Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (15 page)

Along with creativity Roark’s speech also celebrates reason, another theme of dawning importance to Rand. Here again was the influence of Paterson, who constantly ranted and raved about the importance of reason and the dangers of irrationality. The “Manifesto” did not mention rationality or the concept of reason, but Roark’s speech lauds “the reasoning mind” and “the process of reason.” At some points Roark distinguishes between thinking and creativity, at other times he collapses the terms, telling his audience, “The code of the creator is built upon the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive” (681). He returns always to the basic point that individual rights must be valued above collective needs.

Swayed by Roark’s argument, the jury promptly votes unanimously to acquit. The jury proved critical, helping Rand democratize her vision and reaffirm the basic wisdom of the free-thinking, independent American. Although none of the jurors are the history-making creator that Roark represents, Rand makes clear that they can share in his glory simply by understanding and affirming the principle of individualism.

After the trial scene Rand moved quickly to wrap up the loose ends of her story. In the pages preceding the trial she had dwelled at some length on the ordeal of Gail Wynand. Once a cocky and feared mogul, Wynand is humbled to discover that he cannot effectively defend Roark with his tabloids. Roark’s destruction of Cortland has aroused public fury against him, and readers begin abandoning Wynand’s publications when he takes Roark’s side. Wynand has long believed he alone creates public opinion, but now he sees it is the public who owns him. Selling out his deepest values, he salvages his flagship newspaper,
The Banner,
by reversing course and attacking Roark. His fate is the most poignant in the book, for unlike Toohey and Keating, Wynand is “the man who could have been.” In the novel’s closing scenes Wynand shamefully rebuffs overtures from Roark, even as he commissions him to design and build a landmark building. Alone and desolate as the story ends, Wynand learns that his quest for power has brought him nothing in return.

Rand capped off her giant manuscript with a cinematic happy ending. Dominique, by now Mrs. Howard Roark, arrives at the construction
site of the Wynand building. She takes an elevator up the side of the building, looking above to see “the sun and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark” (694). Her closing words were typed just before the firm deadline of January 1, 1943.

Now came the hard part. Both Rand and Ogden knew the manuscript was too long. Rand wanted to write everything down and then edit from there. She had only a few months to do it, for Bobbs-Merrill planned to release
The Fountainhead
in the spring. After nearly a year of nonstop writing Rand was now sleepy and unfocused when she sat at her desk. When she visited a doctor to consult about her chronic fatigue, he offered Benzedrine as a solution. At midcentury Benzedrine was a widely prescribed amphetamine and had a cult following among writers and artists. Jack Kerouac produced his masterwork
On the Road
in a three-week, Benzedrine-induced frenzy. Similarly Rand used it to power her last months of work on the novel, including several twenty-four-hour sessions correcting page proofs.
³²

Desperate to publish, Rand set aside her usual dislike of editorial advice and embraced many of the changes Ogden suggested. Most significant among these was the book’s name. Rand’s working title was “Second Hand Lives.” When Ogden pointed out that this title highlighted her villains rather than her heroes, Rand agreed it must go. Her next choice, “The Mainspring,” had been recently used. A thesaurus led her to “fountainhead,” a word that never appears in the novel. Another important editorial force was Paterson. She advised Rand to prune all unnecessary adjectives, a change that would have gutted the novel. Rand did, however, find some of her suggestions useful. Following Paterson’s advice, she weeded out proper names like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Robespierre from Roark’s courtroom speech to avoid tying the book to one historical moment.
³³
The principles of her book were transcendent, Paterson reminded her.

In these last frantic months Rand also transformed Howard Roark. She decided to eliminate the character of Vesta Dunning, Roark’s love interest before Dominique. The scenes between Vesta and Roark were among the first Rand wrote in 1938. Close in spirit to Rand’s first heroes, the early Roark was cold and cruel, treating Vesta with dramatic indifference. By deleting these scenes in 1943 Rand softened Roark’s character, making him less misanthropic and more heroic. Eliminating Vesta also
slimmed the manuscript and pruned complexity from Roark’s character, allowing him to stand out more sharply as an idealized figure.

Even so, Roark’s relations with women remained one of the most troubling parts of the book. Often, as Rand struggled to make concrete what she intended by the heroic, she described characters with icy emotional lives and distant, destructive relationships. Although their passions for each other are all-consuming, in another sense the novel’s characters never truly relate to one another. Friends find their greatest moments of connection in silence, because it seems that in silence they truly understand one another. Lovers don’t hold hands, they hold wrists. And then there is the infamous rape scene.

As in
Night of January 16th
the grand passion of
The Fountainhead
begins in violence. The first encounters between Dominique and Roark are charged with sexual tension. The two meet when Roark is working in her father’s quarry. Dominique requests that he be sent to repair a marble replace she has deliberately scratched. Seeing through her ruse, Roark smashes the marble, to Dominique’s shocked delight, and then sends another man to set the replacement. Encountering him again while on horseback, Dominique slashes Roark across the face with a riding crop. He returns a few nights later to finish what both have started, slipping through her bedroom window. Rand wrote the scene to emphasize that even as she resisted, Dominique welcomed Roark’s advances. Yet it remained a brutal portrayal of conquest, an episode that left Dominique bruised, battered, and wanting more. Rand herself offered conflicting explanations for the sadomasochistic scene. It wasn’t real rape, she insisted to a fan, then called it “rape by engraved invitation.”
³⁴
Certainly Rand perceived the encounter as an erotic climax for both characters. Risqué for its time, the rape became one of the most popular and controversial parts of the book.
³⁵

The rape scene was a remnant of Rand’s first intellectual preoccupations. In its basic structure
The Fountainhead
resembles many of Rand’s early works. Its hero is a principled criminal with a complicated love life, and the plot culminates in a trial that affords the airing of philosophical views. Rand did what she could to improve the characterization of Roark, sharpening and defining his sense of individualism as the novel progressed.
³⁶
But with a deadline looming, structural changes were impossible.
The Fountainhead
is ultimately a hybrid work that caught Rand in transition from one set of intellectual interests to another.

Along with deleting Vesta, Rand worked to purge the manuscript of her previous fixation on Nietzsche. In the first version of the manuscript she prefaced each of the four sections with an aphorism from
Beyond Good and Evil
. Now she removed these headings, and also removed several direct allusions to Nietzsche in the text of the novel. Still, she could not eliminate from
The Fountainhead
all of the vengeful scorn that had powered her earlier work. Particularly in the sections of the novel that treat Gail Wynand, her old horror at the mob returns. Rand demonstrated Wynand’s lost possibilities by focusing on the masses to which he has sold his soul. One desperate night Wynand walks the streets of New York, his sense of degradation sharp as he smells the subway, “the residue of many people put together, of human bodies pressed into a mass,” and passes drunks, tenement housewives, taxi drivers, and saloons. “I surrendered to the grocery man—to the deck hands on the ferryboat—to the owner of the poolroom,” he thinks (661, 662). His discovery of his own value is twinned with disgust for these others, who “can produce nothing” (663). Pages later Rand tried to counterbalance these descriptions with her positive rendering of the jury, but her contemptuous attitudes still color the novel.

When contrasted with other contemporary celebrations of individualism, however, it becomes clear just how innovative
The Fountainhead
was. Elitism and populism were two impulses that had always coexisted uneasily in the defense of unregulated capitalism. Nock’s
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,
for example, is a credo shot through with educated disdain for the common man. At the same time opponents of the New Deal insisted that men, if left alone, could properly work out their own destiny. Like Sumner they glorified “the forgotten man,” the ordinary workers who maintained what Paterson called “the set-up” without interference from government.
³⁷
Defenders of laissez-faire invoked both elite privilege and the wonders of the ordinary, self-sufficient citizen, often in the same breath.

The Fountainhead
finessed this contradiction and escaped libertarianism’s fatal elitism through Rand’s theory of ethics. For all her bluster, Rand’s ethics were rather anodyne. Roark tells the jury, “Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of man’s independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his talent as a worker and his worth as a man” (681). The book’s hierarchy
of values is not exclusive, for anyone could join Rand’s elite simply by loving their work. Instead of talking about the wealthy, she talked about the independent, thereby sidestepping social class. Inequalities or differences between characters are discussed in specific, individual terms, without reference to larger social structures.
³⁸
Denizens of Hell’s Kitchen and the city’s toniest drawing rooms are evaluated by the same standard of independence.

Even as it uncoupled libertarianism from its traditional elitism,
The Fountainhead
made a familiar argument that humanitarianism is simply a guise for those who seek power. The idea was not novel for a time that had seen the birth of two new totalitarianisms. Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Foreign Correspondent,
released in 1940, depicted the head of Britain’s peace party as a German agent, hiding his diabolical designs under the cover of pacifism. Paterson would make the point in her vividly titled chapter, “The Humanitarian and the Guillotine.” In later years Rand claimed credit for the ideas in this chapter, a contention Paterson vigorously disputed. It is likely that Paterson did believe in an ethics of self-interest prior to meeting Rand, for such beliefs were not uncommon among supporters of laissez-faire. Paterson could have been paraphrasing William Graham Sumner, who was famously skeptical of humanitarianism, when she wrote, “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.” Rand was not the first thinker to criticize altruism or to suggest that noble sentiments often cloak base motives. Indeed in the early libertarians Rand had stumbled across a rare community where her attack on altruism was not taboo.
³⁹

What Rand offered was an unforgettable and highly stylized version of this argument set in a modern context. Her primary vehicle was
The Fountainhead
’s villain Ellsworth Toohey, who angles for power through the promotion of collectivist ideas. Subtly he influences the Wynand papers: “If a statement involved someone’s personal motive, it was always ‘goaded by selfishness’ or ‘egged by greed.’ A crossword puzzle gave the definition of ‘obsolescent individuals’ and the word came out as ‘capitalists’” (588). In a speech he parodies Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: “If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain
the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment” (553). Toohey’s most successful method, however, is to create a Union of Wynand Employees, which he uses as power base to take over the newspaper. Despite its high-minded rhetoric, the union is intended to benefit just one man.

Rand also pushed past traditional libertarian skepticism of charity to assault the very concept of altruism itself. Writers like Paterson and Sumner stressed that benevolence should not be compelled by the state, but supported private charity undertaken voluntarily. By contrast, Roark told his audience, “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!” (683). Revising her earlier binary of Active Man and Passive Man, Rand now drew a primal distinction between independence and dependence and presented morality as a stark choice of either self-sacrifice or egoism. Unlike other libertarians Rand would let no hint of “social conception” taint her individualism.

As she neared the end of the project Rand was working at fever pitch, thanks to her new medication. She was thrilled by the long hours the drug made possible, freely telling friends about this latest discovery. In a few short months she had sliced the novel’s length, reshaped its philosophical implications, and given a final polish to characters that had lived in her mind for nearly a decade. And she had done all this while holding down a part-time job. But Benzedrine had a boomerang effect. By the time the book was complete Rand’s doctor diagnosed her as close to a nervous breakdown and ordered her to take two weeks of complete rest.
⁴⁰