The Changed Belief of Howard Fast

...The great appeal of the international Communist movement was that it took an attitude of total responsibility toward all injustices, all suffering, all war...

...One chapter in it hit him very hard...

...In his release of damned-up resentment, he tells rather of the venomous dislike which American party leaders felt for him because of his writings and international reputation...

...This sentimental distortion is most disappointing when he describes leading Soviet writers, for he had a chance to know them as no other Americans could...

...Huge editions of Fast's novels had been printed in the Communist countries...

...Systematic torture is being carried on by the government not only in Communist countries, but in South and Central America and North and South Africa...

...Both the whites and the blacks are by now painfully familiar to us, and are here presented—despite the reversal—rather simplistically...

...This inclusive attitude did not seem arbitrary or personal...

...Cardinal Newman distinguished between notional assent and real assent...

...Fast's courage was tested in the Peekskill riots, and in his readiness to go to jail rather than turn over names and files to an investigating committee...

...In notional assent, an idea is accepted as an idea...

...The illusion of power and freedom which this gives may be dangerous...

...After unavailing pleas to Ehrenburg and others who stood well with Stalin, Bergelson himself tried to help Feffer and was killed for his courage...

...Moreover, other Russian writers, whom he profoundly loved and trusted, most foully deceived him about this...

...Unfortunately, there is a strong element of the arbitrary...

...Mostly, readers have gone to this book curious to know why Fast entered the party when nearly everyone else was coming out, and how he could have stayed so long...

...Its what-ness remains a mystery...

...We have no idea what conversation produced the glowing memories...

...The person believes that he believes...

...He comes to believe that Communists must always corrupt or kill writers, that any writer who has any feeling for truth or humanity is in terrible danger, for he is regarded as a threat to a structure which can only be sustained by ruthlessness and lies...

...Years before, the storekeeper's only son had been killed in Spain fighting with the Communist Lincoln Brigade...

...Through correspondence with the Soviet writer Boris Polovoy, "a love and warmth and mutual respect" grew and flowered...

...When Fast met Polovoy in New York, he "embraced him as a beloved and old companion...

...It is customary to say with relief, then, when someone like Fast or John Gates really breaks, that he has rejoined the human race...

...The Naked God and books like it suggest the need for a study of modern political commitments parallel to Cardinal Newman's study of religious commitment in the Grammar of Assent...

...By deliberately echoing the title of Richard Crossman's anthology of 1949, The God That Failed, Fast announces that his explicit intention is to repeat— almost in the same terms—what Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Richard Wright were saying against Stalinism at the time when Fast was most eloquently defending it...

...One exchange at a similar party the next night, on the contrary, provides a key to the opposite emotions which produce The Naked God...

...What an evening that was—of warmth and closeness and drink and food and fellowship...

...The story Fast tells is a horrible one...

...Fast found tacit agreement when he declared to the staff of the Daily Worker: "I wonder if there is any comrade here who can say now, out of what we know and have seen, that if our own party leaders had the power of execution he or she would be alive today...

...Polovoy gave a most circumstantially convincing reply...

...It depends on how the evidence is presented, who presents it, where one's emotional commitments lie, or the nature of one's "reference group" and of its chief apparent enemies...

...What we really respond to depends on a conjunction of ideology, publicity, real and apparent interests, imaginative appeal, our reference group, and our favorite enemies...

...As a writer, Fast perhaps does know how to speak to the people more engagingly than any of these...

...The generalized picture of a terribly poor and lonely boy in the 1930s, ambitious to be a writer and reading omnivorously in the public library, could have come from one of Fast's own novels...

...Polovoy was "big, warm, open, his smile a thing of joy to see" as Fast and his wife carried him off to their home...

...In inner-party life he was repeatedly abused and disciplined: "Charges for expulsion were brought against me twelve times...

...It has a larger meaning, too, however, which is also indicated in the imagery of the title...

...Actually the feeling on reading a book like The Naked God should not be one of complacency, relief, superiority...

...The commonplaces about Communism as a religion are mere diversions, and Marxism as such hardly enters the discussion at all...

...In his characteristic confusion of ideas, Fast feels that "millions of good and wise folk" still need someone they can trust, someone with the innocent wisdom of a child, to convince them that their emperor or God has no clothes on and is ugly in his nakedness...

...Obviously, in the matter of retaining or rejecting beliefs, objective evidence may play a comparatively minor role...

...contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review'¦ The earnest banality of Howard Fast's title is an accurate forecast of his political analysis...

...For years, Fast's reference group was almost exclusively the rank-and-file of the American Communist party...

...When, at a certain point in personal history, white becomes black, it looks very black indeed...

...Now, with a great sense of relief, Fast pours out this hatred against the hateful party leaders, against Stalin, Khrushchev and their Lilliputian American counterparts...

...Perfectly sincere verbal assent is given...

...Kvitko lived in the same apartment house with him...

...Russia has become for him the "land where poets and novelists can be tortured, beaten to a pulp, and then executed in silent degradation," where the murder of 3,000 Polish Communists by the MVD is a mere item in a long list of mass crimes...

...You, Howard Fast...

...It would be horrible in any time or place, including the reigns of the late Roman emperors...

...Obviously he feels himself the trusted friend, the spiritual leader of millions of humble readers under temporal subjection to Communist and capitalist bosses...

...The Naked God seems a highly personal book, but no individualized self in all its necessary contradictions ever emerges to take over the public name to which the "plain man" had appealed...

...The human race which ex-Communists join is not doing very well...

...It was all a monstrous lie, of course...

...His style, with its simplifications and exaggerations, requires it...

...If he had let himself be expelled earlier, "I would have lost all power to influence the hundreds of thousands the world over who today see themselves in much the same position as myself...

...It gives no hint of the real interest of this book...

...When the Jewish writer Itzik Feffer, whom Fast had known and admired during the early Forties, was in prison and being tortured, another writer, Bergelson, learned of it...

...This justified his staying on in the party...

...Abused by the party leaders in his own country through his long years of service, he discovers at last that the Jewish writers of Russia, with whom he identifies himself, have been wantonly tortured and killed by the Russian party leaders...

...Nevertheless, he has none of the depth of feeling, the impulse to action, that comes with real assent...

...Every Communist of any integrity, Fast says, accumulates a store of hatred during his experience in the party...

...In statues at least, the Greek gods appeared both clothed and naked...

...Eugene Dennis and William Z. Foster would have killed, too, if they could...

...Fast himself characteristically offers The Naked God as his answer to a "little" man, a storekeeper, who had just read of Khrushchev's report to the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress...

...the writers had been murdered by Stalin's order...

...But when Howard Fast, the novelist, describes realities, they take on the air of unreality...

...several had been made into plays which enjoyed long runs...

...Kvitko had sent, through him, greetings to his friends in America...

...At the Waldorf Peace Conference in 1949, Alexander Fa-deyev gave a similarly detailed and reassuring answer to Mary McCarthy when she asked about the fate of a number of Soviet writers...

...two full-length critical studies and hundreds of articles had been devoted to his work...

...He probably would not be, but Clark's charge is the key to the real meaning of The Naked God...

...Mythologically, this imagery is not very sound...

...they discussed their work together...

...Though the focus might be on particular cases for strategic reasons, ultimately the effort was a total one...

...More than an appeal to real interests is necessary to create real assent...

...Stalin was a "bloody and paranoiac killer...

...but you, Howard Fast, spoke and wrote and pleaded this cause—and why...

...Howard Fast, as a Jewish writer, joined the Communist party when Stalin's armies were fighting Hitler's...

...This devotion was undoubtedly real...

...Why would they be influenced by Fast if they were not influenced by Orwell or Koestler or Gide or Khrushchev or Trotsky or all the others...

...Howard Fast is not alone in requiring a particular combination of personally meaningful events before he can finally believe what he long denied...

...But of what it was really like to play this role, what it really meant to him, Fast explains little...

...These are, he still believes, the most dedicated, selfless, good people to be found anywhere...

...This led inevitably to totalitarianism in another sense, and to the shocking inhumanities which Fast is able to make seem so immediate and personal...

...He has combined the god of his title with the emperor in Andersen's story, "The Emperor's New Clothes...

...By conceiving it in such apparently personal terms, Fast can give it the kind of emotion and dramatic simplicity which makes his fiction popular...

...It is not enough to understand Communism and be able more and more wholeheartedly to condemn it...

...The situation of the untouchables in India and of the Negroes in South Africa is far worse than that of the Negroes in the American South...

...Can you tell me why...

...Someone asked Polovoy about a rumor that the Soviet writer Kvitko, among other Jewish writers, had been arrested and executed...

...But even though Fast is rationalizing and is quite wrong in the role he assigns himself, the story of his stubborn resistance to ultimate disillusionment is an extremely valuable case study of the way beliefs are held and rejected...

...Such a study would be even more relevant to non-Communist political commitments than to Communist ones...

...So could the picture of the devoted party worker, sticking loyally with the dedicated souls who make up the rank-and-file of the party, and who are so different from their leaders...

...The fact that his is an extreme and late case only makes its revelations clearer...

...Freedom comes from self-understanding, from understanding the nature of our commitments, our real assents, in the system now so uncertainly contending with Communism...

...The ring of a name which had become world-famous suggests much...

...It was extremely difficult to break with them, and to do what would seem to them to be siding with the enemy...

...The American people give notional assent to the idea that hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles threaten the very future of the human race, but they obviously do not act as if they really believed this...

...The break with the total commitments and forced assents required by Communist parties may lead, in the liberal democracies, to very limited assents and commitments—often merely verbal—or to quixotic and extremely personal forms of political action which are arbitrary in essence, and whose dynamics are not very clear...

...In a grim hour of revelation, Joseph Clark, foreign editor of the Daily Worker, cried out to Fast: "If you and Paul Robeson had raised your voices in 1949, Itzik Feffer would be alive today...

...In a world full of injustice, the famous cases—Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti—are those which have the imaginative appeal of fiction...

...He saw himself, judged himself, through their eyes...

...The Naked God is an important moral and political document, but its meaning remains implicit...

...It was much later, after Khrushchev's report, that Fast put the story together...

...The actual physical suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was undoubtedly as great as in some Nazi concentration camps...

...Nor is the analysis of personal motives more revealing...

...That I, a plain man," the old father said, "did not comprehend this is no wonder...

...Fast as novelist makes no attempt to recreate the evening for us...

...In fact, Fast is ready to go back to Trotsky, and endorse what Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed...

...Hundreds or thousands of similar injustices occur throughout the world every year and are totally ignored...

...no, gods ever seem to have been worshipped for what Fast calls their "noble raiment...

...The Naked God is a very effectively anti-Communist book...

...Here we still have a long way to go...