The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party

by Howard Fast

Fast’s book on his break with the Communist Party, and a riveting tribute to the importance of justice and beauty over dogma and rigidity

The Naked God is Howard Fast’s public repudiation of the Communist Party, of which he was a devoted member for thirteen years until reading about the full scope of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The bestselling author of Spartacus and Citizen Tom Paine, Howard Fast lent his writing talents and celebrity to the communist cause as a steadfast advocate and public figure. However, he felt increasingly ill at ease with the superior manner Party leaders took with rank-and-file members and with rumors of Soviet anti-Semitism. In his first book after officially leaving the Party in 1956, Howard Fast explores the reasons he joined and his long inner struggle with a political movement in which he never felt he truly belonged.

 

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

188 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Howard Fast was one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century. He was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. The son of immigrants, Fast grew up in New York City and published his first novel upon finishing high school in 1933. In 1950, his refusal to provide the United States Congress with a list of possible Communist associates earned him a three-month prison sentence. During his incarceration, Fast wrote one of his best-known novels, Spartacus (1951). Throughout his long career, Fast matched his commitment to championing social justice in his writing with a deft, lively storytelling style.

Pseudonyms: Walter Ericson, E.V. Cunningham

Reviews

[Sriram Venugopal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tale of an ex communist and why he left the party. Details the communist party's horrific murders and fascist oppression of the writers

[David Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since this book looks at the relationship between the writer and the Communist Party, I thought it might make an interesting companion to The Captive Mind, which I’d enjoyed a while ago.

Knowing nothing of the author, I was a little surprised to learn he’d been the author of Spartacus, because I was aware of the importance of that movie during the Hollywood anti-Communist purges.
Anyway, I thought this well worth the read and I was quietly surprised that people hadn’t made a bigger fuss about it, especially considering it’s relevance to the currently trending “cancel culture” debate.

Fast explains that, when he wrote in criticism of the Communist Party, he expected backlash, outrage, ab hominem attacks and denunciation. Instead what happened was the polar opposite. In the eyes of the Party, he simply ceased to exist. Nobody challenged him, because, officially there was nobody to challenge, and never had been. When modern-day intellectuals discuss the act of cancellation, they would do well to bear this particularly brutal form of social exile existed long before Twitter pile-ons.

A latter section of this book (written in 1955, or thereabouts) concerns the Party’s attitude to censorship, through which writers are subject to the whims of self-appointed moral and cultural guardians which have the power to declare books unsuitable, simply because they contain a word or phrase that fall short of Party Ideals. Fast laments the cancellation of his American Civil War novels because of the use of the N word.

Fast argues that it’s a sure sign of a totalitarian regime gone mad, that publishers should reject a book because it contains racial slurs that would have been common in that period. He argues that only the Communist Party would be small-minded enough to demand that anachronistic language be used for the sake of political correctness.

Fast-forward sixty-odd years, and we now have debates about whether it’s even appropriate for white authors to include characters of colour in their novels, let alone use the N word. What would Fast make of this, I wonder?

One other thing that caught my attention was Fast’s take on the Party’s selective tolerance for Nationalism. He argues that certain nationalism, such as Irish Nationalism is indulged by the Party with benign smiles, whereas other nationalism, such as Jewish nationalism, is abhorred as unacceptably inappropriate. Yet again, fast is making a point decades ago, about something I’m only just becoming aware of. In the UK, it’s perfectly acceptable to be a flag-waving, face painting, song singing nationalist… as long as you’re Welsh or Scottish. It’s okay to be proud of your heritage and celebrate your culture… as long as it’s not English.

Quote of the book: “The definition of a fanatic is somebody who, once he has lost sight of the ends, dedicates himself to the means.”

[Garth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very dated autobiography of an American communist who became disillusioned and left the party in 1956. It was as boring as watching the Waltons sort cranberries.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give me a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R2V7OA5...

Howard Fast is most famous as the author of Spartacus. A book he "self-published" against the opposition of his superiors in the American Communist Party ("ACP") who condemned it as "a study in brutalism and sadism" and published scathing reviews. Here is Fast's comment on that:

"But not to the commissars! To them, in terms of this scene I describe above, I had sinned beyond the totality of all my previous sinning. I had exalted a “capitalist beast,” namely Gracchus. I had degraded a pure “Communist woman, a woman of the oppressed toilers,” namely Varinia. I am not exaggerating; I am not burlesquing; I am describing precisely what happened. Listen to this, from the definitive review in the Daily Worker of February 17, 1952:

            What is intended here? Is this Goethe’s idealistic vision of the Eternal Woman, leading us all, oppressor and oppressed, “upward and on”?… Fast’s conclusion is not believable, either as art or as philosophy. It is true that individuals from a decadent class can press beyond their class into the higher realm of the advancing class … but it is straining artistic credibility and our sense of history that this should take place in the form of a search for human-sexual fulfillment by the two figures who symbolize the entire Roman decadence, the murderer of Spartacus and the gangster-politician. What we have here is a reverse from the class theme.… Can we imagine a Nazi pleading for the love of a Russian woman?… we get something very close to the sexual reconciliation of the classes.… The incursion is felt here … of the destructive influence of Freudian mystifications concerning the erotic as against the social basis of character.…

There should be no temptation to laugh. The ridiculous is also hideous in this case, and I pasted the review into my scrapbook alongside the anti-Communist reviews which sneered at my “Marxist Rome” and my “comic book” characers. But I had not written my book for their praise. I was understandably an anathema to them—but what of my own comrades in whose cause and struggle I had written? Criticism—yes, I wanted it, I needed it desperately—but in all my years in the Communist Party I never received a paragraph worth being called honest and thoughtful criticism, only the type of mumbo-jumbo printed above alternating with equally ridiculous and thoughtless praise which shamed me by describing me as the “greatest” this and the “greatest” that."

Fast had been a loyal Communist. As a youth, he had the experience of being orphaned and having to go to work to survive, where he experienced poverty. He had given his loyalty to Communism as the hope for the future, and, as he explains, as part of the movement of his generation, but he had remained a non-party member "agent of influence" until he joined in 1943. He remained a loyal party member, toeing the party line and ignoring the venality and corruption of the ACP, until the publication of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" in 1956 (and after the ACP's villified his writing in oppressive and idiotic ways.) Nonetheless, Fast adhered to the ACP, donating money, supporting its propaganda, reviling its opponents, until the late 1950s. Fast explains this by arguing that rank and file Party members were honest, motivated, idealistic and virtuous, whereas the ACP leadership was corrupt, venal, oppressive and stupid.

I think that Fast's explanation rings true. It helps to explain Whittaker Chambers' reluctance to unmask and name his fellow spies. (See [[ASIN:B00PSSEK8W Witness (Cold War Classics)]].) Nothing breeds esprit de corps like sacrifice and commitment and secrecy. I am sure that the Communist rank and file were committed, and that they shared a loyalty to each other. Chambers, after all, explains, in response to the demand that he explain why Hiss would give him a car and let him stary rent free in his guest house, that "We were Communists. This is how we did things."

Not that it didn't come without a cost. The cost was the fear of being kicked out of the movement and being rendered "dead" to the people whose opinions mattered. When Fast announced that he was no longer a Communist in February of 1957, he disappeared from the face of a large part of the planet:

"On February 1, I simply ceased to exist on one-sixth of the earth’s surface. All reference in retrospect also ceased, so I not only was not but had never been. A play of mine, General Washington and the Water Witch, was currently being performed in the Red Army Theatre in Moscow; the performances continued, but no reference to the play appeared in the press again."

Likewise, Fast writes:

"When Albert Maltz, in 1946, sent to the New Masses an article that contained a rather mild criticism of the narrow and sectarian Communist attitude toward literature, he was treated as if he had committed a major crime. I include myself among those who blew up his criticism all out of proportion to its intent—a matter for which I have never forgiven myself, even though Maltz found it so easy to forgive and forget. Meetings were held. Mike Gold denounced Maltz with passion and language that a civilized person would reserve for pathological criminals.
The fact that Albert Maltz was a writer of talent and unshakable integrity meant absolutely nothing. I myself have been denounced by writers in the general press as a “red” and as a “tool of Moscow,” but Maltz was denounced by his own comrades as one seeking to strike a death blow at man’s holiest hopes and aspirations. It was not simply that he had erred; he had sinned, and the aim was to make him submit to a process of total degradation. At that point, he had neither honor nor standing; and the Party leadership watched the process with approval and zest. For thus was the line of the Party fought for and maintained, and if a human soul was crushed or maimed, it meant little.
Yes, the Party values its writers, but it has an inbuilt contempt for people, and writers are people."

Fast does not mention Senator McCarthy in this book. It does not appear that he had any run-in with McCarthy. He did go to jail in 1949 - 1950 for refusing to divulge the names of the members of a Communist-front organization, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. He describes his refusal to testify as a matter of principle, but one wonders whether he was under "discipline" from the Party, as was the case with most such cases. For this he suffered a boycott by publishers, but while he reviles this, he points out that his experience was different from that of writers under Communism (and for that matter, he was also blacklisted by Communists):

"In the United States, I was crippled in my function as a writer. At great cost and financial loss, I had to publish my own books. From comparative wealth and success, I was reduced to a struggle for literary existence; and gradually my continuing work became less and less known. But beyond deprivation, these facts are important:
1. I continued to write.
2. I continued to live.
3. I continued to fight for my inalienable privilege of writing as I pleased.
I spell them out like that because of the savage and unjustifiable experience of that time. I opposed the policies of my government and minced no words about it. I asked no quarter and gave no quarter; yet one, two and three, as specified above, were maintained.
My colleague in the Soviet Union, however, did far less than I in terms of his own government. He did not oppose it. He did not challenge it. At most, he dared to challenge within his craft. And concerning him, these facts are important:
1. He did not continue to write; he was silenced.
2. He did not continue to live: he was cruelly tortured and he was put to death.
3. He did not continue to fight for his “inalienable privilege of writing as he pleased.” The privilege was alien to him; “as he pleased” was philosophically unknown to him, and when he tried to discover and embrace this unknown, his rulers rewarded him with death for the misfortune of plying his trade."

Fast also describes his disgust with the willingness of Communist writers to lie for the Communist apparatus, as when a Russian writer invented a story to undermine the sad truth that various writers had been murdered by the Communist state:

"So Polovoy answered, and this was witnessed by too many people that night to be denied. But after Polovoy had gone home, after the Twentieth Congress, we learned via a Jewish-Polish Communist paper that Kvitko had been dead for years, beaten and executed even as Feffer had been, even as Bergelson. I say: May all the implacable justice of time and history be visited upon those who not only murdered men and artists, but who dirtied the soul of such a man as Boris Polovoy. For it was not merely that he told a tragic and grotesque lie; his invention was the summation of what the Communist Party does to a writer."

This book, however, differs from earlier books by earlier refugees from Communism. Fast does not ascribe his "deconversion" from Communism to a religious conversion, as was the case with Chambers or Bella Dodd (See [[ASIN:B00R55IUG4 School of Darkness: (Illustrated)]].) He also remained a committed utopian Socialist. His optimism and adherence to the Left remained in place, albeit, this time, without the stultifying Party apparatus.

Fast's explanation for leaving the ACP rings true and raises questions. On the one hand, how did Fast manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance of the Communists first opposing Hitler, then supporting Hitler after the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact? Fast says that he broke with his Communist friends over the hypocrisy of the Pact, but he joined the Party in 1943 because he felt that the Communists were the only real bulwark against Fascism (and this at a time when the Fascists were being rolled back by the Democracies?) Fast explains:

"Yet four years later, I joined the Communist Party—not because I ever changed my judgment on the pact, not because I could ever forgive it or pardon it, which my friends in the Party knew—but because when I, in my whole body and being, became a part of that terrible moment in history which we call World War II, I came to accept the proposition that the truest and most consistent fighters in this anti-Fascist struggle were the Communists."

Had he forgotten about how quickly the Communists had turned only four years before?

Likewise, he knew about the mass murders and the political killings long before the Khruschev speech, and he did nothing. Yet, when the Communists claim that they are reforming - which was the ostensible point of the Khruschev speech - he leaves the Party? I don't think we really get a credible explanation on this. I think that old Communist habits of dissimulation remained with Fast.

What rings true is this explanation, which we should keep in mind we ask why Pope Pius XII or others did not accept the enormity of the Nazi genocide despite this or that evidence:

"People have asked me why I waited so long to leave the Communist Party. Did I know nothing of what was going on? Yet in their questions, they make it all too simple. I joined because I accepted a premise, as so many others did, that only through this party could peace, socialism and the brotherhood of man come to this earth. Certain aspects of history appeared to bear this out. To join the Communist Party is a very serious action; and serious people do not leap in and out of such organizations. I could not have written what I wrote above a month or a year after I joined the Party. I am, perhaps, not easily convinced; I am also not easily unconvinced. It took years of fact, incident and experience—a good deal of which I will detail later—to come to these conclusions. And above all, it required the catalyst of the Khrushchev secret speech. Only with his contribution, out of the heart of the first and largest Communist Party on earth, did all the bits of the puzzle fall into place. Even then, through my heartsickness, horror and anger, the question of whether this was the result of evil individuals or the historic-organizational pattern of the Party remained. It took months of thought, reading and discussion to make up my mind finally. And it took more months of doubt before I was able to write at any length about this. I know that no analysis of just this kind has ever been written before, and I can sense that it may be of very great consequence. I am writing about people whom I loved as well as about people whom I despised. I am writing about the bravest men and women I have ever known, as well as about petty bureaucrats, mental and physical cowards and power-drugged paranoiacs."

Changing a religious faith involves a paradigm shift, a radical restructuring of how one sees the world. Fast identifies Communism as a religious faith with its own "Naked God." I would think, therefore, that part of Fast's answer is that he didn't accept the data because it didn't fit the narrative. He gave it less weight than it deserved or he denied its credibility. The cognitive dissonance of what he knew, and his own dissatisfaction with his own treatment, was given a kick by the Khruschev speech into realizing what he had already known before.

As the reader can tell from the excerpts, this book is personal and discursive. It is often disjointed and rambling. It is a personal confession rather than a structured argument. It didn't tell me as much as I would have liked about American Communism, but it did give me a feel for the way in which American Communists dealt with the insanity of their movement.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't the best account of leaving the Communist Party ever committed to print. Howard Fast keeps getting in the way of Howard Fast ;) You will be in no doubt of his opinion of himself by the end. It's still definitely worth it though, and if you've ever been seriously involved in either a political party or a religion it will ring uncomfortably true at points.

Interestingly, one of the central reasons Fast gives for leaving the Party was a criticism session of a particular writer (Albert Maltz) which he found horrifying (a reason also used by others such as Elia Kazan in support of their behaviour during the Red Scare). Maltz however didn't see it the same way and was not best pleased at the hijacking of his own experience.

[Al Duran · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Naked God should be read in conjunction with the same author’s Being Red, published thirty-three years after the former memoir. What a difference the change in the political environment makes!

[Jeff J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful indictment of the communist party from a former member.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first became aware of author Howard Fast while reading Kirk Douglas's I AM SPARTACUS!: MAKING A FILM, BREAKING THE BLACKLIST. An outspoken communist, Fast penned the novel that the Douglas/Kubrick film was based on.
But while Douglas wrote at length about how Fast was negatively affected by McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist, he neglected to mention that Fast later rejected communism and became an enemy of the Russian government.
THE NAKED GOD is interesting not only for learning why Fast left the Communist party, but also why a smart, humanitarian guy like himself got mixed up in it in the first place. I'd hoped it would be the kind of book that might make Bernie Sanders supporters stop and reconsider their views on socialism, but, alas, Fast makes it clear that he is criticizing Russian communism only, not socialism in general. To me, it's an insignificant distinction, since history and the study of human nature teach us that democratic socialism inevitably gets twisted into Orwellian, Big Brother-style communism. But Fast is a humanist and utopian idealist who, like so many young Americans these days, believes that the failures of socialism all throughout history are attributable to wrong implementation rather than flaws in Marxist thought. (One wonders whether Red China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, etc. ever made him reconsider that notion.)
This is what makes THE NAKED GOD merely a good read instead of a great one. By applying his insights and observations only to Russian communism under Stalin and Kruschev, Fast consigns his book to modern irrelevancy, except to historians. You'd think after his horrified rejection of communism, he'd at least have a more balanced view of Joseph McCarthy and others on the political right, but such is not the case. His thinking seems to be that, because the right never truly understood communism, they deserve no credit for standing against it. To his mind, the right actually made the situation worse by lumping socialism and communism in the same bucket. The tone he sets is a weird combination of shame at having been brainwashed, and pride at having been at the center of such a great controversy. He comes across like a religious convert who bemoans his past sins while looking down on his fellow churchmen for their relative lack of worldly experience.
I was especially interested to learn that the Communist party at that time was immersed in the same identity politics that the American left is so obsessed with today. Gender equality was touted in theory but ignored in practice. Pandering to "oppressed" minorities was taken to unbelievable extremes while still maintaining a heavy undercurrent of Antisemitism. In one example, Fast documents that $5,000-worth of pamphlets had to be destroyed because a party leader worried that black people might be offended at how the artist depicted them. The kicker? All the characters in the pamphlet were drawn without indication of skin color.
Despite Fast's protests to the contrary, it's pretty easy to connect the dots between Russian-style communism and other "progressive" leftist governments.

[Patricia Mayne-Schlachtun · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, enlightening book

I never knew there was a Communist Party of the United States until I read this book. A look into the life of Howard Fast as a communist, his views and insights of the party he discovered over the years as an active member. The underlying reason of why he eventually decided to leave the Communist Party.