Howard Fast - Being Red: A Memoir

BEING

RED

Books by Howard Fast

BEING RED

THE CONFESSION OF JOE CULLEN

THE PLEDGE

THE DINNER PARTY

CITIZEN TOM PAINE (A Play)

THE IMMIGRANTS DAUGHTER

THE OUTSIDER

MAX

TIME AND THE RIDDLE:THIRTY-ONE ZEN STORIES

THE LEGACY

THE ESTABLISHMENT

THE MAGIC DOOR

SECOND GENERATION

THE IMMIGRANTS

THE ART OF ZEN MEDITATION

A TOUCH OF INFINITY

THE HESSIAN

THE CROSSING

THE GENERAL ZAPPED AN ANGEL

THE JEWS: STORY OF A PEOPLE

THE HUNTER AND THE TRAP

TORQUEMADA

THE HILL

AGRIPPAS DAUGHTER

POWER

THE EDGE OF TOMORROW

APRIL MORNING

THE GOLDEN RIVER

THE WINSTON AFFAIR

MOSES, PRINCE OF EGYPT

THE LAST SUPPER

SILAS TIMBERMAN

THE PASSION OF SACCO AND VANZETTI

SPARTACUS

THE PROUD AND THE FREE

DEPARTURE

MY GLORIOUS BROTHERS

CLARKTON

THE AMERICAN

FREEDOM ROAD

CITIZEN TOM PAINE

THE UN VANQUISHED

THE LAST FRONTIER

CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY

PLACE IN THE CITY

THE CHILDREN

STRANGE YESTERDAY

TWO VALLEYS

First published 1990 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Copyright 1990 Howard Fast. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices

No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fast, Howard, 1914

Being red : a memoir / Howard Fast.

p. cm.

Originally published: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Includes index.

ISBN 1-56324-499-3

1. Fast, Howard, 1914 Biography.

2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography.

3. CommunistsUnited StatesBiography.

I. Title.

[PS3511. A784Z464 1994]

813.52dc20

[B]

9419458

CIP

ISBN 13: 9781563244995 (pbk)

BEING

RED

T here is no way to tell the story of the curious life that happened to me without dealing with the fact that I was for many years what that old brute Senator Joseph McCarthy delighted in calling a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. He had a way of saying it as if it were a spell to evoke Old Nick himself, and he shrouded each evocation of the devil in such nasty delight that you could fairly smell the smoke.

In my single encounter with the old monster, I tried vainly to instruct him in some of the more obvious truths of American history, in response to which McCarthy, in a towering rage, roared at me to go write a book. I wrote more than he asked for, but of that, later. At this point, I am trying to describe the circumstances that led me into the Communist movement, where I remained for twelve years, with a profound effect on all my life.

Pearl Harbor had happened, and the world was at war, and the United States joined the forces that faced Adolf Hitler and his fascist allies. It was 1942, and in the desperate rush by America to turn a peaceful nation into a war machine, many things were quickly if loosely put together. One of these was a propaganda and information center, something that the country had done well enough without in the past but was now a necessity in this era of radio. This propaganda and information center, so hastily thrown together, was called the Office of War Information, or OWI; and feeling that the only available pool of talent to man it was in New York City, the government took over the General Motors Building at Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway. In the first few months after Pearl Harbor, the government set to in a sort of frenzy to remake the building according to its needs, staff it, and somehow learn the art if such it was of war propaganda.

Howard Fast, meanwhile, was living the ultimate fulfillment of a poor boys dream. Raised in bitter and unrelenting poverty, I had now plunged right into the American dream. Of the poverty, of the awful and painful years that I spent in what people call childhood, I will have more to say; at this point, 1942, I was sitting right on top of eighteen pots of honey. My third novel, The Last Frontier, published a year earlier, had been greeted as a masterpiece, praised to the skies by Alexander Woollcott and Rex Stout, and chosen as a selection by the esteemed Readers Club, and my new novel, just published, called The Unvanquished, a story of the Continental Armys most desperate moment, had been called, by Time magazine who found in it a parallel for the grim present, the best book about World War Two. I was twenty-seven years old, about to turn twenty-eight, and five years earlier I had married a wonderful blue-eyed, flaxen-haired girl, an artist by name of Bette, an artist by every right, and still my wife and companion, fifty-three years later. We had survived the first hard years nicely enough, and we had just put down $500 for an acre of land on the Old Sleepy Hollow Road near Tarrytown.

At Sears, Roebuck we purchased for twelve dollars a set of blueprints, and with a mortgage of $8000 and $1000 in cash, we built a small, lovely two-bedroom cottage. Bette became pregnant, we acquired a wonderful mongrel named Ginger, and I finished writing a book I would call Citizen Tom Paine. I cleared the land myself, Bette learned to bake and cook and sew small clothes, and I saw a rewarding, gentle future, in which we would have many children and Bette would paint and I would write my books and earn fame and fortune. And then the war came, and it all turned to dust.

In quick succession, my father died (my mother had died when I was eight and a half, and my father never remarried), my younger brother, close to me and my dearest friend, enlisted in the army, I drew a low draft number, and Bette miscarried our first child and sank into gloom. The future that we had planned so carefully was cast aside; Ginger was given to my older brother and promptly ran away and disappeared; the house was put up for sale; we moved into a one-room studio in New York; and Bette, convinced that my orders would be cut in a matter of weeks at the most, leaving her to face the possibility of years alone, joined the Signal Corps as a civilian artist, making animated training films.

Well, there it was, a pile of ashes but certainly not the worst such pile in those strange times. We were young, in good health, and I was successful and was looking forward to being in uniform. It is hard for us today, living with the horror of the atom bomb, remembering Korea and Vietnam, sick of war, and aware that the next war may finish the human race hard indeed to think about a time when this country was knit together in a hatred of Nazism, wholly united in a conviction that we could not live in the same world as Adolf Hitler. But it was that way, and we knew that we would have to fight, and we accepted it at least the great majority of us.