The Early Ayn Rand (61 page)

Despite the intrinsic interest of this manuscript material, I have serious misgivings about publishing it. In certain respects, the scenes are inconsistent with the final novel (which may very well have contributed to their being cut). It is doubtful to me whether Roark, as presented in the novel, would have had an affair with Vesta. It is doubtful whether, in the Cameron scene, Roark would have lost his temper to the extent of punching a man. Furthermore, Roark’s statements are not always as exact philosophically as Miss Rand’s final editing would have made them. The Roark in the novel, for instance, would not have said that he is too selfish to love anyone (in the novel he says that selfishness is a precondition of love); nor would he have said, without a clearer context, that he hates the world. Aside from these specifics, the general tone of Roark’s characterization does not always seem right; without the context of the rest of the novel, he comes across, I think, as overly severe at times to Vesta, and also as overly abstracted and antisocial. Undoubtedly, this is also partly an issue of exact nuance and wording, which Miss Rand would have adjusted had she decided to retain the material.

The admirers of
The Fountainhead
see the novel, and Roark, as finished realities. The author obviously shared this view. I must therefore stress that the following is
not
to be taken as part of
The Fountainhead.
These scenes do not contribute to the novel’s theme or meaning, and they do not cast further light on Roark’s character or motivation. They are offered as individual, self-contained pieces, to be read as such. If I may state the point paradoxically, for emphasis: these events did not happen to Roark—they are pure fiction!

Despite my misgivings, I could not convince myself to keep the material hidden, for a single reason: it is too well written. Miss Rand told me once that she regretted having to cut the Vesta Dunning affair because it contained “some of my best writing.” This is true, and it is from this perspective that the passages are best approached. Even in this unedited material, one can see some characteristic features of Ayn Rand’s mature literary style. More than any other single attribute of her writing, her style reveals the extent of her growth in the space of a decade.

The feature of Ayn Rand’s style most apparent in these scenes is one that perfectly reflects her basic philosophy. I mean her ability to integrate
concretes
and
abstractions.

Philosophically, Ayn Rand is Aristotelian. She does not believe in any Platonic world of abstractions; nor does she accept the view that concepts are merely arbitrary social conventions, with its implication that reality consists of unintelligible concretes. Following Aristotle, she holds that the world of physical entities is reality,
and
that it can be understood by man through the use of his conceptual faculty. Concepts, she holds, are not supernatural or conventional; they are objective forms of cognition based on, and ultimately making comprehensible, the facts of reality perceived by our senses. (Ayn Rand’s distinctive theory of concepts is presented in her
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
.) For man, therefore, the proper method of knowledge is not perception alone or conception alone, but the integration of the two—which means, in effect, the union of concretes and abstractions.

One literary expression of this epistemology is Ayn Rand’s commitment to integrating theme and plot. The plot of an Ayn Rand novel is a purposeful progression of events, not a series of random occurrences. The events add up to a general thematic idea, which is thus implicit in and conveyed by the story, not arbitrarily superimposed on it. The plot, in short, is a progression of concretes integrated by and conveying an abstraction.

The same epistemology is essential to Ayn Rand’s style of writing, whether she is describing physical nature, human action, or the most delicate, hidden emotion. The style consists in integrating the
facts
being described and their
meaning
.

Consider, for example, the following paragraph, which describes Vesta on the screen:

The paragraph begins with a description of Vesta’s mouth, her hair, her movements, etc. This description re-creates the concrete reality, sets the physical essentials of a young Katharine Hepburn type before us, so that we can, in effect, perceive the event (Vesta onscreen) through our own eyes. On this basis, we are offered some preliminary abstractions, giving a first layer of meaning to these facts; Vesta comes across, we learn, not as pretty, gentle, sweet, but as crude, shocking, fresh—and we accept this account, we see its inner logic, because we know the supporting facts. Then we are given some vivid images comparing Vesta to utterly different entities of a similar meaning (a steel knife, a gun moll, etc.); this helps both to keep the reality real (i.e., to keep it concrete) and to develop the meaning further. The images seem to flow naturally out of the earlier material; they do not strike us as forced or as superfluous, “literary” embellishments. Finally, after this buildup, we are given a single abstraction which unites all of it—the facts, the preliminary abstractions, the images. We are given an integrating concept, which names a definitive meaning, to carry forward with us: “. . . she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.” By this time, we do not have to guess at the meaning of “strength,” even though it is a very broad abstraction; we know what is meant by it in this context, because we have seen the data that give rise to the concept here. And we believe the term; we do not feel that it is empty or arbitrary, or that we have to take the author’s word for it. We do not even feel that it is the conclusion of an extended argument (though in effect it is). We take it here virtually as a statement of the self-evident, as a statement of what we ourselves by now are ready to conclude.

This method is not, of course, repeated in every paragraph. It is applied only where the material requires it. Nor is the order of development always the same; nor are the specific steps—there may be more or fewer of them. But this kind of approach, in some form and on some level,
is
always present. It is one of the elements that make Ayn Rand’s writing so powerful. Concretes by themselves are meaningless, and cannot even be retained for long; abstractions by themselves are vague or empty. But concretes illuminated by an abstraction acquire meaning, and thereby permanence in our minds; and abstractions illustrated by concretes acquire specificity, reality, the power to convince. The result is that
both
aspects of the writing become important to the reader, who experiences at once the vividness of sensory perception and the clarity of a rational thought process.

Essential to Ayn Rand’s method is that the concretes really be concrete, i.e.,
perceptual.
The entity or attribute must be described as the reader would actually see it if he were present. Yet, at the same time, the description must pave the way for the abstraction. The description, therefore, must be highly selective; it must dispense with all premature commentary and all irrelevant data, however naturalistic. It must present those facts, and those only, that are essential if the reader is to apprehend the scene from the angle the author requires. This demands of the writing an extreme ingenuity and purposefulness. The author must continuously invent the telling detail, the fresh perspective, the eloquent juxtaposition, that will create in the reader the awareness of a perceptual reality—which contains an implicit meaning, the specific meaning intended by the author.

As a small instance: at one point, Miss Rand wishes to convey Vesta’s feeling of helplessness in Roark’s bed, her desperate need to confess her love to him and yet at the same time to hide it because of his aloofness. Miss Rand does not describe this conflict in any such terms, which are mere generalities. She makes the conflict real by a
perceptual
description, at once strikingly original and yet nothing more than a selective account of an ordinary physical fact: “He listened silently to her breathless voice whispering to him, when she could not stop it: ‘I love you, Howard . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .’ her lips pressed to his arm, to his shoulder, as if her mouth were telling it to his skin, and it was not from her nor for him.” One can
see
the mouth on the skin as a kind of movie close-up; and implicit in the sight, in this context, is the meaning, the attempt at concealment (“and it was not from her nor for him”).

A further requirement of Ayn Rand’s method is that she use language
exactly.

Miss Rand must name the precise data which lead to the abstraction, and the precise abstraction to which they lead. On either level, a mere approximation, or any touch of vagueness, will not do; such defaults would weaken or destroy the inner logic of the writing, and thereby its power and integrity. Miss Rand, therefore, is sensitive to the slightest shade of wording or connotation that might possibly be overgeneralized, unclear, or misleading; she is sensitive to any wording that might blur what she is seeking to capture. She wishes both the facts and the meaning to confront the reader cleanly, starkly, unmistakably. (Thus her scorn for those writers who equate artistry with ambiguity.)

When Roark first meets Vesta, for instance, he likes her—that is the fact—but “liking” by itself is not enough here. What is his exact feeling? “He liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.” Or, on the level of meaning: when Vesta feels Roark’s aloofness in bed, “it was as if the nights they shared gave her no rights.” The last two words are followed immediately by: “. . . not the right to the confidence of a friend, not the right to the consideration of an acquaintance, not even the right to the courtesy of a stranger passing her on the street.” Now we
know
what it means for her to have “no rights.”

The same use of language governs Ayn Rand’s dialogue. An admirer of her work once observed that her characters do not talk naturalistically—that is, the way people talk. They state the essence of what people
mean.
And they state it exactly. (This is true even of villains in her novels, who seek not to communicate, but to evade.) When Vesta feels ambivalence for Roark, as an example, there is a kind of surgical conscientiousness involved as she struggles to name it, to name the exact shade of her feeling, in all its complexity and contradiction.

Such painstaking, virtually scientific precision could by itself constitute an admirable literary style. But in Ayn Rand’s work it is integrated with what may seem to some to be an opposite, even contradictory feature: extravagant drama, vivid imagery, passionate evaluations (by the characters
and
the author)—in short, a pervasive
emotional
quality animating the writing. The emotional quality is not a contradiction; it is an essential attribute of the style, a consequence of the element of abstractions. A writer who identifies the conceptual meaning of the facts he conveys is able to judge and communicate their
value
significance. The mind that stops to ask about something, “
What
is it?” goes on to ask, “So what?” and to let us know the answer. A style describing concretes without reference to their abstract meaning would tend to emerge as dry or repressed (for example, the style of Sinclair Lewis or John O’Hara). A style featuring abstractions without reference to concretes would, if it tried to be evaluative, emerge as bombastic or feverish (for example, the style of Thomas Wolfe). In contrast to both types, Ayn Rand offers us a rare combination: the most scrupulous, subtly analyzed factuality, giving rise to the most violent, freewheeling emotionality. The first makes the second believable and worthy of respect; the second makes the first exciting.

Serious Romantic writers in the nineteenth century (there are none left now) stressed values in their work, and often achieved color, drama, passion. But they did it, usually, by retreating to a realm of remote history or of fantasy—that is, by abandoning actual, contemporary reality. Serious Naturalists of one or two generations ago stressed facts, and often achieved an impressively accurate reproduction of contemporary reality—but, usually, at the price of abandoning broad abstractions, universal meanings, value judgments. (Today’s writers generally abandon everything and achieve nothing.) By uniting the two essentials of human cognition, perception and conception, Ayn Rand’s writing (like her philosophy) is able to unite facts
and
values.

Ayn Rand described her literary orientation as Romantic Realism (see
The Romantic Manifesto
). The term is applicable on every level of her writing. For her, “romanticism” does not mean escape from life; nor does “realism” mean escape from values. The universe she creates in her novels is not a realm of impossible fantasy, but the world as it might be (the principle of Realism)—
and
as it ought to be (the principle of Romanticism). Her characters are not knights in armor or Martians in spaceships, but architects, businessmen, scientists, politicians—men of our era dealing with real, contemporary problems (Realism)—and she presents these characters not as helpless victims of society, but as heroes (or villains) shaped by their own choices and values (Romanticism).