New Research and Reflections on Arthur Koestler's "The Gladiators"
E-Book, Deutsch, 206 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-939483-63-2
Verlag: Elsinor Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Henry MacAdam earned a BA and MA in Ancient History/Archaeology from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon, and a PhD in those disciplines at the University of Manchester, UK. He taught at the American University of Beirut, in Greece, and in the USA. He has published several books and 100 articles in the field of ancient studies, children's literature, Christian origins, biography, Phoenician history and geography, and Near Eastern epigraphy, since the 1970s. Arthur Koestler's 'The Gladiators' (1939) has been a special subject of interest for the past 15 years. His most recent publication is 'The Gladiators vs Spartacus: Dueling Productions in Blacklist Hollywood' (2020). Its focus is the failed attempt, during the late 1950s, to film Koestler's novel about ancient Rome and the Spartacus Revolt. Interest in Edith Simon, who translated 'Der Sklavenkrieg' for Koestler, led to the recent discovery of correspondence between them during that process.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Just as there is no historical inevitability,
there are always historical alternatives.9 KOESTLER AT A CROSSROAD
On 6 October 1950 Arthur Koestler purchased, at an auction in central New Jersey, a working farm on an island in the Delaware River. He had bid for it sight unseen (photo only) while visiting friends in the area.10 The purchase was emblematic of Koestler’s lifelong pattern of establishing residences that were suitable just long enough for him to lose interest in them, and move on to another location.11 He owned Island Farm for five years, but lived there intermittently only during 1951-52.12 His age (45) at the time of purchase is significant. Twenty-five years earlier (1925-26), he had voluntarily withdrawn from enrollment at an engineering school in Vienna, and began a decade-long career as a journalist that morphed into writing novels and non-fiction. Twenty-five years after (1975-76) buying his island retreat in the USA, he was at the end of his productive literary career. By then his oeuvre included — besides six novels — works on the history of science, a successful polemic against the death penalty in the UK, studies of extrasensory perception, an investigations of chance and coincidence in human affairs, and a controversial volume on religion and ethnic identity (The Thirteenth Tribe, 1976). Thus in 1950, when the world was at mid-century with a very uncertain future as the Cold War unfolded, Koestler was (although he could not have known it) at the mid-point of his own adult life. It was a cross-road moment, promising detours and sometimes dead ends, already a steady pattern in his career. Koestler biographies, or Koestler critiques that are biographical in nature, go back as far as the 1950s.13 Only the two most recently published (David Cesarani, The Homeless Mind, 1998; Michael Scammell, The Indispensable Intellectual, 2011) had access to the documents at the Arthur Koestler Archive at Edinburgh University, but not to the small correspondence collection now in the Edith Simon Archive at the National Library of Scotland. At long last we have one Koestler biography that is both concise and comprehensive, quite a feat given the mass of material now available. Edward Saunders’ Arthur Koestler14 fills a long-standing need for those readers who require a compact introduction to, rather than a lengthy journey through, Koestler’s lifetime of creative conflicts and causes. As Saunders aptly puts it, “He was an often pitch-perfect and incisive commentator on twentieth-century life, with a remarkable talent for literary autobiography”.15 Though this new biography is worthy of a full review,16 it is noted here only as a reminder of Koestler’s legacy as a provocateur intellectuel and a signal that interest in his writings is more intense than ever. Saunders’ assessment of Koestler’s fiction is not that book’s strong point; see now on this Vernyik (2021). Nevertheless, Saunders does draw attention to one important characteristic of Koestler’s earliest published fiction:17 his insistence that all revolutions fail, sooner or later, because of irreconcilable tensions generated by the participants’ reaction to the unfolding uncertainties that inevitably occur during such events.18 The inability of revolutionary movements to avert or resolve those conflicts of interest is what Koestler termed “The Law of Detours.” As we’ll see, he clearly confronted that concept is his earliest published novel The Gladiators (1939), and continued it in the two novels that followed, Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943): “The Gladiators is the first novel of a trilogy … whose leitmotif is the central question of revolutionary ethics and of political ethics in general: the question whether, or to what extent, the end justifies the means.”19 When those three novels were under consideration for re-publication in the late 1950s, Koestler emphasized the Law of Detours (without calling it such) in a letter of 9 August 1958 to his literary agent in London. At the time of writing, The Gladiators project was in early film pre-production for expected release in 1959: … [Swiss publisher Rudolph Streit-]Scherz says that he is willing ‘to republish within a reasonable period four or five of [my] most important novels and volumes of essays’, and asks for suggestions. Here they are. Novels: The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon, Arrival and Departure. These three form thematically a trilogy on the self-defeating nature of revolutions, on violence in the service of an ideal. You may point out that The Gladiators is going to be filmed next year with Yul Brynner, etc. which will add to its topical value.20 Koestler himself was well aware of his emphasis on that failure of purpose among revolutionaries, although such a view can’t be linked to the many “detours” he experienced from 1925 until his death almost sixty years later.21 Saunders is hardly the first critic or biographer to point that out. The film rights for The Gladiators had been sold to Hollywood in early 1957, and a year later blacklisted screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky was hired to adapt the novel for a big-screen epic then being planned. Polonsky’s script reveals clearly where the writer (who had joined the American Communist Party [CPUSA] in the 1930s) agreed with Koestler and where he did not. As Duncan Cooper notes: “I think Abe’s idea, like Koestler’s, was to de-mythologize Spartacus: power corrupts not only because of, but in spite of. The Law of Detours is pitiless. I suspect that every new revolution has to use violence to suppress its own inconvenient Left (or Right) wing after it has arrived in power: Lenin and Kronstadt, Stalin and Trotsky, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Castro and the moderate democratic forces against Batista, Deng and the Gang of Four, and later yet, the dissidents in Tiananmen Square.”22 In a personal communication to me, Howard Gaskill observed that the Law of Detours was a concept within European thought long before Koestler: “It doesn’t owe anything to Kepler, does it? I’m reminded of [Friedrich] Hölderlin’s “exzentrische Bahn” – that the shortest distance between two points needn’t be a straight line is a thought fundamental to [Gotthold] Lessing’s Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts and Hegelian dialectics, and therefore Marxism too?”23 Thus we may explore this topic, knowing that the Law of Detours has a past history; Koestler was inclined to see within it a decidedly deterministic future. 9Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and The Bolshevik Revolution (1989) xv. 10Arthur & Cynthia Koestler, Stranger on the Square 98-100. The price was US $41,000, which in today’s USA dollar value would be $410,000 for a working farm on an island of 112 acres. 11He and wife Mamaine Paget were then living in Paris. He eventually bought a flat in London, on Montpelier Square, which became his permanent home — the first long-term residence since he left his family home in Vienna in 1925. It is the titular locale of Stranger on the Square. 12During that sojourn he completed writing, and read the proofs for, Arrow in the Blue (1952), and then began composing the sequel volume of his autobiography, The Invisible Writing (1954). 13His six autobiographical works, begun during WW II (Scum of the Earth, 1941) and ending with the posthumous co-authored volume contributed to by his third wife Cynthia (Stranger on the Square, 1984) cover the years from his birth until 1956, before his creative career peaked. 14Critical Lives Series (London, Reaktion Books, 2017). The book’s single major drawback is its inexcusable lack of an Index. Saunders, inevitably, did not benefit from correspondence in the Edith Simon Archive. 15Saunders, Koestler, 19. 16My review appeared in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 17.3 (October 2018) 519-520. 17His novel Die Erlebnisse des Genossen Piepvogel was not published until 2013 — see below. 18Koestler 53-56. Oddly, Saunders fails to use the term “Law of Detours” in summarizing the plot, especially when identifying the very events that actually force a change of direction for the slave revolt. Unless I have missed it, the term is also not used in Sauders’ discussion of Darkness at Noon or Arrival and Departure...
