Tag: Howard Fast

Revising his life: Howard Fast

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Howard Fast

After leaving the Communist Party in 1957, writer Howard Fast went on to even greater professional success. The 1960 film version of his novel Spartacus was a huge hit and remains a classic. He wrote a series of highly popular historical novels. Even after he left the Party, his work continued to be shot through with heavy-handed politics. He wrote a draft screenplay for Spartacus, but Kirk Douglas, the star and producer, rejected it, calling it “a disaster, unusable” because “[i]t was just characters spouting ideas.”

Fast also published not one but two accounts of his involvement with Communism. What is striking are the differences between the two books. In his 1957 Saturday Review piece he had written that while the U.S. was not perfect, “it is a land where the individual, in his work and in his rights, is recognized and defended”; the Communist Party however, was “a prison for man’s best and boldest dreams.”

godIn his book The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, published the same year, Fast continued to take this line, describing Communism as being rooted in “naked terror, awful brutality, and frightening ignorance” and saying that Communists had sold their souls when they joined the Party. Thirty-three years later, however, he wrote another book, Being Red, in which – to quote a review by Gerald Meyer – he covered “much of the same material, but from a very different perspective and for a very different purpose.”

red1That’s putting it mildly. As Meyer himself put it, “Being Red describes Fast’s membership in the Party as the best years of his life.” Dropping The Naked God down the memory hole, Fast “insisted that the Party was not dominated by the Soviet Union,” praised the USSR for having vanquished Hitler and saved “three million Polish and Ukrainian Jews,” maintained that the Daily Worker “never compromised with the truth as it saw the truth,” and resumed saying, as he had during his Party days, that he and his fellow Reds were “priests in the brotherhood of man” and members of “the company of the good.” Meyer summed it up this way: “Without ever mentioning The Naked God, in Being Red Fast refuted the damning criticisms of the Party he made in the earlier memoir.” He even made up at least one story out of whole cloth. (This was far from the only lie he told about his career in later years. At one point he even claimed that Ronald Reagan had applied to join the CPUSA in 1938 but had been rejected as “too stupid” – a tale that was sheer invention.) Significantly, the list of “Books by Howard Fast” in the front of Being Red omitted The Naked God. “Clearly,” wrote Meyer, “The Naked God is something Fast wanted to forget, and amazingly the reviewers of Being Red have allowed it to be forgotten.”

Why did Fast revise the story of his life? Meyer got it right: he was 85 (he would die three years later) and “wanted to be remembered as a man of the Left.” While The Naked God had been a good career move in 1957, enabling him to resuscitate his career as a mainstream novelist, Being Red was an equally good career move in 1990, when the most honorable items a writer could have on his CV, in the eyes of the literary establishment, were a stint in the CPUSA and a period on the Hollywood blacklist. Historian Ron Capshaw’s summation seems fair enough: “Howard Fast, among the writers attracted to communism, emerges as the worst example for the CPUSA: simultaneously dupe and careerist, a propaganda merchant and a groupie.”

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Embodying orthodoxy: Howard Fast and the Party

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Howard Fast

The 1957 Saturday Review article in which novelist Howard Fast recounted his history in the Communist Party – and declared his resignation therefrom – provided an illuminating look behind the scenes of an ugly system that thrived on useful stoogery.

For example, Fast recalled a New York conference at which the American author Mary McCarthy asked a high-profile Soviet author, Alexander Fadayev, “what had happened to a number of Soviet writers whom they carefully named,” in reply to which Fadayev

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Mary McCarthy

not only gave his solemn word as a Soviet citizen that all of the named writers were alive and well, but…brilliantly ticked off the titles and description of the work that each particular writer was engaged upon. He told where they lived, when he had seen them, and even repeated details of their merry reaction to the “capitalist slander” that they were being persecuted. So smooth and ready was his rejoinder, so rich was the substance of his quickly supplied background, that one might well credit him with more creative imagination than he had ever shown in his own books. As chairman of the panel, I was quite naturally provoked that Miss McCarthy and her friends should so embarrass this fine and distinguished guest. His conviction and meticulous sincerity were above suspicion, and I think, if I remember correctly, that not only myself but Miss McCarthy and her friends were at least in some measure convinced that he spoke the truth. Like myself, how could they possibly have believed that a man would create such a monstrous and detailed lie and expect it to hold water?

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Alexander Fadayev

Yet Fast later learned that every last one of the writers McCarthy had asked about had, in fact, at the time of that New York conference, been “either dead from the torture chambers of the secret police or by firing squads, or lying in prison being tortured and beaten.” Fast had imagined that a respected writer like Fadayev was constitutionally incapable of telling such a massive lie, especially about such a serious matter as the well-being (or not) of his own literary colleagues; but in reality Fadayev had been a bald-faced liar, a thoroughly obedient tool of the Kremlin – ready, willing, and able to serve up utter fabrications in the service of a monstrous tyranny.

Fast admitted that he himself had been capable of doing this sort of thing:

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Albert Maltz

When Albert Maltz, in 1946, sent to the New Masses an article that contained a rather mild criticism of the narrow and sectarian Communist attitude toward literature, he was treated as if he had committed a major crime. I include myself among those who blew up his criticism all out of proportion to its intent – a matter for which I have never forgiven myself, even though Maltz found it so easy to forgive and forget. Meetings were held. Mike Gold denounced Maltz with passion and language that a civilized person would reserve for pathological criminals. The fact that Albert Maltz was a writer of talent and unshakable integrity meant absolutely nothing.

Recalling this episode, historian Ron Capshaw wrote that Fast wasn’t just one of several people who criticized Maltz – he was, on the contrary, a brutal ringleader, an ideological enforcer out of Central Casting, “the embodiment of orthodoxy” who was “one of the most vicious of [John Howard] Lawson’s minions” (Lawson being the screenwriter who ran the Party’s Hollywood branch). To quote Capshaw, Fast “pounced” on Maltz.

More tomorrow.

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Leaving the Party: Howard Fast

Portrait of American author Howard Fast (1914 - 2003), 1962. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Howard Fast

We’ve seen how novelist Howard Fast was supposedly disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” about the evil deeds of Fast’s longtime hero, Josef Stalin. In a 1957 essay for Saturday Review, Fast publicly declared that he’d left the Communist Party. (He wasn’t alone: a large majority of American Communists quit in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, also in 1956.)

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Josef Stalin

That essay is a curious piece of work. On the one hand, he professed to be stunned by the reality of Stalin’s terror. On the other hand, he goes on to describe, with a novelist’s flair, the reality of life inside the Party, of which he had been a member for thirteen years. It is not a pretty picture. It is a grim portrait of a life made up of meetings with shifty, slimy, barely human characters – men and women who spouted dogma like robots, who feared original thinking “as the devil himself,” who bowed and scraped to their superiors, who systematically intimidate their inferiors, and who routinely listened for the slightest possible deviation from Party orthodoxy by their fellow members so that they could then set about denouncing them, humiliating them, and driving them from the fold.

The Party described by Fast was also populated by people utterly lacking in artistic taste or cultural sophistication – which was all to the good, from a Communist perspective, for art and culture, unless entirely devoted to promoting the Party, are anathema. It was also a fount of hypocrisy: Fast remembered a lunch meeting with the Romanian ambassador to the U.S., who was appalled when Fast and his colleagues from a Communist magazine, Mainstream, suggested that, in line with Communist doctrines of equality, the ambassador’s chauffeur be invited to join them at table. Moreover, the Party was a hive of envy: while Stalin and his henchmen in the Kremlin celebrated Fast, the local CPUSA hacks in New York saw him as an underling who was too big for his britches.

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A 1945 front page of the Daily Worker, edited at the time by Howard Fast

Fast maintained that he had never in his life experienced outside of the Party the kind of consistently repulsive behavior he had experienced and observed inside it. “Not even the warden of the Federal prison where I served a sentence as a political prisoner years later,” he wrote, “ever treated me or anyone else with such inhuman disdain and contempt.”

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Nikita Khrushchev

It’s all very interesting. But also deeply puzzling. For by the time the Times published Khrushchev’s speech, Fast had been a member of the Party for a full thirteen years. He had long since noticed all the unpleasant things about the Party that he would detail in his Saturday Review piece. How, then, could he have been surprised, as he claimed to be, by the revelations contained in Khrushchev’s speech? Since he already knew how far short the Party fell of what it professed to be, why did it take Khrushchev’s speech to make him leave? Wouldn’t it have made more sense, on the contrary, if Fast, aware as he was of the corruption and cynicism of the Party, had welcomed Khrushchev’s speech as a breath of fresh air and as a reason to hope that, with Nikita rather than Uncle Joe at the helm, the whole operation might actually reform itself into something that actually was dedicated to brotherhood and all that? And in that case, why didn’t the Khrushchev speech cause him to rededicate himself to the Party rather than to leave it?

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A jewel in the Kremlin’s crown

Some American intellectuals joined the Communist Party after the stock market crash of 1929, when many people, convinced that democracy was dying and that they faced a choice between the rising powers of fascism and Communism, decided that the latter was the only hope for a better future. A number of these people, who saw the USSR as a principled bulwark against the Nazis, had their illusions crushed by the Kremlin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-3, or by the Moscow show trials of 1936-8, or by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.

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Howard Fast

Howard Fast, the author of Spartacus and other bestsellers, was different. He joined the Party in 1943 – at the height of war, when the Soviet Union was America’s ally and, as the Guardian put it after his death in 2003, when the “wartime love affair with the Soviet Union and the Red army was at its peak.” 

fast-spartacusIt was also the year in which Fast, who was born in 1914, had his first genuine success, with the biographical novel Citizen Tom Paine. He later claimed that although he joined the Party late, he had been drawn to it much earlier, rendered susceptible to its appeal by his “poverty and hunger and despair in the early 1930s,” when he a working-class boy in New York City; if he came to it at such a late date, it was “because I could no longer see any future as a writer unless I was able to wed my principles to action.” Joining the Party, claimed Fast, he “felt that I had now become part of an edifice dedicated singularly and irrevocably to the ending of all war, injustice, hunger, and human suffering – and to the goal of the brotherhood of man.” But it’s hard to believe that an intelligent, independent-minded author who’d followed the news about the Soviet Union since its founding in 1922 could be sucked in by wartime propaganda that dropped all of Stalin’s atrocities down the memory hole – hard to believe that in 1943, a man like Fast could sincerely think that the USSR was “dedicated…irrevocably” to “brotherhood.”

Why did he join the Party, then? “Even among sympathetic biographers such as anti-anti-communist Gerald Sorin,” historian Ron Capshaw has written,  

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John Howard Lawson testifying before HUAC, 1947

Fast’s joining the CPUSA is presented not as an authentic expression of Marxism, but as an act of careerism….Fast was quite an operator, seeking not only fame but the adulation of wealthy Marxists he admired. What clinched the case for signing up with the CPUSA was a trip to Hollywood, where he met Stalinist screenwriters who lived in enviable luxury. He saw that the leader of the Hollywood branch of the Party, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, owned a 50-acre ranch. Then, too, there was the opportunity to romance starlets.

One thing we do know is that by signing up with the Party, Fast became a jewel in the Kremlin’s crown. As Gerald Mayer has written, “the CPUSA and indeed the world Communist movement lionized Fast…the Party enshrined him, along with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, on the highest pedestal in its pantheon of intellectuals.” In the Soviet Union, where it was a crime to even own most contemporary Western books, his novels were issued in translated by government-owned publishers and were widely read. As a result, in a country whose citizens were denied access to the work of far better American writers, Howard Fast became a household name.

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