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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 1, Winter 1958, pp. 63–65.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Naked God
by Howard Fast
197 pp., Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1957.
On June 12, 1956, Howard Fast wrote his last article for the Daily Worker. Writing about the Khrushchev report, Fast said: “It is a strange and awful document, perhaps without parallel in history; and one must face the fact that it itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoiac bloodlust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man.” With those words, Howard Fast ended a chapter of his life begun thirteen years earlier when he joined the Communist Party. In The Naked God, written over a year later, he has attempted an examination of his own political metamorphosis and has succeeded in providing a valuable addition to the literature describing the Communist Party, its leadership and membership, its rites and rituals, its nightmarish atmosphere.
Although Howard Fast joined the Communist Party in 1943, he had committed himself to its ideology during the Thirties; a commitment broken only for the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact and reaffirmed by actual membership when he “came to accept the proposition that the truest and most consistent fighters in this anti-Fascist struggle were the Communists.” Even as he joined, Fast was aware of the many other writers before him who had similarly committed themselves only to leave the Communist Party in bitterness and disillusionment. Their experience failed to act as a deterrent.
Of his years in the party, Fast has much to say. He painstakingly points to what he considers the difference between the sincerity and dedication of the rank-and-file as opposed to the opportunism and omniscience of the leadership. His composite portrait of a leader of the party, spiked with anecdotal illustrations, is properly devastating, as witness his own experience after a talk with one of the leaders of the Indian Communist Party who asked that the conversation be reported to Eugene Dennis. On his return to this country, Fast made several attempts to see Dennis and was unceremoniously put off. Finally, after a lengthy wait he managed to obtain an audience.
“I was led to the large, impressive office, where Dennis sat in his lonely lordship, and when I entered the room, I was told, with a cold nod, to say whatever I had to say. It took me some ten minutes to say it. I finished. ‘Very well. You may go,’ Dennis said.”
Not even the warden of the Federal prison where he served a sentence as a political prisoner years later, Fast remarks ironically, treated him or anyone else with such inhuman disdain and contempt.
But the power to rationalize is almost infinite. “They are not the Party,” Fast and others like him were to say for many years. Even now, Fast writes with an emotion bordering on reverence for the average member with whose courage and idealism he identifies. Yet he knows that the leadership was the Party, that the members were and remain largely disfranchised while the colorless men on top obeyed the Kremlin decisions necessitating tortuous twists and turns of political line, resulting in total commitment and utter subservience to Moscow.
It is in his attempt to answer the question about the length of time he took to discover the truth about the Communist Party that Fast flounders. At one point, in discussing his near expulsion on twelve different occasions, Fast says:
I can say, looking back now, that I think I did right through those years in refusing to allow myself to be expelled from the Party. If I had allowed it to come to that, as so many others did, I would have lost all power to influence the hundreds of thousands the world over who today see themselves in much the same position as myself.
While it is true that Howard Fast enjoyed enormous prestige and popularity in Communist circles and that his testimony is valuable, it is extremely dubious that as a result of successfully retaining his party membership, he is now in a better position to influence the hundreds of thousands throughout the world who remain loyal to the Communist Party. Were that true, think of the many, including Fast, who should have been similarly influenced by the appearance of essays on precisely this subject by such eminent writers as Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender and Louis Fischer, none of them even mentioned by the author, who described their painful break with Stalinism. Fast’s is the Naked God while theirs was the God That Failed. They may have influenced some, but obviously they failed to move Howard Fast, a fellow writer.
Much nearer the truth is a discussion of the reality of expulsion from the party; the fear of being cast out, abused and alone. It is this fear combined with the tremendous desire to cling to illusions about Russia – which is, after all, not an abstraction but a great world power with which to identify and absorb prestige and authority – that leads to the special type of selective ignorance displayed by so many members and followers of the Communist Party. Fast is candid about having for years heard charges against the Russian regime, talk of slave labor, anti-Semitism, suppression of liberty, torture and utter bestiality. These charges he refused to believe. When a comrade of his reported some impressions after a visit to Russia, including a conversation with a Polish Communist high up in government echelons who had spoken of fifteen million people having felt the direct terror in prison and five million of them who had died, Fast refused to believe. His friend, to this day a member of the party, replied sadly: “I also refuse to believe it. I cannot believe it. Only – I know it is true.”
The possibility for talking about such matters, even listening, was provided by the Khrushchev report which gave these “slanders” the status of truth. Fast does not spare himself when he writes: “... but to man’s ancient dream of freedom and equality I owed a great deal, and this I betrayed out of an ignorance almost as awful as the truth.” It is the awful ignorance, the self-imposed censorship, the refusal to believe even while believing which provide the basis for continued loyalty and devotion to the Naked God.
Fast suffered not only as a member and spokesman for the Communist Party but especially as a writer. The party leadership might not have had the wit or imagination necessary to provide its writer members with plot and story line, but they were all expert in the field of literary criticism. They pounced on each new literary creation, eager to go over it word by word in their hunt for heresy. The twelve near expulsions Fast mentions were all based on material found in his books – the use of the word “nigger,” depicting a worker drunk, “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” In the CP, Fast writes:
“... all nationalism can be both admirable and a progressive stage in the development of a people except Jewish nationalism. Jewish nationalism is anti-Party, anti-Soviet, anti-progressive. Irish nationalists are heroes, but Jewish nationalists are the ‘running dogs of imperialism’.”
If Fast is now an outcast, he makes it clear that his experience in the Communist Party did not leave him permanently debilitated. Disillusioned with Stalinism, he has not given up the dreams, hopes and ideals of his youth. He continues to believe in the validity of the socialist ideal and has come to the welcome realization that the Communist Party and Stalinist ideology are its deadly enemy.
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