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.
The title of this volume, "Outlook and Insight", is deliberately evocative of Koestler's "Insight and Outlook" (1949), an investigation of the similarities he found among and within art, science, and social ethics. In this study of Koestler through his early novel "The Gladiators", his particular interest in revolutions via "The Law of Detours" is the focus of Outlook (Part 1). Those reflections are explored in ten segments, one of which is Koestler's own unpublished summary of the first half of "The Gladiators". The volume closes with an account of the attempt to film "The Gladiators" in the late 1950s, including the recent publication of that thwarted project's unproduced screenplay. Additional Insight (Part 2) may be gained from reading the first full publication of the newly discovered correspondence generated by Edith Simon's agreement to translate Koestler's now-published MS of "Der Sklavenkrieg". A Postscript presents a representative selection of Edith Simon's sketches of characters in "The Gladiators".
Autorentext
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.
Leseprobe
Just as there is no historical inevitability,
there are always historical alternatives.9
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 tha…