Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (8 page)

Like Nietzsche, Rand intended to challenge Christianity. She shared the philosopher’s belief that Christian ethics were destructive to selfhood, making life “flat, gray, empty, lacking all beauty, all fire, all enthusiasm, all meaning, all creative urge.” She also had a more specific
critique, writing that Christianity “is the best kindergarten of communism possible.”
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Christianity taught believers to put others before self, an ethical mandate that matched the collectivist emphasis on the group over the individual. Thus a new system of individualist, non-Christian ethics was needed to prevent the triumph of Communism.

Although her ethical theory was firm, Rand was less certain of the other messages her book would impart. In her first notes she thought she “may not include” Communism in the novel. By early 1938 she described it to an interested publisher as “not political, this time.” “I do not want to be considered a ‘one-theme’ author,” she added.
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Not a single Russian or Communist would appear, she assured him. At the same time Rand had always sensed a connection between politics and her conception of the second-hander. Indeed, her neighbor’s statement had rocked her precisely because it seemed to illuminate a puzzling question: What made some people collectivists and others individualists? Before, Rand had never understood the difference, but now she believed that the basic collectivist principle was “motivation by the value of others versus your own independence.”
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Even as she professed a purely philosophical intent, the book’s very origins suggested its possibilities as political morality play. Still, Rand was ambivalent about writing that kind of book.

Part of the problem was that outside of the Russian setting, Rand wasn’t sure where she stood politically. By the early 1930s she was expanding her range of nonfiction reading beyond Nietzsche, and she gravitated first to writers who were deeply skeptical of democracy, such as H. L. Mencken, Oswald Spengler, Albert Jay Nock, and José Ortega y Gasset.
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These thinkers did little to shake Rand out of her Nietzschean fixation on the superior individual. Indeed, they may even have shaped her understanding of Nietzsche, for the writers she selected had themselves been deeply influenced by the German philosopher. Mencken was one of Nietzsche’s foremost American interpreters, and Nietzsche’s ideas strongly influenced Spengler’s
Decline of the West
and Ortega y Gasset’s
Revolt of the Masses,
which in turn exerted its powers on Nock’s
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
. Rand’s reading was a Nietzschean hall of mirrors with a common theme: forthright elitism.

Accordingly, her reflections on American society were both tentative and deeply pessimistic. Rand doubted that America was hospitable to her values, an impression furthered by the popularity of Communism
in New York. In a writing notebook she wondered “if there are things in capitalism and democracy worth saving” and speculated, in a Spenglerian aside, that perhaps the white race was degenerating.
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She qualified every reference to America’s individualistic economic system with sarcastic asides such as “so-called” or “maybe!”
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According to Rand the primary “fault” of liberal democracies was “giving full rights to quantity.” Instead, she wrote, there should be “democracy of superiors only.”
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As she began the book the connections between her vaunted individualism and American society were far from clear to Rand.

By contrast, her characters were starkly etched in her mind. Rand designed an elegant, almost geometric structure for the book. Howard Roark was her ideal man, an uncompromising individualist and creator. The other primary characters were variations on his theme. As she explained in a notebook, “Howard Roark: the man who can be and is. Gail Wynand: the man who could have been. Peter Keating: the man who never could be and doesn’t know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: the man who never could be—and knows it.”
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Rand also created two love interests for Roark, Vesta Dunning and Dominique Francon.

Rand’s characterizations flowed directly from her architectural research, her knowledge of current events, and her developing opposition to American liberalism. To give Roark form and specificity she drew on the career of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright, whose avant-garde style she admired. Numerous details of Wright’s life as described in his autobiography would recur in the novel, and she gave Roark a cranky, embittered mentor in the vein of Wright’s own teacher, Louis Sullivan. Second-hander Peter Keating was based on a contemporary mediocrity, the popular architect Thomas Hastings. As Rand noted excitedly after reading a book on Hastings, “If I take this book and Wright’s autobiography, there is practically the entire story.”
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Other titans appeared in the novel as well. Gail Wynand was modeled after William Randolph Hearst, whose career Rand had closely followed. She was struck in particular by his failed bids for mayor and governor of New York. Here was a man who claimed great influence but had little success in actually grasping the levers of power. Hearst had been thoroughly humbled, Rand thought, overlooking his two terms in Congress and the authority he continued to wield through his media empire. To her Hearst’s strength was a chimera. His power was not his
own, but could be granted or withheld by the masses whom he served. In her novel Wynand would illustrate this principle, with his failings contrasted starkly to Roark’s independence and agency.

Her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, promised to transform Rand’s supposedly nonpolitical novel into a sharp satire on the leftist literary culture of 1930s New York. One evening she and Frank reluctantly accompanied two friends to a talk by the British socialist Harold Laski at the leftist New School for Social Research. When Laski took the stage Rand was thrilled. Here was Ellsworth Toohey himself! She scribbled frantically in her notebook, sketching out a brief picture of Laski’s face and noting his every tic and mannerism. She and Frank went back twice more in the following evenings.

Most of Rand’s notes on Laski’s lecture, and her resultant description of Toohey, showcased her distaste for all things feminine. Rand was repelled by the women in the New School audience, whom she characterized as sexless, unfashionable, and unfeminine. She and Frank scoffed at their dowdy lisle stockings, trading snide notes back and forth. Rand was infuriated most by the “intellectual vulgarity” of the audience, who seemed to her half-wits unable to comprehend the evil of Laski’s socialism. What could be done about such a “horrible, horrible, horrible” spectacle, besides “perhaps restricting higher education, particularly for women?” she asked in her notes on the lecture. This misogyny rubbed off on Rand’s portrait of Toohey, who was insipidly feminine, prone to gossip, and maliciously catty “in the manner of a woman or a finance.” Through Toohey, Rand would code leftism as fey, effeminate, and unnatural, as opposed to the rough-hewn masculinity of Roark’s individualism.
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Before she saw Laski, Toohey was an abstracted antithesis of Roark. But a socialist intellectual fit her purposes just as well, even as the characterization shifted the novel ever closer to a commentary on current events. Laski was not the sole inspiration, for Rand also used bits of the American critics Heywood Broun, Lewis Mumford, and Clifton Fadiman to round out Toohey’s persona. Fitting Toohey so squarely into the leftist literary culture signaled Rand’s emerging dual purposes for the book and ensured that when it was finally published, the novel would be understood as a political event as much as a literary achievement.

This painstaking research also enabled Rand to surpass the limitations of her first attempts at fiction. Characterization had always been a particular problem for Rand. In
Night of January 16th
her characters are powerful symbols but unconvincing human beings.
We the Living
circumvented this weakness because Rand made most of her characters composites of people she had known in Russia. Now she repeated this technique by drawing liberally on biography and observation.

The great exception to this method was Dominique. To capture the psychology of Dominique, a bitter and discontented heiress, Rand conjured up her own darkest moods. She tapped into all the frustration and resentment of her early years, her feeling that the world was rigged in favor of the mediocre and against the exceptional, and then imagined, “[W]hat if I really believed that this is all there is in life.”
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In the novel Howard would teach Dominique to let go of these poisonous attitudes, just as Rand herself had become more optimistic with her professional success and freedom to write.

She combined this introspection with a new analysis of Frank, her beloved but troubling husband. When they first met, Frank was brimming with hopes and plans for his Hollywood career. He had several near misses, including a screen test with D. W. Griffith for a part that helped establish Neil Hamilton (later famous on TV as
Batman
’s Police Commissioner Gordon). But as Rand’s fortunes soared ever upward, Frank’s collapsed. In New York, with Rand’s income sufficient to support them both, Frank idled. He took charge of paying the household bills but made little effort to establish himself in a new line of work. It was an inexplicable turn of events for Rand, who valued career above all else.

Now, as she crafted Dominique, Rand hit on a satisfying explanation for Frank’s passivity. Dominique, like Frank, would turn away from the world in anger, “a withdrawal not out of bad motives or cowardice, but out of an almost unbearable kind of idealism which does not know how to function in the journalistic reality as we see it around us.”
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Dominique loves Howard, yet tries to destroy him, believing he is doomed in an imperfect world. Confusing and conflicted, Dominique is among Rand’s least convincing creations. More important, though, was the effect this character had on Rand’s marriage. Seeing Frank as Dominique glossed over his professional failures and cast his defeated
resignation in terms Rand could understand. Bits of Frank found their way into Rand’s hero too. Roark’s cat-like grace and easy physicality struck the couple’s friends as a precise portrait of Frank.

Frank had become increasingly important to Rand as connections with her family in Russia snapped. In 1936, putting a long-held dream in motion, she began a torturous round of paperwork to bring her parents to the United States. She petitioned the U.S. government for an immigration visa, obtaining letters from Universal describing her screenwriting work. She and Frank wrote a notarized deposition testifying to her financial independence. She even prepaid her passage on the United States Lines. It was all to no avail. In late 1936 the Rosenbaums’ visa application was denied, and an appeal proved fruitless. Rand got the final word in a brief telegram sent from Leningrad in May 1937: “Cannot get permission.”
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It was one of their last communications. Rand stopped responding to family letters shortly afterward, believing that Russians who received mail from America could be in grave danger. It was a cruel kindness, for the Rosenbaums had no explanation for her sudden silence. They pleaded with her to write. And then, ominously, the letters stopped coming.
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Rand was irrevocably cut off from her family.

Although she and Frank were now financially secure, it appears that they never seriously contemplated having children of their own.
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Rand’s books would be her children, to be carefully tended and agonizingly birthed.

As it turned out, “Second-Hand Lives” was a problem child. With the main characters sketched out, Rand turned to the much more difficult work of plotting the novel, beginning an “enormous progression of experimenting, thinking, starting from various premises.” The framework would be Roark’s career, but beyond this basic line Rand was unsure how events should proceed. She spent months trying out “a lot of pure superstructure calculations. What would be the key points of Roark’s career, that is, how would he start, what would be the difficulties on the early stage, how would he become famous?”
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She wrote a detailed outline of Hugo’s
Les Miserables
to grasp its underlying structure and create a model for herself.

The most difficult part was the climax, “really a mind-breaker.” Rand wanted a single dramatic event that would draw together the novel’s disparate story lines, dramatize her theme, and thrill readers. Until
the climax was set everything else in the novel had to remain tentative. Even worse, she felt like “a fake anytime I talk about my new novel, when I don’t yet know the central part of it, when nothing is set.”
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She writhed in agony at her writing desk, caught in her first ever case of “the squirms,” her phrase for writer’s block.

As Rand planned and drafted
The Fountainhead
her dislike of Roosevelt continued to fester. To most Americans, Roosevelt was a hero, a paternal figure who had soothed their fears and beveled the sharp edges of economic crisis. He was unquestionably the most popular political figure of the decade, if not the century. But among a small subset of commentators dark mutterings about Roosevelt were becoming more common. Criticism came from many quarters. To adherents of traditional laissez-faire economic doctrine, Roosevelt was foolhardy in his clumsy attempts to right the economy with state power. To his opponents Roosevelt was a virtual dictator, wantonly trampling on the Constitution as he expanded the government’s reach into business, law, and agriculture. Like few presidents before, his actions spawned a cottage industry dedicated to attacking him, known as the “Roosevelt haters.”
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