Spartacus

SPARTACUS

James Leslie Mitchell, pen name ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon', was born in 1901 and spent most of his childhood in a farming community in the Mearns. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflects his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, left-wing politics and science. His military experiences in the Middle East inspired his first short stories and much of his future work. His most famous work, the trilogy
A Scots Quair,
was published in successive years (Sunset Song in 1932,
Cloud Howe
in 1933 and
Grey Granite
in 1934) and has become a landmark in Scottish literature.

He was writing at full pressure when in 1935 he died suddenly, leaving an unfinished Scottish novel
The Speak of the Mearns,
eventually published in 1982, and many projects which would have established him further as one of the leading men of letters of his time.

CONTENTS

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.