American Dreamers

Daniel Lavette was born to chase the promise of America. He entered the world on the floor of a cold and drafty boxcar rattling across the continent of North America in January, 1889. His parents, penniless immigrants, were traveling to San Francisco, where the Atchison Railroad had promised his father a decent wage and a decent living. But while the railroad's promise proved hollow, the lie did not deter the father's son. Dan Lavette was too tough. By the time America's economic bubble burst in 1929, Lavette had dreamed, bluffed and borrowed his way to the top of a sprawling financial empire. He commanded ocean liners and airlines. He had married one of the most beautiful women in San Francisco, the daughter of one of the city's most wealthy and powerful men. If America had a special promise, he had taken it.

But the promise young Lavette pursued turned out to be as empty as the railroad's commitment to his father. Lavette's wife was cold; his children were indifferent to him; he had lost the only woman he really cared about--his Chinese lover--because it would have been difficult to take her as a wife in racist San Francisco. When the crash of 1929 finally called Lavette's bluff, he was at the mercy of the bank holding his loans. Banks, of course, were not in the business of giving mercy, and Lavette lost his empire.

Lavette, part French, mostly Italian, is the main character of The Immigrants, Howard Fast's latest novel, which traces the history from 1889 to the present of a Jewish family, an Italian family and a Chinese family, all late-nineteenth century immigrants to America and to San Francisco. The book is raw and robust, like the expanding country it describes. Fast's prose is clean; his sentences are short; the pages are dense with human drama. His characters are carefully developed, realistic because they are unconscious of their roles in history. The Immigrants draws the reader into its drama, leads him to read without regard for real time, and intoxicates him with the life of a past era.

Howard Fast is a very American writer. His powerful writing draws on a rich personal history tightly woven with the history of the country. Born in 1914, Fast struggled up from poverty in New York in the '30s, publishing his first book at 18. During World War II he found work as a war correspondent. By the end of the war he had embraced the Communist Party as a major force fighting for man's freedom, and by the end of the decade he had been tried in the fire of the nation's anti-communist paranoia. Brought before the House Committee on Un-American activities, Fast refused to release a list of contributors to the Spanish Refugee Appeal, a group providing medical help to the Spanish Republican forces opposing Franco's fascist movement. This refusal earned Fast, a director of the organization, a three-month term in jail for contempt of Congress. And for years afterward Fast was unable to find a publisher who would handle his work.

But if Fast drew fire from conservatives, he also incurred the anger of his comrades on the left: during the '50s, U.S. Communist Party leaders criticized his novels for failing to adhere to Party dogma. In 1957, weary of the attacks, Fast wrote The Naked God, in which he renounced his allegiance to the Party, arguing that it had become a force for oppression rather than freedom. He objected to its codes for correct thinking--codes he found unnecessarily restrictive. After leaving the Communist Party, Fast found a new school of thought with which to align himself: for the past 20 years he has practiced Zen Buddhism. He explains his attraction to Zen quite simply. Last week, looking slightly out of place but relaxed at a carefully-kept conference room at the Boston offices of his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, Fast said, "You get to a point where you've seen a couple of wars, prison, and all the rest that brings with it, and you have to determine for yourself whether the whole thing adds up to anything--whether the universe is a medley of lunatics and atoms or whether there might be some reason and logic somewhere in it."

Today Fast lives in a peaceful section of Beverly Hills, California, above the smog of Los Angeles, in a home heated and powered by 12 solar panels. At 63 he has written more than 50 books, including science fiction works, "Zen stories," and thrillers--the last under the pseudonym of E.V. Cunningham. His best-known works are historical novels such as The Unvanquished, Citizen Tom Paine, April Morning--all set during the Revolutionary War--and Freedom Road, a tale of the Reconstruction Era. But Fast will probably gain the most recognition from his latest novel, and from his two upcoming novels, which will complete a trilogy tracing the growth from 1889 to the present of the three families he introduces in The Immigrants. Fast has already completed the next volume in the saga, Second Generation, which will be published next fall, and is now at work on the third.

The trilogy could well make Fast a millionaire. "I appear to have blundered into a tremendous bestseller, but that's not necessarily an act of sin," Fast shrugs, adding, "I, for one, do not understand why a book becomes a bestseller. But I guess the publishers don't either."

But they do know one when they see one. The Immigrants is a dual selection of the Literary Guild; Dell has purchased the paperback rights for some $832,000, half of which will go to Fast. And Universal Studios has acquired production rights. The studio will probably produce a mini-series out of the books, and the resulting royalties could mean very big money for Fast, who sees his financial success largely as a freak of chance.

While Fast's primary goal in writing the trilogy may not be mercenary, it still seems ambitious. He recalls, "I set out five years ago to lay out a book that would span the entire recent life of California and also be some sort of a history of our time. I've always wanted to write a history of what I've lived through but I'm not an historian, and I thought the best way to do it would be through a novel."

But Fast does not think his plans are as ambitious as they sound. Last week Fast smiled, "It's less ambitious, I think, than lazy. You're got your work laid out for you years in advance."

In its main plot line The Immigrants much resembles such other novels spanning the '20s as John Dos Passos's The Big Money, or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Man is broke, but dreams of success. Man works hard, makes lots of money, seeks beautiful, high-status wife. Man discovers that success he finally gains leaves him, in the end, unfulfilled and unloved. The large balance in his bank account cannot ensure his emotional well-being.

But Fast's book ends differently. In The Immigrants Lavette is not ultimately consumed by the system through which he rises. For Lavette business is a game that attracts him as poker seduces a compulsive gambler, but Lavette never forgets that he is just the unmannered, uneducated son of an immigrant fisherman. The Depression is therefore a kind of blessing for Lavette, because it stops the game. Instead of jumping out of the window of his office to splatter on the streets of San Francisco when stock prices begin to plummet, Lavette, after a stint as a bum, leaves his business suits in storage and contentedly returns to the life of a fisherman, the life his father and countless generations before him had known.

The ending of The Immigrants is unexpectedly peaceful and happy after the turbulent and troubled tale Fast spins through most of the 389 pages. Almost any other author would have left Dan Lavette dead, his stomach perforated with ulcers. But Fast leaves him tanned, muscular and poor, smelling of fish and brine, married at last to the Chinese lover he would not wed before. One can almost see Fast the grinning Zen Buddhist, sitting in his solar-heated home, tying off the novel with a quote from Lao Tzu about the wisdom of stepping off the merry-go-round of ambition. "I'm not given to pessimism," Fast explains.

The Immigrants is also different from other '20s novels in that it goes beyond the roaring decade to place the era in the stream of human history. And The Immigrants extends beyond the story of Dan Lavette: he is just the character who gives the story its driving force, just as booming industry pushed America through the '20s. Fast creates many rich, three-dimensional personalities in his book--the powerful bankers, the fishermen, the couple who decide to leave the city to operate a vineyard, the girl who leaves for Hollywood in search of stardom, the man who swindles her.

By giving the book a scope beyond the story of Dan Lavette, Fast creates something more than another tale of how the American Dream went sour. He imparts a feeling for the rich variety of life that was swirling in America while the Gross National Product expanded. Fast is, above all, a splendid storyteller, a chef whose recipe is a rich blend of human incident and emotion. And he has an ample stock of ingredients.

ast's writing has been forged and honed sharp by his long writing career and his own Lavette-like rise from poverty. In 1957 Fast wrote of his youth in The Naked God:

I was large and strong, iron-muscled, youthfully indestructible, for I had already survived and made my peace with every bestiality and indignity that poverty exacts. I was the product of the gutter and the gang, the lousy, bedbug-ridden tenement, the burning streets and the empty lots. I had carried brass knucks and used them, and in my animal world, I was beaten and I beat others.

It is hard to connect the author of this passage with the soft-spoken, philosophical man who came to Boston last week. Fast looks on the hardships of his life with a curiously detached perspective, pointing out very reasonably that they were important to his writing. In the Communist Party Fast once found an inspiring movement and struggle, a brave, historic fight for freedom. Even when he entered prison he went as a writer, a man whose purpose was to build up a store of experience. He told his wife at the time that it would be a shame for a writer never to experience imprisonment.

If Fast today sounds philosophical almost to the point of complacency, the story of his own life and the stories of many of his books' heroes have been tales of fighters. Lavette's response to any problem is to charge headlong into it. In Fast's fictionalized biography Citizen Tom Paine (1943), Thomas Paine continues to work for the Revolution after putting out his pamphlet Common Sense, and he dies friendless after he goes on to criticize the new government his efforts have helped to establish. The American (1946) is a fictionalized biography of John P. Altgeld, a poor Illinois farm boy who became governor of his state in the 1890s. Against a storm of political pressure, Altgeld pardoned three anarchists who had been wrongly convicted of murder in 1886 during the public hysteria that followed Chicago's Haymarket Riot. Lavette, Paine and Altgeld all start out poor, and all have to battle the stigma of being outsiders.

In recent years Fast has freed himself from the reins of historical fiction to produce three collections of short stories that libraries catalogue as "fantasy and science fiction," although Fast calls the most recent, Time and the Riddle, "my Zen stories." In these books he cuts loose and plays with absurdities. One tale relates how an American general in Vietnam, "Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie," accidentally shoots down an angel while blasting Viet Cong with his machine gun. Another tells of a hole that appears in the floor of a fourth-story apartment in Los Ahgeles, and how a sunlit pasture reaching as far as the eye can see appears on the floor below.

Fast's mellowing is even reflected in his historical fiction. His last novel before The Immigrants was The Hessian, which he cites as his best. It is not a story of heroes and fighters at all, but the tale of how a Hessian mercenary in the Revolutionary War, a mere boy, is tracked down, captured, tried and hung. It is a story of pointlessness and tragedy. The boy who dies is no menace; he is simply pathetic. The people who execute him are not shapers of history; they are its victims.

In age, Fast's message is perhaps simply that people should think more about what they are doing--things are not always what they seem to be. There is a parallel to be drawn between Dan Lavette and the country he helped build, when Fast says of his character:

People have very few options generally, and a man who has no inner knowledge of himself has almost no options. Daniel Lavette is a man who doesn't know himself. He acts. And he acts almost in a predetermined way.

And Fast, sitting at Houghton Mifflin looking out a windows at the traffic on Boston's Park Street, went on to extend his metaphor:

Twenty years from now these packed streets of Boston are not going to be packed any more. The cars will be sitting still or rusting away. We'll have no gasoline. But to act now in terms of what is going to be the situation 20 years from now would require a kind of judiciousness, at least, which we simply do not have. We would much rather pretend that we can go on forever, just the way we are now. And that's the whole philosophy of a country where no one ever really dies. We ignore it. We're going to solve everything, do everything, live forever. It's not true. It's simply not true. But we have lost touch with the element of life that conditions life, that creates life. We exist in a series of self-created cliches.

At home outside Los Angeles, his solar panels over his head, Fast meditates and continues to write, putting new twists in the cliche of American history. And away below Beverly Hills, traffic hums and on bad days the smog hangs heavy, as a city of immigrants keeps reaching for a lost dream.