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October 2009
Vol. 23, No. 9
Fountainhead
Ayn's World
A new book expands our understanding of an intrguing and perplexing writer.
Stephen Cox is a professor of literature at UC San Diego. His most recent book is The New Testament and Literature.
During the past few months, sales of Ayn Rand’s novels have experienced a great resurgence. Most people think this is because her writing is once again perceived as relevant: her fictional accounts of government gone wild reflect the actual behavior of the Bush and Obama administrations.
And sales will probably advance still further, now that a big new biography is about to hit the stores: “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” by Anne Heller (Doubleday, forthcoming, October 2009). I will have more to say about that book shortly.
Yet Rand’s resurgence never had very far to surge. For 66 years, her novels have sold enough copies, every year, to satisfy the fondest wishes of any publisher of a brand new novel. She is a perennial best seller. Why? The best explanation is that her novels project a powerfully libertarian view of the world.
(I know, she repudiated the name “libertarian,” but she did so for reasons that do her no credit for objective self-description. Instead of calling herself a libertarian, she said she was an individualist and a “radical for capitalism” — in short, a libertarian.)
There are two things involved in Rand’s literary success; they work together, but they should not be confused. One is libertarian ideas; the other is the artistic embodiment of libertarian ideas. Rand knew how to make each of those things interesting, and permanently interesting.
First, libertarian ideas. Individual rights, free enterprise, rugged individualism — these good ideas had become cliches long before Rand started writing. For many people, they were discredited cliches. Rand revived her audience’s interest in them by taking them to their logical but intensely dramatic conclusions. In “The Fountainhead,” her hero Howard Roark addresses the court that is deciding whether to send him to prison for an act that is popularly regarded as disgraceful and repulsive, and he announces, “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.” That’s pushing the envelope.
Second, literary embodiment. Evidence has never been lacking that if the government takes over the economy, it will wreck it. In “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand didn’t present statistical speculations and abstract theories; she projected a nation, an America, in which the government intervenes in the economy and, yes, wrecks it, in ways more picturesque than any economist could possibly have imagined.
Rand often denied that she wrote propaganda, or even that she intended to teach her audience anything. (I believe the first claim was true; the second, transparently false.) She said that she wrote for her own pleasure, to create the kind of characters she would want to meet, in the kind of world that such characters would inhabit and deal with in their own way. Whatever her motivation, she did create a literary world in which radical libertarian ideas were embodied and found an interesting home — an intense and serious world, a world full of ideas and characters and exciting action, a world in which libertarians, self-proclaimed or only implicit, could feel that they too were at home.
This was a very considerable accomplishment. There can be no question about the fact that Rand remains America’s most influential libertarian, with the possible exception of Milton Friedman, and America’s most influential novelist of ideas. In that second category, there is no contest, because there is no runner-up.
Many American novels contain philosophical ideas or are motivated by such ideas. There have even been a few novels that, like “Atlas Shrugged,” were successful in selling a system of ideas. I’m thinking of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” (1888), a socialist utopia that achieved a cult following, for a while; and Carlos Castaneda’s “Don Juan” books (1968 and following), New Age exhortations masquerading as anthropological field reports. (In Castaneda’s case, “system” may be putting it too high.) On the libertarian front we have Henry Hazlitt’s “Time Will Run Back” (1952), a very literate but also very somnolent narrative about a communist state under reconstruction as a capitalist state. But these works are ideological tracts; any interest the reader may derive from plot or character is probably a symptom of the reader’s mental illness. They aren’t really novels, and their quasi-literary success was brief.
Much closer to the novel form were the many works of fiction of the socialist activist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Most of them were real stories, with real characters, and although their purpose was to inform the audience about the evils of capitalism and the moral grandeur of a weird, puritanical, missionary-American form of collectivism, millions of heartland Americans bought them, read them, and suffered no harm. The audience had trouble detecting the author’s big ideas and was therefore in little danger of succumbing to them. The world of Sinclair’s novels is just a sillier form of our own world, with commonplace men and women doing commonplace things and thinking excruciatingly commonplace thoughts.
Rand was different: she created a world, and no one could ever call it commonplace. As the god of a novelistic universe — and an intellectual milieu — that she ran according to her own, highly individual ideas, she can never be confused with anyone else.
This concept of Rand as the creator of her own world is the theme of Anne Heller’s new biography. The book is a very significant addition to the large and growing literature about Rand, her life and times.
The standard biography is Barbara Branden’s “The Passion of Ayn Rand” (1986), based partly on taped interviews with the subject. Nathaniel Branden has contributed an important memoir, “Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand” (1989, 1999), focused on his intimate personal and intellectual relationship with her. Chris Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, has provided a book —”Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical” (1995) — and many articles on Rand’s intellectual and personal history. Even the present reviewer has tried his hand at a (brief) biography for “American Philosophers, 1950–2000” (Gale, 2003).
Heller’s book assesses the existing work — of which she has acquired a virtually encyclopedic knowledge — and offers the results of her own extensive research. Her writing is clear, vivid, and perceptive. She has the good storyteller’s gift for pace; in her narration, nothing is either too short or too long. She presents the dramatic scenes of Rand’s life without underplaying or overplaying them, and she is perfectly capable of recording Rand’s flaws while admiring her virtues. Her Rand was “gallant, driven, brilliant, brash . . . as accomplished as her heroes,” but also “cruel” and “ultimately self-destructive.” Through it all, this Rand retained her interest for her biographer, who believes that Rand “has to be understood to be believed.” The resulting biography is a powerful aid to understanding.
Heller writes comparatively few summary statements, preferring to let concrete facts speak for themselves, but when she does make such a statement, her words are memorable. She speaks, for example, of Rand’s “clarity of language and purity of point of view” — qualities for which, I believe, literary critics should show much more appreciation than they currently do, in regard to Rand as well as other authors. She speaks of Rand’s shrewdness in “deconstruct[ing] political speech and uproot[ing] hidden agendas,” thus identifying another of Rand’s undervalued qualities — her ability to demystify contemporary discourse, often with just one thrust of her incisive, aphoristic style. Heller has an eye for Rand’s most telling aphorisms. “Whoever tells you to exist for the state,” she quotes, “is, or wants to be, the state.” Deny that at your peril.
Heller pronounces Rand “prophetic” and “revolutionary,” as indeed she was. Rand spoke up, she called for radical change — and she was heard: “Her extraordinary achievement extended far beyond the collapse, later in the decade, of the Communist tyranny she so abhorred, and still informs our thoughts about the competing values of liberty and safety, individual rights and the social contract, ownership and equity, and the flickering light of freedom.” All gold, and all true.
The Rand who emerges from Heller’s pages was a brilliant thinker and writer who exercised remarkable power over the world of her texts and the world of her life. Yet in the pursuit of this power, the individualist who refused to believe in the morality of self-sacrifice made enormous sacrifices of things important to herself — friends, truth, objectivity, intellectual curiosity, and self-knowledge. To this also Heller gives appropriate attention.
Everyone who closely studies Rand’s life is struck by the sad contradiction between the plucky Russian emigree who sat at the feet of libertarian social critic Isabel Paterson in her office at the New York Herald Tribune, and the hubristic ideologue who ruled her little senate with a rod of iron, denying that anyone had ever helped or influenced her — except, perhaps, the long-dead Aristotle, supposedly her only philosophical peer. The difference was 20 or 25 years of popular success, success with readers whom the author herself had learned to scorn.
But Heller finds evidence that there weren’t two Rands, a bad one and a good one. Rand was always the same person, right from the start, with the same good qualities and the same bad qualities that would eventually bear abundant fruit, together. She was always a person of immense ambition, immense determination to create a world in which she would like to live. This is the world she assembled in “Atlas Shrugged,” where her heroes withdraw from a decadent collectivist culture and build a community in which each can fulfill the imperatives of his or her unique genius. And this is the world that she (with much help from others) created in her “inner circle,” a community where libertarians gathered to conform completely to her every “rational” whim.
That isn’t good, God knows — but it does show strength of character.
Rand had enormous personal and literary courage. Her standards were her own, and she was not about to compromise them. Heller extends our lines of evidence about the difficulties she faced, from her birth in 1905 to a precariously established Jewish family in Tsarist Russia, through the confiscation of her parents’ property and the risk of her own life in the Bolshevik Revolution, her escape from persecution and inevitable liquidation in the Soviet empire, her battle for economic survival in America, and her unlikely, her very unlikely, literary success with “The Fountainhead” (1943). Hers, as Heller shows, is an heroic story, one that can scarcely be matched in the annals of American literature. And hers was not a morally empty success. If anyone ever deserved to succeed, it was Ayn Rand, who was thinking seriously, all the time, both about ideas and about the literary forms in which they ought to be embodied, and who risked her all to write what she thought was good to write.
But her ambition, determination, and integrity were disfigured by awful scars. Heller shows how frequently Rand lied, explicitly and implicitly, directly and indirectly, to others and to herself. Do we all lie? Sure. But your lie about the artistic ability of your friend’s 6-year-old is nothing like the lies that Rand communicated and believed. She made a profession out of lying to herself about the artistic and intellectual incapacity of 99% of the literary world, so she could feel at home in her own, increasingly isolated domain. And, as Heller’s work shows, there were many worse lies, and worse failures, than literary ones. Rand’s injustice and ingratitude, her intransigent emotional demands, her gross one-sidedness on countless emotional and intellectual occasions, appear in larger dimensions than ever before. All of it testifies to her desire to create the world she wanted to have, even when the evidence was all against her, even when she had to lie to herself and everyone else in order to do so.
Courage? Yes. But not always in a good cause, unless the cause of emotional self-preservation, at the sacrifice of emotional health and balance, can be considered good.
These basic conclusions have been reached before. Yet anyone interested in Rand will value Heller’s new information, both about Rand’s hard-won achievements and about her tragic defects. Most biographers are slaves to their material. They are in love with their subjects, and they stay that way. Why else would they devote years of their lives to chronicling other people’s affairs? Occasionally a biographer decides that he has had enough and turns angrily against his subject. Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis’ biographer, is a good example. He got bored with Lewis’ drunkenness, silliness, and squandering of his talent, and the disgust showed. It didn’t improve the book.
Heller doesn’t fall for either temptation, love or hate. Throughout her biography, she is calm, objective, perfectly willing to praise literary or moral success, and just as willing to notice literary or moral failure. You might regard this as a prescription for blandness, but you’d be mistaken. Heller’s book is engrossing all the way through. If you start reading it on Friday afternoon, you’ll finish it on Saturday, as I did; and it’s a pretty long book.
I do have some disagreements with Heller. I believe that Rand, like her mentor Paterson, was a true libertarian isolationist, unwilling to support foreign wars unless they were clearly defensive, and hesitant about them even then. So I differ from Heller about part of her characterization of Rand’s attitude toward World War II. I doubt that Rand wanted the United States to see whether Hitler or Stalin won, and then go to war against the winner.
I also think that Heller exaggerates the influence on Rand of the “anarchist” libertarian Albert Jay Nock. Nock is a perennially interesting literary figure, but I doubt that Rand needed his distinction between “economic man” and “political man” — the producers and the exploiters — to fill out her system. That kind of distinction could have occurred to anyone, and did occur to many people, from St. Paul onward. Nock’s (goofy) way of thinking about economics was extravagantly different from Rand’s. (For a summary of Nock’s ideas and accomplishments, see Cox, “Albert Jay Nock — Prophet of Libertarianism?”, Liberty, March 1992.)
I would like to believe, as Heller does, that Rand was inspired by Nock’s essay “Isaiah’s Job.” There, Nock pictures literary prophets ministering to the needs of a “remnant” of right-thinking people who may at some time have the opportunity to rebuild their civilization. As Heller says, it sounds like the situation in “Atlas Shrugged,” and I want to agree with her, because “Isaiah’s Job” is one of the finest essays ever written by an American. I like to picture Rand reading it and enjoying it. But I don’t think she needed Nock for the storyline of “Atlas.” Anyone who devotes her life to conveying unpopular ideas is apt to feel as Nock and Rand did — alone and without influence except on a few currently anonymous other people, a small “remnant” of civilization. That doesn’t mean that Nock influenced Rand. I acknowledge that Rand uses the word “remnant” in John Galt’s big speech in “Atlas Shrugged,” so Heller may be correct — though considering the unfavorable things Rand said about Nock’s failure to help her get the individualist movement off the ground, I can’t see her intending to write an homage to him in “Atlas.”
That’s a judgment call. I’m glad that Heller brought the issue up and made it a point of legitimate controversy. On most other controversial issues, I’m inclined to give her the palm. She recognizes Paterson’s crucial influence on Rand’s acceptance of “a uniquely American brand of individualism, based on a commitment to the natural and equal rights of all men.” She’s right — and I believe that only last-ditch orthodox Randians now deny the large extent of Paterson’s influence.
Heller also emphasizes — more perilously, but still with good reason — Rand’s affinities with an older generation of Russian intellectuals who looked to books to discover revolutionary acts: “Sounding like the 19th-century Russian intellectual she essentially was, she wrote [of Paterson’s ‘The God of the Machine’], ‘It takes a book to save or destroy the world.’?“ That was a mighty claim — and one step above Paterson’s own assertion: “The great body of literature and of information handed down in books actually comprises the world we have lived in, both mentally and physically. Every one who lives in this country lives in books; and that would be true even of an illiterate person. He is living in books he has never read.” Probably Heller is correct; Rand derived her attitude toward books and revolution from her continental roots.
Sciabarra emphasized the idea of Rand as a Russian writer, and Heller finds much evidence to support it. Rand’s stress on production rather than consumption; on the primacy of spiritual goals, bad or good, over strictly material ones; and even on liberated ideas of sex and love (“standard notions in Russian intellectual circles from the middle 1800s onward”) — this all seems closer, as Heller says, to the Russia of Rand’s youth than to the United States of her maturity.
Still more interesting is what Heller’s book has to offer as a study in the unpredictabilities of art and of the artistic temperament. Rand’s literary gifts were very special, as are those of any other great artist. She had no faculty for compromise or for what other people regard as realism. She didn’t read widely, and her command of the English language was tenuous when she came to this country as a young adult. She was miserably poor and without important friends. Her chances of success were one in a million. The best imaginable outcome would have been a post as script watcher in some Hollywood studio. And this, basically, was her situation until late 1943, when she was 38 years old and “The Fountainhead” had been published to no particular acclaim except that of Isabel Paterson. Then sales took off. Rand’s book was the sole novelistic example of radical individualism; it cornered the market, a market that proved unexpectedly large. Who but the most radical libertarian — such as herself — could have imagined that Rand was living in the same ideological world as millions of her fellow citizens? But that was the case.
Before “The Fountainhead,” Rand had kept on working, and kept on hoping, while her twenties and her thirties passed. But here’s the strange thing: despite her high ambitions, she was sometimes doing practically nothing to further them. She took six years to plan “The Fountainhead” and to write the first third of the book, losing a publisher’s contract along the way because she twice failed to meet the deadline. Then she sailed through the last two-thirds of that long, long book in just one year — averaging, as Heller points out, a chapter a week, which is something like saying that a locomotive can go 300 miles an hour when it really needs to.
After “The Fountainhead,” she started planning the novel that would be known as “Atlas Shrugged.” She supposed that she would finish it posthaste. It took her 14 years. For what reason? She put out the rumor that she spent the last few of those years getting the right tone for the endless speech about philosophy that she intrudes on the final movement of the book. The true reason, as it seems to me, is that she had come to regard “Atlas” as a philosophical Bible and was anxious to ensure that everything in the Speech would represent her ultimate, unassailable statement of reality. The result was a 60-page literary disaster — a ridiculously long prose essay, its tone arrogant, inappropriate, and repellent to the last degree, in which she repeated everything she had already made obvious in the rest of the novel. Years working on the “tone”? I don’t think so. Rand’s attitude toward this manifest literary failure is a mystery of the creative process. How could she have thought she was doing the right thing?
“Atlas Shrugged” was finally published in 1957, and Rand immediately suffered a paralyzing depression. Heller is a clear and patient narrator of the events that ensued. One probable cause of Rand’s depression was an especially severe form of postpartum reaction, which can be worse for writers than for women literally giving birth. Mothers have the pleasure and challenge of rearing a new child, but authors suddenly have nothing to do after the “birth” takes place — their child has ceased to grow and change; it died the moment it was born. Rand herself attributed most of her depression to the hostile reception that her book received from critics and intellectuals.
That reception would have killed any other book. Yet Rand’s work had the ability to inspire multitudes of people who were not official intellectuals. While its author sank more and more deeply into lassitude and self-compassion, its tale of heroic individualism continued to sell like crazy, and it still does. As Heller shows, Rand took little comfort in her popular success. She played a lot of solitaire, considered writing another novel but never did much about it, and eventually became interested in the kind of writing she had usually rejected as beneath her — prose exposition of her philosophical and political ideas. She proved a very able popularizer of those ideas. Yet she lived for 25 years without producing another work of fiction. This must have been intensely disappointing to her, but she could apparently do nothing about it.
What was the cause? Nobody knows for sure. I suspect she was trapped in her own Bible. The last verses of Revelation contain a curse against anyone who presumes to add or detract from its words. I believe that Rand felt the same about her words in “Atlas.” They were final. Even their author could consider meddling with them only at great risk — the risk of needing to revise her ideas.
But Heller’s suggestion may be the best. She notes that the pleasure Rand derived from writing fiction was that of creating “a world of her own.” In youth, “she longed to find her kind of people, and . . . to do so meant she had to make them up in stories. And so emerged the three-dimensional world of Ayn Rand, where idealized characters take the measure of reality and often find it needs correcting.” Then, in “Atlas,” Rand produced the kind of world she viewed as perfect: “For good and ill, she had fulfilled the mission she had lived for: to create her ideal man and a microcosmic ideal world in which he and all other ‘real people’ could breathe freely and love passionately.” There was nothing left to do. By the time of “Atlas,” Heller observes, Rand’s characters were becoming “more real than the people around her. . . . [H]er own larger-than-life characters came to define the limits of an imagined world so compelling that many admirers who entered it never left.”
The obvious problem was that those characters — though more important for our culture than most people who actually exist — did not exist. You couldn’t touch them, talk with them, see what they would do next. When they showed up, their presence was often destructive. During Rand’s post-“Atlas” depression, she talked about the hero of her novel and said things like, “John Galt wouldn’t feel this . . . He would know how to handle this. I don’t know . . . I would hate for him to see me like this.” If any author was ever captured by the world she created, it was Ayn Rand, whose characters sat in judgment on their creator.
Like Kay Gonda, the heroine of her play “Ideal,” she wanted the “glory [she] create[d] as an illusion” to become “real.” This ideal was enchanting, and it worked enchantment. Under its spell, Rand created stories, friendships, discipleships, ultimately an ideological movement — all of the greatest seriousness. She surrounded herself with concentric circles of intelligent and devoted followers who enabled her to live in her own world as much as any author could possibly expect to do. If that world didn’t satisfy her — and it didn’t — there was no other world that could interest her.
Running through modern literary history is a golden thread of artists who have manufactured their own worlds. Rabelais. Swift. Melville. Faulkner. Borges. Tolkien. All different, all united in the idea of creating a self-substantive literary reality. But none of them created a Following, a Circle, a Cult, as Rand did. Heller, skeptical about Rand’s claim that creative people are motivated solely by a “selfish” commitment to their own work, remarks that “even she sometimes seemed driven by a desire to guide others.” “Driven” is a well-chosen word. As Rand got older and crankier, her concern with the minute details of her followers’ ideas, tastes, and conduct grew more and more obsessive — quite at odds with the laissez-faire principles that she professed and sincerely believed.
The world that Rand wanted to inhabit was essentially a literary world, a novel written by and for herself. Good novels aren’t written by committees, but Rand carried the idea of individual authorship to an absurd degree, denying the influence of others on herself and trying to make sure that her own influence was all that counted for others. As Heller chronicles the falsehoods she told about her family, friends, and associates, one realizes that she had to believe her own stories, because otherwise she could not have enjoyed the pleasure of creating her own world, with herself inside it. It would not have felt like a world; it would have felt like a fake, and so would she. When the defection of her disciples showed her the fragility of the world she inhabited, her response was to assert the author’s prerogative; these characters were written out of her book, no matter how many chapters she needed to destroy. It was a bad business, for herself and everyone else.
Heller dates Rand’s process of deciding to live on her own planet (my phrase, not hers) to the year 1945, when the publishers of “The Fountainhead” prompted her to issue a pamphlet describing herself. This, Heller comments, “was the first building block in Ayn Rand’s public legend. This small pamphlet self-consciously depicted a woman who had been a prodigy from childhood, whose ideas were entirely her own . . . [S]he added that her reason for creating the character of Howard Roark was not to ‘serve my fellow man’ or to ‘save the world,’ but to obtain the purely private pleasure of writing about a kind of man she could admire; she didn’t add, in a world she could control.” That was a long way from the world of “The Fountainhead” itself, in which, as Heller appropriately comments, “moral integrity is forceful, ruthless, and erotic.” Rand’s falsehoods were feeble, obvious, and far from erotically stimulating. It is safe to say that for most people who encountered them, they sounded a warning that her world was starting to close.
Heller lists the few people whom Rand, by the time she reached 60, still professed to admire. It’s a strangely assorted group. Cyrus, the hero of an adventure story she read as a child. Aristotle, for his three laws of logic — and little else, no matter what the professional Randists suppose. Victor Hugo, for his romantic novels. Rostand’s character Cyrano, for his aplomb. Her husband Frank O’Connor, for his good looks. Her lover Nathaniel Branden, for his good looks and his great intelligence. The Founding Fathers, for their establishment of limited government. By denying that she had been influenced by a wide range of writers and thinkers, Rand also denied herself the ability to be, as Heller puts it, “taken seriously” by other intellectuals. In response, she spent her time rereading her own works. That was the world in which she found herself most at ease — a world in which she was the only inhabitant, the Petit Prince of an extraterrestrial kingdom.
There have been important writers — Hemingway is a good example — who were not intellectuals, and who read fairly little. Rand is the only example I can identify of an important writer, and a brilliant intellectual to boot, who in her mature period retained practically no curiosity about current or classic works of literature, philosophy, or history. She had studied some kind of history at Leningrad University, but where are the accounts of her enjoying any work on the subject, outside of Paterson’s “The God of the Machine” (1943)? After that book, and some works by Ludwig von Mises, the great economic theorist, she appears to have ceased learning much from either theory or history. It was as if she were making good on her claim not to have been influenced by other people. It was as if individualism meant making everything up on one’s own.
She couldn’t really do that, of course. In constructing her ideas, she drew largely on Paterson, Mises, the concepts of 18th-century classical liberalism, as expounded by Paterson, the logic of Aristotle (influence acknowledged), and her strong reactions to ideas she did not like. Nevertheless — and this should not be forgotten, whenever she is criticized — she was remarkable for the ingenuity she showed in developing a fairly small stock of premises into a large philosophical system. Much the same can be said of any major philosopher; it’s the professors of philosophy who, typically, know everything about their field but cannot construct a world. Like other real philosophers, Rand often reinvented the wheel, without recognizing it; but her wheels were never like other people’s wheels. Her boldly individualistic conclusions gave her an exciting vantage point on a world that always seemed new, a world over which she seemed to have as much intellectual command as if she had written its blueprints. She imparted this perspective to her disciples. For many of them it initiated a great spiritual experience, one that continued to inspire them no matter how far their relations with her decayed.
Unfortunately, they were admitted to her drama, and continued in it, only on the condition that they repeat the script exactly as written. She told them what to think and disciplined them cruelly when they thought something else. Most of them were people of intelligence, integrity, and high ideals. And most of them either deserted her world or were cast out. Rand was nearly as disappointed as they were. For her, as Heller says, they had “escaped from the world of [literary] symbols and abstractions” — becoming, very regrettably, real. Those who did not escape became dolls in the Museum of Ventriloquism. Few literary fates are worse than this.
Heller is very good at telling the stories of the people whom Rand encountered at various points in her life, people whose lives have their own, very considerable, interest. And she identifies the root problem of Rand’s relations with them: her striking lack of empathy.
“Empathy” is a word that’s hard to define, but most people know what it means. Rand didn’t. She had little spontaneous insight into the beings who surrounded her. To get a fix on them, she needed to view them from an ideological or theoretical remove, as if she were an astronomer and they were distant planets.
Naturally, this problem showed itself most clearly in her relations with the people closest to her. Her letters to Paterson indicate that she hadn’t a clue about the reasoning by which her friend reached different conclusions from her own. No matter how lucidly Paterson explained her thinking, Rand’s way of understanding it was to label it irrational; then it could be dismissed. When her relationship with Nathaniel Branden went on the rocks, she constructed analyses worthy of Sir Isaac Newton to explicate actions and emotions that anyone with empathy would have comprehended in a flash. This, to her, seemed rational, but it was really a fundamental failure of empathy.
Heller’s best example of Rand’s lack of empathy is her conception of Frank O’Connor. Frank was a handsome, lovable, nonintellectual person whom Rand systematically confused with the heroic geniuses of her novels. To say that her expectations of Frank were damaging to him, and to their relationship, is putting it very mildly. Her expectations of other people — people she liked, people she trusted, people she eventually shed — were almost as damaging.
It is significant that Rand’s failure of empathy wasn’t fatal to her art. In some ways, it actually appears to have aided it, by encouraging her to perfect her distinctively stylized, intellectually symbolic characterizations — ways of understanding and portraying people that did not depend on close and sympathetic study.
Discussing Rand’s refusal to employ ordinary forms of literary realism and to “soften her characters’ hard symbolic edges,” Heller comments, “If form followed function, as she believed it did in literary art as in architecture, then the special, the exalted, the highly stylized was her medium and her message.” It’s difficult to think of a better summary of Rand’s literary approach and its justifications. But if Rand had no other means of creating “stylized,” “symbolic” characters, characters without the usual kinds of emotional subtlety, failure of empathy would have sufficed. There is also a Dickensian quality about Rand’s satires (one of the many unacknowledged facts about Rand is that she was one of American literature’s greatest satirists); and this is a quality heavily dependent on the author’s ability to target people from a distance, to fire at them without compunction, and to hit nothing but the bull’s eye. Again, lack of empathy helps.
On the whole, however, this absence of a certain kind of intellectual equipment was as damaging in art as you would expect it to be in life. Rand was uninterested in complexities of character or motive when she found them in other people, and she denied their existence in herself. Intolerant of mystery and ambiguity, of everything that couldn’t be immediately understood according to her own theories and observations (or theories and observations borrowed without attribution from other sources), she missed the fact that mystery is sometimes a sign of depth — of real depth, not the pretentiousness of people who want to be respected simply because they cannot be understood.
Those people she rightly skewered, and if any civilian deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor, she did, for that. But she missed the basic literary fact that characters who retain their allure are characters that one doesn’t fully grasp after the first handshake.
Few of Rand’s characters improve upon acquaintance. Readers return to “Atlas Shrugged” for its brilliant philosophical speculations, its exciting story, its frequently well-wrought oratory, and its uncompromising individualism; they do not return to find out more about the inner workings of John Galt or Dagny Taggart or Francisco d’Anconia or Hank Rearden.
Much of “Atlas” is preoccupied with Rearden’s failure to discover why he is so unhappy, despite his success as an industrial tycoon. Of course, everyone but Rearden knows the answer: his wife is a demon from hell, he’s killing himself with work, the government wants to take him for all he’s worth, and he feels guilty about any form of enjoyment he can experience. To Rand, this means that he has the wrong “philosophical premises.” That’s it; that’s the answer. He has the wrong premises. So much for the complexity of Hank Rearden, who is a much more complicated character than most of the others in “Atlas.”
I used to think that Rand was right when she congratulated Dostoyevsky on his ability to analyze his own characters “all the way down to [their] philosophical premises.” I no longer think so highly of that comment. When characters are tracked to their premises, they usually cease to be characters. Their intellectual function becomes their only function. They may be interesting as something, but they’re not interesting as people. They don’t have enough DNA to populate a fully plausible world, which is what Rand wanted them to do.
I don’t know what cures are available for a lack of empathy. Heller shows that Rand’s formidable powers of ratiocination weren’t sufficient to convince her that she shouldn’t be outraged because Barbara Branden didn’t recognize that a feeble short story that Rand offered for criticism, without naming the author, had actually been written by Rand. And all of Rand’s reason wasn’t sufficient to keep her from warring with her friends because they preferred Beethoven to Rachmaninoff. Liberty Contributing Editor Ronald Hamowy tells me that when he asked Rand why her favorite composer was Rachmaninoff, she said, “Because he was the most rational”; at which Hamowy laughed, thinking that it must be a joke — and was immediately cast into the outer darkness by Rand and her associates (most of whom were later cast into the same place, for other, equally “rational” reasons). The cream of the jest is that the composition in question was Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, which was dedicated to the composer’s psychiatrist, for services rendered; hence Hamowy’s inappropriate laughter.
How does one persuade oneself that one should feel empathy, if one has never been tempted to do so? I don’t know. But if, somehow, Rand could have felt it, her literary works would have become much more than masterpieces of idea, plot, oratory, satire, and symbolic description. They would have become masterpieces in every sense. They would have embodied a human world in which readers could dwell without any sense of boundaries or curfews.
That having been said, the final impression one gets from Heller’s book is that of Rand’s amazing vitality, as a writer and a human being. Limitations that would have doomed anyone else never managed to doom her. Rand hated Tolstoy, but there is a certain analogy between them. “War and Peace” is severely limited in many ways; they’re not the same ways in which Rand’s work is limited, but the comparison is instructive. The plot of Tolstoy’s masterpiece is haphazard; its thesis, constantly preached, is close to nonsense; and several of its leading characters, especially its heroine, are pathetically conceived and rendered. As people, they are dreary or insipid for the same reasons that Tolstoy admires them. Yet the vitality of “War and Peace” carries all before it. As with “Atlas Shrugged” — or Heller’s biography of the author of “Atlas Shrugged” — once you get started you can’t put it down.
The message is: Whether in work or in life, the individual, creative personality can somehow transcend all obstacles — even the obstacle of itself. Heller doesn’t say that. And Rand didn’t say that, either; even her own claims for individualism didn’t go that far. But that’s what Rand’s life had to say.
Liberty Talks with Anne Heller
Liberty: What got you interested in Rand, and in writing a biography of her?
Heller: I first heard of Rand when I was 15 or 16. Given what friends told me, I thought she was more a political and economic than a literary writer; and I wasn’t interested. Decades later, while I was working on a financial magazine at Condé Nast, a contributor emailed me the text of Francisco d’Anconia’s “money” speech from “Atlas Shrugged.” I was amazed by the patient elegance of its logic, and even more amazed by the beauty of Rand’s writing. I bought “Atlas Shrugged,” took it on a trip to the tropics, finished it, and immediately turned back to the first page and started over. How did all the puzzle pieces of plot, character, and message finally fit together? That kept my interest.
In 2004 I believed the time was right for a fresh look at Ayn Rand’s life and work, given that there was no more argument about collectivism versus capitalism (capitalism had won, at least it seemed so). Also, Rand’s closest associates from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s were growing older and should certainly be interviewed; also many Russian archives were newly opened. I wanted to know more about her, and (notwithstanding Barbara and Nathaniel Branden’s books) I was astonished that no one else was then known to be writing an impartial, research-driven biography. I gulped and drafted a proposal. Interestingly, five out of seven of the well-known editors who saw the proposal expressed interest in publishing the book. I don’t think this would have happened ten years ago. Good timing.
Liberty: What was the most rewarding part of your work?
Heller: I loved conducting the research for the book — especially working with archival researchers in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Rand was born. They and I corresponded for two and a half years in pursuit of details of Rand’s childhood addresses, school records, her parents’ origins and family history, her father’s financial situation, the family’s whereabouts when they left St. Petersburg for the Crimea, etc. I also enjoyed tracking down letters, old news reports, and facts revealed in obscure presentations by the Ayn Rand Institute that shed new light on the development of Rand’s thinking. I enjoyed conducting interviews with men and women who knew her, attempting to earn their trust (not falsely, I hope), and recording memories they shared with me that I had not seen in print before.
I liked the hideous process of trying to write to my own standards in a first book.
But most of all I enjoyed the privilege of coming to know Rand at the judicious distance of a biographer. She changed my convictions in ways I didn’t think possible. She was an endlessly fascinating characterological enigma: Where did her drive come from? How did her Russian and Jewish history shape her? What were her sources of inspiration for her plots and characters? How could she be so brilliant and yet so credulous as not to see things that were obvious to people around her?
Liberty: And what were your greatest difficulties?
Heller: Gradually winning the cooperation of her surviving friends and associates was difficult but immensely satisfying. But having to reconstruct aspects of her life without recourse to ARI’s archives (containing unpublished letters, diaries, desk calendars, drafts, notes, and memorabilia) was the biggest difficulty. The reason I was given for not being able to work in the ARI archives was that ARI had given Prof. Shoshana Milgram exclusive use of the material for an unspecified period of time. The Rand estate also blocked other means of gathering information; for example, it refused permission for Curtis Brown, the literary agency, to grant me access to its archives about Rand at Columbia, where I could have found contracts and business and literary correspondence post-1943. I managed to construe some but not all of the important missing information.
Liberty: Along these lines, we understand that some people declined to be interviewed.
Heller: Leonard Peikoff and Alan Greenspan were, finally, the only two important ones who would not talk to me.
Liberty: Did your view of Rand change during the course of your research and writing?
Heller: Yes, it did. I understood her better and admired her accomplishment immensely more than when I started. Her contribution to the American novel and to our continuing national conversation about freedom is immense.
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