AWFULLY LATE TO THE BALL:

Obituary: Howard Fast: Prolific radical novelist who championed the cause of America's common people (Eric Homberger, March 14, 2003, The Guardian)

The writer Howard Fast, who has died aged 88, was the last surviving American recipient of the Stalin peace prize. His first novel appeared at the height of the depression, and he was still publishing bestsellers in the 1980s.

Fast was a literary phenomenon of a recognisable American kind. Untouched by the ugly racism of Jack London, and certainly more skilled at the delineation of character and the crafting of a readable plot than Upton Sinclair, he was the champion of the progressive novel in the United States.

For a decade after the second world war, he moved in the upper strata of inter- national anti-fascism and communist propaganda. His historical novels, which ranged from portraits of slave revolts in antiquity, as with Spartacus (1953), to the American revolution, won him a broad readership across the world. In the Soviet Union, his print runs were substantial.

Having refused to cooperate with the House un-American activities committee and provide records of the joint anti-fascist refugee committee, he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1950, and served three months in jail - it was in effect a congressional imprimatur of his leftwing credentials and integrity. It also meant that, overnight, his books became unpublishable. He was blacklisted. Angus Cameron (obituary, November 30 2002), the editor-in-chief at his publishers, Little Brown, came under fire in 1951 for publishing avowed or secret communist authors, and was forced to resign.

Fast was driven to publishing his own books - including the bestselling Spartacus - until he broke with the American Communist party, which he had joined in 1943. Despite his misgivings about the party, he regarded the rising tide of McCarthyism as a more immediate threat to American liberties. He ran for Congress on the American Labour party ticket in 1952, after it had come under the CP's covert control. He wrote a eulogy of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been executed during the 1920s red scare. The party had played a key role in the worldwide campaign against the American legal system.

For this and other services, Fast was awarded the Stalin peace prize in 1954. He was the one truly popular American writer to remain loyal to the Communist party until 1956, when Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" on Stalin's crimes, and the Red army's crushing of the Hungarian revolution, led three-quarters of the membership of the American Communist party to quit. [...]

He seldom wrote autobiographically; the nearest he came to a self-portrait was in Citizen Tom Paine. For Paine, the greatest revolutionary propagandist of the 18th century, the likely fate of the American revolution of 1776, as well as of the French of 1789, was betrayal and defeat. Paine knew the vicious attacks of enemies in America and abandonment by his friends, as well as persecution and imprisonment in France under the Jacobins.

And, indeed, Fast's novel is a portrait of the writer as revolutionary. It is also a singularly harsh portrayal of the nature of revolution itself, and of the terrible fate awaiting its creators; it belongs on the same shelf as Arthur Koestler's novel of the fate of an old Bolshevik, Darkness At Noon (1940). [...]

It was when Fast learned that the Soviet writer Boris Polovoy had lied to him about the whereabouts of an admired Jewish writer (who had, in fact, been shot), and when he learned that Alexander Fadeyev had lied to Mary McCarthy in 1949 about other "silent" Soviet writers, that Fast saw the moral bankruptcy that was international communism's final legacy. Others, like Dos Passos, had seen it earlier; some never saw it at all. For Fast, Khrushchev's 1956 speech was a final cherry on the cake, when he finally felt able to say much of what he had felt.

Mr. Fast joined the Party too late and stayed loyal too long--including the refusal to reveal who else was working to undermine American society and government--for his crimes to be excused. But given his lifelong focus on freedom and the paradoxical way in which his own writing argue against his personal politics, he can ultimately be forgiven. At any rate, this is an excellent excuse to watch the great film Spartacus this weekend. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2003 6:46 AM