Books: LILO

THE NAKED GOD (197 pp.)—Howard Fast—Praeger ($3.50).

Howard Fast is very slow off the Marx. When he joined the Communist Party in 1943, the world had already been treated to the Moscow purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in his successful novels (Citizen Tom Paine, The Unvanquished) he had already tried to hoist the Red flag retroactively over the American Revolution. He “saw the Communists as the bravest and most skillful fighters for man’s freedom.” Now he says, “I was mistaken,” but it took him nearly 14 years—until Khrushchev’s mid-1956 “secret report” of Stalin’s “paranoiac blood lust”—to realize his mistake. His fumbling book of remorse and recantation is pervaded by pathos. “Why?” he keeps asking in hurt, “say-it-ain’t-so, Joe” tones, but Joe long ago gave the definitive answer: “The truncheon—beat, beat, beat, beat, and then beat again.”

The real nature of the Communist beast is obviously still news to ex-Party Member Fast. The rank and file, he continues to insist, were “the bravest and the best.” The betrayers of the socialist dreams were the leaders, who rule by terror and, above all, by “magic.” The onetime holder (1953) of the Stalin Peace Prize tries to explain and expose that evil Red magic; he sees Big Brother’s ultimate depredations in the destruction of conscience (“The very nature of right and wrong has changed”). Considering Author Fast’s onetime reputation, the book will take its minor place in the long shelf of disillusion, alongside the works of such better writers as Koestler, Silone, Orwell, Malraux. The fact remains that Big Brother’s U.S. pen pal has a conscience that seems to work slower than most. In accounting terms, he might be described as LILO—last in, last out.