This is the third letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Howard Fast: Spartacus. New York: Bantam, 1960 [1951].
Howard Fast is one of those All-American kind of writers. He fell in love with reading as a youth working part-time in the New York Public Library. As a young adult he rode freight trains across the country to look for work through the 30s, while writing fiction in his spare time about events and personalities in US history, his favorite subject. In 1943, he joined the Communist Party. In 1950, he was called before the McCarthyite HUAC, and he refused to name the organizes of a fundraiser for Spanish Civil War orphans. For his "contempt of Congress," he was given three months in federal prison. While in jail, he wrote Spartacus.
Because of the McCarthyite blacklist of artists, no publishing house would touch his new novel, so Howard Fast published it himself.
That experience ended up foreshadowing the whole ordeal of tearing down the Hollywood blacklist by the end of the 50s. The Spartacus film of 1960 was a blockbuster, based on a book by a Communist novelist and adapted by Dalton Trumbo, a former Communist and blacklisted screenwriter who had been working under pseudonyms till now.
The novel ended up blowing your host’s expectations as a very enjoyable read. At the same time, it conveys a sense of why the film despite some epic and memorable parts feels so cold and staid, despite Trumbo’s efforts in reshaping the narrative.
What's striking about reading Fast’s novel after seeing the movie is that it begins where the film stops: on the Roman road lined with countless crucifixes, on which the warriors of the slave uprising have been martyred. Travelling down this road is Crassus, the general who led the Roman state to victory against the rebellion. And Crassus is reflecting on how this “victory” has not translated to social or political advancement — no glory. “He had fought against slaves and defeated them — when those slaves had almost defeated Rome. The whole thing was a curious contradiction, and the humility of Crassus might very well be real. About Crassus, the legends would not be made nor the songs sung. The necessity of forgetting the whole war would belittle his victory increasingly.”
The war is over, the Roman "heroes" are travelling to villa for some R & R. We meet some younger aristocrats hanging out with Crassus. They are all visiting the politician Gracchus, a man who lives on the slave market, and who helped Crassus crush the revolt. As one of the dinner guests says about Gracchus at table: “[The slaves] are always with us, and we are the unique product of slaves and slavery. That is what makes us Romans, if you come right down to it. Our host lives on this great plantation — for which I envy him by the grace of a thousand slaves. Crassus is the talk of Rome, because of the slave uprising which he put down, and Gracchus has an income from the slave market—which is in a ward he owns body and soul — which I hesitate even to compute.”
It's only after 50 pages of somewhat perfunctory goings on in the villa, that, finally, Crassus settles down and tells the young Caius (who's family Crassus is trying to win favors) the whole epic story of Spartacus.
While the film of Spartacus is chronological and straightforward, Fast's novel has this wonderfully cerebral structure, where we have to plumb the depths of this antique episode only through the minds of the ruling class Romans. The more I read on, the more Fast's decisions in structuring the book like this made sense. It's a reflection of the huge disparity in education/literacy at the time. The only access we have to understand Spartacus the man would be through people who have the capacity to think about him — and because of their class position, they can't understand him! As the narrator says later on, the “truth of the slaves was contrary to all truth of the times.”
As a transition to the flashback, the narrator gives an impressive description of the Nubian gold mines during the Iron Age; goldmining fueled a hunger for slave labor.
But a new kind of man was needed. The heat and the dust and the physical contortions necessary to follow the twisting gold-bearing veins into the rock made it impossible to employ peasants either from Ethiopia or from Egypt, and the ordinary slave cost too much and died too quickly. So to this place were brought war-hardened soldiers taken captive and children who were koruu, bred from slaves who were bred from slaves in a process where only the toughest and the hardest could survive. And children were needed, for when the veins narrowed, deep inside the black rock escarpment, only a child could work there.
It is in this hellscape that we finally encounter a representation of Spartacus, in young age, but also the “agelessness of toil.”
What is he like, this man Spartacus? He is twenty-three years old as he carries his chain across the desert, but it is not marked on him; for his kind, there is an agelessness of toil, no youth and no manhood and no growing old, but only the agelessness of toil. From head to foot and hair and beard and face, he is covered with the powdery white sand, but underneath the sand his skin is burned brown as his dark, intense eyes, which peer out of his cadaverous face like hateful coals. The brown skin is an adjunct of life for such as he; the white-skinned, yellow-haired slaves of the Northlands cannot work in the mines; the sun fries them and kills them, and they pass away in bitter pain.
When he can rest, he dreams of childhood days, and in these dreams an old man teaches him to read. “So do we who are slaves carry a weapon with us,” he says. “Without it, we are like the beasts in the fields. The same god who gave fire to men gave them the power to write down his thoughts, so that they may recall the thoughts of the gods in the golden time of long ago. Then men were close to the gods and talked with them at will, and there were no slaves then. And that time will come again.”
Rather quickly, Spartacus gets picked up and transferred to a combat school owned by Batiatus the lanista, a trainer of gladiators.
And strangely enough, it was only now that hatred had come to flower in him. There was no room for hatred before; hatred is a luxury that needs food and strength and even time for a certain kind of reflection. He had those things now, and he had Lentulus Batiatus as the living object of his hatred. Batiatus was Rome and Rome was Batiatus. He hated Rome and he hated Batiatus; and he hated all things Roman. He had been born and bred to accept the tilling of the fields, the herding of cattle and the mining of metal; but only in Rome had he come to see the breeding and training of men so that they could cut each other to pieces and bleed on the sand to the laughter and excitement of well bred men and women.
This Batiatus fellow at one point, while giving an interview with Crassus, spills some red wine, and in the resulting stain sees a foreboding vision, and augury. “This was the man who trained Spartacus; he had threaded himself into a future that has no ending — even as all men do — but for ages unknown and unborn, he would be remembered. The trainer of men who had trained Spartacus sat facing the leader of men who would destroy Spartacus; but they shared in augury the vague and puzzled understanding that no one could destroy Spartacus.”
In these passages and throughout, Howard Fast works in a Tolstoyan mode of historical realism, with a third person narrator slipping in comments about fashion and design details of the antique world, as if to help shepherd the reader along. When the Helena (Caius’s sister) pays a visit to Cicero's bed chamber at night, she catches him working on an essay about the “servile wars,” and the narrator with a kind of wink gives us these lines:
At that time, it was a rare Roman who pursued his work into the night. The strangely unequal development of that society found one of its weakest spots in artificial lighting, and Roman lamps were poor, spluttering things which strained the eyes and gave at best a pale yellow glow. To work at night, therefore, especially at night after too much wine and food, was a specific sign of admirable or suspicious eccentricity — depending upon the person who did the work.
Even though they are the victors of the servile wars, these Romans can't seem to do anything but talk about Spartacus, to try and figure out what kind of man he was after the fact. The person who had the best access to him was Varinia, the Germanic slave who became his lover. Memorable was this passage where she comforts Spartacus from a dream, which the narrator seems to take up as a kind of collective memory, “so were [the slaves'] own dreams less a singular possession than the blood-ridden memories and hopes shared by so many of his profession, the gladiators, the men of the sword.” The memory-dream is shortly counterpoised to the reality of the beginning of the revolt.
As the Romans retreat to a countryside villa spared in the servile wars, Crassus recalls at dinner two monuments erected by the revolutionaries, which the Romans had destroyed: one a monument to the Slave:
He stood with his feet apart and he had burst his chains, so that they hung loose about him. With one arm, he clasped a child to his breast, and in the other hand, hanging loose, there was a Spanish sword. That was one, and you might call it a colossus, I suppose. It was very well done as far as I could see, but as I said, I'm no judge of art. But it was plainly done, and the man and the child were well formed even to such details as the calluses and sores the chains would naturally raise.
The other monument was a collection of sculptures, including a bust of Varinia. Both Gracchus and Helena object to destroying these works, as if Rome weren't strong enough (and also foreshadowing their fixations on Varinia that wrap up this narrative). But Crassus was a soldier following the orders of the Senate. “No one ever came as close to destroying Rome as Spartacus did. No one ever wounded her so terribly.”
The big highlight toward the end of the novel is the harrowing sequence in which the last slave of the revolt is publicly crucified. He hangs up their, tied and with his hands nailed, slowly dying and hallucinating his life's story, chapter after agonizing chapter: “Pain was like a road, and consciousness travelled down the road of pain. If all his senses and sensations were stretched out like the skin of a drum, then now the drum was being beaten. The music was unbearable, and he came awake only to the knowledge of pain. He knew nothing else in the world of pain, and pain was the whole world.”
On consulting the final screenplay, it looks like Trumbo had preserved the flashback structure that, in my opinion, succeeds on the page given the subject matter. The filmmakers must have quickly realized on the shoot that the only real way to adapt the narrative into the shape of an epic movie was to “invert” it in a way, so that we simply follow the journey of Spartacus from the mine to the hellish gladiator camp, to the great struggle.
Stanley Kubrick, for his part, was still groping around for a new project, after both Killing and Paths failed to make money. Kubrick-Harris Pictures even had to give up the rights for Killing including future royalties. Kubrick was a gamblin’ man, and played insane amounts of poker to keep his household afloat. He and Harris were actually developing Lolita, which had come out in 1955, at the same time that Kubrick was brought on board Spartacus by Kirk, who had fired the original director Anthony Mann.
War and imperialism was solidifying as a central theme in the Kubrick filmography. From Kolker and Abrams:
He was thinking deeply about the war genre, which would haunt him throughout his career. Of the thirteen features he made, five are directly or indirectly involved with battle. Wars — from World War I through the Gulf War of the 1990s — were defining events of Kubrick’s twentieth century. He viewed them from afar: although issued a draft card in 1946, he was deferred as a student at City College and never called up. War settled in his imagination — a country of the mind. It was a way of dealing with the horrors of battle by an artist’s favorite device: distancing himself by creating a fiction.
It appears that it was on Kirk’s initiative to give Trumbo screen credit for the film, thereby breaking the blacklist — though Otto Preminger had announced months prior that Trumbo had written his epic movie of that year, Exodus. Kirk claims he was prompted by Kubrick wanting screen credit, which Kubrick has denied.
It’s well known that the Spartacus set was itself a war zone. Kubrick was “hungry” for a good picture, but even though he was already being mentioned in the same breath as John Huston and Elia Kazan as the greatest directors of the age, he was a young guy walking onto a set full of veterans and snobs. The director of photography was Russell Metty, the man who had just shot the opening oner of Touch of Evil.
But this red-faced, gregarious, boisterous man, who always held a coffee cup loaded with Jack Daniels, hated Kubrick, who was just a kid, barely shaving, and some twenty years younger than him. Now fifty-three, Metty was old enough to be Stanley’s father. To him, Stanley looked more like a beatnik than a boss. It was a bad match from the beginning. It would only get worse. ‘This guy is going to direct this movie? He’s going to tell me where to put the camera? They’ve got to be kidding…get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane.’ Metty took every opportunity to criticize Stanley, who wasn’t bothered by the criticism — he simply ignored it and did what he wanted. Ultimately, with his usual force of will, Kubrick took over Metty’s job, leaving the experienced cameraman in a purely observational role. He told him, ‘You can do your job by sitting and your chair and shutting up. I’ll be the director of photography.’
The book argues that Kubrick injected more of his pessimism and bleakness into the story to counterbalance the Left-leaning heroics from the writers, including, apparently bringing in touches from a different and earlier Spartacus novel, The Gladiators (1939) by Arthur Koestler.
There is, in the end, more Kubrick in Spartacus than could be expected from a huge studio production. There were definite visual touches that would become Kubrick trademarks: symmetrical compositions; the ours in the training sequence, which anticipated those of Full Metal Jacket; and the gladiatorial duels, which replayed Killer’s Kiss. The ‘I’m Spartacus’ sequence, which became the cultural marker for the film, is Kubrick’s though he claimed to dislike it. The infamous ‘snails and oysters’ sequence between Crassus and Antoninus in the bath, deleted from the original release print, is Kubrick’s, and one of many bathroom scenes and references to food throughout his films.
One thing the film has going for it is the final sequence where Spartacus on the crucifix dies knowing both Varinia and their son are alive and free.
Another highlight of the film is the portrayal of Draba the gladiator slave by Woody Strode. His part is a lot more memorable and enlarged than in the novel, though the brief dialogue between Spartacus and Draba about killing is the occasion for Spartacus’s line: “The only virtue of a slave is to live.”