The Night of the Party

It was a fashionable soiree in an elegant apartment on Manhattan's Park Avenue. Among the guests was Novelist Howard (Citizen Tom Paine) Fast, who joined the Communist Party in 1943, won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953 but quit the Communist Party in noisy but regretful disgust after Hungary. At the party, says Fast in a 30,000-word article prepared for publication next month in a new magazine called Prospectus,* the fascinating folk around him included:

A millionaire woman, the hostess, who will not now speak to Fast because "she considers me a renegade."

A wealthy owner of a chain of restaurants, once a saloonkeeper, who called one of Fast's friends, a conservative Communist, "Traitor! Opportunist! Renegade!"

A millionaire moneylender, who called another conservative Communist "a lousy agent of the FBI."

A woman in a $5,000 mink coat, who vowed to Fast: "It has to be one way, the only way. You're going to have civil war, barricades, and the workers are going to have to fight and die until blood runs like water in the streets."

A businessman with a doll-like wife in $10,000 worth of gown and gems, who raged at Fast: "So what if 25,000 people died in Hungary! You've got to pay a price for this kind of thing. You're yellow! Yellow! Yellow!"

Writes Author Fast of these well-heeled Red-liners: "I would hesitate to write this scene in a novel, for it has no sane justification except its truth. This was a handful in one room but all over the nation the mental-revolutionaries, the parlor-pinks, the living-room warriors, the mink-coated allies of the working class wept that people like myself had betrayed the holy cause of Communism--but at least I know what I stepped away from."

Author Fast has not stepped far enough away from Communism to expose the people who were at the fashionable party on Park Avenue and others like them. Says he: "I will not name the names."

* A projected monthly, to be put out by Manhattan investment firm Gabriel Gladstone & Co. Inc. Other first-issue contributors: New Deal Economist Leon Keyserling, perennial Socialist Presidential Candidate Norman Thomas.

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