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.