INTRODUCTION

The author

James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) was born in Auchterless in Aberdeenshire in 1901, grew up in the Mearns he was to immortalise in Sunset Song (1932), then early moved to the Scottish cities for a life of largely hated journalism in Aberdeen then in Glasgow. Failure here, compounded by the Depression years, made work impossible to find and he enlisted in the armed services, working in England and in the Middle East before settling to marriage and civilian life in London, and finally in Welwyn Garden City where he enjoyed a few years of amazingly productive authorship before his sudden death through stomach trouble in February 1935. He left behind a widow and two young children; he left also a growing reputation as a major Scottish novelist whose work, crammed into these last years, was only beginning to be appreciated when death removed him from the Scottish scene. His true critical place is still being debated, though his importance is now not in question; today he is seen as one of the major figures of the renaissance in Scottish writing of the present century.

A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, 1932; Cloud Howe, 1933; and Grey Granite, 1934) is his single most remembered work, now famous through repeated republication, television serialisation and teaching at school and university. Spartacus (1933) was to take longer to catch fire in the public imagination; and though it is repeatedly mentioned by Mitchell’s critics in respectful tones, it has been largely out of print since the author’s death and has been overcast by Howard Fast’s better-known recreation of the Spartacist slave rebellion chosen by Hollywood for the celebrated film Spartacus. The present reprint, one of several in the last decade, is part of the process of correcting the picture of a ‘one-book’ author, for few so little fit that description as the astonishingly prolific James Leslie Mitchell. Under his Scottish pseudonym of ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ he made A Scots Quair public property and established it as a Scottish classic; under his own name, which he reserved for a different kind of publication (and for the pleasure of reviewing his own work – often favourably) he published history, archaeology, and accounts of exploration. As Mitchell or as Gibbon, he well merits the revival of interest he is now enjoying. His science fiction (Three Go Back, Gay Hunter), his books of archaeological discovery and argument (The Last of the Maya, Nine Against the Unknown, Hanno or the Future of Exploration) and his short stories alone entitle him to serious consideration, along with his other Scottish writing (The Thirteenth Disciple, Stained Radiance) which has until lately been all but unavailable outside a few libraries and a very few expensive specialist bookshops.1 The Polygon reprints are at last changing this situation, and it is encouraging that the Grassic Gibbon centre in Arbuthnott is the scene of vigorous debate and display and, more recently, dramatisation.

The ‘Mitchell’ books reflected a serious interest in history, social history and anthropology which predated Mitchell’s army and air force years, but which was fuelled by his army and air force service in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. A committed Marxist and implacably hostile observer of the Scottish and British social and political scene, he found a natural attraction in the story of the Spartacist rebellion:

When I hear or read of a dog tortured to death, very vilely and foully, or some old horse driven to a broken back down a hill with an overloaded cart of corn, of rats captured and tormented with red-hot pokers in bothies, I have a shudder of disgust. But these things do not move me too deeply, not as the fate of the old-time Cameronian prisoners over there, three miles away in Dunnottar; not as the face of that ragged tramp who went by this afternoon; not as the crucifixion of the Spartacist slaves along the Appian Way. To me it is inconceivable that sincere and honest men should go outside the range of their own species with gifts of pity and angry compassion and rage when there is horror and dread among humankind. (ScS 304).2

As ‘blasphemer and reformer’ (his own terms, skilfully used by W. K. Malcolm in his analysis of Mitchell) he was to produce in Spartacus a telling indictment of men’s inhumanity to those over whom they had total control – and the authorial disgust at such inhumanity pulses through every page of Spartacus.

‘Diffusionism’ in Mitchell needs to be understood for the reader to make sense of Sunset Song’s standing stones, the decadent Aberdeen of Grey Granite, the pre-lapsarian society of Three Go Back – and the Roman civilisation of Spartacus. Although clumsily titled, it is not really a difficult system to grasp. To the Diffusionist, civilisation is a slow curse, overtaking originally free and happy humanity from the Egyptian pyramid-builders onwards, bringing settlement, culture – and property, compulsion, war, tyranny, religion, mental enslavement. To Mitchell (and to his contemporary and friend MacDiarmid), civilisation was a blight, with its nadir evident in the Depression which they saw all around them and which Mitchell remembered vividly from his Glasgow years in the slums. Ewan in Grey Granite, wandering the streets of Aberdeen in the summer heat and taking refuge in the clean marble halls of the Art Gallery, embodies much of his author’s fastidious distaste for the Depression and its horrors:

There was a cast of Trajan, good head; Caesar – the Caesar they said wasn’t Caesar. Why not a head of Spartacus? Or a plaque of the dripping line of crosses that manned the Appian Way with slaves – dripping and falling to bits through long months, they took days to die, torn by wild beasts. Or a statuary group of a Roman slave being fed to fishes, alive in a pool . . . (SQ 406–7)

If this was civilisation, plainly Mitchell wanted little to do with it. Yet his creative imagination, uncomfortably enough (for much of his work is uncomfortably full of pain and suffering), could not leave it alone. The Spartacist rebellion was plainly a subject for a historical novel he could use as a trenchant commentary on his times.3

Spartacus

When he began to research the background to his 1933 novel, Mitchell was in his thirties, modestly successful, rising to a small house, a small family, a small car, and easy access to the British Museum and the London world of publishers and magazines. He had come from a poor home and lived through hard times – both points which were to give pungency to his Scottish novels at a time when sugar-coated pictures of Scotland had their devotees – and he relished the opportunity to use his time to look at books, historical sources, and write the kind of book his imagination impelled him to work on.

His anger fuelled his interest. As he wrote to Helen Cruickshank in November, 1933:

I am so horrified by all our dirty little cruelties and bestialities that I would feel the lowest type of skunk if I don’t shout the horror of them from the house-tops. Of course I shout too loudly. But the filthy conspiracy of silence there was in the past!4

Art galleries of pleasingly innocuous antiquity did little to damp that anger, and the historical reading he did for Spartacus intensified it. A view of the past which allowed for aesthetic satisfaction in the achievements of Greece and Rome, without making room for the dripping crosses of the Appian Way, was plainly not for him. From his earliest preserved school essays, he had been fascinated by the powerful leaders of the mass movements of history, by the power of individuals, by charismatic leadership, by mesmerism; by the power of writing, too, to blur earthly definitions and to transform the commonplace to ‘the wild dream of the German poet: “There is no beginning – yea, even as there is no end!”’5 The element of irrationality so strong in his version of the Spartacus story is perceptible in this view of history and the power of its leaders; early on described as a slave malleable in the hands of the literatus Kleon, Spartacus moves with maturity to a terrible power of his own beyond reason, beyond beginning and end – indeed, the very last paragraph of Mitchell’s story implies a circularity as the dead Spartacus and the as-yet unborn Christ combine in the agonised Kleon’s death vision.

The origin of the story came in research; from Appian, from Plutarch and from Sallust, the work of reading divided between husband and wife, bolstered by visits to the British Museum.6

Plutarch’s Life of Crassus is plainly the central source,7 providing as it does the following skeleton of events and character:

•Capua’s garrison is overcome.

•Clodius with 3,000 troops is defeated.

•Publius Varinus enters the story: his deputy Furius is routed (with 2,000 men) as is Cossinus (surprised by Spartacus), then Varinus himself.

•Spartacus seizes Furius’ horse. In an interval of poorer luck Gellius falls on a slave contingent (Crixus’ army in Spartacus) and destroys it.

•Lentulus and Gellius are then defeated by Spartacus, who sets off for the Alps, where he confronts and defeats Cassius and his 10,000 Romans.

•Crassus appointed by Senate; despatches Mummius, who disobeys orders, engages with Spartacus, and is routed.

•Crassus, decimating the survivors, establishes firm leadership while Spartacus heads South for Lucania and the sea; bargains with pirates but is betrayed by them.

•Spartacus camps in Rhegium; Crassus walls the slaves in with dyke and ditch; dissension in slave camp.

•Crassus begins to fear Pompey’s return which would steal his thunder; meanwhile Spartacus escapes with one third of his army through Crassus’ wall. The slaves, internally riven and weakened by desertion, are beaten once and head for the mountains, then beaten again at Lucania; Spartacus is slaughtered while trying to reach and kill Crassus.

With additions and modifications from Appian and Sallust, this is to be the groundplan of Mitchell’s plot for Spartacus. Sallust, for instance,8 gave him a keener insight into the relevance of the Spartacist rebellion to the machinations of the Roman Senate and its internal politics; the clash between Pompey and Crassus is an important off-stage element in the historical account. Appian provided a number of striking details which obviously appealed to the novelist’s imagination:

•The Mount Vesuvius details.

•The names of Oenomaus and Crixus.

•The sacrifice of Roman prisoners in memory of Crixus.

•The near-attack on Rome (not in Plutarch) inexplicably abandoned.

Appian’s description of breaking out of Crassus’ trap in Rhegium is full and vigorous. His description of the final battle which cost Spartacus his life is so vivid that Mitchell incorporates it in direct quotation at the climax of his own battle description:

AND SPARTACUS MADE HIS WAY TOWARDS CRASSUS HIMSELF THROUGH MANY MEN, AND INFLICTING MANY WOUNDS; BUT HE DID NOT SUCCEED IN REACHING CRASSUS, THOUGH HE ENGAGED AND KILLED TWO CENTURIONS. AND AT LAST, AFTER THOSE ABOUT HIM HAD FLED, HE KEPT HIS GROUND, AND, BEING SURROUNDED BY A GREAT NUMBER, HE FOUGHT TILL HE WAS CUT DOWN.

Flexibly but skilfully, Mitchell takes what he wants from each source, altering, tailoring; Plutarch has Spartacus kill his superb white stallion for ‘if they lost . . . he would have no need of a horse again’ (S 281). The horse is there in Plutarch but not as the property of Furius. The white stallion and the superb gladiator seemed to need to be introduced earlier in the book for artistic urgency, and Mitchell simply moved them forward.

The larger context, the impact of the slave revolt of 73–71 BC on the volatile state of Roman politics, is very much present in the Latin sources, and very much absent in Mitchell’s account. Mitchell’s sympathies focus on the suffering slave, the human injustice, not on the cultured or sophisticated arguments of the Roman Senate. Not so the orthodox historians: the Cambridge Ancient History, which was published just as he was collecting his sources, saw Spartacus in quite a different light:

Like Eunus and Salvius, Spartacus is a tragic figure, but the significance of his career is small . . . the most notable legacy of the affair was its results on Pompey and Crassus.9

Liddell’s History of Rome (1858), a standard source-book Mitchell can be expected to have consulted, describes Spartacus’ revolt as ‘a formidable outbreak that took place in the heart of Italy, and threatened for a time the very existence of the Republic’,10 yet finds room for scarcely two pages of description in a book of over 720 pages – much of them devoted to the wider implications of Roman politics. Likewise Frank Marsh’s A History of the Roman World, to be published in 1935, devotes one single page out of almost 500 to a revolt which is not interesting so much for itself, as for its consequences:

Rome might have breathed freely again had it not been for the fact that there were now in Italy two generals of somewhat uncertain convictions at the head of victorious armies.11

Examples could be multiplied of the Spartacist rebellion assuming different shape according to the viewpoint of the observer. European observers can be cited discussing the effect on the larger shape of Italian politics12 of the effect on the thinking of the future ‘Spartakusbund’ activists, whose most famous representatives were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.13 As individual hero, as leader of a significant political rebellion, as potential destabiliser of Rome, and as inspiration for future class struggle, Spartacus plainly is important.

Mitchell’s treatment

Clearly, Mitchell chose to write about a rebellion. Already we have seen his hostility towards a conspiracy which would make of history a cosy and unchallenging account of the past, and there is nothing at all about his version of the events of 73–71 BC which is relaxing. The inspiration of the novel is the enormous impetus given to the pent-up rebellious instincts of the slave class in Italy by the towering and charismatic leader in Spartacus the historical personality.

The plot starts with rebellion, if not with its ultimate leader. The plot has little to do with the events after Spartacus’ own death, except to record in its sickening detail Rome’s public revenge. The emphasis in the original historical sources is simply omitted; strict concentration on the rebellion itself is clearly the artistic intention of Spartacus.

The narrowness of Mitchell’s treatment is extraordinary when the novel is finished and the reader reflects. By the invention and retention of the character of Kleon throughout the narrative – Kleon anticipates Spartacus and survives him, narrowly – Mitchell is released from any obligations to provide a wider contextual framework in order to make sense of the rebellion. Kleon makes sense, sense enough for his own narrow intentions and sense enough to interpret a savage, over-simplified society to the reader. The unimpassioned account of a mutilated former slave is the ideal narrative vehicle for the passionate and often repulsive material of the story. Not for Mitchell the unctuous Spartacus of Susannah Moodie, refusing to embrace his child with speeches such as this:

‘Never, Elia, shall my arms embrace my child, till I am free. Thou canst pierce through the dark veil of futurity; how will the morning sun shine for Spartacus? Will it gleam upon my blackening corse, or gild my victorious arms?’

We need no prophet to tell us the outcome for Spartacus, admirable though many of the sentiments with which Susannah Moodie invests him may be. Her Spartacus is unfitted for a world where, when he enters the arena,

his eye glanced round the gay assembly, with a look fraught with contempt and hatred. ‘Is it possible,’ thought Spartacus, ‘that man can come, with light and joyous heart, to witness the sufferings of his fellowmen?’14

Mitchell’s hero, toughened by early hardship and unburdened by ideals plainly directed from author to audience over the character’s head, accepts survival, sexual gratification, and fierce hatred and loyalty as unquestioning motives,

memories dreadful and unforgivable, memories of long treks in the slave-gangs from their native lands, memories of the naked sale, with painted feet, from the steps of windy ergastula, memories of cruelties cold-hearted and bloody, of women raped or fed to fish to amuse the Masters from their lethargy, of children sold as they came from the womb, of the breeding-kens of the north, where the slaves were mated like cattle, with the Masters standing by. (S 97)

Spartacus here is much closer to Ewan and his angry rejection of the art gallery. Ewan’s anger and Mitchell’s coalesce in Grey Granite in that art gallery visit:

Why did they never immortalize in stone a scene from the Athenian justice-courts – a slave being ritually, unnecessarily tortured before he could legally act as a witness? Or a baby exposed to die in a jar – hundreds every year in the streets of Athens, it went on all day, the little kids wailing and crying and crying as the hot sun rose and they scorched in the jars; and then their mouths dried up, they just weeked and whimpered, they generally died by dark. (SQ 406)

Out of such anger, Spartacus’ narrow focus of hatred and ambition for success in the rebellion grows and achieves authenticity.

Mitchell skilfully does make some contact possible with an outside world which is beyond this immediate artistic interest. Gershom ben Sanballat comes in frustration to follow a leader whom ethnically he despises, since no better may be found. Crixus and Castus plainly follow Spartacus from a mixture of personal loyalty and sexual attraction. Even Kleon, mutilated beyond normal passion and anger, feels irrational loyalty beyond self-preservation to a barbarian he first thought he could manipulate, but finally saw he must follow to the death. Mitchell includes these outside contacts and occasionally replenishes them with new characters, but only very sparingly.

One really significant omission is the Romans – the Masters, as they are universally called here. Masters they are to the slaves, and Masters they are to the reader who never approaches them closer than the understanding of the slave army or the superior intelligence of Kleon. Glimpsed in the gathering dusk or in the distant dust-cloud, occasionally eavesdropped on in council or Senate discussion, the Romans remain in Mitchell’s novel a satisfactory enigma, not understood and therefore totally hated. In isolating the reader from the Roman lifestyle, which might encourage identification (and worse still, sympathy) in the modern reader, Mitchell compels sympathy with the barbarous and alien lifestyle of the slave army.

Barbarous the action certainly is. When Crassus the Lean finds his orders disobeyed, the Cambridge Ancient History wryly notes he found his relief in

decimating an unsteady cohort – with the most beneficent results to the morale of the remainder.15

Mitchell’s account of the episode laconically conveys not only the punishment but the complete lack of surprise or sympathy such a punishment might arouse:

When Crassus heard this, the face of the Dives went livid with anger. He commanded that the hundred men of the velites be decimated. Then the whole army stirred at the shouted orders of the tribunes and marched north on the slave-camp. (S 209)

It was the norm of life in the army. The death of one man in ten was hardly worth commenting on: ordinary army discipline. This calculated tight-lipped description of cruelty cumulatively does much to transmit the horror Mitchell obviously felt at the circumstances surrounding the rebellion, and the society which bred it. ‘Bring Cossinus’ head’, orders Spartacus at one point, ‘and Itul the Iberian hewed it from the trunk which his club had mangled, and brought it dripping’(S 93). No comment is required for an emotion doubtless no one felt.

The slaves implored the Gauls to free them. They were manacled one to the other, and when they were discovered with their overseer slain they would undoubtedly be crucified, as a warning to other slaves.

The Gauls listened and were moved a little. But they had no time to unmanacle the gang, and the slaves of it would encumber the scouts. So they left them, hearing their cries for long as they rode round the shoulder of the hill. (S 204–5)

Laconically, Mitchell tidies up the episode a few pages later:

They passed by the field where the ten chained slaves had watched the Gauls of Titul slay the overseer. Ten shapes lay very quiet there now: already the spot was a-caw and a-crow with ravens. Gershom glanced at it indifferently. (S 212)

In catching hardened indifference to suffering, torture and death Mitchell cleverly implants in the reader’s mind the ability to see the events of the novel, people and places, with the artificiality of a narrow slave perspective. Excitement is possible, no doubt, the excitement of personal loyalty to Spartacus, excitement of winning a battle over the Masters, even the thrill of seeing Rome,

at noon, from the Campagna, from the Sabine Hills, shining below them, Mons Cispius crowned with trees and the longroofed Doric temples, Mons Oppius shelving tenement-laden into the sunrise’s place, Mons Palatinus splendid with villas, fading into a sun-haze mist where the land fell . . . Aventine lay south, and north, highcrowned, the Capitoline Hill. Rome! (S194)

Yet the greater part of the book is calculatedly barren of excitement, barren of emotion, whether in the reactions of the mutilated Kleon, the enigmatic Spartacus, or the hardened slaves themselves.

The extent of Mitchell’s calculatedly narrowed vision is seen easily enough in a comparison with Howard Fast’s Spartacus of 1951 (source of Rank’s 1959 film starring Kirk Douglas). Fast implants the story within the Roman society of the time, with flashback and forward through the experience of Crassus, Gracchus, Cicero and a young pleasure-seeking aristocratic Roman circle. Fast’s narrative has its own harrowing moments: a vivid insight into the early years as a slave in the Egyptian mines which Spartacus was lucky to survive; a dreadful description of the crucifixion scenes on the Appian Way. Perhaps Fast’s most vivid achievement is to realise, in a low-key way, the full horror of being a slave, in scenes underplayed skilfully as follows:

The litter-bearers, weary from all the miles they had come, sweating, crouched beside their burdens and shivered in the evening coolness. Now their lean bodies were animal-like in weariness, and their muscles quivered with the pain of exhaustion, even as an animal’s does. No one looked at them, no one noticed them, no one attended them. The five men, the three women and the two children went into the house, and still the litter-bearers crouched by the litters, waiting. Now one of them, a lad of no more than twenty, began to sob, more and more uncontrollably; but the others paid no attention to him. They remained there at least twenty minutes before a slave came to them and led them off to the barracks where they would have food and shelter for the night.16

To describe reality with as little emotion as this is to suggest powerfully the Romans’ contempt for the slaves as human beings, and their simple indifference to them. Indifference is something Mitchell and Fast both attribute to the Romans, Fast in a splendid aside attributed to Brutus waving a hand at the slave-crosses on the Appian Way, their troops’ handiwork:

Did you want it to be genteel? That’s their work. My manciple crucified eight hundred of them. They’re not nice; they’re tough and hard and murderous.17

Like Fast, Arthur Koestler in The Gladiators (1939) looks at Rome as well as at the slave camp, and produces a novel of interplay in a way which Mitchell simply is not interested in doing. Koestler’s Rome is a city of intrigue and strife and plotting, a city where interesting and often clever Romans intrigue for mixed motives, sharing a common humanity with a casual disregard for the welfare of their fellows, slave and free. Koestler produces (in William K. Malcolm’s words) a novel ‘more exacting in its psychological and economic analysis of the historical situation’,18 but the epic qualities of the story are sacrificed to that complexity.

This is a key to Mitchell’s success. Through savage concentration on the slave camp, with perhaps a moment’s eavesdropping or one glimpse of a sunny city from a distant hillside, he suggests the world of Rome without seriously attempting to penetrate it. Mitchell’s interest is in the rebellion, in the possibilities of rebellion to remedy society’s injustices. He would have shared Karl Marx’s admiration for Spartacus since he would have shared the grounds on which that admiration was accorded:

Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representation of the ancient proletariat.

Pompeius, reiner Scheisskerl: got his undeserved fame by snatching the credit . . .19

In the leader of a great rebellion, Marx finds his great historical figure; history will work out its processes, for ‘he who composes a programme for the future is a reactionary’20 and Spartacus comes at the historical moment to exploit a weakness in the system. Mitchell admired Marx and his writings, and he also possessed, closer to home, an analysis of the world of classical antiquity which doubtless hammered home to him the importance of the right struggle at the right historical moment:

The existence of household slaves, generally war-captives, such as we meet in Homer, was an innocent institution which would never have had serious results; but the new organised slave-system which began in the seventh century BC was destined to prove one of the most fatal causes of disease and decay to the states of Greece . . .

The second half of the seventh century is marked in many parts of Greece by struggle between the classes; and the wiser and better of the nobles began themselves to see the necessity of extending political privileges to their fellow-citizens.21

This analysis in J. B. Bury’s History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1912) – a book from the Cairo Forces’ library which found its way into Mitchell’s private library22 – aptly sums up the processes by which Roman society inherited the pent-up pressures of the injustice of slavery. As Diffusionist, as humanitarian, as Marxist egalitarian, as human being, Mitchell rejected the circumstances of 73 BC with disgust. To give concentration to his disgust, he chose the selective treatment described here, and triumphantly drew his readers into the mayhem with the involvement of a horrified and unwillingly fascinated witness.

Greek and Roman societies alike provided Mitchell with an example of the kind of imposed slavery which he thought he saw in a more abstract form in his own society in the 1930s. Slavery of the mind is something which obviously angered him in his late teens, working in the poorer areas of Glasgow: in Scottish Scene in 1934 the anger he felt at the enslavement of a generation to poverty and despair is barely in control, giving ‘Glasgow’ more power than most of his polemics. For Spartacus and his band slavery has been of the body, but not of the spirit; the attack on a morally rotten Roman (or Greek) society is the coming of the historical moment where the free spirit allows the slaves to fight.

It is notable that Spartacus is about that moment of confrontation, the moment when a society loses control; it does not suggest a perfect or guaranteed moment of successful confrontation, the historically correct moment, for of course the rebellion – splendid in conception and gloriously described as it is by Mitchell – is a failure. The last paragraphs of the book suggest that history’s moment has not come; perhaps a few generations off, a rebellion of a different kind may work. The recreation of the events of 73 BC is one of splendidly caught excitement and confrontation followed by an ambiguous final authorial statement (a technique Mitchell used to end Grey Granite). Like Grey Granite, Spartacus leaves the reader with unanswered questions rather than with a programme for historical or social reform; the author’s deepest interest was obviously with the engagement itself, and he accepts Spartacus’ defeat as historical fact. That the struggle took place, and would continue in some form, is as far as Mitchell’s involvement goes. The real involvement is with the reader in the events of the moment.

Reader involvement

Two main techniques give Mitchell’s account an air of the spontaneity of rebellion and revolt. One is the character of the central protagonist, war-wounded, remote, inhumanly controlled, a leader who is not understood by the followers who are prepared to go to their deaths for him. Spartacus may fascinate, but he also puzzles. By his own admission he ceases to be a statesman (S 161) in anger, he turns from Rome when he has it in his sights, he shows human feeling when it is least expected and inhuman fierceness of purpose when it is needed. Initially Kleon’s puppet (or so it seems), Spartacus develops a character of his own, one which commands respect from the other figures in the story and consistent attention from the reader. By keeping the reader at a distance from the central character, Mitchell gives the activity of the book a sense of historical unexpectedness.

The other technique is already familiar, that of the narrowing of narrative perspective. By deliberately depriving the reader of extensive areas of alternative information – Roman strategy, psychological insight into character, flashback or forward – Mitchell keeps the reader on edge for the information of the moment, which is all the reader possesses.

Both techniques serve a common end. The novel was, after all, written in haste at a period of Mitchell’s life when he had limited time for research and writing, and by narrowing the canvas of his historical description he contains the necessary material and gives immediacy and focus to the progress of the rebellion. It has also been suggested that, by filtering out the normal emotions of sympathy and disgust through the hardening effect of war and repeated suffering, the novelist induces in the reader a mood in which the described emotions of the historical protagonists can be felt and understood, even if not accepted.

It is in the light of this analysis that Kleon the mutilated Greek emerges as a splendid narrative device, closer to the reader norm than many, yet decisively separated by the terrible injury so often mentioned by Mitchell. Even the late incident with Puculla, while serving to humanise a character too often seen as unnaturally self-contained, merely redeems rather than humanises. To some in the camp he is an object of sexual ridicule; to others such as Gershom, his harking on Plato’s perfect state is mere madness. He is admired for his efficiency and his loyalty and the reader grudgingly offers identification with someone who can read and understand, within limits; while the Gauls worship the sun, ‘Kleon, Gershom, and the Ionians did not worship, knowing the sun to be but a ball of fire three leagues away.’ (S34)

Kleon has specific strategies: ‘Spartacus and the slaves are one . . . for the Leader is the People’(S 81) and he even wildly considers taking command should Spartacus be killed (S 172); but with maturity Spartacus distances himself from Kleon and all advisers, and finds a life and leadership all his own, increasing the admiration of a readership who can only mourn his passing:

We come to free all slaves whatsoever . . . in the new state we’ll make even the Masters will not be enslaved. We march with your Lex Servorum, but we do not march with your Plato. (S 190)

The Platonic model clearly rejected, Mitchell blends the vision of the gladiator with ‘a great Cross with a figure that was crowned with thorns’, and the dying Kleon ‘saw that these Two were One, and the world yet theirs: and he went into unending night and left them that shining earth’. (S 287)

The reader is being urged, strongly, to accept an identification of Christ the freer of slaves with Spartacus a generation before – Spartacus killed before his time. The future is theirs. Their time is not now. Again, Mitchell stops short of detailed interpretation: his intention is not to make sense of history, but rather to reflect the ambiguity of randomness of the historical process seen from Mitchell’s complex viewpoint.

Style

Spartacus is told with Mitchell’s characteristic verve and economy, for he was a writer who experimented through the short story to find a mature and very recognisable narrative style early in his career. There is indeed a place for good narrative style, since the novel contains very few female characters, little straightforward love interest and a great deal of unpleasant violence. To counter the violence, to distract the reader’s attention from the relatively narrow spectrum of character and incident, Mitchell fortunately has at his command a flexible and arresting prose. The basic narrative medium is well-written narrative English, the language of Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple. As everywhere in Mitchell’s work, the reader is drawn without preamble into the fully active plot:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master’s body even as his own had been mutilated; and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast. (S 15)

The style is arresting; it raises expectations. It provides essential background unobtrusively. Above all, it intimates the general scene of violence, mutilation and death we can expect from the rebellion.

Two interesting points in Mitchell’s narrative strategy are the references to the Masters by the slaves’ name (rather than ‘Roman’), setting the tone for the narrative stance throughout, and the very early setting up of a stylistic device which Mitchell exploits to excellent effect throughout. Kleon is described in the first sentence as a literatus without explanation: it is soon clear from context that a literatus is one who can read, but already the reader is immersed in some variety of Roman experience, the Roman term used without gloss or explanation. Latin-derived words are used exactly: ‘the Way’, ‘casqued’, ‘slave-market’, ‘to compute’ appear early in the narrative; Kleon unwinds, does not open a book; the perverse sexual tastes of Kleon’s master are hardly explained, and certainly not illuminated by references to the tales of Baalim, Ashtaroth or Ataretos. The East is the ‘Utmost Lands’, the supreme deity ‘Serapis’. All this functions without delay to put the reader in the position of a reader of the time.

Mitchell is doing no more here than adapting the triumphantly successful technique of his earlier success in Sunset Song where he had re-shaped the narrative English to the ‘rhythms and cadences of Scots spoken speech’ while adding a minimum number of Scots vocabulary items to produce a narrative medium which gives a warm impression of participation in a Scottish community.23 In Spartacus the words and cadences are not from Scots, but from Latin, and share the same comforting feature in that they operate independently of the reader’s knowledge of Latin.

As the Scottish words in Sunset Song rapidly explain themselves by context, rendering glossary unnecessary, so the Latin (and occasionally Greek) words in Spartacus operate in the same way. In a description of the first century BC the reader can without difficulty decode references to the ‘half a century of cavalry’ (S 122), the sacrifices ‘to the manes of dead Crixus (S 163), to the decimation of the velites (S 209) already referred to, to Lavinia’s ‘himation’(S 159), to the instrument played by the ‘bucinator’(S 189).

So much for vocabulary. Rhythms and cadences are also skilfully imitated from the original Latin. Occasionally Mitchell is content to intrude a single archaism:

Then said Crixus: ‘We’ve come to the feast, but the meat is still uncooked.’ Thereat he took a javelin in his hand, rode forward, stood high in his stirrups, and hurled the javelin . . . (S97)

Sometimes the effect is denser:

The battle was to Spartacus, as once to Pyrrhus. But of the eighteen thousand Gauls and Germans a bare three thousand survived. With these fell Castus, as has been told, who loved Spartacus, and never knew him; and Gannicus, who hated the Gladiator, and was killed in his sleep. (S 261)

This is compounded of Latin translated directly into English (the battle was to Spartacus), commonplace tags from Latin narrative (as has been told), and a conscious archaism from the Bible (and never knew him) covering the point of Castus’ homosexual attraction to Spartacus. Carefully used, the device of direct translation from Latin into English functions powerfully to give the reader a sense of involvement:

The slave horse . . . met the circling Roman cavalry, and, armed with clubs, splintered the levelled hastae, and smote down the riders. In a moment the fortune of the battle changed. The Germans turned and the legionaries, caught between two enemies, struggled to reform in double lines. But this, in that marshy ground encumbered with dead, they could by no means achieve. (S 99)

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 discussion32 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

1See below: Note on the Text.

2Books 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

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

4MS 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13See Malcolm p. 187.

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

15Cambridge Ancient History IX, p. 331.

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

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

18Malcolm pp. 116–17.

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

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

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

22Now in the editor’s possession.

23From ‘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.

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

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

26Malcolm p. 120.

27Young p. 73.

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

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

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

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

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

33The 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.