Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (21 page)

Hence, Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses, as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective. It is a system that compels Kira to see the world dualistically, in terms of herself versus everyone else. Soviet communism had appropriated the essence of Russian
sobornost
’, the fusion of the individual and the collective whole. But instead of preserving the uniqueness and privacy of its members, it sought to annihilate their individual identities. For Rand, communism is a system that defeats “the living” by robbing them of the very qualities that make them human. It institutionalizes a war of the masses against the solitary person.

After she wrote
We the Living
, Rand knew that she had more work to do. By 1934, she began to view her writing as part of a broader project. In her
own words, “These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master
philosophy
—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has been said.”
²⁹

She intended that her
journals
would be
only
for her own use and did not worry if her thoughts appeared “disjointed.” Despite her humility in characterizing herself as “an amateur philosopher,” Rand’s musings are much more articulate and self-conscious than she intimates.

Rand hoped that once her ideas were fully developed, she would be able to present them as a “
Mathematics
of Philosophy.” She aimed to “arrange the whole in a logical system, proceeding from a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems” (7). But it was clear to her that such a project would take time and effort.

In her journals, Rand dealt critically with the writings of other thinkers, such as
Albert Jay Nock
,
H. L. Mencken
, Peter Kropotkin, and José
Ortega y Gasset
. Having rejected both religion and communism, both the worship of God and the idolatry of the collective, Rand wanted to grasp
why
people allowed themselves to obey standards set by others. Reading Ortega y Gasset’s
Revolt of the Masses
, she was perplexed by the actions of “the
mass
man.” Mass men are not those who obeyed their own standards. Rather, they submit to the dictates of others. They are not genuine individuals, in Rand’s view. Since they lack internally generated ideals, they cannot be free. Rand believed that no human quality such as
freedom
could be “disconnected from its content.” She asked: “Isn’t there a terrible mistake of
abstraction
here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said, ‘not freedom
from
what, but freedom
for
what’?”
³⁰

For Rand, the “mistake of abstraction” is the social division of ideals and action, theory and practice, morality and practicality. No human value can be separated from the conditions that make its achievement possible. Rand was developing a view of the individual that included not merely negative notions of freedom, but positive notions of
autonomy
and self-responsibility. Autonomy demands that individuals achieve
values
by their own effort, not by a mystical alliance with God or a selfless union with the collective. The person who attains values and power by pandering to the masses is to be rejected as “a slave to those masses.” A genuine selfishness, an “exalted
egoism
,” demands that the individual achieve his or her “own theoretical values and then apply them to practical reality,” for it is one’s “
actual living
” that must take priority “over all other considerations.”
³¹

Seeing “history as a deadly battle of the mass and the individual” (8), Rand was poised to begin working on a mammoth literary project whose
“first purpose … is
a defense of egoism in its real meaning.
”
³²
Her working title for the book was
Second-Hand Lives
. Ultimately, it would be called
The Fountainhead
.

T
HE
F
OUNTAINHEAD

In 1935, Rand began to outline the plot and characters of the book that would be her first, genuine commercial success. In these early outlines, Rand continues in her quest for a nondualistic, integrated view of human being.

The Fountainhead
follows the exploits of Howard Roark, Rand’s first, fully formed
“ideal man.”
³³
Roark is a brilliant architect, a man of integrity expelled from school for his unwillingness to conform to traditional architectural styles. One of Roark’s classmates is Peter Keating, a man who always relied on Roark’s assistance to complete school projects. While Roark is destitute and looking for work, Keating becomes a professional success by manipulating those around him, and by imitating old and tired architectural standards. He lives a “second-hand” life, in which “the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person” (
Fountainhead
, 607).

Throughout the novel, we meet other characters, such as Dominique Francon, Gail Wynand, and Ellsworth Toohey. Dominique is Roark’s beloved, and one of the more bizarre characters in the novel. She separates herself from the things that she grows to love, including Roark. She is convinced that no man of integrity can succeed in a world ruled by the mob. Wynand, the most tragic figure in Rand’s fiction, is a newspaper magnate who boasts that he has the power to mold the tastes of the masses. His belief that everyone can be corrupted is challenged by his encounters with Roark. Toohey, a critic writing for Wynand’s newspaper, is an arch collectivist. He organizes public protests against Roark’s “arrogant” architectural stylings. Through Toohey’s intervention, Roark is prevented from winning many important building contracts.

But Roark continues his struggle to create buildings in a distinctive and brilliantly imaginative style. In the final sequences of the novel, the ambitious Peter Keating seeks to exploit Roark’s expertise to secure a lucrative contract for the design of a public housing project. Knowing that he will never get the opportunity to implement some of his most cost-effective plans for housing, Roark agrees to submit designs for the project—in Keating’s name—on the condition that the blueprints not be altered. Toohey senses that these plans are not Keating’s creation; he recognizes Roark’s impeccable technique. When the plans are altered significantly and distorted, and
the project is built, Roark is outraged. He dynamites the public housing project, is arrested, and brought to trial.

During the trial, Wynand, now Roark’s friend, decides to embark on a press campaign to build support for the indicted architect. For the first time in his life, Wynand finds the strength to stand for a principle not dictated by the masses. To his grief, he discovers that he cannot alter public opinion. He faces the realization that he has created a vast business empire by pandering to the tastes of the mob; he is its slave and not its master.

Roark defends himself in court by enunciating the principles of
individualism
. He asserts that the authorities had no right to alter his plans. In one of Rand’s characteristically romantic endings, Roark is vindicated of criminal charges. He agrees to rebuild the project according to his own specifications. The novel concludes with Howard Roark triumphant.

Though
The Fountainhead
is fiction, in it Rand articulates a far more integrated—and specifically Randian—view of human existence than she had presented in any previous book. Yet in her portrayal of Howard Roark, the influence of
Nietzsche
can still be detected.
³⁴
Rand had wanted to place a quotation from Nietzsche at the beginning of
The Fountainhead
when it was first issued in 1943, but she removed the passage before the manuscript went to publication. In 1968, she quoted it in the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of
The Fountainhead.
She explained that despite her profound disagreement with Nietzsche’s metaphysics and epistemology, she remained impressed by his ability to project man’s greatness in beautifully poetic and emotional terms. She quoted from
Beyond Good and Evil
, in which Nietzsche celebrates the “fundamental certainty which a noble
soul
has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to he found, and perhaps also, is not to be lost.
The noble soul has reverence for itself.
”
³⁵

In her outlines of 26 December 1935, Rand had this same imagery in
mind
when she described Howard Roark as “the noble soul par excellence.” Rand stated that Roark is “man as man should be. The self-sufficient, self-confident, the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified.… A man who
is
what he should be.”
³⁶
At this time, Rand did not provide a full philosophical articulation of what human beings “should be.” But she did present, in fictional form, her own understanding of the nature of the genuine individualist as distinguished from the mass man. For Rand, the individualist transcends
dualism
, whereas the mass man is split between the dictates of his own conscience and the demands of society. Ultimately, the mass man, or “second-hander,” abdicates his own soul.

The individualist, symbolized in the character of Roark, was not a spiritual abstraction disconnected from material reality. Rand presented Roark
as a fully integrated being of mind and body. She matched Roark’s integrity of spirit with a consummate physical strength. Roark’s egoism is not boastful, conceited, or ostentatious. In her outline of 9 February 1936, she wrote that Roark is “natural” in his selfishness. “He has the quiet, complete, irrevocable calm of an iron conviction. No dramatics, no hysteria.” This spiritual tranquility is matched by Roark’s “tall, slender, somewhat angular” appearance. His passionate sensuality is captured in the hardness of his muscles. He walks swiftly, with ease, “as if movement requires no effort whatever, a body to which movement is as natural as immobility, without a definite line to divide them, a light, flowing, lazy ease of motion, an energy so complete that it assumes the ease of laziness.”
³⁷

Roark is the exact opposite of the mass man, for “he was born without the ability to consider others.” This does not mean that Roark is incapable of social relationships, or that he would trample on the rights of others to achieve his goals. For Rand, Roark’s egoism entailed a cohesion of self. Roark is not a solipsist or a brute. His self is the focal point of responsibility, decision making, and value. It is Roark’s own happiness that is his “basic, primary consideration.” Roark owes nothing to others, nor does he seek to impose obligations on them. As a Randian hero, Roark is an
atheist
. He was “born without any ‘
religious
brain center.’” His intransigent mind “does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself” (699).

By contrast, Rand portrays most of the other characters in
The Fountainhead
as variations of the mass man. Keating, like so many other secondary characters in the novel, tries to achieve greatness as defined by others. He is the “perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist—in the accepted meaning of the word.” He is vain and greedy, a “mob man at heart,” who sacrifices everything for the sake of a professional success that lacks personal significance. Keating “has no self and, therefore, cannot have any ethics.” He exists in an empty shell, never achieving the full distinction of what an individual “should be.”

Whereas Keating attempts to live through others by submitting to social conventions, Wynand attempts to rule others by forcing them to submit to
his
dictates. But as a publishing magnate, Wynand “rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.”
The Fountainhead
depicts what happens when Wynand attempts to stand on principles that are genuinely his own. For Rand, Wynand is “a man who could have been.”

By contrast, Toohey achieves distinction by extolling humanitarian causes and glorifying
collectivism
. He is unable to attain values through productive effort and can only achieve greatness in the eyes of others by crushing and ridiculing the heroic. Rand describes him as “a man who
never could be—and knows it” (698). Toohey seeks domination by diminishing the value of all things so as to reflect his own inferiority.
³⁸

Continuing the use of
Nietzschean
imagery in her notes, Rand explains that Toohey’s character has “an
insane will to power
, a lust for superiority that can be expressed
only through others”
(700). Toohey is a parody of this Nietzschean will to power; he exhibits a superior intellect and force of personality entirely directed toward the inversion and obliteration of values.
³⁹
But Rand also uses Toohey to subtly celebrate Nietzsche in her finished novel. Nietzsche becomes a persistent target of Toohey’s derision. For instance, in one of his newspaper columns denouncing Roark’s architectural design of the Enright House, Toohey states: “It is not our function—paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like [Nietzsche]—to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.”
⁴⁰

When a photograph of Roark appears in
The Banner
, Toohey mocks Rand’s protagonist for his exalted expression of admiration toward the Enright House that he has created. With obvious Nietzschean overtones, Toohey writes, in the newspaper caption below the photo, “Are you happy,
Mr. Superman
?” (343).

More important than all of these subtle allusions to Nietzsche is Rand’s portrait of Toohey. Through Toohey’s character, Rand presents the thesis “that only mental control over others is true control.” Toohey seeks primarily, a
spiritual
communism
, in which each individual is spiritually subordinated “to the mass in every way conceivable.” He hopes to achieve social domination through “the tremendous power of numbers.” Stressing the metaphysical equality of all men as a means of obliterating any “consideration given to the content of their character,” Toohey is a genuine mass man. For Toohey, individuals are valuable only in relation to the masses they serve. Voicing contempt for his betters
“because
they are better,”
⁴¹
Toohey encapsulates all that is evil in modern politics.