed political awareness of injustice and brutality whose message was by no means irrelevant to the 1930s. The clear message of the closing pages of Mitchell's novel is that the butchering of the slave leader by Crassus and his men by no means marks the end of the rebellion, any more than the ghastly crucifixions on the Appian Way broke the spirit of humankind in the search for justice and freedom. Spartacus survives its author's untimely death as a monument to a commitment to justice and freedom – both in the distant past and in James Leslie Mitchell's own world where the fight for justice and freedom was still being fought.

Notes

1
See below: Note on the Text.

2
Books are referred to according to the following code:
Scottish Scene
[with Hugh MacDiarmid] (London, 1934) ScS
A Scots Quair
(London, 1978 reprint) SQ
Spartacus
(London, 1933) S

3
The best treatment of Diffusionism will be found in Douglas Young's
Beyond the Sunset
(Aberdeen, 1973).

4
MS Edinburgh University Library: 18 November 1933. Further details of MS locations, particularly of the partially catalogued Mitchell holdings in Edinburgh University Library, are in ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon Correspondence: A Background and Checklist',
The Bibliotheck
12/2 (1984), pp. 46–57.

5
From his early school essay from Arbuthnott, ‘Power', reprinted in
A Scots Hairst
ed. I. S. Munro (London, 1967), p. 177.

6
Mrs R. Mitchell's account, quoted by Malcolm in
A Blasphemer and Reformer (Aberdeen,
1984), p. 116.

7
Plutarch's Lives
trans. B. Perrin (Loeb Classical Library) III (London, 1916), pp. 335–51.

8
Sallust
trans. J. C. Rolfe (London, 1921), pp. 65–7.

9
S. A. Cook, F. E. Adcock and M. P. Charlesworth,
Cambridge Ancient History
(Cambridge, 1932), IX, p. 332.

10
(London, 1855), II, p. 359.

11
Frank Marsh,
A History of the Roman World from 146 to 30 BC
(London, 1935), p. 145.

12
E.g. Paul Jal,
La guerre civile à Rome
(Paris, 1963), p. 20, and Robert Gunther,
Der Aufstand des Spartacus
(Köln, 1960), pp. 122–3.

13
See Malcolm p. 187.

14
Susannah Moodie,
Spartacus: A Roman Story
(London, 1822), pp. 7, 27.

15
Cambridge Ancient History
IX, p. 331.

16
H. Fast,
Spartacus
(New York, 1951), p. 51; (London, 1952), p. 38.

17
Fast p. 23; (London, 1952), p. 31.

18
Malcolm pp. 116–17.

19
K. Marx and F. Engels,
Correspondence 1846–95
ed. D. Torr (New York, 1934), p. 126.

20
R. Humphrey,
Georges Sorel, Prophet without Honor
(Cambridge, Mass., 1951), p. 192.

21
Bury, p. 118. Mitchell's copy bears the stamp of Central Education School, Zeitoun, Cairo no. 49.

22
Now in the editor's possession.

23
From ‘Literary Lights', ScS, p. 205. For further discussion see ‘The Grassic Gibbon Style' in eds. J. Schwend and H. W. Drescher,
Studies in Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century
(Scottish Studies no. 10) (Frankfurt and Bern, Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 271–87.

24
MS Edinburgh University Library. To Helen B. Cruickshank, 13 December 1960.

25
Rhea Mitchell to C. M. Grieve, MS Edinburgh University Library. 23 February 1937.

26
Malcolm p. 120.

27
Young p. 73.

28
M. Lindsay,
History of Scottish Literature
(London, 1977), p. 415.

29
D. Gifford,
Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon
(Edinburgh, 1983), p. 49.

30
F. R. Hart,
The Scottish Novel, A Critical Survey
(London, 1978), p. 231.

31
R. Watson,
The Literature of Scotland
(London, 1984), p. 386.

32
C. Craig,
The Modern Scottish Novel
(Edinburgh, 1999), p. 135.

33
The list includes
The Speak of the Mearns,
published in Edinburgh by Ramsay Head Press in 1982, and expanded and republished as
The Speak of the Mearns,
Ian Campbell and Jeremy Idle (Edinburgh, Polygon, 2001). The Scottish short stories are supplemented by Middle East ones and an important preface to them by Jeremy Idle.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The novel was typeset once for the Jarrold edition of 1933 (in the author's lifetime), and a second time for the Jarrold Jackdaw paperback reprint of 1937 – without the author's supervision, of course. In 1970 Hutchinson published a reprint, the text photographed from 1933. The textual history of the novel is thus, on the face of it, uncomplicated.

After Mitchell's death, however, Mrs Mitchell came across a complete typescript of
Spartacus
‘which Leslie [Mitchell] had typed here in Welwyn Garden City'
¹
– an interesting ambiguity which (as will shortly be seen) could be important. Presumably this is the typescript which survives among the Mitchell papers now in the custody of the National Library of Scotland. Mitchell was a quick, tidy and thoroughly businesslike worker, and the survival of a complete typescript is significant.

The Jackdaw came out by 17 February 1937
²
and did achieve some success – if we can trust the publishers' notalways-ingenuous annotation on the editor's copy listing it as being of the 42nd thousand. Likewise the 1970 reprint achieved some success, but by April 1978 Mrs Mitchell was sadly reporting to C. M. Grieve that poor sales meant that this edition, too, was shortly to be allowed to go out of print.

The next edition, of which this is an expansion and update, was in
The Scottish Classics
series of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, under the general editorship of David Robb.
Spartacus
was published in paperback form, no. 14 in the series, in 1990.

Why should a complete typescript of the novel survive among the author's papers? We know that Mitchell typed his own work – despite the astonishingly cheap rates he could find for occasional professional retyping
³
– but this is a fair copy retyping bearing none of the marks of the heat of first composition, but frequent changes of mind both in ink (in his hand) and in overtyping on the same machine. The ribbon was changed during the job, and there are instructions typed in to compositors which would have disappeared had the typescript been copy-edited in a publisher's hands.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, Mitchell typed a page of prefatory matter listing other works as follows:

Books by J. LESLIE MITCHELL published in America

Hanno – E P Dutton

Cairo Dawns

Three Go Back – Bobbs-Merrill

The Lost Trumpet

and under the nom-de-plume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Sunset Song – Century Co.

The clear implication is that Mitchell had typed up and kept a copy for the US market, should success in Britain warrant his trying-out the book on US publishers. This would be consistent with his wide experience of US publishers and his keen commercial sense. The fact that it remained in Mrs Mitchell's hands at his death suggests that the typescript (which appears to bear no marks of editing by any other hand) never left his desk. It does complicate the otherwise simple textual picture of
Spartacus
in ways which can be briefly described.

The published version (1933) includes some changes made by Mitchell on this new typescript (TS). TS p. 49 as an afterthought makes the phrase ‘Hating all Greeks' start a new paragraph, accepted by 1933. TS p. 69 superimposes the phrase ‘Now, he shouted aloud' on a much more complicated original version, and 1933 accepts this change.

This strongly suggests that the typescript was made before 1933 was published, and that the carbon was the basis for the typesetting at Jarrold. The top copy was thoughtfully retained for future submission to US publishers. Even apparent errors in the typescript appear in 1933 uncorrected.

However, the 1933 text has also had corrections made independent of the typescript. Mitchell typed ‘assailling' on TS p. 285, and the printer has corrected this (p. 240 of 1933) to ‘assailing'; and minor changes are made – for example, ‘pectorale' on p. 58 of TS becomes ‘breastplate' on p. 55 of the published text, and the tribune who is ‘killed' on TS p. 65 is ‘down' on p. 61 of the final text. The typescript is thus probably Mitchell's top copy of the final version the carbon of which went to Jarrold to be set in type, where it was edited and corrected. Had Mitchell lived, he would probably have marked those corrections on to the typescript and sent it on its way to the US for publication.

A comparison of this unique copy with the published 1933 text suggests few changes, though interesting ones. In the absence of proofs of 1933 (which do not seem to have survived), the text of this reprint is the 1933 version, as being overseen by the author – and without proofs we cannot tell which divergencies from the typescripts are Mitchell's, and which the publishers' own suggestions. The 1937 version, while catching some errors, offers no significant improvements and the 1970 version repeats the text of 1933 by photographic reprinting. In the present edition, obvious misprints have been silently corrected.