Power (50 page)

“Of course it would be all right. Ben always speaks of you. I know he'd like to see you.”

“I'd like to see him,” I agreed.

When we came into the room at the Astor, I saw Ben immediately, looming over the circle that surrounded him. At sixty-two, his hair was white but unthinned, still a great mop and more the lion's mane than ever. His girth had increased, his neck had thickened, but he remained a big man rather than a fat man. He spotted me over the heads of the people around him, fixed his eyes on me, and then pushed through toward me, rolling on like some implacable machine, until he reached me and threw his arms around me in that bear hug that I remembered so well.

“Al Cutter!” he cried. “Son of a bitch, it's Al Cutter!” And he turned to the men near him and roared, “Union men, you call yourselves—Al Cutter here could teach the lot of you what a real trade-union man is! And on twenty cents a day!” And to me, “Maybe we both could—hey, Al?”

“It's good to see you, Ben.”

“Good to see you! Wait until I tell Dotty that I ran into Al Cutter in New York!”

“How is she, Ben?”

“Great. You know, some woman's trouble, none of us are getting younger, but that's over now. She's fine. We moved into our new house last year, and she still hasn't finished decorating. You know the way women are about fixing up a place, Al.”

“I know.”

“What have you been doing with yourself, Al?”

“Running a little country weekly upstate.”

“I heard something about that. How are you making out?”

“We manage.”

“You and Lena. How is she?”

“Beautiful as ever.”

“I'll bet. You know something, Al,” Ben said, his voice dropping, “for your sake, I'm sorry we ever split. You'd have done well if you had stuck with me. Take Jack Mullen for example. He's one of the biggest independent coal operators in western Pennsylvania today. Gives us a little trouble at contract time because he knows all the answers, but we work it out. I know that kind of thing wouldn't be for you, but I would have had you on the payroll for twenty-five thousand a year by now. Take Oscar here—he's become a very shrewd investor. He's worth a hundred thousand if he's worth a nickel. Well, things are different, easier some ways, harder other ways. You have to have both points of view. The whole country's different today, Al—and a damn sight better, if you ask me.”

“It couldn't be much worse than in the old days, Ben,” I agreed.

“Isn't that the truth. You remember those days, Al? By golly, we ought to sit down with a bottle and have a good talk. You know, we got a union weekly now too, half a million copies each edition. It's a big enterprise. Our advertising revenue alone is over a million a year. I'll bet that tops your sheet.”

“It certainly does,” I said.

“Well, what do they say—the old order changeth and so forth. It would be a hell of a world if it didn't. Now, let me buy you a drink.”

I had the drink and I left. It was still a bright and lovely afternoon as I walked back to the hotel, but when I got up to our room, I was drowsy, and I lay down on the bed. I must have dozed, for I seem to remember a dream of Pomax with the cold rain falling, and the miners' kids, all indifferent to the weather, running barefoot through the rain as they floated sticks in the gutters.

Lena awakened me, and I asked her how the matinee had been.

“Delicious. There's this charming French gentleman who's a
couturier
—that's a dress designer to you—and he has the most famous establishment in Paris. Or at least it was. Now he's going broke, but he's too proud to admit it to anyone, and he has this model who falls in love with him. Well, anyone would. He's just beautiful—I fell in love with him myself, the way you keep me penned up like a prisoner out there in the sticks. Anyway, it turns out that this model is the daughter of an American millionaire, and the question is will she bring her friends, all millionaires, of course, in to bail him out, which will make him as proud and snobbish as he was before—he belongs to the nobility, did I tell you?—or will she let him go broke? He's nicer when he's broke.”

“Well, which does she choose?” I asked her.

“See it yourself and find out. What did you do all afternoon?”

“I took a walk.”

“Was it fun?”

“I met someone I used to know,” I said.

“Anyone I know?”

“No,” I said. “No one you know.”

A Biography of Howard Fast

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.