Retroactive Respectability

After years in the national doghouse, Howard Fast renounced Communism, and is now thoroughly rehabilitated: this week he sold another novel to the movies, to be made into a $4,000,000 epic of sin, slaughter, and spectacle (not socialism) in ancient Rome. The history of Fast's career provides disturbing evidence of the existence in America of an informal conspiracy, not so much to prevent the dissemination of Communist propaganda, as to prevent Communist artists from making a living.

During the forties, Fast was one of our leading historical novelists, but with the rise of the anti -Communist movement his reputation sank with a thud. He had trouble finding publishers, and when his books were published they were ignored by nearly all reviewers. After years as a respected, reviewed, widely-discussed writer, Fast found himself surrounded by silence.

In 1957 he recanted, and was suddenly respectable again. His book The Naked God, about his break with the party, found a regular trade publisher and was widely reviewed. His new novel, Moses, Prince of Egypt, was also reviewed, and its publisher was enthusiastic enough to buy a full page in The New York Times Book Review to tell the world about it.

This new respectability not only covers Fast's current works, but extends backwards to include the novels written during his card-carrying days. The novel sold to the movies this week is Spartacus, which Fast was forced to publish himself in 1951 because nobody else would. Evidently, then, the silence that boxed him in during the early Fifties was not imposed to eliminate Communist propaganda.

It is heartening to see that Fast can once again freely practice his profession. It is saddening that this new freedom of his comes not from any renewed belief among Americans in the right to the pursuit of happiness, but as a by-product of Fast's revulsion after Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech.