Howard Fast, who died last week at age 88, was the last of the proletarian writers, a distinction he owed to an unrequited adolescent crush.
Today he is best remembered for his novel “Spartacus,” which became a 1960 blockbuster movie that starred Kirk Douglas. But Fast, a child prodigy of the typewriter, was already publishing short stories three decades earlier, as a New York teenager with eyes for a girl named Sarah Kunitz. Like him, she was a product of Depression-era neighborhoods where poverty and radical politics lived side by side.
She was a communist and he begged to tag along to a party meeting, perhaps thinking it an opportunity to hold her hand. But she kept him at arm’s length, saying he was too young for romance or revolution. Several years later, he proudly sent her his first novels, which were historical romances.
Kunitz responded by pointing out that Fast was a rare breed, a writer who came out of the working class, not a college creative-writing course. He owed it to his origins to do better than spin “fairy tales,” as she put it, for the bourgeoisie.
Taking her criticism to heart, in 1944 Fast published “Freedom Road,” the story of newly freed slaves after the Civil War. It got rave reviews. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a newspaper column about it, and it was translated into more than 80 languages. An African scholar created his tribe’s first written language, so he could bring out an edition of “Freedom Road.”
Read a few passages all these years later, and it is easy to see why all the excitement. The novel begins with black women and children awaiting husbands and fathers called away by the occupying Union Army to choose a delegate to a new state government. Voting was a mystery, something only white folks had done in the old South. So the women are puzzled when their men returned empty handed. If voting was such a great thing, where was the proof?
The men’s leader gathers them together to hear the story of something more precious than any physical gift.
“This here voting’s like a wedding or Christmas sermon, matter for all,” the ex-slave proudly explains of his first taste of democracy. “Government puts out a strong right arm, like the angel Gabriel, and says, declare yourself. We done that. . . . Government says, chose out a delegate. We done that.”
The novel was all the more poignant to its original readers who knew that ex-slaves lost the vote when the federal government abandoned them at the end of Reconstruction. When “Freedom Road” came out, black Americans still were denied the ballot in the South and faced Jim Crow discrimination in the North — even though the U.S. said it was fighting World War II to safeguard democracy abroad.
A fascinating novelty
Fast had an uncanny knack for dealing with contemporary problems by putting them into historical costume. He was one of a group of writers who, being of working-class origins, were a fascinating novelty in the 1930s and ’40s. Literature is generally a preserve of the well-to-do.
But his best novels weren’t set in the Depression, like those of other proletarian writers, as critics dubbed the group. Mike Gold chronicled tenement dwellers of the Lower East Side in his novel “Jews without Money.” Jack Conroy and Nelson Algren wrote about the legions of the unemployed, many reduced to tramping the country desperate for work.
Fast knew privations, first-hand. As a young man, he traveled through an economically hard-pressed South. Years later, he cited those journeys while explaining why he followed so many other writers of the day into the Communist Party.
“You are not me,” he wrote in “The Naked God,” after having quit the party. “You do not see now, as I saw then, as I drifted through America, the kids like myself clinging to the boxcars, journeying here and there, from nowhere to nowhere — in search of hope.”
He wrote several explicitly radical novels, such as “Clark-town,” about a strike in Massachusetts, and “Silas Timberman,” whose hero is a victim of McCarthyism, just as Fast himself was.
But his most successful work was set in time past: “Citizen Tom Paine,” a fictionalized biography of the American Revolution hero; “The Last Frontier,” America’s history from an Indian perspective; “The Immigrants,” the story of those who came from abroad.
He got the idea for “Spartacus,” the story of a Roman slave revolt, while serving a prison term for refusing to name names during the McCarthy era.
As in that case, Fast drew upon personal experience even when writing about times long removed from his own.
The three formative elements of his life and work were poverty, books and libraries.
Fast’s mother died when he was young, and his factory-worker father was either unemployed or working long hours for starvation wages. Fast and a brother had to keep the household going as best as kids could. He was 10, his brother 11, when they went to work, delivering newspapers, working in a dress factory and as street hustlers.
“In actuality, we had no childhood,” Fast wrote in a memoir “Being Red.” “It slipped away.”
Salvation in the library
His emotional salvation was the public library, where, like the ex-slaves of “Freedom Road” he made a liberating discovery: the government gives the poor access to books. “I read through the fiction shelves of the Public Library from A to Z,” Fast recalled in another memoir, “The Naked God.”
Years later and famous, he told a critic he knew the novels of Anthony Trollope, a 19th Century English novelist then less read. Skeptical, the critic asked how come? “Because his books were on the `T’ shelf,” Fast replied.
He started submitting short stories to magazines when barely a teenager. They came back with rejection slips, until a friendly librarian explained that editors wouldn’t read handwritten manuscripts. The family huddled, and decided to invest $1.75 to rent a typewriter for a month. The gamble paid off. He sold a story, “Wrath of the Purple” in 1931 for $37, a small fortune to the Fast family.
At the height of his success in the ’40s and’50s, his books sold millions of copies, enabling Fast and his wife to keep servants comfortably, at least materially. There was always a bit of survivor guilt, as when he spent time among striking steel workers in Chicago.
“I had forgotten this life,” he noted in “Being Red.” “Oh, how easily one forgets how it is to be poor.”
Caught in communist hysteria
Another librarian did him a good deed when the good days ended. By the 1950s, the anti-communist hysteria reached the point that Clark Clifford, special counsel to President Truman, was asked by a congressional committee why he had given copies of “Citizen Tom Paine” to friends. Fast was summoned to a meeting of New York librarians, who reported that J. Edgar Hoover had ordered them to destroy Fast’s books.
The librarians felt strongly that our country shouldn’t behave like a dictatorship. So they had hidden the books in the library basement. Just as soon as the repression was over, they assured Fast that his novels would go right back on the shelves.
During the Red Scare, no book publisher would touch his stuff and he had to publish “Spartacus” himself. It was a financial success, with more than 100 foreign editions eventually appearing. Shortly afterward, he quit the Communist Party, no longer able to rationalize Joseph Stalin’s terrible crimes.
That only switched the attacks on Fast from right to left. Though he had loyally served the party — indeed he was the last major writer to stick with it — he became a non-person in the Soviet Union. His books were pulled off library shelves there.
By then, critical tastes were shifted and proletarian writers fell out of favor with American academics. A new school of literary scholarship, the New Criticism, taught that a book’s social-context was irrelevant. Art for art’s sake, was again the reigning idea.
Though Fast continued to publish right up to the last decade of his life, he never regained his earlier fame. Today, few bookstores carry his novels.
But his work will survive, just as long as there are public libraries. The human condition changes only slowly. Privation and prejudice are with us still.
Years from now, some young person, trapped in the poverty Fast knew, will find his books, preserved in those heavy library bindings, on a shelf somewhere. He or she will realize that others have made life’s difficult journey before them, while reading that remarkable passage in “Freedom Road,” where those anxious women, who had so recently been slaves, see a distant sign of a better world to come:
“Now everyone shaded their eyes and looked down the road. Sure enough, the men were coming back — moving slowly, what with all the miles they had walked, but coming back.”
