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 St
ory (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.
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 19372 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 retyping3 – 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.
Notes
1MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 28 November 1960.
2MS Edinburgh University Library. To C. M. Grieve, 17 February 1937.
3Ian Campbell, ‘Gibbon and MacDiarmid at Play: The Evolution of Scottish Scene’, The Bibliotheck 13 (2), 1986, p. 52.
AN INTRODUCTORY BIBLIOGRAPHY TO J. L. MITCHELL
For lives of Grassic Gibbon see I. S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh and London, 1966); Munro also edited A Scots Hairst (London, 1967) with reprints of biographical and autobiographical material from Scottish Scene (1934). Further important biographical and critical material is found in Douglas F. Young, Beyond the Sunset (Aberdeen, 1973) and W. K. Malcolm, A Blasphemer and Reformer (Aberdeen, 1984). There is a trenchant chapter in Douglas Gifford, Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1983). Substantial sections appear in Alan Bold, Modern Scottish Literature (London, 1983), F. R. Hart, The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey (London, 1977), I. Murray and Bob Tait, Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen, 1984) and R. Watson, The Literature of Scotland (London, 1984). Full bibliographies have appeared in a series of articles in The Bibliotheck, themselves listed in and complemented by Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon Correspondence: A Background and Checklist’, The Bibliotheck 12, 1 (1984), 46–57. An authoritative overall guide is W. R. Aitken, Scottish Literature in English and Scots, vol. 37 of American Literature, English Literature and World
Literatures in English (Detroit, 1982). Malcolm’s 1984 bibliography is up-todate and lists most fully the Grassic Gibbon and Mitchell publications. D. M. Budge has a good paperback anthology of short stories and essays in Smeddum: Stories and Essays (London, 1980). Mitchell died with his papers in some disarray, and the article on his correspondence cited above gives some introduction to that subject: a further treatment is in ‘A Tribute that never was: the Plan for a Lewis Grassic Gibbon Festschrift’, Studies in Scottish Literature XX (1985), 219–30. Also among the papers was the novella which has appeared as The Speak of the Mearns (Edinburgh, 1982). Patricia J. Wilson has an excellent article on ‘Freedom and God: Some implications of the Key Speech in A Scots Quair’, Scottish Literary Journal 7, 2 (December, 1980), 71. A more recent, and very valuable discussion of Mitchell appears in ‘Novelists of the Renaissance’ by Isobel Murray, a chapter of vol. 4 of The History of Scottish Literature ed. Cairns Craig (Aberdeen, 1987, 103–17). For further discussion by the present author see ‘Chris Caledonia, the Search for an Identity’, Scottish Literary Journal 1, 2 (December, 1974), 45–57; ‘James Leslie Mitchell’s Spartacus: a Novel of Rebellion’, Scottish Literary Journal 5, 1 (May, 1978), 53–60; Kailyard: A New Assessment (Edinburgh, 1981) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Scottish Writers Series, 6, (Edinburgh, 1985)).
The most recent works to touch on Mitchell’s writing include two books by R. C. Craig, Out of History (Edinburgh, 1996) and The Modern Scottish Novel (Edinburgh, 1999); M. Walker, Scottish Literature Since 1707 (London 1996); and Ian Campbell, ‘The Grassic Gibbon Style’ in Studies in Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century (Scottish studies 10) ed. J. Schwend and H. W. Drescher (Frankfurt and Bern, Peter Lang 1990), 271–87.
Two important contributions to recent criticism from Germany are Uwe Zagratzki, Libertäre und utopische Tendenzen im Erzählwerk James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) (Peter Lang, Frankfurt and New York, 1991) and Christoph Ehland, Picaresque Perspectives – Exiled Identities (Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2003). Daniel Grader has a valuable MSc thesis (University of Edinburgh, Faculty of Arts, 2004) on Spartacus as a historical novel, and Mitchell’s use of Latin sources. Parts of this may be published in due course.
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