The Last Supper: And Other Stories

by Howard Fast

  That night I learned. I began the book that night, at the kitchen table, the heart of family life and work, with my father and my two brothers beginning to doze opposite me, and then I went on reading after they had gone to sleep, and I read until there was light in the morning sky, with the world dancing and leaping in circles for the first time with a glint of reason breaking through the insanity of how I lived and was, and where I had come from and where I was going.

  Yet it was not George Bernard Shaw, not the kindly librarian who turned my mind from the “righteous paths” and turned me forever into an enemy of class oppression and class justice; it was not they alone who showed me that my poverty of body and mind, my physical and mental hunger, my ragged clothes and broken shoes were not simply personal bereavements, visited upon me by some crafty fate, but rather the price I paid for belonging to that great and mighty factor in modern history called the working class—no, it is not that easy to “subvert,” as our present day Neanderthalers call it; no, it was life that did the “subverting,” and Shaw, of ever beloved memory, only took the senseless hate and resentment and directed it to paths of understanding, reason and creation.

  Yet I could never convince my father, my wonderful, strong, wise and patient father, whose hands were gifted with magic, whose heart was big and strong beyond breaking—who, in a curious way, was the, best the working class produces; and who always, always belittled himself to justify his own poverty. How deeply it had been hammered home in him that the race was to the strong, the good, the best!—so deeply that he could never admit that we inhabited anything but the best of all possible worlds. Only he had failed.

  Only, I say that he had not failed. He gave me a worker, before my eyes and that way until I die. The bitter, endless arguments we had about the system and its meaning, those were nothing against himself who was the largest argument of all, teaching me just in his being.

  And he wanted me to be a writer, and without him I would not have been a writer. He, who could barely read and write, would sit silent and even awe-stricken, night after night, as I sat with sheets of paper, making stories—which I then read aloud to him and to my brothers. They were very poor stories, pathetically poor, but I became a writer because the three people who listened each night to what I had written knew that they were not bad stories, but miracles because words were written at all. It wasn’t that my father’s literary judgment was poor; it was because his wisdom went far deeper than any matter of literary judgment.

  It was shortly before he died that I published my novel, The Last Frontier, in which I wrote the dedication, “To my father, who taught me to love, not only the America that is past, but the America that will be.” My father was already an old man, older than his years, worked out and used up, and very sick, and he, wondered how I had meant what I wrote—for all the pleasure it gave him. For, as he said, he knew so little of the America that was past and was so deeply troubled concerning the America that would be.

  I couldn’t explain to him that in himself, he was the America that would be; and I think that of all my angers in so many angry years, the longest lasting is that he, who was so splendid in so many ways, should have been robbed of that most precious of possessions: pride in and knowledge of the generations of millions like himself who had built with their strong hands what was best and truest in the America of the past.

  Coda: The Poet in Philadelphia

  (For Walter Lowenfels, guilty under the Smith Act!)

  The poet found guilty wrote poetry,

  and his old heart hammered,

  poor wracked machine,

  the most ephemeral of ephemeral flesh,

  squeezed to send out such a passionate cry of love and

  hope!

  If you would investigate again the mystery of man,

  The highest mystery,

  beautiful, gracious, and sweet as honey,

  discover then how with life so brief,

  precious as it is fragile and tormenting,

  a man will give it away

  because he hears the tears of pain

  drop from the eyes of other men.

  A country makes a poet,

  and even when youth is bitter,

  and dry and hard the bread,

  there are some who have to sing.

  We were singers,

  and America was our mother.

  A mother sings to the child,

  and the child grown, remembers,

  wandering, remembers, and searching, remembers,

  and when youth is gone,

  the memory is still a golden glow.

  Our whole song was America,

  born so violent in childbirth’s revolution,

  rich and horizonless,

  and purple mountains’ majesty

  across the fruited plain

  was engraved on our hearts,

  with all the jingle jangle

  telling us

  that freedom was wherefor and whyfor

  a patriot laid down his life,

  and regretted, dry-eyed,

  that he had but one life to give for his country.

  We made a song,

  song of the gutters

  and the dry-brown earth of the dustbowl,

  and the rivers blocked with the fruit of the plains,

  grain burning while men starved,

  and we who were children then

  clung to the mile of boxcars

  like insects cling to a stick of cane,

  going and coming,

  for if there was nothing here,

  there was still the purple mountains’ majesty,

  beckoning across the fruited plain.

  It was a new thing for a poet to make his stanzas

  out of a picket line;

  and hear music in the plain speech of plain people,

  and others heard,

  the world heard,

  head up—listen to the sweet sound

  that comes from the sorrow of America.

  Yet we were mighty in our sorrow then,

  and our song was a song of hope,

  and in the dark places of the earth,

  we saw tyranny and hated it.

  The poet in Philadelphia was found guilty.

  I know how his old heart constricted,

  beat faster.

  Will it go now?

  Will the stabbing pain come,

  the knife edge of death,

  does the, heart speak, whisper,

  cherish me, easy and gentle,

  and let me rest and beat easy,

  and put away your ego about how big your heart is;

  a heart is only so big,

  and where is a heart in one man to beat for all people?

  Here in a courtroom

  where a poet is found guilty

  of conspiring to teach and advocate,

  teach and advocate and conspire,

  or in Galilee, see, the teacher comes,

  rabbi, they called Him,

  which means teacher in old Hebrew,

  that the evil men do in evil places,

  high places, and in the temples too,

  shall be overthrown and done with—

  the cross hurts only when you are nailed to it.

  And in the night that fell on my own land,

  sweet land, sweet land of liberty,

  a wall was made and a roof,

  walled in, roofed in,

  technically perfect and technically soundproof,

  with clever openings

  for conditioned voices,

  obedient patter and chatter of those

  who had never conspired to teach and advocate.

  The punishment is imprisonment,

  five years of darkness,

  and you are put away from the sight of man,

  and talk to yourself and sing to yourself, poet,

  poet! damned, damned filthy stinken lousy poet,

  dirtying the American way of life.
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  And the poet, found guilty, wrote poetry,

  walled in, roofed in,

  wrote poetry of sunlight, full of the laughter

  of little children,

  through the wall and through the roof—

  head up, the world listened,

  heard the sweet sound

  that comes from the sorrow of America.

  Look at America,

  deeper than the Pentagon and the White House

  deeper than du Pont Chemicals and General Motors,

  past McCarthy and McCarran

  and eighteen laws to imprison men forever,

  for one hundred times five years

  and a hundred times more

  for any minor infraction

  of the new order,

  the order of hate and horror,

  fear, indecency and terror,

  the order of the, atom kings and the oil kings,

  the killers and drinkers of blood,

  past them and deeper,

  deeper to the heart and the song—.

  And ask where the heart of the poet finds its strength,

  if not from America,

  the poet in Philadelphia,

  guilty of conspiring to teach and advocate

  the brotherhood of man

  in the city of brotherly love.

  And listen to his old heart,

  weak and tired,

  listen to the beat,

  the timely, measured, splendid beat,

  the pounding, surging, raging beat,

  the beat of dreams made words,

  where the grapes of wrath are stored,

  where the grapes of wrath are stored.

  Biography

  Howard Fast (1914-2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

  Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

  Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

  Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).

  Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. "They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage," Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he "fell in love with the area" and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

  Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother "had no childhood." As a result of their mother's death in 1923 and their father's absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. "My brother was like a rock," he wrote, "and without him I surely would have perished."

  A copy of Fast's military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.

  Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. "Everyone worked at the prison," said Fast during a 1998 interview, "and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America." Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: "I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison."

  Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette's father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)

  Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party t
icket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. "I got a disease, which is called 'candidateitis,'" he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. "And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you're ready to kill to win that election." He concluded: "I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience."

  In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson's work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. "Paul," he said, "was an extraordinary man." Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)

  Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. "In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife," he told People after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent nature-lover, did enjoy California's scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant's Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.