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The Ex-Communist Memoirs of Howard Fast and His Contemporaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

David Seed
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Extract

The wave of investigations into supposed Communist activity from the late 1940s onward by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and similar bodies depended to a large extent on the testimony of expert witnesses. These were former party members as often as not but we should bear in mind a distinction Hannah Arendt drew as early as 1953. Former Communists, she argues, have simply abandoned their commitment and withdrawn from political life whereas, for the ex-Communists,

Communism has remained the chief issue in their lives. They feel that their potential strength is much greater than their small number actually indicates because their past, on which they base present careers and ambitions, is shared by a much larger section of society. They work to persuade their former friends to join them: to make a confession, own up to a conversion, and form a solid political group.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 605 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1. Arendt, Hannah, “The Ex-Communists,” Commonweal 57 (03 20, 1953): 595Google Scholar.

2. Packer, Herbert L., Ex-Communists Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 12Google Scholar

3. Caute, David, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1978), 54, 136–37Google Scholar.

4. Matusow, Harvey, speaking on the BBC2 documentary The Un-Americans, 09 16, 1992Google Scholar. Matt Cvetic appeared before HUAC in 1950, sold a series of articles on his story to the Saturday Evening Post, and a film based on his experiences was released in 1951. For valuable commentary, see Leab, Dan, “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” History Today 46, no. 12 (12 1996): 42–47Google Scholar.

5. London, Jack, “How I Became a Socialist,” in Novels and Social Writings (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1120Google Scholar.

6. Freeman, Joseph, An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 565Google Scholar. Freeman never wrote a memoir of his subsequent move away from Communism but Daniel Aaron discusses his 1943 novel Never Call Retreat not as a “break with his past” but as a “non-Marxian restatement of the ideals that had drawn him into the radical movement” (Writers on the Left [1961; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 374)Google Scholar.

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8. Wald, Alan and Filreis, Alan, “A Conversation with Howard Fast, March 23, 1994,” Prospects 20 (1996): 512Google Scholar.

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10. Fast, Howard, The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party (London: Bodley Head, 1958), 34Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 13.

12. Chambers, Whittaker, Witness (1952; rept. South Bend, Ind.: Regnery/ Gateway, 1979), 159Google Scholar.

13. Fast, , Naked God, 16Google Scholar.

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15. Gates, John, The Story of an American Communist (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1958), 169Google Scholar. These reservations were shared by Howe, Irving, who described Fast's memoir as “incoherent in structure, florid in diction, inflated and hysterical in tone” (New Republic 137 [12 16, 1957]: 18)Google Scholar. Daniel Aaron, too, notes a calculated vagueness, moral complacency, etc., in the volume, concluding, “The novelist or romancer constantly stands in the way of the autobiographer” (Writers, 311).

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17. Crossman, Richard et al. , The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Right Book Club, 1949), 11, 25Google Scholar. The religious analogy was promoted by Hoover, J. Edgar in his Masters of Deceit where he declares, “Communism is, in effect, a secular religion with its own roster of gods, its own Messianic zeal, and its own fanatical devotees who are willing to accept any personal sacrifice that furthers the cause” (Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It [1958; rept. New York: Pocket, 1970), 301)Google Scholar.

18. Hyde, Douglas, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (1950; rept. London: Reprint Society, 1952), 273Google Scholar. Hyde came from a Bristol Methodist background.

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20. Hatch, Robert, review of The Naked God, Nation 185 (12 21, 1957): 481Google Scholar.

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23. Ibid., 91.

24. Fast, Howard, Peekskill, U.S.A. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 108Google Scholar. The awkward term fascization is probably taken from Andrei Zhdanov's 1947 essay “The International Situation,” where it appears in the context of an analysis of supposedly totalitarian tendencies in American political life (quoted in Stephanson, Anders, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], 271)Google Scholar.

25. Wright, Richard, American Hunger (1977; rept. London: Victor Gollancz, 1977), 63Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 77–78. The response to the publication of part of this memoir in 1944 is discussed by Fabré, Michel in his The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Barzun, Isabel (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 255–56Google Scholar.

27. Wright, , American Hunger, 86Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 135.

29. Fast, , Naked God, 139Google Scholar.

30. Nixon, Richard M., “Plea for an Anti-Communist Faith,” Saturday Review 35 (05 24, 1952): 12Google Scholar; and John Dos Passos, “Mr. Chamber's Descent into Hell,” ibid., 11.

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32. Arendt, , “Ex-Communists,” 596Google Scholar.

33. Grizans, Mary Ann, “Identification in Autobiography,” Genre 24, no. 3 (1991): 299Google Scholar.

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35. Ibid., 331. I have discussed such metaphors in more detail in my essay “Writing Out of Communism: Recantation Memoirs of the Cold War,” in Writing and America, ed. Cologne-Brookes, Gavin, Sammells, Neil, and Timms, David (London: Longman, 1996), 52–74Google Scholar.

36. Chambers, , Witness, 532Google Scholar.

37. Renza, Louis A., “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography,” New Literary History 9, no. 1 (1977): 9–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Matusow, Harvey, False Witness (New York: Cameron and Kahn, 1955), 77, 104Google Scholar.

39. Harvey Matusow's case was taken up by the journalist Albert E. Kahn, who managed to secure publication of False Witness despite combined opposition by the FBI and State Department. Kahn, has written a detailed account of these events in The Matusow Affair: Memoir of a National Scandal (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Moyer Bell, 1987)Google Scholar.

40. Matusow, , False Witness, 235Google Scholar.

41. Kahn, , Matusow Affair, 248Google Scholar.

42. Belfrage, Cedric comments, “Whenever a cry of alarm was needed on any front, Budenz could supply it” (The American Inquisition 1945–1960: A Profile of the “McCarthy Era” [New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1989], 147)Google Scholar. Louis Francis Budenz attacked “so bitter an anti-American and disciple of Stalin as Howard Fast” but actually anticipated the latter's satirical account in The Naked God of Communist jargon and “Aesopian language” (The Techniques of Communism [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954], 42–44)Google Scholar.

43. Philbrick, Herbert A., I Led Three Lives. Citizen — “Communist” —Counterspy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1952), 105Google Scholar.

44. Ibid., 299. J. Edgar Hoover exploits the same antithesis between surface or covert action screening underground activity and authenticates his account by quoting Barbara Hartle, a former Communist activist from Seattle who describes the party as promoting “its double life of posing as one thing and being another” (Masters of Deceit, 255–71, 112)Google Scholar.

45. Rolo, C. J. in the Atlantic Monthly 188 (11 1951): 91Google Scholar. This criticism was partly echoed by Belfrage, Cedric, who felt that “sex and suspense predominate over probability” (American Inquisition, 45)Google Scholar.

46. Bentley, Elizabeth, Out of Bondage (1951; rept. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), 26–27Google Scholar.

47. Ibid., 81.

48. Ibid., 225.

49. Ibid., 235.

50. Hoover, , Masters of Deceit, viiiGoogle Scholar.

51. Fast, , Peekskill, USA, 110Google Scholar.

52. Lattimore, Owen, Ordeal by Slander (Boston: Little Brown, 1950)Google Scholar; and Hiss, Alger, In the Court of Public Opinion (London: John Calder, 1957), 419Google Scholar. Hiss subsequently published a further account of his experiences: Recollections of a Life (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988)Google Scholar. The latest state of play in this complex and unresolved case has been summarized by Levin, David in his “Gaps in Narratives of the Hiss Case,” Prospects 20 (1995): 257–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Wald, and Filreis, , “Conversation with Howard Fast,” 513Google Scholar.

54. Fast, Howard, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 83Google Scholar.

55. Ibid., 90.

56. Chambers, , Witness, 450Google Scholar.

57. Fast, , Being Red, 61Google Scholar.

58. Ibid., 276.

59. “Its frequent omissions, distortions, and lapses — even, in fact, its tone — are, nonetheless, often as significant as what Fast deliberately and accurately includes” (Traister, Daniel, “Noticing Howard Fast,” Prospects 20 [1996]: 537)Google Scholar. Fast used many of the details of Being Red in his semiautobiographical novel The Pledge (1988). Here the protagonist, a journalist named Bruce Bacon, has no Communist background at all but nevertheless illogically becomes the focus of FBI attempts to blacklist him as a writer. Bacon personifies a combination of social concern, a quixotic sense of honor, and an amazing naivety about political processes. Like Fast, he refuses to name names and is imprisoned as a consequence. The novel is partly an attack on the expert-witness system. Bacon's lover and fiancée, a party member and writer for the Daily Worker, declares, “Much as I may hate a lot of what goes on in the Party, I have even more contempt and hatred for those who leave the Party and go over to the other side and make a cheap bundle out of becoming anti-Party hacks” (The Pledge [London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989], 102–3)Google Scholar.

60. Koestler, Arthur, The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays (London: Collins, 1955), 56Google Scholar.

61. Navasky, Victor S., Naming Names (London: John Calder, 1982), 319Google Scholar. In addition to the aforementioned works, invaluable commentary on the move from the left can be found in Diggins, John P.'s Up from Communism (2d ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994])Google Scholar. Diggins concentrates on the careers of Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham.