The Last Supper: And Other Stories (22 page)

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.

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.