Reds to Riches

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE IMMIGRANTS by Howard Fast Houghton Mifflin; 389 pages; $9.95

There is something basically unpatriotic about F. Scott Fitzgerald's contention that American lives have no second acts. The tainted blessing of early success ("the victor belongs to the spoils") and a guilty sense that character is fate may have accounted for his bitter judgment. But the fact remains that the world's best-advertised nation of immigrants was built on second--even third and fourth--acts.

Howard Fast's novel The Immigrants is yet another pop epic to underscore this fact. The life and writing career of the author follow a familiar script as well. Fast, 62, was once the U.S.'s best-known literary Communist. In the '40s he wrote throbbingly about American history: the Revolutionary War in The Unvanquished and Citizen Tom Paine, Reconstruction in Freedom Road. As a political activist of the far left, he spent three months in jail during 1950 for failing to comply with a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena. He was a columnist for the Daily Worker, a 1952 American Labor Party candidate for Congress, a 1953 winner of a Stalin Peace Prize and the most popular American author in the U.S.S.R. "There is no nobler, no finer product of man's existence on this earth than the Communist Party," he said in 1949.

In 1957, the year of Sputnik, Fast declared his disenchantment with Soviet Communism in a book called The Naked God. It ensured his distinction as American letters' slowest study in Stalinism. Like the immigrants of his new novel, the author looked to California, where some of his earlier novels, including Spartacus, had been turned into film scenarios. He wrote science fiction and mysteries under the name E.V. Cunningham, eventually acquired a house in Beverly Hills, a Porsche and a yen for Zen Buddhism.

Unfortunately, Fast's life contains more dramatic and moral conflict than his new novel, The Immigrants. It is the first book in a projected trilogy that will follow a number of families from 1888 into the present. Universal already plans to film the saga as a 36-part TV series, for which Fast should gross $975,000. The paperback rights have been sold for $832,000.

As an entertainment package, The Immigrants could easily be read, and eventually seen, under the title Uphill, Downhill. The principal setting is San Francisco, where Daniel Lavette battles his way from crab fisherman to business tycoon. "He had come out of nothing and he had made himself a king, a veritable emperor," writes Fast with stagy solemnity. "He ruled a fleet of great passenger liners, an airline, a majestic department store, a splendid resort hotel, property, land, and he dispensed the food of life to hundreds of men and women who labored at his will."

This handsome hulk of a capitalist-benefactor was born in a boxcar, son of an Italian immigrant mother and a French-Italian father en route to a railroad job in California. Mama and Papa Lavette perish in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Daniel is left with his father's small boat and a shockproof will to rise in the world. He is a tough, practical, democratic cuss who cares little for racial, religious or class barriers. To keep track of his profitable fishing venture, he hires a Chinese bookkeeper and later takes a Jewish business partner. An unselfconscious climber, he woos, and wins the hand of, a beautiful Nob Hill heiress.

Need one go on? Only to say that Daniel Lavette is always in the right place at the right time--getting into shipping for World War I and out of it before the armistice gluts the seas with empty freighters; that he hedges his private happiness by keeping a wise, patient Oriental mistress in reserve; and that he is neither too proud nor too dissipated to return to his nets when the Depression shatters his empire.

Fast, too, leaves no base uncovered as he once again demonstrates his knack for soap history. The old Marxist reveals a genuine enthusiasm for the rugged values of laissez-faire enterprise in his energetic descriptions of Lavette's schemes and deals. Lest one think that this hero escaped from an Ayn Rand novel, appropriate lip service is paid to such issues as war profiteering and the passive wisdom of ancient Chinese philosophy.

The author is still a pro at milking emotions out of his characters' complicated personal relationships, and still a hacker when it comes to pumping life into his historical props. An overripe description of the Statue of Liberty, for example, ends with the line, "Across the water, there was the mass of buildings on the battery, but the lady of liberty was something else." It is a long way from Emma Lazarus' New York to Howard Fast's Beverly Hills, where descendants of immigrants cater to huddled masses yearning for TV. -R.Z. Sheppard

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