Citizen Tom Paine (e-book) (used book) | Howard Fast | bookbook.eu

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"Damned be his fame, & lasting his shame"--Thus runs one line of a horrible bit of doggerel set going against Paine by his American enemies. It sticks in the mind. Some would still have it that way—today's inheritors of the hatred of the people, the lineal descendants of his enemies. The name means much the same thing to fascists as it did to the counterrevolutionary organizers in the last quarter of the 18th century. But the words & deeds of Paine have survived the innumerable assaults on the man. He spoke as a citizen of the world–-the new world. The voice of the common man was his conscious utterance. That fact is something which cannot be howled down. People don't readily forget the great men who fought in the historic battles for their freedom. They know whom to damn & whose fame is lasting!
The great merit of Fast's novel is the sense of the urgency & the reality of the ideas which Paine impressed so indelibly on the political thinking of contemporaries. In the personality of this man the great issues of his time became articulate: the clear realization of their meaning seems to advance the mood of the novel to the present. For the vitality of this book doesn't rest upon what is conventionally conceded to be the chief source of reality in the historical novel–-an accurately painted backdrop of historical events. In this novel, the continuity of history is deeply embedded in Paine's searching for the mainsprings of action which would keep the American people on the march for their revolution. His common sense embodied political truths restricted enough to exert a powerful effect as propaganda on the farmers & city workmen, the rank-&-filers of the revolution–-yet broad enough to scorch a message for more than a century later. Fast makes us profoundly aware of the historical impact of the man. That was imperative. But he's also endeavored to freshen our feeling about Paine as a person, to study the formation of character with the analytical methods of the present. This aspect of his work is bound to arouse controversial discussion. Among the cabal which has gathered against Paine the chief point of attack has been his character, particularly facts about his life which have been magnified & distorted with the object of deflecting attention from his great vision & his immortal services to our country. This line of attack began in his own lifetime & reached a climax of personal persecution after the printing of The Age of Reason. "Formerly Satan had been one; now he became two, himself & Tom Paine." From a man so conscious of the ways in which his enemies worked, it would be a queer sort of irony to find him giving them any assistance. But there may be misgivings at the frequency with which we find Paine alone with the brandy bottle in this novel. With the drinking, slovenliness in dress, carelessness about his person & an occasional orgy also come into the picture. If there were a failure to understand why he lived recklessly, why he didn't heed the affronts to his friends which his own negligence of himself sometimes presented, one would feel it might have been wiser for a writer not to dwell on these things. But it must be understood that Fast has undertaken something more than the balancing of the facts of biographical research: this isn't merely "fictionalized biography". On the contrary, everything points to a desire to present imaginatively the full history of Paine's personality. There must be a welding together of contradictions into a character as definite & explicable as a fictional, nonhistorical creation can become, but, of course, the license for this type of creation carries with it grave responsibilities. Paine's inner conflict, presented here as the outgrowth of the miseries & deprivations of early life, has been clearly conceived. In solitude he'd fought against the forces which were dragging him into the oblivion of the gin-ridden London slums. All the impulses which his terrible past had blindly set in motion, he struggled against (he was 37 arriving in America in 1774): out of it all finally came the convictions which he imparted to the world. While the origins of his character & the maturing of his mind are thus partially presented in terms of a subjective struggle–-& not thru the customary direct examination of putative source materials–-Fast has provided an insight into character which cannot be rejected on the grounds that Paine seems an anguished, disturbed man, so tortured by his memories that he relapsed occasionally into fits of solitary drinking. At the same time the contrast between the solitary Paine & the man who was the inspired comrade of the weary soldiers of the Revolutionary army–-the man whose face bore the mark of suffering & the man who could be completely oblivious of himself has been sharpened in a rather mechanical way. His bouts with the bottle are too frequent incidents in the novel; the accounts of his comradeships too few. Too often Fast tries to turn i...