Howard
Fast,
the son of a factory worker, was born in New
York City on 11th November, 1914. He dropped out of high school
and at the age of 18 published his first novel Two
Villages. Fast held strong left-wing views and a large
number of his novels dealt with political themes. This included a
series of three books on the American Revolutionary War period: Conceived
in Liberty (1939), The Unvanquished
(1942), and Citizen Tom Paine
(1943).
In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist
Party and his Marxist views were reflected
in the novels that he wrote during this period. This included
Freedom Road (1944), a novel of the Reconstruction
era; The American (1946) and a
fictionalized biography of the radical Illinois governor, John
Peter Altgeld.
In 1950 Fast was ordered to appear before the House
of Un-American Activities Committee. Fast refused to name fellow
members of American Communist Party,
claiming that the 1st
Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to
do this.
The HUAC and the courts during appeals disagreed
and he was sentenced to three months in prison.
Fast was blacklisted but after forming his own publishing company,
the Blue Heron Press, he continued write and publish books that reflected
his left-wing views. This included Spartacus
(1951), an account of the 71 B.C. slave revolt,
Silas
Timberman (1954), a novel about a victim of McCarthyism
and The Story of Lola Gregg (1956),
describing the FBI pursuit and capture of
a communist trade unionist. Fast also worked
as a staff writer for the Daily
Worker.
Fast
remained loyal to the Communist Party
until 1956. The two main reasons for this was the speech made by Nikita
Khrushchev exposing the crimes of Joseph
Stalin and the decision by the Soviet government to put down the
Hungarian Uprising. Fast, like three-quarters
of the membership now left the party. The following year he published
The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist
Party (1957).
The Hollywood Blacklist was ended
in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay
for Fast's novel, Spartacus. Fast
himself moved to Hollywood where he wrote several screenplays. However,
he continued to write political novels and had considerable commercial
success with The Immigrants (1977),
Second Generation (1978), The
Establishment (1979), The
Outsider (1984) and the Immigrant's
Daughter (1985). His autobiography, Being
Red, was published in 1990.
During
his lifetime he published more than 40 novels under his own name and
20 as E.V. Cunningham. Fast also wrote a biography of Josip
Tito. His books were translated into 82 different languages and
his last novel, Greenwich, was
published in 2000.
Howard
Fast
died in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on 12th March, 2003.
Howard
Fast testifying before the House of
Un-American Activities Committee in 1950.
(1)
CNN
News (13th March, 2003)
In the 1940s, "Citizen Tom Paine" and "The
American," a fictionalized biography of Illinois governor John
Peter Altgeld, became best sellers - but brought him trouble from
the House Un-American Activities Committee, which labeled them as
Communist propaganda. "Citizen Tom Paine" was banned in
high school libraries in New York City.
In 1945, the committee
demanded he identify people who helped build a hospital in France
for anti-fascist fighters. Fast refused and after years of legal battles
was jailed for contempt.
Prison only made him more
radical, as Fast "began more deeply than ever before to comprehend
the full agony and hopelessness of the underclass," he later
recalled. Out of this experience he wrote "Spartacus," his
populist version of the slave revolt in ancient Rome.
The novel was rejected
by several publishers, many of whom received visits from FBI agents,
and Fast eventually released it himself.
(2)
Eric Homberger, The
Guardian (14th March, 2003)
He seldom wrote autobiographically; the nearest he came to
a self-portrait was in Citizen Tom Paine. For Paine, the greatest
revolutionary propagandist of the 18th century, the likely fate of
the American revolution of 1776, as well as of the French of 1789,
was betrayal and defeat. Paine knew the vicious attacks of enemies
in America and abandonment by his friends, as well as persecution
and imprisonment in France under the Jacobins.
And, indeed, Fast's novel
is a portrait of the writer as revolutionary. It is also a singularly
harsh portrayal of the nature of revolution itself, and of the terrible
fate awaiting its creators; it belongs on the same shelf as Arthur
Koestler's novel of the fate of an old Bolshevik, Darkness At Noon
(1940).
It was while writing Citizen
Tom Paine that Fast joined the Communist party. The wartime love affair
with the Soviet Union and the Red army was at its peak. Fast later
showed himself to be an insightful diagnostician of the way good people,
worthy of affection and respect, were degraded, humiliated, lied to
and betrayed by Stalin and his conscienceless henchmen in the American
party.
The title for his 1957
study, The Naked God: The Writer And Communism, was drawn from a brief,
brilliant passage reflecting on the East German Stalinist leader Walther
Ulbricht: "He has lost touch with humankind. For him are no more
hopes or visions or high dreams - only the caress of power over his
righteousness."
(3)
New York
Times (1st February, 1957)
Howard Fast said yesterday that he had disassociated himself
from the American Communist party and no longer considered himself
a Communist.
Mr. Fast,
the winner of a Stalin International Peace Prize in 1953, has generally
been considered the leading Communist writer in this country. His
books were once sold in large numbers here, and in recent years many
of them have been widely translated and sold throughout the world,
particularly in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Until
last June he was a columnist for The Daily Worker.
Apparently
troubled by the need to end his political affiliation, Mr. Fast at
first was reluctant to be interviewed. When he agreed, he defined
his position in these terms: "I am neither anti-Soviet nor anti-Communist,
but I cannot work and write in the Communist movement."
Nikita
S. Khrushchev's secret speech last year exposing Stalin was the chief
factor leading to his present position, Mr. Fast said.
"It
was incredible and unbelievable to me," he said, "that Khrushchev
did not end his speech with a promise of the reforms needed to guarantee
that Stalin's crimes will not be repeated, reforms such as an end
to capital punishment, trial by jury and habeas corpus. Without these
reforms one can make neither sense nor reason of the speech itself."
In a column
in The Daily Worker last June (Man's Hope, June 12,
1956), Mr. Fast first indicated the shock and anger that the Khrushchev
speech had produced in him. He ceased to contribute to that newspaper
after that, but did not then break with the Communist movement.
Mr. Fast
indicated he had spent the months since last June in fighting out
with himself the question of his future. He asserted that he admired
Communist party members as dedicated fighters for peace, but that
he personally felt he could no longer submit to Communist discipline.
Revelations
of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union also influenced his decision.
"I knew little about anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union before
the Khrushchev speech," Mr. Fast said. "That little troubled
me, but I repressed my doubts. Then the article appeared in The
Folksshtime last spring telling what had actually happened. It
was not an easy thing to live with."
The Folksshtime, a Yiddish language Communist newspaper in Poland,
printed the first news from a Communist source of the repression of
Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union and of the jailing and execution
of numerous Yiddish writers in that country under Stalin.
Asserting
that he had been a devoted Communist because of his belief in democracy,
equalitarianism and social justice, Mr. Fast said that his anger at
the Khrushchev speech was particularly sharp because of his experience
with the American judicial system.
"I
was tried and convicted in 1946 under circumstances that made a mockery
of our pretensions of justice here," he said. "But while
that was happening, I was consoled by the belief that in the Soviet
Union a person would receive justice. I can no longer believe this."
Mr. Fast
was convicted in 1946 on a charge of contempt of Congress arising
from his refusal to produce the records of the Joint Antifascist Refugee
Committee before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He served
three months in jail on the charge.
Recent
events in Poland have moved him deeply, Mr. Fast said. "Poland
has been a living proof of the dream of many people that socialism
and democracy can exist together."
Mr. Fast
said he would not repudiate or return the Stalin International Peace
Prize he received in 1953.
A Communist
sympathizer since the early Nineteen Thirties and a Communist party
member for almost a decade and a half, Mr. Fast declared: "I
am not ashamed of anything I have done. I fought against war, Negro
oppression and social injustice. I am proud of my books. I regret
that in some of my political articles I went overboard - but by and
large I stand by what I wrote."
Mr. Fast
said that in Daily Worker articles written last spring, he had called
for Communists to take a new look at the Soviet campaign against cosmopolitanism
( Cosmopolitanism, April 26, 1956), a movement he now
regards as a form of Soviet anti-Semitism directed against Jewish
intellectuals there, as well as at the party ban on psychoanalysis
(Freud and Science, May 1, 1956) and its condemnation of writers
like James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan books and other
works of fiction.
"I
was supported in raising these questions by John Gates, Alan Max and
Joe Clark," Mr. Fast said. Mr. Gates is the editor of The
Daily Worker, Mr. Max the managing editor, and Mr. Clark the foreign
editor. These three are generally regarded as leaders of the Communist
party's "anti-Stalinist" wing.
Tall, dark
and thin, Mr. Fast explained his original interest in communism as
born of the poverty in which he grew up after his birth here on Nov.
11, 1914.
Mr. Fast
estimated that more than 20,000,000 copies of his books had been printed
and distributed throughout the world.
(4)
Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)
In the party I found ambition, narrowness and hatred; I also
found love and dedication and high courage and integrity — and
some of the noblest human beings I have ever known."
(5)
New
York Times (13th March, 2003)
Mr. Fast's fiction was always didactic to a degree, opposed
to modernism, engaged in social struggle and insistent on taking sides
and teaching lessons of life's moral significance, and he liked it
that way.
"Since I believe that
a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is
not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an
endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched
my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life,"
he said in a 1972 interview.
Despite the international
popularity of historical novels like "Paine," which glorified
the professional revolutionary, and the huge commercial success that
Mr. Fast's well-paced narratives achieved, his work tended to succeed
or fail as art to the extent that he distanced himself from ideology.
(6)
Washington
Post
(13th March, 2003)
Many of his books from the 1940s and 1950s explored class
and race disparity in the United States and implicitly promoted what
he then considered a utopian Soviet system. In the 1950s, he was one
of the most high-profile authors in the United States to be jailed
and blacklisted for actions related to membership in the Communist
Party.
He wrote of joining the
Communist Party in 1943, influenced by "a series of dismal and
underpaid jobs that I had held since, at the age of eleven, pressed
by the need of our utter poverty, I went to work as a newspaper delivery
boy."
He continued: "If
we are to seek for understanding, any sort of understanding, then
the reader must not only recall the 1930s, but must comprehend the
full meaning of the surrender of childhood, a situation that poverty
still imposes on millions of children the world over."
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