Howard Fast's Spartacus would not seem to be much read today and it is not at all hard to understand why that is. If Fast's book is by no means simplistic in its treatment of its theme (Fast's historical sense was too nuanced for that, and the artist in him too developed for that), his leftist ideas are also quite apparent in it, and exactly what mainstream gatekeepers have been most prone to punish. The same goes for the straightforwardness of his writing, all as, in his presenting the Roman Empire not simply from the perspective of the oligarchs and warlords who made up the most outrageously over-romanticized ruling class in Western history but from that of the slaves as well he also did himself no favors with said gatekeepers among whom, even after losing that inadequate-to-be-useful-but-intimidating-to-the-callow smattering of Latin of which they were so proud, the fetishizing of all things Classical remains strong, with the same going for the prejudices of a Cato (or for that matter, the Cato Institute).
I suppose, too, that in the book Fast is so successful at realizing his vision of that era and its events only rankles their kind more--such that, if reading the book few who pick it up are likely to be surprised that the Roman Empire was founded on extreme violence all the way up to the genocidal level, plunder, tribute and slavery on a scale hitherto unseen within the Known World, after reading it one might find it impossible to look on the stones of Rome's still extant and admired works without thinking of the quantity of human blood and misery represented by every cobble in the roads, every building block of the aqueducts. With, one might add, the significant difference that where those who today point to the toll of toil and misery evident in the comparable works of our own civilization commonly do so to implicate their audience in the crime, to in a characteristically postmodernist fashion make the issue one of "personal responsibility," and personal guilt and personal shame for the sake of making them close their eyes to any question of the justice of the thing and never trouble the powerful over it, with Fast the issue is not the individual, especially the individual who knows little of it all and has no practical power over it whatsoever as they do what they must to survive within a world not of their own making, but the System. Befitting this is the fact that such irony as does appear in the tale is not that "smoke of indifference over the whole effort of and intention of mankind" that "is the worst form of snobbism" to which today's cultural elites are so addicted, but that "irony deep laid in the relations of life" that it is an artist's duty "to bring to the surface" (such as we got when Crassus showed his guests about a perfume manufactory he owned, incapable of comprehending how proletarians might one day form a consciousness of themselves as a class and rebel as the slaves were doing).
An extraordinary work I just about can't recall ever seeing equaled in making us feel the existence of that base of humanity on which Civilization stands, it plausibly derived something of its edge from the fact that its author Fast was at the time facing persecution himself--by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which jailed him for refusing to Name the Names of the contributors to an orphanage . He actually wrote the manuscript of Spartacus while incarcerated--and when he tried to submit his manuscript to the publishing houses of Park Avenue was refused every time in ways that made it very, very clear that there was such a thing as censorship in America, driving him ultimately to publish it himself. Neither the first nor the last time that we would owe a great book to this means of bringing work before the public (not that the bashers of self-publishing are a group where one could expect to find sympathy for blacklist victims) he managed to find an audience, and indeed Kirk Douglas was to buy the rights and make a classic film from the material with the help of another blacklist victim, Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay and was credited for doing so--such that John Kennedy's walking through an American Legion picket line to see the film has since been remembered as marking the effective end of that blacklist, and with it that hysteria which does so much to make a mockery of the pretensions of those who speak of "free speech" in America.
But not the end of the damage it did--the deep damage to authors' reputations, the literary canon, the very standard by which we judge literature itself, warped to reflect the political imperatives of those the gatekeepers serve, from which it never wholly recovered, all as literature itself seems likely never to recover simply because of the way media technology and culture are moving on, making Philip Roth's quip that just a few years from now novel-reading will be as "cultic" an activity as reading the poetry of Spartacus' era in the original. Still, we can at least admire what Fast and other artists achieved then, do what we can to pull them out of the rubbish heap, and honor the heroism that made the work possible, the rarity of which is all too evident as we look at the dreck being churned out in every medium today as "Money Writes."
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