The Early Ayn Rand (34 page)

She did not remember the books she read before it; she did not want to remember the ones she read after.

The Viking had a body against which the winds broke like a caress. The Viking’s step was like the beating of waves upon the rocks: steady and irrevocable. The Viking’s eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword; but there was no boundary for the point of his sword.

The Viking’s ship had patched sails and blade-scarred flanks; and a banner that had never been lowered. There was on the ship a crew of men whose hearts froze at a home-fire; whose heads never bowed but to the Viking’s voice. Among the northern rocks of his homeland, the ship lay hidden in a harbor no one dared to enter.

The ship had to be hidden, for high in the mountains was a city surrounded by gray walls, where, at night, a smoked lantern burned by the locked gates and a lonely cat walked down the old stone wall. In the city there was a King, and when he passed in the street, the people bowed so low that wrinkled foreheads left marks in the soft dust. The King hated the Viking.

The King hated him, for when peaceful lights twinkled in his subjects’ homes and smoke rose over houses where mothers cooked the evening meal, the Viking watched the city from a high cliff, and the wind carried the smoke high into the mountains, but not high enough to reach the Viking’s feet. The King hated him, for walls fell at a motion of the Viking’s hand, and when he walked in their ruins, the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing its weight.

So the King had promised a reward for the Viking’s head. And in the narrow streets, on the doorsteps slippery with onion peelings, the people waited and hoped for the reward, so that they could have a big supper.

Far down in a deep valley was a temple that the sun-rays reached but one hour each day; and where the rays struck the temple was a tall window of dark painted glass. When the sun pierced the window, the huge shadow of a tortured saint spread over the backs of those who knelt in prayer, and the gold of the sun turned red as the blood of suffering. The Priest of the temple hated the Viking.

The Priest hated him, for the Viking laughed under the cold, black vaults and his laugh sounded as if the painted window had been broken. The Priest hated him, for the Viking looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.

So the Priest had promised forgiveness of all sins for the Viking’s head. And skinning their knees on the temple steps, the people waited and hoped for the forgiveness, so that they could sleep safely with their neighbor’s wife.

Far away in the polar seas, where the bridges of northern lights connected the waves and the clouds, and no ship dared to break the connection, stood the sacred city. From a long distance, sailors had seen its white walls rising to the snows of the mountains. But they did not look at the city in spring, for when the spring sun struck the white walls, their blaze sent many a sailor home—blind.

At dawn, from a long distance, sailors could see the queen-priestess rise to the tall white tower. Her white robe and golden hair fell to the ground, but her slender body swaying back in a tense effort, her arms were raised, high and straight, to a pale, young sky. And in the still mirror of the sea, from the bottom of a tall white tower, a slender, white figure stretched her arms down into the depth.

It was spring when the Viking said he was leaving to conquer the sacred city.

People ran into their houses and closed the shutters over their windows. But the King smiled, and offered him forgiveness and the royal banner for his enterprise.

“For your King,” he said.

The Priest smiled, and offered him forgiveness, and the banner of the temple.

“For your Faith,” he said.

But the Viking took neither. When his ship cut the waves towards the blazing white spot, on the tall mast, lashing the wind, was his own banner, that had never been lowered.

There were many days and many storms. When the waves rose high, fighting the wind for his dark cape and light hair, the Viking stood on the prow and looked ahead.

It was night when the Viking’s ship approached the sacred city, and its walls were blue under the stars.

When the stars had gone and the sky glowed, transparent with the coming light, white stones crumbled to meet the waves where the walls had been; over the gates flung wide open to the sea the Viking’s banner was nailed.

Alone over the city, his clothes torn, the Viking stood on top of the tall white tower. There was a wound across his breast and red drops rolled slowly down to his feet.

From the ravaged streets below, conquerors and conquered alike looked up at him. There was much wonder in their eyes, but little hatred. They raised their heads, but did not rise from their knees.

On the tower stairs the slender queen-priestess of the sacred city lay at the Viking’s feet. Her head bent so low that her golden hair swept the steps and he could see her breasts as, breathing tremulously, they touched the ground. Her hands lay still and helpless on the steps, the palms turned up, hungry in silent entreaty. But it was not mercy they were begging of him.

The sun had not risen. A pale sky looked into a pale, still sea, both misty green and transparent, touched by the first faint promise of color. Behind the city, a red glow mounted in the sky, rising slowly, ominously, like a victorious banner unrolling into the sky from the heart of the earth. The Viking’s body stood alone, cutting the fire.

Faint waves beat at the foot of the ruins. The waves had seen unknown shores and lost, faraway cities; beyond the line where they melt into the sky, was a great earth alive with a promise of so much that was possible. And the earth lay still, tense in reverent waiting, as if its very heart and meaning were rising to the morning sky; and the morning was like a slow, triumphant overture for the song to come.

The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up, at heaven; but he was looking down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm, straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. Its rays lighted the faces of those below.

“To a life,” said the Viking, “which is a reason unto itself.”

 

A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life. He had known and she knew. He had fought and she was fighting. He had shown her the way. To the banner of life, all could be given, even life itself.

 

 

Editor’s Preface

Ideal
was written in 1934, at a time when Ayn Rand had cause to be unhappy with the world.
We the Living
was being rejected by a succession of publishers for being “too intellectual” and too opposed to Soviet Russia (this was the time of America’s Red Decade);
Night of January 16th
had not yet found a producer; and Miss Rand’s meager savings were running out. The story was written originally as a novelette and then, probably within a year or two, was extensively revised and turned into a stage play. It has never been produced.

After the political themes of her first professional work, Ayn Rand now returns to the subject matter of her early stories: the role of values in men’s lives. The focus in this case, as in “Her Second Career,” is negative, but this time the treatment is not jovial; dominantly, it is sober and heartfelt. The issue now is men’s lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse. The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.

An acquaintance of Miss Rand’s, a conventional middle-aged woman, told her once that she worshiped a certain famous actress and would give her life to meet her. Miss Rand was dubious about the authenticity of the woman’s emotion, and this suggested a dramatic idea: a story in which a famous actress, so beautiful that she comes to represent to men the embodiment of their deepest ideals, actually enters the lives of her admirers. She comes in a context suggesting that she is in grave danger. Until this point, her worshipers have professed their reverence for her—in words, which cost them nothing. Now, however, she is no longer a distant dream, but a reality demanding action on their part, or betrayal.

“What do you dream of?” Kay Gonda, the actress, asks one of the characters, in the play’s thematic statement.

“Nothing,” he answers. “Of what account are dreams?”

“Of what account is life?”

“None. But who made it so?”

“Those who cannot dream.”

“No. Those who can
only
dream.”

In a journal entry written at the time (dated April 9, 1934), Miss Rand elaborates this viewpoint:

Such “dangerous and hopeless ones” may betray their ideal in the name of “social respectability” (the small businessman in this story) or in the name of the welfare of the masses (the Communist) or the will of God (the evangelist) or the pleasure of the moment (the playboy Count)—or they may do it for the license of claiming that the good is impossible and therefore the struggle for it unnecessary (the painter).
Ideal
captures eloquently the essence of each of these diverse types and demonstrates their common denominator. In this regard, it is an intellectual tour de force. It is a philosophical guide to hypocrisy, a dramatized inventory of the kinds of ideas and attitudes that lead to the impotence of ideals—that is, to their detachment from life.

(The inventory, however, is not offered in the form of a developed plot structure. In the body of the play, there is no progression of events, no necessary connection between one encounter and the next. It is a series of evocative vignettes, often illuminating and ingenious, but as theater, I think, unavoidably somewhat static.)

Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda’s face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play’s theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain.

In her journal of the period, Miss Rand singles out religion as the main cause of men’s lack of integrity. The worst of the characters, accordingly, the one who evokes her greatest indignation, is Hix, the evangelist, who preaches earthly suffering as a means to heavenly happiness. In an excellently worked-out scene, we see that it is not his vices, but his religion, including his definition of virtue, that brings him to demand the betrayal of Kay Gonda, her deliberate sacrifice to the lowest of creatures. By gaining a stranglehold on ethics, then preaching sacrifice as an ideal, religion, no matter what its intentions, systematically inculcates hypocrisy: it teaches men that achieving values is low (“selfish”), but that giving them up is noble. “Giving them up,” in practice, means betraying them.

“None of us,” one of the characters complains, “ever chooses the bleak, hopeless life he is forced to lead.” Yet, as the play demonstrates, all these men do choose the lives they lead. When confronted by the ideal they profess to desire, they do not want it. Their vaunted “idealism” is largely a form of self-deception, enabling them to pretend to themselves and others that they aspire to something higher. In fact and in reality, however, they don’t.

Kay Gonda, by contrast, is a passionate valuer; like Irene in “The Husband I Bought,” she cannot accept anything less than the ideal. Her exalted sense of life cannot accept the ugliness, the pain, the “dismal little pleasures” that she sees all around her, and she feels a desperate need to know that she is not alone in this regard. There is no doubt that Ayn Rand herself shared Kay Gonda’s sense of life, and often her loneliness, too—and that Kay’s cry in the play is her own:

Emotionally,
Ideal
is unique among Ayn Rand’s works. It is the polar opposite of “Good Copy.” “Good Copy” was based on the premise of the impotence and insignificance of evil. But
Ideal
focuses almost exclusively on evil or mediocrity (in a way that even
We the Living
does not); it is pervaded by Kay Gonda’s feeling of alienation from mankind, the feeling, tinged by bitterness, that the true idealist is in a minuscule minority amid an earthful of value-betrayers with whom no communication is possible. In accordance with this perspective, the hero, Johnnie Dawes, is not a characteristic Ayn Rand figure, but a misfit utterly estranged from the world, a man whose virtue is that he does not know how to live today (and has often wanted to die). If Leo feels this in Soviet Russia, the explanation is political, not metaphysical. But Johnnie feels it in the United States.