Books: Fast & Loose

THE LAST SUPPER AND OTHER STORIES (214 pp.)—Howard Fast—Blue Heron Press ($3).

As Dr. Johnson and Samuel Butler proved, a man who believes that swallows hibernate in the mud beneath ponds or that a woman wrote the Odyssey can still write sensibly and well. A man who believes that the human race is largely composed of sinister little fascist gremlins engaged in re-enacting the Crucifixion with the author himself as the central figure, is in somewhat worse shape. Still, U.S. Communist Howard Fast keeps on writing all the time. He has just brought out 16 more stories, and his publishers bill him as the world’s most widely read living novelist.

When Author Fast went to jail in 1948 for contempt of Congress, he proclaimed that his persecutors were non-human characters, trying to turn the U.S. into an “abomination.” This is a valuable clue to the art of Author Fast, for the people in his stories are not exactly human.

How Real Is Real? Author Fast’s stories are dedicated to a Communist the ory called socialist realism, which may be summarized as the notion that reality is what ‘the party says it is. This theory has liberated Fast from the preoccupation that unnerves so many lesser artists—the desire to set down the precise truth. The setting of the more intelligible stories is perhaps the UTS.; the time now, or “the new order … of hate and horror, fear, indecency and terror, the order of the atom kings and the oil kings . . .”

The Judas of Fast’s title story is a backslid leftist playwright named Harvey Crane. For an imminent production, he has raised $300,000 (a multiple of the 30 pieces of silver, and thus a big symbol). Then he is asked to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, whose chairman may be assumed to be Pontius Pilate. Hollywood is the fleshpots of imperial Rome. Villainous lawyers and venal politicians (“For a thousand dollars you can buy a Senator”) gnash their teeth in the wings, and of course Judas Crane lets his old party pal have it (after a Last Supper at Sardi’s).

Judas, like all enemies of the party, is a psychopath, in contrast to the faithful apostles—good Equity men all, who still stick to the stuff they wrote in the old Group Theater and WPA days. Judas crops up again (in The Upraised Pinion) as a dim fellow with a remarkable physical resemblance to Whittaker Chambers, who sells out the party for $24 a day to an FBI smoothie with gold cuff links.

How Stupid Is the Enemy? The book is full of comic businessmen, who are not only capitalist bloodsuckers, but suckers for the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. The saddest of them is a tycoon named Henry J. Baxter, who dies hilariously, falling down on the path to his $3,000,000 private bomb shelter because he just would not believe that the Russians developed the H-bomb for the benefit of mankind. Other characters in Fast’s America are the clear-eyed, noble, tragic men who populate the bulging political prisons. If there is one thing Author Fast knows, it is where the grapes of wrath are stored. When he is not busy explaining that Christ and Tom Paine felt just .as he does, he repeats this phrase from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and it obviously makes him feel like Abraham Lincoln.

The reader may see nothing in the book but slick self-pity and ears and eyes so gross and clumsy that they could not furnish credible continuity for a horror comic. But apart from its uproarious, if unintended, humor, the book has another significance. Author Fast’s works offer an insight into the nature of the enemy. On that basis, Americans may reach the useful conclusion that the enemy is not so bright as is generally believed.

An easy boast, as Soviet state printers are churning out translations of his books. His Citizen Tom Paine (1943) and Freedom Road (1944) were bestsellers in the U.S.