Fast Backward
KANFER, STEFAN
Fast Backward Being Red By Howard Fast Houghton Mifflin. 370 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Stefan Kanfer Contributor, "Time," "New Republic" Thanks to such works as Lillian Hellman's memoirs,...
...deplorable because it was metallic and strident...
...Alternatively, he might have flipped through the observations of Irving Howe or Murray Kempton or Richard Wright or Ignazio Silone, or, just for laughs, the arrogant and premonitory comments of Josef Stalin: "One death is a tragedy...
...said Boxer...
...He was evil incarnate...
...At the very beginning the men who took power in Russia forgot that dissent, disbelief, questioning and doubt are the only roads to the stars...
...But everyone knew the sins of Small Moustache, and no one knew the flaws of Big Moustache...
...Imagine the surprise of the True Believers...
...There are enough men still alive who know that I am writing the truth...
...Not Fast...
...During yet another Old Left conference, this time in Paris, he confronted Aleksandr Fadeyev, head of the Soviet Writers Union...
...If Comrade Napoleon say s it, it must be right...
...I am telling what I know...
...I am not trying to trash the memory of Harry Truman...
...Since this is a cooperative venture, the man wonders, why the KGB...
...Do you understand me...
...The Leninist structure became a prison and a church," the lecturer harrumphs...
...Oh, my God, exclaimed the listener...
...He was evil incarnate...
...Hell, no...
...The disciplined party member continued to write for the Daily Worker and to skirmish, in the way that professional wrestlers do, with his conscience...
...who] would immediately be interned in case of war with Russia, and a number of large concentration camps had already been built (and are still in existence, for all I know...
...He was an absolute ruler who believed in terror as a political means...
...In 1944 he joined the CP...
...If Bill Moyers ever decides to produce ThePowerofMythIIonPBS,hesho\i\d aim his cameras at Fast...
...Asachurch,itparadedMarxism as a religion, a new earthly religion given as new knowledge, and as a prison it sealed the minds of its believers...
...Hate underlay his actions, especially toward the Jews...
...Irving Howe recalls that period in A Margin of Hope: At Brandeis,"I debated Howard Fast, the popular writer who in a month or two would break with the Communist Party, but was still defending Stalinism...
...You don't join it...
...not candid or frank...
...None of this, naturally, is of concern to Fast...
...He was an absolute ruler who believed in terror as a political means...
...Other malicious tales are set down without a shred of supporting evidence...
...Communist culture was ...cheap and vulgar and corny...
...He was psychotic...
...I don't believe our leadership lied to us...
...Here is Fitzgerald sneering, in re Dorothy Parker's radical babble in the New Masses: "Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day, [but it] does not affect her indifference...
...Four years later—just about the time Fast was accepting the Stalin Peace Prize—nine Jewish doctors were framed in a" Zionist plot" against the So viet State...
...Thousands took the same path: writers, performers, intellectuals, politicians...
...Not Fast...
...I spoke to Fadeyev as a disciplined party member...'" In 1956, Nikita S. Khrushchev went public with the crimes of Staun, safely dead for three years...
...As f or the President himself, a lawyer informed Fast "that the biggest and best fix in the city was at the White House...
...were put on trial, forced to confess, and then executed...
...If they read poetry at all, it was likely to be Whittier and Sandburg, not Rimbaud and Ezra Pound .. the cultural tonethey set in the'30s was...
...Reviewed by Stefan Kanfer Contributor, "Time," "New Republic" Thanks to such works as Lillian Hellman's memoirs, Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism and now Howard Fast's Being Red, an elaborate new myth is flourishing on college campuses and in salons afflicted with political amnesia...
...It was my idea...
...I am not attempting to trash the image of Howard Fast...
...The Conference occurred at the apogee of the shameful blacklisting epoch in Hollywood, and the cusp of the McCarthy hysteria in Washington...
...During the convention of the Progressive Party in 1948, H.L...
...Most of us," he testifies, "had never been to the Soviet Union [Fast, 75, has yet to visit the USSR] and we knew little about it and less about Stalin...
...Some 50 years later he cannot let go of the legends that sustained them...
...In fact, the Conference was designed to encourage that master of terror and promoter of abject cowardice, Josef Stalin...
...Fast told a colleague about the earlier conversation with Fadeyev...
...The reading matter of Communists was the dreariest kind of journalism...
...I am telling what I know...
...Let me put that to rest...
...Mencken saw through the Communist agitprop and warned Fast to cut loose: "'I can't put politics aside.' "'Put it aside...
...you taste it, smell it, listen to it, and write it...
...What about a friendly one...
...It is not a bad strategy...
...There is, however, an exchange worth noting in Being Red...
...and that below all it apotheosized the century's second greatest mass murderer, Josef Stalin...
...Manifestly because he hopes, even at this late date, to shift the culpa away from mea and onto "thoseclowns" —the men and women who were once his mates at the pulp barricades...
...He was responsible for the deaths of millions...
...After all, he had helped defeat Small Moustache, and his followers were forever trumpeting the benefits of freedom and equality...
...No one critical of the Soviet Union was invited to participate...
...and then went on to explain, with a good deal of admiration, that Harry Truman was totally honest and dependable, that when he was Senator, his price was $3,000, when he was Vice President, his price was$3,000, and when he became President, his price was still$3,000—and he always delivered...
...Students could not understand the bitterness some of us felt toward Fast, and when he appealed to their sense of 'fair play' —hack that he was, defender of the Moscow trials, defamer of the Yiddish writers murdered by Stalin!—they responded sympathetically...
...He rushes to tell us that he grew up in New York, Jewish, poor, hungry, and filled with compassion for the downtrodden...
...Henry Louis Mencken is a party of one...
...Only after cold water was splashed in his face did he rise and wobble to the door, loudly announcing that he was just about to depart...
...executions and one-way voyages to labor camps) were taking place in Eastern Europe, and when the falsities of Lysenkoism (acquired characteristics are inherited) were being forced on Soviet scientists...
...For good old-fashioned self-delusion like mother used to make, Fast's chapter on the '40s is indispensable...
...Scott Fitzgerald had been ready to embrace the party, I was told, but whether heactually joined or not, I don't know...
...The author's 47 th book is the most fabulous of them all...
...It goes like this: Once upon a century there were two ogres, one with a small moustache and one with a big moustache...
...I could only reply that the spectacle of Fast asking for 'fair play' was like a man who kills his mother and father and then asks for mercy on the ground that he is an orphan...
...The autodidact pursued a fool's course...
...After fellow-traveling through the '30s he finally made his allegiance official—but not without some internal swaggering: "You don't join the Communist Party without carrying a burden of morality...
...The sharper ones will discern that Mencken was wrong...
...Whenever he mentions Soviet processes, the writer trots out his notions of political parity...
...Like one of those guests who get loaded and immobile in the first hour, he hung around at the party until no one was left but his uncomfortable hosts...
...Not Fast...
...A million deaths is a statistic...
...Having scattered the field with his unique amalgam of smear, rumor and innuendo, Fast prepares for the confessional...
...Richard Rovere, who had his own youthful adventure with the party, once described the esthetics of the Old Left: "The American intellectuals who fell hardest for Communism were men...
...Big Moustache was different...
...Many others took this as a symptom of the Soviet Union's malaise and got out...
...The Truman Administration, Fast reports, had" a list of3 00,000 people...
...Without a trace of irony, he describes his colleagues as "agalaxy of talent and national distinction and international fame...
...That demolition was an inside job, as evidenced by Being Red, composed by a mythmaker who got along, went along, stayed too long, and has lied happily ever after...
...He was responsible for the deaths of millions...
...A friend is involved in a Soviet-American TV project when he finds himself tailed...
...In 1949 came the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan...
...Duringthattime,Ieducatedmyself, went on with my task of learning to write...
...He dealt with Stalin's lethal farce by looking the other way for eight years...
...But when the money was forthcoming, they had to use it, and that meant more operatives, and having an American film crew here in Moscow was a golden opportunity to use up theexcess...
...Somewhere along the line, though, they realized that the burden was outside the party...
...he has other flesh to fry...
...says the dictionary, "not straightforward...
...I imagine it's no different in the FBI...
...I can't write about this unless they agree...
...It was to be expected that he would react to the Khrushchev revelations in a highly emotional manner...
...He could have come up with a whomping working hypothesis from a re-examination of the Moscow trials, a look at the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact, a reading of Orwell's AnimalFarm (" 'Ah, that is different...
...Thousands rushed for the doors...
...Assuming the posture of aman on the witness stand, he refuses to name names, perhaps wisely...
...Fast proclaims: "Subsequent histories and the newspapers of the time indicate that it was Soviet-inspired and backed with Soviet money...
...On various platforms the ideals of peace were boomed at a time when the USSR was blockading Berlin, when purges (i.e...
...I lashed Fast without kindness or mercy...
...He is still using them: "I do believe that it brought home to the Truman Administration that its carefully orchestrated campaign of terror had not yet reduced everyone to the point of abject cowardice and indifference...
...That is Fast talking...
...Later, when he announced his withdrawal and told his story, party leaders leaped on him like a pack of wolves and began that particular brand of character assassination which the Communist movement has always reserved for defectors from its ranks...
...Not Fast...
...Many of them, of course, had no literary tastes of any sort...
...In 1949 he heard of horrific anti-Semiticpurges in the USSR...
...The devil has two names—orthodoxy and righteousness...
...It has been suggested that Fast recently wrote a critique of Leninism in the New York Observer not out of conviction, but because of those character assassins...
...Fast claims to have been dismayed by the Moscow Trials of 1936: "In August of that year, 16 of the true old Bolsheviks, men who had participated nobly in the making of the Revolution only 20 years earlier...
...That marks Fast's combination of chutzpah and mendacity from bottom to bottom—there is no top...
...Hate underlay his actions, especially toward the Jews...
...I would add a third, disingenuousness:" adj...
...insincere...
...But that is a hostile memory...
...I think they knew as little as we did...
...The accusations were categorically denied, and the plaintiff dropped the subject...
...Just so...
...that official American Communism was false to the minorities it said it would protect, and injurious to the workers it promised to represent...
...Then, long after Big Moustache had passed into legend, a minor ogre revealed his ancient and hidden crimes...
...Thus the minstrels and the scribes were completely taken in...
...They ran from the shadow of Big Moustache into the sun, never to be deceived again...
...and the Gulag was merely a snowbound version of Leavenworth...
...If you do, these clowns will destroy you as surely as the sun rises and sets.'" Why would Fast quote such damaging dialogue...
...He and his colleagues were in business to deceive each other first and the public second...
...Fast gives an official explanation:" If the KGB did not ask for more money each year, their budget would be cut...
...Many significant personalities showed up at the Waldorf in a defiant mood, and the idea man used their presence to publicize his own agenda...
...You don't put politics aside...
...A lot of readers were not alive during the later Revolutionary era, and they may very well be taken in...
...of tastes at once conventional and execrable...
...Fadeyev took a pistol and blew his brains out...
...You're a party of one...
...How could he stand for anything bad...
...My God, Howard, what are you saying to me?' " 'You know I'm a Communist...
...He was psychotic...
...Why haven't you written about this?' "'Because the party asked me not to.' "'Because the party asked you not to...
...Here is the lapsed Daily Worker editor John Gates, who was expelled from the party, recalling the comrade who could not bring himself to resign from the CP until 1957: "Fast .. defended everything Communist and attacked everything capitalist in the most extravagant terms...
...No conspiracy of buffoons could ever destroy Howard Fast...
...There was never a doubt about Small Moustache...
Vol. 73 • December 1990 • No. 16
