"... he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he’s worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn’t, it would be wrong. But he’s finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life’s very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall."
From "I Married a Communist" by Philip Roth.
The character in the novel became entranced with Tom Paine by reading "Citizen Tom Paine" by Howard Fast, which came out in 1943.
“He was the most hated—and perhaps by a few the most loved—man in all the world.” “A mind that burned itself as few minds in all human history.” “To feel on his own soul the whip laid on the back of millions.” “His thoughts and ideas were closer to those of the average working man than Jefferson’s could ever be.” That was Paine as Fast portrayed him, savagely single-minded and unsociable, an epic, folkloric belligerent—unkempt, dirty, wearing a beggar’s clothes, bearing a musket in the unruly streets of wartime Philadelphia, a bitter, caustic man, often drunk, frequenting brothels, hunted by assassins, and friendless.
He did it all alone: “My only friend is the revolution.” By the time I had finished the book, there seemed to me no way other than Paine’s for a man to live and die if he was intent on demanding, in behalf of human freedom—demanding both from remote rulers and from the coarse mob—the transformation of society. He did it all alone. There was nothing about Paine that could have been more appealing, however unsentimentally Fast depicted an isolation born of defiant independence and personal misery.
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4 comments:
Amadeus 48 writes:
Howard Fast is a formidable American character in his own right. He wrote one of the great coming of age novels, April Morning, about a boy who becomes an adult at the battle of Lexington. Do you want to know what it might have been like to stand next to your father on Lexington Green, as the British soldiers, bands playing and drums beating, came marching into the village? Fast takes you there.
Fast was a prolific novelist and television writer who had been a Communist in the 1940s and 50s and who got blacklisted. He wrote the novel Spartacus, as well as the novels that were turned into the movies Cheyanne Autumn and Freedom Road. This is for Meade: he wrote television scripts for the TV series How the West Was Won.
He broke with the Communist Party in the mid-50s after Khruschev renounced Stalin’s crimes.
I have only read April Morning, so I don’t know how the CP line crept into his work. But April Morning is a great, patriotic American work. And Spartacus speaks for itself. Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay based on Fast’s book, so Spartacus was a coming out party for at least two blacklisted writers.
Yes, I'd read the Wikipedia article on Fast as I was writing this post.
I thought this was especially interesting:
"While he was at Mill Point Federal Prison, Fast began writing his most famous work, Spartacus, a novel about an uprising among Roman slaves. Blacklisted by major publishing houses following his release from prison, Fast was forced to publish the novel himself. It was a success, going through seven printings in the first four months of publication. (According to Fast in his memoir, 50,000 copies were printed, of which 48,000 were sold.) He subsequently established the Blue Heron Press, which allowed him to continue publishing under his own name throughout the period of his blacklisting. Just as the production of the film version of Spartacus (released in 1960) is considered a milestone in the breaking of the Hollywood blacklist, the reissue of Fast's novel by Crown Publishers in 1958 effectively ended his own blacklisting within the American publishing industry."
Why was he in prison?
"Fast spent World War II working with the United States Office of War Information, writing for Voice of America. In 1943, he joined the Communist Party USA and in 1950, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in his testimony, he refused to disclose the names of contributors to a fund for a home for orphans of American veterans of the Spanish Civil War (one of the contributors was Eleanor Roosevelt), and he was given a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress."
Thanks, Amadeus48!
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