Barbara Branden

The passion of Ayn Rand

Introduction

The life of Ayn Rand was the material of fiction. But if one attempted to write it as a novel, the result would be preposterously unbelievable. Everything about her life and her person was of an epic scale. Her seventy-seven years encompassed the outer limits of triumph and defeat, of exaltation and tragedy, of passionate love and intransigent hatred, of dedicated effort and despairing passivity. Her person encompassed the grandeur of the heroes of her novels, their iron determination, their vast powers of intellect and imagination, their impassioned pursuit of their goals, their worship of achievement, their courage, their pride, and their love of life — as well as the terrors, the self-doubts, the lack of emotional balance, the private agonies that are so alien to an Ayn Rand hero. Her virtues were larger than life — and so were her shortcomings.

Few figures in this century have been so admired and so savagely attacked. She is viewed as goddess and as malefactor, as a seminal genius and an ominously dangerous corrupter of the young, as the mightiest of voices for reason and the destroyer of traditional values, as the espouser of joy and the exponent of mindless greed, as the great defender of freedom and the introducer of malevolent values into the mainstream of American thought. It is all but impossible to find a neutral voice among the millions who have read her works; each reader takes an unequivocal stand for or against that which she represents. When her name is mentioned in any gathering, it is met with explosions of grateful, loving admiration or enraged disapproval. In the course of conducting more than two hundred interviews with people whose lives were touched by her or by her work, I have yet to encounter a single person who spoke of her with indifference.

Yet despite the furor her ideas have generated — despite the fact that they fill the pages of thirteen books, which, as of this writing, have sold more than twenty million copies — despite the fact that her philosophy has had a powerful and still-accelerating influence on the culture in which we live — little is known about the human being who was Ayn Rand. Still less is known about the woman who was Ayn Rand. Her public and professional activities took place on a lighted stage; her private life was lived backstage, curtained from view.

I first met Ayn Rand in 1950. At the age of forty-five, she had already achieved a singular renown as the author of The Fountainhead and was writing her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged — the work that was to skyrocket her to international fame and place her in the center of a hurricane of controversy. I was attending UCLA with my friend and later my husband, Nathaniel Branden. I was majoring in philosophy, he in psychology. We both had read The Fountainhead — and then We the Living and Anthem, Ayn Rand's two earlier novels — and we deeply admired and were influenced by her work. Learning that she was living in Southern California, Nathaniel wrote her a letter, asking philosophical questions about The Fountainhead and We the Living. Impressed with his questions, she arranged to meet with him; a week later, I joined them for a second meeting.

It was the beginning of an intimate friendship with Ayn and her husband, Frank O'Connor, lasting across nineteen years, during which we met with Ayn or spoke with her by telephone almost every day; for a number of years, we lived in the same New York apartment building. I was engaged in the passions and pains of Ayn's life, first as her student and later as a teacher of her philosophy. We became privy to each other's personal and professional lives, to each other's joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats. It was the beginning of the endless captivation of observing at close hand the unfolding of a great and growing literary and philosophical talent, of a mind of towering intellectual power, of a tormented, passionate, searching spirit. It was the beginning of years filled with wonder, with excitement, with exaltation — and with suffering and tragedy and heartbreak.

I shall not forget my first impression of Ayn Rand. When the door to her home opened that spring evening in 1950, I found myself facing the most astonishing human being I had ever encountered. It was the eyes. The eyes were dark, too large for the face, fringed with dark lashes, alive with an intensity of intelligence I had never imagined human eyes could hold. They seemed the eyes of a human being who was composed of the power of sight.

As the years passed, I was to observe all the many changes of expression of those incredible eyes. I saw them ferocious with concentration on a new idea or question that had not occurred to her before, or on a difficult passage in Atlas Shrugged, with a single-minded intensity that seemed as if it might set fire to the person or page she was addressing. I saw them cold, so icily, inhumanly cold that they froze one's heart and mind. I saw them radiant with the uninhibited delight of a child — I saw them menacing with anger at any hint of what she considered the irrational in human action — I saw them helpless and womanly when she gazed at her husband — I saw them bitter, resentful, and full of pain — I saw them glow with the special, earnest charm that was uniquely hers, and that no one who met her was immune to — I saw them pulled tight with loathing, wild with uncontrollable rage — I saw them kind, touchingly kind, tender with the desire to help and to protect — I saw the merciless, accusing eyes of the moralist, judging, condemning, unforgiving, the power of her reason becoming a whip to scourge the heretic — I saw them shyly solemn like a young girl when a boy, my husband, took her hand. But I never saw those eyes without the light of a vast, consuming intelligence, the light of a ruthless intellect that was at once cold and passionate; this was the core of her life, the motor of her soul.

There was something I never saw in Ayn Rand's eyes. They never held an inward look — a look of turning inside to learn one’s own spirit and consciousness. They gazed only and always outward. It was many years before I was to understand the absence of that inward look, and what it revealed. It was to require all the knowledge of all the years to understand it.

To this day, when I think of Ayn Rand, I see her eyes. They haunted me through nineteen years. Perhaps they haunt me still.

Nathaniel and I were twenty-five years younger than Ayn. But it was not unusual for her, then or later, to seek friends among men and women considerably younger than herself. It was in young people that she found the eager, actively questioning minds that she deeply cherished, minds like her own, which constantly sought new perspectives, new ideas, new ways of dealing with the world. Her contemporaries, she said, were too often closed to ideas they had not heard before, they did not care to be shaken from whatever uneasy mix of concepts had come to form their philosophy of life. And young people, still in the process of being formed and of selecting the values and concepts that would guide their lives, offered her something more, which she did not name and probably did not recognize. Ayn Rand was a woman with a powerful need for control — control of her own life, of her own destiny, and of the belief system of those she chose as her friends. The passionate admiration she elicited from the young, their vulnerability and need for intellectual guidance, made possible an intellectual and moral dominance less likely to occur with accomplished men and women of her own age.

As I look back on my friendship with Ayn Rand, it seems almost as if the whole of that period were my preparation for the writing of this biography. From the beginning of our relationship, I was fascinated by her personality; my fascination led me to study her, to struggle to understand her character and motivation, in precisely the form in which a biographer studies and struggles to understand his or her subject. The years of my association with Ayn Rand, the years of her work on Atlas Shrugged and of the dramatic consequences of its publication, were filled for her with titanic effort, with explosive conflict, with the growth of her moral and philosophical influence which can today be found in the highest reaches of academia, in the halls of government, in the conference rooms of giant corporations, in popular television series, and in quiet living rooms all over the world. They were the years in which her personal life was filled with a similarly explosive conflict, a conflict which led, ultimately, to haunting and destructive tragedy.

In the early sixties, I was given an opportunity to learn still more about her, to examine and study her life with a depth and scope that few biographers are fortunate enough to attain.

Not long after the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Nathaniel and I decided to write a book entitled Who Is Ayn Rand? It consisted of four essays; in three of them, Nathaniel analyzed the moral theories presented in Atlas Shrugged, the view of human psychology it embodied, and Ayn's literary method; my own contribution was a short biographical sketch of Ayn. Who Is Ayn Rand? was published by Random House in 1962.

In preparation for the biographical sketch, Ayn agreed that I might interview her and tape our conversations. We met nineteen times, on each occasion for a minimum of two hours, while she spoke of her past life — her childhood and early womanhood in Russia, the nightmare of the Communist revolution and its consequences, her early years in America, her passionate professional struggle to succeed in a new world and with a new language, her meeting with Frank O'Connor and their courtship and marriage, her friends, her loves, her enemies, her disappointments, and her successes. She spoke not only of the events of her life, but also of the personal meaning of those events, how she felt and judged and what she learned and failed to learn from the days of her life. And when I had turned off the tape recorder and our formal interview was at an end, we often spent many hours in informal, less structured conversations about the material on the tapes. Had she had in mind only the sketch I wrote for Who Is Ayn Rand?, the interviews would have been much fewer in number and shorter in length. But, as Ayn made clear on one or two of the tapes, she thought that I might one day wish to write a full biography, and she spoke with a view to that possibility.

It was an intriguing and exciting experience — particularly so because Ayn rarely reminisced; she was always more interested in the future than in the past. And still more rarely, if she did speak of past events, did she speak of her emotional reaction to those events. Most especially, she did not speak of her years in Russia. In all my interviews with those who had known her, some intimately, I found not a single person with whom she had spoken at any length about the days of her childhood and young womanhood in Russia. Her memories of that period were associated in her mind with an excruciating and, to her, a humiliating pain; for Ayn Rand, pain was humiliation, it was not something to be discussed in casual conversation; the meaning of a human life was the joy one achieved, and suffering was only an irrelevant accident. There was a second, equally important cause of her silence about her early years: her commitment to the idea that human beings are in no sense inevitably the creatures of their environments; we do not have to be influenced or formed by the people and events around us, she believed; we are free to make choices, to evaluate, to come to our own conclusions. "Man," she wrote, "is a being of self-made soul." It would have seemed to her pointless to talk about her childhood with the implication that its events had something to do with the woman she became; parents, friends, the experiences of youth, all were irrelevant to the being whose spirit and values she had molded.

After 1968, when our relationship ended, I saw Ayn only once more before her death. But a number of close friends of mine remained her intimate friends, and, along with more casual acquaintances of Ayn, they were of invaluable assistance in filling in the gaps in my knowledge of those years, in giving me the sense that I was present even then, that I was continuing to observe the unfolding of her life as I had observed it for so long.

Over the years, many people have suggested that it was time for me to write Ayn Rand's biography. But I had come to believe that I would never do so, that I could not again immerse myself in those days of wonder and pain and again struggle to emerge from them whole. For some time after the ending of our relationship, I doubted that I had achieved the necessary objectivity to write about a woman and a life that had so powerfully affected and altered my own life.

But by 1981, I knew that I had made my peace with Ayn Rand and our years together. The pain had lost its keenness; the wonder had endured. And I was left with the awareness that a life and a work as remarkable as hers should be committed to paper, that whatever understanding of her I had gained should not end with me. Her story should be told; it, and the woman who lived it, were unique and important.

The writing of Ayn Rand's biography has been a matchless experience; it has been a four-year-long journey into the life and spirit of one of the most remarkable and complex individuals of our time. And because she affected me so deeply, because, for so long, my life was tied to hers, it has been, as well, a journey in self-discovery. Both journeys have enriched my life. For this, as for so many other things, I am grateful to Ayn Rand.

Those who worship Ayn Rand and those who damn her do her the same disservice: they make her unreal and they deny her humanity. I hope to show in her story that she was something infinitely more fascinating and infinitely more valuable than either goddess or sinner. She was a human being. She lived, she loved, she fought her battles, and she knew triumph and defeat. The scale was epic; the principle is inherent in human existence.

2 In the chapters that follow, quotations from Ayn Rand's works, speeches, and articles are specified as such, as are the reports from other people of statements she made to them. Where a source is not specified, the quotation is from my interview tapes, or from my own conversations with Ayn, or from her conversations with others at which I was present; I have edited such comments only for clarity.

PART I

PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Alice Rosenbaum was born in one of the most beautiful and cultured cities on earth — in the wake of one terrible carnage and amid the ominous warnings of a vaster and more savage carnage to come. It was a sophisticated, glittering world — that was slowly descending into hell.

On February 2, 1905, the day of Alice's birth, St. Petersburg sparkled in the rare winter sunshine. The city's broad, gracious avenues, its golden spires, onion-shaped church domes, and colored cupolas drank in the light. Elegant ladies, wrapped in sables and chattering to each other in French, returned from tea in horse-drawn troikas, and prepared to don formal gowns and their finest jewels for an evening at the Maryinsky Ballet. Along the Nevsky Prospect, in the city's restaurants, diners looked out over the wintry metallic gray of the Neva River to the Peter and Paul Fortress on the northern bank, where the bodies of former Czars lay in state; they talked of the works of Tolstoy and Maxim Gorki, of Pushkin and Turgenev and Dostoievsky, of the exhibit at the Hermitage where the paintings of Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Monet were hung, and of the city's smart new western nightclubs. Their glances slid past the troops of booted Cossacks thundering along the Nevsky on horseback, rifles on their backs and whips in their hands, seeking suspected revolutionaries. Revolution was sweeping the impoverished countryside as enraged and starving peasants, in the wake of the massacre of "Bloody Sunday," set fire to manor houses and crops.

By 1906, when Alice celebrated her first birthday, the revolution had been put down. Czar Nicholas had sold to the peasants, at low prices, more than four million acres of land, creating a new class in Russia: a class of peasant small landowners. He had transformed Russia from an autocracy to a semi-constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Duma; although the Duma had minimal power, the principle of constitutional monarchy was established. But the hatred engendered by the revolution continued to fester, as if awaiting it’s time to erupt in an explosion of devastating violence.

The Rosenbaum family lived in a large, comfortable apartment overlooking one of the great squares of St. Petersburg. Beneath the apartment, on the ground floor, was the chemist shop owned by Alice's father. Fronz Rosenbaum was of slightly more than medium height, stocky and dark-haired, a silent, grim-faced man of severe integrity. His greatest pride lay in the fact that he was a rarity in Russia: a self-made man. His family had been poor, he had struggled to support himself through university, and, when he began to achieve success as a chemist, he had supported six sisters and a brother when their time came to enter the university. He had not wanted to become a chemist, but there were few universities that Jews could attend, and even those had strict quotas; when there was an opening for a Jew in the department of chemistry, he had snatched at the opportunity to enter a profession. He was a serious man whom Alice never knew to have a close personal friend; in his leisure time, he enjoyed reading the works of social criticism which were becoming popular in Russia, works by writers who defended European civilization and the British political system as against the mysticism and political absolutism of Russia. Weekends, when relatives visited, he spent hours in solemn games of whist.

"He had firm convictions," Alice later was to say, "but you'd never know it, because he was mostly silent, and argued very little. Mother argued politics, but Father never did. He seemed uninterested in intellectual issues, but I sensed even as a child that he took ideas much more seriously than Mother. He once told me that what he would have wanted was to be a writer; he considered ideas and the spread of ideas the most important thing of all. It was only after the Communist revolution that he began to discuss political ideas with Mother and other adults, and it was then that I could form some idea of his moral code and convictions about life in general. His strongest issue was individualism; he was committed to reason, but unfortunately not by stated conviction; he was non-religious, although he never objected to Mother's religious ideas — he expressed the idea: 'Well, one never can tell.'

"I felt a friendly respect for him in childhood, not a strong affection, a dutiful 'official' affection — although probably even then I loved him more than I loved Mother. I liked him as a person, but in childhood I had very little to do with him. Children's education was totally in the hands of the mother in those days. Father never interfered, so he exercised no influence. It was when he and I began discussing ideas when I was fourteen, when we became political allies, that I felt a real love, a love that meant something."

Alice's mother was the opposite of her father. A graceful, pretty woman with sparkling, intense eyes, Anna Rosenbaum seemed always to be rushing about the apartment, giving orders to cook, maid, nurse, and governess; organizing, the formal banquets she loved to give; arranging for a pianist to entertain; reveling in the role of intellectual hostess among the lawyers, doctors, and other professional people who attended her lively parties. When she was not entertaining, she read the French literary magazines that were scattered about the apartment, or rushed off to lectures, to the theater, to the ballet.

All during Alice's childhood, her relationship with her mother had the quality of a pitched battle. "I disliked her quite a lot. We really didn't get along. She was my exact opposite, and I thought so in childhood, and now," said Alice years later. "She was by principle and basic style, by sense of life, extremely social. She was not really interested in ideas, she was much more interested in the social aspect. Our clashes in childhood were that I was antisocial, I was insufficiently interested in other children, I didn't play with them, I didn't have girlfriends; this was a nagging refrain always. She disapproved of me in every respect except one: she was proud of my intelligence and proud to show me off to the rest of the family."

Her father's seeming indifference to her and her mother's disapproval had to be sources of anguish to the child. Yet as an adult she always spoke as if they were simple facts of reality, of no emotional significance to her then or later. One can only conclude that a process of self-protective emotional repression — which was so clearly to characterize her adult years — was becoming deeply rooted even in early childhood.

In Alice's later writings, her contempt for the "social" was to be a constantly recurring theme. Lillian Rearden, the major woman villain in Atlas Shrugged, is characterized as someone whose emptiness of spirit is exemplified by her passion for social interaction, for parties, for being the center of a crowd of people. As she characterized Anna Rosenbaum in her discussions, so Ayn Rand characterized Lillian Rearden: the "intellectual hostess" fundamentally indifferent to the world of ideas. To the end of her life, for Alice to say of someone that he or she had a deep need for the company of other people was to dismiss that person as essentially without value.

An equal source of conflict with her mother was Alice's loathing of physical activity. Anna Rosenbaum believed that it was necessary, for health reasons, that children have fresh air every day, whatever the weather. St. Petersburg's winters were freezing; darkness fell early in the afternoon and lasted until the middle of the following morning, with icy winds and whirling snowstorms and a Neva hard as steel. Alice detested the long walks she was forced to take in the snow and sleet. When expensive gymnastic equipment was purchased for her, she refused to go near it. "Make movements, Alice," was her mother's constant angry refrain. The child — and the woman she was to become — never willingly "made movements;" she was sedentary to the point of endangering her health. Even in the final years of her life, when a minimum of physical activity was recommended to her for medical reasons, she angrily refused any form of exercise-as if still defying the mother who demanded that she engage in activities that bored her.

The Rosenbaum household was a chaotic one, alive with Anna’s comings and goings, with visiting friends, with relatives. An uncle and aunt of Alice’s lived in the same apartment building, and Alice’s first companion was little Nina, her cousin, a year and a half older than she. Alice's uncles appear to have been responsible for the family's partial protection from the anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia; one or more of them, an American cousin of Anna Rosenbaum's recalled, carried on the family tradition of being bootmaker to the army.

In the Rosenbaum home, religion had little meaning or place. Although Anna was religious — in what Alice was to term an "emotional-traditional way, not out of conviction, more out of devotion to the religion of her own mother" — she gave her children no religious training. The family perfunctorily observed one or two holy days a year — lighting candles and serving specified foods — then gradually gave up any formal observance. Alice had not enjoyed the observances, and did not miss them. Nor did she appear to recall ever hearing the problems of anti-Semitism, raging throughout Russia, discussed in her home — although her parents must have been painfully aware of pogroms and the frighteningly ubiquitous hatred of Jews. Alice was never to deny that she was Jewish; in later years, as a committed atheist, she would say "I was born Jewish;" but it had no significance to her, she had no emotional tie or sense of identification with Jews or things Jewish. 3

One of Alice's earliest memories was of her fascination with the great city in which she lived. Still a toddler, she sat on the windowsill of her apartment, her father beside her, looking out into the winter street at one of the first streetcars to appear in St. Petersburg. It was evening, and she gazed in wonderment at the blinking yellow and red lights of the streetcar, as her father explained their purpose. Perhaps this was the beginning of the love of technology, of what she later was to call the physical manifestations of the power of man's mind, that she would carry with her as a banner — as a proud crusade — throughout all the years of her life.

Her second memory was of fear. Walking with her nurse one day, she happened to notice a sheet of glass in a wooden crate, propped along a wall. Curious, Alice approached and touched the edge of the glass. The frightened nurse pulled her away; she mustn't touch it, glass was sharp, it could cut her, it was dangerous. For days afterward, the child worried that invisible particles of glass somehow had gotten into her skin and would seriously hurt her. She felt a sense of danger hanging somewhere over her head. This, too, as a number of her friends would observe, was a reaction she was to carry with her all of her life, unadmitted and unrecognized but with a singular motivational effect: the feeling that the physical world held neither safety nor ease for her. As the years passed, her sense of a fundamental alienation from the material existence she would exalt in her writings was to take on a quality of obsession.

By the time Alice was five, the family had grown to include two younger sisters, Natasha and Elena, called Nora. Alice's intellectual precocity, recognized by those around her even in earliest childhood, had turned her focus to the fascinating job of asking endless questions, of struggling to understand the objects and events around her; when she felt she understood the phenomenon of "babies," her sisters had nothing more to offer her. She much preferred the company of adults. She was often included in adult activities; Anna liked to have her precocious daughter present to be admired. At parties in her home, Alice was brought from the nursery to be hugged by her doting grandmother, Anna's mother, a dour martinet except with Alice, whom she adored as the first child of her best-loved daughter, and to be praised by the other adults for her large dark eyes that gazed with grave, questioning solemnity at the world around her.

Implicit in Alice's reminiscences about her childhood is the fact that, from her parents and from the other adults she encountered, love and admiration were purchased by the qualities of her mind. When her mother paraded her before the relatives, it was because Alice's bright lucidity inspired their admiration; when her father smiled at her during his visits to the nursery at the end of the day, it was because she had told him of some activity — a game she had invented, a picture in a children's book she had built a story around — that demonstrated the quickness of her mind. Alice learned well the lesson contained in the reactions she received. As a child, and as an adult, the first question she asked about anyone she met was: Is he intelligent? It was the first question — and, in a deeply personal way, the last. Intelligence was the quality she most admired, that she responded to with the greatest pleasure and respect. Her own remarkable intelligence created that reaction in part; a mind needs the stimulation of its equals. But she placed on intelligence what can only be termed a moral value; intelligence and virtue were to become inextricably linked in her mind and her emotions; where she saw no unusual intelligence — nor the capacity for dedicated productive work that she believed to be its consequence — she saw no value that meant anything to her in personal terms. One never heard her say of anyone, as a significant compliment: "He's generous," or "He's kind," or "He's thoughtful;" none of our common coinage of admiration — particularly the admiration we pay to qualities of character involving the treatment of other people — reached the place in her where Alice Rosenbaum's deepest values lived.

On a bright summer day, Alice discovered a passion that did reach into her most private spirit. Each summer, the Rosenbaums traveled to the Crimea for two months, renting a summer house and spending long lazy hours on the white beaches, wandering through the green, lush countryside and through a sunlit park. At a bandstand in the park, beneath a line of white birch trees, a military band played through the warm afternoons. One day, Alice pulled away from her governess to stop before the bandstand. The musicians were playing the first military marches she had ever heard. Then the little Russian girl listened, astonished and transfixed, to the sounds of "Yippy Yi Yippy Yi Yay" — then "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" — then the gay lilt of American and German light classics. Her small body began to move in time to the music. Thereafter, she demanded to be taken every afternoon to the bandstand in the park. In the terms of a six-year-old child, she appeared to sense that here, for the first time, was music that contained no pain, no tragedy, none of the gloom she associated with the Russian music she had heard in her home; it was music that bore no awareness that pain ever could exist. In later years, in America, she scoured record shops until she had collected most of the music she first had heard in a park in the Crimea, and begged Americans traveling to Europe to scour the record shops there. She called it her "tiddlywink" music.

Over the years, other pieces she heard and loved were added to her list, oddly disparate pieces such as "My Irish Molly," Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "C'mon Get Happy" Prokofiev's "March" from Love for Three Oranges, selections from the operettas of Lehar and Kalman. In the happiest moments of her life, her thoughts would go to that music, she would listen to it, her body would sway to its beat. It was her music, she felt. It was untouched by the world, untouched by alien values. It was a pure, unsullied hymn to joy.

As the child worshipped joy, so did the adult she would become. Forever after, she believed that pain and frustration and suffering were meaningless aberrations, never a normal part of life, never to be accepted as the inevitable nature of human existence — and never to be considered important. This would be a theme in her writings, and despite the pain and bitterness that her life would contain, it remained a theme she struggled to keep alive in her psychology, where it was often muted, sometimes almost indiscernible, sometimes battered into silence, but always present. In Atlas Shrugged, the first words Dagny Taggart, the novel's heroine, speaks to John Galt — the man she has waited all her life to meet — are: "We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" And Galt answers: "No, we never had to"

For a long time, Alice considered most classical music to be "sheer boredom." But when she heard the Overture and the Drinking Song from La Traviata and a few Chopin pieces, she understood that she could love — though never as much as her tiddlywink music — the works of serious composers. It was not until she lived in America that Alice first heard the music of Rachmaninoff; his Second Piano Concerto became her great love, and her standard of great music ever after.

When Alice spoke of the wonders of her tiddlywink music to her mother and other adult relatives, they were appalled that such a bright child — "Why?" and "Please explain" always on her lips — should have what they considered such uncultured tastes. It was the beginning of a series of value clashes with the people around her that was to mark the whole of her life. Years later, she remembered feeling — and still projected — an angry defiance in the face of their rejection of her musical choices. It was a defiance that was to characterize her attitude toward all of her values; "I know, but they don't. This is mine. It's not theirs."

"You're too violent, Alice," her mother constantly told the child. "Either you're tongue-tied, and won't talk to people at all, or — if they don't like something you like — you get angry and rude."

She claimed not to feel the same anger at personal rejection. One day, Anna Rosenbaum shouted at her daughters, "I never wanted children at all! I look after you because it's my duty to do so." Alice listened quietly, thinking: Why does she blame us for being born? We didn't ask for it. Even at this early age, Alice had learned not to expect appreciation except for her intellectual abilities; she had learned it so thoroughly that she appears not to have consciously experienced lack of appreciation as painful (although at a deeper level she must have suffered at a mother's rejection). Throughout Alice's life, she would expect, even demand, that her intellectual qualities be perceived and admired; she would react with pleasure, but with an authentic air of bewilderment, if any other aspect of her character or personality were understood or loved.

It was the following summer that Alice discovered a second passion — like her tiddlywink music, it remained in her mind as a discovery of major importance in her development — about which she felt, "This is mine. This is what I like." But this time, she did not discuss her newfound love with anyone; it seems clear that she was learning, painfully, to keep her deepest emotional reactions locked up inside herself, to view them as too personal, too private to be shared or made vulnerable to the rejection of others. This, too, was a trend that was to progressively characterize her life: as an adult, she spoke easily and in strongly emotional terms of whatever elicited her disapproval, her contempt, her anger; she spoke much more rarely — and then usually in objective and impersonal terms — of that which she most profoundly loved.

In the Crimean resort where the Rosenbaums vacationed, a smart, expensive hotel had recently been built, patronized mainly by foreign visitors. Occasionally, Anna took Alice to the hotel for lunch; from the dining room, they could see the tennis court — itself an unusual phenomenon in Russia. One day, gazing out at the court, Alice's attention was caught by a slender, graceful young girl racing effortlessly after a ball and decisively smashing it across the net. She was a twelve-year-old English visitor, Alice was told, named Daisy Gerhardi. Alice stared, fascinated, at this "sophisticated, foreign" figure — doing something no Russian girl was allowed to do, and doing it with consummate grace. When she was fifty-five years old, Alice glowed as she talked of Daisy. "It amazed me," she said. "It was a creature out of a different world, my idea of what a woman should be. She was a symbol of the independent woman from abroad. I felt what today I'd feel for Dagny Taggart. I only saw her that one summer, but the symbol was magnificent — I can still see her today, a very active, tall, long-legged girl in motion; I don't remember the face, only the long-legged agility, and black stockings worn with white tennis shoes. For years, her outfit seemed the most attractive I had ever seen... I didn't long to approach her or to get acquainted, I was content to admire her from afar." 4

Daisy served for Alice as a focus, a projection, an image that she was to use in her fiction — most particularly, she later said, in the creation of the heroine of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart, the beautiful woman who ran a great railroad. It was an image which she "held defiantly against everyone else. I didn't want others to share this value. I felt: This is my value, and anyone who shares it has to be extraordinary. I was extremely jealous — it was literal jealousy — of anyone who would pretend to like something I liked, if I didn't like that person. I had an almost anxious feeling about it, that it wasn't right. They have no right to admire it, they're unworthy of it."

The passionate concern with spiritual consistency — with a single-tracked purity of value-choices — was a significant element in alienating the small child from the people and the world around her. She felt, always, as she later said, a painful kind of anger — of contempt — for anyone who seemed to love what she loved, but also responded to what she considered boring and stupid; it was as if, through such a response, her love was desecrated. One may not light a candle before a god — and also before the figure of a clown.

The intelligence that boiled inside the child, that already had made her the center of attention in the adult world — "They all seemed to see something unusual in me," she reported — was creating its pressure to be fed. A year before she was to enter school, Alice had taught herself to read and write. By watching her parents and other adults reading, she grasped what the phenomenon consisted of; she asked them. to show her how to write her name in block letters, then to show her other words, so she could learn more letters. By that method, she quickly learned the alphabet, and soon was reading and writing with ease. She was allowed to take a special examination to determine whether she was ready for school; she won acceptance with ease.

Alice was delighted at the prospect of entering school; it would be something interesting, she felt, and she would learn new things that she wanted to know. But by the end of the first year, she was bored with all of her classes except arithmetic. Arithmetic was pure deduction, which all her life was to be a source of joy to her.

"The teacher would lecture straight from the textbook, and explain what was in it — which I already understood; she would not expand or elaborate, and I was at least three lessons ahead. I felt I could learn better and faster at home. I felt that the slow girls needed this, but I didn't." Her boredom soon became torture, and she longed to catch cold, longed for the school to close, for her teacher to be sick. She was happy when she: contracted measles and was quarantined at her grandmother's; there, she could do what she pleased, without rules, without assignments except of her own choosing.

Alice had been at school only a few days when a little girl approached her and said "Let's be girlfriends." The two children talked occasionally over the next few days, but within a week, her "friend" stopped approaching her. Alice felt regretful — she would have liked to have a friend — and "I felt I had failed her in something she wanted, I had no idea what." She never forgot her sudden awareness that she was different from the other girls, that she was too serious, too intense — and, at the same time, too shy — her realization that the other children got along with each other with an ease and understanding that she did not possess; she did not know why. Her continuing inability to form relationships with other children remained in her mind throughout childhood as a troubling question.

Anna Rosenbaum, recognizing that Alice’s lessons at school and at home — her Belgian governess was teaching her French and German — were not enough to occupy her, and that she had made no friends among her schoolmates, began subscribing to French children's magazines in the hope that they would interest the child. At first, Alice was bored with the stories, and the magazines accumulated unread. Alice later said, "My contempt for those stories was exactly the same, only more primitive, as what I would feel today about stories of the folks next door or naturalism."

Then a serial that fascinated her appeared in one of the magazines. It was about a heroic French detective in pursuit of a dangerous jewel thief. The detective overcame all obstacles in pursuit of his goal, and, in the end, was triumphant. This is interesting, Alice thought, because he's doing something important. It's more interesting than what's going on around me. His story is of a battle between good and evil. The battle between good and evil was to engage her ever after. It was to be the major element she sought in literature, it was to be the perspective from which she viewed the world. It would later draw her to such disparate literary figures as Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane; it would cause her to see the world as a giant battlefield in which her personal god and devil were locked in endless conflict. There was good in the world, and there was evil; one had to choose sides in the battle, one had — as writer and as human being — to enlist one's energies and one's life on the side of the good. As Alice matured, the detective and the jewel thief became opposing philosophical ideas, but the principle remained the same.

The idea of writing stories began to intrigue Alice; if others could do it, she could do it. The invention of stories soon became more absorbing than anything around her. She would sit in school, barricaded behind a book, scribbling furiously at her latest adventure, wanting only to be left alone, to write, to devise dangerous exploits for her characters.

Inventing stories and writing came to her with great ease: it was not work, it was a pure, ecstatic pleasure. She later said, in a tone of wistfulness, "The ease with which I wrote has remained to this day as a kind of Atlantis behind me, a lost Garden of Eden." Alice's style was precise and dry, she wrote with the naive directness of a child, in synopsis-like narrative. As it was to remain throughout her lifetime, her primary concern was with clarity, with expressing precisely what she wanted to say. Her greatest pleasure was inventing plots. And when the plot had been put into words, she discovered the heady feeling of living in the world of her own creation. She experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her. She was discovering, without yet the words to name it, the Aristotelian principle that the fiction writer creates the world "as it might be and ought to be."

It was during the summer of 1914 that she read a story which she recognized, then and later, as marking a crucial turning point in her life.

One quiet afternoon, Alice turned, as she often did, to her stacks of French magazines. Leafing through a boys' magazine of adventure stories, she stopped at one entitled "The Mysterious Valley," and began to read. Time stood still. Her life stood still, as if waiting for its purpose. Many years later, she talked about the story and her feeling for it.

"It was a love affair for me from the first installment. It was about English officers in India, kidnapped by an evil rajah, a monstrous old villain who is plotting to overthrow British rule. Two officers set out to avenge their friends, who they think are dead; then there follow a number of exciting adventures, until the men find the mysterious valley

where the hero and the other men are imprisoned in a cage in a temple; the rajah is going to kill them. But the hero, Cyrus — the kind of feeling I had for him, it still exists, it's in essence everything that I've ever felt for Roark, Galt, Nathan, Frank, or all my values. There's nothing that I can add in quality to any important love later on that wasn't contained in that. Except that being the first, the intensity was almost unbearable. I was a woman in love in a serious sense. The whole reality around me lost all meaning. If, before, I felt that I was imprisoned among dull people, now it was: They don't know, but I do — this is what's possible.

"One illustration that particularly impressed me was a picture of Cyrus standing with a sword. He was a perfect drawing of my present hero: tall, long-legged, with leggings but no jacket, just an open collar, his shirt torn in front, open very low, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and hair falling down over one eye. The appearance of my heroes, and what is my type of man, was completely taken from that illustration."

As Ayn Rand, in middle age, talked about Cyrus, the excitement of youth was in her voice and face, like a woman remembering her first love, never to be challenged, never again to be matched.

"Cyrus was a man of enormous audaciousness, defiant independence. All the other officers in the prison were afraid of the rajah and broken in spirit — except Cyrus. He stood holding on to the bars of the cage, hurling insults at the rajah. He was threatened with torture, with whipping, but he was completely defiant — he laughed!

"One of the rescuers climbed on the shoulders of an enormous idol in the temple, put two flashlights into the eyes of the idol and flashed their beams over the assemblage. The Indians were terror-stricken by the lights, and fled, abandoning the cages. Then began the difficulty of escaping the valley — all kinds of adventures, with secret corridors and a pool filled with crocodiles. At the last moment, they found that the rajah was holding a beautiful blond English girl prisoner; they rescued her, and escaped with her.

"In the last installment, they are climbing a steep ladder of metal rungs up the side of a cliff. Cyrus is carrying the girl on his shoulders. They had planted dynamite to go off just as the Indians were pursuing them — a dam broke, water covered the valley, and all the villains perished — and the hero married the girl."

During the years of my friendship with Ayn Rand, I was always impressed with the range and exactitude of her memory; I was never so much impressed as when, in 1982, I was able to locate "The Mysterious Valley." It was written by Maurice Champagne and published in France in 1914 after magazine serialization. I discovered that Ayn, who had recounted the story at considerable length, had recalled almost every detail, major and minor, of a work she had not read since she was nine years old.

"Cyrus was a personal inspiration," she explained, "a concrete of what one should be like, and what a man should be like. He was a man of action who was totally self-confident, and no one could stand in his way. No matter what the circumstances, he'd always find a solution. He helped me to concretize what I called 'my kind of man' — that expression, which I carried thereafter, began with that story. Intelligence, independence, courage. The heroic man."

In the child who was Alice Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand was being born. One can observe in her novels that the spirit of Cyrus became the spirit of all the fictional heroes she would create. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead was Cyrus, John Galt and Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged were Cyrus. The name "Kira," which she chose for the heroine of We the Living, is the Russian feminine version of "Cyrus." As an adult, she would translate Cyrus's courage and daring into intellectual terms; but the basic nature of "the heroic man" was never to alter. Alice Rosenbaum, age nine, was on fire with the human possibility she had seen; Ayn Rand was to hold that fire throughout her life, as the source of a literary career that burned into the consciousness of generations of men and women. It was not the stories in her novels, it was not the literary style, it was not the events that most accounted for the fame she was to achieve; it was the portrayal of the human potential: it was Cyrus.

Talking about her childhood discovery, Alice said: "Thereafter, for the next three years, Cyrus was my exclusive love. I felt totally out of the concerns or reality of anybody. What they were interested in didn't matter at all to me, because I knew something much higher. The story made the reality around me more bearable, because it made concrete the reality of what I valued. My feeling was "This is what I want out of life."'

It made the reality around her more bearable, but it increased her estrangement from other people, both adults and children. She saw what was possible, they did not; she cared with desperate passion about her new love, they neither grasped nor cared about it; it was hers, it was not theirs. "I was shocked to hear that one girl in my class was receiving the same magazine, a girl I never particularly liked. I felt real jealousy. I felt violently: she has no right to it."

That same summer of 1914, Alice spent what she always recalled as an idyllic period. With her family, she traveled abroad, first for a week in Vienna, then for six weeks in Switzerland. She later spoke of that period in Switzerland as the springboard for the description in Atlas Shrugged of the childhood of Francisco d'Anconia and Dagny Taggart. Their childhood is spent in the country; it is a period of inventive, purposeful, adventurous activity, in a world that seems always to be lit by a brilliant sun, a joyful childhood devoted to learning the skills that will make them creative adults. Alice’s own summer in Switzerland was spent climbing through the mountains — the first physical activity she had ever enjoyed — her skirt torn and her legs scratched, scaling difficult heights and searching for wild strawberries. Her companion was a young boy whom she met at a Swiss hotel. She chose him because he was intelligent and physically daring. "When we parted, I firmly intended to meet him again when I grew up... Sometimes, to this day, I wonder what happened to him."

That summer, with its pure, ecstatic sense of adventure, ended in terror. As the family was traveling from Switzerland to Paris, World War I began. The family hurried to London to find a ship which would take them across the North Sea, the only route to Russia left open. They returned to Russia across a sea treacherous with German mines; the ship that had left just before theirs hit a mine and exploded, as did the one that followed them. It was a journey filled with fear and the imminence of death. "The war marked the end of the world," she later remarked.

If one world ended for Alice, another had just begun. Walking along a London street with her governess, while the family awaited the ship that would take them home, Alice stopped before a theater featuring a musical revue; she stared in fascination at a poster that showed attractive, blond young women with pageboy haircuts. When she returned to her hotel room, she began inventing stories about the girls in the poster, telling their adventures to her spellbound sisters, who always demanded to hear her latest story. As she talked and happily invented, it suddenly occurred to her for the first time: "This is what people do — people become writers, and they spend their lives writing stories." She stopped to examine the thought, as a wondrous possibility.

Writing was not merely the most interesting activity of all — it could be a way of life. Her next thought was: This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a writer. The nine-year-old girl felt very solemn. Now I have a purpose, she told herself. I'm going to be a writer.

Arriving home in St. Petersburg, Alice turned to her new purpose with a blinding absorption. She wrote at home, in school, at night, whenever she was free of the demands of childhood and family and school, demands which she resented and despised more bitterly than ever. "The Mysterious Valley" was the symbol of what she wanted, the standard toward which she intended to grow. When she heard that two other girls wanted to be writers, she felt both a professional solidarity and a sense of rivalry. She was eager to learn what kind of stories they were writing, like — she later said — a businessman wanting to know what the competition is doing.

She was fully aware, she would always insist, that the motor moving her in devising her stories was, above all, the vision of the heroic she had found in Cyrus. She wanted to see heroes, so she invented characters who were daring, independent, courageous. She wanted life to be interesting, so she invented characters pursuing demanding goals and overcoming obstacles. She had been bored by the plot-less mood stories she had read, so she struggled to invent dramatic events that led to unexpected climaxes. She disliked the sentimental tragedy of Russian children's stories, and her own stories had a sunlit, benevolent quality and culminated in the success of her heroes.

Convinced she could not find in the life around her the heroism, the drama, the benevolence that she had found in Cyrus — it stood in her mind as "My kind of people don't exist around me, but they exist somewhere, and when I grow up and am on my own, I'll find them" — she turned increasingly to books for the emotional nourishment she required.

One of the stories she found remained in her memory because it seemed to sum up her attitude toward her present and her future. It was a child's biography of Catherine the Great, the little German princess who became an empress. Catherine was presented as an intelligent child, more active than the other children of her background. But she was seen by her parents and others around her "as something between a misfit and an ugly duckling, because she didn't behave like a conventional little princess." At a royal party given for children of the German nobility, a fortune-teller was summoned to tell them what their futures would be. The reigning favorite among the children was a very beautiful little princess, so beautiful that everyone was sure she would marry a great king and have a glorious life. No one had great expectations for Catherine; her parents were of the second rank, and she was not beautiful. The children stood around the fortune-teller. "Do you see a crown on her brow?" asked one of the adults, pointing to the beautiful little princess. "No," answered the fortune-teller — then suddenly she turned to Catherine and cried, "But here is a girl on whose forehead I see the mark of two crowns."

"This was my feeling as a child," said Alice many years later. "I thought that I was exactly like Catherine. I didn't fit into their schemes, and they didn't know that there was a mark on my forehead — and how much I wished that somebody would see it." Then Ayn Rand, aged fifty-five, remarked sadly, "You know something — I'm still waiting, to this day..."

3 In all of my conversations with Ayn Rand about her years in Russia, she never once mentioned to me — nor, to the best of my knowledge, to anyone else — any encounter she might have had with anti-Semitism. It is all but impossible that there were not such encounters. One can only assume that, as with the pain caused by the indifference of her parents, the pain and terror of anti-Semitism was ultimately blocked from her memory — in both cases, perhaps, because the memory would have carried with it an unacceptable feeling of humiliation.

4 In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot, published in 1931, the eminent British novelist William Gerhardi wrote about his family and about Daisy. Alice never learned that the girl she admired was her neighbor in St. Petersburg; the Gerhardis owned the largest cotton mill in Russia, situated on the Nevsky Prospect; the family had migrated to St. Petersburg from England two generations earlier. William Gerhardi, like his youngest sister Marguerite, called Daisy, was Russian-born. Daisy, "a courageous little girl," was William's favorite of his five siblings, and his playmate. One summer, he wrote, "we all went tennis mad" and the family spent the summer playing their favorite game at a seaside resort. Daisy suffered from a lung disease, and later was sent to school in Switzerland; when the family lost its mill and its wealth after the Bolshevik revolution, they left Russia. Daisy ultimately settled in Paris, where she married a Frenchman.

Chapter Two

The destiny that young Alice awaited seemed to recede farther into the future when the family returned to St. Petersburg in the late summer of 1914. A tragically unprepared Russia was at war with Germany and Austria. The front was eight hundred miles away, weapons were outdated and inadequate, the army command was disorganized and incompetent. By the end of the year, Russian losses were staggering, averaging more than three hundred thousand men a month. Their weapons nearly exhausted, soldiers were lighting with clubs, searching for rifles among the bodies of enemy soldiers; around their feet, instead of the shoes which had long ago disintegrated, they wrapped shreds of newspaper.

By the following summer, 1,400,000 men had been killed or wounded in the terrible cold and icy storms of the front, almost a million more were prisoners of war. St. Petersburg — now Petrograd, its Germanic name changed by the Czar to the more Slavic Petrograd — stirred uneasily and prayed for an ever-receding victory.

The events seething in the world outside her barely penetrated Alice’s consciousness in the years from 1914 to 1916. Children should not know about the terrible carnage in the world, her protective parents believed, and the war rarely was discussed in the presence of the Rosenbaum children; nor were they permitted to read newspapers. But perhaps more relevantly, her major focus continued to be on her writing. "I was writing in every spare moment. I felt I was preparing for the future, for the world I would enter when I grew up." Nothing could be allowed to distract her from the dedicated singleness of purpose that was to guide her life for more than forty years.

In school, Alice's class was beginning to read Russian classics. It was "torture" for Alice, it was "sheer official boredom!" The sole pleasure of her class assignments was that, in presenting her own views, she felt like a crusader. In her middle years, she smiled with affection as she spoke of the child who had felt, as she gravely presented her views: "'Thus spake little Alice'... I felt that I was now naming the truth, and I was proud that I was able to do it."

She came to believe that one of the reasons adults were so impressed with the young girl — and perhaps one of the reasons other children kept a careful distance — was the precocity of her articulateness. She could never recall a time when she had had difficulty expressing what she thought or, when necessary, defending it. None of her acquaintances of later years, who unanimously spoke with deep respect of the quality of her mind and her astonishing ability to present complex intellectual issues in terms intelligible to the least knowledgeable of her listeners, ever doubted the validity of her memory.

She was no more than ten years old, she would recall, when she concluded, in conscious terms, not only that the realm of ideas was important, but that it was her realm to deal with. One day, her mother showed her an article in a Petrograd newspaper — it did not involve politics and so was not forbidden — that Anna thought would be instructive for the young girl. It was an interview with a woman who was a specialist in education; she declared that the purpose of education was to provide children with their ideals. "If a child does not acquire ideals from school, he will never acquire them," the woman wrote. Alice felt a "violent, outraged anger," an anger so intense that she never forgot the episode. "At that age," she later said, "I had a value-world of my own, it mainly took the form of the stories I was writing, I felt that what 1 valued or wanted was superior to what others valued or wanted, and school bored me, especially in the value realm. I did not share their values. I did not learn my values from school. I thought 'Wait until I grow up and I'll show those people, and I'll denounce this particular woman. If I don't agree, it's my job to fight it.'" Ideas were important, fighting for the "right ideas" was important, and so was denouncing the "wrong ideas."

Mystified, Alice observed that the other girls in her class found it difficult to form opinions of what they were reading and observing and to articulate whatever opinions they did form. Several of them came to her to ask how she could do it so easily. Alice wondered, "with an edge of contempt," why anyone would find it difficult. One read, one observed, one thought, one arrived at conclusions, and one expressed them.

"Contempt" is a curiously adult reaction to find in a child. But when Ayn Rand spoke of her childhood, it is a term that she used again and again to describe her feelings toward most of the people around her. It is a term that — accompanied by a dismissive wave of her hand and a grimace of distaste — dotted her conversations throughout her adult years.

In childhood, and all of her life, it appears that her most intense scorn was reserved for women. That scorn was evident in her recollections of childhood, and, equally, it is the impression of many of the people who knew her in later years. Even before adolescence, she was what she later called "an anti-feminist. I regarded man as a superior value." In her writing during that period, what interested her was to create a conflict for a hero, a conflict aimed at the achievement of some serious purpose; in her stories, it was the man, not the woman, who represented the qualities of struggle and purpose. "I would not have said that it was improper for a woman, I would have been extremely indignant at any touch of the idea that woman's place is in the home or 'young ladies should be young ladies'... I was always in favor of tomboys, and of intellectual equality, but women as such didn't interest me."

The human qualities she cared about were, she believed, specifically masculine attributes; above all, purposefulness and strength. She would later insist that she had never regretted being a woman, but "it was hero worship from the first." And she would later define femininity as "hero worship." Man, she would say, is defined by his relationship to reality; woman — by her relationship to man. Far into old age, she would comment about herself proudly, "I'm a hero worshipper."

It was in the winter of 1916 that Alice's absorption in her inner life was interrupted. The world was beginning to knock loudly at her door, and she turned from reading and writing to admit it. For the first time, a keen interest in politics, which she was never to lose, began to take shape.

Petrograd was disintegrating. Almost a million troops had deserted the front; despairing, angry, and hungry, they headed for home, looting and destroying everything in their path and clogging the starving, inflation-ravaged cities, vainly looking for work. In towns, countrysides, and cities, the muttering against the Czar's conduct of the war grew loud. Petrograd's bread lines lengthened as the bitterly cold winter passed. Mass strikes, accompanied by outbreaks of violence, became daily occurrences. Crime became a plague, and no one was secure in his home. There was little heat in the city, and in their kitchens, people were burning furniture for fuel. The great city was dying, with only it’s terrible flailing agony as a sign of life. Throughout Petrograd — throughout Russia — the muttering began to grow to a furious bellow.

On the day of Alice's twelfth birthday, in February of 1917, the temperature stood at 35 degrees below zero. Demonstrators clogged the broad avenues of the city, shouting "Down with the monarchy!" Speakers stood at every street corner, handing out pamphlets and cursing the war. In the capital of a country that had a centuries-long heritage of revolution, an enraged population once more was moving to reclaim that heritage.

But this time, the revolution was virtually bloodless. Alice witnessed its beginning. She stood on the balcony of her apartment as a huge crowd gathered on the square below, shouting anti-Czarist slogans. A unit of the National Guard appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd screamed its defiance — the soldiers raised their rifles and Alice heard the first shots of the Russian Revolution. Unwillingly, the crowd scattered. But the next day, the protestors returned in still-greater numbers: the soldiers who had fired upon them had now joined the revolution. Throughout the city, exultant crowds took over the public buildings and the courts. Fires blazed in the streets like beacons of hope.

By the end of February, political power had passed to the Duma in a revolution created by Russian citizens — by workers, by students, by the middle class, and by sympathetic soldiers. The Czar abdicated; the immeasurable power of the Romanovs was no more. Alexander Kerensky, a young lawyer with bristling hair, a powerful voice, and a gift for bold and effective oratory, became Prime Minister.

There were wild celebrations in Petrograd. But amid the cheers and the celebrations, an ominous note was sounding. Bolshevik revolutionaries were returning to Petrograd from exile. Molotov returned, and Trotsky, and a young party member named Stalin. At the railroad station, Lenin was welcomed by cheering Bolshevik crowds; his return was made possible by Germany, eager to see a Bolshevik government that would sue for a separate peace. In The World Crisis, Winston Churchill was to write: "The German leaders turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia."

It is rare that history is so obliging as to present us with a morality play in the form of events that scream out their meaning — scream out the moral significance of the philosophical premises and world views responsible for those events. But for Alice Rosenbaum, the terrible years that lay ahead sometimes seemed precisely such a morality play.

"My concept of good and evil" she would later comment, "already in the process of being formed, saw its vindication everywhere" — as if reality had become the sort of fiction she later would create: a conflict, written larger than life, between two opposing views of man, two opposing views of human society, two opposing views of morality.

In the beginning, it seemed to Alice "that everybody of any political denomination was in favor of the February revolution. And everybody was against the Czar. What fascinated me was that it fit in with my own stage of development — it was the only time I was synchronized with history. It was almost like fiction taking place in reality. That was why I became so interested. I know that I romanticized it a great deal. It seemed the fight for freedom; since that's what they were talking about, I took it literally — by which 1 meant individualism: it's man who must be free."

Even at so early an age, Alice had concluded that she was opposed to "the government or society or any authorities imposing anything on anyone." With the February revolution, "I began to understand that politics was a moral issue." It was a perception she never was to lose or waver from: Is man free to choose his own purposes and set his own goals — or is he forced to accept and live by the goals and purposes of others? Freedom was the issue; in the realm of politics, it was the only issue, it was the heart and soul of her political philosophy.

Alexander Kerensky, thought Alice — hearing the adults discuss his ringing speeches in defense of liberty — was a man who stood for freedom and the individual. Kerensky became important to her as the first man outside of books and her own imagination whom she could admire. She listened eagerly to everything the adults said about him, and surreptitiously scanned the forbidden newspapers for further stories. She reported, "I could never be allowed to go to a political meeting where he spoke, so my great dream was to catch a glimpse of him somewhere. I never did." But Alice collected his photographs, and despite her mother's annoyance, she plastered her bedroom walls with them, as American girls thousands of miles and a generation away would plaster their walls with pictures of matinee idols.

"My infatuation with Kerensky had a very important influence on me in one respect" Alice later said. "I decided that I could never be in love with an ordinary man. I said to Mother, 'I'm in love with Kerensky.' The adults said it was an infatuation, not love — so I stopped telling them. I concluded that I am in love, it's not just infatuation. And since he was married, I would never marry — because I could never be in love with anyone but a hero. In my last years in high school, when girls began to go out on dates, I remember feeling a very superior contempt: How can they be interested in just ordinary boys? I have to have a hero. By then, I had given up the idea that I'd never marry, but one thing did remain, and remains to this day: I can never be in love with anybody but a hero."

Alice's first real-life hero was engaged in a desperate struggle to save his beleaguered land from its terrible economic crisis; and to keep the army fighting. But the task was impossible. The railroads were falling apart, supplies could not move to the front, the streets of the cities were filled with vagabonds and deserters, the factories were closing. By summer, society was on the verge of dissolution.

The Bolsheviks saw their opportunity. On October 10, Bolshevik troops swarmed across the Neva into Petrograd. Within a handful of blood-soaked days, the helpless city was theirs. The desperate government called a meeting in the Winter Palace. But as the ministers conferred — to the sound of shrapnel shells bursting in the air over the Peter and Paul Fortress — armored Bolshevik tanks were bursting onto the: grounds of the Winter Palace. Troops swarmed into the meeting room, and Kerensky's ministers were led out under arrest. Ten days after the Bolshevik revolution had begun, the hope of democracy was no more. The streets of Petrograd grew quiet, as the citizens huddled inside their homes in terror of what was to come.

Kerensky escaped the fate of his fellow ministers; during the siege of the Winter Palace, he was able to flee abroad. From then on, he roamed the world, writing, speaking, passionately recounting the story of the stillbirth of freedom in Russia. In one of the dramatic coincidences so typical of her life, Alice did, many years later, realize her childhood dream of "catching a glimpse" of Kerensky. In 1945, he attended a party in New York, given by political conservatives of her acquaintance — and Alice Rosenbaum was introduced to Alexander Kerensky. "But by then," Ayn Rand reported sadly, "I had no illusions about him. And he was worse that I would have expected. He was a real mediocrity."

As Alice had witnessed the first shots of the Kerensky revolution from her balcony, so she witnessed its last rites: the funeral procession of the delegates to the Constitutional Assembly who had been shot down by the Bolsheviks. It was an event that, even thirty-five years later, she spoke of with a shudder of horror. On the day of the funeral, in a gesture of defiance against the new regime, shops and schools closed; all of Petrograd swarmed into the streets to salute the fallen delegates. As the open coffins moved slowly beneath her window, to the sound of drum rolls and the thunder of cannons, the twelve-year-old girl looked down at the body of a beautiful young woman whose white face and black hair were vivid against a scarlet pillow.

In the city streets, as the weeks passed, the funeral was replaced by its cause: soldiers with bayonets and a hooligan manner — and by its effect: one's sense of being helplessly in the power of something brutal, savage, and mindless. The terror had begun.

"It will be the bloodiest revolution in history," Fronz Rosenbaum prophesied. During the revolutions first days, his frightened wife had begged him to consider fleeing the country. He had refused. He couldn't leave his business, he explained. Soon, there was no business to save.

On an afternoon that she remembered vividly all of her life, Alice stood in her father’s chemist shop, watching in bewilderment as Fronz Rosenbaum gathered together the few personal possessions he kept in the shop, and hurried to hide them in the apartment. As he was returning, armed soldiers burst into the shop, and stamped a red seal on the door. The shop was nationalized in the name of the people. Anna Rosenbaum rushed Alice back to the apartment, but not before she had seen the look on her father's face. "I felt the way he looked. His look was one of helpless, murderous frustration and indignation, but he could do absolutely nothing... It was a horrible silent spectacle of brutality and injustice. I thought: that's the principle of communism."

Along with all other private property, the banks were nationalized, and all safety deposit boxes were confiscated. An aunt of Alice's, who had kept her jewelry in a safety deposit box, wept bitterly over its loss. But Fronz Rosenbaum had uneasily foreseen what was to come, and had removed his funds and his wife's jewelry from the bank. After the seizure of his shop, the family eked out a bare, miserable survival on his savings.

The savings began to wither away; the state did not.

"Even at that age," Alice later said, "I could see what was wrong with communism. It meant living for the State. I realized they were saying that the illiterate and the poor had to be the rulers of the earth, because they were illiterate and poor." She was startled by the fact that while everyone complained bitterly about the physical hardships created by the Communists, no one seemed equally indignant about their ideology. When she first heard the Communist slogan — shrilled in the Bolsheviks' every speech and article and plastered on walls throughout the city — that man must live for the State, she knew that this was the horror at the root of all the other horrors taking place around her. This was the source of the bloodshed, the confiscations, the arrests in the night, the fear gripping the city she loved — of the beautiful young woman's dead face against a scarlet pillow. "I felt incredulous that such a statement could be uttered, and I felt a cold loathing for anyone who would accept it. I saw in that slogan the vision of Cyrus on a sacrificial altar, crucified in the name of mediocrity." She heard in it the statement that the purpose of her life was not her own to choose, that her life and her work must be given in selfless servitude to others — she saw the life of the men of intelligence, of ambition, of independence, the life of the men whose proud worshipper she had chosen to be, claimed as the property of the mob. "It was the demand for the sacrifice of the best among men, and for the enshrinement of the commonplace, that I saw as the unspeakable evil of communism."

Her answer to that slogan, in the form of a conscious conviction and of a passionate dedication — an answer that would become a major theme of all her future work — was that nothing could be higher or more important than an individual's right to his own life, that that was a right beyond the claim of any other individual or group or collective or state or the whole population of the globe.

The course of her life — which before had been moved forward by her vision of a god, the god that was Cyrus and what he represented — now was moved forward as well by a devil: the philosophy of sacrifice. Again, in the complex soul that was Alice Rosenbaum, Ayn Rand was being born.

Despite the accelerating terror and misery of the Bolshevik regime, Alice was not wholly absorbed with politics. In 1917 and 1918, two events occurred which she felt even then were as important for her future as the political nightmare around her.

The first event was a change in her method of thinking. She called her new method "thinking in principles." "I began to formulate reasons consciously," she later said. "I began to ask myself the why of the ideas I believed, and to integrate them. Before, I had very strong value judgments, but they were not very connected." She saw her new method as a major step toward the adulthood for which she longed. It was adults who formulated their ideas in conscious, conceptual terms, who constructed logical chains of why's, who identified the deepest reasons of their convictions, who asked themselves what they believed, and why they believed it. Now, she was learning to do it, too. Alice was following a path not unusual in highly intelligent children entering adolescence. But in a manner that always was to be an essential element in her psychology and method of intellectual functioning — a method that perhaps in part explains the range and controlled power of her mind — she stopped to try to name her path, to grasp it, to conceptualize it, and, most important, to put it under her conscious control. She began to keep a diary in which she wrote down not the events of her life, not the terror and suffering of the political upheaval, but the ideas she was thinking about and the stories she was planning to write. It was, she reported, a period of "wonderfully intense intellectual excitement."

The changes in her method of thinking affected her writing in a manner that was, at first, frightening to her. "Before, I don't remember the genesis of any of my stories — they would come to me as a whole, I would have the idea 'wouldn't it be interesting if... ?' — and I would have the whole story. I had no critical faculty, I would write whatever my subconscious had connected. But now, I began to project an idea in abstract terms. I began to be self-critical, and I gave myself the assignment of what sort of story I wanted it to be. I would have the abstract intention, and the characters, but no specific plot. No concrete climax. And when I tried to fill it in, I couldn't. I could not find the concretes. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I couldn't invent a story. It was a terrifying experience. My 'block' trouble started then, at the age of twelve. Thereafter, until I left Russia, I was writing themes down, I had lots of ideas either for plays or novels, I always got an idea that was part theme and part situations that would be clear, and never filled out the rest. Some were more filled out than others, some I left for future reference. I began to list themes and situations to write when I grew up. I knew I didn't yet have the knowledge to carry them out."

With the Bolshevik revolution, Alice's story themes became political. All of them concerned individualistic heroes, fighting against the Communists or against a king. "They were usually laid abroad, I never intended to write stories laid in Russia. Russia was too fiat, too commonplace... it's stupid, backward, mystical, and sentimental. But abroad, or in historical dramas — that is civilization, that is intellectual, rational people."

All of her life, Alice — despite her love for the gracious city of her birth — was to speak of Russia with loathing, a loathing, she reported, that she felt even before the Communist revolution. She saw Russia as a nation that glorified the tragic and the malevolent, glorified the very qualities that were the antithesis of what she wanted in her own life and what she wanted to create in her stories. "It was the antithesis of my tiddlywink music," she later recalled thinking. It was the antithesis of the joy that she held as her birthright and her goal. And as, over the years, she became more consciously and passionately anti-mystical and pro-reason, championing man's reasoning faculty as the source of any value life might hold and denouncing faith as anti-man and anti-life, what she would call "Russian mysticism" became the synonym for all that was dark and evil and dedicated to the destruction of human life. It was the West — England in her early years, when she knew little of America — that was her ideal. When, in college in Petrograd, she began to see American movies, her allegiance was transferred to all things she saw as "typically American." All her life, she was to respond to men and women who had an appearance and manner she believed to be "the best of the American type": the tall, blond, long-legged, emotionally reserved men and women who would typify the heroes of her novels. When the movie of The Fountainhead was made in 1948, she hoped, although she had no power of decision, that Gary Cooper would be chosen for the part of Howard Roark; his appearance was what she had visualized for her character; and she was delighted when he was chosen. In the 1970s, Farrah Fawcett — so archetypical an American girl, an American version of Daisy — became a favorite of hers, and her choice for the part of Dagny Taggart had Atlas Shrugged been filmed. Many people, even among her close friends, were incredulous that so intellectual a woman as Ayn Rand was fascinated by such nonintellectual types as Gary Cooper and Farrah Fawcett: they did not know Alice Rosenbaum, the little girl in love with the gaiety, the benevolence, the clean-limbed agility, the "non-Russian soul" of Americans. Frank O'Connor, the man she married and loved for more than fifty years, might, in appearance, have been a brother of Gary Cooper.

The second great event in Alice's life during the immediate post-revolutionary period was the discovery of a writer whose work profoundly influenced her future literary development: Victor Hugo. She was later to say that he was the single influence on her in all literature.

In her classes in school, Alice had been exposed to the great classics of Russian literature — which, predominantly, she hated. She later said, "In Russian literature, there was nothing that would answer to my particular taste. There are either the great naturalists like Turgenev and Chekhov and Tolstoy, or the romantics like Pushkin or some others, usually poets, who are always Byronic and malevolent. I loathed stories of tragic, hopeless romance, I was extremely contemptuous of love stories. I despised the idea of love as the main concern, even at twelve, and from then on more so."

While the Bolshevik revolution raged on the streets of Petrograd, Anna Rosenbaum, determined that Alice further improve her French, gave her Hugo's The Man Who Laughs. It was a thunderclap of light exploding in the dull grayness of her life. After reading it, she turned to Les Miserables, then to all the rest of Hugo's novels. "I was fascinated by Hugo's sense of life," she said many years later, still glowing from the radiance of the memory. "It was someone writing about something important. I felt that this is the kind of writer I would like to be, but I didn't know how long it would take. I knew I could not now dream of touching the way he wrote. I was aware of to what extent he was a giant literarily. I knew that The Man Who Laughs was not my kind of heroic story in adult terms that "The Mysterious Valley' was for me as a child. "The Mysterious Valley' was nearer to my sense of life than Hugo." But she had discovered, she felt, a world of unprecedented scope and grandeur, of magnificently ingenious plots, of inexhaustible imaginativeness, of an exalted sense of life — of man seen as a hero.

"Les Miserables was the big experience. Everything about it became important to me, holy; everything that reminded me of it was a souvenir of my love. It was my first view of how one should see life, wider than any concretes of the story. I didn't approve of the ideas about the poor and the disinherited, except that Hugo set them up in a way that I could sympathize with; they were the victims of government, of the aristocracy, or established authority. The personal inspiration for me was that I wanted to match the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness, and those eloquent dramatic touches."

In recounting her reaction to Hugo, Alice was defining what was to be her own literary approach: the heroic, larger-than-life scale of men and events; the invention of complex, ingenious plots; the drama and inner consistency of the stories; the creation of events that are at once startlingly unexpected and logically inevitable. She always insisted that she did not learn her literary approach from Huger — an approach she was later to term "Romantic Realism" — that it already had been contained, in embryo, in her stories — but that she found it eloquently realized and at its most heroic scale in Hugo. She found it in the form in which her mind, in childhood and always, required it: graspable, definable, able to be formulated and thereafter to be in her conscious control. Particularly in We the Living, her first novel, one can see the concrete, specific influence of Victor Hugo; as she continued to write and to grow, she found her own unique voice, but in the beginning she was a writer still reeling from the blinding vision of everything she wanted to achieve.

"I began to be conscious of style for the first time," she added. "I began to be aware that Hugo has a way of using language that makes the drama of the incidents; a synopsis of the same events wouldn't be as good. I saw the importance of style as a means to an end... I was not then, or now, in love with the mere beauty of writing; I judge it by its purpose. But before that, I thought it didn't matter how you wrote, it's what you say. I began to realize that what you say depends on how you say it. And I was aware of his integration of themes, ideas, and action. I was struggling to find actions for all my many themes, and could not, and he was doing it expertly. He served as an ideal inspiration — it can be done. I had no idea of how I could do it, just a patient determination — I have to discover it."

Among Hugo's characters, she found her favorite in Les Miserables. It was not Jean Valjean, the leading character, nor Marius, the younger hero. It was Enjolras, the young leader of the insurrectionists, who dies fighting on the barricades in one of the most exalted and powerful scenes in all of Hugo's novels. "All the other characters, like Jean Valjean and Marius, were presented as average men, however grandly presented. I fell in love with Enjolras. Enjolras is the man of exclusive, dedicated purpose, a man heroically dedicated to a one-track-mind purpose." In Enjolras, the austere, implacable rebel — whom Hugo described as "the marble lover of liberty," who "had but one passion, the right; but one thought, to remove all obstacles" — she saw the dedicated purposefulness and the love of rectitude that were to form her own concept of human greatness. Howard Roark, Henry Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt — they too are austere, implacable rebels, who have "but one passion, the right; but one thought, to remove all obstacles."

This, thought Alice Rosenbaum, is what matters — Hugo's novels and the figure of Enjolras. Not the dismal, tortured existence to which she and all those around her were condemned. This, she felt, is what one lives for — this sense of life and this view of man. This, she thought, is what I shall live for.

Nothing could have been more typical of Alice — and of Ayn Rand — than her passionate enthusiasm for the values she had found in Hugo. It was to be rare in her life that she would discover objects of her admiration; but when she did find them, she became their ardent, dedicated spokesman, both privately and publically, happy to talk glowingly for hours about the priceless qualities she saw in a man, an event, a work of art, an idea, an achievement. They became her spiritual fuel, moving her forward, as Hugo was her fuel in childhood.

Ecstatic from the intellectual fervor of her new interests, Alice, for the first time, longed to find someone with whom she could share her thoughts. "But there was no one. I was desperately alone." Aware that she was unable to approach people or to deal with them in terms they could accept — increasingly uncomfortable with the mixture of painful shyness and emotional violence that characterized her — Alice began to carefully observe one of the girls in her class. It was a girl whom she liked very much, one of the best students in the class, attractive, independent, self-confident, very popular with the other young girls without appearing to court popularity. "I felt that she had somewhat my attitude toward life," Alice later recalled, "but she handled people quite differently, in what way I could not define. I wanted to know what was the difference between us, and what the similarity." One day at school, Alice walked over to the girl and said — without context or explanation: "Would you tell me what is the most important thing in life to you?" The girl looked startled, but she thought for a moment and then answered quietly: "My mother."

"That killed this ideal for me thoroughly," Alice was to say indignantly. "It was the first most important event in my life socially which made me see that it's not significant why some people, who seem to be individualistic, get along with the crowd, and I don't. My emotional reaction was like an elevator crashing — enormous disappointment and contempt. I had thought that she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, she didn't mean anything as a person. It was really like a fallen idol. I felt the kind of contempt that made it unnecessary for me to continue. All I said to her was: 'Oh, I see."'

Nothing could have been more typical of Alice — and of Ayn Rand — than the response revealed in this proudly and sadly told story: the instantaneous judgment, the sweeping contempt for values that were not hers, for a love that was not hers, as well as the unquestioning assumption that she understood, at once, everything that needed to be understood about the meaning of the young girl's answer to her, the failure to ask any other questions, to consider the possibility of a legitimate context not known to her. It was, as she later said, an important event in her life socially. Perhaps it was a decisive event in shaping the direction of her human encounters. A process of alienation appears to have been sweeping through her life with ever-increasing force, to wreak its ever-increasing havoc on her future.

Alice's precocious, intensely theoretical intelligence would serve her superbly throughout her long life; it would lead her, in the area of philosophy, to ask the incisive and seminal questions about the nature of man, about morality, about metaphysics and epistemology, that others did not think to ask, and never to accept the vague and the approximate as an answer; in the realm of philosophical investigation, her patient devotion to finding the truth, however complex and however difficult, was the heart and core of her methodology. But her psychological nature — arrogant, demanding, dogmatically wedded to its first passionate perceptions — would make her, in the realm of human relationships, impatient with methodology, with the calm and painstaking pursuit of hidden truth. In the realm of philosophy, she would be aware of subtleties, of context, of meanings not apparent at first glance; in the realm of social dealings, there would be for her no subtleties, no context, no hidden meanings; there was only: this is mine or this is mediocre, evil, contemptible; there was only: This is like me — or this is valueless; there was only: I value — or I despise.

Since she was bored by the children she met, by her lessons, without friends except for her cousin Nina, indifferent to most of the activities and duties of childhood, it seems evident that it was only the richness and color of Alice's inner life, her writing, her reading, her newborn thoughts about the world, that absorbed and delighted the young girl. Her life was an inner life, as it would remain.

Alice did make one girlfriend, also a classmate, shortly after the February revolution. The girl was a sister of Vladimir Nabokov; her father was a cabinet minister in the Kerensky government. "She was very interested in politics, as was I, and this brought us together. It was a friendship based on conscious common interest. Earlier, when there were no specified common values, I was never able to be interested in anyone or to interest anyone. I was incapable of a personal, non-ideological friendship. As you know," she said smilingly in middle age, "I still am." The two girls discussed their ideas on the revolution — the Nabokov girl defended constitutional monarchy, but Alice believed in a republic, in the rule of law. They exchanged political pamphlets which were sold on the streets of Petrograd but which were forbidden by their parents; they read the pamphlets secretly, and discussed them. The friendship lasted only a short time. The girl's father, realizing that conditions were getting worse and that it was dangerous to remain, left Russia with his family at the end of the year. Alice never saw her friend again. 5

By the fall of 1918, the position of the Rosenbaum family, as ex-bourgeoisie, was becoming increasingly precarious. Their savings were running out, and there was little food or fuel in the city. No one could be sure whether or not he would eat the next day. A citizen accused of hoarding sour cream was lynched by his hungry fellow citizens. During a single month, there were more than fifteen thousand reported burglaries in Petrograd, more than nine thousand holdups of shops, and a hundred and fifty murders. Rumors were spreading through the appalled city about the brutal slaying of the Romanovs. The Czar, the Czarina, and all of their children had been shot by order of the Bolsheviks — then their dead bodies had been dismembered, then burned, then dissolved in sulfuric acid.

In the South and in the Ukraine, newly mobilized White armies were locked in civil war with the Communist Red armies; parts of the country, including sections of the Crimea, were in the hands of the Whites. Desperately seeking refuge from the growing Communist tyranny, Anna Rosenbaum decided that the family must leave Petrograd and journey to the Crimea. Travel permits were difficult to obtain, but with the appropriate bribery and with a doctor's certificate saying that the health of Nora, Alice's youngest sister — who twice had had pneumonia — required that she go south, the family obtained the documents permitting them to leave the shattered city they once had loved.

5 I corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir, in an effort to locate and talk to his aunt. I learned from him that his father had had two sisters, one of whom had died; the other one, whom he was kind enough to question for me, had no memory of Alice Rosenbaum; Alice's young friend must have been the deceased sister.

Chapter Three

In the fall of 1918, Alice and her family set out for what they hoped would be a haven in the Crimea.

As they rode to the train station, Alice could not avoid seeing the political posters that papered the city's buildings and back fences. The posters, crudely and roughly drawn, contained virulent characterizations of the regime's class enemies and expressions of class hatred — linked with exhortations for the people to brush their teeth and with denunciations of illiteracy. As an adult, recalling those posters, Alice shuddered with the same revulsion she had felt then as she spoke of the artists who had created the posters. With few exceptions, Russia's artists had flocked to join the Communist revolution; trains and riverboats over much of the country were splashed with their posters and their slogans, and in Petrograd an orchestra, its instruments consisting of factory steam whistles, played symphonies to the glory of the revolution. "It seemed to me a desecration that anyone sane could sanction communism, but it was almost physically sickening that artists — who are supposed to know and to express the highest possibilities of human existence — could give their talents to an ideology dedicated to the destruction of the best in man."

Because of the difficulty of travel in a country whose railroads were falling apart or were seized by deserting soldiers, and where roving bandits threatened the safety of passengers, the Rosenbaum family spent the winter months in the Ukraine. It was a tense, unhappy period, made bearable only by the news of White Army victories in the Crimea. In early spring, they headed south. When they reached the Crimean peninsula, they boarded a train which was to take them to their destination in a small, remote town.

On the evening of the second day, the train jerked to an unscheduled halt. The track ahead had been blown up, perhaps by Reds, perhaps by Whites, perhaps by bandits; no one knew. They knew only that they were stranded in the dark midst of an empty countryside, miles from Odessa, the nearest city, and that no one could guess when the train might again be able to move. Some of the passengers chose to remain in a nearby village; others, Alice's family among them, hired local peasants with horse-drawn carts to take them to Odessa. Alice threw her suitcase into an open cart and climbed behind the peasant driver to sit on the thin straw covering the wooden floor. The carts proceeded slowly, moving fearfully through uninhabited plains, bumping jerkily over the frozen ground. Suddenly, by the head of the horse drawing Alice's cart, a shot rang through the night — and an angry voice ordered: "Halt!" A group of armed, ragged men, wearing the uniforms of ex-soldiers, emerged from the darkness and commanded the terrified passengers to step down and hand over their money. If anyone tried to hide his money, the gang leader warned, he would be shot instantly. The passengers handed over their money, as the bandits quickly searched the wagons. Fronz gave his wallet to one of the bandits; it contained eight rubles; he had hidden several thousand rubles in the straw of his cart. The passengers were ordered to stand with their backs to the bandits. An elderly woman screamed out that they all would be shot, she wept and made the sign of the cross.

The possibility of death had never before been real to Alice; it was real now. Standing with the other passengers, her back to the bandits' guns, her body trembling under her rough sweater and old black skirt, the night stretching bleakly around her, she wondered if she would die. If it is the end — she thought — still, I have had something great in my life. I have had the image of Enjolras. If I'm going to be shot, I'll think of him at the last, I'll think of how he faced death. I want to die as well as he did. I want to be worthy of him. I want to die in my kind of world.

After what seemed an eternity of time, the passengers were ordered back into their carts, and allowed to continue their journey. It was early morning when they saw the buildings of Odessa in the distance.

When the family had settled in the Crimean town — in the tiny, damp house, with inadequate heating and tattered old furniture, which was all they could find in an area bursting with refugees from communism, and all they could afford — Fronz Rosenbaum opened a still tinier chemist shop. For a time, he eked out a meager living, and the family began to think that the future once again might hold some measure of hope. In the building that housed the precarious government, the Russian Imperial flag flew proudly, and the peeling walls held pictures of the dead Czar Nicholas.

Their hopes soon were dashed. During the next three years, the Crimea changed hands four times. "It was like living on a battlefield," Alice later recalled. "Finally, we began to starve. Food was unobtainable. At last, we ate only millet. Except that Mother insisted on obtaining raw onions, which she fried in linseed oil; scurvy had become a terrible problem and Mother had read that onions prevented it." It was in this period that Anna Rosenbaum's jewelry, carefully hoarded against disaster, began to trickle away, replaced by almost useless rubles. The jewelry was not missed; there were no ballets at which to wear it, no elegant gowns, no gay, carefree parties; there was only drudgery, and fear, and worn, patched garments growing shabbier month by month.

In the misery of the Crimean years, an event of a personal nature occurred which was a significant source of happiness to Alice: her stem, remote father became her "intellectual ally." One day, under the White regime, it was announced that a political lecture was to be held; the lecturer was a well-known anti-Communist. Despite their straitened financial circumstances, Fronz Rosenbaum decided to allow himself the rare luxury of attending the lecture. When Alice announced that she wanted to go with him, he was so amazed by an interest he did not know she possessed, that, despite his conviction that children should take no interest in politics, he allowed her to join him. Alice later recalled that the lecture was interesting — but the conversation with her father afterwards was fascinating. Alice learned, for the first time, the extent of the intellectual sympathy between them in the realm of politics; she had known that he was opposed to communism; she had not known that he shared her belief in individualism. She had known that he was a thoughtful man; she had not known that he took ideas with a profound, respectful seriousness. And, for the first time, he was speaking to her as an adult; her ideas were to be taken seriously.

Years later, when Alice described her new relationship with her father, there was a soft smile on her face and a faint tremor in her voice. It was evident that at last, to her great happiness, she was receiving the sanction, the approval, of the man who had given her so little throughout her childhood. It was evident that she loved him — and that it was the first time in the fifteen years of her life that she had loved and been loved in return. And it was evident that the terms of that love were the only ones she knew, the only ones she respected and could understand: a philosophical mutuality.

It was during the Crimean years that Alice's relationship with her two sisters became closer. "My sisters were growing up and beginning to have personalities of their own, and the age distance lessened... I really loved my youngest sister." In Alice's view, she and Nora shared important values: "We liked the same books, she was developing exactly in my direction, and she wanted to be an artist, a painter. Our personalities were the same, and she was very intelligent." In We the Living, Alice would create — in Irina, a minor character — one of the most sympathetic women in all of her writings, an aspiring artist of great charm and courage whom she acknowledged was inspired by her memory of her little sister Nora. It is not surprising that in the description of Irina's drawings, one finds the gay, impudent spirit of Alice's tiddlywink music.

Alice felt that she had nothing in common with Natasha, her middle sister. "I would not have picked her as a friend, it was only a family affection. She was my exact opposite: she was not intellectual, and she was very 'feminine' — when the family was in rags, she was interested in her personal appearance; she was more interested in young men than I was, she had girlfriends in school, which neither I nor my little sister ever had, she was much more conventional. But she was enormously efficient; for instance, she wanted to be a pianist, and she practiced eight to ten hours a day — driving everybody and herself crazy. She had a marvelous technique but very little expression; she was strictly a virtuoso pianist. You can see in what way that would be different from me.

Alice entered high school ill the Crimea. In these early years of communism, the school was not yet ideologically controlled, even under the Red regimes. The teachers were old-fashioned, pro-Czarist ladies, who endured the rise of communism with grim resignation. For the first time, Alice became a class leader intellectually. Because she came from the sophisticated North, "I was forgiven for my intelligence." In Petrograd, the grim, desperately earnest little girl had been an outcast at school, by mutual, silent consent. She had shared no extracurricular activities with her schoolmates, and had made no friends among them. But in the Crimea "there was a tacit recognition of my superiority. I made no personal friends, I had no girlfriends, but I was recognized as the 'brain of the class,' which surprised me." On the first day of high school, a classmate approached Alice to ask for her help with her algebra homework. Alice explained the assignment, and what had to be done. The girl said that she had been given a different answer by a classmate. Alice replied, "Well, she's wrong. This is the right answer." "But the girl who gave me a different answer is our best student," Alice's classmate answered. Alice replied, "How do you know that 1 won't be?" The story spread instantly through the school that Alice had announced she would be the best student in the school — which she became. "And my answer to the assignment was the right one."

Alice's method of learning, a method that had seemed to her self-evident, but which she was now grasping was not self-evident to others, was to understand. Despite her remarkable memory, memory never was the tool she employed for learning. Her method was deduction: to grasp the stated or unstated axioms underlying a conclusion, to grasp the steps of moving from axiom to conclusion, to grasp the logical implications of the conclusion.

One incident at school, she later said, "influenced my thinking for life. One girl, a very nice, conscientious dummy, came to me because she could not understand her lesson, it dealt with a complex geometric problem. I explained it very thoroughly, I showed her all the connections. I realized she could not fill in the connections herself — I had to show her every step. The girl said, astonished, 'Why don't the teachers explain this the way you do?' I concluded that you can reach people's intelligence if you know how to present things clearly. I knew better than the teacher how to present things, and it was only an issue of logical progression and clarity. It gave me an enormous confidence in the common man, in the power of intelligence — some people were not as fast as I was, they could not connect by themselves, but people can be taught if it's explained properly. I still have that premise."

Alice never rejected "that premise." Throughout her life, she often said that the simplest of men, the least educated, had the power to grasp complex ideas if they were led through the necessary logical steps. It was a view that gave her infinite patience with minds slower and less competent than hers, so long as she believed that the mind was honest and seeking. Some of her friends of later years have commented that they observed her discussing politics, art, even metaphysics, for hours on end, with people she considered "the common man" — with a fifteen-year-old high school student, with her housekeeper, with her gardener — speaking in simple but philosophically accurate terms until her position was fully understood. She believed that such people had a capacity for logic, for understanding, an intellectual integrity uncorrupted by what she contemptuously called "modern education;" her patience and respect for the uncorrupted "common man" made her superbly able, in her personal dealings and through her writings, to reach him.

An element of the powerful charisma of her personality in her adult years was precisely her remarkable gifts as a teacher, her talent for breaking down the most complex ideas into their easily graspable parts — as well as her obvious pleasure in the process of teaching. In speaking to people who knew her, one hears, again and again, "She explained ideas with a clarity and power that was overwhelming" — or, "I had never dreamed that abstract philosophical issues could be made so fascinating, so easy to grasp" — or, "I'd been indifferent to philosophy until she began discussing it with me, and then I saw how important it is, and how enormously interesting" — or, "She had a way of raising precisely the concepts that were most relevant to me, and of demonstrating the crucial role of philosophy in the living of one's life."

Throughout her high school days, Alice continued to be very vocal about ideas that were important to her. "I argued at the slightest provocation, whether people did or did not want to hear. I criticized myself for this. I was very aware they didn't really want to talk, and I was forcing the conversation. I knew it was wrong." Her passion for ideas, her conviction that they were of paramount importance, led Alice, all her life, to "force conversations." One might make the mildest of offhand comments — and suddenly find oneself engaged in an all-night philosophical conversation about the wider meaning and implications of one's comment.

Now an adolescent, Alice decided that it was time to learn about sex. The other girls were beginning to talk about boys and some of them were going out on dates; Alice was not invited on dates. She overheard girls whispering about sex, but she was not sufficiently friendly with any of her classmates to question them; and a Russian girl from a respectable family did not consult her parents about such issues. She had already decided that she would never have children. "It was for the same reason as today," she later explained. "I would not have time for it. I wanted to be a writer, that was the only thing I was interested in, and I knew that's a full-time job; children would require primary attention, they could not be neglected, and I would not want to have that responsibility — it would interfere with my career. A career has to take your full time." She began doggedly looking up words pertaining to sex in dictionaries in the school library, until she arrived at "an approximate understanding of the nature of sex."

One day, she overheard a girl explaining to an eager group that sexual desire is very different from spiritual love — that it is a desire unrelated to one's spiritual choices. In describing the: event many years later, Alice said: "I was as violently opposed to that idea then as I am today. I felt that if it is true that sex is only physical, then no proper man could experience it. There could be no such thing as a desire or an action which had nothing to do with your mind, and with what you value. I told the girl indignantly, 'If this is true, it's wrong and I'm against it.' The girl answered — as if talking about men were somehow sinful — that I didn't understand men or sex. I said, 'I don't know what kind of men you know. My kind of man would be a hero, and he would have no such emotions' I would project kissing or embracing or romance, and by introspection I knew it would be impossible for me to feel any such desire, to consider anything romantic, if it had nothing to do with the man's character. It couldn't be just good looks without mind. I knew I couldn't possibly experience it. I took life and values more seriously than anybody else, and a heroic man would be the same: he would take life and values as seriously as I. No intelligent man could tolerate a desire which had nothing to do with his understanding, and which is stronger than his mind. The theme in a lot of Russian novels of the chambermaid sort was about an irresistible passion that sweeps you off your feet against your judgment, particularly when it is a man or woman one despises. That, to me, was talking about another species. Not only would I not understand emotionally what it is like, but contempt would prevent me from even inquiring psychologically. It was a passion which is against your values that I despised. By fifteen, my sex theory was already formed."

The years of Alice's childhood continued to be unhappy for the most part. Childhood was an overture, she concluded, a preparation for the future, with no significance in itself. "Nothing existential gave me any great pleasure. And progressively, as my ideas developed, I had more and more a sense of loneliness. I felt a driving ambition, and in that sense it was pleasant, but I was enormously unhappy with my position at home; I did not like being a child, I did not like being attached to a family. I resented enormously the implication that anything to do with the family was binding on me — or anything to do with anybody — I had no obligation to unchosen values. Boredom was a cardinal emotion in relation to the events available to me. I didn't care about any of the immediate reality, there was nothing in it for me. My world was the future. Today, I would know that the difference between me and others was my romantic sense of life, my more heroic sense of life. My whole development was desiring and looking for things which are interesting,

versus the boredom of the routine or the conventional, looking for the unusual or purposeful. The heroic concept of man: that's what interested me."

Until now, when she had projected her longed-for future, Alice had assumed that she would write in the Russian language, but would live abroad most of the time. Her real home, she believed, was the European culture. She had not thought of living in the United States; it had seemed as distant and unreal as Mars. But in her last two years in the Crimea, she took classes in American history, and learned about the Declaration of Independence and the American system of government. "To me it was incredible. I saw America as the country of individualism, of strong men, of freedom and important purposes. I thought: 'This is the kind of government I approve of" The germ of a possibility was planted: perhaps she would visit the United States one day; perhaps it would become her home.

The subject she most enjoyed during her high school years, the one subject of which she never tired, was mathematics. "My mathematics teacher was delighted with me. When I graduated, he said, 'It will be a crime if you don't go into mathematics.' I said only, "That's not enough of a career.' I felt that it was too abstract, it had nothing to do with actual life. I loved it, but I didn't intend to be an engineer or to go into any applied profession, and to study mathematics as such seemed too ivory tower, too purposeless — and I would say so today." Mathematics, she thought, was a method. Like logic, it was an invaluable tool, but it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. She wanted an activity that, while drawing on her theoretical capacity, would unite theory and its practical application. That desire was an essential element in the continuing appeal that fiction held for her: fiction made possible the integration of wide abstract principles and their direct expression in and application to man's life. She wanted to define a moral ideal, to present her kind of man — and to project, through fiction, the living reality of that ideal. She wanted to project it, using as her tool the precise, unsentimental mind of a mathematician.

The course that Alice found most fascinating, next to mathematics, was logic. "The first syllogism made an enormous impression on me. It was like a light bulb going off in my mind. The syllogism was 'All cats have tails, this is a cat, therefore it has a tail.' My first reaction was: That's wrong; when people say, for instance, that all Frenchmen are no good, they don't really mean every one of them, it's just an expression. Then I grasped, as a revelation, that when you say 'all,' you must really mean 'all.' I was converted to consistency from then on. It made me conscious of the importance of precision, and to what extent you have to use words exactly. I felt an enormous admiration for the discipline of logic, and a faint guilt: They were right, this is how one should handle words and thoughts, and I was wrong. I told myself that I must never forget this." Consistency became a passion for Alice, and remained so throughout her life. Her proudest boast about the philosophical system she would later devise was that if one accepted any part of it, consistency required that one accept the total of it.

Alice continued to keep a diary of her ideas. One entry read, "Today, I decided to be an atheist." She later explained, "I had decided that the concept of God is degrading to men. Since they say God is perfect, and man can never be that perfect, then man is low and imperfect and there is something above him — which is wrong." Her second reason was that "no proof of the existence of God exists; the concept is an untenable invention." It was all decided in one day, she said. "Since the concept of God is rationally untenable and degrading to man, I'm against it. It was as simple as that. The essence of my present belief is there. It focused the issue of reason versus mysticism. I had the feeling that atheism was an integration of something that had been growing in me for a long time, not a sudden new thought. When I focused on the subject for the first time, the convictions were already there."

Alice never turned back from these convictions; she remained a lifelong atheist. She was not, she would often say, "a militant atheist;" the belief in God seemed to her so patently irrational that it did not deserve to be fought. It was not the concept of God that she would battle throughout her life; it was what she saw as its source, its wider meaning: the rejection of reason. It was to the battle for reason — the tool and the glory of the heroic man — that she would dedicate her life.

Although Alice would argue heatedly about any other issue, she stubbornly refused to engage in any argument about the validity of reason. It was not debatable. She would say only, "You're talking about faith. I haven't any — and it doesn't make sense to me." Man's mind — his reasoning faculty, his power to grasp logical connections — is his basic tool of survival, she would contend throughout her life; and mysticism, the anti-rational, the anti-logical, is the instrument of death.

As reason was an absolute not open to question, so was the value of intelligence. People who did not value intelligence as she did, she wrote in her diary, were "totally negligible. They were not anything human." She felt neither hatred nor anger in the presence of such people. She felt nothing.

Before this period, she had reacted as //"those who did not hold her values were wrong. Now it became a conscious conviction; her values were objective "because I could prove my case. Reason is on my side. I felt they were either stupid or dishonest if they disagreed with me. If they were my own age, they were stupid. I knew that many philosophers and writers had a view of life which was wrong, and I considered them vicious and dishonest." This is an estimate of those who disagreed with her ideas which remained a part of Alice's character to the end of her life; she would "allow" disagreement until a philosophical opponent had heard her case; after that, if agreement were not forthcoming, she was faced with "vicious dishonesty."

Classics of foreign literature were not taught in Crimean schools. But Alice liked only foreign works, so she haunted the town's small library for French books. She read Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. "I cried my eyes out," she reported. In her adult years in America, she often recommended it as one of the world's greatest literary works.

The only novel, apart from the works of Victor Hugo, to which she strongly responded was Quo Vadis? Petronius, the worldly "arbiter of elegance," was her favorite character; years later, writing about Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, she would describe him as "a modern Petronius."

She read — and intensely disliked — George Sand. "It was feminine, sentimental, romantic in a wishy-washy way; it was all love stories, studies of the relationship between men and women, which I considered totally unimportant subjects. I had felt almost rivalistic in advance, because I thought she was the most famous woman writer in the world; but. I felt nothing but contempt for her feminine preoccupation with romantic passions. Great romance is important, and all of my projected novels had great romances — but it is not the main concern. Love has to be part of a great cause, never the main focus for the man or for the woman."

The outside world continued to intrude harshly on Alice's world of school and reading and writing and the fascination of her own developing thoughts. Most of the time, she and her family were hungry, ragged, cold, and frightened of the regime that ruled them, whether it was Red or White. The news of Petrograd and of the countryside was increasingly bleak, as if to match the physical bleakness of their life. The workers were struggling to run the nationalized factories, mines, banks — and were failing. People were fleeing the unrest of the cities; Petrograd alone lost almost two-thirds of its population. The Whites, still fighting their doomed battle, were beginning to lose the civil war. And the peasants, maddened by hunger and the fear of an unknowable future, were slaughtering landowners, pillaging and burning. By 1920, a package of cigarettes cost a million rubles. In the frozen winter of that year, the water supply failed, and fuel for heating was almost nonexistent. Cholera raged through the nation; everywhere one saw people with shaved heads, in an attempt to defeat the germ-carrying lice. It was a year of civil war, of famine, of disease, of political repression.

Early in 1921, the Red government of the Crimea declared a "week of poverty." Soldiers went to every home in the town, and if anyone owned "too much," the excess was taken from him to be given to the town's poorer population. Some people were left with only the clothes on their backs. When the soldiers burst into the Rosenbaum home, they took the family's one priceless luxury, saved from Fronz Rosenbaum's chemist shop: a few bars of soap. During that week, the father of a girl in Alice's class — a former industrialist who had owned a small industry under the White regime — was arrested and shot; his body was found on the seashore. From the loot the soldiers had taken, each school class was sent a single used dress; the girls were to draw lots to determine which one of them would receive the tattered dress. "I can't tell you the horror I felt," Alice later said, "when my class received a dress that had belonged to the daughter of the murdered man. That poor girl just sat numbly at her desk, watching silently as her dress was presented to the group. None of the girls wanted it; they refused to draw lots. But one 'socially minded girl' declared that she wanted it, she had a right to it, she was poor and her clothes were ragged and she took it."

It was in the spring of this apocalyptic year that Alice graduated from high school. By the summer, with the family more desperate for food than ever before, Anna Rosenbaum was able to obtain work for Alice and herself, as teachers. Alice's job was to teach a class of illiterate Red Army soldiers to read and write. She went to her class, the first day, seething with rage and terror. But to her astonishment, she found the work interesting. She was delighted by the eagerness and earnestness with which these rude men struggled to learn. "They treated me, as a teacher, with awed respect, and I felt safe among them." One of the men, a peasant, made constant lists, in the block letters which were the only writing he had painfully learned, of the name of each science he heard mentioned; then he would ask Alice to explain what the science consisted of. A greater delight for Alice than teaching was that she was able to take home the first money she had ever earned.

That spring and summer, the Crimea was again under the occupation of the Red Army. But this time the Whites had been driven back permanently. The civil war was over. Russia lay crushed under the Bolshevik heel, helpless, angry, and hopeless. Wearily, Fronz Rosenbaum decided that the family should return to Petrograd. Before the final Red occupation of the Crimea, many people had escaped Russia; Anna Rosenbaum had begged her husband to allow the family to follow the exiles across the Black Sea. "Father's greatest mistake was that he didn't want to go," Alice later said. "He still hoped that communism would not last. He thought that Europe and the world at large would not allow it to last, and he would get his property — his business and his building — back."

The family had gone South to wait for a change in the government. Now, there was nothing left to wait for. The final blow in a three-year-period that had consisted of nothing but blows was that White Army rubles — which were all that the Rosenbaums' possessed — were declared invalid. They had become pieces of paper to be disposed of.

The Rosenbaums set out on the return journey to Petrograd. Before they left, Alice carefully burned the diary containing her philosophical ideas and plans for stories; she knew that it could mean imprisonment at best if such heretical views were discovered in Communist Petrograd.

The sixteen-year-old girl who boarded the train for the journey was not yet an adult, but she was no longer a child. In the midst of the terrors of civil war, she had thought about the supreme importance of the human mind; waiting wearily in ever-growing queues for ever-diminishing rations of food, she had struggled to grasp the meaning of good and evil; trudging to school through mud puddles against a piercing Crimean wind, wearing thin, patched shoes and her mother’s cut-down summer coat, she had formulated her concept of individualism. The essence of her value-system and her character were formed. She felt that she was now an adult. That she was to be a writer was no longer a decision for an indefinite future; it had become real as an immediate, practical issue.

During the journey, the family had to change trains in Moscow, and wait there for a few hours. It was Alice's first sight of Moscow, the first time she had seen a large city since leaving Petrograd when she was thirteen years old. She stood on a square by the railroad station, gazing at the vast city. "It suddenly struck me how enormous it is, and how many people, and it's just one city. I had a concrete sense of how large the world is, there were so many large cities, and I had to address all of them, all those numbers had to hear of me and of what I was going to say. It was a case of suddenly the nature of my ambition being fully concrete and specific — and universal. The feeling was marvelously solemn. It was a moment of dedication, of doors opening."

Chapter Four

The first doors that opened for Alice were the doors of Petrograd. After a train journey that should have taken three days but had required rocking across Russia's devastated plains for three weeks, the exhausted Rosenbaum family alighted at the Petrograd station. "The first thing we saw," Alice would recall, "were huge red signs on the station's bare plaster walls. They said, LONG LIVE THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT! Other signs said, BEWARE OF CHOLERA! DO NOT DRINK RAW WATER! A gold hammer and sickle hung over the station door, beside a picture of a giant red louse bearing the words: LICE SPREAD DISEASE! The station reeked of carbolic acid; diseases were pouring into the city on every train, and buildings had to be disinfected against them."

When they left the station, Alice saw familiar streets with unfamiliar rows of abandoned shops, their glass panes shattered by the revolutions bullets. In front of a shop bearing the sign PROVISION CENTER, a line of ragged, emaciated people stretched around the block. An old woman stood on a street corner, holding a tray of saccharine and timidly offering it for sale to the passersby; she wore a tattered coat that once had been expensive, but now hung limply over her gaunt, stooped frame. Along Nevsky Prospect emblazoned with red banners were a few tiny private shops, opened as a result of the New Economic Policy; their signs were made of strips of cotton, which waved hopefully in the wind.

By part miracle, part bribery, the family was able to obtain an apartment — in the building Fronz Rosenbaum had once owned. To reach the apartment, they walked up four flights of stone stairs to three tiny rooms and a minuscule kitchen. Grim, silent days were spent hunting for furniture they could afford; when they had found it, the apartment was complete: it contained a few chairs with missing legs, a rusty samovar, two beds, heavy tin cutlery, and the scarred old grand piano that Anna Rosenbaum had managed to procure from the people who lived in their former home and who had no use for so frivolous a luxury.

The apartment had neither water nor electricity; they carried water up the four flights of stairs in iron pails. To light the dark evenings, a wick floated in a saucer of linseed oil; it cast its flickering shadow against an uncurtained window.

They soon joined the long lines at the government stores, where they roasted in summer and froze in winter. One purchased whatever was offered: dry herring, or lentils, or millet. Anna Rosenbaum chopped acorns for coffee, and cooked their food in lard. Breakfast was millet, lunch was millet, dinner was lentils and dried fish — when they were fortunate enough to get dried fish.

At night, few people dared to leave their homes; crime was rampant and no one was safe in the streets. They were no safer in their homes: the GPU made constant night arrests of "anti-Soviet conspirators," and Petrograd joked bitterly that soon there would be no one left to conspire. Private enterprises, opened under the NEP, kept failing; only a few well-dressed men and women were ever seen to enter them; their goods were priced at more than ten times that of the government cooperatives. But in the poverty and suffering of the city, some men were successful; Alice saw them emerging from limousines, wearing fur coats, escorting their jeweled wives. They sat in the front rows of theaters, they went to the new confectioners to buy cakes, they hired taxis. They were the speculators, who smuggled in food from the countryside, to be sold at huge prices. Disdainfully, Petrogradians called the speculators "Nep Men" — and stared at them with a mixture of envy and rage.

In the fall of the year, Alice entered the University of Petrograd, which was free to all students. (When Lenin died in 1924, its name was changed to the University of Leningrad, as the city's name was changed to Leningrad.) She had decided to major in history. Her writing was to deal with broad social issues, and history would give her the background she needed. A major in literature held no appeal to her. "I didn't want to study, as examples, writers who bored me and whom I despised." Nor did philosophy interest her as a primary focus; she felt that it was removed from life, and "I was convinced a lot of it would be mystical chaos."

Fronz Rosenbaum, who rarely interfered with decisions his wife had sanctioned, raised strong objections to Alice's choice of a major. She must not study something as theoretical as history, he told her. She must have a profession, such as medicine or engineering. "The most important thing in life," he said, "is financial independence. Especially in Russia today." In the face of her father's intense disapproval, Alice hesitated. How can I know that I have a talent for writing? she asked herself. How do I know I will succeed? She decided to reread the chapters of a novel she had begun in the Crimea. If she saw in those chapters a significant talent, she would study history. If not, she would consider, not medicine, which she loathed, but engineering. Typically, it did not enter her mind to submit her work to any recognized literary authority; she trusted her own objectivity; she was the only authority on her own work, then or in the future. It was a policy which, whatever its drawbacks, would keep her moving through years of literary rejection.

She reread the chapters. She told her father she was going to the university to study history. Fronz Rosenbaum — who knew the strength of his eldest daughter's will when she had made a decision — sighed in resignation and said nothing more.

No streetcars were running in the city. Each day, Alice walked three miles to school and three miles back, wearing old, torn summer shoes. When the teeth-chattering snows began, she put on a thin winter coat. At school, she sat with the other students in drafty, unheated auditoriums, her mittened hands clasped around her body. She came home to eat a skimpy dinner and to study by the shimmering light of the wick that was the apartment's only illumination.

Although the Soviet Government had not yet established total ideological control over Russia's universities, certain "Soviet subjects" were required of all students. One of them was historical materialism. Students were required to learn, from an official textbook presented with the reverence that religion gives its Bible, the history of the Communist philosophy. The study began with Plato, whom the regime claimed as the forerunner of historical materialism, then went to Hegel, then to Marx. For the rest of her life, Alice knew that she understood the theory of dialectical materialism — and had on her body and spirit the scars of its practice — as few Americans ever would; she did not bear with equanimity the remarks of anyone who ventured to tell her "what communism really was all about."

Despite her doubts about the value of formal philosophy, she chose as an elective a course on the history of ancient philosophy. The course was taught by Professor N. O. Losky, a distinguished international authority on Plato. To her surprise, the course turned out to be her favorite. She was profoundly impressed by Aristotle's definition of the laws of logic, and rejected completely "the mysticism and collectivism" of Plato. In subsequent years in America, she would delve deeply into the works of Aristotle; her own philosophical system was to be powerfully influenced by him; he was the only figure in the history of philosophy to whom she acknowledged a significant intellectual debt.

Professor Losky was a stern, exacting man, contemptuous of all students, particularly of women. It was said that he failed most students the first time they took his examination, and that he was especially hard on women. In the spring, his students went to his home for their oral examination; a long line of them stood outside his study, nervously awaiting their turn. Alice hoped that she would be questioned on Aristotle. But when she entered his study, he questioned her only about Plato. She had studied carefully, and she answered easily and precisely. After a while, although she had not stated any estimate, Professor Losky said sardonically: "You don't agree with Plato, do you?" "No, I don't," she answered. "Tell me why," he demanded. She replied, "My philosophical views are not part of the history of philosophy yet. But they will be." "Give me your examination book," he ordered. He wrote in the book and handed it back to her. "Next student," he said. He had written: Perfect.

In 1921, it still was possible for university students vocally to oppose communism. The students at the University of Petrograd were divided into two camps: the larger faction was the anti-Communists, who defiantly wore the green student caps of the old days; the Communists wore red kerchiefs and military leather jackets. At a meeting to elect the student council, representatives of each side were passionately outspoken. The young Communists talked of service to the proletariat, and of sacrificing one's selfish interests to the good of the state. Alice listened eagerly — as a freshman, she had no right to speak — when the students in green caps spoke about political repression, and hunger, and tyranny. In We the Living, Alice would write sadly about the anti-Communist students: "They were raising their voices for the first time, while the country around them had long since spoken its last." One young man particularly impressed Alice, because he made a violently anti-Soviet speech. The students elected a council composed overwhelmingly of anti-Communists.

Because of the young orator's arrogant outspokenness, Alice felt "the first stirrings of a romantic interest." She did not speak to him, she felt she was too young to interest him, but she stared at him in fascination whenever she saw him in the halls of the university.

By the end of that school year, there were no more anti-Communist speeches on campus, and there were no more anti-Communists on the student council. The purge of students had begun. Alice never forgot the shock of the day she arrived at school to discover that the arrogant young man had been arrested in the night, and was to be sent to the slow, terrible death of Siberia. She never saw or heard of him again. That night, she lay awake, slow, heavy tears coursing down her cheeks. And she lay awake with terror pounding in her chest, expecting at any moment to hear soldiers' fists pounding on the door: in a rage of revulsion, she had shouted at a Communist student that he and his comrades ultimately would hang from the lamp posts of the city.

Because of the dire shortage of medicine among the population — people were collapsing on the streets from malnutrition and disease — the government grudgingly allowed a few private chemist shops to open and to do what the government shops could not. Former owners of chemist shops banded together, since no one was permitted to own a shop individually. With five other men, Fronz Rosenbaum opened a small shop, and was able to run it for almost a year. This was the only period during which the family had some relief from their grinding poverty; for a while, there was food on the table, and a few necessary articles of clothing were bought. But as soon as the new shops began doing well, the government abruptly nationalized them; that had been the purpose of the New Economic Policy: to allow former bourgeoisie to work long enough to present the regime with businesses worth looting. Fronz Rosenbaum, again without work and with no source of income, grimly refused to seek a job as Soviet employee. "I won't work for them," he told the family in a rare burst of fury. "Not now and not ever. Not if we all starve." The family listened in silence. Alice knew — as they all knew — that they might starve; but she would later speak of the sudden stab of admiration she had felt, the fresh love for her tormented father.

With Franz not working, growing more silent, more gaunt, more withdrawn as each day passed, Anna Rosenbaum became the main support of the family. Against her husband's passionate disapproval, and with her customary resilience, she found work teaching languages in a high school. They were going to eat, she told her family, if she had to work for the devil himself; besides, weren't the Communists bringing about interesting innovations in the schools? Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad, after all. Anna's salary, for long, wearying hours of work, was tiny, and Alice was able to contribute only the few ration cards she received as a university student, cards that did not allow enough food even for one person.

"That was the real time of starvation, those years," Alice later grimly recalled. One evening, after a dinner consisting of a handful of dried peas, she felt her legs sagging under her. She sank to the floor, too weakened by hunger and fright to stand. A small portion of peas was being saved for Fronz's arrival home. "May I have... just one of Father's peas?" Alice asked. Her mother handed her a single pea, on her face the most terrible anguish Alice had ever seen in a human face.

As Alice spoke of those years, it was clear that the worst of her suffering was not the hunger. It was the terrible sordidness of life — the colorlessness of a world where men dreamed only of obtaining half a pound of butter through a doctor's prescription — where they talked only of what government cooperative had stocked millet that was not rancid — where men's souls grew shabbier and pettier with each dreary year, as if to match their material existence. She could bear the hunger, Alice sometimes thought, a scream rising inside her; she could bear the rags and the cold and the threats of violence; but she did not know if she could bear the ugliness, the sense of hopelessness that was everywhere around her. As if to impose a final unendurable burden, epidemics of typhus swept the exhausted city. The lice which transmitted the disease became as terrifying as the Communists. Most people who caught typhus died, some of them falling to the streets, their bodies ignored by their fellow citizens who, in order to live, were becoming inured to the unspeakable suffering that surrounded them. The young girl who believed that joy is the meaning and purpose of human existence, rubbed carnation oil and kerosene into her hair as the only available protection against typhus. Streetcars were running again, but to take a streetcar was to risk one's life. Alice tried not to see the lice on the people she tried not to squeeze against. To the panic of hunger and the horror of disease, a persistent, gnawing fear of arrest was added; the Communist stranglehold continued to tighten, and no former bourgeois could be certain of living beyond the immediate moment.

Throughout Alice's university years, her reading of fiction continued. She read all of Schiller's plays, in French, and was passionately enthusiastic about them. "He is the only classical dramatist in whom I sensed an enormous hero worship," she later said.

As a student, Alice was required to read the complete works of Shakespeare, which she intensely disliked. "I was indignant at the tragedy and malevolence, but the malevolence was secondary. I disliked most precisely what his virtues are supposed to be: that he is a detached Olympian, who takes no sides. When we were taught in classes that Shakespeare holds up a mirror to human nature, that set me even more against him. He is a determinist, a nonvaluer, and I had no admiration for any of his characters. Caesar and Mark Antony are stock, cardboard characters, they are official bromides, they are what you are historically supposed to admire, but they are not alive; there is nothing individual about them. I refused to believe that Lear and Macbeth represent what man really is."

That same year, Alice discovered the novels of Dostoevsky. She admired his work, but for more narrowly literary and technical reasons than she had liked Schiller; her feeling was not a personal passion. "For a long time, I studied his plots carefully, to see how he integrated his plots to his ideas. I identified, in his work, what kind of events express what kind of theme, and why. He was very valuable for my subconscious integration concerning plot and theme."

The great philosophical discovery of those years was the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Alice learned about him when an older cousin said to her, grinning with a touch of malice, "Here is someone you should read, because he beat you to all your ideas." Curious, Alice began reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. It was, for her, an exciting, unexpected discovery of a spiritual ally, the first she had ever found on an adult level. Here was a writer "who felt as I did about man, who saw and wanted the heroic in man; here was a writer who believed that a man should have a great purpose, a purpose which is for his own sake, for his own happiness and his own selfish motives. Here was a writer who revered the heroic in man, who defended individualism and despised altruism."

Nietzsche's defense of psychological determinism troubled her. "By introspection, I was convinced that free will was a reality, that men were free to make choices." But so great was her joy at finding ideas with which she could agree, that she focused predominantly on those, and often reread Thus Spake Zarathustra. "The first book I bought myself in America was an English version of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and I underscored all my favorite sections."

Even in her first readings of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Alice was aware that Nietzsche was "equivocal about the issue of power. I assumed he really meant spiritual power, the conquest of nature, not power over others. He is very much like the Bible, he writes poetically, and you can take it as a metaphor or not; I took it metaphorically. I believed that the superior man could not be bothered enslaving others, that slavery is immoral, that to enslave his inferiors is an unworthy occupation for the heroic man." When she read further in Nietzsche, and discovered, in The Birth of Tragedy, that he was "statedly anti-reason," her early enthusiasm began to abate. "He said that reason is an inferior faculty, that drunken-orgy emotions were superior. That finished him as a spiritual ally."

It was toward the end of Alice's first year of college that she made a discovery that swept away her intellectual discoveries, her literary discoveries, even the sordid horror of life under communism — swept it away for enchanted hours at a time and gave her the living reality of the world she had to reach. There were two Soviet theaters in Petrograd — formerly Imperial theaters; one presented grand opera and ballet; the other, light operas and classical operettas. It was the light operas and operettas that drew Alice — like a giant magnet pulling her to an existence where the purpose of life was enjoyment. "The theater had four balconies, and the fourth was very cheap, and very hard to get. The box office opened for the week on Saturday at 10 A.M. I got up every Saturday at 5 A.M. to be there by 6, and I waited outside for three hours even in the Russian winters; at 9, they opened the lobby, and I could wait inside for the next hour. By 10, there were lines around the block for the: cheap seats. For two years, I was there Saturday every time, and I would be either first or second in line. When streetcars were reestablished, my parents had given me money for tickets to go to the university; I walked, so I could save the fare; it was the only way I could afford the cheap theater seats. The first operas I saw were Verdi — the whole spectacle was of a sort of glamorous medieval existence, the productions were of pre-revolutionary days, marvelous sets and costumes. To see that after coming in from the Soviet reality was worth anything. I began going at least three times a week.

"Then I discovered operettas — and they saved my life. They were the most marvelous benevolent-universe shot in the arm — the one positive fuel I could have. They kept my sense of life going. My favorites — I saw one eleven times, another eight times — were Millocher's The Beggar Student, Offenbach's Grand Duchess, Kalman's The Bayadere, and Lehar's The Song of the Lark. The Song of the Lark was presented in modern costume; the actors wore fashionable clothes in the latest foreign style; the men wore top hats; I remember one scene of a ball, and a huge window showing a lighted street of a foreign city. That was more important to me than Nietzsche and the whole university. You know my love for city lights, city streets, skyscrapers — it was all that category of value. That's what I expected from abroad.

"They were the symbol of living for your own pleasure and for enjoyment — not for duty or service or misery. They were everything that was non-Soviet. Yet I was very uninterested in things like the new nightclubs that had opened up — my cousin Nina would occasionally be taken by her boyfriends to a nightclub, and I didn't want to go. None of the physical or obvious trimmings of the operetta style interested me. Nina — she was on the surface the operetta type, but really very malevolent inside, and I was very solemn, grim, aggressive on the outside, always engaging people in serious philosophical discussions — once said to me: 'I feel inside the way you act — and you feel inside the way I act.' It was true. Inside I was enormously cheerful and happy. I was very contemptuous of any book or theory that would preach that life was only suffering." Suffering was the accidental, the unimportant; it was never to be taken seriously, never to blur one's vision of joy, never to become metaphysical.

Alice's conviction of the unimportance of suffering was to be put to still another test.

Occasionally, she attended a party given by one of her cousins or their girlfriends. Parties were rare in Soviet Russia. For small or large gatherings, guests were asked to bring whatever they could — a few slices of black bread, a log or two of wood. "One issue that was very painful to me, in the feminine, personal sense, was that I was in rags; most of my wardrobe was Mothers old dresses, remodeled for me. For parties, I had only one dress, made from an old embroidered summer coat of Mothers; I wore it for several years, until it was so shiny that the only thing to do was to turn it inside out and use the other side. The idea of having clothes belonged to abroad — or to another planet. It was a handicap because my idea on clothes was just like today — either I would be perfectly groomed or not at all, and the result was not at all. And it's not at all to this day. The girls were spending an enormous lot of time on very intelligent makeshifts, but I didn't like the in-between. To be semi-decently dressed took enormous time. Most parties were costume parties, because you could make funny costumes out of anything — we'd ransack old trunks of someone's mother and grandmother for remnants of material, and put together pieces of inappropriate materials that would last one evening. At the parties, someone would play the piano, and one could dance. People really tried to be gay, tried to have intelligent light conversation. I really loved the parties. My feeling for them was the same as for the foreign operettas: they were non-Soviet, they were for a selfish, private pleasure only."

It was a cold night in 1922. A group of young people sat huddled around a fireplace, struggling to keep warm and struggling still harder, in their makeshift finery, to be cheerful. Alice glanced up as a young man strode into the room. "I couldn't quite believe it. He didn't look real — he was so perfectly good-looking. It was my type of face, except that his hair was dark; he was very tall and thin, with light gray eyes and sharp features. It was a very intelligent face, very determined, clear-cut, aristocratic, self-confident. What I liked most was the arrogance and the haughty smile — the smile that said: 'Well, world, you have to admire me.'" Alice was introduced to the young man and learned that his name was Leo — an Americanized version of the Russian "Lev" — that he was a student of engineering, that he was three or four years older than she. "But nothing unusual happened, except that I couldn't stop staring at him."

It was not until several months later that they met again at another party. That evening, Leo paid particular attention to her, and spent most of his time talking with her. "I was astonished," she reported, as she always would be astonished by male attention. He asked if he might accompany her home. "I don't remember the conversation on the way home, we just talked, nothing romantic. But he had a manner of projecting that he's a man and you're a woman and he's aware of it. By the time I arrived home, I was madly and desperately in love."

From that evening on, Alice's life and her thoughts revolved obsessively around Leo, around the sound of his voice, the way his hair fell over his forehead, his long, slender body, his aristocratic, arrogant smile. He began to take her out, and the sordid world around her seemed to be dancing to her operetta melodies — until she learned that he was also seeing several other girls. "I think he had to conquer almost any girl he met. It wasn't sexual conquest — that wasn't really possible then with young girls — but he had to be sure she was interested in him, and then he was not particularly interested any longer. I didn't especially like that in him, but I thought it was simply a man who desperately wanted to live an interesting life."

They went together, for a few months, to gatherings of friends and to the theater. Alice knew that she was openly showing her violent, almost painful passion for him. The young girl who had always been — and remained — so witheringly contemptuous of "emotions that swept you off your feet," who had not known her own desperate vulnerability, was swept helplessly away by her first love. "I knew he didn't like it, I knew it was wrong. I reproached myself, and there was no way for me not to do it. I didn't make verbal declarations, but my manner and the way I looked at him showed how I felt... Perhaps if I had been more restrained, it would have lasted longer. Because as I showed more intensity, he began to draw away... Of all the young people, he was the only one who seemed to value himself, who projected authentic self-esteem; he projected that he was something enormously important. That was a top value for me."

One particular action that she learned about seemed to bear out her most benevolent evaluation of the man she never ceased to love. Leo, whose parents were dead, lived alone with an elder sister. One day, a friend approached him about two young members of the underground who had to go into hiding while they waited to be smuggled abroad. Leo — whose sister was out of town and therefore would not be endangered — agreed to take the boys into his home; he agreed calmly, without a second thought, risking his future and his life during the anxious weeks before they could be sent to freedom.

"When it was over," Alice recalled, "when he stopped asking to see me, that was the most prolonged period of pain in my life. You see — perhaps it's not easy to understand when one has known only the freedom of America — Leo was, to me, life in the present, and the only life I had there. The only human being who mattered to me in a personal way. Before Leo, I had regarded everything as something to get over with; life begins in the future, and all that matters is what I'm thinking and what books I will write; concrete reality doesn't matter. Now, it mattered. He was my entry into life." And he was gone.

From then on, Alice and Leo encountered each other only at parties, where Leo paid scant attention to her. For months, she questioned everyone who knew him about his activities; for months, she went to gatherings of young people only in the hope of seeing him; for months, she allowed her pain and loneliness to wash over her life and drain it of everything but her longing to be with him. It was as if all the desperate intensity devoted before to books, to writing, to ideas, had found a new focus: the face and figure of the man she loved.

And then, one day, she stopped. Slowly, painfully, step by small step, her contempt for suffering began to restore her to life. She would not allow her love for Leo to be a tragedy, and to become a scar on her soul, she told herself angrily. She would not let pain win its one permanent victory: to make her forget her conviction that joy is the meaning of human existence. "Life is ahead," she told herself ferociously. She stopped questioning his friends about him, she stopped seeking him out — she tried to stop thinking about him. But in 1961, in her middle years, at the height of her powers and strength, when it seemed as if the whole world were spread out before her, offering her everything she had ever dreamed of, she said, with an almost childlike wistfulness, "I am not indifferent to Leo, to this day." Then she added softly, "But you see, it was fortunate that he didn't ask me to marry him. I would have said yes, I would have stayed in Russia — and I would have died there."

She was to keep the memory of Leo alive throughout her life and her literary career. She named the hero of We the Living Leo; his description matches that of the young man she had loved. And she would acknowledge that Francisco, one of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged, was also, in appearance and in manner, inspired by her first love. She did not love easily or often; but when she did, it was with a consuming and lasting passion.

Alice turned again to reading, to thinking, to planning the books she would create. The young girl who had been future-oriented from earliest childhood, whose suffering in Soviet Russia had inevitably increased her sense that the expectation of happiness must be relegated to tomorrow — turned again from the present, which she had so briefly and hopefully visited, to her interior life and to her dreams of the future. Tomorrow existed for her with a blazing, compelling reality, beckoning her onward, enlisting her most passionate determination; she believed in happiness, she would be happy, she believed in life, she would live it... only not today.

Her rejection by Leo clearly had increased her already strong sense of alienation from the world around her; it seemed still further evidence that it could offer her nothing of significant personal meaning. Only the future offered it. The future was to be her home, with a few rare exceptions, for the rest of her life: she would live in the richness and complexity of her thoughts, her plans for the books she would write, her single-minded pursuit of her goals. Tragically, when she reached a point in her life when the world around her at last offered its rewards — rewards of fame, of love, of respect, of appreciation, of material wealth — it was too late; perhaps it was too late from the last day she saw Leo. She could no longer live in the present, no longer stop to notice it, no longer remove her mental focus from tomorrow. Several of the people who knew her most intimately in later years, commented that they never once saw her fully enjoy an event or activity that was here and now. The ability to take pleasure in the shining moment, fragile from the beginning of her life, received its final and mortal blow with the loss of Leo.

Near the end of Alice's second year at the University of Petrograd, there appeared on the bulletin board — and in all institutions of higher education throughout Russia — a large notice with huge letters in red pencil: THE PURGE. The schools were to be cleansed of all socially undesirable persons. Those found socially undesirable were to be expelled, never to be admitted to any college again. Newspapers roared over the country like trumpets: "We shall not educate our class enemies!" All students were required to fill out questionnaires about their parents and their grandparents; if any close relatives had owned a business before the revolution, the student was not to be educated. As Alice slowly filled out her questionnaire and more slowly signed her name to it, she felt that she was signing the death warrant of her future. No one dared to think what awaited those who were to be expelled. In the corridors of the university, troubled students whispered that if you were of "bourgeois descent" you were a "class enemy," even though you were starving. They joked bitterly that you must try, if you could, at the price of your immortal soul, if you had one, to prove your origin from the workbench or the plow. Alice knew she could not prove it. She tried to think about what she would do when she was dismissed from the university, but for the first time in her life she could not think. Her mind closed on the horror of what lurked ahead of her.

A few days before the purge was to take effect, a convention of prominent British scientists journeyed to Petrograd, to witness the "noble experiment" taking place there. Alice was to describe, through Kira in We the Living, what she acknowledged were her own feelings when she saw the delegates at a compulsory demonstration staged by the Soviet Government to honor them. As she marched by in the long snake of citizens, "Kira's eyes saw but one person: the woman delegate of the British Trade Unions. She was tall, thin, not young, with the worried face of a school teacher. But she wore a tan sports coat and that coat yelled louder than the hurrahs of the crowd, louder than the 'Internationale,' that it was foreign. With firm, pressed folds of rich material, trim, well-fitted, serene, that coat did not moan, like all those others around Kira, of the misery of the muscles underneath. The British comrade wore silk stockings; a rich, brownish sheen, tight on feet in trim, new, well-polished brown shoes.

"And suddenly Kira wanted to scream and to hurl herself at the stand, and to grab those thin, glittering legs and hang on with her teeth as to an anchor, and be carried away with them into their world which was possible somewhere, which was now here, close, within hearing of a cry for help."

After the parade, the members of the delegation learned, through a chance remark, about the proposed purge of schools. They were indignant about it. Eager to impress visitors who could tell the world about the glories of the Soviet state, the government — only hours before the list of those purged was to be posted — decided to cancel it for some of the students. Those students who were to be seniors the next year would be allowed to finish their education; all others on the list were expelled. Alice was taking a three-year course; she was to become a senior in the fall. The possibility that she might have a future was created by a freak occurrence that was never again to occur in Soviet Russia. Shaking with relief, Alice waited for the next disaster.

Chapter Five

The future was moving closer. At the age of eighteen, Alice felt that she was nearly an adult, ready to be creating stories that would contain the qualities she identified with professional literature of "her kind": stories of heroic men and women involved in suspenseful, demanding events; stories which would be the vehicle for the ideas that had been forming in her mind for years and now were approaching their final form. As she spoke, years later, of how she had visualized "her kind" of stories, it was clear that her concept of her work would bring her to the day when she would be seen, by readers and critics, not simply as a novelist, but in the terms that would please her most; as novelist-philosopher. The tie between writing stories and presenting philosophical ideas was becoming firm in her mind.

While most eighteen-year-olds were groping helplessly in the world of ideas, seeking the intellectual moorings it might take them years to find, the small, ferociously intense young Alice Rosenbaum was engaged in a determined effort to name, to prove, to systematize and integrate the separate philosophical ideas she had been grappling with since the beginning of adolescence. When formed, those ideas were never to alter in any of their essentials; they would be honed and clarified and expanded; but what she believed at eighteen, she believed undeviatingly, without a backward glance or hesitation or doubt, for the rest of her life. In later years, she would say: "I have held the same philosophy I now hold, for as far back as I can remember. I have learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications — and I intend to continue expanding it — but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

She had begun to work on a detailed outline for a novel that she later smilingly referred to as "the grandfather of Atlas Shrugged." Atlas Shrugged, which was to be written in the nineteen forties and fifties, is the story of "the mind on strike": the creators and originators in every field of endeavor withdraw from society, refusing to offer benefits — to offer the fruits of their reasoning minds — to a world that penalizes them for their ability; when they have gone, the world collapses into chaos and anarchy. Atlas Shrugged would be the richly complex, brilliantly plotted achievement of Alice's full maturity, containing the essence of the system of philosophy she was to name Objectivism. And its immensely sophisticated theme was foreshadowed by an eighteen-year-old girl's halting, angular jottings on a cheap school tablet.

As Alice later described the story (she was hesitant to describe it at all: "It's so primitive," she said, laughing) of the "grandfather of Atlas Shrugged" the leader of the strike was a woman of so astonishing a beauty that any man who saw her had to follow her, and join her for the rest of his life. "It is not just physical beauty," Alice would explain, "but also its spiritual meaning. Her beauty is symbolic; lesser men would be perfectly indifferent to her, but if a man were an unusual soul, he would not be able to resist her." The story opens as men of achievement from all over Europe — statesmen, inventors, scientists, artists — begin to vanish, and friends can gather only that the night before each disappearance, the man was seen with an exquisitely beautiful woman. One by one, Europe's men of ability are disappearing. The reader learns that the heroine has not told the men the nature of her goal, she has asked only that they follow her. When she has drawn out the leading brains of Europe, she explains her purpose to them: to take them to the United States, to break all ties with an increasingly collectivist Europe, and to allow Europe to collapse.

Before they can leave, however, one few figure arises.6 He is the hero, a great French inventor named Francis; he is the last genius left and Europe's one remaining intellectual weapon. He resents the woman, whom he has never seen, because he thinks she is attempting to rule the world. He gives a public test of an airplane he has invented that flies faster than any plane yet devised. When he lands, the heroine sees him — and she falls in love.

"That night, in his laboratory," Alice would recount, "Francis gets a private wireless message from her. She wires: 'I need your services. I will buy you. I offer one million dollars' He wires back his answer: 'I don't need your services. I will buy you. I offer two million dollars' A few moments later, he sits in his laboratory shaken, emotionally reached for the first time in his life, because the answer has come back: 'I accept.' He replies that he will expect her in his laboratory on this exact day and time next year.

"A year has passed. He is in his laboratory again. At the exact hour and minute of the woman's original message, there is a knock on his door. She enters, wearing a black cape and veiled. He puts two million dollars on the table between them. She takes off her veil and cape; she is naked.

"The next morning, the newspaper headlines announce that the inventor has disappeared. He becomes the leader of America; she has merely been the spirit of the strike. They declare war on Europe, which they conquer easily because all the machinery, the inventions and the brains are on their side. The book ends on a free world and on their triumph."

It is interesting to note that this story marks the first foreshadowing of a psychological pattern Alice was to follow all her life. She was not a beautiful girl, though her appearance was arresting and unusual; she was small, she struggled with her weight; her movements had a jaggedness, a lack of rhythm, an indifferent carelessness out of keeping with the superbly functioning mechanism of her intelligence. She never liked her physical appearance; she would often say regretfully that she felt as if her body were an annoying burden which she had to drag behind her. But in her novels, she created exquisite heroines with streamlined, gracefully slender bodies and light hair and eyes. It is most unusual for a woman writer not to create, as heroines, idealized versions of her own physical type. But Alice was to write only about her exact physical opposite. In life, she was unhappy with her appearance; in fiction, it was transformed into irresistible beauty.

In life, Alice was not sought out by young men, and was rejected by the first man she loved. In fiction, she created heroines so remarkable that "any man who sees her has to follow her, and join her for the rest of his life... if a man were an unusual soul, he would not be able to resist her."

Through her fiction, Alice had found the philosopher's stone. She took the base metals of her own life, its mud and dross and suffering — and transformed it into the gold of her work.

Alice continued to work on other stories as well, some of which illustrated her interest — an interest that was to remain central to her literary imagination — in works set in the future. The events of Atlas Shrugged occur in an unspecified future, as do the events of a novelette entitled Anthem that she wrote years later but had planned in Russia.

In the spring of 1924, Alice graduated from the university with the highest honors. Her degree was a useless piece of paper; she had mastered the subjects she had wanted to master, but the degree was a key to a door leading to a blank wall in a society where workers and peasants were extolled as the highest types of humanity, and intellectuals, unless they employed their intelligence in selfless service to the state, were denounced as parasitical. Alice’s life, like her country's, was controlled by the ever more repressive Communist regime; she, too, was hungry and ragged. But she was not despairing, she would later recall. When her mind was not preoccupied with her developing stories, when her emotions gave her a few hours' freedom from her longing for Leo, she was engaged in a ferocious intellectual struggle to find some way to build for herself, even in Soviet Russia if she could find no way to leave, the kind of future she had to have, whose beckoning brightness she could not turn away from.

But first, it was necessary to find employment. Fronz Rosenbaum, now the shattered, weary shadow of the man Alice had known, was no longer "on strike;" he had found a job as a clerk in a drugstore far at the end of the city — far from the shop he once had proudly owned. But his income was tiny, and Anna Rosenbaum, continuing her work as a teacher of languages in several high schools, remained the family's main support. Alice's sisters, Nora and Natasha, were at school; when Alice graduated, Natasha, who had finished high school, went to a conservatory of music to study the piano, preparing diligently for the career she was never to have.

Through Anna Rosenbaum's connections, Alice was hired as a tour guide at the Peter and Paul Fortress. She lectured one day a week on the fortress's history to excursion groups — to silent rows of peasants and workers who were as bored and indifferent as she was to the information she imparted — and to the exhibits they dully and dutifully studied. It was a job she loathed, that had no tie to the work she wanted to do, that had no future, no meaning; but it supplied food, and clothes, and physical survival.

It was at the beginning of 1925 that the unimaginable happened. A letter from the United States arrived at the Rosenbaum home — a letter on clean white paper, shining like the silk stockings of the woman union delegate to whom Kira had wanted to scream, with sharp black marks that jerked open the doors to life, to hope, to tomorrow.

In 1889, a strong, gentle man named Harry Portnoy had left Russia and emigrated to the United States, taking his small family to the promised land. Like hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews, he had set off to escape the anti-Semitism of Russia, the hopelessness of life there for a Jew, and the prospect of his sons facing years of forced service in the Army. With Eva, his wife, and with their four small children, Isaac, Jacob, Gertie, and Anna, Harry Portnoy embarked on the long, difficult journey. Settling at last in Chicago, he became a tailor, working the diligent, uncomplaining eighteen-hour days of the immigrant. Shortly after the family's arrival, Sarah was born in their small rented home at 213 West Twelfth Street, then Mandel, then Lilly, then Minna. When Harry had decided to leave Russia, he had not been able to afford the full cost of the steerage passage; the rest of the money was supplied by the family of his wife's niece, Anna Rosenbaum. The two families had remained in contact by mail until World War I, when mail delivery to Russia was interrupted. The Portnoy family had worried and wondered about the fate of their Russian relatives; now, in 1925, they had at last located them.

The letter around which the Rosenbaum family huddled breathlessly was from little Sarah Portnoy, now Sarah Lipski, a grown woman with children of her own. Was the family well? she inquired. In the United States, one heard frightening stories about the fate of the bourgeoisie under communism. What had happened to them during the long years of silence?

The Rosenbaums read the letter again and again, talking excitedly about the account of their relatives' golden life in Chicago. Uncharacteristically, Alice did not join the conversation. She would always recall those moments when she sat silently, a slow, deep chill shuddering through her body, as an almost terrifying thought fought its way into her consciousness. America... the future... freedom... Hadn't she heard people speak of Russian citizens who had been allowed to visit foreign countries because they had relatives abroad who sent the necessary papers? Could the Portnoy family arrange it? Could she be allowed to visit? Visit — and never return? Could she escape this hell to which someone had condemned her for a crime she had never committed? Then another thought — a name slashed through her body like a knife. Leo... Never to return... For an instant, his face seemed to form in the space before her, smiling at her arrogantly. It lingered.

stopping her breath with its beauty. Until, with a hot spurt of anger, she brushed it sharply away, as she would brush away a cobweb blurring her vision.

When the rest of the family had dispersed to their different activities, Alice turned to her mother. The words tumbled out. "Write them, Mother. Write and tell them. I have to go to America. Ask them to help. Do it today. Do it now. I have to go to America." On her mother's face was a look Alice had seen there only once before: the time when, half-starved, she had begged for one extra dried pea from her father's plate; she was half starved now, but not for physical food, and she saw the knowledge in her mother's eyes, and the same look of anguish on her mother's face. "I'll write them, Alice," Anna Rosenbaum answered quietly. "I'll ask them."

The correspondence began. Mail was slow and uncertain, and weeks passed before each arrival of a white envelope with its foreign stamp. An investigation had to be made before the Portnoy family's help could be requested; Anna Rosenbaum had to discover, slowly and carefully, without arousing questions or suspicions, what were the rules of the moment governing Russians who wished to visit the United States. After many guarded inquiries, she learned that, with the proper affidavits from America, the proper promises of financial support, the proper guarantees that the visitor would return to Russia — it was sometimes allowed, and sometimes not. The reasons were not known by anyone.

Anna Rosenbaum wrote often to her Chicago relatives, responding to as many of their questions as she safely could — all mail was censored, and no bourgeois dared write of the persecution of the bourgeoisie — and telling them of her delight at their good fortune. There was a source of sadness in the correspondence; Eva Portnoy, Anna's aunt, had died a few years earlier. When the correspondence was established, Anna asked the Portnoy family if they would be willing to have her oldest daughter come to the United States to visit them for a few months. Anna knew, as did Fronz — who shook his head at the thought of his child traveling alone halfway across the world, and protested, as he had done for eight years, that communism could not last, that life in Russia would one day again be civilized — that there was to be no visit. Alice was determined that if she went to the United States, she would never return; but the request had to be worded carefully, the pretense kept up. It might take months before they could know if Alice would be allowed to leave, weeks before they would learn if the Portnoys could help, Anna warned her daughter. It might never happen at all. Alice must be prepared for failure. She must be prepared to stay in Russia. Alice nodded dutifully, wondering how one prepared for blank nothingness. She began to live two lives, she would later recall. In one, she went through the motions of guiding her tours, instructing visitors on the horrors of slavery and imprisonment and tyranny under the Czar, she went through the motions of reading, of walking to the streetcar, of eating and sleeping and smiling and frowning and talking. In the other — the only one that was real — she prepared for America.

Her first step was to enroll in a school that had recently opened in Petrograd, a school for young men and women interested in a career in the developing Russian movie industry. Until her last year at the university, the few movie theaters that existed in Petrograd had been prohibitively expensive, and although Alice had yearned to see foreign movies, it would have been "like owning a yacht, totally out of reach. And since I didn't go out with young men, there was no one to take me." But when Russia again became interested in trade with Europe and the United States, more and cheaper movie theaters began opening, and Alice was able to attend third and fourth-run theaters. Foreign movies came to serve, for her, the same function, providing the same emotional fuel, that operettas had done. "I was fascinated, because they were a much more specific, rather than simply symbolic, view of life than operettas." It was the great romantic period of the German silent movies — the period of Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, of Conrad Veidt and Mia May and Hans Albers, of Siegfried and The Indian Tomb and The Oyster Princess. These were her favorites, and they seemed to glow from the screens of the theater like the glow of the first sunrise over a darkened earth. "I began to go to movies every night. They were my private avenue to the world outside."

When American movies at last appeared in Petrograd, Alice felt that she was seeing the universe she had glimpsed, years ago, in its abstract essence in "The Mysterious Valley" — a world of free, joyously purposeful, active men. Once in a while, she would see a long shot of New York City — of slender buildings shimmering with light, streaking-upward into the sky; she would sit through two shows for the sake of a single brief glimpse, before returning to the darkened streets of Petrograd. As she spoke, years later, of the movies she had loved, she laughed, throwing back her head in a rare gesture of uninhibited pleasure. "I can't tell you how glamorous it was," she said. "It still is. I have no other perspective, not really. My real enthusiasm for America, apart from its political principles, was formed then. I saw the essence of what Americans could be and ought to be. My favorite American movies were in the Milton Sills tradition — action, enormous benevolent freedom; they were not philosophical, but that's what I liked, it was as if Atlantis had already arrived, the ideal was right here on earth, and one did not have to be philosophical, certainly not political, all those problems were already solved, and it was the perfect free existence for purposeful men."

The idea that she would write movies was born. Typically, when she became aware of something important to her, her first thought was how to incorporate it into her own life and purposes. If she went to the United — when she went to the United States — she would write movie scenarios; that way, she might quickly make her name and her fortune, and then be free to write her novels.

The movie school was a disappointment. She had hoped to learn the craft of scenario writing, but she found that the first period of study was devoted to acting, and it was only in subsequent years that writing and production would be taught. She continued to attend, in order to pick up whatever scraps of useful information might be available.

With her mother's help, she found a teacher of English, an Englishwoman married to a Russian citizen — and began the process of learning the language that she was ultimately, as a writer, to master superbly, learning its subtlest nuances and connotations to an extent rare among foreign-born writers. But she never lost her heavy, guttural Russian accent, which, in later years, especially after hearing her own voice on tape, she intensely disliked. She had battled with her English teacher because she refused to imitate an English accent; the process of mimicking was not something she could accept.

She knew she must continue to think — must force herself to think — about what she would do if she could not go to the United States. She knew she could not openly write her kind of stories in Russia, not if she wished to survive. But what if she wrote scenarios for the Russian film industry in which the apparent villain was really the hero, the alleged hero really the villain? What if she could appear to be pro-Communist, while smuggling in her own message and her own values? — smuggling in veiled political messages which the audience would understand, but the Communists would not. At the movie school, she met a young Communist — "He was very enthusiastic about the screen and very impressed with me." She decided to test one of her veiled story ideas by telling it to him. Watching the young Communist's face closely as she recounted her story — her own face blank and innocent — Alice could see that even he, who was not very intelligent, knew that something was wrong; on the surface, everything was in order, there was nothing he could object to — but he knew. And Alice knew that she had no hope of smuggling her values into the Soviet film industry.

Sometimes, she would think of trying to escape abroad illegally, of heading for a frontier and trying to make her way across it, unseen. "But I would probably not have tried it. I was much too helpless to know how to go about it."

A letter arrived from Sarah Lipski. It contained an affidavit, satisfactory to the American authorities, stating that the Portnoy family had invited Alice to visit them, and that they would be financially responsible for her during her stay; it also contained a promise from Anna Portnoy, now Anna Stone, to pay for Alice's passage.

The first step had been taken. Her heart pounding, Alice filled out her application for a Russian passport. Then she waited, and tried to survive the waiting. The months crawled by, while someone — she could not know who or why or by what standard — decided her fate.

That summer, because Anna, Fronz, and Alice were working, was the first summer since the revolution that the Rosenbaum family could afford to rent a summer house in the country — a poor, shabby house by comparison with their pre-revolutionary standards, but a way to spend the summer by the seashore. Among trees and flowers and the burgeoning life around her, Alice waited to learn if her own life was to begin.

It was then that she did "something very inexcusable, though not malicious," as she later described it. She and her sister Natasha met a young man by the seashore, and "We made a bet, cold-bloodedly, about who would win him. Natasha was somewhat seriously taken with him, but he was not my type, although I did like him. He was rather intelligent, and very conscientious, but he was a typical Russian young man, not particularly distinguished. I went after him to prove to myself that I could win a man; and it would be something glamorous to counteract the enormous burden of tragedy I felt over Leo, the constant inner pain. And I did it. I astonished myself. It was a deliberate campaign; I worked to be charming and interesting. He fell desperately in love with me, and proposed. I said neither yes nor no. I never told him I loved him, but I acted as if I were in love. I felt quite guilty about it... I feel guilty as I tell the story. I felt that what I was doing in fact wasn't right, but my inner motivation was right: I wanted glamour."

In the fall of 1925, a heavy envelope, thick with official seals, arrived from Moscow at the Rosenbaum home. Alice’s hands shook as she opened it — and then shook still more: it was a Russian passport, permitting her to visit the United States for six months. She was free to go. She was free to live. She was free.

Anna Rosenbaum wrote to the French steamship line in Moscow that handled the passage of Russians to the United States and arranged for train transportation across Europe. Shortly after Alice’s passport arrived, another envelope reached the Rosenbaum home: a packet of travel folders from the French Line. Friends and relatives came to leaf through the brightly printed colored pictures of the world outside of Russia, "so cheerful and so non-Soviet that we all were somewhat stunned." Alice moved through the next few months of arrangements arid planning and farewells like a sleepwalker, feeling as if she could not quite see or understand the people and events around her, as if her eyes and mind were blinded by the afterimage of the gaily colored pictures in the travel folders.

There was one final, terrifying hurdle to be crossed before she could know if the gates of the United States would open for her. Affidavits from the United States and a Russian passport were not enough. Alice would have to travel to Riga, in neighboring Latvia, then an independent country, for final approval of her departure by the American consul who was based there; the United States had not officially recognized the Soviet Union, and there were no American officials within Russia. Through one of her uncles, Alice corresponded with a Latvian couple; they warned her that she had only one chance in a hundred of receiving a visitor’s visa from the American consulate. Hundreds of people had been refused, the consul was very severe, White Russians from all over the world were desperately trying to get to the United States, swearing that they would return although they had no intention of doing so. Alice would receive her final visa only if she could convince the consul that she did not plan to remain in the United States; if he had the slightest doubt of her intentions, he was free to refuse her. Grimly, despite her sense of helplessness in the physical world, Alice resolved that if she were refused, she would vanish into the anonymity of Latvia and find a way to flee to Europe.

In January 1926, on the evening before Alice's departure, Anna and Fronz gave a farewell party for her. Leo was invited. Alice arranged that, at dinner, he would be her partner. "I thought I could permit myself that last touch." During dinner — abruptly and without context — Leo smiled at her radiantly and said, "You know, we should meet again when you're about thirty years old. You'll be at your best then." Years later, Alice said, her voice soft, "I'll always see him as he was then. I can't imagine him as an older man. I've tried, and I can't."

During the evening, one of the guests, a man whom Alice knew only slightly, whispered to her, with the sudden, harsh earnestness of desperation, "If they ask you, in America — tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery, and that we are all dying slowly." "I'll tell them," she promised.

The next morning, Alice stood on the platform at the train station, the suitcase her grandmother had given her at her feet, an old Remington-Rand typewriter clutched tightly in her arms, three hundred dollars — the result of Anna Rosenbaum's sale of the last of her jewelry — her passport and affidavits and tickets in her battered black purse, saying what she did not know were her final good-byes to her family and a few friends, and to Leo. Her mother wept, and hugged her tightly; her father's face was expressionless as he patted her shoulder silently, again and again; her two sisters gazed at her in awe, as they might have gazed at an astronaut about to leave for the moon. She would see them again, soon, Alice told her stricken family; either the Soviets would collapse, or she would make enough money in America to bring them out, to bring them to freedom with her.

Before she boarded the train, Leo bent to kiss her hand, his dark hair falling over his forehead. "It was the most personal thing that ever happened between us. I had never even kissed him."

The train seemed to hurtle over the icy plains between Petrograd and Latvia, pushed by the energy of her heartbeats. Then the border was in sight, almost close enough to touch. Then it was behind her. The years of dismal grayness dropped away. Russia was the past. It was prologue. An unobstructed world lay ahead.

At the train station in Riga, Alice was met by her uncle's friends — and by armed Latvian guards. With the other Russians on the train — even those merely traveling to Europe, or visiting Latvia on business — she was taken to a camp on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by barbed wire. The small, threatened state did not intend to be overrun by a neighbor enraged that its citizens made their escape through Latvia; it would finally be overrun with less reason or cause. When Alice wished to leave the camp, she was given a large brass ticket to attach to her coat, indicating that she had been released on official business and was to return. After a few frightening days, her uncle's friends were able to arrange for her to stay at their home while she waited for her appointment at the American consulate. She learned that if her visa were refused, it would be almost impossible to vanish; she would be arrested immediately and shipped back to Russia. She did not dare even to contemplate what would happen if she were refused; vaguely, she thought that she would go to every consulate, begging for admission to any country but Russia; but she knew the hopelessness of such an attempt: penniless Russian refugees were not welcome anywhere. She waited and tried to plan; but each plan seemed to lead to another dead end. Then the day and time of her appointment arrived.

When she entered the office of the consul — "a young man, a good American type, very severe" — she thought that she must tell him every reason she could invent to convince him that she wished to return to Russia. There was one reason she did not think of, at first.

As the American consul questioned her — and as she desperately explained that her family was in Russia, and her friends, and her work, and her life — she noticed a card lying on the desk across from her; from time to time, the man glanced down at it; she could not see the name on it, but it had to be her dossier. As she strained to read it, one phrase leaped out at her: "Engaged to an American citizen." "It's not true!" she protested, pointing to the card and remembering the boy who had proposed marriage. "It's a mistake! I'm not engaged to an American. There's a young man in Russia whom I intend to marry when I return. He's asked me to marry him. We're engaged." The consulate looked at the card, and shook his head. "Somebody did make a mistake," he said. "The card has your name on it, but it's information about someone else. It's fortunate that you noticed it. I was about to refuse you a visa. Now it's all right. I'll okay it."

It was a bitterly cold January day. The cobblestones of the street were covered with a solid sheet of ice. "I had the oddest feeling as I left the consulate. As if my feet weren't touching the ground. I was walking drunkenly, dimly knowing that the ice was dangerous, but I felt as if nothing bad could ever happen to me again; I was walking without even looking at the traffic — and it was like flying. There haven't been many wonderful concrete moments in my life. But that was one of them."

There was last-minute packing to be done again, and a final few arrangements to be made, and farewells to be said, and another train to be boarded — and Alice moved through all of it in a drunken excitement. Her first major stop was Berlin, where she was met by her cousin Vera, who had left Russia a few months earlier to study medicine in Berlin. It was her first sight of a major European city. "I think it was beautiful — I don't really know. Someone took me to a big revue, with half-naked girls and Gershwin music. I bought a collection of photographs of my favorite movie stars; I still have the one of Conrad Veldt." She celebrated her twenty-first birthday, on February 2, in Berlin. But it's not my twenty-first birthday, she thought; this is the first day of my life.

"When I reached Paris, I was met at the station by a funny woman somebody knew who was a Russian widow with two children, 'living by her wits,' I think; she helped me select the stores I shopped in." Alice bought her first foreign dresses, a lipstick, and silk stockings. She walked through the Louvre, and the streets of the city. "I was fascinated by Berlin and Paris, but I couldn't quite focus on them; I felt as if I were just in flight, or like looking out of a speeding train window. I can remember only broken highlights, with nothing in between. It was one streak of exhilaration — and the feeling: This isn't it yet, but I'm out, and everything begins overseas."

She boarded the boat train to Le Havre. For the first time, she felt a pang of homesickness. She wired Anna Rosenbaum from Le Havre, to say that she was about to board the De Grasse and would wire again from New York. "As I stood in the post office, composing the wire, I felt the sadness of parting for the first time; it was more real than at the station in Petrograd. It was my last message from Europe."

On the afternoon of February 10, Alice walked up the gangplank of the De Grasse. She went to her cabin quickly, to leave her luggage, and returned to the deck. In the early evening, the ship shuddered faintly — and she watched the coastline begin to recede; it was dark, she could see only a dim line of hills, and a few dots of lights. She stayed on deck until only the lights were left, flickering in the distance. "This is my last salute to Europe," she thought. From now on, it was to be her world.

In her cabin, she unpacked her new French dresses, marveling at the fine materials, the warm, soft colors, the expert workmanship. She applied her new lipstick, and stared at herself in the mirror. The face that gazed back at her — that still gazes back from her passport picture — did not belong with glamorous clothes and bright lipstick. Framed by its short, straight hair, its squarish shape stressed by a firmly set jaw, its sensual wide mouth held in tight restraint, its huge dark eyes black with intensity, it seemed the face of a martyr or an inquisitor... or a saint. The eyes burned with a passion that was at once emotional and intellectual — as if they would sear the onlooker and leave their dark light as a flame on his body.

But she was twenty-one years old. Tossing sleeplessly on her bed that night as the ship rolled gently beneath her, she wondered which of her new dresses she would wear tomorrow. The woman who had guided her through Paris had firmly informed her that on ships to America there were many millionaires, there was dancing and gaiety and delicious food, and she must see to it that she met wonderful company. Alice smiled happily, anticipating the glamorous evening she would have — then dropped suddenly off to sleep like an exhausted child.

When she woke in the morning, she jumped quickly out of bed, looked through the porthole at the roughened sea and the thick fog — and the cabin began to spin around her. Gingerly, she lowered herself back to bed, where she remained for the rest of the voyage, unable to eat or move or care about new dresses and gay parties and exotic food. The voyage was expected to take seven days; because of the rolling seas and thick fog of February, it lasted eight days.

On the last evening, when the ship was motionless not far from New York Harbor, waiting to enter when the fog lifted, Alice's seasickness abated. She put on a French dress, lipstick, and her new silk stockings. "I was able to have dinner in the dining room; I didn't meet anyone, because I felt very bashful and uncertain, I didn't know how one behaves in a restaurant outside of Russia. I enjoyed watching the dancing, it was exciting and beautiful, but I desperately looked for a system in the new dancing. I didn't understand then that there was no system, that one just moved around.

"My great disappointment was that I didn't see the skyline of New York or the Statue of Liberty. As we approached Quarantine Island in the late afternoon — it was still very foggy — all I could see was a barracks-like building. A small boat approached our liner, and immigration officials boarded. All the passengers coming to America for the first time had to wait in a salon for their papers to be examined.

An official asked me how much money I had, and when I told him fifty dollars, he looked amused and said: 'What do you expect to do with that?' I was astonished, because it seemed a fortune to me. After the questioning, I went back to my cabin; waiting there was a little dark woman, holding a picture of me that had been sent to my Chicago relatives; they had asked for the picture so that they could have someone meet and identify me when the ship docked. I didn't realize we had arrived, I thought she'd somehow come from mid ocean. 'Who are you?' I asked. 'And how do you have my picture?' She explained that she was from a Travelers Aid Society and had come to meet me. 'Where are we?' I asked. 'We're in New York.' I was terribly disappointed. I had missed something that would never happen again."

A few minutes later, all disappointment forgotten, she stood on a pier at the Hudson River. She had disembarked with a new name: Ayn Rosenbaum — Ayn was the name of a Finnish writer whose work she had not read, but whose name she liked and adopted as her own; everything had to be shining and new in her shining new world. And she had embarked with a sword: the fifty dollars in her purse, the typewriter held in her arms, the stories outlined in her mind, and the sense of life as exaltation.

Ayn stood on the pier at the Hudson River. It was 7 P.M. It was snowing faintly. Through the snow, she could see the lighted skyscrapers of New York. On her stem young face she felt the marks of tears and snowflakes.

6 One of the major characters in Atlas Shrugged was to be Francisco, and Frank O'Connor's name was Francis.

PART II

WE THE LIVING

Chapter Six

It was the best of times. The young immigrant from Soviet Russia had left behind her the stranglehold of a blood-soaked dictatorship, the soul-shriveling terror of a life without hope or a future, and had marched with resolute steps and tear-filled eyes from a snowy pier on the Hudson River into a New York City — into a United States — boiling with energy and limitless ambition, in love with the new, drunk on the idea of endless progress, prosperous beyond the dreams of earlier generations. It was the twenties, and the streets were paved with gold. It was the zany, optimistic, shockingly violent and heartbreakingly youthful decade where poverty and suffering seemed only momentary obstacles to be vaulted over, where horizons had no limit and man could remake the earth in the image of his heart’s desire. The worst of times would never come. Here and there might be crazed pockets of wild-eyed advocates of communism and dictatorship, but America was the land of the free, of Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution and the beckoning arms of the Statue of Liberty, where the might and majesty of the free-enterprise system had been amply demonstrated. There could be struggle ahead, and setbacks, and backbreaking work to be done; there could never, in this golden United States, be ultimate defeat.

The immigrant girl who landed in New York never ceased to love her new country, with the passionate, near painful devotion that perhaps only the foreign-born fully understand, and never ceased to be aware that America had given her life, and hope, and freedom, and the possibility of achieving everything denied to her in Soviet Russia. To the end of her life, she would say: "America is the greatest country on earth. No — it's the only country."

Ayn Rosenbaum spent her first days in her new world at the home of friends of her American relatives, so that she might see the city she had dreamed of for so long. "I saw Broadway at night, and when I wrote Mother about all the lights, she said she wished my letter could be published in a magazine. I remember especially the Maxwell House Coffee animated sign, with the words 'good to the last drop,' and the falling drop of coffee. I'll never forget it — it seemed so incredibly cheerful and frivolous, so non-Soviet! I saw my first movie in America, in a huge Broadway theater — which was very thrilling; it was The Sea Beast, with John Barrymore."

As she spoke, thirty-five years later, of her first days in New York, her face was illuminated by a smile that must have been very like the smile she wore then: the gravity of years was swept away, replaced by a childlike, infinitely touching gaiety. A friend of hers once said — echoing the many friends who made similar comments — "I thought I understood her reasonably well, that her personality was basically sober and serious — and then I brought her a little gift, it was an inexpensive necklace that looked as if it were made of gold mail — and her eyes lit up and she suddenly looked about ten years old — except that I've never seen a ten-year-old having such a good time — and then I knew I'd have to start trying to understand her all over again." Whatever the mud and dross of the years, that capacity for enjoyment — particularly enchanting and unexpected in a woman who so rarely lived in the present — never wholly left her. Seeing it, one felt: This is what she was intended to be, this is how she started...

Most of all, to Ayn New York was its buildings. They were to her, then and always, the symbols and the tangible reality of the achievement possible to free men. And she remembered that in Petrograd, waiting through two showings of a movie for a breathless glimpse of New York's skyline, she had vowed one day to write a novel that would capture the meaning of those skyscrapers and of the human spirit that had made them possible. As she walked, enraptured, through the canyons of the city that was to remain her abiding love, she silently repeated her vow.

Within a week, Ayn was once more en route, this time to her mother's family in Chicago. As the train rushed through the wintry cities and the countryside, she was again oblivious to the sights and sounds around her: her thoughts were on the future. The future was writing — writing and life in America. Both seemed precarious, and both were absolutes in her mind. Despite the lessons she had had in Russia, her English was halting and uncertain; she knew she could not expect to write competently in English for many months, perhaps not for a few years. And her visa was valid for only six months; it could be renewed, but only for a limited period. The pressure of time, which was to haunt her all her life, was driving her faster than the engine of the train.

That she must find a way to remain in the United States had been settled in Ayn's mind long before. It had been settled when the first letter arrived in Russia from her American relatives. She would never go back to Russia. "I would no more have thought of returning than of jumping off a building." If necessary, when she could get no further extensions of her visa, she would go to Canada or to Mexico and wait until she could be readmitted on the Russian quota. The quota was filled for seven years. She would wait. She would wait wherever she had to wait, doing whatever she could find to do. There was nothing to think about, only a gnawing, lonely fear to suppress inside her chest. In New York, the people she had stayed with had told her that many refugees were coming into the United States from Canada without visas, and that no one cared or checked. She had answered: "I don't want to stay here illegally. Someday I will be famous, and it would be discovered."

As she rocked gently to the motion of the train — her typewriter jammed, for safety, between her leg and the side of the passenger car, her old black coat wrapped tightly around her against the chill of the air — her plans, dimly formulated before, began to take definite shape. When she reached Chicago, she would begin writing screen originals. Since movies were silent, she could be successful without writing finished screenplays, which her halting English would not permit her to do. She would create the outlines of film stories, the basic plot ideas, and other scenarists could devise the titles. She would stay in Chicago only long enough to write several originals, then she would go to Hollywood and attempt to sell her story outlines.

The fear began to lift from her chest. It would not be too difficult. She knew the value of her work.

From her earliest childhood stories, Ayn seems never to have doubted the value of her work. Now, a timid young immigrant unable to speak or write the language of her new country, she retained that confidence — a deep, calm, unwavering faith in herself and her talents — as she would retain it for the rest of her life. Its source was within herself: she was to feel pain at the harshness of many of the criticisms she would receive, but not self-doubt; she was to feel pleasure at the praise and adulation she would receive, but not a greater self-value. She knew what she had the capacity to do.

The greeting that awaited her in Chicago dispelled, for a time, the last faint edges of her fear. The smiling faces of her aunts greeted her at the train station — little red-haired, vibrant Minna; the motherly Anna; Sarah, delighted that her letter writing and planning had brought a new niece to the family; serene, cheerful Gertrude — and Ayn was wrapped in the warmth of embraces that welcomed her as a long-anticipated member of the family; she was one of them, their greeting projected; she belonged to them. She had not expected it, and she could not understand it, as she was never able to understand an unconditional personal acceptance; but she basked in its warmth, and her grave young face brightened.

Within days, she was hard at work on her film ideas, noticing Chicago only when her aunts and uncles insisted that she come sightseeing with them, visiting other relatives only when firmly pressed to do so, talking to her young cousins only when politeness required. "I disliked Chicago enormously," she said years later. "I felt I was not yet in an American city. And after New York, I felt I had no right to anything — now it's life or death, I've got to sell something, I've got to establish myself."

In the early evenings, whenever possible, she went to a movie, watching intently with a professional interest in the art of film writing and in order to improve her English; she knew, as many foreign-born people have discovered, that by seeing dialogue with the action that matched it, she could learn the language more quickly than by reading or listening to people speak. Sarah and her husband owned a small neighborhood theater, where Sarah played the piano and sang each evening, and Ayn could go there to a double feature when the films changed every few nights.

It had been the family's intention that Ayn live with Anna Stone and her family as long as she remained in Chicago, but, as her aunt Minna Goldberg explained many years later, "Ayn didn't get along in a daily routine, she had very strange habits, and finally Anna couldn't take it, and sent her to me. After a couple of months, I'd send her back to Anna, who would keep her as long as she could, then I'd get her back." The warm, close family was fond of Ayn, and happy to welcome her, but they found her dedicated self-absorption difficult. "We didn't have much money in those days," Minna said, "and my husband and I lived in a small apartment, with the children and my father, Harry Portnoy. My eight-year-old daughter, Fern, slept in a cot in the dining room; but when Ayn came, Fern moved to the living room couch, and Ayn took her cot. Ayn kept her typewriter on the dining room table, and that was where she worked. But she liked to work at night, until very late, and none of us could get to sleep when she was typing. My husband was in the grocery business, and he had to get up at 5 A.M. — and her typing didn't begin until midnight..."

What Minna was too generous to say was that Ayn, who spoke often of her debt to her relatives, who said that they had saved her life, seemed astonishingly indifferent to their context and needs. She was consumed by her need to write. That powerful, undeviating drive, so central to her character and to her later success, was often to make her oblivious to the people around her.

"Her way of life was so different than ours," Minna added. "When she'd want to go to a movie, my father would give her the money, but she wouldn't go to any movie we wanted to see, she'd pick exactly what she wanted, and that's what we all had to see. She wasn't mean or anything, just thoughtless; she was very ambitious; she made up her mind, and she did what she set out to do.

"The worst of all was that late at night she'd want to have a bath, and she'd run the water first for hours, because she had the phobia that water was clean only if you let it run for a long time. The sound of the water running would keep us all awake if the typewriter didn't."

Minna appears to have been correct in calling Ayn's attitude toward germs phobic. She had learned her terror early, from her mother. Anna Rosenbaum held very firm ideas about the omnipresent danger of disease. When Ayn and her sisters were small, no guests were allowed into the nursery without first removing their outdoor clothing, which might be contaminated, and without carefully scrubbing their hands; every toy brought into the nursery was first disinfected in carbolic acid. After the Communist revolution, Anna Rosenbaum's fears had seemed justified; the sole means of protection against the terrifying cholera was a Spartan, dedicated cleanliness. But her mother's attitude, even before the revolution, had appeared reasonable to her eldest daughter. For years in the United States, Ayn would scald dishes in boiling water if she had entertained dinner guests, she would keep an anxious space between herself and anyone who had even a cold, she would worry if a friend went outdoors in cold weather without appropriately warm clothing. What she — who desperately needed the sense that she was in full control of her life and her fate — found unbearable was the idea that she might inadvertently fail to take precautions against an external danger that could be averted; then the fault would be hers, she would often say, the responsibility hers, the disaster of her own making. With regard to illness and disease, as in so many other ways, she perceived the world outside her own being as a threat to be kept at bay.

During her stay in Chicago, she never talked to her relatives about Russia or her family there. To their bewilderment, she would briefly answer whatever questions her relatives asked, and drop the subject at once, as if it were of no importance. "She only talked about what she was going to be and what she was going to do," Minna said. "She never mentioned her mother or her father. She just wanted to put everything about Russia out of her mind, because she hated it there." Russia was the past, she projected, and only the future mattered; she had so little time to ensure her professional success and her safety in the United States; despite her pangs of homesickness, it was only her writing that was of importance; the pangs were merely emotions.

Her relatives recalled that Ayn seemed happy. Minna explained: "She sang a lot around the house. She'd sing 'I'm Sitting on Top of the World.' That was her song, and she'd dance around the room to it. She loved it." Ayn was happy; something inside her was blazing with a fierce, exultant joy; she was free, and the concept rang inside her like a great bell, like a call to live and work and achieve and then to achieve more and still more. The road was clear, and nothing could stop her.

Minna's daughter Fern — today Fern Brown, a well-known writer of books for children — later recalled how Ayn came to choose the name "Rand" for herself. "She had an old typewriter that she had come with," Fern said. "One day, she was sitting at the typewriter and she called me over. She said, 'I'm going to be called Ayn.' "That's pretty,' I said. 'It's different. How do you spell it?'7 And she wrote it in her slanty foreign handwriting: A Y N. 'But I need a last name,' she said. 'I want it to begin with an R, because that's my real initial.' She was writing down different possible names, and then she looked at the typewriter — it was a Remington-Rand — and she said, Ayn Remington... No, that's wrong... I know! — Ayn Rand!' That's how she got her name."

Ayn never told her family in Russia the new name she had chosen. She had no doubt that she would one day be famous, and she feared that if it were known in Russia that she was Alice Rosenbaum, daughter of Fronz and Anna, her family's safety, even their lives, would be endangered by their relationship to a vocal anti-Communist. Through all the years that she corresponded with her family, until, just before World War II, Russia refused entry to mail from the United States and she lost track of them — they never knew that she had become "Ayn Rand." In her early years in the United States, her original name was known by a number of people, and appeared on all official documents; but after her marriage, when her name legally become O'Connor, she refused to tell anyone what it had been. 8

During her stay in Chicago, Ayn often expressed her deep gratitude to her American family; she would not have survived in Russia if they had not gotten her out, she said; she would never forget what they had done for her. "When I make a lot of money," she told her aunt Minna, "I'm going to get you a Rolls-Royce." Sadly, in the years that followed, they felt that she had forgotten. "I didn't want the Rolls-Royce," Minna explained. "It wasn't money. It was to be remembered." For several years after her departure, Ayn corresponded with them and sent autographed copies of her books, but the intervals between letters gradually grew longer, until finally the letters stopped. When Fern Brown's first book was published, she wrote to tell Ayn about it, and to say that she was following in Ayn's footsteps by becoming a writer. "I thought she'd be thrilled that I had written a book," Fern said. "But she never answered my letter. So I knew she wasn't interested in us. However, a few years later, when she gave a lecture in Chicago, she sent us tickets, and of course we went, and she seemed glad to see us."

In fact, Ayn never did forget what her relatives had done for her. Over the years, she would sometimes say, "They saved my life." And when members of the family visited Los Angeles or New York, she was always cordial, inviting them to lunch or dinner. She was cordial, she was polite — but they sensed that her interest extended no farther than that. Two issues were involved in the gradual separation. There was little in common between Ayn and her Chicago family; it was a family such as she had never encountered — warm, loving, deeply concerned with each other's lives and welfare. And they were deeply concerned with living as Jews; the synagogue they attended and their Jewish heritage were profoundly meaningful to them. Ayn did not understand their values, they were not hers — they were not, as she understood it, "intellectual values." In this circumstance, she found it difficult to remain close to them. But equally important was Ayn's attitude toward the phenomenon of "family." It was a phenomenon to which she seemed monumentally indifferent. "It's not chosen values," she would often say when the issue arose in conversation. "One is simply born into a family. Therefore it's of no real significance." She did not appear to share nor really understand the sense others had of a bond to parents or siblings, even to more distant relatives, that arise out of the family relationship itself. This lack of understanding and sympathy for such bonds made her unintentionally cruel; she would occasionally talk to a friend about that friend's mother, or sister, or other relative, in the most scathingly negative terms, oblivious to the fact that she was causing pain to her listener, oblivious to the fact that there could be a love not tied to intellectual values.

There was one exception to her indifference to her Chicago relatives. Her young cousin Burton Stone, Anna Stone's son, admired her intensely; he often said that she was the most brilliant person he had ever met. Over many years, Ayn and Burton remained in touch, and would see each other when Burton visited Los Angeles or, later. New York. This was a relationship that Ayn understood: they talked ideas far into the night, and Burton was eager to hear about her philosophy. Although she did not attend Harry Portnoy's funeral, or other painful or happy events in the family, she did travel to Chicago for Burton's funeral. It was a rare exception for her, since she hated traveling and never felt she had the right to take time away from her work.

In midsummer of her first year in the United States, Ayn decided that it was time to leave Chicago and set out for the world of motion pictures. Her visitor's visa had expired, but her relatives had taken the necessary steps to have it renewed; they bought her a train ticket, and they gave her one hundred dollars, which they could not easily spare, with which to begin her new life. Her aunt Sarah, who was friendly with a Chicago movie distributor, obtained from him a letter of introduction for Ayn to a woman who worked in the publicity department of the Cecil B. DeMille Studio. DeMille had always been Ayn's favorite American director — "He did plot pictures, and most of them were glamorous and romantic. His religious pictures were not shown in Russia, so I didn't know about them; but he was famous in Russia for society glamour, sex, and adventure. He was my particular ideal of the American screen. My relatives could have given me a letter to any of the studios, but I chose DeMille."

Ayn had completed four screen originals. "I could barely write English," she later recalled, "I could read it, and I could speak it, although I constantly had to ask people to speak slowly, but my grammar was atrocious. A young cousin of mine put my writing into proper English. The originals were very flamboyant; one had a 'skyscraper hero' — he was a noble crook who went around jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper by means of a parachute — so you can imagine what the rest of them were like! I knew even at the time that they were too wild and too exaggerated; I had no real material yet, no real knowledge. But they were the best I could do."

7 Pronounced to rhyme with "mine."

8 I discovered it only in 1983, when I obtained copies of her birth certificate and her marriage license.

Chapter Seven

It was a warm summer day in 1926 when the girl who had been Alice Rosenbaum said her good-byes to her Chicago family and to the last remnant of her past life, and boarded the train for Los Angeles. In later years, she recalled very little of the train ride — only that she sat uncomfortably in a day coach for two days and two nights, and that a fellow passenger, who alighted before Los Angeles, gave her the pillow which the passenger had rented for twenty-five cents; Ayn had not rented a pillow, it was too expensive, and she remembered thinking that her seatmate must be wealthy indeed to afford such a luxury.

She did not remember the train ride, but she remembered, with the clarity of a vivid series of pictures unwinding before the screen of her consciousness, the days immediately following her arrival in Los Angeles.

When she reached the sunlit, sprawling city, Ayn headed for the YWCA in downtown Los Angeles; her relatives had suggested it as the cheapest and best place for her to stay. As she registered at the reception desk, chilled by the building's seediness, she mentioned that she was interested in working in pictures. "Go to the Hollywood Studio Club," the desk clerk urged her. "That's the place for you." It was the place for her.

In earlier years, girls on a limited budget who poured into Los Angeles to seek work in the movie industry could find only cheap rooming houses and cheaper hotels in which to live. In 1916, a group of Hollywood businessmen decided to rent a small, cramped old house on Carlos Place in Hollywood in which some of these girls could live inexpensively. Then Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille and Mary Pickford became interested in the young women's plight, and enlisted the help of the motion picture industry. They solicited contributions from studios and individuals, and an architect — Julia Morgan, who designed the Hearst mansion in San Simeon — was hired to design a larger and more comfortable house. The new Studio Club, on Lodi Place, a few blocks from Sunset and Vine, opened in May of 1926 under the directorship of the YWCA, housing eighty-eight girls in all branches of film — actresses, dancers, writers, costume designers, cutters, studio clerks and secretaries.

The three-story Mediterranean-style building, with its crisp white wicker furniture, its central courtyard with a fountain beneath which goldfish swam, its roof sundeck, its rehearsal hall, and its cheerful dining room, became a haven for young aspirants come to conquer Hollywood. Some of them did conquer it; at different periods over the years, until the club closed its doors for lack of money in the seventies, Janet Blair lived there, as did Barbara Britton, Linda Darnell, Barbara Hale, Evelyn Keyes, Dorothy Malone, Maureen O'Sullivan, Donna Reed, Marie Windsor, Rita Moreno, and Kim Novak; the biggest star arrived in 1948, registering as Norma Jean Baker; her name was later changed to Marilyn Monroe. But many of the girls found the pressures and struggle of Hollywood, the constant money problems, the part-time jobs they had to take as secretaries and waitresses when they weren't studying or auditioning, the endless rejections and disappointments, too difficult; a few attempted suicide, and others went home, in despair or resignation, to their cities and towns scattered across the United States.

When Ayn Rand timidly registered at the Studio Club, her dark hair straight, her square, solemn face innocent of makeup, her dark plain Russian clothes too warm for the California climate, and announced in her heavy accent that she intended to be a screenwriter — she must have seemed an odd apparition to the pretty, fresh, cheerful young American women who felt at home in their world — and in their skin — in a way that Ayn was never to feel. But Ayn was warmly welcomed. The girls knew that life was difficult in Hollywood, and whatever they could do for each other, they did; they helped each other with makeup and hairdos, they traded clothes for special occasions, they advised each other about the latest fashions and the latest studio call, they comforted each other when one of them failed to get an especially attractive role or lost a boyfriend. The Studio Club was not a rooming house; it was a home for these homeless young women, full of life and energy and good-fellowship. And it was a place to work; they were allowed to practice their art in the rehearsal hall, to play their songs on its grand piano, to test their work on one another; they staged showcases, with borrowed costumes, and the studios regularly sent scouts to see them.

Ayn paid her first week's rent — ten dollars for a room and two meals a day — to Marjorie Williams, the club's much-loved director. The club's two ironclad rules were explained to her: young men were welcome to attend the weekly parties and dinners, but were never allowed upstairs to the girls' rooms; and the rent must be paid on time. As Ayn's money ran short, she was to discover that although the first rule was stringently enforced, the second was not; like many of the girls, she was often behind in her rent, and Marjorie Williams waited with patient understanding until payments could be made. "During the two years I lived at the Studio Club," Ayn later said, "I had only the two meals a day — breakfast and dinner — that the Club provided. I could never afford lunch; I had to be very economical. And I was always hungry, no matter how much I ate; I could never seem to get enough. In Chicago, I had eaten constantly. It was because of the starvation in Russia; it took several years for the constant hunger to disappear."

Ten years later, Ayn Rand would write to Marjorie Williams: "The Studio Club is the only organization I know of personally that carries on, quietly and modestly, this great work which is needed so badly — help for young talent. It not only provides human, decent living accommodations, which a poor beginner could not afford anywhere else, but it provides that other great necessity of life: understanding. It makes a beginner feel that he is not, after all, an intruder with all the world laughing at him and rejecting him at every step, but that there are people who consider it worthwhile to dedicate their work to helping and encouraging him." After We the Living was published, she sent an autographed copy to Marjorie Williams; the inscription read: "From the little Russian girl in Room 318."

The day after the arrival of "the little Russian girl" in Hollywood and her establishment in Room 318 of the Hollywood Studio Club — it was a foggy, chill morning — Ayn took her letter of introduction and her screen stories and headed for the DeMille Studio in Culver City. Again one of the fortuitous happenings that marked her life occurred. She had been told to wait on a certain street corner for a bus with an orange roof. When she reached the corner, she saw buses going in both directions; when one arrived, she boarded it — only to discover, too late, that it was heading west instead of east and that its destination was Universal Studios, at the opposite end of the line. At Universal, she found the streetcar she needed; but she had lost more than an hour. Had she not made that mistake, two meetings, one that day and the other the following week — meetings which dramatically affected the rest of her life — would not have occurred.

When she at last reached the Colonial mansion that was the studio's main building, she found her way to the publicity department and presented her letter of introduction to "a very nice young woman." She soon realized that the interview was only a formality, that the publicity department had no power to arrange a screenwriting job for her.

Disheartened, with no idea of what her next step ought to be, Ayn headed down the studio driveway toward the exit gate.

As she walked, she happened to notice an open roadster — an unfamiliar, glamorous sight — parked against a curb; the driver was deep in conversation with a man who stood at the curb and whose face she never saw — because she stopped short, stunned, as she recognized the man at the wheel. It was Cecil B. DeMille. She had seen photographs of him in Russia, and she had never forgotten the distinctive face and manner. For long moments, she stood still, staring at him; then, aware that she must not be rude, she forced herself to continue walking. But when she reached the gate, she could not resist stopping again to catch one last glimpse of him before he drove by and out of her life.

The roadster pulled up to the gate — and stopped beside her. Smiling pleasantly, DeMille asked, "Why were you staring at me?" "I... I just arrived from Russia," she replied, stumbling over her words, miserably aware that her accent was heavier than usual, "and I'm very happy to see you." "Get in," DeMille said, opening the car door. Not knowing why, nor where they were going, and not caring, Ayn obeyed. As they drove, she told him that she wanted to be a screenwriter, and that he was her favorite director; he listened attentively, interested and amused. "He had a sense of drama," Ayn later said. "I think that's why it all happened." Much later, when Ayn was famous, DeMille released the story of their meeting, a story presumably written by a press agent: it said that Ayn had been starving, that DeMille had taken her to his home, and that Mrs. DeMille had placed her in the Studio Club.

They drove into the hills, where The King of Kings was shooting on location; they suddenly seemed to be driving on a Jerusalem street; it did not astonish her, because nothing could astonish her in her state of dreamlike unreality; anything was possible, and normal. "I was so breathlessly numb," Ayn always recalled, "that to this day I can remember the feeling. I probably showed it, but I controlled myself fairly well, I didn't get too emotional, but I was tense and bewildered, like being in an adventure that hadn't yet sunk in." As they left the car and walked onto the set, DeMille explained that if she wanted to work in pictures, she should begin by seeing how pictures were made. It was Ayn's first view of the shooting of a motion picture — and her first full day in Hollywood.

DeMille introduced her to a few people on the set — "and they acted as if I were visiting royalty. I learned later that there was a whole court around him, and anyone to whom he showed favoritism was carefully watched; it was a real Louis XIV setup." Entranced, she watched the shooting until the end of the day. Then DeMille approached her to ask, "Do you want to come tomorrow?" He gave her a personally signed pass — "And I went home dazed."

For the next four days, Ayn returned to the studio each morning to watch the shooting of a major movie. Each day, DeMille was on the set; each day, he gave her another pass. Shyly, not wanting to intrude, she never approached him; but at least once during the day he would come to talk to her about how pictures were produced and how screenwriters worked.

Lunch was served daily for the mobs of extras, but "I felt I wasn't entitled to eat; I was only a visitor. When I was asked if I wanted lunch, I said I wasn't hungry. The girls at the Studio Club told me that nobody would mind if I had lunch, but I never did — but I envied the marvelous cafeteria food, served at long wooden tables under a big tent."

At the end of the week, DeMille asked her, "Are you all right financially? What are you doing?" "I'm all right," she answered quickly, appalled that he might think she wanted money from him, "I have enough. But I want to work." "You can have a job as an extra if you want it," he said.

Ayn was hired as an extra, working with three hundred other extras on the huge mob scenes, at a salary of $7.50 a day. It seemed a fortune. "I worked for so long that I could live on my earnings for the next year; I worked daily for several months. The number of extras needed varied at times, but DeMille kept me on every day that extras were required at all. He probably liked me, in a sort of indifferent manner, and he liked the unusual circumstances. And he was interested in discovering talent."

On her first day as an extra, she was sent to the wardrobe department to receive a costume. "The costumes were thrown out at random from big baskets, they didn't even look at you, and I got something that was horrible, like sackcloth, and I had to put on dirty body makeup and a black wig. I didn't like it, and I complained that it was dirty, so they sent me to a young assistant designer; he gave me special scarves and neckpieces, and fixed me up beautifully, he made me a patrician lady instead of a street beggar." The young assistant was Adrian, later to be one of Hollywood's most distinguished designers and, with his wife, Janet Gaynor, Ayn's neighbor and friend.

"I met Joseph Schildkraut on the set. He played Judas in the movie, and he was a big star. He took me to lunch one day, and he somewhat flirted, and gave me an autographed picture. He was enormously good-looking and he was marvelous in his costume. I'd seen him once in Russia, in an earlier DeMille picture."

Ayn plucked up the courage to tell DeMille about the screen originals she had written, and at his request, she gave them to him. "He didn't read them himself, he gave them to the head of the scenario department, an old-maidish woman who disliked me on sight and I disliked her; she gave the originals a very bad report: she said that they were improbable and farfetched, not human enough. Even then, with all the faults those stories had, I knew this was the enemy; I sensed something anti-romantic in her. I still hate her to this day... No, I don't hate her, but I dislike her intensely."

This episode marked the beginning of a criticism of Ayn's writing that she was to hear throughout her life: that her characters and events were too romanticized and extravagant, that "real people don't behave that way," that she must write about people as they are, about human frailty and failure. She was to hear the criticism throughout her life — and she was to react to it exactly as she reacted the first time: with contempt and revulsion. Untouched within her was her conviction that the purpose of art was to show the heroic potential of man; that is what she wanted, what she loved, and what she would do with her days on earth.

Each morning, Ayn left the Studio Club in the dimness of predawn; she was required to be at the studio at 6 A.M. to report for makeup and dress. No buses ran that early, and she had to take two streetcars to reach Culver City; the ride took more than two hours. She didn't mind the long ride. "It was necessary, and I felt very businesslike."

It was a morning during Ayn's second week in Hollywood. She sat on the streetcar, gazing abstractedly out of the window. "I didn't see him enter, but then I noticed him some benches away. I suddenly caught sight of his face — and that was it."

He was tall and slender; a strand of fair hair fell over his forehead; he wore an open shirt, and slacks over long legs. The skin of his face was taut against high cheekbones. His mouth was long and thin. His eyes were a cold, clear blue. He was half dozing, his body relaxed with the boneless elegance of a cat.

Ayn felt a shock of astonishment — a sense almost of recognition — and an emotion of such intensity that she could not know if it was pleasure or pain. She would recall thinking that if she were a painter and were asked to put on canvas her own private vision of the perfect human face and figure, it would be this face and this figure that she would struggle to create. She felt as if she were chained to her seat — or chained to him — unable to move.

"Don't let them tell me about love at first sight," she said in future years. "It was love at first sight. I was always on the lookout for my kind of face, I often saw faces that seemed interesting, but here was my ideal face. I have never seen a face that would fit my view of the ideal man quite as well." Here was Cyrus, here was Enjolras, here was everything she loved and everything she wanted.

Then she felt the jolt of a sudden terror: he would get off the streetcar and she would never see him again. Desperately, she tried to think of a way to speak to him, of some excuse, any excuse, but her shyness and her sense that it would be improper held her paralyzed. How could she approach a total stranger? He was not a stranger to her; he was someone she had known all her life, and loved all her life, but she was a stranger to him. There was nothing she could do. She sat very still, huddled into herself, her mind racing helplessly and hopelessly, feeling as if the world had simultaneously begun — and ended.

Chapter Eight

Ayn held her breath as the streetcar made its periodic stops and the man did not rise to his feet. Then the streetcar — and her heart — stopped at Culver City. She had to get up, she had to leave, she could not be late for her job. Slowly, painfully, she stood up — and saw that he was rising too, and hurrying to the exit door. She watched for a moment in dazed disbelief as he got off the streetcar and headed toward the studio gate; then she quickly followed him as if a magnet were pulling her in his wake.

Ayn dashed to the dressing rooms to change into her costume, and rushed to the set. He was the first person she saw.

"He was magnificent," she would recall, describing his appearance decades later as if her wondering eyes were still seeing him. "He was wearing a short tunic, and a big toga over it with an embroidered collar, and sandals laced to the knees. There was a Roman-looking scarf around his head, with the ends streaming down. The costume was enormously becoming. He was an actor, playing a bit part in the movie. Later, from memory, I drew a picture of him in that costume. I couldn't forget his profile, and how he looked with that headdress.

"I spent the next three days just staring at him on the huge, crowded set, watching his every move, and trying to figure out how to meet him. I watched to see if anyone spoke to him whom I knew, but he was enormously anti-social and of course I liked that. His manner suggested an aloof, confident self-sufficiency. I never caught him speaking to anyone, he always sat alone, his every position graceful... I was following him like a camera. One day, when he was sitting on a flight of steps, I sat beside him, staring at him, but he didn't turn; and I didn't have the courage to talk to him.

"By the fourth day, I had decided what to do. They were filming a big street scene in Jerusalem, Christ was carrying the cross to the Crucifixion, surrounded by a mob; the extras were to mill about chaotically, some shaking their fists and yelling insults at Christ, others weeping and pleading with the Roman officials. The scene was done over many times. Each time, I watched very carefully to see where he went; he had a special routine to follow and a specific pattern of action, since he was a bit player. After I had my plan all calculated, they began shooting the scene again. I walked toward him, stepped directly into the path I knew he had to follow — and stuck my foot out. He stumbled and almost fell. He apologized, and we began talking. I don't know to this day what we said; all I really heard was that his name was Frank O'Connor.

"At the end of the day, I ran to the cashier for my pay; I knew he would have to come there too, so I stood aside until I saw him approaching; as if by accident, I got in the line next to him, and we talked again. He was just asking me how I got home — much later, I learned that he had intended to take me home — when someone he knew came up and offered him a lift, and he took it. I blame him for his indecisiveness — he told me later he regretted accepting the lift, so why did he? His brothers told me that when he got home that day, he said 'I met a very interesting and funny Russian girl on the set. I couldn't understand a word she said.'

"The sad and very painful part was that he had finished work that day, which I didn't know. When I got to the set next day, I waited to see him, but he didn't come; I waited for days before I learned that he wasn't coming back. I didn't know his address, or how to find him, he wasn't in the phone book, and I didn't know anyone who might know him. I finally went to the casting office, and told them I had a book of his which I wanted to return, and I needed his address; but they said they didn't have it. He had vanished, and there was no way for me to find him.

"For the next nine months, I drove one girlfriend of mine at the Studio Club — she was kind of my confidante — almost crazy: I could talk about nothing but Frank. I called him only 'the DeMille extra' — because I didn't want to give anyone his name. I was seriously in love. It was an absolute that this was the man I wanted. In those days, I fully believed that appearance showed character, that my type of face necessarily showed a good character, my kind of man. I was not fully wrong, I couldn't yet really distinguish which part is physical and which spiritual, as I could today; and in Frank's case I was right. It was a combination of how he looked and how he acted on the set, the style of the personality. I loved the aloof, aristocratic look, the look of something strong and independent, something cold and graceful. Even Frank’s touch of repression goes with my type. I was desperately afraid that I would never see him again... but yet, deeper than the terror, I would often feel that I would see him again, that it would happen because it had to happen." The entire event — from Ayn's first sight of Frank O'Connor on the streetcar to the edge of calm certainty that she would somehow find him again — has so much the stamp of Ayn Rand's personality and character that if it had not occurred, one could invent it and know that it might have happened. Her instant and never-to-be-altered decision that here was her type of face and therefore her type of man — her timidity about approaching him, despite the depth of her feeling — her carefully thought out and executed plan to meet him — her positive reaction to his "anti-social aloofness" — her childlike helplessness in the face of the practical problem of finding him again — her refusal to tell her friend his name, because it was too private, too personal, too precious to be shared — the desperation of her longing and loneliness for a man with whom she had exchanged only a few words — the deep, oddly serene conviction that they would meet again because it was right that they should meet again — all contain the unique, intriguing mixture of elements that formed the soul and view of the world that was hers in childhood and was hers in old age. And all are permeated with the fantasy elements — the fiction-like re-creation of a man whom she found physically beautiful into the heroic being of her own need — that was to become so marked in Ayn's relationships with people.

Among Ayn's acquaintances at the Studio Club was Virginia Sale, who was to become a well-known screen and vaudeville comedienne, and who, many years later, clearly recalled Ayn Rand. She spoke of Ayn's reaction to the disappearance of Frank. "Ayn used to weep in her room," Virginia said. "We'd all hear her crying and crying. We'd go to her door, and we'd say 'Can we do anything for you, Ayn?' And she would say, in her Russian accent, 'Go back! Go back!' She wouldn't talk to us about what was wrong, she wouldn't let us help. One weekend, we were terribly worried about her; she didn't return to the Studio Club after work, and we didn't know where she was. We were afraid she had committed suicide. But she returned after the weekend. She seemed all right, though very sad, and she wouldn't say where she had been. We never found out."

It was a situation for which nothing in Ayn's psychology had prepared her: she had learned to deal with disappointment, she had learned to deal with frustration, she had learned to deal with pain — so long as action and control were still open to her. But helplessness in the face of something she passionately wanted — and the lack of control over her destiny which that represented — was and remained the unbearable, the unacceptable. All avenues seemed closed, and she gritted her teeth against the agony; she could do nothing but hope, without the possibility of action.

Her sole emotional salvation was in her work, where she could take action. Not with regard to writing, but at least in her job as movie extra; that was the means for which writing was the end, and she would do it as well as it could be done.

Within a few weeks. The King of Kings was almost completed. DeMille approached Ayn on the set one day, and offered a job as a junior writer to the young woman he affectionately called "Caviar." She would be employed to do detailed synopses of properties he owned, and to outline her suggestions for adapting them to the screen; if her ideas were useful, other writers would complete the adaptations. She would be paid twenty-five dollars a week.

She was not yet rich and famous; but she was in Hollywood, she was a professional screenwriter — and twenty-five dollars a week seemed not far from riches.

To her deep disappointment, she found the work painful, boring, and frustrating. "The stories they gave me were impossible, and I didn't do well. I had terrible 'squirms,' I felt blocked, and couldn't come up with ideas I really liked. The first story they gave me was entitled 'My Dog,"' she was to recall with a shudder, "so you can just imagine how I felt." Although her adaptation suggestions were never used in full, she was pleased, when she attended films made from scripts she had struggled with, to see that at least some of her ideas were used — a small dramatic touch or a stylized line of dialogue here and there.

In the summer of 1927, DeMille gave her a story entitled The Skyscraper, a screen original about the rivalry of two construction workers in love with the same girl. Ayn made an appointment with the construction superintendent of a new building going up on Hollywood Boulevard, in order to interview him and to watch the men working; she knew she had to learn about construction in order to adapt the story properly.9 When she arrived at the building, a message awaited her: the superintendent had been detained, and would not be able to see her for an hour. Ayn walked aimlessly along Hollywood Boulevard, then decided to go to a nearby library and read until it was time for her appointment. She entered the library — and saw Frank.

The event which "had to happen," happened.

Frank, who was also waiting for a delayed appointment, was reading a book. When Ayn saw him — and stopped still as if paralyzed — he looked up from his book, and smiled at her. He had not forgotten her. He rose to his feet, took her arm, and said "Let's go out."

"We walked for blocks, just talking," she would later say. "We talked about movies, and the movie originals that he wanted to write, all outrageous comedies. He talked very eagerly — which is unusual for him to this day." Unusual for Ayn, she talked very little, ecstatic to be beside Frank and to hear the sound of his voice. But she quickly asked him where he lived; she was not going to lose him again. He lived with his two elder brothers: Nick, a reporter on the Los Angeles Evening Herald, and Joe, an actor; the three brothers had taken rooms in downtown Los Angeles, at the home of an Army friend of Nick's; that was why she had not been able to find Frank in the telephone book: it was the friend who was listed, not the O'Connors. She had not needed to ask: as they walked, Frank invited her to his home for dinner that evening. The relationship that was to last more than fifty years had begun.

Throughout those fifty years, people who knew them slightly, and even people who knew them well, confessed to one another their inability to understand the bond that had drawn Ayn and Frank together and held them together. They seemed so oddly mismatched a couple — the handsome, elegant gentleman, quiet, unintellectual and passive, and the small, aggressive, ferociously intellectual woman. And yet, if one examines their lives before their first encounter, one feels that their meeting and their enduring relationship had a quality of the inevitable; that had they not found each other, they would have found startlingly similar loves, similar mates, similar life partners.

Charles Francis O'Connor was born September 22, 1897, in the small steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to Dennis and Mary Agnes O'Connor. The O'Connor family consisted of seven children, Nick, Joe, Frank, Agnes, Margaret, Bill, and Elizabeth; three other children had been born, but two died at birth and the third of scarlet fever at the age of six. Mary Agnes — her name had been "Minerva," but when she married Dennis she had converted to Catholicism and abandoned her pagan name — considered herself a cut above her husband; her father had been a violin maker and music teacher; Mary Agnes had been brought up in a cultured background and with expectations for her future that were dashed when she fell in love with the handsome young Irishman with his twinkling blue eyes and reddish-blond hair and tall, muscular frame. Dennis was a steel worker who had little education and no ambition except to do well at his work; it was not work that his wife respected. Dennis, too, thought that the aristocratic Mary Agnes was a cut above him; his respect and admiration for her intimidated him, silencing him when she used the term "steel worker" to his sons as an epithet.

His sons learned very young that their proud, strong mother had one overriding ambition: to bring them up to have a different, better life than their father; they were not to remain in provincial Lorain; they were to be educated; they were to understand art and music — and, above all, they were not to be physical laborers. Despite her dark-haired, blue-eyed fragility, Mary Agnes was a stem disciplinarian: the children's table manners had to be exemplary, their clothes spotless, their carriage erect. When Frank was not yet ten years old, his mother spent long, exhausting hours washing and ironing for the nuns at the parochial school the children attended so that the nuns would give Frank singing lessons; each Sunday, he obediently took the streetcar to nearby Cleveland to sing in the cathedral choir. She purchased a piano at a crushing cost, and Nick took piano lessons. Mary Agnes's sons were to have the life she had missed, she told them. She did not tell them that they must despise their father, but the message was clear and her power over the boys was complete; they loved their gentle, hard-drinking father, but they did not respect the life he had chosen.

It would have been difficult not to love Dennis. He was a warm, kindly man, and his children knew that he would never physically punish them. If they had misbehaved, Dennis would arrive home from work to find them on their knees, praying ardently; he would wait patiently to scold them until they had finished their prayers — but they were careful not to finish until, tired of waiting and unwilling to interrupt so devout an activity, he sighed resignedly and left the room.

Mrs. David (Mimi) Sutton, the daughter of Frank's sister Agnes, remembered her grandfather with great affection, and remembered especially the color and gentleness of his personality. She recalled enchanted afternoons spent with Dennis in his den, curled up in a deep leather chair in front of the potbellied stove and reading, knowing that all was well with the world because her grandfather was there. She recalled his old seaman friend with the glass eye, who needed a place to stay for- a few days; Dennis gave him an extra room — and Tom stayed for ten years, doing chores to pay for his keep; Dennis never suggested to him that it might be time to leave. "I can picture him so clearly," Mimi said many years after Dennis's death. "First thing every morning, he would go down to the kitchen and pour himself a glass of beer. Then he'd break a raw egg into it, and pour in a shot of whiskey — the whiskey was home brew and he made it himself. I can still see the prettiness of the sun- shining through the kitchen window into the glass, and the egg making a lump in his throat as he drank it down — and then he'd say a great, satisfied 'Ah!' When he was dying — he was in his late seventies — and in the hospital, almost too weak to speak, with his children around him, he asked for a drink. The nun who was nursing him indignantly refused, but Nick insisted that it no longer mattered, and poured him a shot of whiskey. Dennis took the glass, drank it down in one motion, said a great, satisfied 'Ah!' — and died."

The boys worshipped their domineering mother, Frank's sister Agnes would recall. And Mary Agnes was proud of her three eldest sons. Besides being obedient and gentlemanly, they were remarkably attractive, tall, long-legged, with finely drawn aristocratic features — Joe with his mop of shining blond hair and mysteriously aloof manner; Nick with bright blue, penetrating eyes, and a wickedly dry humor; and Frank with soft, light-brown hair, eyes of a slatey blue, and an endearing gentleness of spirit.

The O'Connor children led the cheerfully active lives of young people growing up in a small town. Frank loved anything that was small and helpless; when a neighbor's chickens were sick, he would sneak into the hen roost and steal them, carrying them home to nurse them gently back to health and to apply tiny splints to broken wings. His neighbors learned where to look for their missing animals, but if they had not healed, Frank would stoutly deny the theft, sneaking them back to their owners only when they were fully recovered.

The one sour note in their childhood was that the O'Connor children hated the parochial school they attended and the martinet nuns who taught them. With the exception of Elizabeth, none of the children were religious in later life. Frank once said that when he was only six, he had, as usual, been taken to church one Sunday morning; but this particular week the priest was explaining that all babies are born in sin, and must be cleansed of their evil. The child was shocked at the idea; he knew that sin meant lying and stealing; how could an infant lie and steal? If that was what religion taught, he decided, then it didn't make sense; there was something wrong with it, something bad.

When the first primitive two-reel moving pictures came to Lorain, Frank was immediately fascinated by the medium. At his instigation, the O'Connor children began putting on plays, in barns and attics and basements, for their neighbors and friends. If they did not find a play they wanted to do, Nick would write one; they borrowed makeshift costumes where they could, slathered on makeup, built primitive sets out of whatever materials they could scrounge, robbed a nearby graveyard for flowers when they needed them — giving their sisters hair ribbons pulled off the bunches of flowers — and sold tickets for which they charged one pin.

In her early forties, Mary Agnes developed breast cancer, and underwent a radical mastectomy, an operation rarely performed in those days. When she recovered, she found it painful to move her right arm, and Joe, Nick, and Frank learned to shop for groceries, to cook, to set the table and to serve, eager to spare their mother. A few years later, the cancer recurred and could not be halted; when their mother died at the age of forty-five, the children were emotionally devastated. So terrible was the blow to seventeen-year-old Nick that he attempted suicide, and fifteen-year-old Frank's behavior, for many months, was uncharacteristically brusque and insensitive.

Shortly after Mary Agnes's death, Frank, Joe, and Nick decided to go to New York, where the major movie studios were located. All three were interested in working in films, although Nick was later to become a newspaper reporter. They left Lorain a year later, and gradually worked their way from city to city toward their destination, picking up whatever jobs they could find. It was almost three years before they reached New York.

Thomas (Tommy) Carr, who had been an actor since childhood and later directed both movies and television, knew the three O'Connors in their days in New York, and later knew Ayn as well. "It was tough for young actors in New York at that time" he said many years later. "And Frank was not a very dedicated actor. He tried to make a living, like we all did, but he didn't go all out for it. He was very quiet and soft-spoken, a thoughtful and considerate person. I never heard anyone say a negative word about him, not then and not even after Ayn became famous; everyone liked him."

In his years in New York before meeting Ayn, Frank struggled hard enough to ensure at least a precarious living; he made the rounds of the studios regularly and found occasional bit parts and work as an extra.

Despite his startling good looks, parts were difficult to obtain for a young man without professional experience or contacts. During World War I, Joe and Nick left to join the Army. They were sent to France; it was an experience from which they would come home, two years later, physically shattered. Both had been gassed in the fighting. Both were frail and often ill for the rest of their lives, and worked only occasionally, subsisting on government disability pensions.

One July day in Central Park, Frank helped a truck driver to change a flat tire. What could he do in return? the driver asked. "Take me there," Frank said, pointing to the name printed on the side of the truck: D. W. GRIFFITH STUDIO. By the end of the day, he was helping an assistant director to repair a boat at the Griffith studio in Mamaroneck; by the end of the week, he was an extra on the set of Orphans of the Storm. During the filming of the picture, he worked in almost every department of the studio: he worked in the wardrobe, he designed costumes, he painted sets, he assisted the director, he was an extra in mob scenes, he had a bit part in the movies opening scene.

When Griffith left to make a movie in Europe, Frank remained in Mamaroneck, working for a department store, delivering furniture and decorating windows until Griffith returned and the studio reopened. This was the pattern of the next several years: while a movie was in production, Frank worked at the studio; in the intervals between productions, he took whatever jobs he could find.

In 1925, Griffith left permanently for Hollywood, where the studios were moving. Frank decided to follow the studios, and to join his two brothers, who were now living in Hollywood. Once again, he worked his way to his destination, as steward on a freighter going through the Panama Canal. His first movie job in Hollywood was as a bit player in The King of Kings. The first person he spoke with on the set was a "very-interesting and funny Russian girl" named Ayn Rand.

Many years after their meeting, Frank reminisced about what had drawn him to Ayn in the early months of their relationship. "One of the most striking things about her was her complete openness — the absence of any trace of deviousness. The total honesty. You knew that it would be inconceivable for her ever to act against her own principles. Other people professed so many things that had no connection to what they actually did. But you knew that anything Ayn said, she meant... She had a tremendous capacity for enjoyment. Whether it was a piece of music she liked or a story or some present I bought her that cost a dollar — she

was so expressively and radiantly delighted... She constantly passed value judgments. If she liked something, she liked it violently. If she didn't like something, she would communicate that violently, too... When we were with other people, she was reserved, even shy — until they began discussing ideas. Then all the shyness vanished. She was as confident then, in her early twenties, as she is now... The people we knew all talked about the things they were going to do in the future, if they got 'the breaks.' Ayn never spoke that way. She never thought about 'breaks.' She was convinced that it was up to her — and she was absolutely determined that she would get where she wanted to go. It didn't matter how difficult it was, or what hell she had to go through. She never wondered if she was going to succeed. The only question was how long it would take."

It was evident to everyone who knew them, then and through the years, that Frank deeply respected Ayn and was proud of her achievements. But he rarely spoke of such feelings. Ayn often spoke about what Frank meant to her. His physical appearance was never irrelevant to her love for him; she once told a friend — more seriously than not — "I married him because he is so beautiful." But most of all, she would say, her appreciation was based on what she defined as their deep and enduring value-affinity. She spoke of him as a man who shared her most intimate view of life, who understood her and her work, her loves and her hates, her joys and her suffering and her passionate aspirations, and who stood by her unflinchingly, as no one else ever had or would; she spoke of him as a man who, in his deepest being, held the same sense of life she did, worshipped the same values, was dedicated to the same concept of rationality. It was clear that he was the only human being she ever accepted fully into "her universe." She knew that Frank did not have the words for the convictions they shared. Although he would listen quietly to her discussion of philosophical concepts, he could bring little to the conversation. But that always appeared to be unimportant to Ayn; with Frank, she could accept and cherish an emotional understanding that he could not make explicit. Despite the disasters that were to occur in their life together, despite the bottomless agony she was to cause him, he was the love of her life. Always, there was Frank — and there was the rest of the world. She had no other loves before him.

Yet the friends who knew them most intimately were to agree that the man Ayn spoke of in such extravagant terms had little to do with the real human being who was Frank. As they listened to her praise his intelligence, his insights, his philosophical and psychological perceptiveness, they were often embarrassed — as Frank, too, appeared to be — by the nature of her compliments. It seemed that she could not allow Frank merely to be consort to a queen; she needed to announce to the world — and to herself — the validity of her choice of a husband. They felt — and they wondered if Frank, too, felt it — that his actual character and virtues were not visible to or appreciated by Ayn, that she responded, instead, to the heroic virtues he did not possess. Frank was a gentle, kind, sensitive man; he was not a giant of the intellect, he was not a world-mover. But for Ayn, he had to be a hero. "I could only love a hero," she had said. "Femininity is hero-worship," she had said. If she were to find herself the worshipper of a deeply flawed man, what would that mean about her soul and her femininity?

The words Ayn and Frank spoke about each other, and even the view between the lines in their attitudes toward each other, seem only a part of the picture, only a part of the intense bond that linked them. The picture has another component, crucial to its meaning and composition and to the sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes sunlit colors that formed its background: that component arose from the markedly similar patterns in their experiences long before they met.

Patterns. Each human life has its own unique recurring patterns, its own unique repetitions, from childhood to old age-patterns of action and emotion and choice that form a central part of it. And perhaps it is our experience of the relationship between our parents, in childhood — our observations of the two people most important to us, for good or for ill — that first tells us what love is to be for us, tells us what it means when a man and woman choose to spend their lives together, tells us what is the appropriate way for a couple to function and interrelate. This unnamed and unidentified conclusion profoundly influences our later emotional responses, influences whom we choose, whom we love, and how we behave in our most passionate human dealings; it forms the patterns that our loving relationships are to follow. Some people, as the years pass, question their early conclusions, alter them, and go on to make choices widely at variance with their youthful patterns. Most do not. Some change the patterns of their romantic choices. Ayn and Frank did not.

Frank, as a child, saw a vivid and unmistakable pattern in the relationship of his parents — even in the relationships of his grandparents and other relatives. Dennis O'Connor's mother, Bridget, was a strong, tyrannical woman, who ruled her home and her passive husband with an iron determination. Bridget's sister, Ellen, was cast from the same mold; she was a woman of great fire and unanswerable will; at the age of eighty-two, contemptuously refusing any offers of help, she could be seen laying cement for her sidewalk. Mary Agnes, Frank's proudly domineering mother, made all the important decisions in her home and about the raising of "her" children; she strode through her short life with a band of steel hardening her spine, her eyes fixed steadfastly on her goal of improving the lot of her sons.

Without any significant exception, the men who surrounded Frank in his childhood — including his beloved elder brothers — although they were distinctively different personalities in many ways, shared common characteristics: they were kindly, passive personalities, emotionally repressed, hiding their resentments and their pains behind a wall of silence, controlled by the powerful women in their lives. Without any important exception — including his own sisters — the women who surrounded Frank were the exact opposite: dominant, aggressive, ambitious, ruling their husbands by means of the husbands' admiration for them and by the single-tracked intensity of their purposes.

For the young boy — and for the man he became — this must have seemed to be the way life was, the nature of men and women, and the inevitable nature of the relationships among them. It is not surprising that this view became embedded in his subconscious mind, to function as a powerful motivating force. It is not surprising that he chose Ayn Rand.

If one examines the photograph, taken in St. Petersburg about 1908, of the toddler Alice Rosenbaum and her family, it is with a sense of deja vu — deja vu after having investigated the men and women in Frank's family. In the center of the photograph, surrounded by her children, their mates, and her grandchildren, Ayn's maternal grandmother sits solidly, her heavy body erect and confident, her square, expressionless face under tightly pulled-back hair rigid and severe, her mouth held inflexibly taut — clearly the feared matriarch and the soul of her family. Beside her sits her husband, his shoulders somewhat slumped, his eyes soft and sad and without intensity. To the grandmother's right are Fronz and Anna Rosenbaum, Alice's parents. Anna is leaning forward, as if ready to leap into motion; her large dark eyes are wide and intense, flashing even in a still picture; one sees the energy in her posture and her face — but her mouth, like her mother's, is held tight and tense with resolve; her posture, like her mother's, is confident and precise. Beside her is Fronz. Fronz and Anna lean in opposite directions, as if avoiding each other. Like his father-in-law, Fronz's shoulders sag faintly; the fingers of his fleshy hands are parted and lax; his body seems to be moving backward, as if away from the watching camera. His heavy-lidded eyes are not fully open, as if he does not care intently to perceive the world; his eyes hold a look of quietly uncontested sadness.

The message of the photograph is confirmed by the facts of the life of Ayn's parents. It was Anna who was the dominant figure in the Rosenbaum household, as Ayn, despite her lack of warm feeling for Anna, always acknowledged. Fronz was a quiet, retiring man, content to leave decisions in the capable hands of his wife. He had his work — the exception to his passivity, for in that area he performed with considerable success — and he had his weekend games of whist; he seemed to require nothing more. It was Anna's firm convictions that were expressed and Fronz who listened silently, even when her convictions were not his. It was Anna who decided what the children should be taught and how they should be raised. It was Anna who determined the direction her family's lives should take. It was Anna who decided, after the Communist revolution, that the family must seek safety in the Crimea; it was Anna who found the way to get them there. It was Anna who supported the family when they returned to Petrograd, despite Fronz's disapproval of her working for the Communists. It was Anna who decided that Ayn should be allowed to emigrate to America, despite Fronz's fears for her safety. It was Anna who took responsibility for handling the complicated process of securing Ayn's passport and making the necessary arrangements. In the life of his family, Fronz was a dim, passive figure; Anna was the power.

It was also clear that Ayn saw nothing remarkable in the relationship between her parents. Even this woman of so uniquely a firsthand vision, carried the emotional baggage born of the characters of Fronz and Anna Rosenbaum. Her mother's dominance appeared to her both normal and appropriate. When she spoke of her early years, Ayn would say, again and again, "Mother decided" — always without comment or question. Like Frank, she had accepted as valid the pattern of the marriage she was born into. For the young girl — and for the woman she became — this seemed to be the way life was, this seemed to be the nature of men and women, and the inevitable nature of the relationships among them. It is not surprising that her view became embedded in her subconscious mind, to function as a powerful motivating force. It is not surprising that she chose Frank O'Connor.

The period following Ayn's rediscovery of Frank was one of the happiest of her life. They began to see each other regularly, to go walking, to movies, to dinner, to visit Frank's brothers and his friends. She remembered always the moment when he came to the Studio Club for the first time, and she saw the beauty of his tall figure moving across the room toward her. She remembered the day he brought her an impossibly extravagant bunch of golden chrysanthemums, the first flowers she had ever received, which she kept in their vase long after they had died. And she remembered the first time he kissed her: they were in the rumble seat of a friend's car, passing the dim shapes of orange groves; she remembered the sweet smell of the oranges, the clear, starlit summer sky of California, the touch of his narrow mouth on hers, spreading its heat through her body. At the Studio Club, she was never far from the telephone, waiting eagerly for the sound of Frank's voice. "Sometimes, he didn't call when he said he would, and two days passed. When there was no call, I would sometimes call him — at a desperate cost emotionally. I believed that a girl shouldn't do that, but I had to, I couldn't stand it, it wasn't by decision, it was by breakdown. Years later, he told me that he didn't call when he wasn't working and had no money to take me out."

But this period — in a different respect — was one of the hardest of Ayn's life. DeMille closed his studio, moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as an independent producer — and she was out of a job. For the next year and a half, she had to take whatever jobs she could find. She found employment as a waitress, but "I was fired after the first day. I didn't even properly know the names of the food, so I didn't know what to carry to what customers, and I didn't fake too well." At her next waitressing job, at a roadside diner, "I lasted a whole week. I was beginning to be good, but they let me go because there was not much business." Calls would come to the Studio Club with offers of temporary jobs; Ayn drearily stuffed envelopes for a few endless weeks. She tried to sell newspaper subscriptions to the Hollywood Citizen: "I sold one. That would be the last thing in the world I would know how to do."

There was one month, after she had moved out of the Studio Club, when she lived on thirty cents a day. In the morning, she ate a chocolate bar in her room, with hot water from the bathroom; during the day, she ate a can of cold spaghetti or beans. By the end of the month, enduring painful stomach cramps, she went to a restaurant and ordered a bowl of soup. "I held my poverty against myself," she would later say. "I had expected to be famous in a year at most, but I had learned that that was too fast to expect. I didn't blame anyone for my poverty. I knew I had no profession, I was not trained for anything but unskilled labor, and I had no time to train."

When she worked as a waitress, she took jobs in outlying districts of Los Angeles, in the slum areas, more than an hour's streetcar ride from Hollywood. Her reason, she would proudly recall when she spoke of those days, was to be certain Frank would not see her there. He never knew of her financial hardships, nor the sort of work she was doing. She was not ashamed of her work, but he, too, was struggling on an irregular income, and she did not want him to think that she needed help. It was typical of her psychology that she refused to share her pain with him. A passage she would later write for Atlas Shrugged, describing Hank Rearden's thoughts as he faces Dagny Taggart, equally, she once said, described Ayn's attitude of that time: "He grasped a feeling that he had always experienced, but never identified because it had always been absolute and immediate: a feeling that forbade him ever to face her in pain. It was much more than the pride of wishing to conceal his suffering: it was the feeling that suffering must not be granted recognition in her presence, that no form of claim between them should ever be motivated by pain and aimed at pity. It was not pity that he brought here or came here to find."

Despite her financial worries, despite the fact that she could not do the only work she cared to do, it was in her first years with Frank that the warmth, the charm and the quality of youth in Ayn's personality blossomed as never before. The girls at the Studio Club had found her grim and remote; she had not joined in their activities or discussions; she had no part, and clearly no interest, in their social life. Each month, a dancing party was held at the club; Ayn never attended. The girls traded clothes and silk stockings and gossip; Ayn, focused as always on the future, haunted by the pressure of time, severely went her own way. But now, in her happiness, they saw a new, a kinder and gentler, part of her.

Virginia Sale would later speak of an event that typified what the girls saw as "the new Ayn." Virginia was working on a one-woman comedy show, and discovered, to her astonishment, that Ayn laughed uproariously at her jokes. The night she first showed her act to girls at the club, Ayn stood behind a drape, enthusiastically banging pots and pans to create the required sound effects. She told Virginia that her show was wonderful and could not help but succeed, and Virginia, who had been considering taking it on the vaudeville circuit, and heartened by Ayn's enthusiasm, decided to do so — with great success.

The cost of board and room at the club had gone from ten to eleven dollars shortly after Ayn began seeing Frank, and she was often late in her payments. Marjorie Williams, the club's director, took an interest in all the girls, and was troubled by Ayn's struggles and her poverty and the shabby clothes she wore. One day, a woman in the motion picture industry, a patron of the club, offered to give a needy girl a gift of fifty dollars. She asked Marjorie Williams to recommend a deserving recipient, and Miss Williams suggested Ayn. A few days after receiving the money, a beaming Ayn walked into the director's office, carrying a large box. "Would you like to see what I got with the money?" she asked. She opened the box — to proudly display her new black lingerie. It is a story which is still told in Hollywood.

A year after encountering Frank in the library, Ayn moved out of the Studio Club. She wanted a place where she could spend time alone with Frank, and she took a minuscule furnished room, struggling with more determination than ever to meet the small rental payments. Ayn's sexual relationship with Frank, the first for both of them, began. When, many years later, she admitted that she and Frank had made love prior to their marriage, it was in a manner of shy pride: shyness at revealing so intimate a secret, and pride in what she saw as her daring flouting of convention. Sex was always very important in her life, and central to her relationship with Frank; physically, he was her type of man, and as such, powerfully sexually attractive to her; the intensity that was her trademark dominated every aspect of her relationship with Frank.

"I don't remember how the question of marriage came up," she was to say. "There was no 'official' proposal. It came about by unspoken understanding."

Several of the young people who were friendly with Ayn and Frank during those days have since said, separately, that "everyone knew" the reason for the marriage was the imminent expiration of Ayn's visa; she had had several extensions, but no more were possible. Tommy Carr said, "Frank and Ayn got married so that she could stay in this country Her time was running out, and she had to do something about it, and that was the way she solved it. No one thought Frank was in love with her; he did it for her, basically; he was that kind of a guy, very easygoing, very kind. It wasn't a question of love, but of convenience. That was common knowledge. All my family and our friends thought it was a very nice thing for him to do." And Millicent Paton, who was friendly with Nick O'Connor and through him with Ayn and Frank, echoed the same belief, adding, "Frank didn't seem to be in love. He was fond of her, he respected her, but one didn't have the feeling of love. Nick told me he married her because of the visa issue."

And Ayn once said, many years after her marriage, recalling with amusement that Frank and Nick had joked about which one of them should save her from deportation by marrying her, "Ours was a shotgun wedding — with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun." All of their friends knew that Ayn adored Frank; it was clear in her words, in her manner, in the way she looked at him, in her reliance on him, on her need to have him always with her. But one never fully knew what Frank felt. It was apparent that he felt respect and admiration, and a deep attachment; but their friends never sensed in him the presence of passionate romantic love. It seems that, in their decision to marry — as well as in their future lives together — it was Ayn who was the motive power.

Ayn and Frank were married on April 15, 1929. (On the marriage certificate, her occupation is listed as "Waiter.") "It was a 'proper' nonreligious ceremony in a judge's chambers in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice," she later said. "It was a very unromantic marriage in one sense, because there was no real celebration; we didn't know many people, and the people we did know were all broke." Ayn wore her old black coat for the ceremony; it was the best garment she owned. On it, she pinned a corsage of flowers, tiny white roses that were a gift from Nick. A sculptor friend gave her two embroidered handkerchiefs, which she kept long after they were shabby and worn. After the wedding, there was a quiet dinner in the home Frank had lived in with his brothers. "I almost didn't want anyone there. I felt very private about the ceremony. I wanted total privacy or an enormous formal wedding with a white veil and ballroom dresses — that had always been my idea of how it should be." But when Frank stood beside her as her husband, and when she signed her name "Mrs. Frank O'Connor," her wedding day became a dream of romance.

The young couple moved into a furnished room, and began their life together. As if to complete her happiness, Ayn found work in the wardrobe department of RKO. She began as a filing clerk, at twenty dollars a week; but she learned rapidly and worked hard, and within six months her salary was raised by five dollars. Within a year, she was head of the department — at a salary of forty-five dollars a week. "I loathed and hated it," she would recall. "The work was filing and purchase supervising, keeping track of the costumes and accessories and seeing that the actors got the right costumes. I loathed it, but it was a godsend. I was always grateful to have it, especially when the Depression began and everybody was out of work."

The RKO job solved their financial problems. Ayn was able to form contacts in the Central Casting office, and Frank was kept working steadily, for several days each week. They moved from the furnished room, and rented an apartment near RKO. "Frank decorated the apartment beautifully, out of nothing. It was the first time I saw his artistic ability. He built shelves, and framed inexpensive prints, and hunted for the little secondhand-shop ornaments that he was always finding. We bought our first car, on time, a secondhand Nash convertible and it was wonderful. Frank designed a desk for me, and had it made to order; it's the desk I still use. We even got a radio."

In late June, two months after their marriage, Ayn and Frank drove to Mexico, so that she could reenter the United States as the wife of a citizen. When they returned, she applied for American citizenship. For the first time, she felt politically — and emotionally — secure.

9 DeMille finally produced the story in its original version. The Skyscraper, starring William Boyd and Alan Hale, was released in 1928.

Chapter Nine

It was the worst of times. It was the decade of the thirties, and the crash of the stock market had brought its thunderous repercussions into the lives of all Americans. Never again would they feel quite safe, their world unassailable. Never again would life have the innocence it once had had.

By 1933, fifteen million people were out of work, and Roosevelt had inaugurated his National Recovery Administration — an action undreamed of by any former American President — by which the nation's industry, agriculture, and manufacturing became subject to centralized economic planning; the break with the laissez-faire free market was gathering momentum. The ambition, the energy, the sense of unlimited horizons that were the hallmark of the twenties, were fading into the memory of a golden age; the streets paved with gold had tarnished.

Soon, the rush to collectivism, which would earn the thirties the title of "the Red Decade," would begin. Writers and artists and professors and theologians and publishers and scientists and social workers and journalists and labor leaders and wealthy dilettantes would flock to embrace the doctrines of totalitarian communism. Soon, Granville Hicks, "the literary terrorist of the left," would write in the prestigious New Masses: "To be a good writer, a man must first become a proper communist" — and Stuart Chase would ask: "Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?" — and Dorothy Parker would announce: "There is no longer 'I,' there is 'WE'! The day of the individual is dead."

But in the early years of the 1930s, the signs of what was to come were not yet clear, even to so prophetic an intelligence as Ayn's. "I had no idea, then," she later explained, "of the degree of leftist penetration in America. I knew few people in Hollywood, but those were certainly not left. Russia was not yet recognized, and I simply thought that although people were not sufficiently aware of the menace and evil of communism, they were decidedly not in sympathy with it. And I took it for granted that no one could advocate altruism except the worst kind of hypocrites — that most Americans, explicitly or not, lived in effect by my code. I did not see the enormity of what had to be fought."

And Ayn was involved in a project that required her whole mind, her whole attention; it blotted out everything in the world around her. In 1930, she had begun outlining her first novel. Its working title was Air Tight. She was to change it to We the Living.

Her initial thought had been to develop one of the story outlines she had devised while still in Russia, but all of them involved heroes and heroines older than herself, whom she did not yet feel comfortable working with. "I wanted to do something of which I felt certain," she later recalled. "I did not really want to do a major novel — that is, a novel that would have my kind of hero and my philosophy; I felt more sure of myself writing about characters in their early twenties, about a major character who was a woman, and about a theme that was political rather than more widely philosophical."

Frank and his brother Nick — who, with Joe O'Connor, was now her neighbor and close friend — argued that she should tell the world the nature of her Russian nightmare; people must know what was happening in Russia, and why it was happening, and no one was telling them. As they spoke, she thought of the farewell party her mother had given for her shortly before her departure for America; she thought of the guest who had approached her and said, "If they ask you in America — tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying slowly." "I'll tell them," she had promised. She decided to write We the Living.

"We the Living was to be a protest," she later said, "and an introduction to my philosophy." She wanted to show that communism destroys not only the average man but most particularly the best among men — the brightest and the most creative, those with the greatest gifts to offer the world.

She began preparing her outline in the manner that was to characterize all of her future writing; in exhaustive, painstaking detail. Before a word was committed to paper in her angular, stark handwriting, each scene, each development and each character was fully spelled out, fully in her conscious control. She knew that writing required complex subconscious integrations, but she attempted to leave as little to her subconscious as possible. To work primarily by "feel," by inspiration, was abhorrent to her; as in every area of her life, she had to know what she intended, she had to remain in conscious control, the work had to be an intellectual, not an emotional process.

The outline was completed in several months.

Set in the years immediately following the Communist revolution, We the Living is the story of Kira Argounova, a girl of fierce independence, and — in the mold of future Ayn Rand heroines — dedicated to two purposes; the work she has chosen to do, and the man she loves. Kira plans to be an engineer, a builder of bridges, of mighty spans of steel and aluminum crossing wide blue rivers. But she is the daughter of the bourgeoisie; as a "class enemy," she is expelled from the university — in the student purge that Alice Rosenbaum had so narrowly escaped — and prevented from pursuing her education. She knows that she cannot leave this brave new world of Soviet communism — not merely because the state forbids it, but because there is no power on earth that can tear her away from Leo Kovalensky, the tall, slender aristocrat with the severe, contemptuous mouth and "a face that was like a drug to her, inexplicable, unconditional, consummate like music."

And then a power arises which threatens to rob her of her love, threatens to smash Leo's life and her own: he develops incipient tuberculosis, the disease of poverty and dirt, the rampaging physical disease brought to epidemic proportions by the intellectual plague of totalitarianism. Leo's only salvation lies in admission to a sanatorium in the South. The son of aristocrats and the daughter of the middle class cannot hope for the largesse of the state; Kira's desperate efforts to secure the necessary permissions are in vain; the doors of the sanatoriums are locked air tight to Leo, as air tight as the suffering spirits of the regime's victims.

There is one way... a way unbearable to contemplate... until Kira listens in anguish, night after night, to the accelerating, racking cough of her young god, and sees his sunken cheekbones, and knows that he will die. The way is Andrei Taganov, the Communist who loves her.

Andrei is Ayn's idealized version of a young Communist. In We the Living, the preponderance of Communists are villains — malicious, cynical, using the tenets of their faith for their own aggrandizement, in the mold of the altruists and statists who would appear in her future novels. But through the character of Andrei, she wished to show the Communist at his best potential, a potential possible only in the early days of the revolution, before the malice and cynicism and lust for self-aggrandizement of the regime itself became too overwhelmingly apparent for many of its most devoted adherents to stomach. When Andrei confesses his love to Kira, she shrinks from him as a lover, despite her affection for him as a friend — and then she thinks of red bubbles on dying lips, and she answers, "I love you" Kira becomes Andrei's secret mistress. He does not know that his gifts of money are sent to a private sanatorium in the South, where they purchase Leo's life.

The dramatic climax of We the Living comes when Andrei, searching Leo's apartment for evidence of black market activities, finds in a closet the evidence of a second crime, in the form of a woman's clothes — a black velvet dress, a coat with a fur collar, a white blouse — that he recognizes. "Whose are these?" he asks, his voice empty. "My mistress's," answers Leo. "Citizen Kovalensky, you're under arrest."

Kira goes to Andrei to scream to him that his love and his body meant to her only a pack of ten-ruble bills with a sickle and hammer printed in the corner, which have bought back the life of the man she loved long before she met Andrei. Andrei learns at last what communism has done to — has made of — the woman who is "his highest reverence," and he understands the irreplaceable value of that thing in his spirit which is able to revere. The Party is dead for him, and communism — along with his desire to live and act. His last act before his suicide is to free Leo.

But he has sent back to Kira only the shadowy remnant of a man. Believing that Kira has betrayed him with Andrei, seeing no future and no hope for a human life in Russia, his spirit and his will eroded by years of dismal days, Leo announces to Kira that he is leaving her for a middle-aged, wealthy woman who wants him.

Now, she will go. She will try to escape abroad. There is nothing left to hold her, neither work nor love. Kira makes her way across the Latvian border alone, on foot. Wearing white clothes to hide her in the snow, she begins her long crawl toward freedom in the bitter cold of the winter darkness.

Hours later, a Russian border guard sees something moving in the snow, far away. He raises his rifle to his shoulder and fires. "Just a rabbit, most likely," he mutters.

She can still walk, despite the little hole in her jacket and something warm and sticky slithering down her skin. She goes on, trembling and swaying and calling Leo's name as a plea for help from across the border.

At dawn, she falls on the edge of a slope and knows that she cannot rise again. There is a smile on her face, the last shape of her hymn to the life she has never betrayed.

Ayn would later say that We the Living was not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual sense — that Kira's convictions and values were hers, and the background was real, but the plot and the events of Kira's life were fictional creations.

The background is real: the setting is the Russia in which Ayn had lived and suffered — the grayness, the terror, the ignominy of life under the Soviets. But the novel as a whole is nearer to autobiography than its author chose to say publically. Many of the characters — most especially the major male character, Leo — appear to be closely modeled after people she had known; the choice of the name "Leo" for the hero was not accidental; and Leo's inner conflict — that he teeters on the edge of a cynical, self-destructive despair, from which Kira cannot save him — is Ayn's interpretation of the mystery of her first love. The passionate, exalted worship that Kira feels for Leo is, most signally, the passion of Ayn Rand.

The character of Kira's Uncle Vassily — who refuses to work for the Soviets and stubbornly retains the conviction that communism cannot last, that his suffering country will be saved — was, Ayn would privately admit, "copied, both in appearance and in essential characteristics, from Father. Not in literal detail — he is slightly exaggerated for fiction. But the unbending character, the repressed integrity, that is Father." And the character of Galina Petrovna, Kira's mother, was borrowed from Ayn's own mother, "her politically liberal attitude, her tolerance for the Revolution, her social snobbery about the Revolution." The young couple, Irina and Sasha, who are sentenced to Siberia because of Sasha's underground activities, are taken from a boy and girl Ayn had known in Petrograd, who had suffered the same fate for the same reason. And Irina's work as an artist is modeled after that of Ayn's favorite sister, Nora.

When the outline was completed, Ayn began the writing, working in longhand as she was always to do. It proceeded with agonizing slowness. Her hours at RKO were long, there was often overtime and weekend work which she could not refuse at a time when more and more people were losing their jobs to the Depression. Her job increasingly came to feel like a jail sentence, despite its financial value. She would arrive home in the evenings exhausted, she would cook dinner for Frank and talk to him for a while, then find herself staring at a blank page of paper that demanded to be filled, her body aching and her mind a weary blank. After weeks of struggling to write at night, she knew that, at least in the early stages of the book, it was impossible for her, and that she could continue only on Sundays and on her yearly vacation. It meant that the novel would take years to complete. That was all right, she told herself grimly; she was moving, and that was all she could demand. She would reach her goals more slowly than she had expected. But she would reach them.

During the evenings, she and Frank often visited with Frank's brother Nick — he had changed his name to Nick Carter — to whom Ayn grew increasingly close, finding in him an intellectual stimulation that she did not find in her adored husband. Throughout her life, she was to draw to her intellectual young men with whom she could share the philosophical interests she could not share with Frank. As the months and years passed, Ayn and Frank seemed to talk less and less with each other, Frank seemed progressively to fade still farther into Ayn's background, and Ayn turned to others for the conceptual understanding and the passionate concern with ideas that she needed.

Ayn was, and remained, helpless and contemptuous in the realm of what she called "small talk." Parties held no interest for her, and she avoided them whenever possible. Her manner at purely social gatherings was one of shy, aloof boredom, that she neither knew how to conceal nor cared to. Millicent Paton, who occasionally saw Ayn and Frank when they moved to New York a few years later, was to recall: "We had a summer place in Darien, Connecticut, and I invited Ayn and Frank for the weekend. I gathered a group I thought would be compatible, or at least understanding of her; I wanted a light sort of thing, and to have these friends get to know her somewhat; but she just sat very grimly without making any attempt at conversation. I said to her: Ayn, you're so quiet tonight.' She answered: 'I cannot make small talk.' I said: 'Oh dear, isn't that a shame, because it would be so dull if we all just made profound remarks' She didn't answer, she just looked at me as if I were the stupidest person on earth. Frank, on the other hand, was extremely pleasant; and when he had a chance, he could be very amusing, telling funny little anecdotes. But she didn't like to have too much of that 'silly talk,' as she called it... Nick and Frank were quite close, as close as one could be with Ayn in the picture. Frank was all hers, and she made that clear... Frank was not an aggressive man. If Ayn had wanted it, she could have really pushed his career... but I think she preferred to have him right by her side. Things had to be her way, no doubt about that; she was so positive, so brilliant. Nick once said to me: 'You don't ever try to change Ayn. If you have different views, keep them to yourself.'"

In one sense, Ayn was a surprisingly social being. When she and Frank visited with their few friends — a Russian actor who had helped Ayn get her job at RKO, a young ballerina who lived at the Studio Club, the family of Tommy Carr, a sculptor — Ayn was fascinated if the evenings consisted of intense philosophical and political discussions. She enjoyed nothing more than surrounding herself with people with whom she could discuss metaphysics or morality or politics or art, and she hungered, above all, for people who shared her own vision of life and man. When she found such people, she was happy to see them night after night and month after month. Her friends would observe that she seemed rarely to spend an evening alone or with Frank when philosophical discussion was possible instead.

It is interesting to note that during this period, when Ayn was only in her middle twenties, the people she met, whether friends or merely acquaintances — from the head of her department at RKO to Virginia Sale to the family of Tommy Carr to Frank's brothers to the struggling young artists she and Frank associated with — all seemed aware of her remarkable intelligence, of the breadth and scope of her mind, of her drive and ambition. She talked often of the novels she would write — as most of the young people in Hollywood spoke of the great things they would one day accomplish; but the people who knew Ayn believed her; they expected that she would accomplish what she said she would accomplish, that her name and her talents would eventually be widely known and recognized, that her work would be insightful and controversial. Even though she was so young, awed by her new country, struggling with a new language, socially awkward, working at an undistinguished job, her blazing conviction of her own abilities was infectious, her charismatic certainty was convincing. Nick, with whom Ayn and Frank spent most of their free time, was especially enchanted by Ayn. It was evident to those who knew Nick that he, vastly more sophisticated and worldly than Frank, regarded her with a deep, affectionate esteem; he and Frank were united in their conviction that if Ayn believed she would startle the world as novelist and as philosopher, then she would do precisely that; they were united in feeling that they were watching the first steps of a major talent, a major and provocative intellect.

Nick was an interesting and complex man, warm, outgoing, highly intelligent, with gaiety and style and great charm. "He made everything exciting and exotic," his niece Mimi Sutton once said. "He brought gaiety to everything and everyone he touched. He'd tell thrilling stories, and one knew they weren't quite true, but it didn't matter; it was his way of making life interesting.

"But in a terrible way, his whole life was a disaster. Because he had been gassed in the war — over the years, he was hospitalized with lung trouble a number of times — he received a lifelong pension, just enough to scrape by on. So he never had to work seriously. He'd talk about being a novelist, and he did do some writing; once, he sold a couple of short stories; and he'd work off and on for newspapers. But none of it ever came to much... For a while, he lived with a young man, who I suppose was his lover. In those days, it was not something one could talk about; Ayn suspected that he was homosexual, and Frank did too, but it was never discussed. Nick would talk as if he were a ladies' man, and one sensed the pain he felt at having to pretend."

Ayn spent many long evenings talking to Nick about her ideas for We the Living and about her developing philosophical concepts. But always — as remained true throughout their lives — she wanted Frank to be with her; she appeared to need him at her side, to see him, to touch him, to experience the sense of visibility that he gave her. Sometimes, Frank would doze off during an all-night conversation, wanting nothing more than to go to bed; but Ayn would insist that he stay, as if his mere physical presence were a source of spiritual fuel. "Just a few more minutes," she would say as the hours passed, oblivious to his boredom and his need for sleep.

Frank read very little, but with Nick, Ayn could discuss the books she was reading, which she obtained from a rental library in her neighborhood. She was never a voracious reader, and as the years passed she read less and less, despairing of finding material that would suit her particular tastes and uninterested in anything else; although she could intellectually appreciate technical ability or sensitivity of characterization or narrative power, she responded in a personal, emotional manner only to novels that presented man at his highest potential through the medium of a skillfully devised plot; where she did not find these values, no "lesser" values had the power to move her. But she wanted to have some familiarity with current and representative American and British literature, and to continue improving her English. She discovered little that she liked.

One of her few favorites was O. Henry, whom she admired for the gaiety and imaginativeness of his stories. She was to say that, more than any other writer, Henry represented the spirit of youth — "the expectation of finding something wonderfully unexpected around all of life's corners." She read the novels of Sinclair Lewis, and appreciated "his characterization and an intelligent mind writing purposefully, though journalistically; but he's not my sense of life." She read Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, "which I hated; it's mushy, morbid malevolence; the heroine, in the end, dies in childbirth, and that's the finish of the passionate romance, it's a totally gratuitous and accidental tragedy!"

She began Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, but gave it up after three hundred pages — "It's a pretentious piece of nothing at all; I remember only dry, catalogue-like descriptions of precisely how tuberculosis patients were put to bed on the veranda, and pointless conversations about the meaning of life." It was after attempting to read Mann that she asked the librarian, an elderly, kindly woman, "Do you have anything that is a good plot story but has some serious ideas?" The woman answered sadly, "I know exactly what you mean. They don't write them anymore." And Ayn thought: Well, I will.

She did, however, find the book that became her favorite novel. It was entitled Calumet "K," written by Merwin and Webster and originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1901. It was given to her by Cecil B. DeMille, who admired it as work projecting the drama and heroism of a construction job. Calumet "K" is a work of light fiction, dealing with the struggle of its hero, against great odds, to construct a grain elevator. Its style, Ayn would acknowledge, although straightforward and competent, is undistinguished, and it lacks what was, for her, the most important ingredient of good fiction, a plot structure. But she loved the book, then and always, because "it has one element that I have never found in any other novel: the portrait of a strong, confident, cheerfully efficacious man in a universe where victory and fulfillment are possible."

Calumet "K" was, to Ayn, who reread it every few years for the rest of her life, the quintessentially American novel. To the American reader, it is a startlingly light, non-philosophical story to be beloved by so philosophical a woman. Yet between 1926 and 1930, she had written several short stories which seem similarly startling from the pen of Ayn Rand: in marked contrast to her future work, they are without explicit philosophical content; they are charming, almost magazine-like fiction, adventurous and cheerful and lighthearted. 10 In a deeper sense, neither those stories nor her love for Calumet "K" are startling at all: they represented to the young Russian émigré — as did her tiddlywink music and the American movies she had seen while still under the nightmare of communism — a world where one did not have to be philosophical; all philosophical problems were solved, and one was free simply to act and to achieve. In her response to Calumet "K" and in these early stories, one sees a manifestation of the youthful, life-intoxicated joy that still danced somewhere within the increasingly severe and serious woman.

Until almost the end of her life, Ayn spoke of wanting to write a novel in the manner of those early stories: a novel of action and high adventure that would make the point, but only by implication, that evil is the exception in life and that one lives for the achievement of happiness; she would write of a world in which "Atlantis had already arrived, the ideal was right here on earth, and it was the perfect free existence for purposeful men." She chose the name of the hero of the novel: he was to be Faustin Donnegal — a name that made her smile whenever she said it, and represented the extravagantly lighthearted approach she wished to achieve. But as the years passed, she knew that there was too much pain in her: she could no longer write that kind of story. She always hoped that the day would come when she could write her novel of pure, unsullied joy. The day did not come.

It was during this period of the early 1930s that Ayn received news of Leo from Russia. Her cousin Nina, with whom she occasionally corresponded, wrote that Leo had married a girl who was "neither intelligent nor attractive, a real homebody." Nina had visited Leo and his wife, and said that theirs was "a typical lower-middle-class bourgeois household — the kind of home where the wife puts little lace doilies on the arms of the armchairs, and was just the little woman. Leo seemed embarrassed and enormously unhappy." The news shocked and pained Ayn; it was, she said many years later, "a horrible mystery. I still feel that Leo is an unfinished mystery story in my mind, I didn't really understand him, I knew only what I saw in him. But I can never feel that he's a total mediocrity and that I just invented him. I think that he was like Leo in We the Living, that his marriage was a deliberate act of self-destruction, that he consigned himself to mediocrity because higher values were not possible to him."

Oddly, nothing Ayn ever said about Leo seemed to warrant her ascription of such noble motivation to him; apart from what his appearance suggested, and his admirable act of courage in hiding members of the underground, there was nothing to indicate that he was the self-doomed hero of We the Living. Perhaps it is the case that what she did with Frank, she also did with Leo: they had to be heroes, to justify her love. They had to be transformed into the stuff of fiction — the fiction of Ayn Rand.

Even before learning the story of his marriage, Ayn had said her final farewell to Leo. Not in Russia, when he had bowed to kiss her hand at the train station, but in America. She had done it in the form of a short story which she wrote in her early months in America. The story, entitled "The Husband I Bought,"11 is written awkwardly, sometimes ungrammatically, and clearly is a first attempt to write in a language still foreign to her. But it trembles with the doomed passion of its female narrator for the man she adores, and it leaves the reader feeling an exalted, exquisite agony. It is astonishing that a newcomer to the English language could capture, with such precision and power — the precision and power that were to become Ayn's literary trademark — the wrenching, bottomless pain of unrequited love.

Ayn never attempted to publish the story, nor did she wish to do so; she was too aware of its flaws. She did not even sign it with her own name, but with an invented name, "Allan Raynor." (As she once said, writers and criminals keep their initials when they change their names.) It was written as a literary exercise, as practice in writing in English — and as her final exorcism of Leo. She never forgot him, she often thought of him, she wrote of him in We the Living, but her thoughts were no longer blurred and heavy with pain. She had taken her love and her hero-worship — sensitively capturing her feeling for her "ideal man," her feeling for Leo, for Cyrus, for Enjolras, and for the men she was yet to create, Roark and Galt, in its purest essence — and had put those feelings on paper, where her life was most truly to be lived.

As the world plunged deeper into the chaos of the thirties, the writing of We the Living continued to proceed with agonizing slowness; Ayn could not begin to foresee its completion. Writing a novel in English was a painful process; sometimes she thought in English, sometimes in Russian — even, occasionally, in French. Sometimes, American idioms and ways of phrasing came to her mind automatically; sometimes, a style that was typically Russian was, to her disgust, evident on the pages before her. Clarity and precision were the highest of her literary values; she shuddered at an inexact phrase, an approximate metaphor, an irrelevant sentence, an awkwardly expressed thought. Often, she would spend an entire day struggling with a single short paragraph that dissatisfied her.

She had little difficulty with the plot ideas; the central concept of the story had come to her relatively easily, complete in its initial form. "I seldom remember getting the idea for a story or for any particular situation," she later said. "When I'm working, it's as if it is a living entity; getting the ideas is a constant process which you don't remember until it's set, and then, when it is set, it feels as if it was always that way. But I do recall the day I thought of the central situation of We the Living — that is, the idea of the Communist who has to arrest the other man, and he discovers the truth during the search: the twist on the old bromide of the woman giving herself to someone to save the man she loves, the twist being that the villain is really morally superior to the hero, that the tragedy is greater for him than for the woman. I don't mean that Andrei is essentially a better man than Leo, but in the setup, in the stage where they are at the climax, Andrei is more idealistic than Leo, and the worst blow is to him, not to Kira or to Leo. That idea of the search was the center from which all the rest of the story developed."

Nor did she have difficulty with characterization. "Characterization was always what I have given least thought to. I'm always very clear on the concept of the character, but not in the technical sense of how to project the kind of character I have in mind. I'd have to be very clear on what are the major and minor premises and motivation of each character, on what makes him tick, what he is after — and I could state it in words. But I would not project in advance how to show, for instance, that Andrei is brave. I had almost a block against characterization, I was contemptuous of the issue because of the irrational importance given to it by the kind of stories and schools of literature that say characterization is a primary, and there's detailed character delineations of people who do nothing at all. Throughout the writing, I was astonished that I was keeping to a very great consistency of characterization; apparently, my subconscious premises were set."

With We the Living, stylistic issues presented the greatest difficulties — both because she was writing in a new language, and because "I felt throughout that I was expressing only approximately what I wanted, not fully; I was fully satisfied with the presentation of the ideas and the theme, but not with my way of saying things, with the narrative, linguistic aspects. For instance, many of the early passages pertaining to Kira's reactions to Leo are not quite right, they are too brief, too understated. Particularly in emotional scenes, I felt that there was so much I wanted to project that I did not know how to capture it all; I was not yet at home with writing in essentials about emotions and moods; one has to do that by practice, one can't do it theoretically. I worked very hard, everything was rewritten many times, particularly the first chapter. But I was not yet at home with my own particular style. Style pertains to what you choose to say, and how you say it; my particular style consists of writing in essentials about emotions or mood. I could not yet express everything I wanted to express: that did not happen until The Fountainhead. In We the Living, everything was difficult."

In writing We the Living, Ayn was aware of the influence on her of Victor Hugo, which she struggled to avoid. "His influence shows itself in a certain kind of overassertive, overeditorial, and slightly overdramatic turn of sentences. My mind worked in those literary forms that had most impressed me, because I could not yet have any of my own, not on a first novel. My mind seemed to act in Hugo's kind of pattern, but I was learning in the process how to form my own method of expression. When you first begin, you will be influenced by those values that impressed you most; that is the way you'd think of expressing yourself, the most forceful way you have ever seen."

Late in 1931, unendurably frustrated by the slowness of her work on the novel — she had done only the outline and two chapters — Ayn decided to interrupt her work to write a screen original. If she could sell it, she would have the money to quit RKO and spendfull time on the novel. The original she wrote was entitled Red Pawn. 12

Red Pawn is a flamboyantly dramatic story — more typical of the later Ayn Rand than anything she had so far written — about a beautiful woman who becomes the adored mistress of the commandant of a Soviet prison for men convicted of political crimes; she becomes his mistress in order to free her husband who, unknown to the commandant, is one of his prisoners. It contains, in sharp, abbreviated focus, the dramatic twists, the plot inventiveness combined with keen philosophical insight, that were to reach their climax in Atlas Shrugged.

While Red Pawn was making the rounds of the studios — Ayn was able to secure the services of an agent through her contacts at RKO — she showed the synopsis to an acquaintance who was an executive assistant at the studio. "It will never sell," the woman told her. "The story is too improbable."

The story editor of a major studio, who had given a newspaper interview saying that he was interested in discovering fresh new talent and original ideas, read the synopsis and called Ayn in for an interview. He wouldn't buy the story, he explained, but he wanted to give her some advice. "We're interested in realistic stories about average people," he said. "That's what you should write about. Write about the people you know."

The theme that Ayn was to hear all her professional life, that was to haunt her in book reviews of her work, in articles, in interviews, in discussions of Ayn Rand, was sounding. Choose more realistic themes, write about more realistic problems; your stories are too romantic, your plots are implausible, your characters larger than life. Write about life as it is. She rarely attempted to explain that she wrote in order to create the kind of people she would like to know, and to project what life should be like. She did not want to create Babbitt, but Enjolras; not Main Street, but a golden Atlantis.

Early in 1932, Universal Studios made an offer for Red Pawn. "When my agent called to say they wanted to buy it," Ayn later laughed delightedly, "I had to go to a hospital to talk to Universal's business manager; we settled the deal right there, in his hospital room where he was recovering from surgery. I was to be paid seven hundred dollars for the story, and another eight hundred for doing a treatment and the screenplay — a total of fifteen hundred dollars! I was enormously thrilled and proud."

From the hospital room, Ayn took her last bus ride to RKO — and quit her job.

A three-year jail sentence had come to an end.

10 Published posthumously in The Early Ayn Rand, they illustrate her rapidly growing mastery of her new language.

11 It appears in The Early Ayn Rand

12 It consisted of an eight-page synopsis, which she later expanded into short-story length and which appears in The Early Ayn Rand.

Chapter Ten

Ayn wrote one of her aunts in Chicago and told her, with happy excitement, of the events surrounding the sale of Red Pawn. Universal had bought the story for their rising young star, Tala Birell, who was being groomed as the new Dietrich; Ayn had been given a two-month contract to write the script. She reported that Universal was very pleased with her script, and that she expected it to go into production soon. If the movie were successful, she could get a long-term screenwriting contract with Universal and still have time to work on We the Living. The most difficult part of her struggle, she said, seemed now to be at an end.

The struggle was not at an end. A film that had been intended to establish Tala Birell's career was a financial and critical disaster, and the studio released her. Red Pawn was put on a shelf.

But shortly thereafter, Universal traded Red Pawn to Paramount Pictures for an E. Phillips Oppenheim story for which Paramount had paid twenty thousand dollars. Ayn told her friends that she felt no resentment that a story which had earned her fifteen hundred dollars was sold for twenty thousand; despite her desperate need for money, she was thrilled by the compliment to her work.

Paramount decided to produce Red Pawn with Marlene Dietrich, and with Josef von Sternberg directing. It was Dietrich whom Ayn had envisioned when she wrote the story. Ayn was called in to do final work on the screenplay. "I sat in the studio at one hundred dollars a week for four weeks, doing nothing," Ayn later said. "Von Sternberg had the okay on the choice of stories for Dietrich, and I could not start work until they had sold him on making my story. Paramount had my preliminary screenplay from Universal, and I was to work with Von Sternberg on the final script. But Von Sternberg turned it down. He had just done The Scarlet Empress with Dietrich, a bad picture about Catherine the Great, and he didn't want to do another Russian story. Instead, he chose a ghastly, plotless story, it was a terrible flop, and Paramount let him go. He never made a comeback, and I always thought that that served him right. It was as contemptible a thing as anybody has ever done to me artistically — the kind of thing he preferred to my work."

Red Pawn was removed to another shelf, where it still remains, unproduced.

In the letter to her aunt, Ayn had reported that she and Frank were as happy as ever, "even happier, if such a thing is possible. Frank is simply wonderful." The family had never met Frank, and Ayn suggested that if they were curious, they could see him in a picture entitled Three on a Match, produced by Warner Brothers and starring Bette Davis; near the beginning, there was "a good, long close-up of him."

While Ayn`s star was beginning to rise and she was embarking on her first major work and selling her first professional screen play, Frank's career, never successful, was moving steadily toward oblivion. He continued to work as an extra or bit player when he could, appearing in such unmemorable movies as Smashing the Rackets and Hold 'em Up. In Cimarron (the movie from the novel by Edna Ferber, starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne) he was given a scene in the opening sequence, as the young fiancé of the heroine, whom she leaves for the hero; it was his first part with dialogue. 13

Frank's important "break" came in a comedy entitled As Husbands Go. He was hired for the Los Angeles road company production of the Rachel Crothers stage play. But he played — as Ayn later termed it, while Frank nodded his head in agreement — "a tall, ungainly young professor having a romance with a young girl; they were the comedy relief. The part was totally wrong for Frank. Then Fox bought the movie rights and Frank did the same role on the screen. After the first day of shooting, he was told not to wear makeup, because he was too good-looking! It was heartbreaking for me to see him trying to be as ungainly as he could and to clown as much as he could."

Frank was bitterly unhappy with the progress of his career, and he was losing interest in acting. He continued working at it because it was what he knew, and he and Ayn needed the money. As time passed, he had less and less hope of achieving the kind of success he had wanted. As Ayn grew more fired with ambition and purpose, Frank was sinking deeper into passivity and a quiet, unacknowledged defeat. "That particular break in As Husbands Go really finished him," Ayn said. "And even if he had gotten big parts, Hollywood would have done to him what they did to Gary Cooper. I don't know if Frank would have stood for it, or if he would have fallen to pieces."

Acting was the only work that Frank had ever timidly wanted; it was crumbling to dust with each day's new defeat, and his gentle spirit, his capacity to want anything, seemed slowly to be crumbling with it. Progressively, his friends and colleagues observed, he was becoming only Ayn`s consort, his own identity dimming and fading beside the power and demands of a personality obsessed with its own purposes and needs. Ayn had begun full-time work on We the Living. Although the writing still was difficult, the manuscript pages on her desk kept growing. But by 1933, money was again running short; Frank's employment was precarious, and little remained of the money from Red Pawn.

On an evening which Ayn would always remember as a turning point in her life, she and Frank went to see a play, a melodrama comedy set in a courtroom, entitled The Trial of Mary Dugan. (It had been produced earlier on Broadway by Al Woods, then made into an MGM movie.) "I didn't especially like it, but I thought the form was dramatic. I thought: Wouldn't it be interesting if someone wrote a courtroom drama with an indeterminate ending, one in which the jury would be drawn from the audience and would decide whether the accused is guilty or not guilty. My next thought was: Why don't I write it?"

"Wouldn't it be interesting if?..." is a crucial key to Ayn's literary approach. In 1940, she would write a short story entitled "The Simplest Thing in the World." The "simplest thing," writer Henry Dorn tells himself, would be to turn out hack work, "to be stupid on order," to toss off some popular nonsense that would sell — unlike the novel he had spent five years working on, "writing as carefully, as scrupulously, as delicately as he knew how," and which had not sold. I'll write a good commercial story, he decides, and make a lot of money. But whatever "stupid, human, bromidic" idea he gets, soon leads to the thought: Wouldn't it be interesting if?... and he finds himself creating, in his mind, his sort of story, romantic, intellectual, controversial, important. In the end, knowing what he cannot do, he reaches for the Times Help Wanted ads.

Ayn did not try to do "the simplest thing in the world." She understood, as Henry Dorn did not, that an artist's sense of life, his values, his philosophy, direct the creative process, that he cannot alter his basic identity, he cannot leap out of his own soul. But Dorn's method of working was Ayn's method: to project, in imagination, the most interesting, colorful characters and the most dramatic and important events she could devise — then to build on that, to make her story and her people still more interesting and more colorful — to build drama on drama and abstraction on abstraction until she had created the world that was the motive power of her writing.

After seeing The Trial of Mary Dugan and considering the possibility of writing a courtroom drama — she had always wanted to write a play; even in Russia many of her story ideas were for plays — Ayn remembered an event that had blazed across the headlines of the worlds newspapers: the suicide of the Swedish "Match King," Ivar Kreuger, after the crash of his vast financial empire, and the subsequent shocking revelations that his empire was a gigantic fraud. Ayn had felt sympathetic toward Kreuger; she believed that it was not essentially his methods, his ruthlessness and dishonesty that accounted for the storm of denunciations that followed the financial revelations; it was his ambition. She was to say: "It was a spree of gloating malice. Its leitmotif was not: 'How did he fall?' but: 'How did he dare to rise?'" From Vie Trial of Mary Dugan, from the story of Ivar Kreuger — and from "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." — the idea for Penthouse Legend was born.

Once again, interested in the project and hoping to make money from it, Ayn took off a few months from her work on We the Living and turned to her new project. Penthouse Legend is the story of Bjorn Faulkner, an arrogant, ruthless industrialist, and Karen Andre, the powerful, beautiful woman who loved him, worked with him, obeyed his every wish — and is on trial for his murder. As in "The Husband I Bought" and in We the Living, the major male character is not yet Ayn's "ideal man;" rather, Ayn was concerned to show a woman's feeling for her ideal man.

Her intention was that the factual evidence of the heroine's guilt or innocence be evenly balanced, so that the verdict must be determined by the moral philosophy of the jurors. Jurors would be selected each night from the audience; they would witness the play and decide on their verdict at the end of the last act, judging, by the standard of their own values, the diametrically opposite characters of the woman on trial and the major witness against her, characters which represent two different types of humanity. "The events," Ayn wrote, "feature the confrontation of two extremes, two opposite ways of facing existence: passionate self-assertiveness, self-confidence, ambition, audacity, independence — versus conventionality, servility, envy, hatred, power-lust." Thus, it is not only Karen Andre, but the jurors, who are on trial.

As the defense attorney tells the jury, "It is your own souls that will be brought to light when your decision is rendered."

Commenting on the fact that Faulkner, like Kreuger, was a swindler, Ayn explained many years later: "It's not to be taken literally. Fraud and crookedness are not and were not my idea of individualism; but the issue that interested me was the man who stood alone versus conventional society; that's the way a young person, which I was, sees the issue of individualism. At the time I wrote it, I was not as conscious as I would be today that the concretes were symbolic, I was not as clear that Faulkner's morality, if taken literally, is the opposite of mine."

Ayn was very pleased with the play. "I was more in control of technique than with We the Living, because it was simpler and involved no narration, only plot and dialogue. It was with narrative that I was not yet fully in control." The major difficulty was the legal research: she had never been inside a courtroom and knew nothing about the law. Through DeMille, whom she still occasionally visited in his office and who always seemed happy to see her and interested in the progress of her career, she was able to get a pass to a famous murder trial; she attended for one day only, in order to see a courtroom. She obtained a transcript of part of the trial, and studied it carefully to learn general courtroom procedure and principles. A lawyer later checked the play, and Ayn was delighted that he had few objections to make.

Although Penthouse Legend was written as a stage play, MGM learned about it, became interested, and took an option on it. An MGM producer, Lucien Hubbard, wanted it as a vehicle for Loretta Young, who was under contract to MGM and was in the process of departing from her usual role of innocent, sweet, maidenhood. Ayn went to MGM to write a screen adaptation, without, of course, the device of the jury chosen from the audience. "I had a very miserable time with it," she would later recall. "Hubbard kept insisting that I 'humanize' it. He had a reputation for never leaving anything in the original. Some MGM writers told me — they swore it was true — that he had bought a Broadway play by a well-known writer, then changed it so completely that nothing of the original was left in the movie version; the writer then bought his play back and said he would write his own screen adaptation and submit it to another studio; Hubbard said to him, 'If you get an offer for the screenplay, give me first option.'

"Every so often Hubbard would say that we needed to insert a comedy scene. I struggled to be funny — how is one funny to order? — I had the naive idea that it was a flaw in me that I couldn't write comedy; whenever I tried, what came out was enormously phony. Fortunately, Hubbard would read it and say: 'Well, let's forget it.' When the script was finished — without being humanized — he didn't like it and MGM didn't pick up the option. But at least this gave us more money."

While her agent was submitting the play to theatrical producers, Ayn returned to We the Living. As it approached its final chapters, rejections for Penthouse Legend began coming in. Most of the producers rejected it because of the jury device, feeling that it would destroy the theatrical illusion; Ayn was convinced that the device was the play's particular strength. She was deeply disappointed, but We the Living was approaching completion, and that mattered to her more than a hundred plays and a hundred producers.

She was working on the climactic scene of We the Living — the scene in which the three leading characters face each other in Leo's apartment and Andrei learns that Kira is Leo's mistress — when an incident occurred which Ayn always recalled with great amusement. Frank had a bit part in a movie that day, but Ayn expected him home for dinner. When he did not arrive, she called the studio and was told that the shooting was running overtime. She returned to work. It had been an inspired day; she was writing her favorite scene, and she knew it was right, exactly as she had wanted it to be. About ten-thirty, the telephone rang, and a gruff masculine voice said "Mrs. O'Connor? This is the Lincoln Heights jail. We're holding a Mr. Frank O'Connor here." Ayn had immediate visions of horror: with her Russian background, to be held by faceless authorities was the ultimate in peril. When she finally stammered: "What for?" she was told, "For speeding. His sentence is to spend the night in jail." Ayn called Nick immediately: they had to raise the money to get Frank out at once. But Nick told her, "Don't interfere. Let him do what he wants to do." Frank had been fined for speeding, had insisted that he was "framed," had argued indignantly with the judge, refused to pay the fine, and chose to go to jail. Miserably, fearfully, Ayn accepted Nick's insistence that Frank be allowed his own choice. "I was terribly upset at the thought of Frank in jail; I stayed up all night waiting for him, I couldn't think of sleeping. I continued writing — and to my astonishment I did very good work, my mind was very clear. At six in the morning, a sheepish Frank came home, looking like a guilty jailbird. I made him take off all his clothes in the foyer, and shower, it must be terribly unhygienic in jail — I was very angry, but he just kept laughing... I've always remembered that the best sequence in We the Living was written while Frank was in jail."

Toward the end of 1933, Ayn completed We the Living. It had taken her four years.

The moment of completing it remained with her forever. Beaming, she handed the thick manuscript to Frank, and her own eyes suddenly grew wet as she saw the tears in his eyes. Perhaps it had not taken four years, but twenty-eight. The days of her life, the ambition, the capacity for concentrated work, the indifference to obstacles, the values and the philosophy that were uniquely hers, had finally brought her to this day. She had transformed the base metal of her wretched years in Russia into the shining gold of a novel.

13 When the movie recently appeared, uncut, on cable television, no such scene appeared; presumably it had been removed from the film years earlier. All that remained was a dinner party during which one saw Frank in two or three brief glimpses.

Chapter Eleven

"While writing We the Living, I was literally living in that world" Ayn said. Now it was time to emerge from the crystalline, luminous world of her imagination and to cope with the world of other people, other values, other attitudes, a world from which she always had felt remote and alienated. What was to come was itself like fiction: the events of the next years seemed devised by some demonic fiction writer first to raise her hopes for professional success by presenting her with opportunities she had only dreamed of — and then to send them crashing and crushed, as if determined to increase her remoteness, her alienation, her anger and frustration.

But at the time she completed We the Living, her hopes were high. And the work, Nick confided to Frank, seemed to have smoothed some of the rougher edges of her personality. It had an important personal-psychological, as separate from professional, value for Ayn. Her experiences in Russia had remained a painful issue, driving her on relentlessly to tell their meaning to the world, and haunting her with memories of fear and suffering that had often jerked her, sobbing, from sleep. "We the Living got Russia out of my system," she said. "By the time the book was finished, the issue of Russia was also finished for me."

Though We the Living did not satisfy her completely, because of her language difficulties and problems with style, certain aspects of it were a deep and lasting source of pride. She later explained, "What I liked most, literarily, was the plot structure; it was a single-tracked series of events leading to a dramatic climax, a highly personal novel set against a social background. With the plot, I succeeded completely in what I had wanted." And she added, "Ideologically, I had said exactly what I wanted, and I had had no difficulty in expressing my ideas. I had wanted to write a novel about Man against the State. I had wanted to show, as the basic theme, the sanctity — the supreme value — of human life, and the immorality of treating men as sacrificial animals and ruling them by physical force. I did so."

The stylistic problems, however, continued to disturb her. "The events leading to Andrei's suicide and the suicide itself were among the very few places where I was able to achieve the deliberate understatement and indirection and implication that is crucial to me literarily; those scenes were conscious underwriting. It wasn't until later novels that I fully succeeded in the art of implication — that is, building a strong emotional situation, then not naming it for the reader but writing around it. That makes the emotional impact stronger."

Interestingly, this aspect of We the Living which Ayn considered a defect was precisely the aspect that would cause many of its readers to prefer it to her later novels. We the Living is a passionate work. Although Kira dies in the end, the overall emotional tone of the book is not tragic, but life-affirming: the State has the power to end Kira's life, it does not have the power to destroy her spiritually; she remains as she had begun, loyal to her knowledge of what life could be and should be. Throughout most of the novel, the emotion is in the lines, most particularly in Kira's words and reactions and manner. The writing is lush and romantic. True to Ayn's purpose, the emotion in the novels that would follow We the Living became predominantly between the lines: it became implicit rather than explicit, understated, and projected by action alone, as she mastered "the art of implication" — and as she began subordinating emotion to the intellectual message she wished to impart. Her style — culminating in Atlas Shrugged — became increasingly cerebral.

The progression of Ayn's work, inevitably, closely followed what was to be the progression of her life. During the struggle and disappointments of the years following the completion of We the Living, her own emotions began to sink below the surface of her life, replaced by intense rational cerebration. In her later novels, the passionate intensity results from the cumulative power of the events, but one does not see it — as one was ceasing to see it in Ayn Rand.

There was another element in We the Living that Ayn evidently considered a defect, although she never spoke of it, because many years later she was to remove it from a new edition. That element represented the influence of Nietzsche on her early thinking. In the original version of the book, Kira tells Andrei, "I loathe your ideals, I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don't know, however, whether I'd include blood in my methods." In the Foreword to the 1959 edition — from which that statement was removed — she would write: "I have not added or eliminated to or from the content of the novel. I have cut some sentences and a few paragraphs that were repetitious or so confusing in their implications that to clarify them would have necessitated lengthy additions. In brief, all the changes are merely editorial line-changes."

Some of her readers were disturbed when they discovered this and similar changes. It is unfortunate that Ayn did not choose to explain it, rather than to ignore it. It appears likely that even at the time of writing We the Living, had she been asked if she intended literally that one should force "fools" at gun point — she would have said that she did not intend it; it appears likely because, in all of her later writing, she was to stress, consistently and constantly, that "Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate... no man may start — the use of force against others." This conviction was the core of her rejection of socialism, of communism, of fascism, of any "ism" that presumed to allow some men to force others to act against their will and convictions; it was the basic premise of her political philosophy. Force might, and should, be answered by force; under no circumstance, for no reason, for no holy cause or purpose or goal, might it be initiated. Like Nietzsche, Ayn worshipped "the superior man" — by which she meant "the man of the mind," the rational, purposeful, independent, courageous hero who lives by his own effort and for his own happiness; unlike Nietzsche, she rejected as unforgivably immoral any suggestion that the superior man had the right to employ physical force as a means to his end.

During the writing of We the Living, Frank, and Nick, whose intelligence and literary sensitivity she found invaluable, had read the manuscript as it progressed — or rather, she had read it to Frank, as she was always to do. With the completion of the manuscript, she asked Gouverneur Morris, the well-known fiction writer whom she had met while working on the scenario of Red Pawn and with whom she had become friendly — he had autographed one of his stories to her with the words: "To the only genius I've ever met" — if he would read We the Living. Morris read the novel and thought it a remarkable and important work. He immediately recommended it to his New York agent, Jean Weick. Ayn, not knowing how she would otherwise have enlisted the services of a New York agent, was delighted to send the manuscript to her.

The story of Gouverneur Morris was typical of the course of Ayn's career: one man or woman discovering her work, responding to it enthusiastically, believing that she had a great and rare talent, and taking action to help her professionally despite her status as an unknown writer in the early years of her career, and, later, despite her status as a writer whose works were considered dangerously controversial. Her personal, charismatic intellectual powers had the same consequences; always, there were people around her who spoke of her in their own circles of friends and associates as a woman of so astonishing an intellect that she yet might change the world.

Jean Weick began submitting We the Living to publishers. The first response was a rejection. Then another, and another, and another, until Ayn lost count. "It was a terribly painful period," she was to remember. "I went to the mailbox twice a day — and all I got were more rejections. I was very shocked. I thought, It's wrong, injustice, and I have to find my kind of editors. Jean Weick — who was primarily a magazine agent, and whom I later discovered didn't take my book very seriously — didn't give me any reasons, I didn't know why it was being refused. I finally learned that she had been hearing from editors that I was too concerned with ideas, that the book was too intellectual. I knew that was the enemy attitude."

During the agony of waiting, Ayn recalled something she had been told several years earlier. She had been borrowing books from a lending library owned by a White Russian woman. One day, as the two women were talking, Ayn had said that she was writing a novel about Soviet Russia. The woman had answered: "You'll have a hard time and a lot of opposition; the Communists have tremendous influence on American intellectuals." Ayn had been indignant and had not believed it. "I thought it was typical Russian panic-mongering. I told her it was possible there would be some opposition, but not the majority of American opinion."

But she later heard from Weick that a number of publishing houses had not troubled to disguise the fact that the cause of their rejection was not literary, but political: they saw no possibility of making a profit on a book that denounced Soviet Russia.

The O'Connors' main income now was from Franks sporadic acting work. The last of Ayn's money was gone, and she was close to desperation professionally and economically — when an offer came for Penthouse Legend.

The offer came from Al Woods, the famous New York theatrical producer. It seemed to Ayn almost miraculous that a man who was a legend in the theatrical world, who was inundated with the work of known and unknown playwrights, should wish to produce the first play she had written; it seemed to her almost miraculous — and utterly appropriate. A contract with Woods would mean a Broadway production, and all that that entailed professionally and financially; it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break forever out of anonymity and to begin her playwriting career at the top. Again, one man had seen, by his own judgment, the value of her work, and had responded by taking action.

Ayn rejected the offer.

Woods had insisted that he be granted the right to make changes in the script. She would not grant it. Her reason was not that she considered her play to be flawless; it was that she knew, then and always, that her survival as a writer required fidelity to her own firsthand vision; she could not allow her work to be given into the hands of someone else — anyone else — to be altered by the dictates of a vision that was not her own.

Ayn was beginning to be known and talked about in Hollywood through her sale of Red Pawn, through Gouverneur Morris' enthusiasm for her work, and, she suspected, through the audacity of her refusal of Al Woods's offer. It was not long before another offer came for Penthouse Legend, this one from screen actor E.E. Clive, whose first love was the theater and who produced occasional plays on a modest budget at the Hollywood Playhouse, a small local theater. In terms of professional advancement and monetary reward, there was no comparison and no contest between his offer and Woods's.

It was with E. E. Clive that Ayn signed a contract.

The rehearsals of the play were not happy occasions for her. "Instead of being glamorous, it was nerve-wracking day after day to hear people reading my lines and not really knowing what they were saying, and very few did it properly. Clive was a good director, and really respected the play and my kind of writing. But there was not much he could do with those actors. A special kind of conscious focus is required for my sort of lines."

The play opened at the Hollywood Playhouse in October 1934, under the title: Woman on Trial. Ayn had made the title change at Clive's request; he felt that the original title suggested a fantasy. Arriving at the theater on opening night, standing on the pavement before the brilliantly illuminated entrance, Ayn looked up at her name and the title of her play sparkling on the marquee. "That gave me a real thrill, because I had read about it in Russia, in American film magazines. But the play was spoiled for me because of the acting, and because my own lines had become a bromide to me through repetition during the rehearsals. To this day," she would say almost thirty years later, "I can still hear all the different voices of that company and subsequent companies. So opening night meant nothing to me, because it was not the way I wanted the lines to be given."

Because of Clive's reputation as a producer, a number of Hollywood celebrities attended the opening, including Marlene Dietrich — who was, second only to Greta Garbo, Ayn's favorite actress. An actor friend gave a festive party after the show. Ayn, as was usual at social occasions, felt uncomfortable at the party: "I felt that none of these people spoke my language. It was only a social strain, the necessity of being introduced, smiling, saying "Thank you very much.'"

Tragically for the woman who wrote so convincingly of the joy possible in human life, it was indicative of the manner in which Ayn was developing psychologically that she took little pleasure in the rehearsals or in the presentation of her play. Where she saw, in her view, both good and bad, she was tending increasingly to react emotionally to the bad, to focus on it, to discuss it, and to remember it. Except for those times when she listened to the music she loved — her tiddlywink music, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, some Chopin pieces, and a few others — she could rarely abandon herself nonjudgmentally and benevolently to the living moment. The stem, unforgiving judge in Ayn, present since childhood but now in the ascendancy, was beginning to stand as an impassible wall between her spirit and the happiness that life offered her.

"The big shock to me were the reviews of Woman on Trial," Ayn would recall. "I never really recovered from it."

The reviews, predominantly, were highly complementary. But the play was praised for aspects which she considered of secondary importance; that which she considered most original and ingenious was ignored or mentioned only in passing. She had the sense that her play had not been seen. "My attitude always toward reviews and compliments, since my high school days, was that I expect superlatives or nothing, and I wanted raves that raved about the right things. The reviews were not intelligent, there was no mention that is was a play of ideas; the stress was on the melodrama and suspense. There were three or four reviews in all, and they hardly mentioned the gimmick of choosing the jury from the audience... The one really bad review was in the Los Angeles Times, by a man named Paul Jordan Smith; it was a hooligan misrepresentation. He wrote as if it were trite and violent, and never mentioned the ideas, as if it didn't have any. The irony is that he later gave a favorable review to Atlas Shrugged. I've never been able to explain it... I suppose it's just the usual irrationality of people."

Woman on Trial ran to less than full houses, but did sufficiently well to justify its short run.

When the closing was announced, Al Woods renewed his offer. Ayn learned that he had been stunned by her earlier refusal; unknown playwrights did not turn down offers from Broadway producers. After long, nerve-wracking negotiations, Woods finally agreed to make minor alterations in the clause pertaining to his right to make changes in the script, although, Ayn said, "it was very dubiously worded. I was wary of it, but I thought that the Hollywood production would give me a certain bargaining power with Woods. I decided to take a chance on it, a calculated risk."

Ayn signed the contract with Al Woods for a Broadway production of Penthouse Legend. Woods planned immediate production, and asked Ayn to come to New York at once.

In the late fall of 1934, Ayn and Frank, in their battered secondhand convertible — "We couldn't even think of affording a train" — set out for New York. They had little more than one hundred dollars between them: the money from Woods for the first month of his option on the play.

Ayn carried with her a new novelette, ideal, which she had written during her last six months in Hollywood. Although it was written after We the Living, it showed more clearly than the novel her struggle with her new language. "It sounded as if the writer were thinking in a foreign language," she later said. "Perhaps the problem was that it was laid in America."

Ideal is a strange and bitter and very beautiful work, in the emotionally explicit tradition of "The Husband I Bought" and We the Living. The idea of the novelette came to her in the following way. A

middle-aged woman of her acquaintance, pleasant but undistinguished and conventional — "a kind of Mrs. Babbitt" — spoke one day of Greta Garbo and of her intense admiration of Garbo. "If only I could meet her!" she gushed. "I'd give my life for it!" Would you? Ayn wondered. What do your values actually mean to you? Wouldn't it be interesting if...?

Ideal is the story of a movie actress whose appearance and personality suggest so exquisite a beauty of spirit that her audiences see in her the embodiment of their own deepest values and ideals. Desperately needing to know that there are others who share her exalted sense of life, she attempts to discover whether those who claim to worship her do want, in actual reality, that which she represents — or whether they want it to remain only a distant, unrealizable dream. As the story progresses, all of them betray her, in different ways and for different reasons, just as they betray their own ideals — all but one: a young man who gives his life for her when he believes that her life is threatened; in so doing, he shows her that there exist on earth a few rare men who are not content merely to dream, who will live — or die if they must — for their values.

Ideal is both angry and exaltedly idealistic, a tortured hymn to integrity. In it one sees the union of attitudes so marked in Ayn: the union of passionate idealism with a profound scorn for those who are only idealists, who renounce the responsibility of translating their ideals into action and reality. And in it one sees Ayn's desperate loneliness for people who saw the world as she did. She felt that in all her twenty-nine years she had found only one man who shared her exalted vision of life, the man she had married. She had discovered other values in other people, but never that most basic value of all. Where were the people she was seeking? She could not doubt that they existed somewhere. Would she find them in New York?

As Ayn and Frank began their long drive, they talked excitedly of what awaited them in New York, of the new world that seemed to be opening its arms to take them in its embrace. But their excitement was soon marred. "We were barely out of Hollywood," Ayn later recalled with a shudder, "when the brake lining burned out, then the battery went — which meant more expenses. When we got to Virginia, a stretch of road was being repaired; suddenly there was a dip in the road where the pavement became a dirt road, the car went out of control, we slid onto an embankment over a sharp drop, we started turning over — but at the last moment the car stopped on its side. A small rock was holding one of the back wheels. It was a miracle we weren't killed. We had to be towed to town. The damage was too expensive to repair, so we sold the car, for very little, to the repair man, and we went on by bus. It was not a very happy procedure"

But New York was where Ayn had wanted to live since her first sight of it as she stood, a timid twenty-one-year-old immigrant, on a pier on the Hudson River. When she again saw its gleaming skyscrapers, she felt that she was home at last. To the end of her life, she would leave New York only when absolutely necessary for professional reasons, or for her very rare vacations. She seldom took advantage of the cultural offerings that New York uniquely possessed — art galleries, theater, ballet — but to know that the great city was there, just outside her window, seemed to give fuel to her spirit. New York was, to her, the symbol of human achievement, the living, breathing reality of the accomplishments possible to the mind of man. With her writing, and with Frank, it was her life's great love.

The O'Connors had arrived with almost no money. Nick had moved to New York several months earlier, and was working as a reporter; they were able to I borrow some money from him — a limited amount, since he had little to spare. Ayn turned to Millicent Paton, their friend from Hollywood. "Ayn called me and said, 'I'm here, and we don't have one penny,'" Millicent would recall. "She said, 'I'm putting my play on. You must lend me some money.' She was very direct and frank, no subterfuge. We were happy to lend it. And she paid it back — every penny — when she could."

Another disaster struck shortly after their arrival. Al Woods explained that he had not been able to arrange financial backing for the immediate production he had planned. Ayn would continue to receive one hundred dollars a month until the play was produced — but Woods could not say when that would be.

The Depression was at its height, and unemployment was rampant. Frank spent his days desperately searching for work, any kind of work, but no jobs were to be found. Ann Watkins, Ayn's new agent, began seeking work as a script reader for Ayn.

As the writer of a play soon to be on Broadway, it was no longer difficult for Ayn to interest an important agent in her work, and she had been dissatisfied with Jean Weick. A friend arranged an introduction to the much respected Ann Watkins. "I liked Ann Watkins very much at our first meeting," Ayn would recall. "We got along well, and she took We the Living. I showed her Ideal, which she liked, although she recognized that the style was shaky. She submitted it to a few magazines, but there were no buyers; most magazines then were publishing detective and action stories, and Ideal was an episodic story."

Ann Watkins found a job for Ayn as a free-lance reader, first at RKO and later at MGM. Her work consisted of reading books and manuscripts submitted to the studio, synopsizing them and evaluating their screen potentiality. RKO paid two dollars for a brief synopsis, and five dollars for a long one. "Few were long, because the material was awful. My advantage was that I could read French, Russian, and enough German to manage, so I got the foreign stuff, even Soviet plays."

That money, with the option payments from Woods, was what Ayn and Frank lived on for almost a year. Ayn was a promising playwright with a play about to go into production — and she was struggling to buy enough food to survive. At RKO, she earned about eleven dollars a week, at MGM about twenty dollars a week. Rent was forty dollars a month; her payments were often late. "I'd buy one lamb chop for dinner for Frank" Ayn would recall. "I had to diet anyway, so I would do without. One day, we had fifty cents between us, and our only food was the remains of a box of oatmeal. It was slightly Russian... You see why I'm not very glamour-conscious and don't like to live glamorously. I gave up the idea long before then, but that helped. There was no time to think of it... The tension was enormous because of our financial situation. I was planning The Fountainhead at that time, but I had no peace of mind to really work, I could neither work nor not work — I was running a race with an undefined bank account." And month by month, Ayn waited for word that Al Woods had obtained his backing.

The O'Connors made an arrangement with Nick that was financially helpful to all of them: Nick came to their small furnished room on East Sixty-fifth Street for dinner each night, helping with the shopping and cooking, and paying his share of the expenses.

Another intellectual young man came into Ayn's life that year. They became close friends, in a relationship that lasted for many years. Albert Mannheimer was a budding and talented writer — and a convinced Marxist. Ayn had violent political arguments with him, but she liked "Fuzzy" — his nickname due to the unmanageable frizz of his brown hair — for his lively intelligence and his eager curiosity about ideas diametrically opposed to his own. "You're an honest man," Ayn told him. "I'll convert you to capitalism in a year." He laughed at such a preposterous idea. It took less than a year. Albert became one of the first "students" of her philosophy and she spent long evenings and nights — while Frank listened quietly and served drinks and coffee — presenting her ideas to him. Twenty years later, Albert was still telling the story of their friendship, saying that he had been fascinated, "almost hypnotized" by her intellectual brilliance and by the power of her personality.

Rehearsals for Penthouse Legend finally began in the summer of 1935; Woods had obtained the financial backing he needed. At his insistence, Ayn grudgingly agreed to change the title to Night of January 16th; the alternative he offered her was The Black Sedan. It was to open on Broadway, at the Ambassador Theater, on September 16.

During the period of the rehearsals, lonely except for Nick and Albert, and beginning to relax after a year of unrelieved tension, Ayn and Frank began to meet people in New York — a young director, Bob Grey, actors Ivan Lebedeff and Robert Shayne, writer Jeanne Temple — and once more to spend evenings devoted to discussing the subjects Ayn loved best. She had not yet entered the world of New York political conservatives; she had not yet developed the passionate interest in American politics that was later to characterize her. But people were seeking her out, drawn as if to a magnet, as word of her talents and her ever-increasing intellectual powers began to spread.

But the demonic fiction writer was still at work, and Ayn emerged from the rehearsals and production of Night of January 16th with the sense of having escaped a medieval torture chamber. In an interview with Rex Reed in 1973, she would say: "The entire history of the play has been the worst hell I ever lived through. It was produced in 1935 by Al Woods, a famous producer of melodramas, who... turned it into a junk heap of clichés that clashed with the style and confused the audience... He was a faithful adherent to the school of thought that believes if a literary work is serious, it must bore people to death; if it's entertaining, it must not communicate anything of importance."

"Al Woods," Ayn would say bitterly when recalling the production of the play, "was really an old scoundrel, uneducated, and a pathological liar. He tried to get anything dishonestly, even if he could get it honestly. His one redeeming value was that he had a marvelous dramatic sense — his taste was vulgar, but he loved whodunit action. I later discovered why he bought the play: he had learned about the jury gag, and when

the more intellectual producers were saying it would destroy the theatrical illusion, he thought it was a marvelous idea. But it was mutual hatred between us from beginning to end. He was impatient of what he called my 'highfalutin speeches, sweetheart,' and he cut them all to the bone, so they were meaningless...

"Casting on Broadway was supposed to be by mutual okay of the producer and the writer. I suggested Walter Pidgeon for the part of Guts Regan [the criminal who is in love with Karen Andre]. At that time he was out of the movies, he didn't catch on in talkies, and Woods said he was a has-been. But I had seen him at the Hollywood Playhouse in Androcles and the Lion, and he was very good. Woods finally gave him the part — and as a result Pidgeon got an MGM contract, which started him on his big career. I was later told that he said publically that my play was responsible for his contract. And he did Guts Regan very well, he was the best in the cast.

"Karen Andre was played by an unknown whom Woods had discovered: Doris Nolan. She was the right physical type, very attractive, but not a sensational actress. The rest of the cast was okay. 15

"The director, John Hayden, was a very ratty Broadway hanger-on. I didn't get along with him at all. Anything good in the direction was supplied by Woods — he knew how to make things move." By the terms of his contract with Ayn, Woods was permitted to hire a collaborator; he chose John Hayden, paying him one percent of Ayn's royalties.

"I sat through rehearsals every day for three weeks, I began to dislike the actors very much; they kept wanting to change words or lines, they'd say 'I can't feel it the way it is' — they were the kind who suddenly find difficulty in saying 'The cat is on the mat.' You know how I write, the extent to which every statement is weighed, even for rhythm. It was plain torture...

"What I most objected to was not the cuts, but the additions: Woods insisted that there be a gun in the play, so I had to write it in — and it had nothing to do with the story. He'd weigh down the action with stuff like that, and then cut out the speeches. I could only argue. The contract was really in his favor... He kept saying "This is your first play, and I've had forty years in the theater. Don't you respect my judgment?' And I kept explaining that if the elevator boy suggested something, and had a reason, I'd accept it — or if the greatest authority in the world suggested something without reasons, I wouldn't accept it...

"The worst of all was that he decided to put an extra character in the last act, Roberta Van Rensselaer. Her part was written by the director. She didn't belong at all, and it held up the action — but Woods liked the idea of a chorus girl with furs. The girl who played it was said to be the mistress of Lee Shubert, who owned the theater and who was Woods's main financial angel."

In an article that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on November 17, 1935, John Hayden wrote about his preproduction concern for the play. He and Woods were told by a prominent manager that it was ridiculous to believe that members of the audience would leave their seats and pass three entire acts on the stage. People come to the theater to be entertained, not to be made a part of the show; they would be embarrassed if asked to go on the stage... After listening to these and many more reasons why the idea was all wrong we felt a little ashamed at having started it and a whole lot concerned about the expense that had been incurred in ripping out the orchestra pit, installing a new platform, steps, and so forth...

"With all this to worry about it was a perturbed production staff that settled down in Philadelphia to see if it would work. When the first juror's name was called he answered it promptly and alertly stepped right up on the stage. I then went out and had my first drink. Continued elimination of obstacles provided me with enough excuses to arrive at a very mellow stage by the time the play was over. Our week out of town proved the prophecies wrong. Not only would the public serve on the jury gladly, but it was pulling wires to get the chance."

Although the reviews were reasonably good and the reactions of the audiences enthusiastic, the Philadelphia tryouts were a special agony for Ayn. Woods insisted that she make script changes before almost every performance; she worked day and night to create material she believed served only to damage her play.

"One day in Philadelphia," Ayn later recalled, "I was walking along the street with Frank and Nick, who had come with us, and I started to cry. I tried to walk behind them so they wouldn't see me. I felt that the whole thing was blind experimentation, like a child and the surgeon is trying to decide which organs he can cut out."

As if to make a miserable situation still worse, Woods horrified her by bringing in a play doctor, Louis Weitzenkorn. Ayn considered him "a terrible sort of creature. He described himself as a Marxist, and we had violent political arguments." Ayn was not told that Woods planned to pay Weitzenkorn one percent of her royalties. When she later learned it, she insisted that the matter go before the American Arbitration Association. "I was not going to pay him out of my own money for nonsense." 16 Weitzenkorn's contribution to her play, Ayn told the arbiters, was to have the district attorney say to Guts Regan, "You bastard!" He wanted that line inserted, she explained, because the tag line of The Front Page, a major Broadway hit a few years earlier, had been a character saying "the son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!" — and he decided the scene was funny because of the word. Woods had tried it, the audience did not respond, and Woods took it out. "When I told this to the board, Mrs. Vincent Astor, a member of the board, leaned forward and said "That was all he did?' You should have seen the look on her face!" The board decided for Ayn.

Opening night on Broadway, Ayn sat in the back row of the theater — and yawned. It was not out of nervous tension — she was neither excited nor fearful — but out of acute boredom. The play was dead for her. It was no longer a play about ideas.

To create excitement in the audience, Woods had arranged for boxing champion Jack Dempsey to be among the jurors on opening night. The verdict was Not Guilty.

Next morning, in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote: "It is routine theater with the usual brew of hokum... It involves gangsters, millions, airplanes, grave-robbing and several noble flourishes to a man's devotion to the woman of his dreams, with perhaps a little suggestion of abnormality thrown in to spice the dish."

Other reviews, including that of Walter Winchell, praised the play, but their praise was embarrassing to Ayn. "They praised it as a plain good melodrama. The whole thing was such a messy compromise, I wanted to run. I felt that making my name with that kind of a play was a handicap, it was the wrong kind of name."

The Atkinson review and other negative reviews damaged the play, but did not destroy it. Despite Ayn's unhappiness with it, it continued to run to slightly less than capacity audiences. It was considered successful, although not a smash hit. One performance was given for an audience of the blind, with Helen Keller serving as foreman of the jury and newscaster Graham McNamee describing the scenes. The verdict that night was Guilty. Helen Keller herself, whom Ayn admired and later wrote about with great respect, voted Not Guilty. 17

Through the gloom of this period, one event had burst through like an explosion of sunlight in an underground cavern. During the Philadelphia tryouts, a telegram from Ann Watkins had been delivered to Ayn's hotel room. The Macmillan Company had made an offer for We the Living.

Ayn signed a contract with Macmillan. Her advance was two hundred and fifty dollars. Ann Watkins told her how the offer had come about. The Macmillan editors had been deeply divided on the manuscript; some wanted to publish it, some did not. Stanley Young, an editor who was also a poet and playwright, had fought for it stubbornly. The man who was most violently and intransigently against it was Granville Hicks — a member of the Communist Party and editor of The New Masses — who had written that "to be a good writer, a man must first become a proper communist." The final argument was given by George P. Brett, Sr., former president of Macmillan and still involved in its operations, who said: "I don't know if we'll make money on it or not, but it's a novel that should be published."

Substantial royalties for Night of January 16th began coming in. On good weeks at the box office, Ayn received as much as twelve hundred dollars. For the first time since the Communist revolution she was not on the edge of financial panic. She and Frank moved into a sunny, comfortable apartment at 66 Park Avenue. Frank was intensely proud of his young wife and her accomplishments; cheerfully, he told a newspaper interviewer, "I've been called 'Mr. Rand' so much that I'm going to have my name changed legally to that of my wife." Ayn, still not quite certain that their new comfort was real, began shopping, a little tentatively, for the clothes she could never before afford; the days of her dark Russian garb were over, and she wore casual American clothes, simply cut, straight-lined, and belted.

Because she now had the financial means to arrange it, Ayn made her first attempt to keep her promise to her family: to bring them to the United States. The matter had to be handled with great care, so that her anti-communism would not be known to the Soviet authorities. As Ayn had waited in 1925, so the Rosenbaums now waited to learn if they would be granted permission to leave Russia. Permission was not granted. When war began in 1939, Ayn lost all contact with her family, as completely as if they had died. Many years later she learned that Fronz and Anna had died in the German siege of Leningrad; the Soviets' refusal to allow them to emigrate had cost them their lives.

In March of 1936, a month after Night of January 16th had ended its run of 283 performances, We the Living was published.

Ayn sent a copy of her book to Frank’s father, Dennis — whom she had not met — inscribed: "To my American father, from his Russian daughter!” She sent a copy to Cecil B. DeMille inscribed: "From a little Russian immigrant to whom he gave her first chance at writing." She sent copies to her Chicago relatives, and wrote them: "I am glad to think that you believe the book justifies all the trouble you've had in bringing me to this country and in keeping me here... From now on, I think, it will be easier and you won't have to wait for years to hear of my success."

But the demonic fiction writer was waiting in the wings. We the Living was born and it died within a scant few months.

"The way We the Living was published was enormously painful to me — really enormously," Ayn later said. "Apparently it was way down on Macmillan's list of important books, and they concentrated any publicity only on their two or three leaders. I got only a couple of ads in conjunction with other books, and that was all. Nothing was done for it. That terrified me.

"Then the reviews started appearing — not appearing, really. There were no daily reviews in New York at all, only a couple in the weekend magazine sections. The New York Times review was ghastly; the reviewer panned it unmercifully, and said it was 'slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda.' There were a few complimentary out-of-town reviews, but they didn't praise it in the right way or understand the ideas. I blamed the reviewers totally, not myself. If they had given me justice for what was good, and said the style was rough or uneven, then okay, I would have taken the blame. But they wrote things like 'God is too frequently on the side of the non-Soviets,' and 'the author pours out her hatred for a collectivist world,' and 'the tale is good reading, but bad pleading; it is not a valuable document concerning the Russian experiment.' I always knew I would be controversial but I was concerned only with reaching my kind of readers." There was no means for We the Living to reach Ayn's kind of readers: without advertising or publicity, with only a few, mostly negative reviews, published at the height of Americans' excitement about "the noble experiment" occurring in Russia, her potential public did not learn that the book existed.

Like Henry Dorn in her short story "The Simplest Thing in the World," what made the reactions to We the Living harder to bear was that she knew the value of her work. As Henry Dorn had written his novel, so she had written We the Living "as carefully, as scrupulously, as delicately as [she] knew how." Like Henry Dorn, "[she] read [her] book over again, very carefully, and [she] was happy when [she] found a bad sentence in it, or a muddled paragraph, or a thought that did not seem clear; [she] said, they're right, it isn't there, it isn't clear at all, it was perfectly fair of them to miss it and the world is a human place to live in. But after [she] had read all of [her] book, to the end, [she] knew that it was there, that it was clear and beautiful and very important, that [she] could not have done it any better — and that [she'll] never understand the answer. That [she] had better not try to understand it, if [she] wished to remain alive."

The review that most angered Ayn appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature. "It was the most disgusting," she said, "because it gave a synopsis only, expressing absolutely no opinion." The review was written by Irina Skariatina, a former Russian countess who had fled to America in 1922, married an American, and returned with him ten years later to visit her homeland. In 1933, her book, entitled First to Go Back, was published by Bobbs-Merrill. Written during the period of some of the worst Communist atrocities against the Russian people, it glows with accounts of the "new Russia" in such statements as, "Truly the worker is sitting on top of his world with everything conceivable being tried that would be of benefit to him."

Ayn met Irina Skariatina at a party a few years later. "She approached me and gushed about what a wonderful book I'd written. I said, violently and coldly, 'Why didn't you say this in print?' She giggled with embarrassment, shrugged, and changed the subject."

After publication of We the Living, Ann Watkins was working to get Ayn a screenwriter's job in Hollywood. Ayn knew that her income from the play would not last indefinitely, and publication of We the Living was evidently not to add to her income. A screenwriter's job seemed the solution; it would provide money to live on, and give her free time to work on her next novel. Ayn had burst out of obscurity — she had a successful play on Broadway, a published novel, she had begun giving occasional anti-Communist talks to club and luncheon meetings, articles were appearing about her in the newspapers — and Watkins expected no difficulties. But no job was to be found. "We can't get a job for Ayn Rand," a Hollywood associate reported to Ann Watkins, "because she talks too much about Soviet Russia." "It really was the red decade," Ayn later said. "I was blacklisted."

A year after publication, sales of We the Living suddenly started to climb. Recommendations of people who had discovered it on their own were beginning to break through the barriers of opposition and indifference; the novel was becoming talked about and known. This was to be the pattern of all Ayn's future books. In an industry in which a novel usually has its highest sales in the first few months after publication, then begins diminishing, Ayn's work reversed the pattern; sales were not immediately large but kept growing through word-of-mouth recommendations, and in the second year they increased rather than diminished. But it was too late for We the Living. After issuing a first edition of three thousand copies, Macmillan, convinced that the book would not sell, had destroyed the type. Apart from her small advance, Ayn earned in royalties on the American sales of We the Living, a total of one hundred dollars. 18

14 It was never published until it appeared, posthumously, in the play form to which she had later adapted it, in The Early Ayn Rand.

15 Ayn's evaluation of Hayden seems illustrative of her growing inability to acknowledge any worth in someone in whom she found significant flaws; Hayden had had a long career as a Broadway director; only a year earlier he had directed his own revised version of Lost Horizon.

16 Ayn was represented at the arbitration by Pincus ("Pinky") Berner, a renowned theatrical attorney, who was to become a friend and to remain her attorney until his death in 1961; after he died, Ayn stayed with his firm; in her will she appointed among the executors of her estate Paul Gitlin and Eugene Winick of the firm Berner had headed.

17 In the years following the Broadway production, the play has been astoundingly successful, up to and including the present time. Two road companies went on highly successful tours. It was produced in Britain and other foreign countries. It has been played endlessly in summer stock; it is still, more than fifty years after its first production, a classic of the summer stock repertoire. It has been presented on radio and on television. To Ayn's great delight, it was staged, in 1936, by a summer theater in Stony Creek, Connecticut, with Frank playing the part of Guts Regan. In 1937, in a presentation in Suffern, New York, Jose Ferrer appeared in the cast. After World War II, it was performed by the USO for the American troops occupying Berlin. Amateur groups continue to perform it regularly, in a bowdlerized version not written by Ayn, directed to the amateur market. In 1941, Paramount released a movie version of the play with Ellen Drew and Robert Preston; it could not, of course, contain the play's most original feature, the choosing of the jurors from the audience. Rex Reed quoted Ayn as saying: "I had nothing to do with the screen adaptation. There is nothing of mine in that movie except the names of some of the characters and one line of dialogue, 'The court will now adjourn until ten o'clock tomorrow morning.'" The movie, she said, was "cheap, trashy, and vulgar."

18 In 1937, We the Living was published by Cassell in London, and began appearing in other foreign editions. In 1959, it was reissued by Random House. In 1960, New American Library published a paperback edition, and printed more than 400,000

copies within one year, twenty-four years after the novel's original publication. By 1984, American editions of the book that was "too intellectual" and "too anti-Soviet" to have a market, had sold more than two million copies. First editions are now selling on the private market for more than one thousand dollars — and the price is rising.

PART III

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Chapter Twelve

It was time. The concept of "the ideal man," its seeds planted early in Ayn's childhood, developed and refined over the years, had grown to fruition in her mind as she developed through her twenties. It was, as it always had been, as it always would be, the focus of her literary and philosophical interests; it was the radiant center of her soul.

Now, she was ready. Now, that radiant center demanded expression, demanded an entrance into life, like a child struggling to be born. Ayn endured its birth pangs, severe and passionate as a martyr to a noble cause.

The man-child struggling to be born was Howard Roark. His universe was The Fountainhead.

And it was a universe that she would create. If one examines the history of art, one will conclude that the writers whose works have lived across time — like the composers and painters and sculptors — share an essential characteristic. Their unique and personal stamp, their unique and personal spirit, emanates from every page of their writing, and one knows that it could have been created by no other sense of life, no other consciousness, no other intellect. The literary universe of Dostoievsky, its tone, its emotional quality, the conflicts that rend it — its metaphysics, so to speak — can never be confused with that of Henry James of Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde or Thomas Wolfe — just as the musical universe of Chopin can never be confused with that of Handel or Wagner or Prokofiev. Dostoievsky's world of aspiration and betrayal and martyrdom is his world, the manifestation of the internal spiritual universe in which he alone lived. In the presence of such an artistic creation, one has the sense of being led through a self-consistent new planet, born of an inimitable perspective. And so it is with the work of Ayn Rand. One turns the pages of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, and one has entered her spot in the literary galaxy, formed out of chaos in the image of the world view and the values that were hers alone.

During the years of writing We the Living, she had known she was not ready, in philosophical knowledge or literary experience, to attempt a full portrait of her concept of the ideal man, The ideal is only suggested in what Kira sees in Leo, that potential he might have realized had he lived in a free country, "We the Living," she once said, "was only an exercise, it was not fully my novel yet. My first serious novel had to present my type of man." When We the Living was completed, she knew she now could write her "serious" novel, a novel that would present her philosophy and would be written fully in the literary style that had been struggling slowly and painfully into life. She had learned enough about her new country confidently to place the novel's action in America. She was, at the age of thirty, fully an adult, prepared to handle adult characters.

She knew what the theme of her new novel was to be; while still writing We the Living, she had worked on it in what she called "small glances" — that is, it was not a systematic activity, but something her mind went to whenever she was momentarily free of other responsibilities.

The theme of The Fountainhead — which she identified as "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man's soul" — had been born on the day that Ayn grasped the distinction between two basic types of human motivation. It had been a day while she still was living in Hollywood, before the sale of Night of January 16th to Al Woods had brought her to New York. A young woman who lived in the same apartment house as Ayn and Frank had an important position as an executive assistant at RKO, where Ayn was working in the wardrobe department. Ayn watched the woman's professional struggle with fascination. She was battling, Ayn felt, with a desperate, amoral ferocity, scheming, manipulating and conniving, to advance her career. Ayn would later say "I liked the fact that she took her career very seriously — yet I disliked everything about her and her outlook on her career as against mine." The woman was passionately ambitious; so was Ayn. The woman was enormously hardworking; so was Ayn. Yet Ayn sensed a basic difference in the nature of their ambition — a difference of profound moral and psychological importance.

Seeking a clue to the principle involved, she asked the young woman one day, "What is your goal in life? What is it that you want to achieve?" The young woman answered immediately, as if the answer had long been clear in her mind: "I'll tell you what I want. If nobody had an automobile, then 1 would want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two."

Ayn was never to forget her feeling of incredulity, indignation, contempt. Her mind raced with the implications she saw in the young woman's statement; she knew that in a few brief sentences, she had been given the key to answer the question she had wondered about for years, the question about people whose values and actions seemed incomprehensibly irrational: But how can they? In future years she would say wonderingly, "It was like a light bulb going on. Without that statement, I don't think I could have ever arrived at the explanation. I owe The Fountainhead to that." It was typical of Ayn's method of thinking that she searched for a fundamental principle that would make the woman's attitude intelligible, rather than leaving the matter at: "All she cares about is material possessions," or "She wants to feel superior," or "She's a social climber." It was typical of her method of considering intellectual issues that from a brief verbal exchange, she would work her way to a dissection of human motivation.

The woman, Ayn thought, would conventionally be called "selfish." But wasn't a self — that which thinks, judges, values, and chooses — precisely what she lacked? I want to achieve things that are important — important objectively, in reality, in fact — thought Ayn; she wants only to make an impression on others. I choose my own goals, I decided that I wanted to write, and what I wanted to write; she struggles to imitate the goals chosen by others. I set my own standards; her desires are dictated by the standards of others. Why? What is the concept that will name the essence of the difference involved...?

She was led to define two different ways of facing life — two antagonists — two types of man. The man of self-sufficient ego, of firsthand, independent judgment — and the spiritual parasite, the dependent who rejects the responsibility of judging. The man whose convictions, values, and purposes are the product of his own mind — and the parasite who is molded and directed by other men. The man who lives for his own sake — and the collectivist of the spirit, who places others above self. The prime mover, whose source of movement is within his own spirit — and the soulless being who is movement without an internal mover. The creator — and the secondhander. Howard Roark — and Peter Keating.

Her earliest notes for The Fountainhead began with the statement: "The first purpose of this book is a defense of egoism in its real meaning" She was always to say that she had grasped the political implications of her purpose immediately. "The question of what makes a person an individualist or a collectivist politically, what is the principle, had interested me. The conversation with that girl gave me not just the key to personal motivation, but to political motivation as well." 19 In Ayn's notes, one finds an interesting insight into her first thoughts about Roark's characterization: "How he feels is entirely a matter of his own, which cannot be influenced by anything or anyone on the outside. His feeling is a steady, unruffled flame... a profound joy of living and of knowing his power, a joy that is not even conscious of being joy, because it is so steady, natural and unchangeable. If outside life brings him disappointment — well, it is merely a detail of the battle. He will have to struggle harder — that's all... He is in conflict with the world in every possible way — and at complete peace with himself."

She knew that her hero must represent the creative principle in man, and she chose architecture as Roark's profession. It gave her the opportunity she had always wanted: to glorify the American skyscraper as a symbol of achievement and of life on earth. And because the profession of architecture involves art, science, and business, she could illustrate the creative principle in man's three major types of productive careers.

She had arrived at the concept of Dominique Francon, the heroine, shortly after the conversation with the young woman who was to be the model for Peter Keating. As she and Frank were driving through Virginia on their way to New York for the production of Night of January 16th, she had happened to notice a chain gang of convicts working on a road under construction. A little later, she noticed an old and very beautiful Southern mansion, with graceful white columns and weathered, dark red brick walls, which had the air of a feudal castle. The two images suddenly united in her mind, and she had the essence of the quarry scene in The Fountainhead: Dominique, fragile, delicately austere, aristocratic, the chatelaine of the surrounding countryside, walks from her estate to the granite quarry owned by her father — to see Howard Roark, a nameless worker drilling granite under the broiling sun, his face streaked with stone dust, his shirt clinging to his gaunt body, looking up at her with a glance that is an act of ownership. That scene led Ayn to the famous "rape scene," in which Roark, his identity still unknown to Dominique, takes her sexually despite her violent, terrified struggle — a struggle which she wants only to lose. 20

"Until then," Ayn later said, "I knew about the heroine only that she and Roark were to have a romance, and since this was to be my kind of novel and the events were to represent 'what could be and ought to be,' the ideal romance had to start with violent antagonism. It was seeing the convicts and the mansion that gave me the idea for what would be the most romantic first encounter possible in my kind of style... So while we were being towed through Virginia in a broken-down car, my whole mind was on that scene.

"After getting the quarry scene I was stopped for a while by what would be the exact nature of Dominique's conflict with Roark. The problem was that I could not give her a moral conflict, but there had to be a conflict that would make her oppose Roark."

Ayn arrived at the essence of the inner conflict that would set Dominique in opposition to Roark, by introspection. "Dominique," she later remarked, "is myself in a bad mood." She projected what she herself felt in moments of disgust or depression, during the worst of her indignation against injustice, her contempt for depravity, her passionate rebellion against the rule of mediocrity — and asked herself: "What if I really believed that that is all there is in life, that values and heroes have no chance in the world?" What if she believed that the "journalistic" facts around her were metaphysical — necessary and unalterable by the nature of reality? Thus she projected the psychology of a woman who is motivated by the bitter conviction that values and greatness have no chance among men and are doomed to destruction — a woman who is stopped and paralyzed by contempt — a woman who withdraws from the world because of the intensity of her idealism — a woman who fights against the man she loves in order to make him renounce his career before his inevitable destruction.

In all of her writing, Ayn was to argue that evil, by its nature, is impotent, that only the good — the rational — can ultimately triumph; in Atlas Shrugged, "the impotence of evil" is a significant theme. Evil can destroy, it cannot build, it cannot create. Yet she knew too well the inner state of a Dominique, the revulsion and disgust from which such an attitude stems.

Ayn told close friends — although she never stated it publically — "The other source of Dominique was Frank. I knew that here was someone stopped by enormous contempt for the world and indignation at the world — what I later would have called 'he's on strike.' I felt that that would be Dominique's premise — a withdrawal from the world not out of bad motives or cowardice but out of an unbearable idealism which does not know how to function in journalistic reality as it is. The key to Dominique is that she is myself in a bad mood — and Frank if he were a woman."

Whenever Ayn told this story, her friends wondered, dumbfounded, at her lack of objectivity; some of them felt that she had invented two characters: Dominique — and Frank. Frank was not the spiritual giant that Ayn spoke of, and his motivation was not Dominique's. Frank could become angry — especially when he felt that Ayn had been treated unjustly — he was a very protective man; he could become disgusted with behavior he called "nonsense" and Ayn called "immoral and irrational;" but no one who knew him ever saw moral indignation or contempt in Frank's attitude. When Ayn was furious at a friend or acquaintance, it was Frank who tried to make excuses for actions that. Ayn would not excuse, it was Frank who tried to calm Ayn and be the peacemaker, it was Frank who would comfort the often bewildered, emotionally shattered victim. One saw his warmth — the frustrated warmth of a lonely man — especially in his dealings with the animals he loved; he treated the least stray animal with the exquisite gentleness of a parent; a part of Frank always remained the boy who had stolen sick chickens from his neighbors in order to heal them. Bitterness? Contempt? Passion? These were not attributes that had relevance to Frank.

Like Dominique, he had withdrawn from the world; unlike Dominique, he had withdrawn into silence and passivity. Throughout the years he and Ayn spent in New York, from the mid-thirties to the early forties, he rarely worked at a job or in the theater which he loved. Jobs were difficult to obtain during the decade of the Depression, and Frank was not a man who knew how to obtain whatever work was available; he was profoundly helpless in the practical world. But his withdrawal, his noncommunicativeness, his lack of deep attachment to any long-range goal were not the result of frustrated, embittered idealism. The reasons appear to have arisen out of his own character as it formed through a childhood dominated by powerful women — and out of his marriage. His respect and admiration for Ayn were deep and enduring; he knew that he had married an extraordinary woman; he was disarmed by his admiration. And Ayn required, psychologically, that she and her work and her interests be the center of the world for both of them; he did not have the strength to resist the force of her will, he did not resist — and sadly, he was becoming, as he had jokingly predicted, "Mr. Ayn Rand."

It was Ayn's genius — and in one sense her curse — that she could envision men of the stature of her heroes. In her intellectual and spiritual loneliness, she longed, throughout her life, for such a man: a man who would be her equal, who would see the world as she saw it, and who would represent the challenge she had never found. She told herself — and the world — that Frank was that man. But it seems more than possible that had Ayn married a man who in fact was like her heroes, the marriage would have shattered to rubble in terrible bursts of rage. Two people equally obsessed by their careers, equally singled-tracked, equally convinced of the validity of their ideas and the rectitude of their positions, equally dominating, could not have lived together with any serenity. One of the tragedies of Ayn's life was her painful, lifelong yearning for what she could never have endured.

The twin sources of Dominique's characterization may well be the reason why, even in the view of many readers who greatly admire Ayn's work, she was to be the most unsatisfactory figure in the novel. Dominique, who loves Roark, was to spend years attempting to destroy his career; it could have been no more intense and carefully structured a vendetta had she hated him. And she was to spend years trying to destroy herself and her own vision of life, that sense of what the world ought to be that was the cause of her torture at what is; she was to do it by leaving Roark and marrying two men she despised: first Peter Keating, then Gail Wynand. She was to be one of the most intriguing and complex of Ayn's characters, but ultimately she lacked the reality of the other characters. Ayn would ask for too great a "willing suspension of disbelief." By forming Dominique from herself "in a bad mood" and from an unrealistic vision of Frank, Ayn was dealing with a level of abstraction different from the level that was the source of her other characters. Roark, Keating, Wynand, and Toohey, the major male protagonists, are symbols; they represent four distinct psychologies and ways of dealing with good and evil; but they may also be taken as realistically possible individuals engaged in realistically possible courses of action. Only Dominique stands solely as a symbol — the symbol of idealism frozen by contempt. If one were to meet Dominique in life, one would be appalled by her marriages and by her treatment of the man she adores; one would find it impossible to accept her motivation.

It was late in 1935 when Ayn felt she could begin spending all of her time systematically planning The Fountainhead. Night of January 16th was running successfully on Broadway, royalties were coming in, and for the first time it seemed possible that she could complete a project of her own choosing without the strain of financial worries and without the need to interrupt her work to earn a living. She and Frank were ensconced in a new apartment, where their continuing arrangement to share household tasks with Nick eased Ayn's responsibilities for marketing and cooking. To Frank's great pleasure, he and Ayn had once more begun attending occasional movies and theatrical performances, rare events in their lives because of their straitened financial circumstances and because of Ayn's work; during the evenings in which she was not working on a project, she preferred to discuss philosophy with friends or to sit quietly listening to her favorite music and thinking about her writing. Still tentatively, still not quite certain that their new means were real, Ayn had begun shopping for furniture — a modern bedroom set in pale wood, a comfortable, overstuffed couch and chairs for the living room — and for the clothes she could never before afford. It was Nick who was Ayn's worldly Petronius. It was from Nick that both Ayn and Frank, oblivious to social conventions, learned how to entertain their guests, what food to serve, what wine or liquor was appropriate. It was Nick who urged Ayn not to wear the too feminine, fluffy clothes she occasionally bought. Mimi Sutton, Frank and Nick's niece, would later recall that on one of her visits to New York, "Ayn proudly purchased a small white 'Dutch' hat with a starched peak and a blue netty veil — it was awful! Frank very gently said that it wasn't right — but Nick said 'Take it off at once. It's ridiculous!' Ayn was a little hurt, she thought it was pretty — but she never wore it again." She began to wear the dramatic flowing capes that became her trademark; for a few years she jauntily carried a slim black cane with a silver head. It was Nick who made her aware that she had pretty legs; with her indifference to her physical person, Ayn had not been aware of it, but she was delighted to be convinced.

One of Ayn's most charming qualities was her attitude toward beautiful women. That she was not beautiful, nor even the physical type she admired, was a fact she appeared to accept with characteristic realism; nonetheless it was evidently a painful fact — perhaps more painful than she permitted herself to know. One might speculate that had she looked like Dominique or Dagny — tall and slender and fair — her life would have been vastly different and her relationships with men vastly more satisfying; nor would she have found it necessary to insist — implicitly at first and finally, years later, by explicit statement — that she, as the greatest of hero worshippers, was the standard of feminine worth, and that by their response to her all men were to be judged. Yet despite her dislike of her appearance, she took great pleasure in the beauty of other women; it was an aesthetic delight in which there appeared to be no tinge of envy. When she met an attractive woman, she was disposed in advance to like her — taking the physical beauty as the sign of an inner spiritual loveliness. None of her friends ever reported seeing envy in Ayn toward anyone; she wanted to see success and happiness and beauty in others; it buttressed her conviction that it was a "benevolent universe," where joy and accomplishment were possible.

With her decision to devote her time to planning The Fountainhead, Ayn turned from her brief sally into the world of "glamour," of entertaining and of buying clothes — "with an immense feeling of relief," she would later laughingly admit — and lost herself once more in the world where she felt most at home. Because of the considerable success of her play, she had become talked about and known in the literary and theatrical world; there were opportunities for her to meet people who might have helped her career, there were invitations to speak and to appear on radio; she was not interested. The book came first, as her writing was always to come first in her life. Any other value, apart from Frank, was essentially a distraction, emotionally trivial in comparison to her passionate need to work.

The characters of Roark, Keating, and Dominique were clearly set in her mind. Now, she began to devise two other central characters: Gail Wynand, the brilliant newspaper publisher, a man of great stature who makes the destructive error of seeking power over other men, and who tries to attain it by publishing whatever his readers want to hear; and Ellsworth Toohey, architectural critic of the Wynand newspapers and the archvillain of the story, who preaches the nobility of self-sacrifice in order to rob men of their self-esteem, their courage, their virtue, and their honor, and to turn them into willing sacrificial victims.

"I thought of the four men this way," Ayn was to say. "If I took the ideal man as the center, in relationship to him I would show three other types. Every character was devised in relation to the main theme. Roark is the man who could be the ideal man — and was; Wynand is a man who could have been — but wasn't; Keating, who wasn't — and didn't know it; Toohey, who wasn't — and knew it. These were not fundamental definitions, but they were the ones most helpful to me; they were the definitions I used for myself as to why I take these as the key figures. I asked myself what would happen to Roark if he surrendered to others — he would be the man of good premises who had given in — and that's how I arrived at Wynand. Then I asked who would be the arch-opposite and enemy of Roark and Wynand — and I arrived at Toohey. The average man who rides on evil without fully knowing it was Keating; from the beginning he was my idea of the girl in Hollywood."

There was to be considerable speculation over the years that Wynand was modeled after William Randolph Hearst. "Yes and no" Ayn said privately. "One could equally say he was Hearst or Henry Luce or Pulitzer. The common abstraction was: in order to rise from scratch and establish a great newspaper chain or magazine, you have to have some firsthand premises and ability and independence; how can that man dedicate his career to giving the public what it wants to hear? Some people thought Wynand was Hearst because — and I only learned this long after Wynand was clear in my mind — there were particular things about Wynand that resembled Hearst." In The Fountainhead, Wynand was to own an important art collection, one of the few things on earth he loved; before meeting Dominique, he had added to his collection an ecstatic nude statue of her. "How did you know about Hearst's statue?" Ayn was asked by a man who was acquainted with Hearst. "What statue?" Ayn replied. She was told that Hearst had a statue of a nude woman which was one of his prized art treasures.

"One thing was influential to me about Hearst," Ayn explained. "He was enormously ambitious politically; at the height of his success, he had tried to run for office and had been badly beaten. What impressed me was that when he tried to use all that influence for an ideological issue and to have people follow his ideas, he couldn't do it. That was a lead to Wynand's character: if a man goes after power by appealing to mob taste, he has the least power of anyone."

There were more direct sources for Ayn's characterization of Ellsworth Toohey. One day, Ayn's attorney and friend Pincus Berner and his wife invited the O'Connors to attend a lecture at The New School for Social Research. The speaker was to be Harold Laski, the British Socialist who was influential in the development of the British Labour Party. Ayn had only a vague knowledge of who Laski was. "Isn't he a socialist?" she asked. Yes, the Berners replied, but he was charming and witty, a wonderful speaker, and to hear him would be a cultural treat. Ayn was and continued to be emphatic in her disapproval of giving any form of sanction to "evil" — she maintained in later years that one should not attend such events as the Bolshoi Ballet, that to do so was to morally sanction and financially contribute to the Soviet Union; she felt "somewhat guilty" about going to Laski's lecture; but since the Berners had already purchased the tickets, she told herself "It's on their conscience," and agreed to join them. Several months later, when Laski returned for another lecture, Ayn and Frank eagerly purchased tickets; in this instance, she felt fully justified: Laski and his intellectual brothers would be infinitely more damaged by her use of them in The Fountainhead than they would be helped by a two-dollar admission payment.

"When I saw Laski, I knew I was seeing the soul of Ellsworth Toohey in the flesh," she was to recall. "Thereafter, I just had to remember how Laski lectured — his mannerisms, the pseudo-intellectual snideness, the whole manner of speaking on important subjects with inappropriate sarcasm as his only weapon, acting as though he were a charming scholar in a drawing room, but you could sense the bared teeth behind the smile, you could feel something evil — and I would know how Toohey would act in any circumstance; it gave me the complete sense of life of that type. Toohey is larger scale than Laski, who was a cheap little snide collectivist, but Laski projected Toohey's essential characteristics. Even his appearance was ideal. I drew a sketch during the lecture, with the narrow cadaverous face and glasses and big ears, and I gave all of it to Toohey."

There were other spiritual sources for Toohey. One was Heywood Broun, who wrote a column entitled "It Seems to Me" for several New York newspapers. "He would lecture the world on everything, always collectivist. He made one especially horrifying statement: that a man cannot form his own philosophy of life, but has to, in effect, find it ready made. He was a busybody, like Toohey, butting into every possible intellectual issue." Another was Lewis Mumford, architectural critic for The New Republic. "He was the only writer on architecture who went into social-political issues, as Toohey did, and he was a collectivist of a medieval kind, he defended medieval cities and the medieval way of life against the modern machine age." The final source was Clifton Fadiman, book editor of The New Yorker. "He was the archliterateur of the left, an elegant literary type, very intellectual, who made constant references in his articles to the history of literature of the seventeenth century, and general name-dropping literary phoniness. That intellectual superciliousness combined with leftism was just right for Toohey." (Many years later, after Atlas Shrugged was published, Ayn met Clifton Fadiman — and discovered that she rather liked him, and that he appeared to admire Atlas Shrugged. "I lifted him a few rungs in hell," she said.)

"I had had Toohey in mind before," Ayn said, "but it was like an abstract drawing, and these four helped me to fill in the details."

With the four major protagonists now devised, her next step was to do the necessary architectural research. She had never been interested in architecture, and knew nothing about it except that she liked modern and Gothic buildings, and disliked classical and eclectic architecture. She went to the New York Public Library and asked for a reading list of books that would acquaint her with the history, the aesthetics, and the profession of architecture. Within a few days, she was given an excellent list, and began her reading. "One of the first thrilling things was that Frank bought me a very expensive book — it was on sale but it was still a luxury — it was a good history of modern architecture and its problems, with illustrations." She also read a number of architectural magazines, to get the sense of how professionals discussed their problems, and what were the specific, immediate problems that arose for them.

A biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, about whom she knew only that he was famous in the field, was among the recommended books. After publication, many of her readers would assume that Roark was patterned after Wright. She would respond: "The only resemblance between Howard Roark and Frank Lloyd Wright is in their basic architectural principles and in the fact that Wright was an innovator fighting for modern architecture against tradition. There is no similarity in their respective characters, nor in their philosophical convictions, nor in the events of their lives."

While working on the architectural research for The Fountainhead, Ayn was simultaneously struggling with the plot. Devising the concrete events of the story, presenting the theme in terms of action, "was the hardest assignment I have ever had," she later said. The difficulty was inherent in the assignment: she had to devise a tightly integrated, unified progression of events that would cover Roark's entire career. In her early notes, she described her assignment as follows: "The story is the story of Howard Roark's triumph... It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way — and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph. These obstacles, of course, can come from only one source: other men. It is Society, with all its boggled chaos of selflessness, compromise, servility, and lies, that stands in the way of Howard Roark. As THE FOUNTAINHEAD goes on, it is every conceivable form of second-hand living' that comes to fight him, that tries to crush him in every possible manner... and fails in the attempt. To every second-hand creature he stands as a contrast, a reproach and a lesson."

Ayn had set herself a unique literary and philosophical goal. Historically, the originators of moral philosophies presented their theories in the form of treatises, as non-fiction. The writers of fiction who dramatized moral concepts were not philosophical originators; writers of the Romantic school, such as Hugo, Schiller, Dostoievsky, Rostand, took as their base the moral code of the culture of their time, which the majority of their readers accepted. But as Ayn was to say throughout her life, she was interested in philosophical principles only as they affected the actual existence of men; and in men only as they reflected philosophical principles. "An abstract theory that has no relation to reality is worse than nonsense; and men who act without relation to principles are less than animals. Those who say that theory and practice are two unrelated realms are fools in one and scoundrels in the other. I wanted to present my abstract theory where it belongs — in concrete reality — in the actions of men." Like the philosophers, Ayn intended to present a new moral theory. Like the fiction writers, she intended to dramatize it in a novel. She had rejected the common context, the conventional view of morality, in favor of an unprecedented concept of good and evil, a new definition of egoism, a radical view of man — and intended to present it not in the form of a treatise, but concretized and illustrated in human action, in the character of Howard Roark, in the events of a story. It was an assignment of stunning intellectual audacity.

She once said, "If all philosophers were required to present their ideas in novels, to dramatize the exact meaning and consequences of their philosophies in human life, there would be far fewer philosophers — and far better ones."

Working out the plot of The Fountainhead involved a long process of experimentation, of trying and dropping various possibilities. She reread Les Miserables, and wrote an outline of its structure in order to understand how Hugo had created a unified story that spanned the lifetime of his major character. "That helped bring some sort of order into what was an immense vacuum; but I still had no specific event or conflict to hang the story on, only the abstract conflict of the characters and their professions... I devised certain events very slowly, by pure conscious calculation: what would be the key points of Roark's career, how would he start, what would be the early difficulties, how would he become famous. I wanted to show how, even when he succeeded to some extent, the combined evil of the villains could throw him down... I had a lot of trouble with Dominique: in one version, she was to be Wynand's wife from the beginning, and Roark wouldn't meet her until Part IV; Vesta Dunning was to be the romantic interest in the first part of the story."

The character of Vesta Dunning, included in Ayn's early thinking about the novel — it was to appear in the first typed version — was removed before publication. Vesta was to be a young and idealistic actress who falls in love with Roark; they have a love affair, although he knows she is not his final or lasting romantic choice. The reader was to see her gradual spiritual decay as she began to debase her great talent in order to win public acceptance. Years after the end of their relationship, she would meet Roark again; she had become a world-famous actress — and a mediocrity. 21

Ayn's major plot difficulty was that she could not, for a long period of time, devise the book's climax, and any other events she projected could only be tentative until she had done so. "That was the real mind-breaker. I wanted an event for the climax connected with architecture, that would put Roark in great danger and antagonize the whole of society, and that would involve all the major characters. It was such a torturous process, I couldn't know when I could even start writing. I felt almost like a fake talking about my novel, since nothing was set and I didn't even know the central part of it... I was really against the idea of a novel that takes eighteen years of time, but the theme required it."

By the summer of 1937 — a year and a half after making her first notes on The Fountainhead — Ayn still had no idea for the central integrating climax. Frank was working in summer stock in Stony Creek, Connecticut, playing Guts Regan in Night of January 16th and doing small parts in other productions, and Ayn joined him for the summer. "I spent the whole time walking around in the country working on the plot, and going crazy. I would sit on a raft on Long Island Sound and think about it, then I'd walk through the woods, tearing my hair in despair — but every day I started again. By late in the summer, I still had no ending."

Exhausted from her fruitless struggle to devise the novel's climax, and desperately needing to write rather than to spend all of her time vainly planning to write, Ayn took off the last weeks of the summer to write Anthem, a novelette she had conceived while still in Russia. "I wrote it as a rest from plotting," she was to say.

Anthem (originally entitled Ego) is the most lyrical of any of her work, the most abstract and stylized in its literary method. It has the beauty and cadence of a prose poem — and, as always in Ayn's writing, the action is integrated with the philosophical theme. The story is laid in a world of the future, a totally collectivized world in which even the word "I" has long been forgotten; an individual refers to himself as "we," and to another individual as "they." The achievements of the past — industrial, artistic, and scientific — have vanished from men's world and from their memories. Until one man arises with the passionate, single-minded determination to pursue knowledge. Working alone, at night, in secret, he rediscovers the electric light — and is forced to flee when the rulers order the destruction of his light. In an uncharted forest, with the woman who loves him and follows him into the wilderness, he discovers the word — and the meaning of — "I," and plans to establish a new society. "I shall call to me all the men and the women whose spirit has not been killed within them and who suffer under the yoke of their brothers... And here, in this uncharted wilderness, I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the first chapter in the new history of man."

Anthem is illustrative of an important distinction between Ayn and other writers who have described collectivist societies laid in the future. The idea of projecting such a society was not new: it was part of the literary intellectual ferment of the twenties in Russia. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote his novel We in 1920-21; it could not be published in Soviet Russia but was read to writers' groups and widely discussed throughout Petrograd. In We, as in the world of Anthem, men's names have been replaced by numbers in a totalitarian world where the human spirit is crushed. But unlike the world of Anthem, the enemy of freedom is the rule of reason, which flourishes in the form of superb technological achievements. Like the anti-utopian novels to follow — most notably George Orwell's 1984 — Zamyatin projected his society as brilliantly mechanized and industrialized, on the implicit premise that slaves will continue to think, to work, to achieve.

Ayn believed that slavery is not practical. In her society of brute force the achievements possible only to free minds have ceased to exist. This was an issue that was to form the theme of Atlas Shrugged, where she would show the inevitable destruction of industrial civilization in a world where human intelligence no longer functions.

Ann Watkins, Ayn's agent, could find no buyer for Anthem in the American magazine market, where Ayn wanted to publish it, or in the book publishing market. "The author does not understand socialism," was one editors comment. A year later, it was sold to the English publisher of We the Living, Cassell, but continued to be rejected by American publishers. 22

When Ayn and Frank returned to New York from Stony Creek, Ayn decided to spend a few months working in an architect's office, without pay, in order to become familiar with the day-by-day activities of the profession. Through a friend, she met the famous New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn and he agreed to her plan. Ayn's friends were aware that her social shyness had made it difficult for her to approach a stranger and request a favor; but they also knew that when her work was involved, she allowed nothing to interfere. Ayn spent six months working in Kahn's office as a filing clerk, typist, and general assistant. He was the only one in the office who knew that her real purpose was research for a novel, and he seemed charmed by the adventure of having her there.

After leaving his employ, Ayn did not see Kahn again until The Fountainhead was in galleys, when she asked him to check it for any architectural inaccuracies. "He found none, except that I used the term 'silver granite' in the quarry scene and he said it should be 'gray granite' — and another of that kind. I was tremendously pleased — I was really delighted. Kahn was very complimentary about the book, and pleased by its glorification of his profession, but I could sense that the philosophy frightened him to pieces. I asked if he wanted an acknowledgment for his assistance, and he said no, it was not professionally appropriate, but that he would like me to give a general acknowledgment to the profession because they get so little recognition. And that's why I put the note in the front of the book, I felt I had to." The note reads: "I offer my profound gratitude to the great profession of architecture and its heroes who have given us some of the highest expressions of man's genius, yet have remained unknown, undiscovered by the majority of men." In post-publication interviews about The Fountainhead, Ayn, at Kahn's request, kept his name confidential. "I knew he was afraid of the book and thought it might be embarrassing. By the time it was a bestseller and the movie rights were sold, he kept announcing that I had worked there, and when I saw him again he said it was fine to mention his name. He was so open about it that I couldn't resent it."

It was while working for Kahn that Ayn solved the problem of devising a climax for her novel. One day, she asked Kahn "What is the biggest technical problem in architecture at the moment?" He told her it was in the field of housing projects, and that the difficulty lay in finding a means of building modern structures at the lowest possible cost. Many architects had tried to solve the problem but had done badly: in one project, he said, the architects had left off the closet doors for the sake of economy. "When he said 'housing,'" Ayn would later say, "something clicked for me. I thought that this was both a political issue and an architectural issue, and that it fitted my purposes. I knew that it was a good lead... but I didn't yet know what to do with it."

Ayn went to lunch at a nearby Schratft's that day. She sat with an uneaten sandwich, thinking of the problem of housing. "Suddenly — like Newton's apple — the total of the climax fell into place. I saw how it would unite Roark, Keating, Wynand, Toohey, and Dominique, and how it would fit my theme. I saw how it would involve all the chief characters in an action way, and bring all the chief conflicts and problems into focus. From then on, it was easy."

Ayn's idea for the climax of The Fountainhead was that Howard Roark would dynamite Cortlandt Homes, the housing project he had created.

Excited by the possibilities, she immediately began to work out the details, partly in her racing mind and partly on paper. Peter Keating would see an opportunity to rise from the debris of his failing career by designing Cortlandt Homes, a gigantic government housing project to be built on the shore of the East River and to serve as a model for the whole world. But he knows he cannot design it. He asks Roark to do it for him, and to allow him to present it as his own work.

Roark agrees. He has spent years working on the problem of low-cost housing, he has solved its problems — and he knows he will never be given a chance to build it: he will never be hired by any group, board, council, or committee, public or private.

Roark attaches one condition to his agreement. Cortlandt is to be built exactly as Roark designs it; that is his purpose, his goal and his reward: his own work, done his own way.

Keating agrees. Roark designs Cortlandt. The building of Cortlandt begins and Keating fights, the first fight of his life, to save it "from so many people involved, each with authority, each wanting to exercise it in some way or another." He fails to save it. Roark's structural and engineering plans, without which the project would not have been possible, are retained, but the finished building has only "the skeleton of what Roark had designed, with the remnants often different breeds piled on the lovely symmetry of the bones." With a charge of dynamite, Roark destroys the butchered body of his creation.

The climax of The Fountainhead, worked out over a sandwich in Schrafft's, is an archetypical illustration of Ayn's powers as a plot writer. It involves each of the novel's leading characters intimately and brings each of them to his final victory or defeat. Simultaneously, it dramatizes Ayn's philosophical theme: the rights of the individual versus the claims of the collective. It dramatizes the crucial role of the creator, the thinker, the initiator in making human survival possible, and the manner in which the morality of altruism victimizes him.

Through the working out of the climax, Peter Keating would be brought to professional disaster and to the realization of his self-created mediocrity. Gail Wynand would attempt to use his newspapers to defend Roark, to fight for the first time for a cause in which he believed — then sees the public rising against him and learns that it was not he who had directed public opinion, but public opinion that had controlled and directed him. With the closing of Wynand's newspaper, the channel for his destructive philosophy, Toohey would discover that he must begin his struggle for power all over again; his years of scheming and plotting had led him only to defeat. And Dominique would witness what she had most feared: the man she loved in the greatest danger he had ever faced; but this time, she would not be afraid for him; this time, she would know that he was right, that he would not be destroyed by a malevolent world — and she finds her way back to him after painful years of separation.

Almost from the moment that Ayn conceived the climax, she decided that a trial had to follow the dynamiting: the trial would be the occasion for a statement to the jury by Roark that would summarize the philosophy which the events of the novel — and of Roark's life — had illustrated: that progress and achievement come only from the independent mind; that altruism is the second-handers' weapon for enslaving the creator; that man is not a sacrificial animal, but has the right to exist for his own sake. It did not require a separate act of thought for her to conclude that Roark would be acquitted: his acquittal would serve as the final confirmation of her conviction that the moral is the practical. In 1938, almost four years after Ayn had conceived the original idea for The Fountainhead, she completed the plot structure and began the writing of the novel.

With the words that open the story: "Howard Roark laughed" — the ideal man was born.

19 By chance, Ayn met the woman who had given her the key to The Fountainhead after the book was published. She had married, and had given up her career. She had read The Fountainhead, and she spoke of how proud she was of Ayn's success. "She was basking in my reflected glory," Ayn said, "and talking of how we had lived in the same apartment house and been struggling young girls together. I was dying to tell her how much she contributed to the book-that she was Miss Peter Keating. But I couldn't do it. It would have been pointless cruelty." I agree with Ayn, and that is why the woman's name is not included in this description.

20 Many years later, when Ayn was asked during a radio interview why Dominique was raped, she replied, "If it's rape — it's rape by engraved invitation."

21 Some excerpts from the Vesta Dunning story were published in The Early Ayn Rand. They show an aspect of Roark which does not appear in the published novel: a steely indifference to a woman with whom he is sexually involved, an unjust intolerance of her failure fully to see the world as he does, a bewildering severity in his treatment of her. Presumably, these sections would have been substantially edited before publication; but as they stand, Ayn did the book, and the character of Roark, a service by removing them.

22 In 1946, Pamphleteers, Inc., a small politically conservative house, put out an edition of five thousand paperback copies. Caxton Press took it over from Pamphleteers, and in 1961 New American Library issued a paperback edition, which has had a continuing sale to the present. Like all of Ayn's fiction, Anthem has become a classic, rediscovered by each new generation, not through major advertising campaigns but through readers who discover it, love it, and recommend it.

Chapter Thirteen

As she began writing The Fountainhead, Ayn hoped — and expected — that the work would move quickly. It did not. It moved with painful slowness. The plot was clear in her mind, and the specific events, and the characters, and the philosophical ideas; but as before with We the Living. Ayn's literary difficulties were stylistic. Now it was the cadence and the beat, the expression of emotions and the narrative, that forced her to keep rewriting again and again. Frank often heard her reading paragraphs aloud to herself, time after time, to ensure that the rhythm was precisely as she wanted it. She would spend hours and days on a single paragraph, struggling to capture exactly the emotional quality she intended. She went over each page of her work as if with a powerful microscope, never abandoning a word or a sentence at the approximate, working far into many nights until she was fully satisfied. In Atlas Shrugged, when Richard Halley, the composer, denounces those who claim that art represents the spontaneous outpouring of the artist's blind feelings, and tells Dagny Taggart: "I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art — I, who know that it requires a labor which makes a chain gang look like rest and a severity no army-drilling sadist could impose..." he speaks for the author of The Fountainhead.

Ayn had thought that her carefully hoarded royalties from Night of January 16th would guarantee that she would be able to write her novel without interruption and without financial worries. But as the weeks and then the months went by and she was still struggling with the first chapters, rewriting them constantly, she began once more to feel driven by the sense of a race against time and a dwindling bank account that had haunted her for so long. Frank was not working, and the occasional screenwriting job Ayn had tried to obtain was closed to her "because she talks too much about Soviet Russia." She wondered anxiously if her money would last long enough and what she would do if it did not last.

Despite the passionate romanticism of Ayn's nature, there was a firm and unyielding realism in her; she had always uncomplainingly believed that her life and her future were in her own hands, that there was no one who could or should remove that responsibility from her. In her later comments on this period, she neither expressed nor projected any resentment at Frank's failure to contribute to their expenses, although it is difficult to imagine that she did not feel it, at least at times. She communicated implicitly that she saw their financial support as wholly her responsibility, and she appeared never to question it. But perhaps, somewhere inside her, she did question it, for as the years were passing her love for Frank seemed to remain as powerful as ever but their unspoken emotional rapport, their friends observed, was diminishing. For the first time, there were occasional flashes of temper between them, and progressively, in the rare social time she allowed herself, Ayn chose to be in the company of friends rather than alone with Frank. Mimi Sutton, who spent her summer vacations with the O'Connors in New York and observed them with an intimacy not available to their other friends during this period, thought at times that the glue holding their marriage together was Nick. Nick's gaiety and spirited conversation livened the silent hours Ayn and Frank would have spent together, as they had less and less to say to each other; when they quarreled, Nick made peace between them; when Ayn seemed lonely, he was her companion, as he was Frank's companion in his loneliness.

It was at this time, when her nerves were on edge from the slowness of her work and the beginning of new worries about money, that Ayn began contemplating the first of the series of interruptions that were to plague the writing of The Fountainhead. Ann Watkins approached her to suggest that, since no publisher had been found for Ideal in its novelette form, Ayn ought to rewrite it as a play. The timing was appropriate: Ayn had earned a reputation as the writer of a successful and controversial Broadway play — a play becoming equally successful on its road company tours — and it seemed likely that a new play would be eagerly sought after in the theatrical world.

Ayn did not want to do it. She dreaded taking time away from The Fountainhead, but a new play, if successful, would bring new royalties, enabling her to finish the novel even at its present slow pace, and would establish her reputation more securely.

Ayn had never been fully satisfied with Ideal as a novelette; however, she told her agent, she was not convinced that it was appropriate play material because of its episodic structure. But Ann Watkins continued to urge her, and finally, unhappily but believing it was a reasonable and practical step to take, Ayn tore herself from her work on The Fountainhead and began to turn Ideal into a play.

This was an ability she had always had, and would retain: the ability to cope with more than one writing project at a time. It was painful to do, and it remained painful, but she had schooled herself to switch literary assignments when she was a junior screenwriter for DeMille and wrote short stories in her free time; and she had rigorously schooled herself never to hope that financial problems would somehow dissolve unaided.

She was delighted to discover that the adaptation of Ideal proceeded rapidly, and was soon completed. Ann Watkins began submitting Ideal to theatrical producers; she reported that there was active interest. But the interest soon began to fade and rejections began coming in — until the prestigious Theater Guild told Ann Watkins that they were considering making an offer. The Guild held the play for several months, while Ayn nervously waited and wondered. At last, Ann Watkins called to say that Theresa Helburn of the Guild wanted to talk to Ayn. During their interview, Theresa Helburn praised the play — "She seemed to like it a great deal, and to understand it," Ayn would later say. She said she wanted to do it but was concerned that it was highly experimental and that its episodic nature, requiring many sets and many actors, made it very expensive to produce. After still more weeks of consideration and conversation, the Guild regretfully decided against production. Ann Watkins could find no other producer. 23

Ayn was "almost relieved" that Ideal was not produced; once more she was free to devote herself to The Fountainhead. But as she turned back to the novel, it was with an intensified concern about money. It had been a year since she had begun writing, and she was still struggling with the early chapters. Unable to work with a clear mind, knowing that now there was little likelihood that her bank account would last to the end, she soon again painfully faced the need to interrupt the novel and attempt to earn money.

She had had an idea for a play, "a philosophical murder mystery," which she believed had much greater commercial possibilities than Ideal. She began to write Think Twice. "I did it strictly for commercial purposes," she was to say, "and it was one of the most pleasurable writing jobs I ever did. I had thought out the plot between other activities, and I wrote it in three weeks. It's a much better play than January 16th... We had a gray Persian cat named Turtle Cat, whose food was very expensive; she'd eat only raw hamburger. I would economize

on my food and Franks, but not on hers. I told Frank that the play would be dedicated to Turtle Cat, 'who costs fifteen cents a day and sometimes a quarter."'

Think Twice is an ingenious thriller, in the tradition of Night of January 16th and Atlas Shrugged rather than Ideal or Anthem — that is, the stress is on intricate and complex action and the emotional power is between the lines, the cumulative effect of the action. It is a union of mystery and philosophy, and thus a precursor of Atlas Shrugged, where the reader’s attention is held by a series of grippingly unexplained events at the same time that he is learning a radical new philosophy. In Think Twice, in the simplified form of a play, one sees in clear relief Ayn's greatest literary strength: the ability to make exciting events carry a profound philosophical message, to tie plot and abstract ideas into a single integrated unit.

Like Night of January 16th, with its device of choosing the jury from the audience, Think Twice has what Ayn loved to call "a gimmick." Its hero, young scientist Steve Ingalls, commits a morally justified murder — commits it stupidly, clumsily, leaving behind a trail of clues which unequivocally point to his guilt. The district attorney, knowing the quality of Steve's mind, concludes that Steve is being deliberately framed — just as Steve had wanted him to conclude. In a dramatic flashback, we observe Steve talking to his intended victim just before the murder. "I will have no alibi of any kind," he says. "It will be the sloppiest and most obvious murder ever committed. And that is why it will be the perfect crime." 24

To Ayn's great disappointment, Think Twice could not be sold. She had taken more time from The Fountainhead, and now she had less money than before.

It was then that she received an excited telephone call from Ann Watkins. Eugenie Leontovich had read We the Living, had heard there was an unproduced play version of it, and wanted to do the role of Kira. Ayn had written a play version, entitled The Unconquered, shortly after publication of the novel when Broadway producer Jerome Mayer had expressed interest in it; Mayer had been unable to arrange a production, and Ayn had not attempted to do anything further with the play. As a result of Leontovich's interest, Ann Watkins told Ayn, the famous producer George Abbott was now interested in producing it. Ayn had serious misgivings about the project because of Leontovich's age — she was in her forties and would be playing a young girl — and because Abbott's reputation had been made predominantly in the field of comedy. But she knew she had no choice but to agree.

"And it was a disaster," she said many years later. "Abbott was pleasant, honorable, a well-educated gentleman, but intellectually he was a farce man, capable of nothing more. He had an inferiority complex about the intellect which he had given up but could have had. He often spoke wistfully of Maxwell Anderson, with whom he went to college, and he would say 'Somehow he became a serious playwright, and that's what I always wanted to be.' And you know what a phony Maxwell Anderson is!... William Saroyan's first play had opened, and Abbott said 'I couldn't understand it, that's why I knew it was deep.' I used that line for a villain in The Fountainhead.

"Abbott was totally inept about drama. He was a realist, unstylized, and he wanted 'the folks next door.' He disliked the directness and brevity of my dialogue, and if a line was simple, he wanted me to complicate it and use ten words instead of three. He'd say 'All right, if you want it to be arty' — when the 'artiness' consisted of simplicity, economy, and purposefulness. He wanted it to be the sloppy way people really talk."

Learning from her bitter experience with Night of January 16th, Ayn had refused to sell The Unconquered unless she were given script control. "I like to permit changes if they're not too awful, I didn't want to be arbitrary — especially since he had to direct it — but this was a succession of flat no's, one after another. It was terrible to deal with, particularly on We the Living, which was more important and which I took much more seriously than January 16th.

"There were endless rewrites, Abbott sacrificed everything for comedy, and the direction was miserable. Eugenie Leontovich was terrible, no one could do anything with her; she played in the old Moscow Art Theater hammy way and wouldn't take direction. The road reviews were miserable, and Abbott told me that if we went to New York, we had to get rid of Leontovich; I agreed fully He asked if I would tell her, and say the decision was mine, since they were old friends; and besides, I had the okay on cast. It was cowardice on his part, but I agreed to do it — and it was done."

The play was recast for the New York opening. Abbott chose for the part of Kim a young actress named Helen Craig, whom Ayn considered "not the type, but a rather good actress." At Ayn's insistence, Dean Jagger played Andrei; "his performance was the best in New York," Ayn said. John Emory played Leo. Ayn liked Emory personally, and they soon became friends. Frank had a small part as a GPU man, and understudied Emory. "Frank was much better than Emory, who was sort of a ham, but we had to have names."

The young actor John Davis Lodge was hired for the part of Andrei in New York. "He was a terrible actor," Ayn recalled; "he couldn't deliver Andrei's speech. Abbott labored with him but could do nothing. We knew we had to let him go. But this time, Abbott fired him. When I got home from rehearsal the day Lodge was fired, Frank and Nick were there, and Mrs. Francesca Lodge, whom I had never met. She was furious and practically hysterical, demanding to know why I had fired her husband — if it were on the stage, I'd be sure she'd pull a gun. She asked if I was against her husband, and I said, yes, I was, I didn't hide behind Abbott, and I very calmly explained what he did wrong and why he couldn't do the part. She finally left, not happy but no longer angry, just resigned. Nick complimented me enormously on how I handled it, but all I did was be rational... When John Lodge became governor of Connecticut, I thought I'd better not go there."

Ayn's experience with The Unconquered was a nightmarish repeat of Night of January 16th. "Even the script was bad," she felt. "It was a compromise between ten different versions. The sets were expensive but totally wrong for the play. Abbott had really done his best, which made it even worse; I could not accuse him like Woods." Ayn did not drink — she disliked both the taste and the effect — and was in later years to be vehement in her disapproval of the drug culture. How could anyone be irrational enough to tamper with his mind? — she would demand. The vigorous clarity and precision of her mind was the most precious of her possessions; to interfere with its functioning would have been to her a mortal sin. But Ayn got drunk, for the first and last time in her life, just before the dress rehearsal of The Unconquered. "I knew it was going to be a disaster, and I could not stand the idea of seeing it one more time. Frank was at the theater, and I was with Nick at home. I took a glass and a half of straight gin — it tasted horrible — but I gulped it down. When we arrived at the theater, I was marching down the aisle weaving from side to side and trying to control it — but it worked, it cut off any emotional reaction, and I could watch the rehearsal feeling nothing." After the rehearsal, Frank, seeing the state she was in, was furious with Nick for allowing Ayn to drink. Upset by the ordeal of the play, and even more upset by Frank's anger, Ayn burst into tears.

Mimi Sutton was again visiting Ayn and Frank in New York during this hectic summer, and the twenty-year-old girl felt as if she had been dropped into the center of a hurricane of emotion. She loved her aunt and uncle, and was painfully moved by Ayn's misery. Mimi had first met Ayn several years earlier, an experience she never forgot and still talked of almost forty years later. The thirteen-year-old girl had dutifully kissed her new aunt on the cheek. "Ayn was polite" Mimi recalled, "and inquired about me, but she was a little remote. After a few minutes, she said, 'Tell me, Mimi, are you afraid of me?' I was a little in awe, but I said, rather defiantly, 'Why should I be?' That got us off on the right foot."

It is true that the small, dark woman with the huge dark eyes, who was stiffly polite and shy at a first meeting, always seemed to inspire immediate awe, and not merely in children. It is also true that Mimi's answer would have "got us off on the right foot." All her life, Ayn sensed that people were intimidated by her; she would at rare intervals refer to it as a source of considerable pain, further alienating her from those around her. To say "how do you do?" — and to see a flicker of fear in the eyes of the person one is greeting — fear that appeared not to be predominantly the result of Ayn's professional or personal reputation, nor even of her "thus spake Ayn Rand" manner, but of her directness, her intensity, and her perceptiveness — was a singularly unhappy relationship to have with other people. That a little blond blue-eyed child stood up to her bravely, would indeed have been a rare source of pleasure for Ayn. It was soon after that meeting that Ayn and Frank invited Mimi to spend her summer vacations with them. They treated Mimi with warmth and affection throughout their lives.

There had been another meeting with Ayn that Mimi was never to forget. She was sixteen when Dennis, Franks father, had died and Ayn and Frank had traveled to Lorain for the funeral. Ayn was there, she told Mimi, because she wanted to see where Frank had been born and brought up — and because she was curious to view the body, to see if Frank resembled his father. "We escaped the wake," Mimi would recall, "and went back to her hotel room. I was telling her about my latest crush, on a boy named Peter, and she said that that was the name of a terrible person in the novel she was writing. We took off our shoes and lay on twin beds, and she told me the entire story of The Fountainhead; it wasn't written, but it was all planned. She made me feel as if the people were real, and the story was real, and I was living through it all. She wanted to get a kid's reaction. I was fascinated. She even told me about the rape scene!"

It was at the funeral, Mimi recalled, that most of the O'Connor family met Ayn for the first time. They found her aloof 'and difficult. They felt that Frank had abandoned the family after his marriage, rarely contacting them or showing concern for them, and they blamed Ayn for the loss of the brother to whom they had once been close.

Ayn was not interested in Frank's family, a fact which she did not hide from Frank. It is unlikely that she questioned him about his feelings for them; throughout their lives together, she seemed always to take it as self-evident that her feelings must also be his. But had Frank spoken of his love for his family, it is equally likely that, out of her love for him, Ayn would have agreed to see them and would have been cordial and friendly; no one who knew Ayn and Frank ever saw her refuse him a firmly expressed wish. But the time had long passed when Frank spoke openly about his feelings or desires; as the world outside came to hold less and less for him, his retreat into isolation and passivity was beginning to accelerate.

During what Mimi often referred to as "that incredible summer of The Unconquered," it was evident that this entire period — the worries about money, the constant interruptions of The Fountainhead, the failure to sell Ideal and Think Twice, the knowledge that The Unconquered was heading for disaster — was agony for Ayn. The one thing she wanted was to work on the novel she had been waiting all her life to write, and it was the one thing she could not do.

And it was agony for Frank. Not only because of his concern for Ayn, but because he was unable to help, as he was to admit in later years; he was unable to find work that would support himself, much less his wife. And because, as some of their friends observed, Ayn, in her pain, resorted to the only means she knew to deal with it emotionally: sudden rages over trifles — sometimes bewilderingly directed at Frank — to which he listened silently and helplessly; frightening periods of paralyzed, mute depression; all of which must have profoundly increased Frank's already intense sense of failure as a husband and removed from him his sole armor against an unintelligible world: the strength and certainty of Ayn Rand.

"Frank and I would go places together and talk that summer," Mimi recalled. "He seemed to talk more freely when Ayn wasn't with us...

He'd often say how proud he was of Ayn. Once, he told me that he'd like to have had a child, but it wouldn't have fitted into Ayn's life. He sometimes seemed upset over Ayn's breaks with people."

In this last statement, Mimi was noting a phenomenon that no one who knew Ayn well failed to observe: a series of angry ruptures with people who had been her friends, accompanied by condemnations of them for irrationality or moral treason. Ayn often was warm and generous with her friends, generous with her concern, her time and her attention. But when, in her view, a line had been crossed, when she saw an action as unjust to her, or as intellectually dishonest, or as morally wrong, she became an avenging angel and the relationship ended in a burst of rage. It was a pattern of behavior that was to escalate disastrously through the years that followed. "She was close for a while with Eugenie Leontovich," Mimi recalled, "and I used to hear Ayn's long telephone conversations with her, half in English and half in Russian. Then Ayn got furious with her one day; God help you if you were on the other end of that conversation! They never saw each other again... There were other good friends, and then something happened, and they'd just disappear. Frank would try to say: 'Well, we differed on some things and we don't see them anymore'; he'd try to smooth things over."

Fascinated and thrilled, Mimi attended some of the rehearsals for The Unconquered. "I got to meet the cast, and George Abbott, and S. N. Behrman, who wrote No Time for Comedy — he'd been called in as play doctor because things were going badly." At the rehearsals, Mimi observed a characteristic in Ayn which other friends would later comment upon. Dean Jagger, an attractive and gallant man, was warmly attentive to Ayn during the rehearsals. Ayn was unused to masculine attention that was not of an exclusively intellectual nature; men were intimidated by her, and she knew — this woman who wrote with such passion about exalted romantic and sexual relationships, who would have flourished under masculine attention, who would have loved to flirt and tease like a romantic young girl — that she was only an incarnate intelligence to most of the men she met, not, in their eyes, a woman. Mimi saw a glow in Ayn's eyes when she spoke to Jagger: "I could see that she had a sort of crush on him." With the boldness of youth, Mimi said to Ayn one day, "You'd really like to investigate this further, wouldn't you?" "Yes," Ayn replied, smiling. "You're entranced with him, I bet you'd like to have an affair with him, but you'd be afraid to take a chance, because you'd be afraid of losing Frank," Mimi went on. "You're absolutely right," said Ayn calmly.

The Unconquered opened February 14, 1940 — twelve days after Ayn's thirty-fifth birthday — at the Biltmore Theatre. "The crowd was good, and a lot of celebrities were there," Mimi remembered. "I saw Mary Pickford, wearing a chinchilla coat. Ayn had loaned me a beautiful dress, with a black velvet bodice and a black and white taffeta skirt. But we all knew the play was a disaster. We went to a party at Dean Jagger's house to wait for the reviews — he had a Japanese barman and maids serving the hors d'oeuvres — but when the papers came, it was awful We went home. Ayn stayed in bed all the next day, crying, and no one could talk to her; Frank and Nick tried, but it was hopeless."

The reviews of The Unconquered were awful. "One of the season's mishaps," wrote Richard Watts in the New York Herald Tribune. "Sentimental melodrama," said the Times. In the Daily News: "The interest is held but the imagination is not fired nor the emotions noticeably stirred." In the World-Telegram: "If it is intended as anti-Bolshevik propaganda, it is neither impressive enough in its doctrine nor brilliant enough in its satire to arouse anything beyond the mildest interest in the subject."

The play closed after a five-day run. Ayn never again wrote for the theater. 25

Her emotional salvation lay, as always, in her work. She returned to the writing of The Fountainhead.

The writing continued to go slowly.

There seemed one last chance to raise enough money to finish the book. As Ayn worked, negotiations were in progress for publication of The Fountainhead. Despite the commercial failure of We the Living, James Putnam, Ayn's editor at Macmillan, had inquired about her new novel. She explained the theme to him, and something of the story. He made an offer to publish The Fountainhead — on the same terms as We the Living had been published: the company would pay an advance of two hundred and fifty dollars. Ayn was willing to accept the small advance, but she insisted that, this time, she be given a guarantee that Macmillan would spend a minimum of twelve hundred dollars on publicity and advertising; she was not willing to have The Fountainhead vanish into the oblivion of We the Living. Macmillan refused to give the guarantee, and Ayn's association with her publisher was at an end.

When the first three chapters were completed, Ayn showed them to Ann Watkins. The agent was complimentary and enthusiastic. You can stop worrying about money, she told Ayn; if your money runs too low, I can get you an advance very easily, there will be no difficulties. "She had no business to say that," Ayn later said angrily. "She should have known that no matter how good the book is, one can guarantee nothing, particularly when the ideas are so controversial. I knew it would not be easy to get a contract."

Ayn agreed that Ann Watkins should begin submitting the early chapters. At first, it seemed that the agent had been correct; Ayn was immediately offered a contract by Knopf. She signed with them for an advance of one thousand dollars, which was not to be paid until the completed manuscript was delivered. They agreed to a small publicity guarantee, and gave Ayn one year to complete the manuscript.

There was no way for Ayn to speed up the writing process, not if she were to adhere to the literary standards she had set herself; and she never conceived of the possibility of accepting lesser standards. She worked for crushingly long hours and at a frantic pace to meet her deadline, seeing no one, rarely leaving her desk. As time began to run out, she had completed only one third of the manuscript. Desperate, she had Ann Watkins ask Knopf if they would extend the deadline, and pay her some part of the advance. Knopf read the completed section of the book, agreed to extend the deadline — but refused to pay any part of the advance. On the date of the deadline, the contract was dropped by mutual agreement.

"Now," Ayn later said, her face taut as if still enduring the strain of that period, "I didn't know if I'd be able to finish the book. We had no money at all. And I didn't even have a publisher. This was when the real horror began." Ann Watkins continued circulating the completed chapters, and rejections began coming in — eight rejections in all.

Ayn was upset when Ann Watkins, against her stated order that that "red house" was not for her, submitted the manuscript to Simon & Schuster. It was rejected. A friend of Ayn, who knew Henry Simon, insisted that the decision must have been made by the editors without Simon's knowledge, and that Simon was not politically to the left. He wanted Ayn to talk with Simon, and dubiously she agreed. "Simon was a tall, gawky type," she was to comment. "He was so intellectually out of focus that he could not be leftist or anything else. He said the house was not leftist, but that their editors hadn't liked the book, they'd thought it was badly written and that the hero was unsympathetic. Then he said, 'We're not Communists, we're really conservatives — we're so conservative we even published Trotsky!' I had to make an effort not to burst out laughing. It was so ludicrous I couldn't even be upset too much. It was like being turned down by the Daily Worker plus Mortimer Snerd."

It was after the eight rejections, Ayn always felt, that her agent's opinion of the book began to change. "She couldn't sell it, so she had to blame me. One day she said "The real trouble is that you have an unsympathetic central character, and you can't have that in a book.' I said 'I don't see why you can't. Look at William Faulkner, his leading characters are always unsympathetic.' She said 'Mmm, yes' — and the way she said it was so eloquent. The look on her face was as if I had cut the ground from under her feet. I had refused to sanction what she was saying; she knew that I considered Roark sympathetic, and I was telling her I don't give a damn what you think, if you want to call him evil, fine...

"Our relationship began to get very tense. One day she was talking about something being wrong with The Fountainhead, and I kept asking her what it was. She finally said, 'I don't know, I just feel it, I can't always give reasons.' I was still naive enough so that that was a traumatic shock to me. I didn't expect anyone to say that seriously. I went home and wrote her a long letter, saying why one must always go by reason, and that this has to be a break with her. That's how I left her. I had no choice. She was to continue handling my past work, but now I no longer had an agent."

By then, the book had been rejected by twelve publishers. The intellectual world was dominated by collectivism in politics and by naturalism in literature. Ayn had no doubt that the rejections were based on one or the other — or both — of these two allegiances. The reports declared that the novel was too controversial — that it went against the prevailing political climate of opinion — that it was too intellectual for a novel — that the story was improbable — that the hero was unsympathetic — that no one could identify himself with Roark. The verdict: The Fountainhead had no commercial possibilities.

Ayn continued to work steadily, burdened by the knowledge that her savings were dwindling with each page of manuscript. By the fall of 1940, she had only seven hundred dollars left. It was under these circumstances that she took three months off from writing, using the last of her savings, to work for a political cause.

23 When Ayn later returned to Hollywood and became established in the film industry, studio representatives approached her from time to time, asking to see the play for possible movie adaptation; every few years, Ayn rewrote it, making improvements in a work that never fully pleased her. In the end, Ideal remained unproduced and unpublished until 1984, when the play version appeared posthumously in The Early Ayn Rand.

24 Like Ideal, Think Twice was published posthumously in The Early Ayn Rand

25 The Unconquered is available now only in typescript at the New York Public Library.

Chapter Fourteen

Ayn had been in the United States for several years before she began to take an interest in the American political scene. In her first years in her new country, there had been no time for political studies. Besides, she would say, "when a play or a movie preached some sort of drippy altruism, I took it to be just conventional hypocrisy which was of no cultural significance. The political institutions of America, the Declaration of Independence, were so individualistic, so much on my premises, that I thought altruism and statism were a dead issue."

The 1932 campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been the first presidential campaign to interest Ayn. She was by then, proudly, a citizen; her first vote was cast for Roosevelt. Her reason was his promise to fight for the repeal of Prohibition. "Prohibition was the political issue that aroused me," Ayn would recall. "I knew that this was a complete breach of individual rights, a collectivist-mystical issue serving the interest of the worst kind of pressure groups, created by a small religious and Bible Belt minority... What shocked me was the hypocrisy with which the issue was handled by the Republicans. The Democrats came out with an uncompromising, absolute stand against Prohibition; the Republicans temporized — you know, the attitude of 'something can be said for both sides.'

"Besides, FDR seemed to have the more libertarian platform; he criticized Hoover for too much bureaucracy, that taxes were too high, that the national budget was too high... I must confess that I did not follow all of Roosevelt's speeches, I was not yet a very careful political observer, I read only the highlights of an issue. Much later, I saw quotations from some of his speeches during that campaign that made me feel a little guilty — he said that this economy had reached its climax as far as production was concerned, that now it's an issue of distribution."

As she began to observe the American political scene more closely in the mid thirties, it was with a growing sense of uneasiness. "It had become really apparent that Roosevelt was a collectivism that he was moving toward a socialist program," she concluded. "Some of his Brain Trust were making speeches that were out-and-out Communist. I was violently indignant." She began to read in increasing numbers of newspapers and periodicals that the nightmare from which she had escaped was a "noble experiment." She began to hear intellectuals denouncing individualism, industry, and the profit motive in a manner she had not expected to hear outside of Russia; collectivism was being advocated more and more openly. She watched in stunned disbelief — and then in growing horror — as the country's intellectuals began their rush to embrace Stalinism. It had happened in Germany with Hitler, it had happened in Russia with the Communist revolution — she had seen it happen, she had lived with it: that the intellectuals — the men who ultimately determined a country's philosophy — were the first to ringingly endorse totalitarianism. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," they proclaimed, indifferent to the fact that it was human bodies that were being broken and that the dish they were preparing was dictatorship. She had never forgotten — she never would forget — the vision of America she had held while still in Russia, the golden, free America she had loved. She loved it still, it lived within her still — as she could not doubt that it lived within most Americans, struggling against the dead weight of altruism and collectivism that was beginning to choke its life. She watched her new country's steady march toward collectivism and began to grasp that she had walked down the gangplank of the De Grasse into an America that lived and worked by one moral code, but in its churches, its schools, its art, its literature, its departments of philosophy, it championed and preached and taught its young the exact opposite of that moral code, the exact opposite of the code that had made possible its unprecedented achievement and grandeur. She had come to an America that was vastly productive, whose industrialists and businessmen were raising the standard of living of the country to heights no gem-encrusted rajah had ever conceived, where scientists and inventors were lifting the centuries-old, backbreaking work of manual labor which had always been the life of most of mankind, where architects were building edifices that soared arrogantly to the sky as if to match the aspirations of the people who occupied them, where government was limited predominantly to the protection of human rights and had no mandate to be the big brother of its citizens or to distribute the wealth and achievement of some men for the unearned benefit of other men, where men were free to live for their own happiness and pursue their own goals and, in so doing, to create the most productive country that had ever existed. But she had come to an America that had been hurtling toward disaster and had not known it: an America where men were taught that humility was a high virtue, that self-sacrifice was a moral imperative, that poverty was noble, that material wealth was the sign of spiritual depravity.

She had come to an America that was cut in two. It lived by the moral code she had been struggling to formulate since the first days of the Communist revolution, since her first horrified sight of the posters informing her that man must exist for his brother men, for the state, for the collective; but it upheld, philosophically and morally, the sentiments of those scrawled red posters. She had come to an America that had never named or sanctioned its own unique code, the principles by which it lived and prospered and had become the last great hope of mankind.

Despite the professional activities in which she was engaged throughout the thirties, despite her work on We the Living and Ideal and Anthem and Think Twice and The Unconquered and The Fountainhead, she had begun to spend most of her spare moments — and to take more moments than she could spare — systematically studying economic theory and practice, reading every new book by conservative thinkers, following newspaper and magazine accounts of the political situation.

By 1940, she felt that "through the reading and thinking I had done, I was a real political expert. I was convinced that if Dewey or Taft were nominated, it would be complete disaster for the Republican Party and for the nation if one of them were elected — both were uninspiring compromisers without any righteous or moral stand, they were Republicans in the present-day sense. It was only Willkie who was — in the beginning — an outspoken and courageous defender of free enterprise."

Wendell Willkie was nominated to run against Roosevelt. Ayn believed that this was a crucial election, that if Roosevelt were reelected the country would accelerate its perilous roll toward political disaster, and that "this time one has to do something." It was self-evident to Ayn that if she believed something should be done, she did not wait for others to do it; it was her job to leap into the fray. After long discussions, Ayn and Frank agreed that Ayn would temporarily stop work on The Fountainhead, they would live on the last seven hundred dollars of her savings, and they would join the Willkie campaign to fight for the preservation of the American political system.

It was a difficult and painful decision, made at a wrenching emotional cost. But when Ayn was asked if it were a "sacrifice" to abandon her novel and spend the last of her money, she denied it vehemently, saying that it was an act of pure selfishness to fight for her ideas and for a world in which she would be free to write.

Ayn knew no one in the political world, no one who might see to it that her name and her talents were properly utilized in the campaign. It was consistent with the modesty that coexisted with her certainty of her abilities that, with Frank, Ayn went to the headquarters of the Willkie Clubs, introduced herself as "Mrs. Frank O'Connor," and volunteered her services in any capacity required.

Frank's job — a job totally out of character for this reserved, retiring man — was to ring doorbells, hand out literature, and urge people to register and to vote for Willkie. Ayn became a typist. They both worked full time, and without pay. Within a week, Ayn suggested the formation of an "intellectual ammunition bureau" — a bureau that would analyze Roosevelt's speeches and prepare answers for Republican speakers across the country, that would unearth and disseminate facts and statistics damaging to the Democrats. Her suggestion was accepted, and she was put in charge of a group of hard working, dedicated volunteer researchers.

"There was a real crusading spirit at first," she recalled. "I've never seen it in any election since. People were bristling with Willkie buttons. I wore five of them."

It was still early in the campaign when Ayn "began to see the disasters. Willkie began uttering such a mishmash of compromises that his popularity — he had had the enthusiastic support of millions in the beginning — began to fall and he never recovered. The torture for me was that each of Willkies major speeches would defeat whatever good the other campaigners were doing; each was a worse disappointment than the preceding. The issue was capitalism versus the New Deal — and by abandoning his moral stand for capitalism, Willkie was the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt, who was only the creature of his time, riding the current; but Willkie had had a chance single-handedly to stop or at least delay the disaster. It was horrible."

Ayn was passionately opposed to any American involvement in the war in Europe. And she was horrified that Willkie did not speak out unequivocally against such involvement. "It was Roosevelt," she said, "who was uncompromisingly anti-war. He swore he would never send American boys to fight on foreign soil."

As Ayn watched the campaign collapsing into ruins, she was given a new assignment by the Willkie Clubs — added to her "intellectual ammunition" work — which was an enormous source of pleasure to her. She had never enjoyed — and never would enjoy — formal public speaking; the few talks she had given following the publication of We the Living were done as a dutiful, nervous chore. But now she began enthusiastically addressing assorted, often vocally hostile, groups on street corners, in cafes, in parks, wherever she could find people who wanted to listen and question. Once, a heckler demanded: "Who the hell are you to talk about America? You're a foreigner!" Calmly, she answered: "That's right. I chose to be an American. What did you do, besides having been born?" The crowd laughed and applauded — and the heckler was silent.

The Gloria Swanson Theater on Fourteenth Street, near Union Square, a strongly pro-Roosevelt district, was showing Willkie campaign movies and had requested speakers to answer the audiences' questions. Seven times a day for two weeks, Ayn's shyness vanishing as it always did in the presence of eager, questioning minds, she happily answered questions from the stage of the theater. The experience further confirmed her in her respect for the American public, in her conviction that the so-called "common man" is singularly uncommon. The most intelligent and rational questions she heard anywhere were asked by the audiences from the working-class area of the theater.

She was delighted, too, by her newly discovered ability to make complex political issues instantly clear and to establish communication even with antagonistic audiences — and she found that she loved being in the thick of an intellectual battle. A friend from the Willkie Clubs sat in the audience to see the severe, cerebral Ayn Rand sparkling on that Fourteenth Street stage as the power of her words and the power of her personality held her audience entranced. Her ability to make complex issues effortlessly intelligible, to open wide the gates to the realm of ideas for even the most modest of intelligences, was newly discovered by Ayn, but had always been clearly perceived by those who knew her. It was a talent that was an essential part of the spell she was progressively to weave as the years passed, bringing even the most antagonistic audiences to their feet in thunderous applause for a woman — and a philosophy — they had been prepared to dislike. It was a talent that was to reach a towering height — a talent for finding the most devastating arguments for her case, for presenting her arguments with stunning clarity and precision — a charismatic power to convince.

The 1940 election was a landslide for Roosevelt. Ayn was bitterly disappointed, but she felt that Willkie had not deserved to win, that he had sabotaged his own campaign. A few weeks after the election, Ayn met Willkie at a party given by some of her new conservative acquaintances. "I approached him very timidly," she would recall. "I didn't quite know how to speak to people like that nor what was understood between us — and I asked naively, 'Can you tell me why, prior to the campaign, you were writing about individualism constantly, but you never mentioned it during the campaign?' He looked at me in a completely unfocused manner, I could tell that the eyes were not seeing me, and said 'Individualism? Well, I'm for it' — and walked off. This was a memorable moment for me. It was a horrible shock of disgust.'

It was through her work in the campaign that Ayn began to meet prominent conservatives, to see them socially at her modest Manhattan apartment or in their homes, and to begin working with them on free-enterprise causes. The man she liked best was the distinguished novelist and playwright Channing Pollock. She was concerned that he was religious; the link between reason and freedom had always been firm in her mind; but, she was to say, "He was violently pro free enterprise, and he didn't mix religion with it, he was very sincere and militant." Although she disapproved philosophically of religious beliefs, she felt that they were an individual's private business — until and unless he attempted to justify his political philosophy on religious grounds, on faith rather than reason. That, she maintained, was the death knell of freedom. After the election, Ayn suggested to Pollock that what was now required was a union of intellectuals to take a philosophical and moral stand for capitalism; since Pollock had more of a public name than she, she suggested that he be the official organizer of such a group. Pollock was skeptical about the possibility of recruiting such a movement, but he agreed to test the idea during one of his lecture tours; he would announce that he was contemplating the formation of a pro-free-enterprise group, and request that people write him if they were interested. In the spring of the year, he returned from his lecture tour with eight thousand letters.

Pollock introduced Ayn to a number of important conservative thinkers and writers, feeling that her unique powers of persuasion would interest them in the group. "That's how I met the most extreme advocates of capitalism of the day," she later recalled. Among them were Ruth Alexander, prominent economist, writer, and lecturer; Albert J. Nock, one of this century's most significant influences on libertarian thought; Rose Wilder Lane, the brilliant political writer and theorist; and Isabel Paterson, a conservative theorist of fiery and outstanding intellectual range and power.

Many of the people Ayn spoke to were interested in helping with the groups formation, and several meetings were held to formulate plans. Ayn wrote an article for them entitled "The Only Path to Tomorrow," in which she stated her definitions of individualism: "Man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals in voluntary, unregulated exchange" — and collectivism: "the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter." 26

Ayn intended the paper as a draft of what the organization would stand for. Several meetings were held, but, Ayn soon concluded, "It was complete disaster. I had written my paper as a bromide, assuming all of them would be in favor of it; that it was a revelation to many of them was a shock to me. What disillusioned me was the realization that they were really nonphilosophical, and that education would have to begin with them." She had read and admired Nocks work, but she felt, meeting him, that his attitude was cynical and weary; he once told her that freedom was doomed, that it was a rare accidental exception in history, and there would always be majorities demanding handouts — and he wished the group well but refused to join it. "At one meeting," Ayn recalled, "Pollock brought in several professional 'gravy boys,' concerned only with how we would raise money rather than with what we would do... It all fell apart, and I lost interest." Ayn continued to respect a number of the conservatives she had met, but she was becoming convinced that the "devotion" to free enterprise of many among them consisted of compromise, timidity, fence-sitting, and an aggressive non intellectuality.

"I didn't conclude then that conservatives were actually hopeless traitors," she later explained. "Just that a lot of them were weak and cowardly; I still thought that it's an issue of ignorance. It took years for me to gradually discover that it was an amoral, anti-moral attitude. This wasn't true of all of them, but most. The other killer was cynicism; they didn't believe capitalism could be saved." Characteristically, when Ayn made her final negative judgment on conservatives, it was in terms of immoral motivation; the possibility of an honest error involving such crucial issues seemed not to be in her lexicon.

Ayn was to maintain her contacts with many of the conservatives she met, and over the next years she was to become acquainted with many more; she found Rose Wilder Lane particularly interesting. But it was her meeting with Isabel Paterson that marked the beginning of one of the most important friendships of her life.

Isabel Paterson — called "Pat" — was a widely respected conservative thinker and writer, a remarkable woman with a still more remarkable intelligence. Small, dark, and plain, Pat was the blazing firebrand of the conservative movement, ferociously dedicated to her principles and ferociously contemptuous of anyone who disagreed with her. "Stupid," "blockhead," "traitor," and "fool" were among the more kindly of her descriptions not just of her political opponents, but of any of her allies whom she found guilty of even the most minor intellectual heresy — descriptions she never hesitated to announce to them, waving her arms and shouting, both publically and privately. She wrote several novels which achieved a moderate success; one of them, Never Ask the End, was a Literary Guild Selection; she told her friend Muriel Hall that she wrote them because it was relaxing, "like doing needlework." 27

When Ayn meet her, Pat was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune Books, where she wrote a witty and brilliant Sunday column called "Turns With a Bookworm." Her column, intended to be about books, was as often about politics. At the same time, she was working on a major nonfiction book, The God of the Machine, which was to be profoundly valuable addition to the library of free enterprise thought. 28

"She was very pleasant to me when I met her," Ayn recalled. "We discussed politics, which I enjoyed — but I disliked her enormously as a person. The malice was so blatant. Later, I reproached myself for trusting a first impression. She contacted me to say that she liked my attitude toward politics and wanted to see me. That's how our friendship began."

Within a few weeks of their acquaintance, Pat invited Ayn to spend the weekend at her country home. It was one of the very few times that Ayn left the city for a weekend without Frank. She and Pat talked until sunrise, discussing philosophy and politics. The acquaintance soon became a warm friendship between these two women of great and passionately held principle. It was the first — and the last — important friendship with a contemporary that Ayn ever had. They saw each other constantly, and talked endlessly. Each Monday evening, when the Herald Tribune Sunday Book Section was going to press, Pat was in her office to check the final copy. It had become a tradition that a few conservative friends joined her for intellectual conversation, which continued until the small hours of the morning. Ayn soon became a member of the group, which included the writer and literary critic Will Cuppy and journalist Sam Wells, and looked forward eagerly to the Monday meetings.

Despite their closeness, Ayn had important philosophical disagreements with Isabel Paterson. "Pat could be totally rational," Ayn was to say when she later spoke of their friendship. "She once broke with a conservative friend because the friend had said she didn't always form her goals by reason, but by feelings or hunches; Pat had screamed at her: how dare she go by feelings when human lives and freedom were involved! But you never knew when, during the same week or even the same evening, she'd be at her best: a marvelous, enormously rational, abstract mind, who could talk fascinatingly and made the best philosophical identifications and connections — or at her worst, when she'd turn mystic. She told me that she believed in God, and when I said that was incompatible with rationality, she replied that she was absolutely for reason, but that reason itself can tell you what issues reason cannot handle. I insisted that she explain what on earth she was talking about, I'd bring up the issue from time to time, and she always maintained that she could explain it — if she hadn't, that would have been the end between us — but she never did. She even told me once that she believed in reincarnation, and that she'd been a German countess during the Renaissance. I listened as politely as I could, then said: I do not take cognizance of anything I cannot check. Whenever she'd start on mysticism, I'd cut her off so short that after a while she stopped talking about it."

The absolutism of reason with its corollary, the rejection of faith, was, and remained, the philosophical issue most important to Ayn. As early as adolescence, she had grasped that man's reasoning mind is his tool of survival; as early as 1934, she had written in her private notes, "Religion... is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought" Never would she see as less than evil, as less than anti-life, any explicit or implicit rejection of reason.

"Pat often told me" Muriel Hall later recalled, "that she thought Ayn was a genius — and 'genius' was a word she very rarely used. She was always very complimentary about Ayn's courage and integrity and intellect... She loved some of Ayn's difficulties with the English language. 29 Her favorite was Ayn saying once, 'It's an ungulfable bridge.' ... My brother, who used to attend the Monday discussions, told me that Ayn used to sit at Pat's feet — he saw it time after time. They would take an issue such as, for instance, the Supreme Court, and discuss it until Ayn had a full understanding." Pat had read widely and thoughtfully in American history, world history, economics, political philosophy, literature, and science, and while Ayn had a firm concept of freedom and free enterprise, she had little knowledge of American history or the Constitution or the history of American industry.

Mimi Sutton met Pat during one of Mimi's New York summers with Ayn and Frank. "Isabel Paterson was a dowdy woman, with no charm whatever," Mimi remembered. "But Ayn was entranced with her. They'd sit up until four or five in the morning — and Ayn would be sitting at the master's feet. One night, when they were talking, I went to bed, but I could hear the conversation, and it was as if Pat were the guru and teacher — and Ayn didn't do that. Ayn would be asking questions, and Pat would be answering. It was very strange."

It seems clear that Ayn's early relationship with Pat did have a strong element of student to teacher — not in the realm of philosophy, where Ayn held positive and rigorously thought-out convictions, but in areas of the history and interpretation of American politics and institutions. One of the rare and cherished pleasures of Ayn's life was precisely the opportunity to learn from others; she delighted in the occasions when she did not have to be the teacher, when she could "sit at someone's feet" and listen to ideas and theories that were new and valuable, and ask questions, and listen again. It gave her, if only for a few brief hours, the sense that she was not, after all, utterly alone in the world, that she was not alone to see, to understand, to grasp, to know. It made her a member of the human race, rather than some odd creature whose mind danced among the stars while others struggled in the mire below.

Years later, Ayn would write a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny Taggart shows the brilliant scientist Dr. Robert Stadler the remnants of a motor that represents a great new scientific breakthrough... 'It's so wonderful,' said Dr. Stadler, his voice low. 'It's so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!... Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own — they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal — for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim theirs — when you would give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors — hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom — the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?'"

The words are Robert Stadler's. The voice is Ayn Rand's.

The deep contradiction in Ayn's nature was that she so rarely allowed herself this pleasure, even when it was possible to her. Her own deeply rooted need to be teacher and guru, to dominate intellectually, was too powerful to permit her, with very rare exceptions, the relationship or any part of the relationship that she had with Pat.

It was that relationship that was the sole important value she found during the months she took from The Fountainhead to work for a doomed political campaign.

26 In January of 1944, the article was published in the Reader's Digest

27 Muriel Hall, although much younger than Pat, was an admiring and loving friend, and finally the executor of Pat's estate. She is now Senior Staff Editor at the Reader's Digest

28 In 1982, conservative writer and critic John Chamberlain was to write: "It was Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and (later) Atlas Shrugged... that made it plain that if life was to be something more than a naked scramble for government favors, a new attitude toward the producer must be created."

29 I, too, have memories of Ayn's occasional language problems, which lingered in her conversation long after they had been eliminated from her writing. Talking about the actor Louis Calhem, she said: "Frank looks like him — but not as ugly.

Chapter Fifteen

The summer and winter following the Willkie campaign were among the most difficult periods of Ayn's life. Three months and seven hundred dollars had been lost. She was financially unable to return to the writing of The Fountainhead and she had no way of knowing when it would be possible. She had no choice but to find a job — any job.

Richard Mealand, story editor of Paramount Pictures in New York, had seen the first part of The Fountainhead when Ann Watkins was submitting it and had arranged to meet Ayn. It was a great novel, he had told her. He had tried, without success, to convince Paramount to buy it. When Ayn told him that she was broke and wanted work as a reader, he shook his head sadly and hired her at once. Her wages were six dollars for a short synopsis and ten dollars for a long one. "The money seemed a gift from heaven," she said.

She had hoped to be able to snatch some time for writing, perhaps a few hours a week; but even that was not possible. She was a painfully slow reader; to keep up with her assignments and earn the money she needed, she worked twelve or more hours a day, seven days a week. The Fountainhead was relegated to "small glances."

"It was not a fully wasted period," Ayn later said. "My subconscious was working, which helped later to make the writing go very fast." But she longed for her work as one longs for a lost lover; it was a sensation of physical pain, somewhere in her chest, that never left her.

Frances Hazlitt — the wife of Henry Hazlitt, the conservative economist who was to have a long-running column in Newsweek and to publish a number of important books on economics — later herself a writer, was Mealand's assistant at Paramount, in charge of readers. She and Ayn became friendly. It was a relationship of mutual respect and affection that was to last for many years. Frances once told Ayn that she had been upset when she learned that Ayn Rand was to be their new reader: she had expected an arrogant, difficult woman who felt above her job. She was pleasantly surprised to find that she liked Ayn immediately and that Ayn was the most conscientious and hardworking of any of her readers. "I was terribly impressed with her resolution," she told William Buckley many years later. "Despite the kind of work she had to do, she kept talking about the great book she was writing." And she was pleased to observe that Ayn and Frank, despite their difficult financial circumstances, loaned small sums of money to out-of-work writers who were having an even more difficult time than they. Frances Hazlitt gave Ayn the pick of books for outside readers, and kept her busy even during slow periods.

Time dragged by as if some malevolent force were stretching out each hour. Sometimes, Ayn felt as if she were back at the beginning, back in the days of her arrival in America, when her work had been only a dream of the future.

She had been at Paramount for almost six months when Richard Mealand learned that she had left Ann Watkins and that The Fountainhead was no longer being submitted to publishing houses. Appalled, he offered to personally recommend it to any house of her choice. She had not thought to ask Mealand for help; she rarely asked anyone for help. It was characteristic of her that even when a friend would have been delighted to offer assistance, but did not know it was needed, her fierce independence prevented her from asking. If ever help were forthcoming unasked, she reacted with astonished pleasure; she never took it for granted — so much so that people who knew her were often startled by the extent of her gratitude when they did her the smallest of services, offering the kind of assistance one automatically offers a friend. Her gratitude was indicative of two facts: the extent of her passion for self-responsibility — and how rare it had been in her life that a hand was held out to her in simple human kindness. Perhaps the second is in part the sad result of the first: an independent spirit is expected to take care of herself, to give help, not receive it; those strong enough to bear burdens are given still heavier burdens to carry. And the Atlas who was Ayn Rand never shrugged. But it appears that the cause can also be found in her alienation from people, which led to a formality and aloofness of manner that intimidated those who might have wished to offer help; her manner made them feel that she might interpret good will as a pitying insult.

Ayn told Mealand that she would like her novel to be submitted to Little, Brown, which had a reputation for good salesmanship of serious novels. Mealand introduced her to the editor, Angus Cameron. Six weeks later, Cameron called to say they were rejecting the book. When she came to pick up her manuscript, against normal publishing procedure he showed her the report written by a member of the firm's editorial board. To the end of her life, Ayn remembered the wording of that report: "This is a work of almost-genius — 'genius' in the power of its expression — 'almost' in the sense of its enormous bitterness. I wish there were an audience for a book of this kind. But there isn't. It won't sell." This was typical, Cameron told her, of the other reports he had received. All had praised the novel — all had predicted commercial failure.

"Of the whole history of The Fountainhead" Ayn said in later years, "this was the most depressing. I told Frank when I got home that if they had told me it's a bad novel, then okay, that's their bad standards. But to have it rejected because of its greatness — because it's too good — that's really a feeling of horror."

Mealand offered to submit it to another house, and asked Ayn to select a publisher. Once more, she felt uncomfortable about imposing, but when he insisted that he wanted to help, she agreed. Bobbs-Merrill had recently published Eugene Lyons's The Red Decade, so she knew they were not influenced by communism. She asked Mealand to submit The Fountainhead to Bobbs-Merrill. Mealand arranged a meeting with the new young editor, Archibald G. Ogden.

"When I walked into the Bobbs-Merrill office with the manuscript and saw Archie," Ayn recalled, "I thought "This is no place for me' — because he acted like a complete Peter Keating — bright, smiling, almost too palsy and effervescent; he was friendly, but unserious and superficial. I thought there was no possible chance that this man would like my book."

Knowing that publishers usually required a month or more before reaching a decision on a manuscript, she was startled to receive a telephone call from Archie Ogden less than a week after she had submitted the book. He had called, he said, to tell her that The Fountainhead was magnificent. Still glowing with pleasure when she discussed their conversation many years later, Ayn said, "He proceeded to pay me the greatest compliments I ever had — he said it was great writing, that I was enormously talented, that I was writing in the tradition of real literature. He wasn't gushing, he was very solemn, and he told me specifically what he liked — he thought it was a great theme, marvelous characterization of Roark, that it was inspirational and uplifting. It was incredible."

Ayn had asked for an advance payment on royalties of twelve hundred dollars and for a year's time to finish the book. Archie explained that if she hadn't required what was a large sum for Bobbs-Merrill, he would be authorized to sign a contract immediately, but because of the advance, he had to send the manuscript to the company's head office in Indianapolis for a decision. He was sending it with a strong recommendation.

While she waited for word from Indianapolis, Ayn continued reading for Paramount — reading one undistinguished book after another and thinking of the book that had found no publisher. "You're casting pearls," Frank told her one day, "without getting even a pork chop in return." His remark found its way into The Fountainhead, where it is spoken by Dominique about Howard Roark's struggle.

Six weeks passed. Early one morning, as Ayn was wearily completing a rush assignment on which she had worked through the night, the telephone rang. It was Archie Ogden. He was ready to draw up a contract for the publication of The Fountainhead.

She soon learned the story behind the acceptance. On the strength of two reports on the novel from Indianapolis editors — one that called it a great book but said it would not sell, a second that said it was a bad book but would sell. D. L. Chambers, the head of Bobbs-Merrill, had returned the manuscript to Archie, telling him to reject it. Archie was a young editor in an important position which he had held for only a few months. He staked his job on The Fountainhead. He wired Chambers: IF THIS IS NOT THE BOOK FOR YOU, THEN I AM NOT THE EDITOR FOR YOU. The return wire said: FAR BE IT FROM ME TO DAMPEN SUCH ENTHUSIASM. SIGN THE CONTRACT. BUT THE BOOK BETTER BE GOOD.

It is an interesting postscript that the man who fought for The Fountainhead was the man who rejected Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. He often told the story cheerfully, saying that he never regretted either decision.

Radiant with exhilaration, Ayn took her completed synopsis to Paramount, and told Frances Hazlitt and Richard Mealand that she was to be published. However, she needed to continue working weekends; Archie had been able to get her an advance of only one thousand dollars, which would not last for a year. Mealand and Frances Hazlitt guaranteed that she would have as much work as she wanted — and the entire department joined in a celebration of her success.

The contract was signed in December 1941. Ayn had a year in which to complete the manuscript. Her deadline was January 1, 1943.

Before the contract could be signed, Pearl Harbor was bombed and America was at war. Archie told Ayn that had their oral agreement been made a week later, in wartime, he could not have put the contract through: the book would be long and expensive to produce, and publishers were already concerned about a new market situation and a possible shortage of paper. One week had saved her from another rejection.

Almost two thirds of the novel remained to be written. She began working day and night, with intense concentration and unlimited mental energy, seeing no one and going nowhere — in a state of happily agonized tension. And now, at last, she was writing rapidly, her mind freed from the chains that had inhibited the creative process. As the days and nights went by, Ayn measured time by the distance from January 1, and by the mounting stack of manuscript pages on the desk Frank had given her.

Mimi Sutton stayed with Ayn and Frank that summer. "I slept on the couch in the living room," she said, "and Ayn would be working in the dining area long after Frank and I were asleep. I remember waking at four in the morning, and she was still writing."

Once, when Ayn was depressed because of minor interruptions that had prevented her from working, Frank told her, jokingly, "It's nothing that a little writing won't cure." He repeated it often during the years to come. They both knew that it was true — that no negative emotion could long withstand the sense of achievement that writing gave her.

Isabel Paterson was also deep in her work, completing The God of the Machine; she and Ayn were running a friendly race to see who would finish first. Ayn had spent many evenings explaining her moral philosophy to Pat, clarifying and specifying the rationale behind it, and how it applied to human action; during their early discussions, Pat had argued against a morality of self-interest, but after months of often angry discussions, had finally been convinced. Now, she asked Ayn if she might include in her own book a defense of Ayn's moral theory as opposed to humanitarianism. Ayn agreed immediately. She later explained, "I felt pleased and flattered that Pat wanted to use my ideas. She told me that for certain reasons — she hated a lot of footnotes — she would rather not mention my name in her book. My consideration was only that the more the ideas are spread, the better, and that it would be wonderful to have them presented in a nonfiction book. I was totally idea-centered. So I told her, 'By all means, I don't want any credit.'"

Ayn's two mainstays during that hectic year were Frank and Nick — Frank, because of her sense that on an emotional level he comprehended her work and took a quiet joy in it — Nick, because she could discuss the book with him, know she was understood, and receive an intelligent feedback. The two brothers did whatever could be done to make that difficult year easier for her. Ayn had customarily helped with the marketing and cooking; now, they insisted that they would do all of it, and they bickered cheerfully about their division of household responsibilities. As always, Ayn first read her longhand drafts aloud to Frank. But as she wrote each sequence or chapter, then edited and typed it, it was Nick to whom she turned for his criticism or approval.

"I'd be dozing on and off, late at night," Mimi recalled, "and Nick would come in. She'd read to him, and they would talk for hours... Nick could be angry and annoyed with her, he could be terrified of her and intimidated — but he came as close to loving her as he could with any woman. He was proud of her — and proud that she valued his opinion." Both Nick — whom some of his friends called "a small-town Oscar Wilde" — and Frank, whose wit was wonderfully dry and unexpected, were especially helpful to Ayn with regard to the rare touches of humor in her work. A number of Frank's offhand comments — such as "throwing pearls and not getting even a pork chop in return" — were included in her books. Several of Ayn's friends had the impression that whatever occasional humor appeared in The Fountainhead was Frank's or Nick's.

Ayn had very little humor in her psychological makeup, and was suspicious of humor on principle. She roundly criticized the view that a sense of humor is an important human trait, and projected an especially withering contempt at the suggestion that one should be able to laugh at oneself. "That's the man who wants a blank check on flaws," she would say. Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she met a few years after completing The Fountainhead, once told her that he regretted Roark's lack of humor, particularly his lack of ability to laugh at himself; Roark would never say, for example, "What a damn fool I was!" Ayn replied stiffly: "Roark would admit errors, but he'd certainly never say a thing like that; he'd never think of himself as a fool; he would never take himself or his work lightly."

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler — in a fascinating analysis of the nature and function of humor — wrote that the humor of a joke consists of being led to follow along a certain conceptual track, which.

by the punch line, is abruptly switched — so that the punch line is both totally unexpected and perfectly logical in its own terms. The pattern is "the sudden shift of ideas to a different type of logic or a new rule of the game." The inclusion of the totally unexpected and perfectly logical was central to Ayn's purposes and method as a fiction writer. Yet those who knew her often had the chastening experience of telling her a joke which they thought was hilarious — then being greeted by a blank look of bewilderment — then having to give a lengthy explanation of what was the presumed humor. Having to explain anything to Ayn Rand was an unusual experience; having to explain one's humor made one less than eager to repeat the next hilarious story one heard.

It appeared as if, despite the brilliance and intricacy of her mind, she somehow failed even to grasp humor that was subtle or sophisticated; her tastes ran rather to the broad and obvious. Perhaps the cause was that her entire self-training was to rigorously follow a straight and undeviating line from a concept to its implications, to hold one single perspective from premises to conclusion; it was precisely not to shift perspective in midstream or ever to employ a "different kind of logic."

During this happiest and most hectic year of her life, the months — which previously had dragged by — now seemed to fly past Ayn at the same breakneck speed as the manuscript pages handed to Nick for proofreading. The only shadow on her pleasure was her weekend work for Paramount; she did the work efficiently and well, but never afterward remembered a single script she had read; the scripts existed in some dim unreality cut off from her emotional life.

Always, Ayn's mental energy was limitless; she was never too tired to continue a philosophical conversation, even after an eighteen-hour work day, even when those many years younger than she were collapsing with exhaustion. But always, she struggled with the problem of low physical energy, which she tried to alleviate with the dark Russian breads and rich cheeses and chocolates she loved, often adding too many pounds to her small frame. She had never been ill except for the normal diseases of childhood, never been in a hospital; at most, she caught a rare cold; but she would rise from long hours at her desk with severe pains in her shoulders and back, her body too weary to move or even fall limply into bed. 30

Early in December of 1942, as The Fountainhead neared completion, Ayn worked through a single unbroken stretch of thirty hours. For two nights and a day, she wrote steadily, without sleep, stopping only to eat, as one refuels a motor, so that she could continue to write. She felt exultantly clear-headed, as if she could continue indefinitely without tiring.

When she had time to notice, she knew that The Fountainhead was right. She had always resented the idea that a writer must inevitably feel some sense of dissatisfaction with his work, that he can never perfectly express what he wishes to say. While writing She Living, she had still been in the process of mastering her technique and of developing her own unique style, and she had had the added difficulty of writing in a language which was not yet fully natural to her. But with The Fountainhead — which was far more complex in theme, plot, and characterization — she felt fully in control and fully satisfied with her means of expression: the means were perfectly matched to her end; she was achieving exactly what she wanted, in precisely the form she had intended.

She began the final typing of the manuscript, working around the clock, sleeping only for a few hours at long intervals — while Frank and Nick worked in twelve-hour shifts, proofreading the manuscript and collating pages.

In The Fountainhead Gail Wynand asks Roark: "Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were there stops — points reached — and then the typing rolled on again?" "There were stops," answers Roark. "Did you know them at the time — did you know that that's what they were?" asks Wynand. "Yes," says Roark.

As she walked toward the Bobbs-Merrill office in the brilliant crispness of a winter morning, Ayn knew that this was a stop for her — a point reached. It was December 31. She was carrying the completed manuscript.

A few hours earlier, she had typed the final sentence of The Fountainhead: "Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark."

30 It was during this period of nonstop work on The Fountainhead that Ayn went to see a doctor. She had heard there was a harmless pill one could take to increase one's energy and lessen one's appetite. The doctor, telling her there would be no negative consequences, prescribed a low dosage of a small green tablet which doctors had begun prescribing rather routinely. Its trade name was Dexamyl. Ayn took two of these pills each day for more than thirty years. They appeared to work: she felt that her physical energy had increased, although it was never high, and her weight stayed under reasonable control. In fact, medical opinion today suggests that they soon ceased to be a source of physical energy; their effect shortly became that of a placebo.

Dexamyl consists of two chemicals: an amphetamine and a barbiturate. It was not until the sixties that researchers investigated the effects of large doses of these chemicals. They found that extremely high doses were harmful, sometimes even resulting in paranoid symptoms; but to this day, there is only the most fragmentary and contradictory scientific evidence to suggest that low doses such as Ayn took could be harmful. As one pharmacological specialist has said: "Perhaps they hurt her, and perhaps they didn't." In the early seventies, when for the first time she became seriously ill, her doctor took her medical history, and, quite innocently, she told him about the Dexamyl. Disapproving, he ordered her to cease taking them at once. She never took another.

I include this discussion only because I have learned that a number of people, aware that she took this medication, have drawn ominous conclusions about Ayn's mental health; there is no scientific basis for their conclusions.

Chapter Sixteen

In the period before publication of The Fountainhead, Bobbs-Merrill, because of the imminent paper shortage, was concerned about the length of the manuscript. Ayn shortened the first part of the manuscript by approximately one third; the major cut was the elimination of Vesta Dunning. She was not unwilling to do it, she had felt some dissatisfaction herself, but, she later said, "Because of the cut, I've always thought Part I was a little slow. There's no major romantic relationship. If I had not planned Vesta Dunning from the beginning, I would have introduced Dominique earlier — not that she would have met Roark, but she would have been there as a presence, so that the main concern would not have been exclusively professional. But there was no time to readjust."

From the inception of the theme in her mind, she had called the novel Secondhand Lives, that had remained its working title until the end. But when Archie Ogden pointed out that it stressed the negative, that it made it appear the novel was essentially focused on Peter Keating, Ayn agreed at once and chose The Fountainhead instead.

Ayn was immensely gratified that she had no editorial difficulties with Bobbs-Merrill. She often complimented Archie as one of the rare editors who had a sensitive understanding of the intention of his writers, and never attempted to interfere with that intention. "We discussed the book only in my terms," she said. "He never interfered with the creative part or suggested how I should change it. We got along wonderfully. Editorial suggestions from Indianapolis were sent through Archie. He told me only one: that Chambers objected to the length of Roark's [courtroom] speech, particularly the fact that it was unbroken; he wanted it to be interrupted for descriptions of the characters and so on. I said no — it was absolutely wrong — and that was that."

Ayn did the final editing in galleys. Archie would come to her apartment in the evening after his office day to work with her; they would both remember as happily creative times those evenings over manuscript and coffee and the sweet rolls Ayn never could resist. Ayn remained staunchly loyal to Archie, continuing to see him at regular intervals until he moved to England in the early sixties. It was an unusual friendship for her: Archie was not the sort of man she normally liked. He was a man of charm and wit, but without the philosophical bent or the intensity that were important to her. But she never forgot that he had risked his job for her work, and would discuss what she saw as his shortcomings only with her most intimate friends.

Despite her pleasure in the completion of the novel and in her hopes for its success, Ayn, like the rest of the country, was living with the anguish of a nation fighting for its life. The early years of the forties were desperate years, as newspapers and radios trumpeted the news of Hitler's steady march through Europe, of the blinding speed of the fall of France, of Japanese successes in the Pacific, of young Americans bleeding and dying on foreign shores. Her own especial anguish was the news of the German siege of Leningrad, where her family — with her youngest and beloved sister, Nora, whom she thought of often and missed painfully — still lived. Since the beginning of the war, she had had no word of her family, no way to reach them. During the nine hundred days of the siege, she had no way to know if they were alive. In the terrible months from October of 1941 through April of 1942, almost half of Leningrad's three million people died in a city without heat, light, transport, food, or water; as the temperature fell to thirty degrees below zero; as bombs and shells rained down on the living and the dead; as men, women, and children with pencil-thin limbs and swollen bellies fell in the streets as often from starvation as from the effects of the bombings; as looting and stealing were replaced by cannibalism in a city with nothing left to steal but human bodies. The noble and gracious city, celebrated by its poets, had become a charnel house. 31

Ayn returned to full-time work at Paramount. The advance payment of royalties had provided only enough money to enable her, with her weekend work, to finish the book. Now, the advance was gone. She did not mind returning to Paramount. Her main assignment was completed.

Over the last years, Frank had found, at best, occasional bit parts in the theater and roles in summer stock. Ayn often said that he willingly abandoned acting when they left Hollywood. That appears not to be so; in New York, the work he looked for was in the theater. It appears that he had left Hollywood because Ayn had to leave Hollywood; he had followed her unquestioningly, his life revolving around her as it had and always would. It appears that Ayn believed that if she felt his acting career had become futile, then he must feel it; if she wanted him to leave Hollywood and its last faint hope of a career in movies, then he must want it. Authentic emotional communication between them had ended long ago; Frank did not tell Ayn — or anyone else — what he really felt, what he really wanted, what brought him suffering or happiness. These two people, so different in most respects, were alike in the extent of their alienation from their own emotional lives, and now talked primarily of their day-to-day activities and of Ayn's career and work.

In order to help them over the period before publication, Frank began to seek work more actively; he found a job in a cigar store in Brooklyn. It was the uncontested end of his desire for a career of his own; he never looked for acting work again.

Shortly before publication, Ayn was delighted to be approached by Alan Collins, president of Curtis Brown, Ltd., one of the largest and most respected of literary agencies, asking to represent her. It was a remarkable tribute to her; she was the author of a successful play, Night of January 16th, but that had been followed by the failures of We the Living and The Unconquered. Alan Collins told her that he had seen galleys of The Fountainhead and was convinced that she had a great literary talent. "I always gave Alan credit for approaching me," Ayn later said. "No one could know how the book would sell." She no longer required an agent for the book rights, but they agreed that he would handle her future work and the movie rights to The Fountainhead. It was the beginning of a long and mutually respectful relationship; Alan Collins, a wise and gracious man of great integrity, remained Ayn's agent and friend until his death in 1968; after his death, Ayn remained with the firm.

When she received early copies of the novel, Ayn gave one of them to Isabel Paterson. She inscribed it with Roark's words to Gail Wynand: "To Pat — You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated — Ayn — April 25, 1943." 32

Discussing the novel with Pat one day, Ayn said: "If The Fountainhead does not make me famous, I'll continue to write, but I will not expect any recognition in my lifetime. I know the nature of this novel. I do not care to become famous for any other." "What sale would you consider a success?" Pat asked. "One hundred thousand copies," Ayn said. Pat gasped: "How can you set your desires in the stratosphere? Do you realize how few books ever sell that many copies?" "That's what I want," said Ayn. "If it sells a hundred thousand copies, then it will have reached my kind of readers, the right minds, wherever they are."

Publication day was approaching. From her experience with We the Living, Ayn knew she could not count on reviews to accurately inform the public about her book. She could count only on Bobbs-Merrill, on an advertising campaign that would stress the revolutionary nature of The Fountainhead's theme. Archie reported that the book was already causing a stir: he was receiving enthusiastic telephone calls from booksellers and editors of publications to whom advance copies had been sent; all the signs were good, he said exultantly.

On the day before publication, Frank told her, with happy confidence: "We've made it, this time."

The Fountainhead was published in May 1943.

The week of publication, Bobbs-Merrill sent Ayn an advance proof of the advertisement scheduled for the Sunday newspapers. It was a half-page advertisement, which described The Fountainhead as an interesting new book that would do for architecture what Arrowsmith did for medicine.

"I stood still in the middle of the living room holding the page," Ayn would later recall with a shudder, "and literally wished I could die on that spot. I've never experienced anything like that before or since. It was the most ghastly shock of anger and futility, and the feeling that there's absolutely nothing I can do about this and I don't want any part of a world in which this is done."

It was too late to change the first advertisement; the ones that followed continued to be, for the most part, Ayn said, "vague, noncommittal, and meaningless." There was no way for anyone to distinguish The Fountainhead from all the other allegedly "big" and "challenging" books offered to them daily by means of the same routine bromides.

One of the first reviews called it an interesting book about architecture, and said its message was that we ought to do something about the people in the slums. Another announced that the ideas it presented were selfish and reactionary. Another described Roark as a selfless architect. A socialist reviewer attacked it ferociously. There were many attacks, most of which ignored the ideological content and damned it as dull, badly written, with implausible characters; "Miss Rand has much to learn before she can write," said one. Another said, "Miss Rand can only create gargoyles, not characters." None of the major magazines, with the exception of The Saturday Review, even mentioned its existence. None of the reviewers, including those who praised it, stated the theme of the novel. The one fact — more than any other — that Ayn had wanted the public to know, was that this was a book about individualism. For all practical purposes, it was as if the press were under censorship; "individualism" seemed to be the forbidden, the terrifying word.

There was a storm of objections to the climax of The Fountainhead. In articles, reviews, and discussions, the assumption was often that Roark dynamited Cortlandt Homes "because somebody changed the look of his building, and he didn't like it, so he blew up the home of the poor." These critics had not read the fine — or the large — print. Ayn had made it clear that the issue involved was breach of contract. The contract for the building guaranteed that it would be erected as it was designed. It was a government project; the government could not be sued or forced to honor its contract without its consent. Roark had no legal recourse by which to undo the butchering of his work.

"I agreed to design Cortlandt," he told the jury at his trial, "for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid... the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else who could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

"It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander's creed now swallowing the world.

"I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

"I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

"It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrifice."

There was an exception to the generality of the reviews. On a week day shortly after publication, Archie telephoned to say he wanted to read Ayn an advance copy of a review by Lorine Pruette which was to appear in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. "I don't want to hear it," Ayn said wearily. "I've had enough." "You'll want to hear this one," Archie told her.

Lorine Pruette wrote: "Ayn Rand is a writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly." The review made explicitly clear that the theme of the book was individualism versus collectivism. "Good novels of ideas," Pruette stated, "are rare at any time. This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall... You will not be able to read this masterful work without thinking through some of the basic concepts of our times "

"It saved my whole sense of the world at that time," Ayn was to say. "It's the only intelligent major review of a novel I have had in my whole career."

Later reviews, several of which Ayn considered intelligent and perceptive, came in from other cities. But professionally only New York reviews counted, she believed.

The first printing of The Fountainhead was 7,500 copies; Bobbs-Merrill's intention had been to print only 5,000, but they had raised it when advance sales seemed promising. After publication, sales were ominously slow. The book would appear at the bottom of one or another bestseller list, then vanish, then appear and vanish again. "All that summer," Ayn recalled, "I watched its progress. It looked as if it had been completely killed by a campaign of silence about its content. I fought with Bobbs-Merrill constantly about their ads, although I had no contractual right of control. They would advertise it once in a while, but the wording was terrible — to this day I can't think about it calmly. In one they had a drawing of a woman with an enormous bosom, and the copy said 'the amazing story of a ruthless woman.' They told me that would sell books. I kept telling them that people who would buy the book from such ads would hate it — and my real audience would be stopped from buying... That whole summer I was thinking about how to plan the rest of my life. I'd need a job, and could continue to write only at night, and I'd have to get used to that sort of life."

Toward fall, Bobbs-Merrill scheduled a second printing of 2,500 copies. Archie demanded that they raise it at least to 5,000. The business manager refused: "This book will never sell more than a total of ten thousand copies," he said. Archie made a bet with him, for one dollar: If you don't increase this printing, you'll have to reprint by Thanksgiving. In November, the business manager walked into Archie's office and silently placed a dollar bill on his desk: sales had reached 18,000 copies.

In his posthumously published autobiography, Hiram Haydn, later to be Ayn's Random House editor for Atlas Shrugged, wrote: "A... startling example of Mr. Chambers' [the head of Bobbs-Merrill] penuriousness and stubbornness involved another novel Bobbs published that year: Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Despite an unmistakable groundswell of excitement over this book, DLC, as we all knew him, gave it only the most perfunctory support."

Sales slowly began to accelerate, and the book appeared steadily on bestseller lists. But the paper shortage had become severe, and paper rationing began; quotas were set according to the amount of paper a publisher had used during an arbitrary base year. 33 Bobbs-Merrill kept issuing small editions — then going out of print.

It seemed as if The Fountainhead would follow We the Living into oblivion. Ayn was still working full time as a Paramount reader, Frank was working in a cigar store, and sales of the novel continued to limp along. Ayn had never felt closer to despair, nor had the future ever seemed more bleak. In that painful year of publication, Ayn could not know that in 1945 alone — two years after publication — The Fountainhead would sell 100,000 copies. She could not know that the odyssey of The Fountainhead, unique in publishing history, was beginning.

It is an odyssey without an end. By 1948, sales would exceed 400,000 copies. In 1952, the New American Library would publish it in paperback. By 1962, it would have sold over 500,000 copies in hardcover editions and over a million copies in paperback. Today, the "noncommercial" book for which there was no audience has sold more than four million copies. The book that was "too intellectual" is read by truck drivers and farmers. The book that was "too controversial" is studied in university classrooms. The Fountainhead has achieved the status of a modern classic.

Ayn could not know what was to happen — but beneath her pain and despair still existed the bright core of conviction she had carried with her throughout her thirty-eight years: that human beings will ultimately respond to values. It might happen more slowly than she had expected, it might take longer; but The Fountainhead was an important book, and one day it would find its audience. Frances Hazlitt was never to forget Ayn telling her, even before the novel was accepted by Bobbs-Merrill, that her novel would become a bestseller, would have great impact, would change people's lives — that a movie would be made of it, and that she would demand a say in picking the actors; she would choose Gary Cooper as the male star. 34

From the beginning, Ayn was deluged by mail from her readers. Publishers later said that they know of no other writer who inspired an equivalent response. The letters began to come — and would continue to come until Ayn's death — from professors and unskilled workers, from students and soldiers, from housewives and scientists and businessmen and artists. They wrote that they had found in Roark's moral intransigence a personal ideal — that the image of Roark had given them a greater courage to stand by their own convictions and to fight for their own achievements — that The Fountainhead had liberated them from the guilt they had experienced for their failure to live by the altruist ethics — that it had taught them to feel proud of their work — that after reading it, they gave up meaningless jobs which they had accepted as second best, and returned to the careers for which they had longed — that it had given them the sense of what is possible in life, what is possible to man, what is possible to them. 35

Many of the letters that Ayn most appreciated were from men in the armed services overseas. One letter from a group of air-force men said: "After every mission, we gather around a candle and read passages from The Fountainhead aloud." Another said: "I'd feel much better about the war if I thought it was being fought for the ideals of The Fountainhead."

Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine had been published the same month as The Fountainhead. In it was a chapter dealing with Ayn's theory of morality entitled "The Humanitarian with the Guillotine" — which contains a paraphrasing of Ayn's ideas. Today a reader of Ayn Rand would recognize the source of certain of the ideas in that chapter; but then, with The Fountainhead newly published, readers could legitimately assume that Isabel Paterson was the source of these radical new moral concepts. "It was only after the book came out," Ayn later said, "that I realized Pat had done something enormously improper. And she had a name, I did not; had she mentioned me, it could have helped me professionally." One can only take as an indication of Ayn's deep attachment to her friend, that this was not the occasion of a permanent rift. 36

On an afternoon in the fall, Alan Collins telephoned Ayn with the news that Warner Brothers was interested in the movie rights to The Fountainhead and wanted to know her price. "I want fifty thousand dollars," Ayn calmly replied. Collins objected: that was a fantastic amount to ask, there had been no cross-bidding on the movie rights, and to demand so large a sum would probably cost her the deal. "Ask for twenty-five thousand," he said, "and settle for twenty." Ayn replied, "This book is going to be worth much more than fifty thousand dollars. But for now, that's a good price, and the money is important to me. If I take less, I'll regret it; if I get fifty thousand, I won't. I know the value of the book. I'll take the chance of losing the deal."

Ten days passed. Ayn, by now well-known in the conservative world, had maintained the contacts made during the Willkie campaign, and was attempting to interest conservative businessmen in contributing money for advertisements for her novel, advertisements that would stress its pro-individualist, pro-capitalist nature. She was turned down everywhere, by men who she concluded were unable to see that she was fighting for a cause that was theirs as well. "Of what importance are books on politics?" one of them demanded. "Of what importance was Das Kapital?" she asked. "I was ruthless with myself in those days" she later recalled. "I hated to work for a campaign for my own book, but I did it."

Still anxiously waiting to hear from Alan Collins, Ayn lunched with a businessman who had expressed interest in her campaign. "He was the usual type of conservative, not intellectual, he gave me the usual line about philosophical education being long-term, and our time being too short for that. I knew it was hopeless."

Arriving home from lunch, feeling weary and discouraged, she opened the apartment door to see Frank standing in the living room, an odd look on his face.

"Well, darling," he said, "while you were at lunch you earned fifty thousand dollars."

31 It was only many years later than Ayn learned that her parents had died in that charnel house. In the decades following the war, rumors of her sisters would reach her from time to time-from an American tourist with an unconfirmable report of having met Natasha, from a Russian refugee who might have talked with Nora. But the rumors never jelled into knowledge, and Ayn was afraid to enlist the help of the State Department; if her sisters were alive, official inquiries from the United States might destroy them. As year after year went by, even the faintest grounds for hope dissolved, and Ayn painfully accepted the fact that she had no family left to seek.

32 When I interviewed Muriel Hall, she showed me the first-edition copy of The Fountainhead that was part of Pat's estate. I burst into somewhat appalled laughter when I began to thumb through the book. At some point, probably in later years, Pat had decided to edit Ayn; the first few pages of the novel show Pat's cuts of what she considered extraneous material. Among other things, she had eliminated The Fountainhead's first sentence-and most famous line: "Howard Roark laughed."

Muriel Hall asked me if I thought Pat had ever shown her editing to Ayn. "No," I answered, "I know she didn't." "How can you know it?" Muriel asked. I replied, "Because Pat lived to show you the book."

33 It was not until 1944 that Bobbs-Merrill entered into an arrangement with Blakiston, a small publisher who, in the base year, had had a huge sale of a manual, and whose paper quota was now very large. The arrangement was that Blakiston would take over publication of The Fountainhead until the shortage ended, as it had taken over bestsellers from a number of major publishers. Blakiston issued very large editions, and in their ads, for the first time, the theme of the book was stated; they called it "the story of a rebellious, individualistic man."

34 Henry Hazlitt was later to say, "To our enormous surprise, but not Ayn's, it all came true."

35 Finally unable to deal with the thousands of letters, Ayn would later have a "Letter from Ayn Rand" printed, in which she answered the questions most often asked. In it she wrote:

"The success of The Fountainhead has demonstrated its own thesis. It was rejected by twelve publishers who declared that it had no commercial possibilities, it would not sell, it was 'too intellectual,' it was 'too unconventional,' it went against every alleged popular trend. Yet the success of The Fountainhead was made by the public. Not by the public as an organized collective — but by single, individual readers who discovered it of their own choice, who read it on their own initiative and recommended it on their own judgment.

"I did not know that I was predicting my own future when I described the process of Roark's success: 'It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places.'"

36 When Nathaniel and I met Ayn and expressed an interest in economics. The God of the Machine was one of the handful of books she recommended to us. In 1964, when it was reissued after having been out of print for many years, she wrote an admiring review of it, terming it "an invaluable arsenal of intellectual ammunition for any advocate of capitalism. It is a sparkling book, with little gems of polemical fire scattered through almost every page, ranging from bright wit to the hard glitter of logic to the quiet radiance of a profound understanding."

Chapter Seventeen

The day she earned fifty thousand dollars, Ayn and Frank went for dinner, as they often did, to a neighborhood cafeteria on Lexington Avenue; they lived nearby, in the small, somewhat seedy apartment they had moved to when every penny was required for the writing of The Fountainhead. All afternoon, their moods had shifted between excited happiness and dazed disbelief. Whatever they needed to do of a physical nature, from dressing to feeding their cat to locking the apartment door behind them, they seemed able to do only with the automatic parts of their minds.

The cafeteria offered two types of meals: one cost forty-five cents, the other sixty-five cents. They had always ordered the former. They glanced at the menu, ignoring as usual the more expensive dishes, then stopped short, looked at each other — and burst out laughing. Today they could afford a sixty-five-cent dinner.

Ayn could not sleep that night. She sat at her desk "just gloating." When she heard Frank, who had gone to bed, still tossing and turning hours later, she asked, "Are you gloating too?" "Yes," he answered. "I'm afflicted." They stayed up all night, talking and smiling and hugging each other.

The day the contract with Warner Brothers was signed, Ayn and Frank went to the Roosevelt Hotel for champagne cocktails. "Although I don't like to drink," Ayn later said, "we had to celebrate. We were both walking on air. It was the most unreal period in my whole life. If I had become rich and successful by degrees, it would never have had such drama — it was the sudden switch from the bottom economically to fifty thousand dollars and a Hollywood contract. It was worth the whole struggle."

Ayn was wearing an old cloth coat, inexpensive when it was new and now, Frank told her, "a disgrace." He and Isabel Paterson insisted that she buy a mink coat. Ayn was horrified at the suggestion; she wanted to save her new riches so that she would never again lack time to write. She would buy a new coat, she agreed, but it would be cloth. Frank responded: "You can buy any kind of coat you want — provided it's fur; and any kind of fur you want — provided it's mink." It was mink.

The price of the coat was twenty-four hundred dollars. Little more than a year before, the fate of The Fountainhead had depended on getting an advance of twelve hundred dollars — which she didn't get. When she told Alan Collins of her new purchase, he laughed delightedly. "I've never yet had a woman client," he said, "who, if she sells the movie rights to her novel, doesn't buy a mink coat."

The contract with Warner Brothers required that Ayn come to Hollywood to write the preliminary script for the movie. She had accepted eagerly: she wanted to be the scriptwriter for The Fountainhead, and if Warner Brothers liked her preliminary work, they might hire her to do the final version. She knew that writing the script would not give her control over its fate, that the studio had the legal right to change it in any manner they chose, at any moment, for any reason. She knew she had taken a terrible risk by selling the movie rights; her sole weapon in fighting to protect the integrity of her work would be her power of persuasion.

If she could not save it, still, her freedom to write her next novel was financially assured. And the movie, if it merely followed the plot line of The Fountainhead, would communicate the essence of her ideas; and it would help the still-sagging sales of the novel. "I would never allow a cut version of the book to be published," she explained. "That's destroying the work itself, that's Roark's Cortlandt. But a film, however bad, leaves the book intact."

In December, Ayn and Frank left by train for Hollywood. On Ayn's first trip to Hollywood, seventeen years before, she had traveled by day coach; Frank had worked his way as steward on a freighter. Now, they took the luxurious Twentieth Century to Chicago, then a stateroom on the Chief, happily and incredulously reveling in a luxury that had never before been possible to them. "The transition to this way of life was incredible," she would always recall. "We both remember that trip as an enormous highlight in our lives. We went to the diner on the Twentieth Century, and Frank ordered steak — the feeling that we could do this, and that we had earned it, was marvelous. The only advantage to poverty is that if you can get out of it, the contrast is wonderful."

The first person Ayn met when she arrived in Hollywood was Henry Blanke, who was to produce The Fountainhead. "He was a charming, nice man," Ayn said, "but not strong." She was pleased that he was to be the producer, because he had done serious movies such as The Story of Louis Pasteur, and had worked with Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, both of whom Ayn admired — "although he did inexcusably awful B movies too." He was enthusiastic about the project. His first words were, "It's a great book. It's magnificent." He said that he wanted her screenplay to be as faithful to the book as possible.

Blanke was later quoted as saying, "She told us that she would blow up the Warner Brothers lot if we changed one word [of her script], and we believed her. Even Jack Warner believed her."

Ayn was disappointed to learn that, as a result of the wartime shortage of materials for the many sets the film would require, production had to be indefinitely delayed. In the end, she waited five years, through delay after delay — never knowing if she would be asked to do the final script — until production was finally scheduled.

Ayn and Frank moved into a furnished apartment in Hollywood until they could decide where they wanted to live — smuggling in Turtle Cat, who had traveled with them, against the rules of the building. The only pets they did not have to hide were Oscar and Oswald, the small stuffed lion cubs that Frank had given Ayn soon after their marriage. The cubs went with Ayn wherever she lived for the rest of her life, sitting sedately in the room where she wrote "as a symbol of the benevolent universe." Each Christmas — a holiday Ayn loved to celebrate, maintaining that in America it was essentially a pagan event, an excuse to give parties and exchange gifts with friends — the two cubs were brought out from her study, dressed in cheerful Christmas hats, and ensconced, slightly bedraggled with age, in the living room, where they were surrounded by colorfully wrapped gifts. The cubs fulfilled the same need as her tiddlywink music — and as the private affectionate names that new friends were always astonished to discover Ayn and Frank used for each other: he was "Cubby-hole" and she was "Fluff."

This severely austere intellectual took enormous pleasure in being called "Fluff." The woman who most of her life felt as if she were a brain encased in flesh, seemed never to feel more womanly than when Frank addressed her by her pet name. The woman who fought her own battles and made her own decisions, reveled in the feeling of being fragile and delicate and protected.

Despite the delay in production of the movie, Warner Brothers wanted Ayn to write a preliminary script immediately. Blanke's instructions were that she was to make it as long as she wished and to

include as much of the story as possible. Ayn completed it in six weeks; it was three hundred pages long; the final working script was under a hundred and fifty pages.

"I had no difficulties with the dramatic form as such," Ayn later said. "The difficulty was that I was not interested personally as a writer, I was very uninspired — I had worked for seven years to achieve the structure, and to tear it down was horrible; the better the integration, the harder it is to change it. I would have fought to the death to do the adaptation, but as a job it was very boring and painful; I had told the story in the proper form in the book. And I was certain that it couldn't be made into a really good movie: the length of time involved in the story, eighteen years, is too long to be ideal movie material, and too much of the action is psychological rather than physical. But Blanke liked the preliminary script very much."

It was Barbara Stanwyck, Ayn learned, who had interested Warner Brothers, to whom she was under contract, in The Fountainhead. Stanwyck had read it, admired it, and wanted the role of Dominique. She and Ayn lunched together several times to discuss the role, and although Ayn's first choice for Dominique was Greta Garbo — whom she knew would probably not be obtainable — she fought unsuccessfully to have the part given to Stanwyck. Stanwyck was not the physical type Ayn had envisioned, but Ayn admired her work, liked her personally, and was grateful for her help.

During the years before the movie went into production, it seemed as if every major star in Hollywood, male and female, wanted the role of Roark or Dominique. For a while, Humphrey Bogart was seriously considered, but to Ayn's great relief — her choice was Gary Cooper, and Bogart could not have been more opposite a type — he turned it down. A story about Clark Gable appeared in the newspapers, which he later verified to Ayn. Gable had been on leave from the Army and was traveling from New York to Hollywood; a friend gave him several books to read on the train, including The Fountainhead. In Chicago, Gable got off the train and telephoned MGM, to whom he was under contract, demanding that they buy the book for him immediately. He was furious when he learned it had already been purchased by Warner Brothers, and "he raised hell that while he was away fighting, his studio was not protecting his interests." MGM offered Warner Brothers four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the property; the offer, which would have given the studio a four-hundred-thousand-dollar profit, was refused — and Gable demanded to be let out of his contract with MGM. Ayn had not been wrong in predicting that her book would one day be worth much more than fifty thousand dollars.

Joan Crawford gave a dinner party for Ayn — "It was very funny, she appeared dressed as Dominique, in a white Adrian dinner gown and loaded with aquamarines. She was a good actress, but she could never play an intellectual woman or a lady... The funniest of all was Veronica Lake, who said the role was perfect for her because of her haircut — you know, she wore her blond hair over one eye — which Dominique didn't."

Ayn and Frank began to discuss the possibility of buying a house, in order to invest the money from the movie sale. Frank scoured the area until he found a small ranch at 10,000 Tampa Avenue in the San Fernando Valley — thirteen acres of land and a modern house of steel and glass designed by Richard Neutra. Ayn liked the design of the house — it is considered to be the most dramatic of Neutra's houses — but was hesitant about purchasing it, concerned by its twenty-mile distance from Hollywood and by what seemed so enormous an investment. Josef von Sternberg, the original owner, had paid less than fifteen thousand dollars for it; the present owner was asking twenty-four thousand. But Frank insisted that it would be a good investment, certain to increase in value. 37

It was then that Ayn and Frank's landlady discovered their smuggled cat. "Get rid of the cat," she said, "or leave the apartment." "All right," Ayn told Frank, "we buy the house." Soon, she was working in a sunlit study facing the austere blue shapes of hills in the distance, with Oscar and Oswald on a couch near her desk.

Whenever Frank talked about his life on the ranch in later years, his friends observed, his face seemed to come alive with a smile that made him look younger than his age. The next few years appear to have been the happiest of Frank's life. He managed the ranch, reconditioned the land, landscaped the grounds, and grew acres of flowers and citrus trees for commercial sale. Soon, one could see among the flowers exquisite miniature gladiolas that he had developed himself. On one section of the land were cages of peacocks — cages that Frank, who could not bear to see any living thing imprisoned, had built without tops, so that the peacocks were free to fly. He often worked eighteen hours a day; he would enter the house in the evening exhausted, but uncharacteristically eager to talk of the things he had done that day. To work with beautiful things — his flowers and his peacocks — and to work with his hands, to make things grow — and to be engaged in activities that were his, not Ayn's, was a way of life that gave him deep contentment.

Thrown into the midst of unaccustomed luxury after years of struggle, Ayn often found herself thinking of a line quoted in Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs: "No man can pass abruptly from Siberia to Senegal without fainting." But much as Frank loved living on the ranch, Ayn came to dislike it. As she had feared, the distance to Hollywood became a severe problem. Frank had promised to teach her to drive their new Cadillac convertible, so that she would not be dependent on him. He gave her several driving lessons, then they both gave up the attempt in mutually enraged despair. Frank was a very bad driver — some of the most terrifying hours in the lives of his friends were spent in cars with Frank at the wheel — and Ayn, who found mechanical objects impossible to master, was unable to learn. Whenever she had to go to the city, Frank had to take her. The isolation began to trouble her: she felt cut off and trapped, unable to do what she wanted when she wanted. After her years in New York, she disliked California, which she called "the provinces;" she missed the activity and excitement of New York. She made an uncomfortable, complaining peace with her new way of life and was never happy with it.

Ayn and Frank soon began to enjoy inviting guests to their new home — always alive with Frank's flowers — as Ayn met political conservatives in California. Leonard Read, head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce who was to become widely known and influential as the founder of The Foundation for Economic Education, was an occasional visitor. One evening. Read and another friend were at Ayn's home and began discussing the need for a book about a society of complete collectivism, showing the ultimate consequences of collectivist doctrine applied to the actual existence of man. "I have written just such a book," Ayn said. "It's a story called Anthem." Leonard Read later wrote, "I borrowed her only copy and read it on the eastbound Stratoliner. My secretary, to whom I gave the book to be returned, read it during her lunch hour and said: "This is a great book. Isn't it too bad that others can't read it?' Precisely what I had been thinking."

Through Pamphleteers, a small publishing house whose purpose was to further the cause of freedom and individualism, Read arranged for the publication of five thousand copies. Anthem, written in 1937 and published only in England, received its first American publication.

Other visitors to the ranch were people in the movie industry, such as Morrie Ryskind, writer of the sensationally successful Of Thee I Sing, and his wife, Mary. Janet Gaynor and her designer husband, Adrian, were Ayn and Franks "neighbors" — which meant that they lived only a few miles away — and the two couples developed a warm relationship. A younger friend was Herbert Comeulle, later to move to Hawaii to head Dole Pineapple. Ayn's favorite of the political conservatives she met was William Mullendore, president of Consolidated Edison of California and an outspoken defender of free enterprise. He was a charming, attractive, courageous man, who spoke his mind with great dignity and effectiveness, and he deeply admired Ayn's work. "He was the star of my Hollywood conservatives" Ayn would often say. "He went all over the country speaking for free enterprise; he was the only uncompromising businessman I've ever known."

Ayn had met Henry Hazlitt earlier in New York, through her friendship with Frances; she began to know him better during this period, on her rare visits to New York and his more frequent trips to California. "Frances was always very complimentary and enthusiastic about my work," Ayn was to say, "and Henry seemed to echo her, although I wasn't sure of his exact views, I didn't really know his reasons. But he projected respect for me and interest in my ideas, and that I was an important intellectual ally." And Henry Hazlitt was to say, "Frances and I both liked Ayn personally very much, considered her our friend — and did not get particularly upset by her occasional scoldings of us. I differed strongly with her on ethical problems, but sensed that any discussion of them would simply lead to a useless quarrel. I don't try to change someone's mind if I think it's a basic and set thing."

Through the Hazlitts, Ayn met the brilliant theoretical economist Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of the "Austrian School" of free-market economics and later to become a seminal influence on twentieth-century economic thought. His major work, Human Action, deals with the nature, scope, and methodology of economics, and presents a comprehensive defense of the free market and free exchange. 38 One of his students was Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek.

Ayn was charmed by Von Mises. Along with a vast and searching intellect, he had a gentleness, a warmth, and communicated a respect for whomever he talked with, that made him beloved by his friends and his students. "He seemed very impressed," Ayn recalled, "that a woman had read his books and was seriously interested in economics. He had read The Fountainhead, and he seemed to think highly of it. I didn't like his separation of morality and economics, but I assumed that it simply meant that morality was not his specialty and that he could not devise one of his own. At that time, I thought — about both Henry and Von Mises — that since they were fully committed to laissez-faire capitalism, the rest of their philosophy had contradictions only because they did not yet know how to integrate a full philosophy to capitalism. It didn't bother me; I knew I would present the full case."

Henry Hazlitt said to Ayn one day: "I just talked with Lu Mises a few days ago. He called you 'the most courageous man in America.'" "Did he say man?" asked Ayn. "Yes," he replied. Ayn was delighted.

While still in New York working on The Fountainhead, Ayn had hoped to meet Frank Lloyd Wright and to interview him about architecture. Through Ely Jacques Kahn. she had attended a banquet at which he spoke. "I spent three hundred and fifty dollars out of my savings to buy a black velvet dress and shoes and a cape, everything to match, at Bonwit Teller's, which I had never entered before," she would recall. "I felt this would be an unrepeatable occasion, because I was to meet a man who was really great." After the banquet, Kahn introduced her to Wright. When she told him she was writing a novel on architecture and wanted to interview him, he seemed disinterested and vague about his plans. She realized that she would have to show him her work; then he would be interested, she thought.

When three chapters were completed, she had sent them to Wright with a copy of We the Living, and again asked for an interview. She had received in return a brief, antagonistic note, saying, without explanation, that he liked nothing about the chapters. Ayn was deeply wounded. "I never could forgive him," she once said, "because he hurt me through his virtues; he could hurt me only because I admired him."

Now, in California, Ayn met Wright again at the home of his son, Lloyd Wright. This time, he was pleasant and cordial. He said he had not yet read The Fountainhead, but planned to do so. Ayn liked him, and believed that he liked her. "He talked as if he and I understood each other spiritually," she would explain, "as artists against the world. We had an interesting conversation about individualism. He was an extremely intelligent man... He said one very funny thing. You know, he's very short, though he carries himself beautifully and with dignity. He said that from the early chapters I'd sent him, he hadn't liked the fact that Roark was so tall, and that he should not have red hair but a mane

of white hair. Lloyd said, 'Oh, Father, Miss Rand wasn't writing your biography!' He chuckled and said, 'That's true...'

"He said to me at one point, 'I don't think you can write about integrity. You're too young to have suffered.' I answered, 'Oh yes, I have suffered. Do you want to know what was the worst of it? It was your letter.' He shook his head sadly. He seemed to recall the letter only vaguely. He'd thought I just wanted to use him for publicity, as so many people had tried to do... As we were leaving that evening, he sat at the piano and began to play violently dramatic, exultant music. It was so false and phony. I felt sad and embarrassed that such a man had to express himself in that way. Because under the falseness was something very authentic — a heroic and romantic sense of life that he could express only in architecture."

When Wright read The Fountainhead, he wrote Ayn: "I've read every word of The Fountainhead. Your thesis is the great one. Especially at this time... Your grasp of the architectural ins and outs of a degenerate profession astonishes me... Your novel is Novel. Unusual material in unusual hands and, I hope, to an unusual end." Ayn was thrilled with the letter, but disappointed that he did not volunteer to be quoted. She learned later that he kept the book on his night table in Taliesin, and that, at his suggestion, almost every student in his architectural school had read it. But he made no public statement.

Wright invited Ayn and Frank to visit him, and they spent a weekend at Taliesin East. It was a shocking experience for Ayn. "It was like a feudal establishment," she was to say, recalling the weekend. "The buildings were magnificent, and thrilling to see after having seen pictures of them. They were connected by courts and galleries, built on sloping hills, and adapted perfectly to their site. But they were terribly neglected; there were broken window panes, doors that didn't fit, the floors creaked — he had a theoretical mind with no concern for how one would actually live, the practical side didn't interest him."

As Ayn described the scene, it was clear to her listeners that, unknowingly, she was describing her own attitude and her own way of life; Frank had always furnished their apartments attractively, as he did the house on the ranch, with the clean, modern lines that Ayn loved — but the furniture was soon ripped by the claws of their cats, the carpets were stained, the bathroom was rarely cleaned. Ayn "had a theoretical mind with no concern for how one would actually live."

At Taliesin, Ayn was startled to learn that Wrights students, who lived there, were required to pay for tuition and also to take care of the house, the grounds, and the farm, to cook and clean, to wait on tables, and to do the complex drafting of his buildings. She knew that his lectures and his criticisms of their work were invaluable, but felt that it was not right that he make them servants. She later commented disapprovingly, "They were like medieval serfs. The most horrible thing was that the menu for his table, where his guests also ate, was different than the menu for his students. We sat on a raised platform, high above the others, we ate fancy delicacies and they got fried eggs; it was a real caste system. The idea for all of it was his wife's. He was the deity of the place, its spirit, and she was the practical manager.

"Almost all his students seemed like emotional, out-of-focus hero-worshippers. Anything he said was right, there was an atmosphere of worshipful, awed obedience. When he and I began to argue about something, the students were against me instantly; they bared their teeth that I was disagreeing with the master. They showed me some of their work, which was badly imitative of Wright. What was tragic was that he did not want any of that; he was trying to get intellectual independence from them during the general discussions, but he didn't get anything except 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir' and recitals of formulas from his writing. He wanted what I want: independent understanding; but he didn't know how to stimulate it. I felt sorry for him in that atmosphere. Although he was approaching eighty, by comparison with that retinue he was the youngest person there."

As Ayn described the Wrights' attitude, it was clear to her listeners that she was describing, unknowingly, conflicting aspects of her own attitude: the emotional need and demand for total agreement always at war with the equal, simultaneous longing for an independent response.

It was that weekend that Ayn commissioned Wright to design a home for her, to be built in the future. The sketches show a beautiful, complex structure of three stories, with her study at the top. Ayn would later tell a friend, Lawrence A. Scott, the final installment of the story of Ayn Rand and Frank Lloyd Wright. When Wright showed her the sketches of the house, she asked the price — and was stunned by the amount he named. It was well beyond her financial capabilities, she told him. "My dear lady," he replied. "That's no problem at all. Go out and make more money."

After her return to California from Taliesin, Ayn soon had less time for the political and philosophical discussions that she enjoyed. While completing the preliminary movie script of The Fountainhead, she had met Hal Wallis, producer of Jezebel, Dark Victory and Casablanca, who was working on the Warner's lot. Soon after their meeting, Wallis quarreled with lack Warner and walked off the lot to form his own production company. He offered Ayn a long-term screenwriting contract. Blanke had made her the same offer. Ayn told Wallis what she had told Blanke: she was ready to begin a new novel, and would sign a contract only with the provision that she work no more than six months each year. Blanke had refused; it was against studio policy and unprecedented in Hollywood. Wallis agreed. Ayn signed a five-year contract guaranteeing her six months work a year and six free months. "To this day, I like Wallis very much," Ayn said many years later. "He was a talented, sensitive, very intelligent man, though not intellectual; and he had a good dramatic sense. It was a pleasure working for him because he would always accept a rational argument — reason was an absolute to him." And Hal Wallis was to say, "Ayn was a brilliant writer, and totally an individualist in her person, her writing, and her ideas."

She began working harder than ever, under the pressure of Wallis's constant deadlines; often, she and Frank had no time to see each other except at the dinner table. But she did take time to go to Beverly Hills to make two purchases: the complete works of Aristotle and three suits by Adrian.

Ayn's first assignment for Hal Wallis was an adaptation of the novel Love Letters, written by Chris Massie. "I chose it out of sheer desperation from among the batch of plotless novels about someone's emotions that he showed me," she said. "He didn't see how I could make it dramatic — the book was junk. But I saw at least the possibility of a dramatic situation in it." Dubiously, Wallis agreed to let her try it.

The movie of Love Letters, a love story with a strong mystery element, starred Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. It was a huge commercial success. To this day it can regularly be seen on late-night television. One finds the touch of Ayn Rand everywhere in the movie, in the considerable reworking of the original story and in the beauty and romanticism of the dialogue between the two lovers.

Her next assignment was You Came Along, the story of a dying airman and the woman who loves him. It was an original screenplay, which she felt was badly written. However, she liked the story, and agreed to redo it. "I kept whatever was good in the original script," she said, "and wrote the rest; I got second credit, which was fine even though I'd saved it." The movie, starring Robert Cummings and Lizabeth Scott, was also an unusual commercial success; it, too, can still be seen on late-night television.

Hal Wallis suggested to Ayn that she write a movie original: the story of the development of the atom bomb. The idea interested her, and she agreed to do it — on one condition: that she be allowed to write the story as she understood it, as a triumph of the human mind in a free society. Little information about the work done on the bomb in Germany was yet available — although the newspapers said that America and Germany had been in a frantic race to unlock its secret — but Ayn was convinced on principle that Hitler's Germany could not have developed it, that great achievements could not emerge from slaves in a slave state. Wallis accepted her condition. Ayn interviewed a number of physicists, among them General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as "the man who built the atom bomb." Ayn, who had never studied physics, had laboriously struggled through only the very technical Smythe Report on the bomb, when one of the physicists she interviewed said to her admiringly, "You must have a very extensive background in physics."

"When Wallis and I met with Oppenheimer," Ayn would recall, "he greeted us very suspiciously; he didn't like the idea of a Hollywood movie on the bomb; there was a lot of resentment of scientists for creating it, and he was afraid a movie might add to that. I told him what I wanted to do — to show the bomb as a great achievement of the human mind that could be done only by free minds in a free country — and he was my friend from that moment on. He told me everything I wanted to know, he kept us past the allotted time, he walked us to the car and invited us to come back again. We did return for a second interview.

"He told me that I was right about the impossibility of the bomb being created by Nazi Germany, that all through their work the scientists in America had known they were not in a race — and he projected an Atlas Shrugged - like satire on the constant interference of German bureaucrats with their scientists. German scientists had to flee to America to be effective. "There was never a single bureaucratic order given to any scientist at Los Alamos,' he said."

It was Oppenheimer who would be the inspiration for physicist Dr. Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged. "I copied his appearance and manner, and what he suggested," Ayn said when discussing Oppenheimer. "An enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, very much a gentleman, slightly otherworldly, with an almost ostentatious simplicity. I even copied his office for Stadler. He was a fascinating man."

Ayn had completed one third of the script when, without warning to her, Hal Wallis sold his rights to the movie, and Ayn's script, to MGM. Furious, Ayn asked to be released from her contract. Wallis compromised by extending her next free six months to a year.

It was in the mid-forties that Nick became seriously ill. He had been hospitalized a number of times with lung trouble, which had become more severe over the years since he was gassed in World War I. Ayn and Frank invited him to come to California and live with them until he was well. He did so, and for several months Frank cared tenderly for his beloved brother. But shortly after his return to New York, Nick entered the Veterans Hospital in Saranac, where he died. It was a painful loss to both Ayn and Frank. Neither of them talked about it, but one could see the suffering in Frank's eyes when his brother's name was mentioned.

Albert Mannheimer, Ayn's young friend from New York, had moved to Hollywood to write for the screen. Among other assignments, he collaborated with Garson Kanin on the screenplay of Born Yesterday. He came to the ranch regularly to visit Ayn and to discuss her philosophy, to which he was now dedicated. Albert was struggling to deal with a problem not uncommon to idealistic young men working in Hollywood: the clash between his moral values and what he believed to be the requirements of his job. The sense that he was not living up to his potential, that he was compromising the values he had learned from Ayn in order to achieve success in his career, led to attacks of anxiety. His anxiety was severely heightened when, after an unhappy love affair, the girl he had broken off with stole into his apartment and — in what appeared to be an act of vengeance — committed suicide there. Ayn tried to help Albert: to convince him he had no cause to feel guilt, that only the young woman bore the responsibility for her actions; and to help him learn how he might remain a Hollywood writer while maintaining his integrity. Despite the pressure of her own work, she took whatever time he required, whenever he required it, to talk with and advise him.

It was her first experience of systematically helping someone psychologically. Psychology was a field she had never studied, and had taken little interest in; she believed that people could make their decisions and lead their lives as she insisted that she did: by rational calculation; if they had emotional-psychological problems, they were functioning irrationally, and could choose not to do so. Now, through her conversations with Albert, she was learning that human motivation was more complex than she had known, and she began evolving theories in the field.

Essentially, her theories were elaborations of the views she already held: that a man chooses to be rational or irrational, and that if he is in psychological pain, the solution can be found by discovering the irrational, contradictory convictions that he consciously or subconsciously holds, identifying them, and changing them to rational convictions.

She was armed with two basic concepts of the nature of man. One was that man has free will, to which she gave a radically new and important definition. "Man," she would write in Atlas Shrugged, "must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform... 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think — not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment..."

The second concept, which she derived from the first, was that a human being's emotions are the result of the thinking he has done or has refused to do. If his emotions are consistent with his rational judgment, their source will be found in his constant choice to use the best of his mind and his intelligence, and in the conclusions he has reached thereby. To the extent that he has contradictory emotions, emotions that conflict with his rational judgment, their source will be found in intellectual error or in acts of "blanking out."

She would often give an interesting example as evidence of her theory that emotions are the result of cognition. "If a small baby sees someone pointing a gun at him," she would say, "he will not react with fear; he may smile, thinking he is being given a new toy. If an adult sees someone pointing a gun at him — he will feel fear: he knows the gun is dangerous and may kill him."

When Ayn announced proudly, as she often did, "I can account for every emotion I have" — she meant, astonishingly, that the total contents of her subconscious were instantly available to her conscious mind, that all of her emotions had resulted from deliberate acts of rational thought, and that she could name the thinking that had led her to each feeling. And she maintained that every human being is able, if he chooses to work at the job of identifying the source of his emotions, ultimately to arrive at the same clarity and control.

Both of these concepts — that emotions result from the thinking one has done or has failed to do, and that free will consists of the choice to think or not to think — have great importance philosophically and as guides to human psychology — and both, even in the opinion of many philosophers and psychologists who admire Ayn's work, are highly oversimplified. Because of their oversimplification, they can be explosively dangerous guides to the human psyche. It is precisely our deepest values, our most intimate feelings, our most cherished loves and passions — those emotions that we experience as forming our very souls and as having always formed our very souls — those emotions that Ayn called our "sense of life" — that are not amenable to easy, or even to difficult, reduction to a set of intellectual conclusions that we may then accept or reject according to their rationality or irrationality. And although we are sometimes able to say: I should have thought about this issue or that one, and I dimly recognized it at the time but I evaded it — more often we can only say: I don't know if I failed to think through an issue because I evaded it, or simply because I wasn't aware that it was necessary to do so — I don't know if I blanked out or was merely lacking in knowledge. We are not omniscient, not about the world outside us, and not about the vast complexity of our own mental content and processes.

These two concepts — for which her arguments were powerfully convincing — formed the heart of Ayn's approach to psychology, to her method of attempting to help Albert — and, in later years, to help those of her young friends who were struggling with what they thought to be psychological problems. The result was that her psychological work consisted to a great extent of what can only be called "moral lectures" — that is, stem advice to find the failures, the irrationalities, the "blank-outs" that had led to the problems, to rethink the original errors, to form correct conclusions, and thereby to find one's way to health. If one did not finally succeed, one clearly was continuing to evade. One felt under a constant pressure to discover the irrationality buried in one's subconscious that had led to the confusions or self-doubts or self-damaging actions that were defined as "psychological problems."

The danger of Ayn's oversimplification became compounded by an aspect of her own psychology. She stated, and wrote, that one could make simple, non-willful errors in thinking and evaluating, which she termed "errors of knowledge" as opposed to "breaches of morality." But she very often behaved and responded as if only willful errors, only evasion, existed in the realm of contradictory emotions and irrational value choices. Her anger, her accusations, her indignation at the perception of any value differences between herself and others, could be understood only on the assumption that she felt herself to be dealing with deliberate irrationality.

Despite her best efforts, it was Ayn's impression that Albert "got a little better" over the long period of their psychological discussions, "but not much."

During their years on the ranch, Ayn and Frank became friendly with Ruth and Dr. Borroughs Hill. Ruth Beebe Hill was then researching the book that would become a bestseller many years later: Hanta Yo. Borroughs, known as "Buzzy," was a researcher in cancer at UCLA Medical Center. Ruth had read The Fountainhead shortly after it was published, and had fallen in love with it.

"Howard Roark," she said, "is what I'd want to be if I were a man... I wanted everyone to love The Fountainhead as I did, and I think I became quite obnoxious. Buzzy once said to me, 'Do you realize that for the last three years you have spent every social evening talking about The Fountainhead?'"

Knowing what The Fountainhead meant to Ruth, Jean Elliott, a friend, telephoned one day to say, "I'm going to tell you something you won't believe. I'm going to be Ayn Rand's secretary! I'll be typing for her one day a week, on the recommendation of a neighbor of hers whom I know." Ruth replied, "No, I don't believe it. And I give you exactly ten days to arrange for me to meet her."

Ten days later, the Hills met the O'Connors. Ayn soon attended, at the American Association of University Women, one of the dramatic readings of The Fountainhead that Ruth had been presenting. Her comments on the presentation, Ruth recalled, "influenced me more as a writer than a year's course in writing. I learned from her the importance of constructing a story as an architect constructs a building — that the structure must be strong and enduring and logical."

At Ruth's urging, Ayn gave her first talk in Hollywood at a Books and Authors group — at which the attendance established a record for the organization. The fame of The Fountainhead was growing. She spoke for a few minutes, then asked for questions. At the first question, Ruth cringed with embarrassment. "Miss Rand," a woman said, "the sex scenes between Roark and Dominique are so wonderful! Do they come from your own experience? What is their source?" Ayn brought down the house when she replied in two words: "Wishful thinking."

Ayn gave another talk during this period. While she was still living in New York, Ely Jacques Kahn had arranged for her to address a luncheon of the American Association of Architects. Now, she was approached to speak at a meeting of the Los Angeles branch of the organization. During the question period, a man said, "You present Howard Roark as unconventional — but he wasn't really — he was, after all, faithful to one woman all his life!" Ayn replied, "Do you call that conventional?" — and the audience burst into laughter and applause.

Like many of the people who knew Ayn, Ruth Hill loved her deeply. And she felt a special tenderness for Frank. She often commented on the intensity of Ayn's love for him. Ayn once said, Ruth recalled, "Frank is the power behind the throne." To which Frank responded, "Sometimes I think I am the throne, the way I get sat on." In the same man-worshiping vein, Ayn told Ruth, "It's Buzzy I admire most. And if you're half the woman I think you are, you'll like that."

One day, talking to Ruth while dipping the heads of white chrysanthemums into pans of coloring, Frank grinned and said, "Not the sort of thing Howard Roark would do, is it?" Ruth would learn that, probably for the first time since his marriage, Frank had formed a friendship of his own, not of Ayn's choosing. His friend was an older woman, Aretha Fisher, who sold flowers in a nearby area. On many afternoons, Frank would visit her at her home, sometimes to talk, sometimes to join her for lunch, sometimes to relax in his favorite chair. Nothing was required of him by this kindly woman; with her, he was not "Mr. Ayn Rand," he was Frank, who grew beautiful flowers on his ranch and of whom she was fond. Ayn knew they were acquainted, but Frank never told her of the depth of their friendship nor of their constant meetings; like his work on the ranch, this friendship was his.

One day during this period, Ayn received a letter, signed "Thadeus Ashby" — a name she did not know — informing her that "Warner Brothers can't produce The Fountainhead. I can. I must talk to you about it." Amused when she learned that he was only twenty-one, and touched that he had read The Fountainhead while in the Air Force and was so eager to meet Ayn that he hitchhiked from New York to Hollywood to do so, Ayn agreed to meet him. The meeting went well. Ayn would later say, "He talked philosophy, he was very perceptive about The Fountainhead — he even understood that Wynand dramatized the Nietzschean philosophy — he was very intelligent. Frank is usually more severe on first impressions and I'm more mushy, but both of us liked him."

Ayn and Frank learned that Thadeus was working on a novel and a play — but he had no money and no job. Ayn soon invited him to live with them on the ranch so that he could work there without having to hold a job. She wanted to spare a young writer a painful struggle. While Ayn never believed that charity was a moral virtue or requirement, and did not give money to organized charities, she occasionally was financially helpful to people in whom she saw ability. In later years, she gave gifts of money, informal scholarships, to young people who could not otherwise complete their educations and in whom she saw intelligence and promise.

In the months he lived with Ayn and Frank, Thadeus was to recall, he was struck with their devotion to each other. "She was deeply in love with him," he said, "and he was always tender and affectionate with her. Their relationship seemed perfect to me; it served as a model... From what I could observe, she always initiated sex between them, and though he was a passive man, he was always available; I'd often see them go upstairs to the bedroom, their arms around each other... She used to say that Frank was on strike, that's why he had no career. I once asked him if that were true, and he answered, "That's how Ayn interprets it.'"

Ayn appeared to accept Thadeus to an extent rare in her relationships. She inscribed his copy of The Fountainhead: "To that spirit which is yours and mine." But it was not long before she began to grow disillusioned. After almost six months, he had written only approximately twenty pages of his novel, and Ayn considered those pages to be "a terrible imitation of The Fountainhead." She seemed not to understand that the imitativeness was almost inevitable. She had known why her own first writing was overly influenced by Victor Hugo: "My mind worked in those literary forms that had most impressed me," And she believed that her own literary approach, which she called "Romantic Realism," was the rational approach; it is not unlikely that she would have been equally indignant had Thadeus's writing been of a different school and a different style.

Ayn and Frank were planning a trip to New York; she asked Albert — the two young men had become friendly — to move in with Thadeus while they were away. Albert and Thadeus promised that the house would never be left empty, that one of them would be there at all times. Albert kept his word, Thadeus did not. When Ayn and Frank returned, Ayn was furiously angry that he had broken his promise, and soon after she asked him to move out. It was that disappointment, she would later say, that made her extremely reluctant to meet other fans in the future.

One of the sources of Ayn's frequent disappointments with people is evident in her relationship with Thadeus. Painfully hungry for intellectual companionship, judging people exclusively by their intellectual interests, their stated philosophy, and their intelligence, she tended to move too fast, to accept someone as a friend on the basis of an apparent intellectual rapport without knowing anything about the person's character or background or life. As she saw more of her new friend, she often discovered that they had little in common, and that she disapproved of qualities and actions she had had no way of discerning from conversations about philosophy Almost forty years after their friendship ended, Thadeus was to say: "Ayn was a genius, the most brilliant person I have ever known. I really loved her — and I still do... Although I have moved in different philosophical directions, I'm still an individualist; I learned individualism from her, and that remains... But my separation from her was ultimately liberating. For a number of years, I didn't grow as a person, I was almost slavishly repeating her ideas. The break finally allowed me to grow philosophically."

He added that there had been a sexual element in his relationship with Ayn, despite her indisputable love for Frank; there had been a flirtatiousness, a sexual awareness of each other that cut across the nineteen-year difference in their ages. It was never acted upon, but their mutual attraction existed as a constant presence, and they openly named and discussed it on several occasions. "We debated whether or not to discuss our relationship with Frank," Thadeus said. "But we decided not to."

There seems reason to believe that something was coming to life in Ayn, that her dissatisfaction with her life with her husband was seeking expression — and that it could, one day, explode into action.

37 Frank was correct; in 1963, Ayn and Frank sold it for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.

38 As late as the fifties, Von Mises was relatively unknown in the United States — his books were not published here before 1944 — until, beginning in the late fifties and continuing for more than ten years, Ayn began a concerted campaign to have his work read and appreciated: she published reviews, she cited him in articles and in public speeches, she attended some of his seminars at New York University, she recommended him to admirers of her philosophy. A number of economists have said that it was largely as a result of Ayn's efforts that the work of Von Mises began to reach its potential audience.

Ayn also widely recommended and discussed Henry Hazlitt's brilliant presentation of basic economic issues for the laymen, Economics in One Lesson. But Hazlitt and his work were already known, and his book a bestseller.

Chapter Eighteen

Because of The Fountainhead — by 1946, three years after its publication, a much-discussed bestseller — because of her friendships with political conservatives who were universally admiring of the brilliance and depth of her social-political reasoning, and because of her eagerness to talk about her political philosophy with anyone she met, Ayn had herself become much discussed in Hollywood as an active and vocal opponent of collectivism. And she had become progressively more concerned with the infiltration of Communist propaganda into American movies.

She wrote a pamphlet entitled "Screen Guide for Americans" for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-Communist organization with which she was for a time associated. Among its members over the years were John Wayne, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou, Sam Woods, and Walt Disney; Ayn was unanimously elected to the board shortly after attending her first meeting. In the pamphlet, she wrote: "The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies — by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories — thus making people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication." She made it clear that she was unalterably opposed to any form of legal restriction on the movie industry; she was offering suggestions for voluntary action. Don't smear the free enterprise system, she recommended to writers and producers; don't smear industrialists, don't glorify failure, don't glorify the collective, don't smear the independent man, don't smear American political institutions. And when you make pictures with political themes and implications — don't hire Communists to write, direct, or produce them. "The principle of free speech requires that we do not use police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas — which means that we do not pass laws forbidding them to speak. But the principle of free speech does not require that we furnish the Communists with the means to preach their ideas, and does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense."

Early in 1947, representatives from the House Un-American Activities Committee, preparing for hearings that would investigate Communist infiltration into the movie industry, arrived in Hollywood. They contacted Ayn and requested that she testify before the Committee in Washington. It was the beginning of a flood of angry controversy throughout the nation that set politician against politician and friend against friend — and that has not ended to this day.

The purpose of HUAC's October 1947 hearings, under the chairmanship of Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, was to investigate Communist Party penetration of Hollywood: "to discover the truth and report it as it is... with such recommendations, if any, as to legislation on those subjects as the situation may require and as the duty of Congress to the American people may demand." HUAC subpoenaed a group of "unfriendly witnesses" — among them Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, and Edward Dmytryk. Among the "friendly witnesses" were Ayn Rand, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper. A group of Hollywood personalities — Lauren Bacall, Jane Wyatt, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Henried — flew to Washington in a well-publicized campaign to register their opposition to the committee's work.

Ayn agreed to appear before the committee on one condition: that she be allowed to testify as she wished, without dictation from HUAC, and that she be allowed to speak on ideological issues. Two movies were run for her in Hollywood: The Best Years of Our Lives, an enormously popular 1946 release starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, and Dana Andrews, and The Song of Russia, released in 1943 and starring Robert Taylor and Susan Peters. Ayn felt that The Song of Russia — the story of an American musician who tours Russia in 1941 and falls in love with an idealistic peasant girl — was so blatant in its pro-Soviet orientation that it "was totally meaningless; no one could really be taken in by it." Robert Taylor had been quoted by the newspapers as saying that he hadn't wanted to do the movie, but before he left for the Navy he had received word from Washington that if he did not accept the role, he would not get his commission.

The Best Years of Our Lives was a recent success, and a movie Ayn wanted to denounce ideologically. "Everyone was praising it," she would recall, "as a humanitarian achievement — you know, Fredric March played 'the banker with a heart,' who, in his big speech, decides that loans should be given without collateral. I agreed to go to Washington on condition that I could present a full case: I would start my testimony by reading from my 'Screen Guide for Americans' in order to establish my foundation, and then take up the two movies."

Considerable pressure was brought to bear on the anti-Communist witnesses to prevent them from testifying. Many of them were told, tacitly or openly, that cooperation with the committee would be professionally damaging to them. When an acquaintance of Ayn congratulated her on her courage in agreeing to testify, she replied, "I'm not brave enough to be a coward. I see the consequences too clearly."

The day Ayn arrived in Washington, Louis B. Mayer, a friendly witness, was testifying. Then the committee called her to the stand — to testify only about The Song of Russia. At the end of the day, Ayn recalled, "I threw a fit; I told the committee members that if I only spoke about an unimportant movie that was several years old, it would seem that that was the worst Hollywood had done and it amounted almost to a whitewash. It was much more important to show the really serious propaganda going on right now, and about America." She was speaking to two members of the Committee, Parnell Thomas and a young congressman named Richard Nixon. She had become convinced that most of the committee members were "intellectually out of their depth, and motivated by a desire for headlines," but she was impressed with Nixon; he seemed intellectual and he seemed to understand the issue she was naming. But Thomas told her that the press coverage of the hearings had been so damning, that if a widely praised and popular movie like The Best Year of Our Lives were denounced, there would be a furor. Finally, in the face of Ayn's arguments, he capitulated; he promised that she would be called in a day or two to give the testimony she had come to give. Ayn stayed throughout the hearings — and was not called again.

"The hearings were a disgusting spectacle," Ayn was to say with contempt when she, rarely, spoke of them in later years. They were a painfully unpleasant memory. "Each one of the unfriendly witnesses would make long denunciatory speeches to the committee — and when the chairman tried to stop him and get the answer to a question like 'Are you a writer?' — he'd say 'I'm answering in my own way' — and continue the denunciation. After putting up with this for hours at a time with each one of them, and getting no answers to his questions, Thomas finally held them in contempt of Congress. They were not jailed for being Communist Party members; they were jailed for contempt.

"Before each of them left the stand, his Communist Party card was produced. That was the dramatic part. It shocked the audience and the newspapers and all the liberals, who had been screaming that these men were being persecuted. But to this day, when people denounce the hearings, they don't even know — they are not told — that these people were Communists.

"The unfriendly witnesses' attitude was that if their unpopular political viewpoint became known, then people wouldn't attend their movies — so they had the right to put over a fraud. I kept yelling at the conservatives about the difference between the right to freedom of speech — which means the government cannot interfere — and the private right of people who don't want to deal with Communists, to boycott; and the private right of employers not to hire men whom they consider to be enemies of this country." Ayn's viewpoint was also unpopular, among both liberals and conservatives; it remains unpopular to this day. That was not a fact that troubled her then or at any time in her life. She was later to term herself a "radical for capitalism;" she knew very well the price to be paid for radical and innovative ideas, and she was calmly prepared to pay it.

When the hearings ended, Ayn, furious that she had not been recalled, held another angry session with Thomas. Apparently he was impressed with both her fire and her arguments; he said that he wanted to hold another set of hearings dealing specifically with ideology; he asked Ayn to be the chief investigator. Ayn refused. He said that he would allow her to testify exactly as she wished — and would pay her throughout the period before the hearings were held. Ayn refused.

It is well known and well documented that a number of the unfriendly witnesses were blacklisted by Hollywood after the hearings — although several of them continued working under false names and others worked in Europe. What is less well known — except to those involved and to those who have since researched the issue — was the silent, unpublicized persecution of friendly witnesses. "Everyone who had testified or the committee — not the big stars, but the lesser-known actors and writers who were considered dispensable, and those who were free-lancing and were not under contract to a major studio — lost their jobs," Ayn would recall bitterly. "Morrie Ryskind had had more work than he could handle; he never again worked in Hollywood. Adolphe Menjou, who was also free-lancing, got fewer and fewer jobs; after about a year, he could find no work at all. I was not victimized, because of The Fountainhead and because I had a contract with Hal Wallis."

Friends were later to observe that Ayn appeared to have uncomfortably mixed feelings about both the committees validity and her own appearance before it. When she was questioned, her attitude ranged from calm, reasoned explanations to outraged defensiveness at any suggestion of disapproval of her actions. She often said that she and the other friendly witnesses had been so maligned by the press and public, that any of her doubts about the committees legitimacy were irrelevant in the face of such injustice. But she granted that "It was a very dubious undertaking. I think that legally and constitutionally they had the right only to ask factual questions, such as party membership and Communist penetration of organizations. If their focus was to expose communism, it had to be done ideologically — but it's improper for a government agency to do it."

She had agreed to testify, she would explain, because she wanted the extent of Communist propaganda in movies to become publically known, and the committee was the only existing forum by which to accomplish it. "My real purpose was to get that information into the press; all the articles that had appeared about Communists in Hollywood were not about ideological penetration or propaganda on the screen, only that there were a few Communists around; they never discussed the content of the movies. I didn't think the hearings were immoral or improper under the circumstances, since congressional investigating committees had existed long before that; it was not an evil institution, but futile. And it did not interfere with anyone's freedom of speech." But when asked how she thought such a problem should be handled by government in the kind of society she advocated, she responded, "There would be no hearings."

Despite her misgivings, Ayn was convinced that something of value had arisen from the hearings: that Communist propaganda on the screen vanished after that, at least in the blatant form it had taken. "My 'Screen Guide for Americans' did that," she would say proudly. "It was reproduced on the front page of the Drama Section of the New York Times, and several other papers ran it. All the points I had made, particularly about the attacks on businessmen as villains, disappeared from the screen. I take credit for that."

But whenever the subject of the hearings arose in future years, Ayn would say, "The whole thing is a very unpleasant, ugly memory for me. I disliked being there, I disliked the attitude of most of the committee, I disliked the futility of the conservatives — they had no idea of how to fight an intellectual battle — and I was furious that I couldn't do what I went there to do."

Ayn returned to California weary, frustrated, and depressed. She had maintained her contact with Isabel Paterson, seeing her whenever she and Frank visited New York and engaging in long philosophical discussions with her by mail and telephone. It had been agreed that because Ayn was in a better financial position than Pat, she would one day give Pat the present of a trip to California. Now, thinking that a visit from her friend would lift her spirits, Ayn called Pat to invite her to spend a week. The Freeman, a new conservative magazine, was in the process of being formed; Pat was helping to raise money for it, and could combine her trip with meetings with Hollywood conservatives, to whom Ayn would introduce her. When Pat arrived, Ayn was delighted to see her. But knowing her friend's hair-trigger temper, Ayn warned her firmly that the conservatives in Hollywood meant well, but they were not philosophical. She demanded, and received, Pat's promise not to insult any of them. She then began introducing Pat to all of her "best conservatives, a couple at a time, inviting them to my house." The first people to meet Pat were Janet Gaynor and Adrian, who had read The God of the Machine on Ayn's recommendation. To Ayn's relief, Pat was cordial and polite with them.

Ayn then invited Morrie Ryskind and his wife Mary. The evening went well, but when they left, Pat said, "I don't like Jewish intellectuals." Angrily, Ayn replied, "Then you don't like me." Pat laughed, insisting that she had not meant it "that way." Ayn's response was typical of her. She would not grant what she termed "the sanction of the victim." If Pat was implicitly insulting her by her remark about Morrie Ryskind, Ayn would not spare Pat's feelings by pretending she didn't know it. What others, out of pity or conventional good manners or fear preferred not to name, Ayn named.

"I had a constant stream of people in and out of the house," Ayn would recall, "and Pat kept her promise pretty well — until Janet and Adrian invited us to their home for dinner with a group of conservatives. Pat was horrible all through dinner. Adrian had begun painting, and when he showed us his work, she just looked away without saying a word. She kept telling people they knew nothing about politics; and everyone was humbly polite toward the great conservative."

Ayn was angry, and grew angrier still when Pat inadvertently revealed something that Ayn had long suspected but had been unable fully to believe. Just before publication of The Fountainhead, Pat had told Ayn that Irita van Doren, head of the Herald Tribune Book Section, had offered the book for review to a conservative woman — who had refused the assignment. "That's a moral crime," Ayn had said, wondering why Pat seemed oddly upset. Now, Pat revealed that she was the one who had been offered the review and had turned it down. Ayn was stunned. When she asked Pat her reasons, Pat said only that she did not agree with certain aspects of the book and had not wanted to attack it. "I was so sickened that I couldn't even question her much," Ayn was to say about the incident. "I felt I should throw her out, but even that didn't matter. Today, I suspect that she did like certain aspects of The Fountainhead — but really hated it because of its romanticism and anti-religion."

Despite her anger, Ayn kept her promise to continue introducing Pat to conservatives. Her next guest was William Mullendore. She had explained to Pat that he was "my best friend in California politically, that I really liked him, and that she was to treat him accordingly." When Mullendore arrived, he began to tell Pat his reasons for agreeing that an intellectual magazine such as The Freeman would be important. "He was using all the arguments Pat had been using with other people," Ayn recalled. "I thought she'd be delighted. But she began to argue a bit, slightly switching her viewpoint. Then Janet and Adrian came in. Adrian suggested that the organizers of the magazine should make up a dummy, with one or two articles, perhaps written by Pat if she wanted, to show potential backers what the magazine would be. It was a perfectly good idea.

"Pat exploded. She began yelling that none of them appreciated her, didn't she work hard enough, why did she have to work more, the backers should take her word. She made it a totally personal issue. Then she whirled on Mullendore and said 'It's all the fault of businessmen, because they don't care about free enterprise and they do nothing about it — none of them!' Mullendore waited for her tirade to end, then got up, and with his usual dignity he said goodnight. I apologized to him at the door; he said he understood, he had heard of her reputation. But the whole thing was horrible.

"When Janet and Adrian left, I told Pat I wanted to know what on earth! I told her this was a moral issue, that her actions had been immoral, and I told her why. She answered that she hadn't been insulting, and she had nothing more to say. I kept pressing. Finally she said, 'If that's the way you feel, I'll leave tomorrow.' I said, 'Fine. Until you agree to discuss this, we can have no other discussion."'

The end had been coming, for Ayn, before this disastrous visit. The tension between the two women had been growing, predominantly because of their philosophical disagreements on issues of reason and faith. "Pat once said," Ayn would recall, "that her real self is nothing that can be materially perceived, it's not her actions or words or body or thoughts or books. I took that verbatim for James Taggart [one of the arch-villains of Atlas Shrugged]. And she was very helpful, in reverse, one time when she was arguing that logic can deal only with measurement, and therefore it can apply only to material, not spiritual, reality. I knew she was wrong, but I went home to think about it. That's when I arrived at my definition of logic as 'the art of noncontradictory identification.'" Ayn's definition of logic, with its application both to matter and to spirit, was to form a continuing theme in Atlas Shrugged and to serve as the base of her later writings on epistemology. But Ayn had long since stopped being the eager student to her older friend — their roles had been reversing themselves as Ayn had grown in intellectual power and breadth of thought; it was a reversal that Pat apparently could not accept.

Pat left the next day. At the airport, she told Ayn sadly that she would always wish her success and luck. Ayn replied, "I hope you'll be happier than you are." There was nothing more to say. The friendship was at an end. Ayn returned home feeling a mixture of depression, outrage, and loss.

For many years after their break, Ayn would occasionally mention Isabel Paterson in an offhand and disapproving manner, never indicating that the association had once been important to her; her conversation focused almost exclusively on the intellectual differences between them that had led to their rift. Her friends could not and did not suspect — and were startled to discover — that the two women had once been warmly friendly.

Ayn's manner of discussing Pat was illustrative of a growing trend in her psychology — a trend that consisted of "rewriting" the history of a relationship if that relationship ended, of retroactively demoting a former friend in stature and importance so that her past view would appear to conform to her present view. With Pat, and with other former friends, she would cease to see as significant, even as worthy of mention, aspects of their mind and character that once had aroused her enthusiastic approval; what she had once described as values were given a new and malevolent interpretation. Perhaps it was not done consciously; it appeared, rather, as though her new view of the person became so total an absolute, her damnation so thoroughgoing, that no former interpretation could be allowed reality; as though the vividness and conviction of her present estimate had to wipe out even the shameful memory that she once had had a different perspective. If she now viewed Isabel Paterson, or another former friend, as an individual she could not deeply care for — then she had never deeply cared. If she saw her as immoral and spiritually corrupt — then that had always, at bottom, been her estimate.

The source of this psychological mechanism is not difficult to find. Ayn — who proudly said: "I can explain the reason of any emotion I feel" — clearly was growing more alienated from her own emotions with each year that passed. Her thoughts, like her perceptive eyes, looked only and always outward. If she felt anger, she did not introspect to find the cause: the cause, self-evidently, was the "evil" of the person who had angered her; if she felt love, the cause was the heroic qualities in the person she loved; if she felt alienated from the world, the cause was the failures and irrationalities of the inhabitants of that world. More and more, as time passed, the actual nature of her emotions was retreating into some hidden, never-to-be-examined part of her, to work unseen and unacknowledged.

Nevertheless, Ayn's spirits were at a low ebb when Pat boarded the plane for New York. But then, as if timed to lift her depression, she received exciting news: the movie of The Fountainhead was shortly to go into production, and Ayn was to write the final script.

She did not know that she was about to wage a war to protect the integrity of her work, a war from which she would emerge battered, bleeding, and without illusions. She did not know that on the sets and in the boardrooms and offices of a movie studio, she was about to fight the most courageous battle of her life — that she would become once more the young woman on the stage of the Gloria Swanson Theater, in the thick of an intellectual battle which charged her with limitless energy and resolve, utilizing the whole of her charismatic power to convince.

In the beginning, she was primarily focused on her pleasure and relief that she had been assigned to do the final script. And then an event occurred that thrilled her. From the time she had begun writing The Fountainhead, when she had first considered the possibility that it might one day be made into a movie, Gary Cooper was the one actor she wanted for the role of Howard Roark. His physical appearance strongly suggested Roark to her; she saw him as the archetype of the American hero. "He looks like Frank," she often said. She had discussed her reasons for wanting him with everyone involved in the movie, but she could only suggest and advise, she had no power of decision. She was ecstatic when Gary Cooper was signed for the role.

Ayn was told that Cooper had read her preliminary script, and although he was not under contract to Warner Brothers, he had signed a two-picture-a-year deal with them on the condition that he be given the part of Howard Roark. A slightly different version of his desire to do the picture is presented by Larry Swindell in his book Trouble in Paradise. "...in Brentwood, Rocky Cooper [Gary Cooper's wife] was reading The Fountainhead and being enthralled by it. She was a reader, Gary wasn't, and she kept him informed of what was going on in the world of books although she made it a point never to advise him on matters of his career... she broke her rule, and advised him to go after The Fountainhead."

The first sign of trouble to come occurred when King Vidor, famous for such films as The Big Parade, The Crowd, and The Champ, was chosen to direct the movie. Ayn recognized the importance of having a director with a distinguished reputation, but she felt that he was "the worst man they could find for The Fountainhead. He was a naturalist, so he had no mind or imagination for the book; he seemed anxious to do right by it, but he was afraid of it." 40

Ayn began working on the final script with Vidor. "He wanted a lot of things I didn't like artistically," she would later say, "but I was willing to give in on some of those. I kept my thunder for the intellectual issues. My real power — through all the arguing and fighting — was that nobody in the studio knew what to make of the book. They knew it was different than other books, but they didn't understand what would or would not ruin it, what would antagonize my readers. That was my protection and my weapon."

Warner Brothers continued with the casting as the scriptwriting progressed. "I asked Vidor about Garbo, whom he knew," Ayn recalled. "He thought she would be wonderful as Dominique, but he said the studios were afraid of her: she had so often agreed to do a picture, then changed her mind at the last minute; but he said he'd try to arouse her interest. Later, he told me he had sent her the script, and that she had called him enthusiastically and wanted to do it — but the next day, she changed her mind; she said she couldn't play love scenes with Cooper... The story might or might not be true. I suspect that Vidor was dishonest, but it seemed true."

Apparently, Vidor's story to Ayn was true only in part. In Trouble in Paradise Swindell wrote: "Vidor, an old friend, sent the script to Garbo. She came to his house to return it in person. 'Do you really think I should come back with this part?' she asked. Vidor knew there wasn't a chance she would do it, and he tended to feel it wasn't right for her, no matter how commercial her return to the screen would be. 'As a friend, I don't think you should,' he told her."

It seemed as if Warner Brothers were considering every major actress in Hollywood for the role of Dominique — Bette Davis, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, and Gene Tierney. Ayn was so violently opposed to Bette Davis, who she thought was too old for the part and impossibly difficult to work with, that she threatened to walk out and to remove her name from the screen play if Davis were chosen. Then Warner Brothers decided to test the beautiful young actress Patricia Neal, who had received rave reviews for her Broadway performance in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest and whom they were grooming for stardom. "Her test was horrible," Ayn remembered. "Her appearance was really good, but she had a terrible voice and she couldn't read lines. Cooper happened to come to the set during the test. He turned to me and said 'What's that?' When I explained, he said he would stop this."

Cooper did not "stop this." Instead, during the course of the filming, he fell in love with his leading lady, and she with him, in one of Hollywood's most famous romances. "Patricia Neal worked very hard on her role," Ayn later said, "and she did improve." It was said in the studio that the improvement in her performance, especially in the love scenes, came from the inspiration of her love affair with Cooper. "I remember the day we drove up to Fresno to do our location shooting for The Fountainhead" King Vidor reminisced to Stuart Kaminsky. "We met Patricia Neal there that night. It was the first time they had met. They went for each other right away. After dinner we never saw the two of them again except when we were shooting."

Both Henry Blanke and Ayn wanted Clifton Webb to play Toohey, but the studio refused; he had been hugely successful in several comedies, and Warner Brothers felt that his public would not want to see him as a villain. It was Robert Douglas who finally was selected. "He was too forceful for Toohey," Ayn felt, "and too strong for the rest of the cast. He should have been slippery and snide, not so openly villainous. But he delivered his lines with enormous intelligence."

In later years, Ayn laughed delightedly when she described a discussion she had had with Melvyn Douglas's agent, who wanted Douglas to be signed for the role of Gail Wynand. "I was totally against it," she said. "He would have been an awful type for Wynand. I told his agent I objected — and he said I didn't want him because of his political reputation. 'Has he a political reputation?' I asked innocently. 'I didn't know that. No, I object to him because he has a moustache.'" Ayn had an oddly intense dislike of facial hair. "A man wears a moustache or a beard," she would say, "because he wants to hide behind it; there's something he wants to conceal, not just physical defect, but a spiritual defect; I would never trust such a man." 41

Ayn was relieved when Raymond Massey, whom she considered a fine actor, was cast as Wynand. But when the shooting started, she began to feel that "Massey was overacting and he didn't fully understand the requirements of the roll." Kent Smith was cast for the role of Peter Keating; although Ayn was not familiar with his work, she felt that, as physical type, he was right for the part.

Henry Blanke was determined to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to do the architectural drawings that would illustrate Roark's work on the screen. Ayn agreed enthusiastically; only an architect of Wright's caliber would be convincing as designer for Roark, and would immeasurably help to publicize the picture. She had written, as visual instructions at the beginning of her screenplay, "Among present day architects, it is the style of Frank Lloyd Wright — and only of Frank Lloyd Wright — that must be taken as a model for Roark's buildings. Wright holds a unique position with the general public — even the people who cling to traditional architecture and hate modernism of the concrete-and-steel-pipe school. This is extremely important to us, since we must make the audience admire Roark's buildings." But Wright demanded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as a fee, and the right to approve or reject the sets and the script. Unwilling to meet his terms — the right to the final say on sets and script would have made Wright, in effect, the film's director — Warner Brothers looked for another designer. "They gave Roark's buildings to a studio set designer [art director Edward Carrere], who had been trained as an architect but had never built anything," Ayn would recall with a shudder. "He and Vidor got pictures of horrible modernistic buildings and copied them. Architects criticized them enormously, with justice; they were embarrassingly bad." The Hollywood Citizen reported that Wright commented: "Warner's sent an art director to ask me to design the sets. I said I would, for my regular fee of ten percent. He asked if I meant ten percent of the $400,000 budget for the sets. I said no, ten percent of the cost of the movie... That amounted to a refusal. I think the art director was glad... He wanted to design the sets himself." 42

As the shooting progressed, Ayn became still more convinced that Vidor was not the director for The Fountainhead. She argued with him constantly, aware that he saw her as a meddler, but she cared only about the purity of the ideology for which she had fought all her life. There seems little doubt that she was often overprotective of her ideas; she was lonely and frightened in a hostile environment, an environment that intellectually was part of the mainstream of American thought, the very mainstream that her script opposed. Blanke stood by her sympathetically, for which she was grateful, but intellectually she had to fight alone. It appears that Vidor was, at worst, intimidated, or, at best, captivated by the blazing firebrand that was Ayn Rand and by the forceful logic of her arguments; he made concessions to her that were astonishing in Hollywood. "When he was ready to film the scene in which Dominique goes to Roark's apartment after she learns who he is," Ayn reported, "he told me he wasn't sure he could explain Dominique's psychology to Patricia Neal, and would I write it out for him. I did, and I also wrote out Roark's psychology for the scene. I think it's the best scene in the picture."

And when Roark's climactic courtroom speech was being shot, Vidor asked Ayn to work with Cooper. Coopers attitude, too, was astonishing for an actor of his position and stature; he agreed, in effect, to be directed privately by Ayn. "I spent an entire day coaching him," Ayn would recall. "He was very good about it. I'd always liked him as a screen personality, and I liked him as a man. But I couldn't do much with him, he didn't quite get it."

Ayn would never forget what was for her, emotionally, the worst moment of the shooting. She came to the set to watch the courtroom scene — and discovered that Vidor was shooting a cut version. Their unwritten agreement had been — after endless battles — that once the script was approved — and it had been approved — no changes were to be made on the set. "I rushed to Blanke's office, screaming at the top of my voice; I said I'd not only take my name off the movie, I would also see to it that my audience didn't come to it, I'd take ads denouncing it. Blanke went to see Jack Warner, and came back with an unprecedented ruling: no changes are to be made in the script."

Nevertheless, "the whole thing was an enormously miserable experience. I was anxious through it all; I never knew who or what would ruin it. I decided then that I'd never again sell a novel without getting script control, unless it were absolutely financially necessary."

Throughout the months of conferences and scriptwriting and casting and filming, Frank had to leave the ranch daily to drive Ayn to and from the studio. The ranch began to fall into disrepair. Once more, Frank's life revolved around Ayn; the peace he had found was replaced by exhausting evenings of listening to Ayn planning her next day's battle, marshaling the arguments she would need — sometimes pounding the arm of her chair in frustration, her pain and fear transformed, as always, into anger. He did not argue with her — as he never argued with her — but this period, some of their friends recognized, marked the beginning of something in Frank that was to grow and intensify as time passed: an impatience with Ayn, totally at variance with his usual personality, split-second bursts of furious, seemingly motiveless anger at her that were gone almost before they could be noticed. He did not shout at her because his gentle spirit cringed at her anger, he did not shout at her because her needs were taking from him the few moments of contentment he had found — he shouted at her because she was late in dressing for an appointment, or had forgotten her keys, or wore stockings with runs in them, or nagged him to wear a warm sweater on a balmy day. He had repressed too much of his emotional life over too many years: it could not forever remain underground. Now his inevitable resentment of Ayn — perhaps his resentment of his own failed life — burst out at unpredictable times and for unpredictable reasons. Ayn was bewildered by it. Her fantasy view of herself, of Frank, and of their relationship, did not permit her to understand the motivation she might have understood in someone else. Through the rest of their life together, as his outbursts of anger grew more frequent and more intense, it remained unintelligible to her.

Nor did she have time to think about it. From all sides, pressures to make ideological changes in her script began descending on her. Her response was to dig in her heels, straighten her spine, and defy the whole of the Hollywood establishment. Her battle was not unlike the battle she had waged with Al Woods for Night of January 16th — a constant struggle to preserve her script, to salvage the integrity of her work. It was a battle not unlike Howard Roark's battle to preserve Cortlandt Homes, when everyone seemed to have a say, everyone had a vote, everyone had the right to mutilate the work Roark's life had gone into creating. She was under constant pressure to disguise, dilute, or tone down the philosophical theme of her novel, to turn her ideas into meaningless generalities that would shock no one, to destroy the forceful clarity and originality of her work by means of ideological bromides. In the most timid of all mediums, in an industry whose guiding principle was a quest to amuse the lowest common denominator, an industry convinced that the public was not interested in ideas and was specifically not ready for Ayn's ideas, she was fighting to present on the screen a moral code that defied the moral tradition of two and a half thousand years.

A major source of pressure was the Johnson Office, Hollywood's self-censoring agency. Oddly, they did not object to the "rape scene" — but to Roark's courtroom speech. "Two men came to see me," Ayn would recall, "one of whom was a Catholic scholar. He said they objected to the speech because it was 'materialistic.' I explained and explained — and he kept retreating, he knew he was on shaky ground because the Johnson Office was not supposed to discuss the philosophical content of a movie. Finally, I said 'Are you censoring me on the grounds of what does and does not accord with Catholic doctrine?' He backed up immediately — and I had no more trouble. That's how one should treat any underground pressure that doesn't dare come out into the open: make it open, name what they are implying."

Another source of pressure was the studio's business manager, who "wanted me to soften certain points about altruism, about man not being a sacrificial animal. 'So you think man is a sacrificial animal?' I asked. I argued in very clear and simple terms, and he, too, backed up."

Ayn's final ideological battle was with Gary Cooper's attorney. "He said that Cooper's audience was not intellectual, and if they heard him say such selfish things, they'd hold it against him, it might damage his reputation and his career. I bent over so far backward in defense of selfishness that I must have sounded like a monster — on the ground 'If this be treason, make the most of it.' He finally gave up."

With quietly intense pride, Ayn was to say, "My script was shot exactly as I wrote it." In 1926, she had come to Hollywood to conquer it. Now, twenty-one years later, she had conquered it. It was a victory unheard of in Hollywood. But in the end it was a hollow victory. When the shooting was completed, Ayn saw the first rough cut. "I knew it was no good," she said wearily. "And I never changed my mind. The people involved were not worthy of the assignment. I didn't even like the script; they wanted the movie to be under two hours, so the script was too short, it wasn't right. I was through with Hollywood. There's nothing there for me." Ayn turned her back on Hollywood forever, on the shining possibilities she had seen as a young girl in Russia, gazing, rapt and enchanted, at American movies glowing on the screen. She never wrote for films again.

Two previews of the movie were scheduled, one in Beverly Hills, the other in Hollywood Park, a working-class district. Henry Blanke hoped the studio would give the first preview in Beverly Hills. Ayn told him she wanted it to be in Hollywood Park, because that was where her real audience would be. It was in Hollywood Park. "I never saw so responsive an audience," she recalled. "They understood it all, and they applauded Roark's speech. After the previews, the top brass were gloating and delighted, they were sure it would be a big hit, and we had an enormous celebration. The Beverly Hills audience was not quite as responsive or perceptive, although they liked it. That's why I like the common man."

After the preview of the movie, in a strikingly modest gesture, Gary Cooper told Blanke, Jack Warner, and Ayn that only now did he really understand Roark's courtroom speech and how he should have done it. He felt that his performance had not been forceful enough. Silently, admiring the integrity of his gesture, Ayn agreed with him; she thought his performance was wooden, that he was unconvincing as an architect of genius, that "there were places where he was almost coy, and he was often embarrassing when he was supposed to show emotion."

The movie premiered at Warners Theater in Hollywood in July of 1949. Ayn was able to forget her disappointment in the final product long enough to enjoy the extravagant glamour surrounding the premiere — stars in festive evening clothes, lines of eager theatergoers cheering their favorite stars, interviewers thrusting microphones at anyone of importance who would say a few words, brilliant searchlights sweeping in giant arcs across the night sky. "Frank and I talked about how we'd risen from the bottom of the ladder to this," she would recall with a smile. Her smile faded as she added, "And I told the interviewers how proud I was that my script had not been altered or cut."

Ayn and Frank entered the theater and took their seats. The movie began. Ayn watched uncomfortably, thinking that at least her script and her lines had been preserved. The final courtroom scene began — and suddenly, like a knife cutting through her body, she saw that Roark's most important line, the line that named the theme of the book and the total of its meaning — the line "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others" had been cut.

All the work and struggle of months, all the arguing and persuading, all the dealings with irrationality and mediocrity — she felt in that moment — had been for nothing. She had lost her battle. 44

Within a few days, she was able to remind herself that she had not lost, that the rest of her script and her ideas were untouched, that the novel's theme and meaning had been preserved. But whatever personal value there had been for her in the movie was destroyed. Its sole remaining importance for her was that it did achieve her primary purpose: it brought large numbers of new readers, fascinated by the movie and by its stunning new ideas, to The Fountainhead. An unprecedented six years after publication, it put the book back on the bestseller lists. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of viewers did not agree with Ayn's negative judgment on the movie; it continues to bring the novel an ever wider readership to this day.

Warner Brothers' publicity campaign for the movie, though enthusiastic and extensive, virtually ignored its ideological content. The advertisements show Patricia Neal struggling to free herself from Cooper's embrace or huddled on the floor as Cooper gazes down at her with a look both sexual and menacing; the captions read: "No man takes what's mine!" The reviews were mixed; in many of the smaller newspapers, they were respectful and admiring; the major New York reviewers were appalled and angry. Several said, echoing the Vancouver Sun: "The Fountainhead is the story of an architect who coldly blows up a badly needed housing project rather than permit the slightest alteration in his designs." Another announced: "The novel's religious aspects have been removed from the screen version." Ayn, who never defended herself against printed attacks, knowing that to do so would give added publicity to the attacks, did — despite her anger at the studio — respond to Bosley Crowther's attack on Warner Brothers in the New York Times. She wrote a statement that was printed in the Letters column: "Mr. Crowther missed the fact that Warner Brothers have given a great demonstration of courage and consistency: they have produced the most faithful adaptation of a novel ever to appear on the screen."

Ten years after the movie was released, when it was making its still-frequent appearances in neighborhood theaters and on television, Ayn saw Patricia Neal at a party in New York. "Have you seen The Fountainhead on television?" Ayn asked. "It's a strange thing," Neal replied. "All my fans seem to have seen it on television — and they like it now better than they liked it originally." "That's because it's better on a small screen than a large one," Ayn said. "The intimacy of television is much better suited to the presentation of ideas. And because the ideas are working; what seemed outrageous in 1949, seems less so now. The book — and reality — are working."

The culture has changed since the forties, in significant part as a result of the works of Ayn Rand. Her ideas have spread, they have been heard, they have made a difference. The book — and reality — are working.

39 Ayn was correct in believing that Pat had mixed feelings about her work. Years later, when William Buckley's conservative National Review published the most violently antagonistic of any review of Atlas Shrugged, Pat denounced Buckley for "his treatment of a woman of Ayn's genius and courage and honor" — and broke with him. She was, her friend Muriel Hall said, "thrilled with Ayn's ability to take an intellectual concept and translate it into fiction; 'I couldn't do that,' she said." But she disagreed with much of Ayn's philosophy — she believed that "Ayn was limiting her talents and taking herself out of the mainstream by that Objectivism philosophy" — and she disliked Ayn's literary style.

40 Critics do not agree that Vidor was a naturalist. In Coop, a biography of Gary Cooper, Stuart Kaminsky wrote: "The Vidor film [of The Fountainhead] is one of the most noteworthy of American films. It is one of the most antinaturalist films imaginable... There is almost no attempt in the film to make the dialogue or scenes conform to the prevailing American goal of 'realism.' ... Symbolism is overt with no apologies... The very decision to ignore so-called realism makes the film a strange and courageous effort, rather like a building by Howard Roark.

41 Many years later, a friend of mine who was a screenwriter arranged a meeting with Ayn to discuss his proposed screenplay of Atlas Shrugged. Before their meeting, I warned him — embarrassed but knowing it was necessary — that if he didn't shave his beard, he had no chance of getting the assignment.

42 The Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal reported that an indignant Frank Lloyd Wright said, after the movie was released: "Any move I make against such grossly abusive caricatures of my work by this film crew would only serve their purpose."

43 In 1950, Variety reported: "Politically intriguing is the word from London that 'The Fountainhead', which preaches rugged individualism, is mopping up in the United Kingdom's industrial areas, where the government is nationalizing the steel industry."

44 When Ayn learned from Henry Blanke that the cut had been made at the order of the front office, it was the end of her relationship with Warner Brothers. Furious, she called Alan Collins to say that when Atlas Shrugged was completed, it was never to be submitted to Warner Brothers.

PART IV

ATLAS SHRUGGED

Chapter Nineteen

Ever since leaving New York to do the preliminary movie script for The Fountainhead, Ayn had spent every spare moment on the new novel that had come to absorb her wholly. She had returned to it the instant the script was completed, she had worked on it between assignments for Hal Wallis, she had devoted many evenings to it despite the turmoil of the shooting of the movie; gradually, she had begun to see fewer people, begrudging the time spent on social activities. Now, with the release of the movie, she was due to return to Wallis for another six months. Longing only to work in peace on her novel, she asked him to release her from her contract. Hollywood had been hit by a depression, fewer movies were being made, and to her great relief Wallis agreed to her request. She had worked for him three years of the projected five; her insistence on canceling the contract cost her more than seventy thousand dollars.

"A plot," Ayn would write, "is a purposeful progression of events. A plot-structure is a series of integrated, logically connected events, moved by a central purpose, leading to the resolution of a climax." Her novels have been criticized as romanticized and unrealistic; it has been said that the progression of a human life consists of a random series of disconnected, unchosen events, untied by any common theme or purpose, and leading, in the end, to the grave.

But the life of Ayn Rand — like her art — was a plot.

Her professional life was increasingly ravaged by conflicts, her emotional life was buried ever deeper in the underground of her spirit, her life as a woman was painfully unfulfilled — but she held fast to whatever was golden in her soul, carrying it untouched and unaltered through the years. Until, in the purposeful progression of her days, that store of gold led her to the moment that united and integrated all the separate threads of all the separate purposes of her life.

That moment was the first inception of the idea for Atlas Shrugged.

It was on an evening five years earlier, shortly after the publication of The Fountainhead. The book was selling slowly and no one could predict its future spectacular success. During a telephone conversation with Isabel Paterson, Ayn was discussing her crushing disappointment with the sales of the novel. "People can't accept your moral philosophy in fiction form," Pat said. "You should write it as a nonfiction treatise." "No," Ayn replied emphatically. "I've presented my case in The Fountainhead. It’s clear to any rational mind. If they don't respond, why should I wish to enlighten or help them further? I'm not an altruist." Pat continued to press her, arguing that if she wished her ideas to be known, she had a duty to write nonfiction; people needed it. "Oh, they do?" answered Ayn. "What if I went on strike? What if all the creative minds of the world went on strike?" She added, in passing, "That would make a good novel" — and they went on to discuss other matters. When she hung up the telephone, Frank, who had been in the room, remarked: "It would make a good novel."

Ayn turned to stare at him, her eyes widening — then narrowing as her mind retraced the words she had spoken to Pat, then flew back in time to her childhood story of the beautiful woman who withdrew the men of intelligence from a collectivist Europe. She talked excitedly all night, her mind racing with possibilities that were shaping themselves into a form more real to her than anything in the world around her: the form of a novel. By morning, she had decided that "the mind on strike" was to be the theme of her next novel. Its title was to be Atlas Shrugged.

From that night in 1943 through the success of The Fountainhead, through the emotionally barren periods of writing screenplays for Hal Wallis, through the frustration of the Hollywood hearings, through the fierce battle to preserve her movie script of The Fountainhead, through the accelerating decay of a marriage without intimacy or reality — Atlas Shrugged was the center of her life and thoughts, alive within her as her battle cry, her armor and her holy grail, as the invincible world in which her real life was lived.

As an early step in the project that was to absorb and obsess her for fourteen years, Ayn began to study the problems and the history of heavy industry, of railroads, steel, oil, copper. "I had to do less specific research than for The Fountainhead," she would recall, "because I did not have to know any profession as thoroughly as I'd had to know architecture." She collected a small library of books and began reading them in the evenings. As she projected particular sequences in the novel which would demand highly specialized knowledge, she did more detailed research: in order to describe the breakout of a blast furnace at a steel mill, she struggled through the complex instructions contained in a technical manual for furnace foremen. She began a series of interviews of railroad and steel executives, and she and Frank drove between both coasts to visit steel plants and railroad yards.

Again Frank was pulled away from his beloved ranch. But he seemed to enjoy their trips as much as Ayn did, although the source of his pleasure was different from hers. Ayn was willing to travel only when she had a specific, preferably professional, purpose; Frank enjoyed, as an end in itself, the sight of mountains and streams and cities and hidden towns he had not seen before. They now had the money for pleasure travel had they wished it; Frank told a friend that he longed to see Europe. "But Ayn wouldn't go there," he said wistfully. It seemed not to be a possibility, as they understood their lives together, that Frank might travel alone.

Ayn had chosen railroads as the main background for her novel because they deal with all the other major industries, thus functioning as the blood system of the economy. On one of their trips to New York, she interviewed the vice president in charge of operations of the New York Central Railroad, a dignified, white-haired gentleman; she wondered what his reaction would be if he had known he was to become Dagny Taggart, a beautiful young woman of thirty-four.

She was planning a climactic scene in which Dagny and Rearden would ride in the engine of the train on the first run of the John Galt Line. She wanted to know firsthand what such an experience would be — and she was able to obtain the railroad's permission to ride in the engine of the Twentieth Century Limited. She would later say that, "It was one of the few existential experiences in my life that I really enjoyed every moment of." In a letter written to Isabel Paterson before their break, she described her adventure: "The most thrilling moment was when the engine started moving, and the ride through the underground tunnel out of Grand Central. Everything I thought of as heroic about man's technological achievements, was there concretely for me to feel for the first time in my life... I was not afraid at all. It was the feeling of being in front and of knowing where I was going, instead of being dependent on some unknown power... All I felt was a wonderful sense of excitement and complete security... At Harmon they changed the engine, and I got into my first Diesel... the engine rides as if it were floating. It actually seems to glide; you don't feel the wheels under you at all... The next morning, I had to get up at six o'clock, and got into the engine again at Elkhart, Indiana. During the night they had their first snowstorm. It was still dark when we started riding through the snow...

They put me into the engineer's seat and let me drive the engine myself... I have now driven the Twentieth Century Limited. They let me start the engine from a small station, and of course, there were three men standing behind me watching, but still nobody touched a lever except me, and I started the train and accelerated it to eighty miles per hour... the signal lights seemed to be coming along every few seconds... An old railroad man was riding on the cowcatcher of a switch engine on a siding; when he looked up, as our train came along with me in the engineers seat, the look on his face was something I have never seen on any human face before. It was like an exaggerated close-up in a movie farce. There was a man who was staring, stunned and stupefied... I am completely ruined now as a train passenger. I was bored all the way out of Chicago, riding in a compartment. That's much too tame. I would love to travel across the whole continent in the engine." The scene which was to result from this ride is one of the most movingly beautiful in any of Ayn's writing.

That same summer, returning to Los Angeles, she and Frank drove along the exact run of the John Galt Line: diagonally across Colorado from Cheyenne, Wyoming through Denver, then on southwest. For the location of Atlas Shrugged's Atlantis, the hidden valley where the men who have gone on strike spend a month together each summer — they call it "Galt's Gulch" — Ayn had studied a Union Pacific Railroad map until she found an isolated valley high in the most uninhabited section of the Rockies. She and Frank drove to the location of the valley in Colorado — and found, to their astonishment, that there was a beautiful little town there, the town of Ourey. "It was an old mining settlement," she would recall, "circled by mountains; at the time, it had just one street of very old houses and a tiny motel. It was cut off from everything, very difficult of access in the winter. I'll never forget how beautiful it was. Someday, I'd like to go back there."

Ayn's work on the plot of Atlas Shrugged was not beset with the years of difficulties she had encountered with The Fountainhead. Her talents as a plot-writer, always the core of her approach to fiction, had been honed during her struggles with We the Living and The Fountainhead. Within five months after she began outlining Atlas, the essential plot outline was completed. "I would walk around the garden and on the road near the alfalfa field" she was to say, "because there were no interruptions and no sounds of cars; that's where most of the plotting was done. At the end of five months, I knew the key events and developments, and in what order they would occur. Some of my notes are very generalized; I'd know what was to happen, but I didn't know how it would happen until I came to the chapter in the writing. Other events were fully worked out in the outline. I had first thought that the strike would have to begin three generations before the strike's present leader. But I soon grasped that a certain amount of foreshortening was permissible, and by that means I could show it occurring in one generation. My main worry was how I would show the economic disintegration of the country throughout the novel, concretely and plausibly, while enormously foreshortening it. A lot of the specifics in my mind bad to be kept fluid, so that I could use whatever of them could be tied to all the developments and advance all the steps of the disintegration."

As she first conceived of the novel, Ayn had thought that her theme, "the mind on strike," would not require the presentation of new philosophical ideas. It would demonstrate the application of the theme of The Fountainhead, individualism, to the political-economic arena. The action, with a minimum of comment, would carry the philosophical message, it would demonstrate that capitalism rests on the mind and the freedom of the mind. It was when she began to concretize more specifically what her theme required, to outline the means by which she would show the role and importance of the mind in human society, that she began to have the first glimmering of the philosophical dimensions of what she had undertaken. One day, while she was working on the final movie script for The Fountainhead, a young Associated Press reporter came to the studio to interview her. He asked her about the new novel she was planning. She told him, "it will combine metaphysics, morality, economics, politics, and sex — and it will show the tie between metaphysics and economics." Ayn beamed like a young girl when she later told the story, adding, "I'll never forget his look. He said helplessly. 'I can't see how you'll manage it... but I guess you know what you're doing.' And he released the story exactly as I'd stated it."

In order to achieve full conceptual clarity before beginning to write the novel, Ayn made extensive notes on the ideas that were explicitly or implicitly to be involved. In these early notes, one sees the scope of the novel begin to grow and broaden.

"My most important job," she wrote, "is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth."

While projecting what would happen if the men of the mind went on strike, while defining how and why civilization would collapse, she was led to a crucial question. If it is the men of the mind who carry the world on their shoulders and make civilization possible — why have they never recognized their own power? Why have they never challenged their torturers and expropriators? When she grasped the answer, she knew it was to be one of the most important moral concepts in the novel: the concept of "the sanction of the victim." She saw that it is the victims, the men of virtue and ability, who make the triumph of evil possible by their willingness to let their virtues be used against them: their willingness to bear injustice, to sacrifice their own interests, to concede moral validity to the claims of their own destroyers.

Her identification of the disastrous consequences of the soul-body dichotomy was another contributing element to the growth of the novel's scale; it would become a central philosophical issue. In her notes, she described the way in which this dichotomy has served as sanction and excuse for the persecution of industrialists and for the scorn directed against those who create the physical means of man's survival. She wrote: "Show that the real sources, key spots, spark plugs of material production (the inventors and industrialists) are creators in the same way, in the same sense, with the same heroic virtues, of the same high spiritual order, as the men usually thought of as creators — the artists. Show that any original rational idea, in any sphere of man's activity, is an act of creation and creativeness. Vindicate the industrialist — the author of material production."

She added, "It would be interesting to show how the same principle operates in relation to sex." She believed that just as men do not understand that the source of the production of wealth is man's mind, so they do not understand that the source of a man's sexual desires and choices is his philosophical values: both production and sex are scorned for the same reason, as mindless, animalistic activities that have no relation to man's spirit. The meaning of the soul-body dichotomy as applied to sex became a crucial part of the story. The manner in which it is tied, through the character and life of Hank Rearden, to the same dichotomy in the realm of economics and politics, constitutes one of the most brilliant feats of integration in Atlas Shrugged.

Excerpts from her notes provide an interesting illustration of the process by which she proceeded from wide abstractions to the concrete events of a specific story. "The collectivists and the champions of the 'common man,'" she wrote, "have screamed for so long about strikes, about the dependence of the industrialist upon his workers, about the workers supporting him, creating his wealth, making his livelihood possible, and what would happen to him if they walked out. Very well. I will now show who depends on whom, who supports whom, who creates what, who makes whose livelihood possible, and what happens to whom when who walks out."

One of her notes states: "Reverse the process of expansion that goes on in a society of producers: Henry Ford's automobile opened the way for [the expansion of many] industries: oil, roads, glass, rubber, plastics, etc. Now, in a society of parasites, the opposite takes place: a shrinking of industries and productive activities. A James Taggart at the head of a big concern would have exactly the opposite effect from that of a Henry Ford."

In another note, she wrote: "Since the essence of the creator's power is the ability of independent rational judgment, and since this is precisely what the parasite is incapable of — the key to every disaster in the story, to the whole disintegration of the world is, in each case (big or small), a situation where independent rational judgment is needed and cannot be produced (cannot — in the case of the parasites involved; will not — in the case of the creators)."

In devising the plot structure, Ayn had had to call upon her full power of dramatic integration. Each key event had to carry and illustrate the philosophical theme, and — simultaneously — contribute to the economic disintegration of the country, advance the personal relationships among the characters, and heighten the element of mystery and suspense created by the disappearance of one man of ability after another.

The mystery element was a major one because, as Nathaniel Branden later wrote in Who Is Ayn Rand? "Atlas Shrugged is a mystery story, 'not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder — and rebirth — of man's spirit.' The reader is presented with a series of events that, in the beginning, appear incomprehensible: the world seems to be moving toward destruction, in a manner no one can identify and for reasons no one can understand. A brilliant industrialist — Francisco d'Anconia — appears suddenly to have abandoned all purpose and to have become a worthless playboy. A great composer — Richard Halley — renounces his career, after years of struggle, on the night of his triumph. Businessmen who have been single-tracked in their devotion to their work — such as Midas Mulligan, Ellis Wyatt, and Ken Danagger — retire without explanation, and disappear. A pirate — Ragnar Danneskjold — is loose on the high seas, attacking and robbing government relief ships. The world's most distinguished philosopher — Hugh Akston — leaves his university position and chooses to work as a cook in a diner. The abandoned remnant of a new type of motor that could have revolutionized industry, is found on a scrap heap in the ruins of a factory. And in the growing darkness of a crumbling civilization, in moments of hopelessness, bewilderment and despair, people are crying: 'Who is John Galt?' — without knowing exactly what the question means or where it came from or why they cry it...

"Atlas Shrugged... is an action story on a grand scale, but it is a consciously philosophical action story, just as its heroes are consciously philosophical men of action... It moves effortlessly and ingeniously from economics to epistemology to morality to metaphysics to psychology to the theory of sex, on the one hand — and, on the other, it has a playboy crusader who blows up a multi-billion-dollar industry, a philosopher-turned-pirate who attacks government relief ships, and a climax that involves the rescue of the hero from a torture chamber. Notwithstanding the austere solemnity of its abstract theme, her novel — as a work of art — projects the laughing, extravagantly imaginative virtuosity of a mind who has never heard that 'one is not supposed' to combine such elements as these in a single book."

As Ayn worked on the progression of the story, she began to devise the kind of characters who would represent the theme and enact that kind of story. "It took quite a long time for me to decide who would be the characters," she would explain, "except for Galt and Dagny."

Just as the person of John Galt would dominate all the events of Atlas Shrugged, so his spirit and image dominated the conception and writing of the novel. He is the man who conceived the strike, who initiated it, who sought out the men of the mind who would join it, and who brought it to its final climax and triumph. He is the man who said he would stop the motor of the world and did. He is the man who gave his strikers their banner, the solemn oath that bound them together, and their rallying cry, in the form of the statement: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"Galt's character was almost simultaneous with the idea of the strike," Ayn was to say. "It feels as if... as if his character was always there."

The character of John Galt was always there; Galt was to be her full and final statement of "the ideal man," the statement toward which the whole of her life had been moving her. He was to be the apotheosis of the human potential — the man of theoretical genius, of practical efficacy, the man who lives joyously, productively, courageously, triumphantly — the man who belongs on earth. When Dagny first meets John Galt — after her plane crashes in Atlantis — Ayn would describe Dagny's reactions in one of the most exalted tributes to her ideal in all of her writing:

"When she opened her eyes, she saw sunlight, green leaves and a man's face. She thought: I know what this is. This was the world as she had expected to see it at sixteen — and now she had reached it — and it seemed so simple, so unastonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.

"She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this was what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt. The shape of his mouth was pride, and more: it was as if he took pride in being proud. The angular planes of his cheeks made her think of arrogance, of tension, of scorn — yet the face had none of those qualities, it had their final sum: a look of serene determination and of certainty, and the look of a ruthless innocence which would not seek forgiveness or grant it. It was a face that had nothing to hide or to escape, a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing, so that the first thing she grasped about him was the intense perceptiveness of his eyes — he looked as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world — to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing...

"This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence — and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke. She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again. He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

"'We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?' she whispered.

'"No, we never had to."'

In these paragraphs, two women are in love: Dagny Taggart and Ayn Rand. "And all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke." Those years would come to an end for Dagny, through the living reality of John Galt. They were not to end for Ayn. She never found the man whose "eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world." But she would do what, perhaps, mattered to her even more than finding John Galt in life: she would give him reality in a work of art, she would shape her hero with her own mind and her own hands; and when the shaping was completed, she would have found her life's great love. He would never disappoint her, as every other love had disappointed her, as every later love would disappoint her. He would never leave her, he would never betray her. But he could never return her impassioned worship; like all the men she loved who lived and breathed in the real world — like Fronz, like Leo, like Frank, like the man who was soon to enter her life — he sentenced her to a lifetime of unrequited love.

The attributes most sharply emphasized in Galt's portrait were to be rationality, realism, serenity, self-esteem. An essential characteristic of Galt illustrates Ayn's view of what she called "the impotence of evil," a concept of great importance in her philosophy and in the structure of all her novels. Galt has a profound contempt for evil, a contempt based on the conviction that evil is the irrational and, therefore, the blind, the aberrated, the impotent. Evil is to be fought, when necessary, but not to be taken seriously in one's own view of life, not to be granted metaphysical power or significance; evil is to be despised, not hated or feared. One may observe this premise in the plot-structure of Atlas Shrugged: the central lines of dramatic conflict are not between the good and the evil, but between the good and the good — between Galt and Francisco, the strikers, on the one hand, and Dagny and Rearden, who will not join the strike, on the other. The errors that set Dagny and Rearden in conflict with Galt and Francisco are what Ayn defined as errors of knowledge, not breaches of morality. This same pattern is apparent in The Fountainhead; the central conflict is Roark versus Dominique and Wynand. In both novels, the villains merely cash in on the consequences of the heroes' conflicts, but are not the initiators, the sources or the motive power of the story's events. "In my novels, and in actual life," Ayn often said, "the alleged victories of evil are made possible only by the flaws or the errors of those who are essentially good. Evil, left to its own devices, is impotent and self-defeating. To make my central conflicts a struggle between heroes and villains, would be to grant to evil an honor it doesn't deserve."

When she had devised the character and role of John Galt, Ayn turned to her heroine, Dagny Taggart, the woman who was to be worthy of loving Galt and being loved by him. "I had always been somewhat frustrated by my presentation of women, and eager to present my kind of woman," Ayn said. Dagny is Ayn's first portrait of "the ideal woman." Kira was still a young girl at the end of We the Living; Dominique was paralyzed by a profound inner conflict. But Dagny was to be free of psychological conflict, serene in her basic relationship to existence, passionately ambitious and creative. Ayn wished to project her as the woman thought to be impossible by the conventional view of life — and of sex: the woman engineer, dealing with the material world of metal rails and freight cars and Diesel engines, who is, simultaneously, a consummately feminine hero-worshipper.

"Dagny is myself, with any possible flaws eliminated," Ayn once said. "She is myself without my tiredness, without my chronic slightly anti-material feeling, without that which I consider the ivory tower element in me, or the theoretician versus the man of action... Dagny is myself without a moment of exhaustion."

The character of Hank Rearden, the leading industrialist and the chief victim of the novel — whom many of Ayn's readers would consider the most attractive and memorable of her characters — was arrived at with considerable difficulty and over a considerable period of time. "As I first conceived him," Ayn was to say, "Rearden was not to be a romantic character, but a much older man. He was to be a key means of dramatizing the martyrdom of the men of the mind; he was to be the martyred industrialist, the concrete Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders and receives only torture in return; that never changed; but as long as I saw him as an older man, I could get nowhere with him, and I couldn't get a central plot line. Everything had to be in flux until that central line was established. Then I had the sudden idea that Rearden should be younger, that he and Dagny should have a romance — and that their romance should be the central plot line. From that decision, everything else fell into place quite easily. I could begin to organize all the tentative events into an orderly progression, and decide which of the many possible events I had in mind should be used."

The characterization of Rearden was to be unique in Ayn's work; he is a hero, he is a man whom one admires intensely for his dedication, his uncomplaining struggle, his achievement, his austere honor, the magnanimity of his personality. But he is a man torn by conflict — not only the conflict with the outside world that characterizes Ayn's other heroes, but by inner conflict: the conflict between his sexual passion for Dagny and his view that sex is degradation; the conflict between his love for Francisco and his conviction that the face of the playboy which Francisco presents to the world is the proof of depravity; the conflict between his love for Dagny and his sense of duty toward the wife he despises. It is Rearden's battle with himself, and the unflinching honesty with which he fights it, that engages the reader. He is a man who, within the context of his understanding, will not deceive himself. After his first sexual encounter with Dagny, he would tell her: "I held it as my honor that I would never need anyone. I need you. It had been my pride that I had always acted on my convictions. I've given in to a desire which I despise. It is a desire that has reduced my mind, my will, my being, my power to exist into an abject dependence upon you — not even upon the Dagny Taggart whom I admired — but upon your body, your hands, your mouth and the few seconds of a convulsion of your muscles... Whatever I wanted, I was free to proclaim it aloud and achieve it in the sight of the whole world. Now my only desire is one I loathe to name even to myself... I want no pretense, no evasion, no silent indulgence, with the nature of our actions left unnamed... It's depravity — and I accept it as such — and there is no height of virtue that I wouldn't give up for it." In the end, Rearden would come to understand the nature of his mistake, and of all the central mistakes of his life; and the reader would understand the means by which a man of spiritual nobility faces his internal conflicts.

Francisco d'Anconia — Galt's closest friend and the first man to join him in the strike — would become one of Ayn's most colorful and dramatic figures: the man of ruthless purposefulness who assumes the role of a playboy in order to destroy his fortune in plain sight of the whole world. Francisco's leitmotif is a lighthearted gaiety: he is the man with a superlative capacity for the enjoyment of life, who is an iron-disciplined worker of unsurpassed productive energy and achievement. It is Francisco who would explain the meaning of the novel's title, and its theme, to Rearden and to the reader:

'"Mr. Rearden,' said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, 'if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?' '"I... don't know What... could he do? What would you tell him?'

"'To shrug."'

"Francisco," Ayn would say, "is the philosophical expression — the concretization in a human character — of what I heard in the operetta music I fell in love with in my childhood... I don't remember how or when I got the specific concept of the character. More than any other character, he was Minerva — he came ready-made into my mind. I don't even remember how I got his name. I probably heard it somewhere; to this day I'm slightly afraid to discover that his name is some forgotten association." Ayn had forgotten that the name she had given to the French hero of "the grandfather of Atlas Shrugged" — was "Francis;" and it is interesting to note that the world’s largest producer of copper, like Francisco in the novel, is Anaconda Copper.

To Ayn, Francisco's name — Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia — symbolized the whole character. "He is the other axis of my type of man," she once said. "You know, there are two types of man in my novels: Roark, Galt, and Rearden are one line; Wynand, Bjorn Faulkner, Leo, and Francisco are the other. The Francisco type are the men who symbolize the enjoyment of life on earth. In my early attempts in Russia, the Francisco type was very prominent — so in devising the character of Francisco, I was cashing in on an enormous store of ideas." 45

If the leitmotif of Francisco was to be an indestructible gaiety, the leitmotif of Ragnar Danneskjold — the philosopher who becomes a pirate — was to be an implacable sense of justice. "... my only love," Ragnar would tell Rearden, "the only value I care to live for, is that which has never been loved by the world, has never won recognition or friends or defenders: human ability. That is the love I am serving — and if I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?"

In her early notes, Ayn wrote that Ragnar was to be the symbol of the good man's helpless indignation against evil. "That was my lead to his character — the indignation that all of us feel, that any victim feels — against evil. That was the justification for a superior type of man choosing a career of violence. He was to be the avenging angel." 46

Once the major protagonists were formed in Ayn's mind, she turned to the creation of secondary characters — of Dagny's brother, James Taggart, who "hides in mystical nonsense to avoid moral judgment;" of Lillian Rearden, Hank Rearden's wife, "the archetype of the humanitarian liberal pseudo-intellectual who despises and hates the industrialist;" of Cheryl, the young girl who marries James Taggart believing his pretense of greatness, and is destroyed when she grasps the horror of the truth; of Robert Stadler, the great scientist destroyed by his own cynicism; of Ellis Wyatt and Ken Danagger, industrialists who abandon the work they love and join Galt's strike. In her outline, Ayn did not determine the relative importance of the secondary characters; she planned to use them as the plot required, when it required them.

"One character is an exception in my whole writing career," she would later say, shaking her head as if still startled by the exception and by how it came about. "He's a character who, without my intention, seemed to write himself — he came out of the material inspirationally, as I was writing. All I had intended was to describe in one brief mention a modern young college boy bureaucrat." The character was the young man nicknamed "The Wet Nurse," sent by Washington to direct the "fair" distribution of the new metal Rearden had created. He was to be a boy who "had no inkling of any concept of morality; it had been bred out of him by his college; this had left him with an odd frankness, naive and cynical at once, like the innocence of a savage." The character began to interest Ayn, she explained. "I realized that through this type of innocent savage — not corrupt enough to know how corrupt his actions are, innocent enough to admire Rearden, a boy who really accepted what he'd been taught in college — I could show the tragic representative of the good average young people. He would be a boy brought up as amoral, then awakening to moral understanding. I was idly listening to music one day, and I thought that it could be a beautifully tragic scene if he died trying to save Rearden — and that that would be the specific event I had been trying to devise, the event which would finally make Rearden quit and go on strike."

The Wet Nurse was to become the most endearing and touching of all Ayn's minor characters. In his last scene, during a riot at Rearden Steel staged on order from Washington, he would be shot in a last desperate effort to save Rearden's mills. Rearden takes the dying boy in his arms, to carry him to safety. But it is too late. "The boy's features had no power to form a smile, but it was a smile that spoke in his glance, as he looked at Rearden's face — as he looked at that which he had not known he had been seeking through the brief span of his life, seeking as the image of that which he had not known to be his values."

Another minor character whom Ayn had planned in her notes, but later decided not to use, was a priest. "He was to be one of the philosophical variants illustrating the evil of the morality of forgiveness," she said. "If you always take the burden of sin upon yourself — as God does — it amounts to the sanction of evil. The power of religion consists of the power of morality — that's what holds people to religion — and I wanted to show that religion's monopoly on values does not belong to religion, but to philosophy. The priest was to be a glamorized Thomist philosopher who thought he could combine reason and religion, and finally realizes the mistake of his choice, and joins the strike. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to show a man attracted to religion by morality. But the problem was that he was not to be taken literally; all the other strikers are members of valuable professions, and to include a minister would be to sanction religion."

One of the minor characters — a woman striker in the valley — had a particular personal meaning to Ayn: the woman Ayn called "the fishwife," because her work was to provide the fish for the grocery market. As Dagny and Galt drive through the valley, Dagny was to see "a young woman... stretched on the sun-flooded planks, watching a battery of fishing rods. She glanced up at the sound of the car, then leaped to her feet in a single swift movement, a shade too swift, and ran to the road. She wore slacks, rolled above the knees of her bare legs, she had dark, disheveled hair and large eyes... Dagny... saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt... hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in that glance." Galt said, "She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind." The fishwife is Ayn's Hitchcock — like appearance in Atlas Shrugged.

In her notes, the fishwife originally was intended to have a larger role: "She has written a very good book, which has been totally neglected and is being killed. One lonely, dark evening, she is standing in front of a book-store window, looking for her book. She hears a voice saying, 'You'll never find it there.' It's one of the strikers — and that's how she goes on strike." Commenting on the notes, Ayn was to say wistfully, "It was wishful thinking on my part — it's what I wished to God would happen to me. I still do, in a certain sense. The woman was projected from that sense. But there was no room to handle it properly, so I finally used her only for that one scene in the valley. It amused me to have her be like me, as a private joke... There were other things on that order that gave me enormous pleasure — like the use of the dollar sign [cigarettes produced in the valley were marked with a gold dollar sign, 'the initials of the United States, the only country where money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness'] — and the gimmick of 'Who is John Galt' [the slang expression used as the novel's opening sentence and throughout the story as an expression of despair and a cry for help] — and the theme of the strike itself. These fantastic gimmicks are the real source of pleasure in fiction for me, the greatest pleasure. They capture the whole spirit and style of the book."

Throughout the last year of the forties, Ayn was working full time on the writing of Atlas Shrugged. The philosophical work was done, the plotting was done — and, since the ending of her contract with Hal Wallis, her time was her own. Her tendency to reclusiveness continued to increase as the world that interested her narrowed to the dimensions of her novel and the study in which she worked. Often, in the evenings, she would put on her favorite music — her tiddlywink pieces, selections from Rachmaninoff and Chopin, operettas — and think about her next day's work. The music she loved always inspired her, it gave her the sense that she did not leave her world, the world of Atlas Shrugged, when she left her study; some of her best literary ideas were arrived at as she listened to it.

The political conservatives she had met since moving to California continued to be among her rare social contacts. But she was becoming progressively and painfully disillusioned with them, progressively convinced that they did not know how to fight an intellectual battle; their concern was with political and economic issues, despite Ayn's efforts to convince them that the political-economic case for freedom had long ago been presented, but no one was listening, the march toward collectivism had not halted, and that what was needed was a moral justification for freedom. So long as men were taught to feel guilty for their success and their wealth, so long as altruism was accepted as a morality for life, men might give lip-service to freedom, but they would turn their backs on it. The dominant ideas in the world were faith, self-sacrifice and collectivism. "Historical trends are the inescapable product of philosophy," Ayn often said. "It is philosophy that has brought men to this state, and it is only philosophy that can lead them out." She continued to watch America's political progress, to watch and to work on the book which she would offer as the solution to the decay of freedom.

The young immigrant girl who landed in New York had never ceased to love her new country, with the passionate, near-painful devotion that perhaps only the foreign-born fully understand, and had never ceased to be aware that America had given her life, and hope, and freedom, and the possibility of achieving everything denied to her in Soviet Russia. But Ayn Rand was a trader. She would write that"... the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved." She was to repay her adopted country for the gifts it offered her. She was to repay it by giving America its voice.

In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart would ask John Galt what he had told the inventors, the artists, the industrialists, the scientists, the men of the mind in every field of activity who had joined his strike, leaving behind their work and their lives — what he told them to convince them to abandon everything and to join him. Galt answers, "I told them they were right... I gave them the pride they did not know they had. I gave them the words to identify it. I gave them that priceless possession which they had missed, had longed for, yet had not known they needed: a moral sanction."

This was to be Ayn's gift to America. A moral sanction. The philosophical demonstration that to live for one's own rational self-interest, to pursue one's own selfish, personal goals, to use one's mind in the service of one's own life and happiness, is the noblest, the highest, the most moral of human activities. Speaking of his strikers, Galt would say: "I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity's brief summer... had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory." Speaking to the unnamed, unchampioned, beating heart of her new land, Ayn was to say: "Yours is the glory."

45 I asked Ayn one day, "Which type was Cyrus?" She smiled. "It still seems odd to me when you mention his name, Barbara. He's always been like a private secret... Cyrus was the Roark, Rearden, Galt type — the grim, domineering man of action. I still remember him, and I'm still in love with Cyrus."

46 When I read Atlas Shrugged in manuscript as Ayn was writing it, I was fascinated with Ragnar from his first description: the smile that "was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg" — "the startling beauty of physical perfection - the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue" — the golden hair and the sky blue eyes. Ayn happened to mention a woman striker whom I would later meet in Galt's Gulch — "a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real... she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten." Almost involuntarily, I said, "How can you keep Ragnar and Kay Ludlow apart? Two people who look as they do, should be together." Ayn laughed, looked thoughtful for a moment — then said, "Okay. I'll do it for you." In the final version of the novel, Ragnar and Kay are married.

Chapter Twenty

It was during this period of intensive work on the writing of Atlas Shrugged that Ayn agreed to meet two young fans of The Fountainhead.

She had received a letter from Nathaniel Branden, 47 asking philosophical and literary questions about The Fountainhead and We the Living. Since beginning the writing of the novel, she rarely took time to answer her mail; her "Letter from Ayn Rand" had been printed, and it dealt with many of the questions that were addressed to her. But Nathaniel's letter posed questions about philosophical inconsistencies he believed he had found in We the Living that intrigued her with their perceptiveness; she felt he deserved a thoughtful reply In her lengthy response, she added that she was working on a new novel, and could not continue to engage in correspondence; but since he was living in Los Angeles, he could send her his telephone number if he had more questions, and perhaps she might call to arrange an appointment.

Ayn did not know that Nathaniel's telephone number — dropped off as he was speeding to tell me that he had heard from Ayn Rand — was in the mail five minutes after her letter arrived at his home.

Nathaniel and I were students at UCLA, he in psychology, I in philosophy. We had both separately discovered The Fountainhead when we were fifteen years old and had devoured it nonstop in a few rapt days of emotional and intellectual absorption; it had had a powerful influence on the development of our thinking. A few years later, it was because of the novel that we met. I was living in Winnipeg, Canada, with my family; Nathaniel, whose home was in Toronto, was spending a year in Winnipeg after his graduation from high school. A friend said to me one day: "There's a boy you must meet. You'll find him fascinating. He's the only person who talks about The Fountainhead the way you do." My friend was correct: I was fascinated by the brilliant, erratic, passionately intellectual young man. We began to see each other frequently, and our relationship continued when our education took us to Los Angeles, as we struggled together to find a consistent view of a complex world, to find the answers to questions to which The Fountainhead had given us a key, but had not yet opened the door.

She did not really want to meet this new young fan, Ayn told Frank when Nathaniel's telephone number arrived, despite his apparent intelligence. She had been disappointed too many times by admirers of her work to whom she had been friendly and helpful; too often, young fans had tried to use her for personal advice, for professional advancement, for the social prestige of knowing the writer of an international bestseller. She would later recall, "I paced up and down in my office one late winter night, talking to Frank, trying to decide if I should or should not meet Nathan. Today, it's almost frightening to think how much depended on that decision. I finally made up my mind on a theoretical moral principle: that it was wrong to pass collective judgments on the basis of a few bad experiences, and I shouldn't be stopped by the fear of disappointment." Ayn went to the telephone. It was a few steps and a brief conversation that were to radically alter her life.

Ayn met Nathaniel at her home on an evening in March 1950.

When he arrived at my apartment early next morning — collecting a speeding ticket on the way — it was clear from his face that something of extraordinary meaning had happened to him. They had talked long into the night, he said excitedly; her conversation was brilliant, powerful, overwhelming in its clarity and consistency. She had talked about reason, and why reason versus mysticism, man's mind versus faith, was the most fundamental of all philosophical issues, of which capitalism versus collectivism was merely a derivative. As she discussed the absolutism of reason, he had interrupted to say uneasily, "But there's a problem." Ayn was later to explain that the exchange that followed was, for her, the highlight of the evening, convincing her that Nathaniel was an unusually intelligent and promising young man. He had said, "Even if I were somehow rationally convinced that I should murder, say, my wife, I don't think I'd be able to do it. So doesn't reason have limits?" "Did you say rationally convinced?" Ayn had asked quietly. "Oh..." he had answered. Then he had laughed. "Of course."

"She's fascinating," he told me. "She... she's Mrs. Logic. She's everything I could have expected from the writer of The Fountainhead — no, she's more." Then he grinned and said, "She told me I'd be welcome to visit again. I'll ask if I can bring you with me."

"Of course, bring him" Ayn responded when Nathaniel called to say he'd like a friend, who admired her work as he did, to join him on his next visit. "It's not a 'him,'" he said. She laughed. "Fine. Bring her along."

In 1950, no freeways had yet been built between Los Angeles and most of its outlying towns. Chatsworth was over an hour's drive along narrow roads to what seemed less like a suburb than a country village. As we drove in Nathaniel's ancient LaSalle, we passed long stretches of open country where only the first few homes were beginning to rise. Today, the busy freeway passes used-car lots and fast-food restaurants and housing developments and banks; but it does not reach the house at 10,000 Tampa Avenue where Ayn Rand once lived: that house has long since been razed.

When we reached Ayn's home, secluded on a tree-lined street, it was to see an austere modern house that looked as if it might have leaped from the pages of The Fountainhead over the signature of Howard Roark. It was made of glass and aluminum-covered steel, the aluminum burnished to a satiny glow; it was light, airy, formed of straight, rising lines and with, incredibly, a curving moat — devised by Richard Neutra to ensure an extra measure of privacy — around the front of the house and surrounding a circular steel patio. The geometric forms of the house were reflected among the water reeds of the moat. It was already dark, but the shapes of fields could be seen behind the house and, nearer, flowering shrubs and a stand of small lush trees.

I no longer recall what I said or what Ayn said when we were introduced and I first heard her husky, Russian-accented voice. The total of my concentration was on the visual reality of the woman who stood before me. At first, I saw only her eyes — and I had the sudden, odd feeling, a feeling gone before I could grasp it, that I was naked before those fiercely perceptive eyes, and alone — and safe. It was the beat of a long moment before I could wrench my glance away to capture the full figure.

Ayn was a small, stocky woman, dressed in a pale green blouse and gray skirt, with short, dark hair — the hair style of the twenties, straight and bobbed and severe — and a full, sensuous mouth set firmly in a squarish face. She was not a conventionally attractive woman, but compelling in the remarkable combination of perceptiveness and sensuality, of intelligence and passionate intensity, that she projected.

Beside her stood a tall, gaunt man with the appearance and manner of an aristocrat. There was no touch or hint of aristocracy in Frank's background, only a long line of manual workers. But his figure had an elegance that spoke of generations of breeding. He had light, straight hair thrown back from a high forehead, gray-blue eyes, and the large, slightly gnarled hands of a laborer. He seemed a man from a different century, perhaps a member of the Southern landed gentry living in the nineteenth century. There was an easy, slow grace about him, a warmth, a gentleness, the spiritual and physical elegance of a man who would have been content in beautiful old surroundings with beautiful old possessions and a way of life that required only his particular quiet charm.

The living room of the house seemed inevitable for that house and for Ayn Rand. The room, its walls painted peacock blue, was large, filled with comfortable overstuffed furniture covered in shades of beige, with coffee tables and a record cabinet in blond wood; scattered over the tables were brightly colored ashtrays in vivid blue-green, Ayn's favorite color, and bowls of fresh flowers. And everywhere, larger than life size, were giant plants, their colors and shapes bringing sunshine and daylight into the night room. Above, extending around two sides of the living room, was a gallery that formed the hallway of the second floor; from the gallery's peacock blue railing the green of more plants spilled down like a cheerful frame for the second story. Through a window, one could see the burnished walls of gray slate, open to the sky, which formed the outdoor patio.

As we began to talk, Ayn pulled out a cigarette holder and lighted the first of the evening's many cigarettes. She was rarely without the holder; even when she was not smoking, she held it almost as a weapon, punctuating her words with sharp, jagged gestures. All her gestures were abrupt, straight-lined, and unblurred, like her thoughts and her conversation.

After not more than ten minutes of getting-acquainted social conversation — she asked how Nathaniel and I had met, and seemed delighted to learn that it was because of The Fountainhead: "It's a wonderful fiction event," she laughed — we plunged into a discussion of precisely the sorts of issues Nathaniel and I had been struggling with for the past two years. An important part of the powerful effect of Ayn's personality on everyone who met her was that she appeared to have an acute sensitivity to the particular concepts most relevant to whomever she was addressing, a special antenna that gave her a direct line to what would be especially meaningful; many of her acquaintances had commented on this phenomenon, as many more were to do throughout her life.

Evidently pleased by our interest in philosophical questions — an interest for which she had been starved in her dealings with conservative friends whose concerns were narrowly political — she spoke, that evening, of her concept of "the benevolent universe," her view that man's natural state is one of achievement, fulfillment, and joy; she spoke of free will as the choice, or the refusal, to use one's mind to the limit of one's ability; she spoke of emotions as the product of an intellectual estimate, made consciously or subconsciously. Ayn was, by basic mental set, a superb teacher, taking endless joy in the activity of breaking down complex issues into their easily graspable parts, in communicating her thoughts, in working out the implications of her ideas in conversation, in honing the concepts she was developing in Atlas Shrugged. Nathaniel and I listened, argued, and questioned with an almost painfully intense eagerness, feeling as if she were weaving a personal miracle for us.

It was clear why Nathaniel had described Ayn as "Mrs. Logic." One could not encounter a human being in whom the psychological attribute of rationality was more pronounced; one grasped it almost as a visible presence. It was conveyed by the openness of her manner — by the precision and clarity of her speech — by the directness of her conversation and the fact that she gave reasons for her every statement — by the intense perceptiveness of her glance — by the natural, effortless pleasure she projected in the act of intellectual analysis.

Throughout the evening, Frank said little. But his silence was not aloof; he seemed to be listening carefully, smiling or nodding at times, his eyes very kind, his long body relaxed and graceful as a cat. Ayn often turned to him as she spoke, as if gaining some special comfort from the fact of his presence. After a few hours, he disappeared into the kitchen, and emerged with mugs of coffee and mounds of sweet pastry and a plate of Ayn's beloved Swiss chocolates.

We talked — or, rather, predominantly it was Ayn and Nathaniel who talked, as I struggled with a shyness I had not yet overcome — until the sun came out and lighted the black marble floor of the outdoor patio. The conversation dealt with metaphysics, with politics, with religion, with the nature of knowledge, with aesthetics, with morality, with the absolutism of reason and the power of the human mind — while I listened with a feeling of intellectual excitement I had never before experienced. There was something Ayn conveyed, something more than her words and their meaning, something as tangible as the sound of her voice, that seemed to have its own especial purity and beauty. Here, with this woman, in this room, ideas mattered — they were of life-and-death importance, they were the means of commerce among human beings, the only values to be traded. Here was a world ruled by the rigorous, cool elegance of rationality. I listened to Ayn Rand with a sense of wonder, and with tears stinging at the back of my eyes.

When Nathaniel and I finally tore ourselves away and headed back to Los Angeles, we carried with us Ayn's invitation to return again in a week. I recall saying to Nathaniel as we drove, "I feel as if, intellectually, I've always stood on a leaking life raft in the ocean, and as I jump to cover one leak with my foot, another spurts forth — and I leap to cover it — and then there's another... But now I have the sense that it might be possible to stand on solid ground, to understand, to know what sort of world I live in. It's as if... as if for the first time the earth is firm under my feet." I began to laugh. "But Nathan, I'm nowhere near the ground — I'm floating six feet above it — and I feel wonderful! Is all this really possible? I know it's happening, but is it really possible?"

It was possible. What began for us was an enchanted period of time. We went through our university days talking not of our classes or our daily lives, but of the things we were learning from Ayn, and the new questions rising in our minds. And each week seemed to crawl by until our Saturday meetings with Ayn Rand.

Ayn had told Nathaniel that he might telephone her when he had philosophical issues to discuss. "Do you mean tomorrow?" he had asked. He began to call as often as she would permit, which soon became daily. His sister, Elayne, with whom he was living, was furious when her April telephone bill arrived. Chatsworth was a toll call's distance from Los Angeles — a ten-cent toll call. That first month, the bill for calls to Chatsworth was forty-three dollars. Despite the pressures of her work, Ayn welcomed his calls, her mind teeming with the issues she wished to discuss.

During the first weeks, Nathaniel and I drove to Chatsworth on Saturday evenings. Soon, other evenings and an occasional afternoon were added. Within a few months, we had graduated from young fans to the status of personal friends. Since early childhood, Ayn had scornfully rejected any human relationship not based on a philosophical mutuality; she often said that she was "incapable of a no ideological friendship." She rarely used the word "friend," or showed more than the most perfunctory interest, for any man or woman with whom she did not share a common philosophical interest and dedication. As a result, she had few intimate friends. She was no longer in contact with Isabel Paterson, and Thadeus Ashby had been gone from her life for several years. She enjoyed occasional meetings with the few friends she did respect, with Adrian and Janet Gaynor, with Ruth and Buzzy Hill, with William Mullendore, with Herbert Corneulle, with Henry and Frances Hazlitt on their rare visits to California; she continued to see Albert Mannheimer, although at less frequent intervals than before. But she felt that most of the people she met did not offer her the intellectual challenge she sought.

When Nathaniel and I asked Ayn why she spent so much of her time with us, particularly in a period when she had cut herself off from almost all social contacts, she answered, "Don't you know that the pleasure of dealing with active minds outweighs any differences in age or knowledge?" Despite Ayn's growing reputation, which brought to her doorstep mature men and women of similar renown, she was indifferent to reputation and social standing — her own or that of others; she preferred to spend her time with those, wherever they might be found, who wanted to discuss the burning issues of philosophy And in her attitude toward the power and importance of ideas, she seemed closer to us than to many of her contemporaries: she was like a youth who had started out on the same quest, the quest to acquire a set of principles to guide one's actions in practice, but had never given up and had reached her goal, and could now show us the steps of that long road. Often, when we arrived in the evening, she would come out of her study, having had no time for dinner; she would look one step away from collapsing — then Nathaniel or I would mention some philosophical issue and the lines of exhaustion would vanish from her expression, she would begin to ask questions and to talk, and we would see the face of a forty-five-year-old woman become the face of a twenty-year-old-girl within the space of ten minutes.

It was particularly with Nathaniel that she experienced the philosophical give-and-take that was so rare in her experience. With Nathaniel, she felt that she was teacher, but not merely teacher; she was adviser, but not merely adviser. She was astonished and delighted to discover a young man deeply committed to her philosophical ideas who was equipped and eager to challenge, to argue, to debate with her. She was further delighted that, in the area of his own field, psychology, he was able to expose her to issues and problems she had never considered, broadening her understanding of human motivation.

Sometimes, on a bright afternoon, Ayn and I would walk together along the paths of the ranch, past the cages of Frank's exquisite preening peacocks and along the alfalfa field, while she scanned the ground for the colorful rocks she loved to collect. As we walked, I would tell her about the problems on my mind — problems in my university classes where I was becoming a pariah by arguing violently in defense of her philosophy, family problems, intellectual and emotional problems — all the difficulties of a young girl on the verge of adulthood. Where I saw no avenue to a solution, she would point out what I had overlooked, with a sensitive, nonjudgmental understanding of my context and needs. I have never forgotten those sunlit walks and those equally sunlit discussions; in my memory they are endlessly lit by a gentle golden glow. It was during those golden days that I first came to love Ayn.

One afternoon, I began to speak of the difficulties in my relationship with Nathaniel, of my sadness that I could not passionately love a man whom I admired in so many respects. The bond between us was strong: we were growing up together, we were trying to understand the world together, we were sharing our thoughts, we were sharing the experience of knowing Ayn Rand and the excitement of the world view we were learning from her. As we became still more deeply involved with Ayn's philosophy, the bond had grown stronger still: we were fellow-fighters in a crusade. But I knew I did not — could not — return the emotional and physical intensity of his feeling for me. Ayn was very kind and sympathetic; but it was clear that she did not understand how there could be a barrier to my loving Nathaniel; she seemed bewildered that a young woman would not be passionately drawn to him. I recognized that it was not a problem I could share with her; for a while, her attitude puzzled me, but I soon dismissed it from my mind.

It was not until several years later that Ayn spoke in detail of her first impressions of Nathaniel and me. "My impression of you, Barbara, the evening we met," she said, "was of delicacy and strength, of someone of the Dominique style. I couldn't definitely estimate the personality, because you were so quiet, but I was aware of very great intelligence. Your mind worked in principles, and very fast... The week before that, when Nathan first arrived, I remember that I was as usual slightly late dressing. Frank had let Nathan in, they were in the living room. When I came downstairs, I saw Nathan standing in profile to me. I was enormously impressed with his face. It was completely the face of my kind of man... I'll never forget that moment.

"I was completely fascinated by him during the whole evening, totally emotionally sold on him, and Frank was too. He was brilliantly intelligent, totally open and honest, he spoke to the point, he spoke in principles, he asked the right questions... He talked that evening more than I did, but it was not that he was trying to tell me, he was presenting philosophical issues that interested him and he wanted to know my views... I knew he was testing me, but so openly and rationally that I was very pleased. I felt, 'I would have done the same thing.' He was checking on the consistency of my views. He projected enormous respect and total independence... I was sold on both of you from the first meeting; the rest was taking the time to be sure rationally. I was committed that this was an important discovery in my life, a real value, from the very beginning."

As the weeks and months passed, Nathaniel and I came to know Ayn not just as a thinker and philosopher but through all the daily, prosaic events of life. We saw her well and ill, we saw her irritable and cheerful, we saw her loving and rejecting, we saw her laughing and... no, we did not see Ayn crying. She was a woman who did not hide her pain; pain, whatever its cause — from a torn hem in her dress to a disappointing day's writing to a human encounter that disgusted her — was always discussed with us and with Frank. But pain in Ayn was instantaneously transmuted into anger, into allegedly rationally motivated indignation, in a subconscious means of avoiding suffering.

I recall vividly — it has the impact of a still, unchanging photograph of Ayn, a photograph of something beneath any anger and pain, more true to her most intimate vision of life than her normal grave severity — the first time Nathaniel and I saw passionate joy in her, the first time we saw her totally happy and openly showing her feelings. As we were parking the car, we heard the sound of Ayn's tiddlywink music coming from the house. When we entered the living room, it was to the sight of this serious, austere woman, interested only in the most crucial issues of human life and thought, dancing around the room, spinning in circles and laughing, her head thrown back in a gesture of cheerful defiance, waving a baton that Frank had bought for her — like a child to whom life was an endlessly joyous adventure.

It was that same day that Ayn made dinner for us and another, faintly jarring aspect of her personality became apparent. Usually, her servant did the cooking, but tonight, as a special treat, Ayn was to create the dish of which she was most proud, an authentic Russian beef Stroganoff. I stood with her in the kitchen — she didn't want me to help — and watched her at work. Although she was an excellent cook, she worked painfully slowly, her movements awkwardly over-precise, and she projected an excruciating physical and emotional tension. "It's because," she said, "my mind is never really on working in the kitchen. It's because I can't fully focus on most of the necessities of daily life. So I have to be extra conscientious." She made a list of the ingredients necessary for each dish — even though she had prepared it many times before; she made another list of the amount of time necessary for cooking each dish; and she carefully checked the lists at every step of the process. This same tension over practical affairs was present in many other aspects of her daily routine. When she left the house, she would lock the front door, step away, come back, check the lock, head for the car, come back, check the lock again — distrusting herself initially to have given it the attention it required. In part, her distrust clearly was due to her concentration on her work and on the philosophical issues that concerned her; her concentration was so absolute and all-absorbing that it left her no mental space for anything else. But it seemed to be, as well, an indication of her alienation from the physical world, her sense of helplessness, tinged with fear, in dealing with material reality.

The same alienation was evident in her attitude toward her physical body, the carelessness with which she treated the body she had not chosen and did not like. Her one source of pride in her physical person was her shapely legs, which she cheerfully flaunted in short skirts. But her stockings usually were snagged, her lipstick smearily applied, her skirts often stained. Occasionally, she would make an effort to look, as she termed it, "glamorous." For important occasions, she wore Adrian designs, enjoying their drama and simplicity. But to dress for such occasions, to see that her hair was properly combed, her makeup perfect, her gown pressed, was always a tension-filled, irksome chore. But when she was dressed and groomed, she delighted in the compliments she was paid; she would come into the living room, beaming, and twirl around to be admired.

The alienation so apparent in her dealings with the material world, extended beyond the physical to encompass her emotional sense of herself as a woman. Ayn expected, and demanded, that the people around her appreciate and understand her literary and intellectual achievements. She exploded in anger and contempt when she did not receive what she believed to be her right. But she never expected that her emotional life, her motivation, her existence as a human being and especially as a woman, would be intelligible or even of interest to other people. As a result, when she felt visible as a person, rather than solely as a mind, she reacted with astonished pleasure, as if she had received a gift she had never allowed herself to know she wanted. If she received a moment's understanding of herself as a woman, the bitterness of years seemed to fall away, replaced by a touchingly innocent gratitude.

One evening, when we were talking about We the Living — she had not yet told us the story of Alice Rosenbaum and Leo — I said to her: "Ayn, you knew a 'Leo' in Russia, didn't you?" She looked startled and asked, "How in the world did you know that?" I explained that I had guessed it because her choice of the name "Leo" for a literary hero was an out-of-character choice for her; it was not the sort of name she had given to her other heroes, who were Howard and Gail and Andrei. I had concluded that she chose the name because a man named Leo once had been important to her. She seemed bewildered that I had guessed this about her. During all the subsequent years of our friendship, she would occasionally again compliment me on my sensitivity in having understood her.

It was evident, quite early in our relationship, that something was involved between Ayn and me that was more than the exchange of ideas, something that was never named or acknowledged but that was always present as an unspoken element in our friendship. From the beginning, I was aware of the woman, hidden behind a battery of defenses, who co-existed with the intellect that was all she was willing to show to the world; I did not see her as merely a brain encased in flesh. I knew — and I somehow communicated it to her — that somewhere inside her was a woman's longing, a woman's emotions, a woman's struggle for self-expression. Sometimes, in our private conversations, she would speak with uncharacteristic ease not of her thoughts, but of her feelings about "the ideal man," of the loneliness of her early years in America, of her social shyness, of her painful awareness that the men she met were intimidated by her and thus oblivious to her femininity. I believe it was her awareness of my understanding which, many years later — when the world of the woman who was Ayn Rand was crashing around her — caused her to turn to me for help, for protection, for the solace of someone who knew the agony she was enduring. Both Nathaniel and I often were asked if, in those early years, when we were not yet fully adults, Ayn's attitude toward us was maternal. It was not. When she introduced us to her friends, as she soon began to do, she spoke of us as "the children;" she was protective of us, eager to encourage us in the pursuit of the careers we planned, concerned that we might be hurt, perhaps professionally damaged, by our espousal of a philosophy as radical as hers — but there was nothing of the maternal in her manner or personality. The special softness, the need to touch and be touched, the concern with day-to-day activities, the nonjudgmental tenderness, the unconditional acceptance that one associates with motherhood, were alien to Ayn. We were, so to speak, the children of her brain, not of her body.

The concept of unconditional love was totally foreign to Ayn's thinking. It soon became evident, as those who knew her were uncomfortably aware, that however much she previously had projected love and affection, one was always potentially on trial with her. At any time, an action, an emotion, a conviction that she deemed irrational, could result in an explosion of anger. One had no hoard of deposited virtue in the bank; one was judged moment by moment, loved or rejected moment by moment. Often, when a friend said or did something of which she disapproved, she would react as if suddenly she knew nothing about the person except the single issue under discussion. One was forever on trial, forever required to re-prove one's virtue and rationality. Clearly, she hated what she perceived as the irrational; but on a more subtle level, her hatred seemed to be rooted in a deep, terrible fear — as if the outside world was not merely an arena where wrong ideas were held and wrong actions taken: it was an arena fraught with danger. She was struggling, as she had always done, to create a safe haven around her, a smaller world within the larger irrational world that would consist of people who were predictable, intelligible, in accord with her thinking, devoted to her, convinced that she was the spiritual and intellectual equal of her heroes — and who, therefore, posed no threat to her. Any sign of the "irrational" appeared to threaten her safety, her world, her life; it could not be permitted to enter her safe haven. When she attacked "irrational values" — particularly in the few people for whom she deeply cared, the people she had allowed entrance into the innermost reaches of her safe haven and who therefore had the power to endanger it — her manner projected something oddly personal, as if she desperately needed to annihilate forever whatever irrational love they clutched to them. She needed not only to be loved and admired, but to know there were no conflicting loves in the haven she had built.

During the happy excitement of our first months of seeing Ayn — months full of questions and answers and talking and learning — it was Ayn's fear of "the irrational" that planted the first small seed of the problem that finally was to engulf all our lives. One evening, I casually mentioned that I liked to look at mountains and the ocean, that the sight of them gave me a special feeling of peace. "Why?" she demanded, a slight edge in her voice. "Because they're beautiful, and, I suppose, because they never change, they're always just what they are." "And human beings?" she asked. I shrugged. "Human beings change constantly, they shift, they seem to dissolve from one identity to another." The edge in her voice was sharper as she said, "That's always why people prefer nature to man." And she began to speak of skyscrapers, of city pavements, of giant industries, of all the mighty creations of the human mind — almost as if I had been denouncing man's achievement. "It's a 'malevolent universe' emotion — it's the subconscious belief that man's life is inevitably tragic — that makes you prefer nature to the man-made," she told me, and I saw, bewildered, that she was deeply angry I listened uncomfortably as she continued speaking, wondering why a philosophical disagreement — if that was indeed what was involved — had become the occasion for an analysis of my psychology. But I had learned the quality of Ayn's intelligence: that behind every statement stood an enormous breadth and complexity of thought and integration; if I took it seriously when that intelligence was directed to philosophical issues, then I had to take it no less seriously when it was directed to what she saw as errors in my thinking and reactions. And I knew that some part of what she said was true. Her sensitivity to the slightest implication of a statement was honing in like a laser beam to something that was real. Some part of me was not convinced of what my mind had accepted: that reason and achievement were man's natural state. The issue remained unresolved in my mind, and left behind the first faint tinge of guilt.

On another evening, we were discussing the aesthetics of literature. I was telling Ayn that I deeply loved the novels of Thomas Wolfe, that I had discovered Look Homeward, Angel when I was twelve years old, then devoured all of his work. As I spoke, I dimly observed that Ayn's face was an expressionless mask, and that her eyes, usually so warm when she looked at me, were icy with disapproval. She interrupted only to ask me an occasional question. When I was silent, she reminded me of our former discussions of literature. "Plot, theme, characterization, style — those are the essential ingredients of fiction, are they not?" I nodded. Her voice had become driving and sharp as the ice of her eyes, her words followed each other with machine-gun-like rapidity. With devastating logic, the logic that had drawn and held me to her from the beginning, she demonstrated Wolfe's shortcomings with regard to precisely the elements of fiction I had agreed were essential. She spoke of his indifference to plot; she spoke of his thematic confusions; she spoke of the overwriting that was an omnipresent part of his style. I had no answer; it seemed irrelevant to explain what he meant to me emotionally — that the majestic songs he sang had reached into my deepest being, that I often felt they were me.

I sat with my friends in a quiet room, talking in a civilized manner — and feeling a small death occurring inside me. In the choice between my emotions and the commandments of reason, I had no choice. Then, and always, the greatest value Ayn offered me was the rationality of her arguments; then and always, that was her greatest intellectual and emotional hold on me. I had told her, at our first meeting that reason was an absolute to me; that had not changed, it could not change. Whatever the emotional consequences, I would not turn my back on what I believed to be the truth.

In the weeks that followed — indeed, the years — I never learned to tear out of me my passionate response to Thomas Wolfe's novels. Instead, I learned repression, as so many of her young friends were to learn it in later years. I learned not to recognize my authentic feelings — not to recognize them nor to experience them nor to know that they remained, never to acknowledge them to myself or others. The first step toward placing my emotions into a destructive vise had been taken. I was to continue along that path for many years.

Ayn had convinced me — as she was to convince me that the paintings of Vincent van Gogh were too undisciplined, too chaotic and wild to be considered great art — as she was to convince me that Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage propounded a deeply malevolent view of life — as she was to convince me that Wagner's Tristan and Isolde was profoundly tragic. She convinced me, as, over the years, I would see her convince so many others, of the invalidity of their artistic tastes — the tastes and the loves that so often, in fact, represented the best within them. It did not happen all at once. It could not have happened all at once. Such conversations occurred over a space of months and years — always interspersed with the great experience of dealing with a mind that presented the rich texture of a total world view and a systematic philosophical system of awesome logical consistency.

When I had met Nathaniel, the first book he gave me to read was Rolland's Jean Christophe. But Rolland was a socialist, Ayn pointed out, and the philosophical underpinnings of socialism had made him a realist, rather than a romantic, in literature. While I was dealing with my private aesthetic agony, Nathaniel was abandoning Jean Christophe. Over the years, we were to hear Ayn excoriate the "grim, unfocused malevolence" of Rembrandt — to a painter; Shakespeare's "abysmal failure" to present human beings with free will — to a writer; Beethoven's "tragic sense of doom" — to a musician. And we were to see the painters, the writers, the musicians, fail hopelessly to refute her arguments and unhappily grant the logic of her position. Some ran from her, unwilling to renounce their deepest aesthetic values. Most remained, and from then on their work reflected the air-tight underground into which they had placed their aesthetic emotions: in the name of reason, their work became thin, and tight, and without originality.

But in those early months, when the future storms were only the first faint wisps of clouds far off at the horizon, there seemed nothing that could for long blemish for Nathaniel and for me the joy of our new intellectual discoveries, and our conviction that we had found a woman as noble and admirable as her ideas. Ayn was first and foremost a rationalist and a moralist. These qualities brought her admiration and respect; they did not bring her love. But Ayn was loved, by Nathaniel, by me, by many others who had been and were to be her friends. The source of that love, for some of us, was that quality in her which I often felt was most profoundly, most nakedly, Ayn Rand: the quality of passionate idealism, the exalted vision of life's possibilities. In The Fountainhead, she had written that love was "a command to rise." In Ayn's presence, and in her work, one felt that command: a command to function at one's best, to be the most that one could be, to drive oneself constantly harder, never to disappoint one's own highest ideals.

47 At that time, his name was Nathan Blumenthal; he was later to change it to Nathaniel Branden; many of his friends, including Ayn, continued to call him "Nathan." My name was Barbara Weidman.

Chapter Twenty-One

Ayn spoke to us often about the new novel she was writing — as deliberate "teasers" to arouse our interest and curiosity. Privately, she and Frank were discussing her desire to show us the manuscript. One evening, she brought out the first chapter, a wide smile of anticipation on her face.

We read Chapter One that evening. We were fascinated by the drama of the story's beginning, intrigued by the mystery, and delighted to be meeting a new Ayn Rand heroine. So enthusiastic was our reaction that Ayn agreed to show us further chapters. Soon we were reading regularly, until we had read everything that had been typed. Ayn wrote in longhand, editing as she proceeded; when she was satisfied with a section, she gave it to her secretary to be typed. From then on, at each visit, she would show us the work completed in longhand since our previous visit.

It was an unrepeatable intellectual and emotional experience. Reading a new section, of the book each week, we felt as if we had gained private entry into the world that had been a dominant focus of our thought since our discovery of The Fountainhead, as if we had left everyday reality and had entered a new planet fashioned by Ayn Rand. We were meeting, not the Babbitts we had seen as representative of businessmen until then, but the giants of ability and achievement who peopled her world; we were following the complex strands of a mystery more involving than any thriller; we were encountering a style of luminous clarity and consistency. We were hearing, on each page, a command to rise to heights of a greater nobility than we had ever conceived. We felt that we were now citizens of the world of Ayn Rand — of a world in which man's mind was efficacious, where achievement and happiness were possible, where life was a great adventure and the human potential was unlimited. We were eager to understand that world in every detail, to live up to the high standards it demanded, to be worthy of the exaltation it promised.

The process of writing continued to be arduous for Ayn. She could not, she would not, abandon herself uncritically to the literary inspiration, the free, uncensored flow of thought and feeling that emotions provide a creative artist; the process of inspirational writing was aborted before it could fully begin. She was rarely solely creator; she was editor as well, during the very act of creation, often devising each paragraph, each sentence, each phrase, sometimes each word, by conscious rational calculation.

"Writing Atlas is the most difficult thing I've ever done," she said. "It takes the total of all my intellectual circuits, it requires my full capacity. I could not handle anything wider. It's been difficult from the beginning. You see, nonfiction writing feels to me like the ease I had in writing before I was twelve; it feels natural to me. But in fiction, I feel as if my mind has to work on two tracks, one natural, the other forced; it's the fiction element — except for the action sequences — that feels forced. The need to communicate moods, emotions, sensory perceptions, feels like it's impeding what I really want to say. I project everything in my mind in nonfiction terms, then I must drop that and allow myself to feel, and then project what I want by means of a feeling — and the words don't come. The main appeal of fiction to me has always been the presentation of the ideal man and the ideal manner of existence. In that sense, fiction is a means to an end for me. But philosophy alone is not yet life, it's only a blueprint for the future. So I feel that one without the other is not enough; only together do they give me the career and activity I really want, being simultaneously both a novelist and a philosopher."

Sometimes, she would come out of her study at midnight after fifteen uninterrupted hours of work, her body aching from strain, looking frighteningly exhausted — having written that whole day and evening perhaps a page, perhaps only a paragraph. The cost in mental torment and tension was beginning to take its toll in every aspect of her life, in the form of a growing impatience, an intolerance, sudden, accelerating bursts of temper, and moods of black depression.

But Ayn's enthusiasm for conversation continued unabated. Nathaniel and I began to introduce to her a few of our friends who were also admirers of her work. Among them were Joan Mitchell, a talented painter and my dearest friend since our childhood in Winnipeg, and my seventeen-year-old cousin Leonard Peikoff; in later years, both of them were to become close friends of Ayn's. One evening, I brought one of my UCLA philosophy professors to meet her. He was not an admirer of her work; his views were diametrically opposed to hers; but he was a man widely respected in his field who had expressed great interest in meeting Ayn. It was a memorable evening. They talked and argued with mutually enthusiastic pleasure; Ayn was at her most incisive and spirited, marshaling powerful arguments for her positions. They discussed metaphysics: he was a Platonist, Ayn an Aristotelian; they discussed morality: he was a utilitarian, she an advocate of self-interest; they discussed politics: he was a socialist, she an advocate of capitalism. At dawn, as the professor and I left, he said to me, clearly distressed: "She's found gaping holes in every philosophical position I've maintained for the whole of my life — positions I teach my students, positions on which I'm a recognized authority — and I can't answer her arguments! I don't know what to do!" He found a solution: he refused to see Ayn again, and he went on maintaining his former views.

Ayn continued to be deep in conversations about psychology with Nathaniel. He had begun applying to his own field the philosophical concepts he was learning from her. Over the next eighteen years, this was to be his major intellectual focus. His work during those years was to culminate in his book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969. Within the framework of the Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, the book contains major new work of his own, which he had been honing in discussions with Ayn, particularly on the psychological nature and meaning of self-esteem, on the nature of mental health and illness, on the source of pathological anxiety, and on what he termed "the principle of psychological visibility," an explanation of why man needs human companionship and is motivated to find human beings he can value and love. Ayn often said, "Everything I know about psychology, I learned from Nathan."

One does not perceive the impossible. Ayn's growing and unique closeness with Nathaniel was evident to everyone who saw them together. It was clear that they felt an increasing affection for each other — an affection which included occasional touching and hand-holding. Their feeling was fully intelligible to me, and a source of pleasure. I had no hint of what was to come, of what was beginning to develop, unnamed and unacknowledged, between them. Neither did Nathaniel.

Perhaps it might have been predicted by someone who knew of a battle that was raging in Ayn — as it had always raged, but never so intensely as now, when she had reached her mid-forties. It was the battle to remain a woman. Throughout her life, she had fought against what she saw as her feminine attributes — fought against her softness, her tenderness, her desire to yield to a stronger force; these were the enemies that would make her vulnerable to a world and to men that threatened her. She needed to control, she needed to dominate, she needed to set the rules and establish the terms; only therein lay her safety. She had married a man whom she could control, who posed no threat to her dominance. She had often selected friends who were much younger than she, who revered and loved her, who were captivated by the new world she opened up to them, a world in which she had set the rules and established the terms; she was the teacher, the mentor, the guide. Now, in writing Atlas Shrugged, she called upon all that she felt to be most male in her; although she was creating an ideal man, she was God creating man out of chaos; she was forming his identity, shaping his world, directing his philosophy. It was her intellect — chaste and sexless and impersonal — that directed her through the pages of her novel.

The only hint that there might be hidden complexities and drives in Ayn, self-doubts and confusions at variance with the self-sufficient woman whose face she presented to the world, the confident woman, at peace with herself, in full and serene command of her purposes and her life — was the mystery of her relationship with Frank. The people who knew Ayn and Frank often puzzled over the question of what had drawn and held her to him. Frank projected a sympathy, a wordless understanding, a kindness that was as essential a part of him as the color of his eyes, which touched his friends deeply; but they could not understand why these qualities were of value to Ayn — whose stated values of intellectuality, of ambition, of energy, of commitment, were alien to the values Frank possessed. It was impossible to doubt the reality of her love. It was evident in her constant need for his presence, in the compliments she continually paid to his appearance and his character, in the softness in her eyes when she looked at him, in a kind of hovering concern for his physical well-being. "Frank is my rock," she, would say. "He always knows my context. He reacts just as I do, to people and to events. He always knows what I'm feeling and what things mean to me. He's never once let me down."

Occasionally, she would grow irritated with him, and they appeared to have little to say to each other. But none of their friends suspected the extent to which the relationship was troubled. A number of years later, Ayn was to admit that during this period the friction between them and their lack of intellectual communication had come to so frustrate her that she had seriously considered divorce. She had decided to put the issue out of her mind until Atlas Shrugged was completed. By then, she had changed her mind. It seems unlikely that she would have divorced Frank under any circumstances, however hard and long she had considered it; her need of him was too great; the place he filled, the place of nonthreatening lover and companion, was too vital ever to be abandoned.

As Ayn and Franks relationship was silently deteriorating, my relationship with Nathaniel appeared to be improving, as a direct result of Ayn and Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Francisco presents Ayn's theory of sex, saying: "A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself... He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience — or to fake — a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer — because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut... There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desire of his body... Love is our response to our highest value — and can be nothing else."

It is an intriguing theory — and a potentially dangerous one, which already had had explosive effects on Ayn's life. It had led her to wildly aggrandize the men who were her sexual choices — Leo and Frank — and it would continue to do so in the future; if the men to whom she was attracted were not heroes, then what would her choices say about her? And it had led her to denounce and intimidate those of her friends who were not able to demonstrate that their choices were similarly exalted.

In retrospect, it seems clear that while one may grant that a man sexually drawn only to sluts suffers a deficiency of self-esteem, and that a man drawn to women of character and intelligence possesses a greater sense of self-value. But possibilities between these two extremes are so vast that the infant science of psychology can say little about them. Few things in life are so complex and so little understood as that which motivates our passionate sexual response; to require, as proof of psychological health, that this motivation lead only to the choice of a "hero," is to inflict, on oneself and others, inestimable damage.

But at the time, through long discussions with Ayn and Nathaniel, I came to accept Ayn's theory of sex. And I made a decision. Nathaniel appeared to embody the values I cherished. The difficulty had to lie in me, in psychological problems I had not dealt with. I must continue growing, I must continue learning, I must work to resolve my unidentified problems, and the day would come when I would respond to Nathaniel as I should and wanted to respond. The road would be cleared and I would be free to live my life rationally. It was all perfectly simple — and perfectly impossible of achievement.

On a cloudless day in the early summer of 1951, Ayn and Frank said good-bye to Nathaniel and to me as we left Los Angeles to return to our respective homes in Toronto and Winnipeg. I had always wanted to live in New York; ironically, it was Thomas Wolfe who first inculcated that desire in me, through his moving descriptions of the great city he loved. I had received my Bachelor of Arts degree from UCLA; I had enrolled in the philosophy department of New York University for the fall semester. Nathaniel had decided to join me; he would continue his work in psychology at NYU. As we stood in the driveway of her home for the last time, Ayn said that we would visit each other from time to time, we would speak on the telephone often, we would write letters — and when Atlas Shrugged was finished, she and Frank would leave the city she disliked with increasing fervor and would join us in New York. But it would be a long parting; the novel, she believed, would require at least another two years for completion. As her dislike of California intensified, she was feeling a growing homesickness for New York — the first homesickness she had ever experienced for a geographical locality — but she did not want to interrupt her work and to move until the novel was finished. It was a painful parting; we felt that we had become a family, and although I wanted to leave its bonds and to build a life of my own, we would sorely miss one another and the never-ending excitement of our conversations.

"When your car drove out of the driveway," Ayn later said, "I found that I could barely speak and that I was crying. I tried not to cry, but my eyes were full of tears. And the kind of emptiness you left behind — that's when I fully realized how enormously important the two of you had become. You know, when something is growing day by day, you don't quite notice it. I hadn't known it meant quite that much."

Shortly before this, Ayn had met Evan Wright, a young Marine who was studying English at UCLA and writing pro-free-enterprise letters in the university newspaper. She now began to spend occasional evenings in philosophical conversation with him, and hired him to do proofreading of her manuscript. She was touched and amused when

Evan, because of her, met the girl who soon became his wife. He had gone to the bank to deposit his paycheck; Mickey, the pretty teller, recognized Ayn's signature, and excitedly asked if Evan knew her. Three days later, after consulting with Ayn, Evan returned to the bank. "Would you like to meet Ayn Rand?" he asked Mickey. Five weeks later, they were married. "It will be a good marriage," said Ayn at the wedding, "because you share the same ideas."

Years later, Even would recall — in an echo of Thadeus Ashby, whom he had never met — that there was an unnamed sexual element, a sexual awareness, in his relationship with Ayn. It was never discussed, but he did not doubt that she recognized it, too. "I remember especially," he said, "one day when I was working on her manuscript, and she came to stand beside me silently, we were almost touching — and there was a powerful magnetism there, we both knew what we were feeling. I didn't look up — I suppose I was too shy — I don't know quite what would have happened if I had looked up... Yes, perhaps I do know. After a long time, she walked away..."

Like so many of those who came to know Ayn, Evan never forgot the constant fascination of being with her. "She was by far the most brilliant human being I have ever met. She was remarkable in so many ways, not like anyone else," he was to say, adding — thirty-five years after their meeting — "I still think of her, and Mickey and I often talk of her... When I met Ayn, college had confused me about a lot of issues; she gave me direction, and part of her thinking became a lasting part of my own life. I owe her a great debt of gratitude. Because of her I learned to think better and more clearly. I developed a logical power and a rationality, and clarified my thought processes... But then I found it was impossible to disagree with her, and I didn't want that; I couldn't remain tied to her apron strings."

Ayn's parting from Nathaniel and me was briefer than any of us had imagined. In the fall, she telephoned to announce happily that she and Frank would arrive in New York in three weeks. The day after she finished the chapter called "Atlantis," she had found she could not bear to remain in California any longer. That same day, she talked it over with Frank — it was the quickest decision they ever made — and by evening they were making arrangements to move back to New York.

She talked it over with Frank, she said. But there is little doubt that, as always when Ayn had come to a decision involving both of them but felt that Frank must be consulted, her conversation consisted of telling Frank that she had to return to New York, and that she knew he wanted it, too. And there is no doubt that Frank did not want it, although he did not tell her so. He had found, on the ranch, his first contentment in many years, and a work that he loved. He enjoyed working outdoors, he had made friends of his own among the men he hired to assist him, he took great pleasure in the physical beauty of California. New York offered him nothing. It was far too late for him to again consider an acting career; that possibility had ended when he and Ayn first left California in 1934; now, he was once more being torn away from a world and from goals that he had carved out for himself — and that were his one source of serious pleasure in what must have been, for him, the arid wilderness of Ayn's world — and he did not know what would ever again replace it. Ayn's decision to leave California ended a way of life that was precious to Frank, a way of life he lacked the strength to fight for. It was a tragedy built into their relationship from the beginning that it would not occur to Ayn that Frank's nod of assent to her decision was less than a wholehearted agreement. Or perhaps it did occur to her, somewhere in a part of her awareness, because for many years afterward she would talk of her love of New York and her loathing of California and say: "You feel the same way, don't you, Frank? Don't you?" She said it too often. She said it too insistently.

As Ayn and Frank made their plans to leave California, they asked Ruth and Buzzy Hill if they would move into the house; Ayn did not want to leave it unattended, nor rent it to strangers. In exchange for a nominal rent, the Hills agreed to care for the ranch and the grounds. They were to remain in the house they came to love for almost twenty-five years.

Once again, Ayn and Frank drove across the county. This time, they shared the ride with a passenger: a six-week old gray-and-white kitten, which a neighbor's cat had given birth to in the back seat of their car; they named the kitten "Frisco," in honor of Francisco d'Anconia.

On their arrival, Ayn told us, "Frank said that he thinks I decided to come to New York because of you two. It was an enormous contributing factor. I followed you across a continent." We began to visit more frequently than had been possible in California, often four or five evenings a week. Ayn once asked: "Don't you ever want to go out in the evenings, rather than spending it talking to two old fogies?" She said that our look of astonishment "told me that you would never prefer any lighter or less intellectual pleasures."

Ayn and Frank moved into an apartment in the Murray Hill area of the city, at 36 East Thirty-sixth Street. An eight-by-twelve-foot office, jammed tight with file cabinets and her battered desk, with a view of a few apartment buildings, replaced Ayn's luxurious, sun-filled California study — much to her delight. If she stood very close to the room's single window and craned her neck, she could see a part of the Empire State Building; she often stood there, her body angled in order to gaze at the building that gave her the reality of what she loved about the city: the man-made.

Back in New York after almost eight years in California, Ayn knew she would never build the county home that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for her, no matter how much money she earned. Never again would she choose to live away from the city.

Within a few weeks, the city became only a presence to be seen from the window of her study, as she resumed the task of writing. She drove herself on a ruthless schedule, often working seven days a week, for as many hours as she was mentally and physically able to continue. It was not unusual for her to eat dinner at midnight. She no longer kept servants except for a weekly cleaning woman, and, with her oddly old-fashioned view of a woman's appropriate behavior, insisted on preparing dinner for herself and Frank no matter how late she finished working or how exhausted she was. The results were not beneficent. Frank was too thin, and needed to eat on a regular schedule; he should not have waited until midnight for what was usually his only full meal of the day. But Ayn needed to feel that she was functioning as a woman, and Frank, as always, did not cross her.

During the next several years of concentrated work, Ayn went out only rarely. She grew progressively disillusioned with the political conservatives who had been her friends, progressively convinced that her philosophical differences with them were greater than she had known, and, as a result, progressively certain that she and they were not, as she once had thought, fellow fighters in the battle for political freedom. She continued to contend that the reason why a laissez-faire economy was being rejected had little or nothing to do with economics as such, that the proof of the practicality of economic freedom had long been available in an endless series of writings and in the reality of the astounding growth of the United States. That it had not convinced people that America was moving with ever increasing speed toward an ever more stifling welfare state, was a matter of morality. "If men feel they are faced with a choice between the moral and the practical," she said, "then proving to them that capitalism is practical will never motivate them. Men have always been willing to fight, and to die if necessary, for moral principles; they will not fight and die for economic principles. They will choose morality over practicality, whatever the cost. In order to turn the country to capitalism, one must first demonstrate the morality of capitalism." This was the view which she tried, in vain, to communicate to conservatives of her acquaintance, whom, she felt, wrote endlessly on political and economic subjects to no avail, since they had accepted an anti-capitalist morality, a religious morality, an altruist morality. This was the view which led her, finally, to conclude that conservatives were in no serious sense her allies, and that "conservative" was a term she could no longer apply to herself; she was, she said, "a radical for capitalism."

Occasionally, Ayn spent an evening with Henry and Frances Hazlitt or attended a gathering at the home of a conservative acquaintance. Margit von Mises was to recall an early meeting with Ayn, at which Nathaniel and I were present, at the Von Mises home. "She was very kind and very friendly, like every other guest. I wouldn't have said she was haughty or arrogant, and I liked her. But Frank was like a slave to her. He never said a word, he just watched her, and if she needed something he was there. When she wanted to smoke a cigarette, he was there with his lighter." 48

One evening, the Hazlitts invited Ayn and Frank to dinner, with Dr. and Mrs. von Mises. The evening was a disaster. It was the first time Ayn had discussed moral philosophy in depth with either of the two men. "My impression," she was to say, "was that Von Mises did not care to consider moral issues, and Henry was seriously committed to altruism... We argued quite violently. At one point, Von Mises lost his patience and screamed at me. We did not part enemies — except for Von Mises at the moment; about a year later, he and I met at a conservative dinner, and his wife made peace between us; neither of us wanted a feud, and we resumed a cordial relationship... I continued to see the Hazlitts, and I consider him a valuable writer on politics and economics, but my interest vanished when I realized that his philosophical base was thoroughly modern and pragmatic."

Ayn was to denounce conservatives — and liberals as well — several years later in an article on the evil of censorship. (She did not intend to include Ludwig von Mises or Henry Hazlitt as the type of conservative she was discussing, since both were opposed to censorship and any form of government control of ideas.) "Both camps," she wrote, "hold the same premise — the mind-body dichotomy — but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy. The conservatives want freedom to act in the material world; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man's spirit, i.e., man's consciousness; they advocate the State's right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education... But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property — they advocate it all the way down to total expropriation... each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises." Her article caused considerable furor among conservatives, by whom it was widely discussed. It marked her final break with her former allies.

In January of 1953, Ayn and Frank were matron of honor and best man at Nathaniel's and my marriage at the home of my relatives in White Plains. Nathaniel and I had met because of The Fountainhead; it seemed beautifully appropriate that Ayn and her husband should assist at the culmination of that meeting. When we arrived home and Nathaniel carried me over the threshold of our one-room apartment on Thirty-fifth Street, furnished with the few pieces we could afford to buy and with some of Ayn and Frank's old tables and chairs — it was to enter a garden. Frank had spent the day transforming the room into a bower of apple blossoms; blossoms swept across the ceiling and the walls, delicately scenting the room and creating an exquisite honeymoon cottage.

It was in part our enthusiasm over his floral arrangements that led Frank to take a job with a New York florist, where he sold and arranged flowers. For a while, he made the rounds of office buildings, suggesting that he be engaged to do weekly arrangements for the buildings' lobbies; although he lacked the drive to pursue the idea with the sustained effort it required, he was hired by a few buildings at a monthly fee. It was work that was important to him; it gave him some sense of self-esteem, some sense of carrying at least a part of his financial weight in his marriage.

Nathaniel and I continued introducing to Ayn young people we knew who shared our admiration for The Fountainhead and were eagerly interested in its ideas. Over the next several years, they attended regular Saturday evening discussions of philosophy at Ayn's home, as they began to be intellectually and emotionally absorbed in her world. She nicknamed the group "the class of '43" — because 1943 was the year The Fountainhead was published. Privately, we referred to ourselves as "the collective" — because the term was so absurdly the opposite of what we represented. While Ayn usually led the conversation, the collective was not a formal organization, nor a formal class; it was a group of friends who met together because of a common interest in ideas. Eventually, because of the group's questions about Atlas Shrugged, and because of its relevance to the issues being discussed, Ayn allowed them to read Atlas in manuscript.

The group represented diverse professions, and all were concerned with the application of the ideas of Atlas to their respective professions or fields. Alan Greenspan was an economic consultant. Leonard Peikoff was now a student of philosophy at NYU. Joan Mitchell (who had briefly been married to Alan Greenspan) was a graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU, as was Mary Ann Rukavina. Allan Blumenthal was a physician who for a few years abandoned medicine to pursue the career of a concert pianist. Harry Kalberman was an account executive at Merrill Lynch. Elayne Blumenthal, Nathaniel's sister, was a nurse. During the next few years, there were changes in the professional and personal lives of members of the group: Joan Mitchell and Allan Blumenthal were married, and Allan returned to the field of medicine to become a successful psychiatrist; Elayne Blumenthal and Harry Kalberman married and became the parents of a daughter named Kira after the heroine of We the Living; Leonard Peikoff received his doctorate in philosophy and began teaching; Alan Greenspan headed his own consultant firm and was establishing the reputation that would later make him adviser to three presidents.

As always, Ayn enjoyed her role as teacher, and enjoyed the new experience of being surrounded by a number of young people who shared her philosophy and were eager to learn more about it. Despite the grueling pressures of her work, she never canceled a Saturday night meeting. She later explained, "As you know, I barely went out at all, I didn't leave the apartment for weeks at a time, I couldn't leave my desk; I'd been on the book for so long, and I had to finish it; and the integrations required were so vast that I couldn't interrupt them. On the few occasions when there was someone I had to see, the emotional and intellectual switch would cost me two or three days' work, it took me that long to get back into my own universe. The collective was my only contact with intellectual activity in a form which made it possible for me to take my mind off the story, but which wasn't a break. We could talk all night, and I'd go back to my desk in the morning with an uninterrupted sense of life; our conversations belonged in the same world as the novel.

"The nights they all read the manuscript were an especially great pleasure, and it was a pleasure to be able to talk about the book on nonreading nights; the group were the ideal sort of readers. All of them had an undivided eagerness to understand. It was the only kind of social contact I could have had. They, in their separate ways, were the next generation, the dramatized, concrete reality of what the world would be like if people were beginning to accept my philosophy."

Ayn went on to say, "Of you, Barbara, and of Nathan, I expect world-shaking achievements. I do expect miracles. As far as you're concerned, Barbara, career-wise, the turning point was when I saw the first few pages of that short story which you started and didn't finish. It was those pages that convinced me that you're going to be a great writer, and you've been developing, since then, everything I saw in those pages... As to Nathan, I thought he was a genius from the first evening. I've never pronounced that judgment that immediately and objectively. For 'genius,' what's necessary is a creative, initiating intelligence, total independence, the firsthand look of a creative mind, a mind constantly active on its own power. Nathan is the man to whom I want to leave my intellectual inheritance, whom I want to be my intellectual heir."

I was then, and am now, grateful that such were Ayn's views. But there was in her a deep and unnamed need to see Nathaniel and me as she did: as astonishing, once-in-a-lifetime creatures. She had made us an integral part of her world; in the inner reaches of her safe haven only giants of the intellect, only giants of ability, could be admitted. Not even Ayn, with her perceptiveness and impressive powers of prediction, could see a "great writer" in the few pages of a short story I wrote; not even Ayn, with her special sensitivity to intellectual creativity, could see "genius" in a brilliant young man who as yet had not demonstrated his powers in action. Just as Ayn formed — as a novelist must — fantasy figures in her mind to whom she gave reality by means of fiction — just as she formed a fantasy replacement of her real self and demanded to be seen as the archetype of virtue and rationality — just as she formed a fantasy replacement of Frank in the image of her novelistic heroes — so she seemed to be forming fantasy figures of Nathaniel and of me and attempting to live within that artistic conversion.

In the fall of 1954, Ayn and Frank took their first trip out of the country since their marriage twenty-five years earlier. Nathaniel and I, with his sister Elayne, intended visiting his family in Toronto, and Ayn and Frank had agreed to join us — although Ayn was always nervous about traveling and particularly nervous about leaving the boundaries of the United States. She insisted that we drive; she had never flown, and despite writing with assured conviction and dramatic power about Dagny Taggart at the controls of her own airplane, she was frightened of flying.

It was an especially happy few days for Ayn. Away from her work, she seemed more relaxed than she had been in many months.

We headed back to New York on a chilly, sunlit Canadian day, with Frank driving, Ayn and Nathaniel beside him and Elayne and I in the back seat of the car. As the hours passed, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. I had the sense that, for the first time, I was observing something between Ayn and Nathaniel that was more than their usual enjoyment of each other's company. His arm was around her shoulders, her hand was in his, their heads were close together, they were talking and laughing with an intimacy that seemed to exclude the rest of us. Ayn often paid Nathaniel compliments, just as she did Frank, but now she was speaking of his intellectual achievements more extravagantly than ever before. An occasional glance passed between them that was too personal and that lasted too long, as if they were gazing deeply into each other and could not bear to look away. One could almost touch the vibration of the emotion that seemed to lock their eyes together, as they lapsed into silences that spoke more intimately than their words.

I did not want to see it. I did not want to believe it. But by the evening of that endless, terrible day, I could no longer doubt the evidence of my senses.

We were to stay overnight at a motel along the highway. We pulled up to our rooms at dusk. The darkness obscured Ayn and Nathaniel's expressions as they looked into each other's eyes and spoke quietly. But it was no longer necessary to see their faces or hear their words.

As Nathaniel and I entered our motel room, the explosion that had been building in me throughout the day erupted. "She's in love with you!" I shouted. "And you're in love with her!"

48 Margit von Mises, today still beautiful and blazing with energy, has written a biography of her late husband and is chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Nathaniel stared at me with a look of stunned disbelief, as if I had suddenly gone mad. "What in hell are you talking about?"

I told him what I was talking about — I stumbled out the words — I shouted and paced the room as tears of rage and pain streamed down my face — while Nathaniel listened and watched as if paralyzed with incredulity. "She's in love with you!" I said. "And you're in love with her! I know what I saw! I know what it means!"

"For God's sake, I love you!" he replied, as his own eyes grew wet. "She — she's twenty-five years older than I am!"

I stood my ground. I knew what I had seen. I knew what it meant. But Nathaniel's response was authentic: he had not yet grasped nor named nor understood the new and unexpected feelings that were growing within him. I have sometimes wondered, in the years since, what might have occurred — or not occurred — had I kept silent.

The anguished conversation continued until, both of us weary and heartsick, we agreed to try to sleep; we would talk when we reached home. All night, I lay sleepless beside Nathaniel, the scenes from the afternoon running ceaselessly through my mind as if all the cameras in the world had jammed and I was doomed forever to stare at the same insistent, tormenting repetitions.

The few remaining hours of the drive home were silent and strained. Ayn and Nathaniel barely looked at each other, barely spoke, as if they were reeling from the blow of an event they could not name to each other nor to themselves. It was impossible to know if Frank was aware of yesterday's events; there was nothing to be observed in his face. Elayne talked cheerfully, aware only of the unusual silence among people whose conversation was characteristically uninterrupted.

It was the next day that Ayn telephoned Nathaniel. She had to see him at once, she said. It was important that they talk.

The nightmare that was to last for fourteen years, and was finally to smash many hundreds of lives, had begun.

When he hurried to her apartment, Ayn asked at once, without context or preliminary, "Do you understand what happened to us two days ago?" Did he understand its meaning? Did he know its consequences? Her questions had the odd style of an interrogation, an interrogation that was pushing him too fast. He was only beginning to understand his feelings — and he was utterly unaware of their consequences. He knew only that this was the woman he had idolized since childhood, since he had first read The Fountainhead — this was the woman whose spirit was formed in the image of the noblest of his values — this was the woman who saw him as a man of genius, who had given him a new, heady sense of his destiny — this was the woman who had ended his own deep alienation and had thrown wide the doors to a world of purpose, achievement and joy — this was the woman who was the symbol and the embodiment of that world — this was the woman toward whom he was now feeling strange and troubling emotions and whose passionate dark eyes were speaking to him of love.

And he was the boy who, through all the years that he was growing up, had been rejected by the girls he approached: he was too intellectual, he wasn't interested in parties or athletics, he frightened them with his intensity, they were bored by his philosophical conversations — he was the boy who, finally, had felt rejected by the wife he loved. And now, in answer to those years of rejection, Ayn Rand — the consummate hero-worshipper — had fallen in love with him. Intoxicated with the miracle that was happening to him, he answered her questions with the words: "I love you."

Many years later, Nathaniel was to say, "I know, in retrospect, that if she had let the matter die after the drive from Toronto, I would have let the matter die. But once we had spoken, it was too late."

It was a few days later that Ayn asked to see me. Nathaniel had gone ahead. In the living room of her apartment, Ayn and Nathaniel sat together on the couch, their hands clasped, an ashen-faced Frank half hidden in an overstuffed chair. Ayn said simply, almost matter-of-factly, that she and Nathaniel had fallen in love: it was no longer the love of a teacher and her student, it was no longer the love of intellectual comrades, it was no longer the love of close friends. It was the romantic, sexual love of a man and a woman. Her voice seemed to go on endlessly as Frank and I listened, stricken, grasping only a random sentence, a disconnected thought here and there. "You know what I am, you know what Nathan is... By the total logic of who we are — by the total logic of what love and sex mean — we had to love each other... It's not a threat to you, Frank, or to you, Barbara... It's something separate, apart from both of you and from our normal lives... Nathan has always represented the future to me — but now it's a future that exists in the present... Whatever the two of you may be feeling, I know your intelligence, I know you recognize the rationality of what we feel for each other, and that you hold no value higher than reason... There's nothing in our feeling that can hurt or threaten either of you... There's nothing that alters my love for my husband, or Nathan's love for his wife..."

The room seemed to be spinning, and Ayn's insistent voice was coming from some vast, lonely distance. Frank's face had remained expressionless, but he was paler still. I was the first to speak. "No!" I said. "I understand what the two of you feel. I think I even understand why you have to feel it. But it will be without me! I won't be any part of this." For the first time, Frank spoke. He jerked upright in his chair, and his voice was ferocious as he said, "And I won't be part of it." Now it was Nathaniel's face that was ashen. He walked to me and took my hand, as Ayn sat motionless. "What Ayn told you is true," he said. "There's no threat to you. You know what you are to me, what you've always been to me. But I love Ayn, too. It's real. We have to work this out. We can't run from reality."

Ayn's husky voice — hadn't it always been the voice of logic, of reason, of morality? — continued as if no one had spoken, and her marvelous eyes seemed to probe into Frank's brain and mine. "We're not suggesting an affair. Both of you must understand that... We want it, but too much is at stake, and it's not the only important thing... Besides, the age difference is far too great... We've decided that we need to spend time alone, one afternoon and one evening a week, we want time together, for ourselves... That's all..."

Frank turned to look at me, a faint touch of relief on his face. They weren't talking about a sexual affair... not yet. This was something we could live with, perhaps. We could try. There was a long, heavy silence. Then I nodded my head. "I'll agree to that." Ayn turned to her husband. "Frank?" "I agree," he answered.

For the next few weeks — while Ayn spent one afternoon and one evening each week alone with Nathaniel — Frank and I tried to prepare for what we knew was coming. And it came. And we were not prepared.

The four of us sat in Ayn and Frank's apartment, as she discussed all the reasons why she and Nathaniel could no longer keep their original agreement — and all the reasons why Frank and I should understand their desire for a sexual relationship, and accept it — and all the reasons why the four of us could and should remain loving friends — and all the reasons why Ayn and Frank and Nathaniel and I could and should remain, respectively, loving husband and wife. As we talked hour after hour, there were moments when it seemed as if all of us had stumbled into a home for the insane — and there were other moments when Frank and I remembered that this was Ayn, her magical eyes had not lost their tenderness, and this was Nathaniel, and we knew who and what they were, they were sane and reasonable and just, they were the people we loved, and this quiet living room in New York City, where Frank was serving coffee and Frisco was tumbling across the floor with his ball, was not a chamber of horrors.

The conversations and the variations on the themes already sounded went on, day after day and week after week. "This isn't intended to be forever," Ayn kept saying. "Perhaps a year or so, that's all. If Nathan and I were the same age, it would be different. But we aren't the same age. An affair between us can only be temporary... This is something out of space and out of time. If the four of us were lesser people, it could never have happened and you could never accept it. But we're not lesser people... It's right and rational that Nathan and I should feel as we do for each other. But it's right and rational that a sexual affair between us can last only a few years. I could never be an old woman pursuing a younger man..."

Nothing was to happen without our knowledge and consent, Ayn and Nathaniel told us. Nothing was to be hidden, there were to be no lies. After each discussion, Ayn would continue talking alone with Frank, and Nathaniel and I would return home to lapse into the long, empty silences that were the first since we had met. In the void of those silences, I tried to make sense of the senseless, as Frank was trying to do. In retrospect, it remains astonishing that there was even a question in Frank's mind or mine about what action to take; in retrospect, it remains astonishing that even the power of Ayn's personality could cause us to consider agreeing to an affair; but it was as if she had cast her spell long ago, and now it was too late to flee from its web.

Ayn's motivation appeared to Frank and to me as crystalline in its purity and clarity as the functioning of her mind. She had named her motivation, and we accepted her explanation. We had no real understanding of the psychological complexities and the desperate needs that drew her to Nathaniel. The need to live as a woman — so unfulfilled in her marriage — had at last burst forth. She could no longer live only as "Mrs. Logic." In Atlas Shrugged, through the relationship of Dagny and Galt, she was creating the "ideal" romance. She could no longer bear to create it only in fiction. She had to have it in her life — she had to have it before it was too late — she had to have it now, that feeling she had longed for since she discovered Cyrus in The Mysterious Valley, that passionate feeling she had given to Kira, to Leo, to Andrei, to Dominique, to Roark, to Rearden, to Francisco, to Dagny, to Galt. She had to live it, if only once, if only for a year — if only for a day. And her time was running out. She was fifty years old. The passion, the capacity for joy, the hero-worship, the violent sexuality, the longing for submission to a stronger force, that had found its outlet only in her novels, was screaming to be lived before it was too late, and could no longer be denied.

She could not find what she needed with a man who was a contemporary and an equal. Such a man might challenge the whole structure of the fantasy in which she progressively had begun to live — the fantasy in which she was flawless, serene, morally and intellectually superior to those around her, the apotheosis of rationality, the woman without self-doubts or inner conflicts. And so she chose a boy — a brilliant, talented boy, but still a boy, who posed no threat, who revered her and would confirm the fantasy picture she could allow no one to threaten. She chose him as, twenty-five years before, she had chosen Frank.

But Nathaniel offered her something that Frank, now totally defeated by her strength, his identity submerged in hers, could no longer offer. Ayn's respect for Nathaniel, despite his youth and inexperience, the respect which from the beginning of their friendship was not solely for his intellectual precocity but for an attractive, even irresistible man — his face "was completely the face of my type of man," she had often said — had created a new confidence in him. Of all the young men Ayn knew — and the men who were not young — he was the only one who treated her as a human being and a woman, who knew and expressed that at times she needed a shoulder to lean on, that she could be fragile and hurt and soft, that she needed emotional as well as intellectual understanding; he was the only one who challenged her intellectually and, in the realm of psychology, was her teacher. She had long ago ceased to expect it. She could not renounce it. "A soul cannot live without fuel," she had said. She would live the great romance she wrote about, she and Nathaniel would be Dagny Taggart and John Galt but with a crucial difference that would serve as her safety net: Nathaniel would be the hero-worshipper, and she the immaculate hero.

Nathaniel had no power to resist the force that was Ayn Rand. Her passion for him was a triumph beyond any he had ever dreamed. It was a triumph that ennobled him, it was the proof of his worth, of his virtue, of the greatness that was to be his future — and he knelt as if before a queen to receive the gift of knighthood. It was more than knighthood, it was a morganatic marriage, and he was raised high to sit on the throne beside her.

Throughout the nightmare of the years that were to follow, it sometimes appeared that Nathaniel, despite his protestations, did not return the intensity of Ayn's passionate sexual feeling for him, and that his love for me was more real than his romantic devotion to Ayn. Many years later, he said that it was true, and that he had fought against it throughout the course of their love affair. By the madness of a coincidence that was not a coincidence at all, he and I were in the identical position: I believed that I should love Nathaniel, that I should feel an overwhelming sexual response that I did not feel; he believed that he should love Ayn, that he should feel an overwhelming sexual response that he did not feel. He never named or hinted it to Ayn. Not until it was much too late.

Frank and I met together often during the long weeks of conversations with Ayn and Nathaniel. His silent, helpless suffering was terrible to see. We talked for hours — predominantly, I talked — while he listened as I tried to make the irrational turn rational for both of us. I knew, very early, that I would agree to the affair; I knew that Frank would also agree. I thought I could survive it — perhaps even find some peace of mind — and I wanted Frank to survive it, too. We went for long walks, while I echoed Ayn's words: it isn't a threat to us; it will only be temporary; it makes sense that they feel as they do and want what they want; if it were otherwise, they would not be the people they are. We had accepted the validity of Ayn's theory of romantic and sexual love — we could not turn against what we believed to be true.

Ayn had taught that one's own emotional context is irrelevant in the face of knowledge of the right; personal pain is not in itself an appropriate motive for action. In hindsight, looking back on those anguished days, it seems clear that Frank and I were struggling, as we had learned from Ayn to do, to ignore our own personal contexts; we were struggling to be the objective observers of four lives, deciding what was right; that two of those lives were ours, that we were suffering, was irrelevant to the justice of the situation. One day, I said, "Frank, I've asked myself what I would do if I could simply push a button, and none of this would have happened — Nathan and Ayn would never have met, never have fallen in love. I wouldn't push it. I want to live in the kind of world where people like that exist, and find each other, and love each other. I hate what's happening, but I don't want the alternative." Frank listened, and sometimes he nodded — and sometimes he exploded with rage and swore he'd leave Ayn and never see her again — and sometimes his eyes filled with tears and he said only, "No. No. No..." — and sometimes we clutched each other’s hands and walked silently through the winter streets.

Again in hindsight, it is apparent that both Frank and I were carrying within our psychologies a lethal combination that disarmed us and left us helpless to leave Ayn, to leave Nathaniel, to leave the whole destructive situation, or to fight it and refuse our agreement. That combination was idealism — and guilt.

Ayn had established herself among her young friends, through the rigor of her argumentation and the forcefulness of her personality, as the epitome and the standard of the human potential, of everything we were struggling to become and everything we loved. I felt that she had given me so much, she had pulled me out of the intellectual morass of adolescence and had helped me to make sense of a complex, confusing world, she had given me friendship, and knowledge, and love. She had opened wide the doors of her own shining world to admit me, she had consistently encouraged me to achieve my most treasured goals, in my work, in my person, in my life; she had healed my wounds and ended my lonely distance from the world around me; she had taught me to exchange the leaking life raft on which I'd floundered for a sturdy, high-speed cruiser; she had shown me the grandeur and the limitless possibilities of existence. It was unthinkable that I should interfere with her happiness or that I should run from the sight of it. She had given me the possibility of mine.

Even so many years later, I cannot judge the precise extent to which my sense of guilt toward Nathaniel aided in forming my decision, except to know that it was significant. Since our marriage, although I had fought to change whatever in my psychology was preventing me from giving him the response he had a right to expect, I had failed.

Nathaniel was painfully unfulfilled. One day, I still believed, it would be different. But it was not different yet. If he could find, with Ayn, the romantic and sexual fulfillment he sought, then my sanction would be the form in which I did have the power to make his life happier. I did not know that I was torturing myself in the name of a concept of the source and meaning of sexual love that I would finally reject as false to the infinite complexities and needs of the human psyche.

Frank's motivation seemed to be almost identical with mine. He, too, revered Ayn; he, too, believed that the love between Ayn and Nathaniel was inevitable; he, too — the man who rescued sick chickens and left his peacocks free to fly — could not bring suffering to the woman he had married. And he, too, was tormented by the guilt of failure, the guilt of not being the hero he believed Ayn deserved — the man of productive achievement, of limitless ambition, of unique, self-generated intellect — the hero who would match her heroism.

Frank was further disarmed by a factor he alluded to only much later. Throughout their marriage, Ayn had been the center of his life and his motive force and his purpose; his life belonged to her. He had few skills, no trade, no profession, no money of his own. Twelve years later, after a violent quarrel with Ayn, Frank angrily stamped out of the living room. I followed him to the bedroom and found him sitting quietly, a look of uncontested anguish on the still beautiful planes of his face. As I tried to comfort him, he grasped my arm so tightly that I winced. "I want to leave her," he said, his voice a hiss of rage and despair. "I want to leave her!" His hand fell from my arm, and I could barely hear his words as his voice dropped and he turned his face away to look into a void. "But where would I go?... What would I do?..."

Together, walking through the streets of New York, Frank and I named the decision that I had known I would make and that he had made twenty-five years ago, on the day that he and Ayn stood in a county courthouse and listened to the words that pronounced them man and wife. We would agree to Ayn and Nathaniel having an affair.

And so it began, that afternoon and evening of sex and love that Ayn and Nathaniel spent together each week. And so we all careened toward disaster.

As I look back on the beginnings, I think of a question I have asked myself many times in the years since. How did Ayn, who had lived in sophisticated cities all her life and mingled with worldly, sophisticated people, not know that the course on which she was embarking could lead only to tragedy? Surely, by the age of fifty, one has seen enough of life and its complexities to have some intimation of what was to follow. Surely, she had lived long enough to know that she was presiding at the death of two marriages and at the corruption of four lives in an ugly tangle of deceit and emotional savaging and pain. But Ayn was a strikingly unsophisticated woman. She had had little personal experience of the world, except as it related to her career; with the exception of Frank, I believed, she had had no personal experience in intimate relationships with men. She had fought valiant battles, she had endured revolution and dictatorship and the death of her family and loneliness and joy and defeat and triumph — yet she had lived an oddly sheltered life, locked within the confines of her special view of reality. To Ayn, other people were not fully real; they were moving and breathing abstractions, they were, for good or for ill, the embodiments of moral and psychological principles. They were not formed of flesh and blood and bone and sinew; they were formed of the ideas that moved them. It was how she saw herself; it was how she saw everyone else.

And if she should have known what awaited Frank, and Nathaniel, and herself, and me, if she could have known, if some hidden part of her suspected it but kept silent — if she was the guiltiest of the four of us, in a situation where no one was blameless — then it was she, in the end, who would pay the highest price of all.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The timing of the love affair between Ayn and Nathaniel could not have been more unfortunate. During this first extended period in her life when she had unlimited time to devote herself to her novel, without the interruption of other literary assignments or the need to earn money, Ayn was writing the major and climactic philosophical speech of Atlas Shrugged. As the world races toward economic collapse, John Galt gives a radio address in which he explains his strike and presents the synopsized total of the philosophy of Objectivism.

It was the earlier speeches in Atlas — by Rearden, by Francisco, by Dagny — that had always created the greatest literary difficulties for Ayn. The problem had not been conceptual; she knew what issues she wanted to present. The problem had been to make her points clearly but not to lead the reader, or the characters who had not yet joined the strike, too quickly to the solution of the mystery of a disintegrating world — not to let them discover too soon that they were witnessing the strike of the world's productive geniuses. Sometimes, she would have to rewrite a speech five or six times, carefully measuring what could and what could not yet be said, while at the same time properly covering an intellectual issue.

She had known, long before she approached Galt's speech, that it would be the hardest challenge of Atlas Shrugged. It was to sum up, in essentials, all of the issues of the novel. But as she approached it, it kept growing in scale in her mind until she recognized that she could not predict how difficult it would be or how long it would take. And until she had finished the speech, she could not guess how long she would need to finish the book. She refused to submit the manuscript to publishers before Galt's speech was written; only then, she knew, could she estimate the time the final chapters would require.

When she began writing Galt's speech, Ayn thought that the purely conceptual planning had been done, that she knew precisely the issues she would cover. But she found that new thinking was required and new ideas had to be included. The most notable was her theory of the origin of values, to which she had given only cursory consideration before. The statement of that theory was one of Ayn's outstanding intellectual achievements; in a few paragraphs in a novel, she took a major step

toward solving the problem that has haunted philosophers since the time of Aristotle and Plato: the relationship of "ought" and "is" — the question of in what manner moral values can be derived from facts.

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence — and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms," she wrote. "The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death... It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil... Man has no automatic course of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives, by means of volitional choice... Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal... A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

In writing the speech, Ayn was attempting to complete the task she had begun in We the Living: the destruction of the altruist morality and the demonstration of a morality of reason. "My morality," Galt says, "the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists — and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason — Purpose — Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge — Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve — Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living."

Ayn had expected that it would require three or four months to write the speech. It required two full years.

"The organization was a major difficulty," she said. "And the difficulty of legalistic definition, of covering all the loopholes and all the possible objections, the arguing without sounding like it was arguing. Galt had to present his explanations as if they were assertions; he wouldn't be debating with his opponents... I first started writing the theoretical part of the speech beginning with metaphysics, then epistemology, then morality; that was the easiest way to do it. But then I realized, after a lot of pages, that you can't do that in fiction, you have to start with the presentation of the morality, which is the real theme of the book. I had to change the whole order, then sometimes spend weeks getting the original mental set out of my mind, then start rewriting."

The work was nerve-racking. The most difficult part was the need to impose a fictional form on philosophy. "I had to keep remembering the emotional part of the presentation," Ayn explained, "and to make it a rousing speech, and that kept getting in the way of the theoretical presentation. My assignment was to present the whole of my philosophy briefly and logically; to have to worry about emotions was pure hell. When I'd arrive at especially good formulations, that was a pleasure, but it was only drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture. Frank said it was the worst he ever saw me go through."

The sixty-page speech was the culmination of a lifetime of thinking, a lifetime of devotion to philosophic truth, a lifetime of flogging her mind, her spirit and her body to do more and still more, to delve deeper, to work harder, to push to the limit of her endurance and beyond. Ayn suffered both physical and mental agonies in her struggle. Sometimes Frank would find her slumped over her desk as if she were unable ever to rise again; she would emerge from her study with new deep lines on her brow and her body sagging with weariness. At other times, she projected an emotional tension that was painful to see; she could not eat, or sleep, or even talk. She was reaching the limit of her endurance.

The emotional effects on Ayn of these two years of "pure hell" were destructive. As her literary and philosophical talents reached their zenith, her personal attitudes were falling into disrepair. The long period of unremitting intellectual effort and its accompanying emotional and physical tensions profoundly exacerbated the conflicts and unidentified self-doubts, the lack of sensitivity to the contexts of others, the need for control, the fears, the alienation and suspiciousness, the judgmental explosiveness, the tendency to self-aggrandizement, that were a part of her character.

Adding to the exacerbation was the fact that she had spent her days, for many years, giving life to her ideal human beings and her ideal world, making real, for herself and her readers, her vision of the human potential. That potential flamed from the manuscript pages growing on her desk — and it made the rest of reality unendurable. She left her study each night — she left Galt and Dagny and Rearden and Francisco — to glance through newspapers and magazines and listen to news reports that brought word of the country she loved continuing its headlong hurtle toward catastrophe, toward an ever-growing welfarism, and she wondered whether anything could now stop it. She left Atlantis each day to deal with her disappointment in Isabel Paterson, the one friend who had been important to her, in Albert Mannheimer, whom she had struggled for so long to help and who had not contacted her since her departure from California, in Thadeus Ashby, whom she learned had now joined the religious right, in the conservatives such as Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises, whom she felt were no longer allies she could count on except in the narrow realm of politics and economics, even in William Mullendore, her favorite of the California conservatives, who appeared to be toying with Eastern mysticism.

As the last of her powers of endurance were spent, as her nervous state grew more jagged and fragile, the bitterness and pain in her personality began to take the ascendency. As always, her pain was converted into anger, the only means she knew by which to deal with it. The lighter, gayer aspects of her personality — the element in Ayn that responded to her special music and danced to its strains — began to be buried somewhere out of sight and out of reach.

It was only the collective whom, she felt, offered her the sight of her own world. "Our conversations," she had said, "belong in the same realm as the novel." As time went by, others were joining the group around her, as The Fountainhead continued its astonishing odyssey and attracted still more young people to Ayn. Some, who lived in other cities — my brother Sidney and his wife, Miriam, and Nathaniel's two sisters and their husbands, Florence and Hans Hirschfeld and Reva and Sholey Fox — were present only at irregular intervals. And what Ayn called "the junior collective" began to form: younger people who had contacted one or another of her friends to express their interest in learning more about Ayn's ideas. Ayn and the various "collectives" were becoming a small society. Her dependence on them for the spiritual fuel provided by her sense that they were a part of her world, markedly increased as they became, except for a few rare evenings that she spent with others, her only social contacts in a life steadily growing more reclusive, a life lived within the boundaries of Atlas Shrugged. Her dependence became dangerous, both for her and for them. Her need to know that they would never betray her, that they would remain unfailingly and unswervingly the consistent denizens of her world, became a demand impossible to meet. Despite Ayn's affection for her friends, her relationship with them had always been marked, and marred, by the absolutism of her moral condemnations of any deviation from the principles of Objectivism. Now, as if to clasp them still more tightly to the universe of Atlas Shrugged, she began to demand fidelity even in those areas that she herself had defined as subjective.

She had said, and continued to say, that the validity of one's musical tastes could not be philosophically demonstrated: not enough was understood about the mechanism by which music was interpreted by the brain and translated into emotional responses. Yet if one of her young friends responded as she did to Rachmaninoff, or especially to her lighter musical loves, she attached deep significance to their affinity. On the other hand, if a friend did not respond as she did, she left no doubt that she considered that person morally and psychologically reprehensible. One evening, a friend remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss. When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction becoming increasingly typical, "Now I understand why he and I can never be real soul mates. The distance in our sense of life is too great." Often, she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks. If she was now demanding adherence even in areas of subjective preferences, her demands in realms she deemed rationally demonstrable became obsessive.

Ayn's childhood division of the world into the white of good and the black of evil, with no shades of gray between them, was not lessening in this difficult period of her life, but increasing. Innumerable times, her shocked friends witnessed her verbal flaying of those whom she felt had failed her and failed her standards — a painter in whose work she saw a "malevolence" he was not working to correct — a journalist who she believed had compromised his principles — a student of philosophy who had been pleasant to a socialist professor who could advance his career — an economist who had not defended her publicly when she was attacked. They saw her denouncing people as evil, rejecting them, breaking off relationships of many years' standing. She seemed able to end relationships without suffering pain; during the life of a friendship, she was predominantly focused on its cerebral content, not on its emotional meaning to her, and thus could sever it without full awareness of what she was abandoning.

It was her new theorizing in psychology that became the weapon that Ayn began to use as an inquisitor might use fire and the rack.

Nathaniel had been developing a concept of human motivation that Ayn considered a major step forward in her understanding of the mechanisms of the human psyche. He called it "social metaphysics." He was to write on the subject: "A man of self-esteem and sovereign consciousness deals with reality, with nature, with an objective universe of facts; he holds his mind as his tool of survival and develops his ability to think. But the man who has abandoned his mind lives, not in a universe of facts, but in a universe of people, people, not facts, are his reality; people, not reason, are his tool of survival. It is with them that he has to deal, it is on them that his consciousness must focus, it is they whom he must understand or please or placate or deceive or maneuver or manipulate or obey.

"It is his success at this task that becomes his gauge of his fitness to exist — of his competence to live... To the man I am describing, reality is people: in his mind, in his thinking, in the automatic connections of his consciousness, people occupy the place which, to the mind of a rational man, is occupied by reality..."

Nathaniel was giving a psychological interpretation to the Peter Keatings of the world, in conjunction with Ayn's philosophical interpretation. As with many of Ayn's own interpretations, it represents a valuable description of an aspect of inner behavior, but it is not a fundamental motivational principle; it names how some people behave, but it does not name the underlying sources and base of such behavior.

Nevertheless, the diagnosis of "social metaphysics" became in Ayn's hands, and in Nathaniel's, both a means of accounting for human "irrationality" and a means of exercising control. The world, before divided into the Roark’s and the Keatings, now was divided into the rationalists and the social metaphysicians — with the rationalists forming a minuscule portion of that division. When applied to one or other of Ayn's friends or close acquaintances, the diagnosis of social metaphysician — announced with the gravity of a medical doctor pronouncing a verdict of cancer, to which was added a moral opprobrium appropriate to a volitionally chosen cancer of the spirit — became a nightmare to be avoided at all costs. And once that verdict was pronounced, the consequences were clear: hours and weeks, even years, of psychological consultation with Nathaniel in an effort to rid one's spirit of the demon into whose hands one had given it; hours and weeks, even years, of work and thought and struggle to perform the necessary act of exorcism.

But was Ayn not writing — as Galt describes the world he and his strikers will create — "Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle, as does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? ... do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide."

No one, however young and inexperienced, would have accepted so cavalier and damning an explanation of his psychological state as social metaphysics, had the source of the explanation not been Ayn Rand. In Ayn's own terms, in the terms of one of the most important concepts of Atlas Shrugged, it was "the sanction of the victim" that gave her the power to inflict such damage: only her virtues made it possible. It was the same intellect that was presenting a comprehensive world view that made sense of human existence, the same intellect that was defining a moral code that made achievement and joy possible, the same intellect that was creating the inspirational fictional characters they wished to emulate — the same mesmerizing power to convince that had told them that their desire to live for their own happiness was the highest of virtues, that their most exalted goals were possible on earth — the same overwhelming breadth of mind that never made a philosophical statement without the backing of an endless list of logical justifications — the same towering intelligence whose derivation of morality from metaphysics they were reading with a sense of ecstatic release from the amorality they had been taught in their classrooms — the same exquisite acuity that had lifted them up to the heights of an exalted understanding — that was now dashing them down to the depths of tortured self-doubt and defining them as "social metaphysicians." They felt themselves on a roller coaster of conflicting messages and contradictory emotions. But they could not reject such a denunciation out of hand. It had to be taken seriously. Particularly when it was echoed — more often initiated — by the psychologist whom Ayn called a genius and had named her "intellectual heir."

A highly intelligent young woman of twenty, a dancer and a member of the "junior collective," had personal problems in her romantic relationship with a friend of Ayn's. Ayn, Frank, her lover, and I were present when Nathaniel called her in for a discussion of her psychology. Such evenings were becoming a commonplace in Ayn's dealings. The evidence was presented, the diagnosis of social metaphysician was made. In a paper she later wrote in an attempt to organize her thoughts, the young woman said — in an echo of others who felt as she did — "I have not been this unhappy since I was a kid, when I used to look out the window and calm down by watching the stars. But then I had the promise of a brilliant, beautiful future. Now I have the echo of an empty, futile past... Everything is gone. Everything... I began to see the pattern as Nathan went through example after example of what I had done. It was when he said 'and your self-esteem is tied to what other people think of you,* that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what was being said to me — the worst degradation, the worst muck. I had betrayed everything that has ever meant anything to me... He said I could work to correct it and become a proper human being, or be like the people I hate for the rest of my life... I'm afraid to care about anything, because I'm afraid I'll get all mixed up again. I have to find out if it's safe to care about something again. I don't know any longer what I want in a career, in anything — it doesn't seem to matter, and I'm afraid of the day when it is going to matter... Yet I will always remember the day I met Ayn as one of the happiest days of my life..."

That evening, Ayn exhibited a lack of human empathy that was appalling. As Nathaniel, who conducted the conversation — it had the aura of a trial, except that the accused had no defense attorney — was pointing out the young woman's psychological deficiencies, he occasionally made some especially compelling point, succinct and well-phrased. Each time, Ayn chuckled with appreciation and clapped her hands in applause.

The girl, like others of Ayn's friends caught in similar situations, was to find a means of ridding herself of guilt. The means, as her paper indicates, was emotional repression. "I'm afraid to care about anything, because I'm afraid I'll get all mixed up again." She, like they, began the process of changing from an open, spontaneous, enthusiastic young woman into a rigid thinking machine. It was done as an act of self-preservation: one must not experience emotions that might brand one as immoral.

The distance between the self-created myth of Ayn Rand and the real woman who lived and acted outside the world of her study, was growing steadily greater. In retrospect, it is evident that none of Ayn's young friends, including Nathaniel and myself, were helping Ayn to deal with the tensions that drove her. No one achieves power who does not seek it; had she not insisted upon being viewed as a goddess, she would not have been so viewed. Nevertheless, the adulation she received was a great disservice to her. She needed to be challenged when she applauded a young woman's agony — or when she spoke of Aristotle as the only thinker in history from whom she had had anything to learn — or when she demanded, in her affair with Nathaniel, that a set of rules be held as applicable to her that were not applicable to others — or when she flew into a rage, as she did with her attorney, Pincus Berner, at his suggestion that everyone, including herself, had at some time done what they knew to be wrong — or when she made it implicitly clear that any criticism of her was an act of treason to reason and morality. But had the attitude of her friends been different, it is likely that she would have renounced them and surrounded herself with people who would give her what she needed. It was not chance that her chosen friends were so many years younger than she — as it was not chance that her lover was so many years younger than she.

The sexual affair between Ayn and Nathaniel had begun early in 1955. Years later, Nathaniel would acknowledge that their romance was not truly lived in reality. Rather, it was theater — no, not theater, it was a scene from a novel by Ayn Rand, full of sexual dominance and surrender and the uncontrollable passion of two noble souls. Ayn, so desperate to live in the real world, not merely in her novels and in a future that never came — could not, after all, be content with reality. Once more, she was struggling to turn base metals — the painful, unsatisfactory fact of a woman having an adulterous affair with the too, young husband of her closest friend — into the gold of a great and exalted romance. She succeeded in her fiction. She did not succeed in her life.

The practical realities under which the affair was conducted seemed designed to destroy whatever authentic joy might have been possible between Ayn and Nathaniel. Despite his pleas, Ayn refused to allow him to take a small apartment where they could meet; she was terrified at the possibility of being recognized if she were seen entering a man's apartment. She said that she would not be ashamed — she would be proud — if their story were featured on the front pages of the worlds newspapers; but everything that was conventional in her silently said the opposite. Frank, Nathaniel, and I were sworn to lifelong secrecy about the affair; it was too personal, too precious to be shared with an irrational world.

Her fear created a situation more terrible for Frank than the affair itself. Twice a week over a period of years, knowing that Nathaniel was soon to arrive, Frank left the apartment. Sometimes, he was a few minutes late in leaving, and he would usher Nathaniel in, chat with him while Ayn finished dressing, kiss Ayn good-bye and listen to her admonitions to "Be careful" — be careful crossing the street, be careful to keep his coat warmly buttoned, be careful to be home in time for dinner — and then depart, leaving his wife to spend a few hours of love in his bedroom.

Frank was always vague about what he did when Ayn and Nathaniel were together. "I went for a walk," he would say. Or, "I saw a movie." Or, "I dropped into the bar at the Mayfair Hotel for an hour or two; I know some of the men who go there, and we talked." It was not until years later that the truth about how Frank spent that afternoon and evening each week was revealed. He did go for a walk — just as far as the bar he frequented. He did visit with some of the men at the bar: they were his drinking partners. Frank had always enjoyed a drink or two in the evening — his powerful martinis were guaranteed to elicit gasps at the first sip by an unsuspecting guest — but now his drinking began to be a way of life, an escape from an intolerable reality.

A friend of Frank's — now a recovered alcoholic — who sometimes joined him for the drink or two which became three and four and five and more, was convinced in later years that Frank was an alcoholic. None of the friends Frank shared with Ayn were aware, during these years, that he drank to excess. But much later, his drinking was to become a painful and explosive source of friction between Ayn and Frank.

Perhaps some part of Ayn's shocking insensitivity toward Frank in matters involving her relationship with Nathaniel was, subconsciously, a means of punishing the husband who had failed her expectations. And perhaps a part of it was the hope that he would, at last, assert himself — that he would say: Enough! and forbid her the relationship. Apart from the indignity visited upon Frank by the private meetings in his home, there was, when the four of us were together, an element of flaunting their sexual feeling in Ayn and Nathaniel's manner, an unnecessary touching and hand-holding and gazing into each other’s eyes, as if they were throwing their passion into Frank's face and mine, as if they were saying: you would not give me what I wanted, but now I have it despite you.

Throughout her marriage, Ayn, in her search for her own femininity, had given the appearance of deferring to Frank's judgment and preferences, saying, "May I do this, Frank?" — or, "Frank won't permit me to do that" — or, "Do you agree, Frank?" — or "Frank insisted" or "Frank refused" or "Frank wants" or "Frank demanded." Now, this dependency, more apparent than real, was transferred to Nathaniel's shoulders: Ayn constantly solicited his agreement, his sanction, his opinion, as if leaning on his knowledge and support; she praised him for the least accomplishment in extravagant and loving terms; she continually announced and stressed what she had learned from him about psychology, calling him her intellectual heir, stating that he was the spiritual equal of her heroes. Remarkably, among her closest circle of friends, only one, Joan Mitchell Blumenthal, wondered about the real nature of the relationship between Ayn and Nathaniel. The answer may be that it was inconceivable to them that the relationship could be sexual — and so it was not conceived.

The circumstances surrounding the liaison inevitably had their effects on Nathaniel as well as on Frank. It was not possible for Nathaniel to enter Ayn and Frank's apartment, talk with Frank, say goodbye to him when he left, wonder where he would go and what he was feeling — then turn to Ayn to see her drawn and tense and weary — and then move with her to the bedroom to become an inspired young lover. There were, of course, exceptions, when their deep feeling for each other was a stronger, more compelling force than any obstacles to its expression, and they could be simply a man and woman in love. Frank had never been a man of intense sexuality, and in their marriage it was Ayn who was predominantly the sexual initiator. Now her lover was a man of youth and vigor — a man wise enough to give her the sense of herself as a woman for which she had always yearned: the sense of being helplessly in the control of a male force stronger than her will.

Rut Nathaniel was struggling to deal with a deeply ingrained emotional repression which always had interfered with the spontaneous expression of his feelings. And the last of Ayn's patience and capacity for dogged endurance had gone into the manuscript pages on her desk. It was unbearable to her that he, the best gift the world had offered her, should now refuse her what she so desperately needed. She began reproving him for what she termed his "emotional distance," for his lack of verbal, easy communication of his love, for his periods of coldness and emotional withdrawal which raised frightening doubts of the authenticity of his love. She never said that the doubts were hers, the problem was his; it was not the result of the numbing existential circumstances, of her husband roaming the streets, of his wife sitting miserably at home, of the secrecy of their meetings; nor was it the result of her own ambivalence toward emotional intimacy, her simultaneous longing for it and dread of the self-confrontation that it entailed. It was the result of Nathaniel's psychological problems. As her reproaches escalated, his emotional distance inevitably grew more marked; each week, he entered her apartment wondering how he would fail her this time.

Often, Nathaniel would arrive home from a meeting with Ayn looking grim and tormented. He would say that Ayn had been furious with him — that they had spent their hours together analyzing his psychological problems and the reasons for his failure of spontaneous emotional communication. Many times, still angry, she telephoned him when he reached home, scolding, accusing, denouncing. Immersed in the insoluble problems of our own disintegrating relationship, neither Nathaniel nor I heard Ayn's unspoken cry for what she had missed all her life, and now, struggling to create Atlas Shrugged, missed more painfully than ever, We did not see the years of rejection and of silent, unacknowledged suffering beneath her demands, we did not recognize that in a lifetime of too many battles and too many personal defeats, she needed to receive strength from outside herself. All four of us were suffering, each in his or her own way and for his or her own reasons; each of us was lost in his own pain; none of us could hear the others': "I want!" — "I need!" — "I must have!" As Nathaniel listened to Ayn's voice over the telephone, his dream of love was becoming a nightmare.

The quarrels and reproaches had their effect on Nathaniel's life. Just as Ayn's too demanding struggles as a writer did not create, but did exacerbate, preexisting emotional problems, so Nathaniel's difficulties in his relationship with Ayn did not create, but did exacerbate, his own pre-existing problems. He and Ayn were alike in their lack of empathy with the suffering of others, in the alacrity with which they passed moral and psychological judgments. Just as these qualities were accelerating in Ayn, so they were accelerating in Nathaniel. Sometimes in the past, he had attempted to stand between Ayn and young friends in whom she was disappointed, soothing her, reassuring her, reminding her of the values which still remained. But now it was Nathaniel who was often the first to find grave fault, to condemn, to savage victims

disarmed by the credentials Ayn had given him. The devastation inherent in the events of that car ride from Toronto to New York, was spreading its corruption over his spirit.

Nathaniel's pain and confusion were worsened by mine. Within a few months of the beginning of the affair, I awoke one night with my heart pounding, my pulse racing, my body drenched with perspiration — and with a feeling of uncontrollable, sourceless terror. I was convinced that I was having a heart attack. Allan Blumenthal rushed over to examine me. It was not a heart attack. It was the classic onset of an anxiety attack.

It was to continue, almost unabated, for more than a year and a half. It never completely left me during that period, it rarely significantly lessened in severity. For endless days and endless nights I walked the streets of New York, trying to stamp my emotions into the pavements of the city, trying to rush past the terror that fed on itself and created a terror that I would feel still more terror. As is typical of such attacks, the "free-floating," apparently causeless anxiety became attached to one object after another: it was heights that frightened me, I concluded, or flying in an airplane, or riding in an elevator — or any of a long list of concrete sources. In a vain attempt to battle my fears, I would go to the Empire State Building and take an elevator to the top and look out over the city from the observation deck — feeling that my thudding heart would stop at any moment; when I traveled, I would fly to my destination — feeling that to crash could not be worse than the agony of my fear. I felt that I was fighting for my sanity and my life.

I saw neither a physician nor a psychiatrist. Was I not married to a great psychologist? Of what importance was it that other psychologists did not treat their wives? He was helping me, and Ayn Rand was helping me. And another theory was evolving, for which I was the laboratory experiment, to take its place beside the theory of social metaphysics and to explain the terror in which I was drowning. The theory at which Ayn and Nathaniel arrived was called "emotionalism."

Ayn wrote a paper on the nature of emotionalism; she wrote it, as she often did with new concepts, as a private statement to clarify her thinking; she made no attempt to publish her many papers. "The Emotionalist's premise" she said, "is as follows: 'Reality is objective, but let other people deal with it, my role is only to form values (desires) in spirit, their role is to serve me and to provide me with the material means and the opportunity to translate my values into physical form, their role is to make reality somehow subservient to my desires'... The Emotionalist bases his self-esteem on his 'intentions' or 'aspirations'... I think that there are two different types of Emotionalists: those who became Emotionalists in childhood, by evasion — and those who acquired it later, by an error of knowledge. These last would be the Emotionalists who have a tremendous passion for values and a total sense of 'the stylized universe,' like F and B [Frank and Barbara]. They, I think, had started out in life as Rationalists... The Emotionalist who becomes such later, in adolescence or youth, starts out as a purposeful, independent child... The error which later throws him off is Emotional Repression. When he encounters disappointments in his clashes with other people, he represses his pain, in the name of his values, in the mistaken belief that suffering is weakness or betrayal of values. Once the habit of emotional repression is established, it grows and it handicaps his perception of reality, his thinking, his mind. It blocks one area of reality after another and reduces his rational faculty to a state of passivity... This type of 'later-day' Emotionalist, no matter what errors or evasions he may proceed to commit, can never lose his self-made soul. He will always remain an entity, a person — in a manner which the 'childhood' Emotionalist does not possess or achieve."

The concept of emotionalism — the theory that the emotionalist attempts to grasp the world not by reason but through the medium of his emotions, and views his emotions as tools of cognition, just as the social metaphysician attempts to grasp the world through the medium of the opinions and values of others, and attempts to use the minds of others as his tools of cognition — was utilized by Ayn and Nathaniel, as they utilized the concept of social metaphysics, to account for a certain psychological syndrome. But Ayn considered emotionalism to be, morally, a giant step above the cancer of social metaphysics. And it seems likely that her division of emotionalists into two categories — the relatively corrupt category of the "childhood Emotionalist" and the relatively innocent category of the "later-day Emotionalist" — functioned as Ayn's means of keeping pure the souls of her husband and Nathaniel's wife.

In the theory of emotionalism — even in its name — one can glimpse Ayn's ambivalent attitude toward emotions. Her conviction that happiness is the proper goal and purpose of human life lies at the very heart of her moral code. Yet throughout her novels one reads of her heroes ruthlessly ignoring their emotions, damning emotions in others, taking pleasure only in their work, leading lives of Spartan self-discipline. It was so in her novels, and it was so in her own person. And many of her admirers learned to make it so in their own persons — they learned to deny their emotions, to ignore the inner signals their feelings were giving them, to abandon the evidence that was telling them who they really were and what they really loved, to devote their lives to work and to self-improvement, to deal with each other by means of philosophical abstractions. They learned emotional repression and its inevitable concomitant: the alienation from self.

The theory of emotionalism was the tool by which Ayn and Nathaniel attempted to deal with the problem of my anxiety. The anxiety did not lessen. In fact, it increased, as all the work I did, all the thinking, all the conversations about my psychology seemed unable to lead to a solution.

It was Nathaniel who arrived, in the end, at a concept which names, in abstract terms, what appears to be a fundamental psychological source of anxiety. In The Psychology of Self-Esteem, he would write: "The experience of pathological anxiety always involves and reflects conflict... and the acute anxiety attack is occasioned by the ego's confrontation with that conflict... The conflict is the collision of two absolutes... It is the conflict between 'I must" — and 'I can't'... between 'I must not' — and 'I am.'... There is always a conflict between some value imperative that is tied, in a crucial and profound way, to the persons self-appraisal and inner equilibrium — and some failure or inadequacy or action or emotion or desire that the person regards as a breach of that imperative, a breach that the person believes expresses or reflects a basic and unalterable fact of his 'nature.'"

This, as in retrospect I understand what was happening to me, names it precisely: the conflict between "I must" and "I can't" — the collision of two absolutes. One absolute was that I must accept my husband's love affair with Ayn, that it was right, it was rational — the other was the absolute screaming silently within me that "I can't." 49

During that year and a half before my anxiety disappeared as mysteriously as it had come, Nathaniel suffered over my suffering — although, incredibly, neither he nor Ayn saw its connection to the situation in which we were all involved. Their love affair, they believed, was the inevitable and rational consequence of their estimate of each other; they believed that I had accepted it as fully as they had. The source of my symptoms was emotionalism, for which I was now paying the price. Ayn shifted between two attitudes toward me. Often, she spent hours and days and nights struggling to help me, to release me from anxiety; she was tender, and kind, and loving, she was the beloved friend who could not bear to see me in pain. At other times, she was impatient, angry, morally disapproving. But she had only one attitude when Nathaniel, having left me in the throes of a panic attack, would arrive at her apartment troubled and worn and fearful of admitting that he had not wanted to leave me: her attitude was rage. "How dare you worry about Barbara when you're with me!" she demanded. At times, she hinted broadly that he should divorce me, that he had no right to live with a woman so patently unworthy.

There was one night I shall never forget — the worst of all those years and of the years to come. It was about eleven o'clock, I had been walking all evening; the anxiety was building to a pitch greater than any I had ever experienced. I began to grow frantic; I believed that my mind might collapse from the bombardment of so great a terror. I had never called Ayn's apartment when she and Nathaniel were together; but that night, I stopped at a pay phone and dialed Ayn's number. When she answered, I told her what was happening, and that I wanted to come over to talk. Her explosion made the telephone drop from my hand — and a moment later I felt her voice pursuing me as I hurried away from it as from the cold clasp of hatred. "How dare you! Do you think only of yourself? Am I completely invisible to you? I don't ask anyone for help! There's your whole problem in the fact that you called — if you want something, that's all you know or care about! Don't dare to dream of coming here!" And on and on and on, until I was beyond the range of that terrible loathing. I did not, could not hear Ayn's unspoken cry that she had waited and worked all of her life for an evening such as this, an evening of love and passion and exaltation with the man she adored — and I was demanding that she give it up.

It was later, during an informal course Ayn gave on fiction writing for several friends who were interested in the subject, that the climax of her negative attitude toward me was reached. The course was fascinating, as Ayn explained her own principles of writing and the reasons for those principles, and illustrated her points with excerpts from her work and the works of other writers. One evening, she decided to compare three writers stylistically: Ayn Rand, Thomas Wolfe, and Mickey Spillane. Spillane had become her favorite contemporary novelist, from the aspects of originality, imagination, sense of drama and, above all, plot-structure; she admired him as "a moral crusader," saying that he approached conflicts in uncompromising black-and-white terms and that his hero, Mike Hammer, was a moral avenger. 50

For the purposes of comparison and contrast, Ayn chose a section from Atlas Shrugged, one from Spillane's I, the Jury, and another from Wolfe's Of Time and the River. She insisted that I be the one to read the selections aloud: I had a very attractive speaking voice, she said: she always loved to hear me reading her work. The selection she had chosen from Wolfe — as an example of bad writing — was a few paragraphs of a description of New York that I had shown her, when we first discussed Wolfe, as an example of what I most loved and cherished in his work.

After her analysis of the excerpts, Ayn announced that last on the evening's agenda would be Nathaniel's reading of a short story. Apparently it was his suggestion, to which Ayn acceded, that the class should not be told who had written it. The group listened intently as Nathaniel read a rather charming story; but it was awkward stylistically, it seemed blatantly imitative of Ayn, and was without real drama despite an original and professionally handled plot. When he had finished, I was the first to present my negative opinions. Then Nathaniel announced that the title of the story, written in 1927, was "Good Copy." Its author was Ayn Rand. 51

Ayn's face was a thundercloud, her eyes flashing a dark and ominous lightning. In the silence that fell over the room, she began to shout in outrage. What was wrong with me psychologically that I could so totally fail to appreciate her story and her sense of life? — I knew nothing about literature, I knew nothing about writing, and most of all I knew nothing about her! I sat in a state of numbed shock as her anger intensified, and the others, aware that they should not be present at such a scene, quietly took their leave. Ayn's fury continued unabated; she accused me of every imaginable psychological evil. It was too much. I could accept no part of what she said, and I stood my ground like a bulldog while the thunder of her voice crashed around me. It was impossible to speak at any length, when I interrupted her she shouted louder, all I could do was keep repeating: "It isn't true" — "You're wrong" — "You're wrong" — "You're wrong." By four o'clock in the morning, she was likening my psychology to that of the archvillain of The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey. At that point, I gave a shout of laughter and said, "Ayn, stop it!" She stopped it. We began talking quietly and sanely, and by the time the sun rose, she had retracted her accusations, and we were friends again.

In retrospect, it appears that the rejection of her story in itself only partially accounts for the intensity and injustice of Ayn's anger that night. More relevant is the fact that it was I, whom she had chosen, along with Nathaniel, as her closest friend, whom she had likened to her heroines, whom she had praised as an example and exemplar of her philosophy, was now invading the safe haven of her world not merely with alien values, but, still worse, with a repudiation of her work. And perhaps it was, as well, the explosion of all the frustrations of her affair with Nathaniel, all the unrecognized pain and guilt it was causing her, all that I stood for in her mind as the wife her lover steadfastly refused to leave. And no one heard her silent cry that life was intended for happiness and fulfillment — and why was that joy denied to her?

It was in this tortured, explosive fusion of overheated emotions, of anguish and rage and frustrated longings and bitterness — and of love and sexual passion and ecstatic fulfillment — that Ayn at last completed the writing of John Galt's speech.

49 According to recent scientific findings, pathological anxiety is believed to be primarily the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain, whatever else may be involved of a psychological nature, and is treatable by appropriate medication.

50 When Ayn later met Mickey Spillane, she discovered that the admiration between them was mutual: he had read and loved her novels. It was a strange sight to see these two together: Spillane, who physically suggested a prize fighter or a dock worker, was courteous and pleasant, but nonphilosophical in his approach to writing, and Ayn painstakingly tried to make him aware of the philosophical meaning and value of what he had accomplished.

51 Published in The Early Ayn Rand,

Chapter Twenty-Four

With the ordeal of John Galt's speech behind her, Ayn's boundless intellectual energy and enthusiasm began to return with astonishing rapidity. As if a spiritual switch had been thrown, she soon was once again the woman Nathaniel and I had met in California. All the tensions seemed to drain from her almost overnight; her exhaustion and sudden angers and accusations seemed only the memory of a distant storm.

There was more to be done on the novel, there were three long chapters still to be written, completing the climax begun by the speech and bringing the story to its final resolution. The remaining chapters would be "the cashing-in;" they were chapters predominantly of action and drama and suspense, precisely the kind of material she most enjoyed writing, and she could revel in the luxury of working with a single concern: that of dramatist and plot-writer.

As if a pall had been lifted from our lives, it began to seem as if the four of us were the triumphant survivors of a natural disaster, and we could begin to pick up the smashed pieces of our lives and gradually to regain the former closeness and love that had so tightly knitted us together. It began to seem as if the affair between Ayn and Nathaniel would become a tranquilly accepted part of our lives instead of the divisive and painful trauma it had been.

One could see in Ayn, during this period, a quality not manifest since the time of her meeting with Frank and her marriage: something bleak and grim had gone from her personality, replaced by a sensual quality, a pleasure in her own physical person, a concern with grooming, with clothes, with looking attractive. Her affair with Nathaniel had passed through its traumatic, tortured beginnings, and one began to see the emergence of a provocative, sexual woman. There was a new glow about her like a young woman in love; her stem features took on a softness and a femininity, as if cold marble had been warmed by an inner fire. Timidly, by slow, careful steps, Ayn was again attempting to live in the present, and was finding, in her work and in her romantic attachment — perhaps to her astonishment — a fulfillment the present had never before afforded her.

As Ayn began to consider the submission of the completed sections of her manuscript to publishing houses, Nathaniel was continuing his schooling at New York University and was busy and active as a psychological consultant; I, the period of anxiety behind me, had earned a master's degree in philosophy and was working in the editorial department of St. Martin’s Press. And Frank, to his great joy, had at last found the work he loved to do and to which he wished to devote the remainder of his life.

The turning point in Frank's life came one evening when the collective was discussing painting. They were questioning whether or not certain careers required abilities that were innate and could not be taught, or if all forms of ability could be developed over time and with the appropriate knowledge. I said — only partly jokingly — that I felt myself so hopelessly lacking in the approach and perceptions of a visual artist, that I could never be taught to draw. Joan disagreed; any intelligent person, she maintained, granted a reasonable amount of interest and effort, could learn to draw with some degree of competence. She offered to prove it by giving lessons to anyone in the group who would care to attempt the experiment. Several of us laughingly agreed to try — including Frank.

At the first session of the class, hearts sank as Joan placed a white egg on a piece of white paper, and said that the assignment was to draw it. With her instructions, the group fell to work with varying degrees of success. But within a few sessions, what happened to Frank — who had never given any thought to painting or expressed any interest in the subject — had the quality of an explosion.

It was as if a subterranean talent, lying dormant for years, suddenly found an outlet and burst into the open. It was obvious that he was in a category by himself: while the other members of the class struggled slowly, and eventually did vindicate Joan in her claim, Frank shot forward like a rocket. His early drawings exhibited a violent self-assertiveness one would never have expected from so reserved and retiring a man, and an astonishing sense of drama and composition in spite of their technical flaws. Ever since childhood, as an integral part of his interest in the theater and the movies, he had been preoccupied with the visual: with composition, with spatial tensions and relationships, with esthetic form and design. Now it was the accumulated visual observations of years that his imagination was calling on and using, filling his brain with dramatic sensory images.

He began to draw and sketch constantly. His drawings were scattered all over the apartment — and often, when one spoke to him, one saw that he had not heard, he was frowning in concentration and staring critically at some sketch halfway across the room. Soon he began working in pastels. He worked ceaselessly; he would come out of his room when guests arrived in the evening, his clothes smeared with chalk, in a state of quiet, ferocious rapture; he would utter a brief "Hello" and go back to his easel. And he was planning future work, projecting paintings he would do far into the future. He often talked of a painting of Icarus flying triumphantly into — and through — the sun, emerging unscathed and more beautiful than before. Frank was fifty-eight years old; he did not know how long it would take him to master the technique of painting. But this, he knew, was the work he wanted.

It was another giant boost to Ayn's morale. Here, at last, was what she had always hoped to see in Frank: a man working to the top limit of his capacity, working productively and happily, working for both short-and-long-range goals that elicited her deep admiration. And she felt that his painting revealed a startling artistic affinity to her own novels in his extravagant imaginativeness, in his sense of visual drama, in the union of tension and serenity, of austerity and sensuousness. 52 His silent agony over her love affair with Nathaniel seemed a thing of the past: it was as if he barely had time to notice it. And when he did take time to be with Ayn, the resentments and anxieties and raw, chafed nerves between them seemed equally a problem of the past.

Recognizing his need for technical training — although always impatient with it, like a man who has too much to do and too little time in which to do it and wants to focus only on the broad sweep of his work and not its details — Frank enrolled in the Art Students League. Rosina Florio, executive director of the League, has described the world-famous League as a "clutch of ateliers" — no credits or grades or diplomas are given, the students come to work five days each week, and work predominantly on their own from models or still-life setups provided for them, with critiques two days a week by a staff of teachers who have achieved eminent positions in the art world. She spoke of Frank with warm affection. "He worked very hard," she said. "He came every day, and progressed well... He was a very private man, very kind and gentle, and everyone liked him..."

Joan Mitchell Blumenthal was also working at the League. She did not know that Frank had never mentioned to anyone that his wife was Ayn Rand; his status was Frank O'Connor, painter. One day, Joan was talking with a group of students; one of them asked: "Is Frank married?"

She replied that he was, and the student inquired: "What is his wife like?" "Her name is Ayn Rand" Joan answered. When she mentioned the incident to Frank, and saw the look of resigned pain on his face, Joan realized her mistake: he did not want to bask in Ayn's reflected glory, he wanted to be his own man and to stand or fall by his own work and his own considerable capacity to draw people to him; he was very popular among the other students — especially the women — for his courtly manners, his kindness, his unfailing helpfulness. "I wish you hadn't said it," he told Joan. "This is the one place where I'm liked for myself." But Rosina Florio would later say, "No one really cared at all who his wife was, only what sort of person he was, and what sort of work he did. Besides, Ayn rarely came to the League and people didn't pay much attention when she did... I remember a party we all went to, given by one of our teachers, and my husband saw Ayn sitting alone while all the artists and their wives were discussing art; he went over to talk to her — he didn't have any idea who she was — and he later said to me, 'She's a strange woman. She answered my questions in one-sentence staccato assertions' She couldn't be part of a group. You couldn't have a real conversation with her, an exchange. She seemed unable to handle not being the center of attention. Understandably so. She was an important writer, internationally famous, and here we were, a group of artists talking art, very shy and conscious of not wanting to disturb her."

One of Frank's classes was conducted by the distinguished painter Robert Brackman, member of the National Academy of Design. When asked his opinion of Franks work, he said, "It was obvious almost immediately that Frank was not a student when he came to my class. He was already an artist. He had an absolutely individual way of doing things, right from the beginning. I saw that all he needed from me was technical advice — I would point out the kind of errors it would take him a long time to discover on his own — but in every other respect, I knew that he should be left free to develop in his own way... With most students, one can see a dozen different historical influences reflected in their early work. There were no historical influences at all in his work... I was floored at how quickly he learned. I didn't think that anyone could grow that fast... Whatever subject he's given to paint, his first idea is always: What is the most dramatic way of presenting it? So far, composition is his strongest point technically... Some people work at painting all their lives and never find themselves, never really find what they want to say or how they want to say it. Frank had found himself from the start."

Joan, an accomplished artist and a teacher of drawing and painting, was later asked her opinion of Frank's work, and what she thought to be its shortcomings. "His overwhelming virtue was his artistic imagination," she said. "He was able, for instance, to transform even the most uninteresting of the League's models into fascinating characters on canvas — or take a couple of onions in a still-life setup and create a dramatic fantasy. His work looked only like his work; it was uninfluenced by anyone else... His problem areas were technical, particularly with regard to perspective, which he never mastered, and anatomy, which was always very faulty. One was aware of a lack of consonance in the perspective, as well as disturbing anatomical distortions. He was not at all interested in technical issues, and did not appear to see his errors... One could not really teach Frank, one could only turn him loose to work in his own way and to exercise his admirable imagination. That was why Ayn was totally unsuccessful in influencing him artistically. She continually made suggestions about his work, and had long talks with him about what he should and should not do — but he paid no more attention to her than to anyone else."

It was in this happier atmosphere of the end of her own long ordeal with Galt's speech and Frank's newfound joy in his creative activities, that Ayn began discussing with her literary agent, Alan Collins, the submission of Atlas Shrugged to a publisher. She was eager to have the issue settled before she completed the book. She was not willing to submit Galt's speech ahead of acceptance of the novel; Alan was to send out the manuscript up to but not including the speech.

By the terms of her contract with Bobbs-Merrill for The Fountainhead; Bobbs had the right to the first submission of her new novel. Ayn was determined that they would not again be her publisher; she could not forgive them for their handling of The Fountainhead,' she was prepared to insist on terms to which they would not accede. But her proposed demands were unnecessary.

A few weeks after receiving the manuscript, Ross Baker, the company's New York representative, called Ayn to suggest that she and Alan Collins join him for dinner. "What is it you want to discuss?" Ayn asked. Baker replied, "The book is much too long. The editors and I have made a long list of possible cuts." "You may make an offer or not," Ayn said angrily. "I will not come to dinner and I will not discuss changes. The book is to be published exactly as it is." "There are too many long speeches" Baker complained to Alan in a hurried telephone call — naming as an example a speech given by Francisco about the nature and meaning of money. He was naming one of the most powerful and effective speeches in the novel, which was later to be reprinted in journals and magazines and for private distribution across the country; it is aimed at those who say that money is the root of all evil, and upholds Ayn's view that money, as a tool of exchange, is the noble symbol, not of force nor of fraud, but of voluntary trade among men who produce. Baker concluded, "In its present form, I regret to say that the book is unsalable and unpublishable."

Discussing this event long after publication, Ayn chuckled gleefully. "I hope he remembers what he said. It was the history of The Fountainhead repeating itself."

Word flew through the publishing industry that Ayn's new novel was approaching completion and that she was free of her contract with Bobbs-Merrill. The phenomenal success story of The Fountainhead had become a publishing legend, and her new work had been awaited with intense anticipation. She no longer had to struggle to interest publishers in her work; instead, they courted her, with lunches, with telephone calls, with expressions of enthusiasm for The Fountainhead. Almost every major publisher approached Alan Collins to express interest in Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn's main concern was to find a publisher from whom she could expect, not necessarily agreement with her ideas — she knew that an innovator cannot expect that — but intellectual understanding and the courage to face the kind of antagonism her book inevitably would arouse. She made up a list of questions to keep in mind when she spoke to the publishers she was considering: Are they aggressive? Will they stand by a controversial book? What is their enthusiasm for publishing? Do they have initiative or are they routine-bound?

From among the inquiries, Ayn and Alan Collins selected four possibilities. McGraw-Hill, because "they wrote a very enthusiastic letter to Alan about the scope of the publicity campaign they would undertake, and because they were a big business house." Knopf, because "Alan had a great deal of confidence in Pat Knopf, who was just taking over the business from his parents." But Alan warned her that the senior Knopfs had "retired" several times, but had always returned; if it happened again, it would be a problem for her; they were difficult to deal with and he felt that they would not respond to her book as she wished. Viking, because Archie Ogden, who was no longer staff editor at

a publishing house, had arranged with Viking that if he brought them a novel they wanted, he would edit it and would get a percentage of the profits. Ayn had never forgotten that Archie had risked his job for The Fountainhead, although she would not otherwise have considered Viking, she was eager to help him if she could — but not at the expense of Atlas.

The fourth contender was Random House. Hiram Haydn, editor-in-chief at Random House, had been an editor for Bobbs-Merrill; in those years he had lunched with Ayn at intervals to ask how her new novel was progressing; Ayn had liked him and felt she could deal with him. Haydn would later say, speaking of their meetings and of the power of Ayn's intellect: "Because of Ayn Rand, I have a foolproof method of judging honesty. If I introduce a friend to her, and they meet for a discussion, and the friend then tells me that their differences ended in a draw — I know he's a liar. If he tells me that their differences ended in his demonstrating the truth of his views — I know he's a hopeless, permanent, irredeemable liar."

In his posthumously published autobiography, Words and Faces, Haydn wrote: "I shall never forget (those words again, but true) my first meeting with Ayn. A short, squarish woman, with black hair cut in bangs and a Dutch bob... Her eyes were as black as her hair, and piercing. We sat down for lunch at One Park Avenue, a place to which we were to return again and again because their eggs Benedict were good, and that was her invariable meal. I made one or two conventional remarks: she fixed me with those eyes and said, 'What are your premises?'

"Again and again, during the next decade, I was to hear that question — with anticipation when it was addressed to someone else, with discomfiture when to myself. For Ayn had built up a comprehensive systematic philosophy, which she calls Objectivism, and which, once you accept its first premises, is the most closely reasoned, rigorously logical and consistently interlocking world view and explanation since the great synthesis of Thomas Aquinas."

Now that Ayn was free of Bobbs, Haydn again began taking her to lunch for the purpose of selling her on Random House. "It was a benevolent joke on me," Ayn was to say. "For years I had considered Random House, next to Simon and Schuster, the worst possible place for my work; until the forties, when they published Whittaker Chambers's Witness, they were the most left-wing of all publishers."

Despite Haydn's assurances that this was no longer the case, Ayn was hesitant. He asked that she and Alan Collins at least meet with the owners, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, so that she could judge for herself. "It's a fair request," Ayn said. "We'll meet for lunch."

The morning of the luncheon, everything seemed to go wrong. Ayn had an emergency dentist appointment; when she left the dentist's office, her jaw aching, it began raining heavily, and no cabs were to be found. She arrived at the restaurant feeling dutiful about the meeting and expecting nothing.

"It was the best and most exciting publisher's meeting I have ever had in my career," she later said.

"I liked Bennett and Donald immediately, they had such an open, active, intellectual attitude. They spoke as I would want publishers to speak — they faced ideas openly, they heard what I said, they were enthusiastic about my work, they answered all my questions straight. I explained my problem to them, that other publishers wanted a chance at the book, and that I had not decided to which of four publishers I should first submit. Bennett came up with a brilliant idea — and what I liked about him was the fact that he focused enough and had enough initiative to think on the spot and propose something. He proposed, in effect, a philosophical contest, by a method that at that time was daringly unprecedented in the publishing world. He proposed that, with their knowledge and consent, I should submit to all four publishers simultaneously, not for the purpose of getting cross-bidding on terms, but in order to learn their reactions, how they felt about the book, and how they proposed to handle it. By their answers, I could choose whom I wanted to deal with... That he suggested such an idea told me that Bennett understood and took seriously exactly what I wanted. Alan and I said we would consider it and let them know.

"Another highlight of the luncheon was a statement by Donald. I had indicated only the general ideology of Atlas, that it was an extreme, uncompromising, moral defense of capitalism and presented a new philosophy. Donald's acumen startled me when he said, 'If it is a moral defense of capitalism, wouldn't it have to clash with the entire tradition of Judaeo-Christian ethics?' I had never heard anyone else observe the clash between capitalism and religion, and I was enormously pleased that he was so philosophical." Ayn did not ask him whether be agreed or disagreed with her position; what impressed her was that he had understood an issue which professional defenders of capitalism seemed unable to understand.

After the Random House luncheon, Ayn came home to talk about it ecstatically for several days. She was unbending in her condemnation of the bad, but when she discovered people or events that could elicit her positive response, she was as openly and happily enthusiastic as a child who has never been hurt, never been disappointed, never had cause for bitterness or suspicion.

Ayn and Alan Collins, with Archie Ogden, next met with Harold K. Guinzburg, the owner of Viking Press. "The whole tone, style and universe was totally different than Random House," Ayn reported. "The Viking people were uncomfortable discussing controversial issues, and when I mentioned Bennett's idea, Guinzburg was very much against it; he said he had no personal objection to entering such a contest, but 'what would you really learn? — publishers will necessarily lie to you — they'll want the book and will say what you want to hear.' I'll remain naive until I'm ninety, I'm sure, because that shocked me. Then he explained how their editorial board functioned: major books are submitted to all eight editors, all of them read it and make suggestions to the writer. He was even saying it as an advantage, because, he said, 'If one or two editors said something was wrong, you wouldn't have to accept it; but if all eight said it, wouldn't you want to consider it?' I answered quietly, 'No, I wouldn't.' He was saying that to the writer of The Fountainhead."

The next luncheon was with Edward C. Aswell of McGraw-Hill — who had been one of Thomas Wolfe's editors. "That was the worst of the three lunches," Ayn reported. "He was cynical, bored, malevolent, as if nothing on earth were of any value or interest to him. He said, in an exhausted manner, that he didn't like the idea of the contest, because he'd have to go to all the trouble of reading the manuscript — and he might not get it. I knew it would be hopeless to try to deal with him."

At the final luncheon, Ayn met Pat Knopf. "He was very active and intellectual, he told me very intelligently and enthusiastically why he liked The Fountainhead, and controversy didn't seem to bother him. But he didn't make anywhere near as good an impression as the Random House men... Perhaps there was a bit too much youthful enthusiasm — and he wasn't that young... He was willing to accept the contest, but he said that his father was still officially head of the company, and would refuse — Alfred Knopf would consider it an insult to the Knopf imprint."

Ayn and Alan Collins returned to Collins's office to make their decision. But Ayn said that Bennett Cerf's idea had already worked, and that no actual contest was necessary. On the basis of his idea, she felt that she had the best test of Random House possible. "My mind was really made up at the first luncheon," she said. "If this is the campaign they staged to get me, they will be just as clever and active in selling my book."

Random House had been calling Alan Collins to ask if Ayn would accept the idea of the contest. She decided to stage the kind of dramatic scene she loved, and Alan got into the spirit of it. He made an appointment with Bennett, merely saying that he wanted to talk about the book; he did not mention that Ayn would be joining him. "When we entered Bennett's office," Ayn would report happily, "I said to him: 'You have the first, exclusive submission. The book is yours.' Bennett simply inclined his head silently for what seemed a full minute."

When Bennett, Donald Klopfer, and Hiram Haydn had read the manuscript, Bennett opened his next meeting with Ayn with the words: "It's a great book. Name your own terms."

"The whole atmosphere was wonderful and enthusiastic," Ayn said. "And the deal was completed the way Alan Greenspan told me Wall Street tycoons used to do it in the old days: in about five minutes. Alan Collins said we wanted a fifty-thousand-dollar advance — they said okay; he said we wanted a straight fifteen percent royalty, they said okay; Alan asked for a guaranteed first-edition printing — they said they'd print seventy-five or a hundred thousand with a minimum guaranteed advertising budget of twenty-five thousand dollars. There was no bargaining or bickering, it was settled just like that — in the spirit of an enormous celebration."

When the business part of their meeting ended, Ayn was told, to her delight, that when Bennett had finished reading the scene of the train ride on the John Galt Line, he ran out of his office and down the hall, waving the manuscript and shouting: "It's magnificent!" Donald Klopfer said that he had recently been flying over Detroit — and he'd suddenly felt glad that smoke was coming out of the factory chimneys, that the factories were still functioning. "They didn't pretend to be converted," Ayn said, "but they knew these were important ideas and they were very affected by the book. And Bennett was chortling about how they'd antagonize their neighbors." The Random House offices occupied one wing of a wonderful old Stanford White brownstone palazzo, across from St. Patrick's Cathedral; it had been built in 1885 as a private mansion, consisting of five buildings joined by a common courtyard. The other buildings were owned by the Catholic Church.

As Ayn and Alan Collins were leaving Random House, Hiram Haydn ran down the stairs after them to kiss Ayn and to say how much her decision meant to him. She asked, "Don't you want to hear all the details of how I arrived at my decision?" He answered: "I don't care — just so you did it!"

Later, Ayn met with Donald Klopfer — who had said that Atlas had caused him to change his mind about several issues — to ask him what those issues were. Ayn would always remember that "he said above all, what impressed him was the demonstration that industrial and business success depended on intelligence and ability. Before, he had felt faintly guilty when he was reproached for his success. After reading Atlas, he attended a party where someone was criticizing a famous doctor for charging high prices and being very rich — and Donald thought of Atlas Shrugged and suddenly said: 'And what's wrong with being rich, if he has earned it by ability?'"

In his posthumously published At Random, Bennett Cerf wrote about his first meeting with Ayn and the several years of their friendship. "I had heard of her philosophy, which I found absolutely horrifying. The Fountainhead was an absorbing story, nonetheless... She had lunch with Hiram, Donald and me at the Ambassador Hotel, now unfortunately torn down, and asked us a lot of questions. I found myself liking her though I had not expected to... She has piercing eyes that seem to look right through you and a wonderful way of pinning you to the wall. You can't make any loose statements to Ayn Rand; she hops on you and says, 'Let us examine your premises' I am likely to shoot off my mouth occasionally and make statements that I don't quite mean or can't quite prove, and Ayn, again and again, would nail me... Later on, after she came to Random House, she showed me a chart she had kept. She had visited about fifteen [sic] publishers, and when she got home she rated them on all the things they had said. I didn't realize, of course, that I was being examined this way, but I came out very high because I had been absolutely honest with her. I had said, 'I find your political philosophy abhorrent.' Nobody else had dared tell her this. I said, 'If we publish you. Miss Rand, nobody is going to try to censor you. You write anything you please, in fiction at least, and we'll publish it, whether or not we approve...'

"Ayn and I became good friends. What I loved to do was trot her out for people who sneered at us for publishing her. Ayn would invariably charm them. For instance, Clifton Fadiman, who had snorted at the idea of our publishing Ayn Rand, sat talking with her until about three in the morning. George Axelrod, author of The Seven Year Itch, toward the end of a long, long evening at Ayn's, disappeared with her into another room and we couldn't get him to go home. Later he said, 'She knows me better after five hours than my analyst does after five years.'...

"Ayn's a very simple and modest woman. We were on our way to lunch in Radio City once, and as we passed one of those junk shops with all kinds of statues and knickknacks, she saw a little blue bracelet in the window, and like a twelve-year-old girl, Ayn said, 'Isn't that a beautiful bracelet!' So I went in and bought it for her. It cost exactly one dollar, but she was as happy as a child.

"She's so brilliant at expounding her theories!... People react violently to her iconoclastic statements. She's entirely against any religion. She thinks that strong, selfish people should prevail, and that, in reality, two percent of the population is supporting the other ninety-eight percent... There's a lot in what she says."

Donald Klopfer, too, vividly recalled the initial luncheon with Ayn. He was to say, "Ayn never was reluctant to talk. At our first meeting, she talked about her book and her whole philosophy. She was a very difficult, very strange woman, but I liked her; she was extremely bright and she was fun to spar with, and fun to publish even if you disagreed, as I did, with almost everything she said... We got along just fine. I respected her stubbornness, and her integrity by her own standards. We were very glad to be her publisher. She was one of the most interesting authors I've met in a very long career in publishing. A fascinating, strange, very strong woman."

After the frustrations and disappointments of her former dealings, it seemed to Ayn little short of a miracle that she had found publishers who believed in her work and seemed prepared to stand by her. In a note entitled "About the Author," which appears as a postscript at the back of Atlas Shrugged, she would pay Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer the highest tribute she had the power to offer: "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written — and published — is my proof that they do."

About eleven years earlier, in the first chapter of Atlas, she had written a description of Richard Halley's music, with the knowledge that she would repeat it verbatim in the last chapter. That description is the philosophical leitmotif of the novel; she knew that it would sound different the second time — that the same words would carry a greater meaning, a more specific conviction, a fuller reality, a deeper emotional power — and that the difference would tell a perceptive reader what it was that he had learned from the chapters between. Now, at last, she reached the day when she wrote that passage for the second time, in the opening paragraph of the novel's final sequence:

"It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of triumph, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance."

She had come out of the most brutal dictatorship in history, she had risen past years of poverty, of struggle, of intellectual isolation, she had moved by the power of her knowledge of man and of life as they could be, by the image of John Galt and of his world — and now she had given to that world and to the sense of life from which it came the reality of a superlative artistic projection. And she had named the motive power of that world when she said: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

As she had written in the novel: "To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started."

On an evening in March 1957, she wrote on the last page of her manuscript:

"The road is cleared,' said Galt. 'We are going back to the world.'

"He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar."

Later, she could remember nothing of that evening, except that she stood up at her desk, walked out of her study in a state of dazed numbness and exaltation, and handed Frank the last page of her manuscript to let him see the words: "The End."

52 The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, issued in 1968, has on its jacket a reproduction of Frank's painting Man Also Rises.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The end of Atlas Shrugged marked a new beginning for Ayn. The work of her lifetime was completed, and she could relax, ravenously gulp down the sleep she had been starved for, and spend her waking hours looking over the manuscript and "just gloating." She was peacefully happy with every aspect of the novel she had created. Even the title delighted her. Originally, she had tentatively named the book: The Strike. But she had soon realized that that title gave away the mystery; and when a friend pointed out that it might be interpreted as a book about labor unions, she had scrapped it instantly. Briefly, she had considered The Prime Mover, a concept taken from Aristotle, but had decided that that was too philosophical and nonliterary a title. "Atlas Shrugged" had initially been a chapter title, but Frank had suggested that she use it for the* title of the book. She had agreed at once: it captured for her the spirit and the whole meaning of the novel.

One sentence of the final manuscript is in Frank's handwriting. Ayn had found herself unable to formulate Francisco's farewell message to the world after he blows up d'Anconia Copper and disappears. The message had to contain — in the briefest possible form and in a style characteristic of Francisco — the essence of the motive behind his action. After many unsuccessful attempts, she explained her problem to Frank. "You mean," he asked, "that it should be something like 'Brother, you asked for it?"' "Not like it!" she cried, delighted. "That's it!" She handed him her pen. "It's your sentence," she said. "You write it."

As Random House moved toward its publication date of October 1957, it was time for Ayn to plunge into the editing and copy editing of the manuscript. But there was to be no editing. Ayn would allow no changes. In At Random, Bennett Cerf wrote "... arguing with her was like running your head against a stone wall. I remember when Atlas Shrugged was being edited by Hiram Haydn. The hero, John Galt, makes a speech that lasts about thirty-eight pages [Bennett was mistaken; it lasts sixty pages.]... but Hiram couldn't get her to cut a word. I very angrily said to him, 'You're some editor. Send her in to me. I'll fix it in no time.' So when Ayn came in and sat down, looking at me with those piercing eyes, I said, Ayn, nobody's going to read that. You've said it all three or four times before, and it's thirty-odd pages long. You've got to cut it.' She looked at me calmly and said, 'Would you cut the Bible?' So I gave up." The report that circulated in the publishing industry was that Bennett had replied, "Well, it would make more money!"

Ayn has often been criticized for refusing to allow any of her work to be edited. But in fact, in her earlier work, she had been amenable to editing; George Abbott had suggested a number of changes in her play, The Unconquered, to which she had acceded; and she had found Archie Ogden's suggestions for cuts in The Fountainhead acceptable and helpful. It was only now, with Atlas Shrugged, convinced of her own literary professionalism and convinced that she had worked long enough and hard enough to be certain that the work matched her intention, that she would not entertain suggestions for changes.

In his Words and Faces, Hiram Haydn was to write that although his contract with Random House stipulated that he was to receive a commission on books he brought in, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer asked him, with some hesitancy, if he would forgo his usual commission for Atlas, it would be a very long, high-priced novel and expensive to produce. "I agreed immediately. I had felt all along some uneasiness of conscience. Ayn's philosophy, replete with social and political consequences, troubled me. Left to myself, I would not have published that book. Yet I had owed it to the partners to steer Ayn to them if I could, for she was a publishing catch, with 'best seller' stamped all over her... Moreover, I believed that a publisher should publish books with all sorts of political and social coloration. Only I didn't want personally to make money on one so contrary to my own convictions. Yet again, I was willing to act as her editor for Random House. So, in a muddled way, I split my allegiance.

"How she would have laughed had she known the welter of contradictory reactions I was experiencing! And how well indeed I illustrated her concept of the softheaded, ambivalent, tortured liberal!"

Ayn would not have laughed had she known that her editor, left to himself, would not have published her book. Nor would she have laughed at his statement that: "In her novels, she wedded her ideas to a first-rate narrative skill; the pace of the action was usually fast, and she was proficient at suspense and the melodramatic, spectacular scene. But her style was drab, and although I respected her philosophy as one kind of arid intellectual triumph, a tour de force that commanded admiration even though she based it on an utterly false (as I see it) central premise — although that was how I felt in measured moments, there were times when I conceded that the world I lived in was most probably right, and she really was a crackpot, though of a noble sort.

"Even now I can't write about Ayn Rand without feeling upset, unhappy with myself. I know of no other relation with an author in which I played such shamefaced ball, never being wholly for or against her, never saying right out all the things I believed about her book or her ideas or life in general."

Although Haydn did not tell her his actual views, Ayn was aware of the deep intellectual gulf between them, and indignant at the editorial changes he suggested. After many futile sessions, recognizing that Atlas Shrugged was not to be edited, Haydn turned the manuscript over to Bertha Krantz, then Random House's chief copy editor and assistant managing editor.

Bertha Krantz found that copy-editing Atlas Shrugged was the single most difficult, nerve-racking assignment of her professional life: "Ayn and I worked together daily for several months. We were dealing with a manuscript that was more than a thousand pages long — and there were discussions about every comma, every semicolon, every word I questioned. Everything had to be explained to her in painstaking detail and, according to her philosophy, had to be rational But I must say that she always listened to me, and when she felt I was 'right,' she'd accept my explanations, complimenting me on my reasonableness. I think the worst thing I had to contend with was that there was never a light moment — laughter, doing or saying something just for fun seemed to have no place at all in her life. I found that very sad."

Nevertheless, the two became friendly enough to lunch together occasionally, and Ayn even invited Bertha to her home. Gradually, Bertha "began to see that there was no reason to be afraid of her — those piercing eyes and stem manner had really frightened me at first — and our relationship got to be fairly easy. She could be very kind: she was concerned that my apartment was in what she considered an unsafe area, and she really worried that I traveled on the subway, thought it was dangerous...

"She was such a brilliant woman, and to listen to her, one could be convinced that she had no fears, no contradictions. But we live every day, we live with the little things of life; once when I was at her home, I noticed that she almost boiled the dishes when she washed them; and she admitted that she was deathly afraid of germs. And, of course, she scoffed at 'superstition,' but I remember that when I commented on a little gold watch she always wore, she said she had found it in Los Angeles years ago, and that it was her good-luck watch. And I saw that she did indeed have contradictions — Ayn Rand believing in a good-luck charm! But I admired and respected her, and I never for a moment doubted the sincerity of her convictions.

"I made it clear to her that I could never think her way, and she seemed to accept it. But there was still an element of her trying to convert me. It seemed not to be second nature with her; it was first nature.

"In the end, I began to feel somewhat sorry for her. As I said, laughter did not come easily to her, and she seemed to have no capacity for simple enjoyment. Everything had to be carefully considered, analyzed — again, had to be rational. And her view of things was so limited. We'd be walking along somewhere, and she never 'saw' the sky or the trees or even any of the people: her attention seemed to be given only to the stone and glass buildings... I went with her to a lecture she delivered at Columbia University, and I was struck by the number of students who obviously worshipped her; it had to be terribly hard to be regarded as an idol and to have to sustain that image to the world.

"But what I say reflects only my reactions. Certainly Ayn Rand and her philosophy represented — still represents — something very important to a lot of people."

Ayn was very excited when Bennett Cerf took the unprecedented step of asking her to speak about her book at a conference of the Random House salesmen. The meeting delighted her: the atmosphere was relaxed and cheerful, and the salesmen were full of enthusiasm for Atlas. One of them, concerned about how he would communicate her philosophy to book sellers, asked her jokingly: "Miss Rand, would you give the essence of your philosophy while standing on one foot?" She did. She said: "Metaphysics — objective reality; Epistemology — reason; Ethics — self-interest; Politics — capitalism."

During the months of preparation for the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn was well aware that she could not expect the rest of the world to react to the novel as her young friends reacted. "I know that I am challenging the cultural tradition of two and a half thousand years," she said. She was ruefully amused when Leonard Peikoff', the youngest of the collective, seemed to hope that within a few years of publication, America would return to complete political freedom and a laissez-faire economy. "That's not how things happen, or can possibly happen," she insisted. "I will have an influence — Atlas will have an influence — but it will be a very slow process. We won't begin to see its concrete results in action for many years. I may not fully see them at all."

On an evening a few days before publication, Ayn, Frank, Nathaniel, and I, remembering that Random House always placed featured new books in its small window on Madison Avenue — drove to Random House to see if Atlas was there. We got out of the car and hurried to the window. Atlas was there; it was the only book in the window. I grinned, and, quite involuntarily, pointed at the colorful jacket that had been designed by Frank, and said: "That's us!" It was one of the few times I ever saw Ayn roar with delighted laughter.

On the back of the jacket was a photograph of Ayn taken by Phyllis Cerf, Bennett's wife: Ayn sits in front of a window with a view of New York, her head slightly raised, her expression cheerful, serene, intent, her large eyes looking upward. On a copy of that picture which she gave to Nathaniel and me, the inscription reads — in a phrase from Galt's words to Rearden and Francisco, to which she added the words in parentheses: — "To Nathan and Barbara — my first friends, my fellow-fighters, my fellow-out-casts (and fellow winners), in whose name and honor I speak — Ayn."

In my copy of Atlas Shrugged, she wrote a still more personal message: "To Barbara — for that sense of life which is mine and yours — for starting with the same values and accepting nothing less — to carry on my battle, my universe and all my values — Ayn." The underscoring of "all" was not accidental; it referred to Nathaniel. The dedication page of the novel read: "To Frank O'Connor and Nathaniel Branden."

Shortly before publication, the collective decided to give a celebration surprise party for Ayn. The Cerfs were invited, the Klopfers, the Haydns, the Ogdens, the Collinses — all the people who had a professional part in bringing out Atlas. A private room at the Plaza Hotel was engaged, which Frank agreed to decorate with his exquisite floral arrangements, invitations were sent out with the explanation that Ayn was to know nothing about it, and an elaborate banquet, consisting of Ayn's favorite dishes, was ordered. Frank was to tell Ayn that he wanted to take her to a special dinner, just for the two of them, and that she was to dress accordingly.

When Ayn and Frank arrived at the banquet room, the guests shouted "Surprise!" and hurried to greet and congratulate her. Her first words were an angry: "I do not approve of surprises." The friends crowding around her had been talking and laughing; but the laughter stopped; it was evident that her words were not a startled reaction of the moment, that she was truly indignant. She sat grimly all through dinner, through the strained efforts at conversation and the toasts to her, and through Bennett Cerf's redoubled efforts — with the warmth and charm that was so delightful a part of his personality — to melt her chilly disapproval. Bennett was partly successful; Ayn began to join in the conversation — although she continued to say that she disliked surprises and should have been informed of the party in advance.

One touch that almost — but not quite — saved the evening was that Alan Collins and Bennett Cerf distributed packages of cigarettes they had had made, with a bright gold dollar sign printed on each cigarette; on the front of the packages, in gold lettering over the Random House insignia, were the words: WHO Is JOHN GALT? THEY KNOW AT RANDOM HOUSE. In Atlas, these cigarettes are manufactured in Galt's Gulch, with the dollar sign as the symbol of the trader. Ayn smoked several of the cigarettes — she had always been a heavy smoker — and saved the rest. As she puffed away happily, one saw again the childlike charm in the woman who a moment ago had been so sternly disapproving; she could scarcely believe that Bennett and Alan had taken the trouble to arrange something for the sole purpose of giving her personal pleasure.

In retrospect, it might have been predicted that a surprise party would not please Ayn that she could not cope with the unexpected. Her reaction that evening seemed relevant to her lack of humor: she could not, would not, move abruptly from one context to another. She had expected a dinner alone with Frank; when the nature of the evening suddenly switched, she could not flow with the change of plans — and, typically, she reacted with anger and a touch of fear. It was as if she felt a painful pressure to force her mind to abandon its straight-line, single-track functioning and to make a mental leap not only to another context, but worse, to a context imposed upon her by other people.

When the first Random House advertisements for Atlas began to appear, as part of one of the most major and aggressive advertising-promotion campaigns in the firm's history — Ayn felt that they were essentially meaningless, and had her first quarrel with Bennett. But she was pleased when he ran an advertisement that she and Nathaniel had worked out together; it consisted of a dramatic portrait of Frank, with the caption "This is John Galt — who said he would stop the motor of the world — and did. Meet him in Atlas Shrugged"

Atlas Shrugged was published on October 10, 1957.

And then it was over — over forever in Ayn's life — that happy period of excitement, and hope, and expectation. And with it seemed to go almost the last of her fragile capacity to live in reality.

The reviews of We the Living had been bad. The reviews of The Fountainhead had been worse. The reviews of Atlas Shrugged were savage. Incredibly, once again Granville Hicks came into Ayn's life: it was to Hicks that the New York Times gave the job of reviewing Atlas. "This Gargantuan book comes among us as a demonstrative rather than as a literary work," he wrote. "It seems an expression of the authors determination to crush the enemies of truth — her truth, of course — as a battering ram demolishes the walls of a hostile city... Not in any literary sense a serious novel... Loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate..."

Patricia Donegan wrote in The Commonweal: "Atlas Shrugged is a cumbersome, lumbering vehicle" — its heroes "all subscribe merrily to the theory that morality lies in taking what one is capable of getting... Miss Rand is all for the survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog, sauve qui peut and other such bracing philosophies... The destruction of the weak to the advantage of the strong is applauded... an outpouring of hate."

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert R. Kirsch wrote: "It would be hard to find such a display of grotesque eccentricity outside an asylum... The reader looks on with the amazement of one who has been given access to another's nightmare... Galt is really arguing for a dictatorship."

"Ayn Rand's philosophy is nearly perfect in its immorality," wrote Gore Vidal. Other reviewers wrote that the philosophy of Atlas "makes well-poisoning seem like one of the kindlier arts" — that it is "crack-brained ratiocination" — that it is "a pitiful exercise in something akin to paranoia" — that as a novel it is "execrable claptrap" — that it is "longer than life and twice as preposterous." Although many critics denounced Ayn for specifically literary incompetence, the reader could not judge the authenticity of such accusations, since they so often were combined with outrage at her philosophy.

The worst review of all appeared in William Buckley's conservative National Review. It was written by Whittaker Chambers, former Communist spy who had reembraced religion. It would be difficult to find a reviewer whose intellectual history was more representative of the villains of Atlas Shrugged — the villains of "faith and force" — and more certain to be antagonized by its philosophy. The review was headlined: BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU. "The Dollar Sign is not merely provocative," Chambers wrote, "more importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order... It is a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel... Systems of philosophical materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world's atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts... a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them... Miss Rand calls in a Big Brother of her own... she plumps for a technocratic elite... And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship... From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'

It is astonishing that some attackers of Ayn's philosophy accused her of materialism and continue to do so — she, who wrote of the glory and magnificent achievements of the human spirit — as if, without the hypothesis of a divine creator, there can be no spirit, no values, no morality; and that they accused of lusting for dictatorship a thinker who places, at the very heart of her moral and political philosophy, the total rejection of force. Galt states: "Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate — do you hear me? no man may start — the use of physical force against others... Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins... It is only in retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use."

Whittaker Chambers's review began the now famous vendetta against Ayn and Atlas Shrugged by National Review — most particularly on the grounds of her opposition to religious faith — that has lasted to

this day. In the pages of his magazine, William Buckley has attacked the "desiccated philosophy" of Atlas Shrugged and has written, "All that needed to be said about it had already been said in the Sermon on the Mount." He attacked again in both of the two newspaper columns he wrote about Ayn and her ideas immediately following her death, denouncing "the essential aridity of Miss Rand's philosophy" and quoting Chambers's references to Atlas Shrugged's "tone of over-riding arrogance... its shrillness... its dogmatism."

Many years after the Whittaker Chambers review appeared, William Buckley was asked why he chose Chambers to review Atlas for National Review. "He volunteered," Buckley insisted. "He had read the first one hundred pages and had said that it was off to a wonderful narrative start, and he exclaimed over how thoroughly she knew her material... I was in Europe when the review came out, so I didn't see it before it was published."

Asked if the review was representative of his own opinion, Buckley said, '7 never read the book [selection mine]. When I read the review of it and saw the length of the book, I never picked it up. I think I read all her other novels. I didn't read her philosophy books... One of these days I'll probably get around to reading Atlas Shrugged"

Despite the furor of negative reviews, many reviews were highly, often ecstatically, favorable. Critic John Chamberlain wrote that Atlas Shrugged was "directed toward the creation of an entirely new mental and moral force in the world." Ruth Alexander, in the New York Mirror, wrote that "Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and profound philosopher of the twentieth century." Other critics praised her striking narrative power, her skill at the creation of a complex and intricate plot, the breathtaking suspense which carries the reader headlong through the book's eleven hundred and sixty-eight pages. But, as with her earlier work, most of the rave reviews were published in papers and magazines outside of New York City.

The sales began slowly — not as slowly as The Fountainhead, but not as Random House had expected. Bennett Cerf wrote in At Random, "By the time we published [Atlas] we had an enormous advance sale. It was her first novel since The Fountainhead and we printed a hundred thousand copies, knowing there would be tremendous interest in it. Then the reviews came out. The critics were hostile, as they always were to Ayn Rand, and the sale was badly crimped for a while. We thought it was going to be a failure."

In an effort to publicize the novel, Ayn agreed to an interview with Mike Wallace on his New York television show, "Night Beat," the hard-driving program that began his rise to prominence. They liked each other immediately, and were to visit together on a number of occasions over the following years. "She was perfect grist for the mill of 'Night Beat,'" Mike later said. "She voiced provocative opinions, she was anti-establishment and utterly unexpected, with a kind of close reasoning and a clarity that one had to admire; it was a remarkable interview. And the calls and letters that poured in about it shook the rafters."

Mike smiled ruefully as he spoke of sending his young staff of three for pre-interview talks with Ayn. "They all fell in love with her!" he said. "And they made life pretty difficult on the show at times, demanding an adherence to Ayn's ideas that I couldn't possibly give... I liked to look at Ayn, her hair in the same kind of Dutch cut that I had as a small boy. She had such sparkling eyes and an extraordinary texture to her accent; and when she talked to you, she really talked to you, she cared about talking to you. She was fascinating."

As always in Ayn's professional career, it was predominantly word of mouth that caused the sagging sales of her novel to pick up — then to soar — then to skyrocket through printing after printing and edition after edition and year after year. Speaking of the success of Atlas, Bennett Cerf later remarked, "In all my years of publishing, I've never seen anything like it. To break through against such enormous opposition!" Its history is still more phenomenal than that of The Fountainhead; it has repeated the saga of The Fountainhead, but on a wider scale and with a more profound impact. By 1984, it had sold more than five million copies, and had been printed in most of the major languages of the world. In 1963, New American Library brought out a paperback edition which made publishing history; because of its length, NAL took the risk of pricing it above the top mass-market paperback price of fifty cents; they priced it at ninety-five cents. 53 Paperback sales zoomed skyward at once. Today, more than twenty million copies of Ayn's books have been sold; without advertising, the novels continue to sell at the rate of over three hundred thousand copies a year — more than the equivalent of new bestsellers. Like The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged is now a modern classic.

Each reader of Atlas Shrugged finds for himself, according to his own standards and judgment, its virtues and its flaws. Many among even its most admiring readers have found a major shortcoming in the characterization of the novel's hero, John Galt: despite his epic grandeur of intellect and imagination, he is, in the end, a shadowy, unknowable abstraction, he is the wholly cerebral man, the man whose passions we deduce but never experience. Another shortcoming has been found in a similar deep emotional remoteness in all the major characters, whose conversations, even in their most intimate moments, are predominantly without authentic intimacy, are philosophical presentations and debates; their minds touch, their bodies embrace, but their souls remain aloof, hidden in some unseen spiritual haven. Another — in the often bewildering severity of the moral judgments pronounced by its heroes and heroine, their blistering contempt for the world, their withering dismissal of lesser minds and less exalted goals. Another — in the sadomasochistic overtones of its love scenes, the troubling violence of the sexual encounters. Another — in the novel's often pedantic quality, its overly detailed spelling out of each new concept, with the resultant loss, in such passages, of literary spontaneity.

Necessarily, the novel's shortcomings — and its virtues — reflect its authors personality and psychology.

Like her characters, Ayn, too, was damaged by her rejection of the emotional and intuitive aspects of her nature, by her indifference and obliviousness to her deepest emotional needs, as she, like Galt, became increasingly a rigidly cerebral being, cut off from and unable to utilize the deep wells of knowledge contained in the noncerebral levels of her mind. As the years were passing, it was particularly the "feminine" aspects of her nature that she turned her back on. Increasingly, the once rejected child — rejected by her beloved father, who responded only to her intellectual qualities, rejected by her mother as socially inadequate, rejected by young men, who chose prettier girls as the objects of their romantic interest, rejected by Leo, who won her with a single arrogant smile and left her bleeding and bereft — the child who had suffered from the rejection more than she ever permitted herself to recognize — was struggling to disallow her need for intimacy, for love, for comfort, for solace, for authentic emotional closeness in her human relationships, for the joy of a man's strong, protective arms. She was snuggling to do it despite — or, perhaps, because of — her marriage and her love affair.

Philosophically, Ayn defined a woman's love as surrender. But her inability to make peace with her feminine needs had led to a conflict in her romantic life that never left her: the conflict between, on the one hand, her terror of surrender, a surrender that could bring in its wake the agony and humiliation born of her love of her father and of Leo, her fear of recognizing a will and a strength greater than her own, her horror at the possibility of any loss of her independence — and, on the other hand, her need, both passionate and timid, to find in a man the courage, the will, and the strength that would bring her helplessly to her knees. In her novels, that conflict took the form of a romanticized sexual violence. She had said, discussing Roark and Dominique, that theirs was to be the ideal romance, "so of course it had to start with violent antagonism." That the "of course" seemed self-evident to her was not a matter of abstract philosophy or of psychological theorizing, but of the deep division within her: in order for her to surrender, she needed to feel, like Dominique, like Dagny, that she was helpless in the power of a hero of overwhelming dominance and will. Only thus could she avoid feeling self-contempt for her feminine instincts.

But Atlas Shrugged is a great work of art — not merely in the grandeur and sweep of its story, the extraordinary power and originality of its plot — not merely in the inspirational quality of its heroes and heroine, the "command to rise" which they embody — not merely in its integration of complex, ingenious events with still more complex and stunning philosophical ideas — but most of all in the breathtaking intellectual audacity of what it attempts and encompasses.

As in The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand was presenting new philosophical ideas and concretizing them in the lives and actions of men. But as she once said, "The Fountainhead was only a prologue to Atlas Shrugged.'' In Atlas, she was attempting what no other philosopher and no other novelist had dreamed of; to present the total of a self-consistent philosophical system — a system and a world view that embraced metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, economics, and aesthetics, that included such issues as the meaning of free will — the relationship between mind and body — the nature of universals — the law of identity as the bridge between metaphysics and epistemology — the derivation of "ought" from "is" — the distinction between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality — the psychology of sex — the nature of logic — the spiritual meaning of money — the relationship between happiness and moral values — the creative man's attitude toward pain — the psychology of the secondhanders and why they hate the creators — the meaning of charity — the social conditions necessary for material production — the industrialists as exponents of man's creative ability. And she was doing it by dramatizing and demonstrating each complex concept as it related to and affected men's life on earth, she was concretizing the meaning of each concept in human action, in reality, as it led men to joy or tragedy, to achievement or parasitism, to triumph or defeat. She was doing it not in the dry and scholarly form of a treatise, but by uniting the cool, mathematical methodology of the philosopher with the novelist's passionate, imaginative projections through theme, style, characterization, and plot.

As with The Fountainhead, mail from the readers of Atlas began to pour in like a torrent which has continued to the present day. Hundreds, then thousands of letters were written to Ayn, expressing enthusiasm for her achievement and asking philosophical questions, as she began attracting an ever growing following.

Within little more than a year after publication, Ayn was on her way to world fame, she was becoming wealthy, she was passionately admired by many thousands of devoted readers. She had written the novel she had been moving toward all of her life. She had achieved all the dreams of her childhood — and all the dreams of her adult life.

It was then that Ayn began sinking into a profound, terrible depression. It was a depression that would last almost without abatement for more than two long years. Her mood returned to what it had been when she was working on Galt's speech: tense, irritable, demanding, with violent outbursts of rage and bitterness. During some part of nearly every day, she wept in pain and frustration. Her agonizing physical tension returned, and the severe, debilitating pains in her shoulders and back. Her energy dissipated; she seemed to drag herself from assignment to assignment without interest or motivation. She had always played solitaire as a means of occupying herself when she was blocked on the writing of a passage or a scene; now, she sat at her desk daily, playing game after game; she did not read, she did not write, she was scarcely willing to talk. The life seemed to be draining out of her body and spirit in slow, anguished drops. She was gradually running down, like a mighty engine losing the fuel that is its life's blood.

It was not the bad reviews, she said. "I had told Bennett not to expect a single good review. If there were any, fine, but we couldn't count on it — although I did think I'd get more intelligent smears, I didn't expect them to be such abysmal, stupid hooliganism, to contain such self-contradictions and such total distortions of what I'd said." It was not the outpouring of hatred directed against her, she said. It was not the initial slow sales of Atlas. It was that there was no one to object to the attacks,

no one to oppose them, no one with a public name, a public reputation, a public voice, to speak for her in that world which was vilifying her, to defend her, to fight for her, to name the nature and the stature of her accomplishment. Ayn had never doubted her own uniqueness as novelist and as thinker. Her unwavering belief in the value of her work had always before protected her in the face of disappointments and attacks; now, it became her enemy. Since her achievement was beyond question, what was wrong with a world in which there was no one of stature to announce it from the rooftops?

"The whole state of the culture suddenly appears much worse than I had ever imagined," she said. "I no longer know to whom I'm addressing myself when I write. I no longer know where are the intelligences to which I've always addressed myself. I feel paralyzed by disgust and contempt. You can fight evil, but contempt is the most terrible feeling... you feel you are fighting lice, in a vacuum. And if I feel contempt for the whole culture — if it feels like I'm living in the last days of the Roman Empire — then what sense does it make to continue writing?"

Unfortunately, in a respect quite apart from its philosophical or literary content, Atlas inevitably antagonized the very group among which Ayn had expected to find the voices to speak for her: the intellectuals. Throughout the novel, her worst denunciations and the worst villainy are reserved precisely for modern intellectuals. "The parasites of subsidized classrooms," Galt calls them, echoing themes dotted throughout the story — "hatred-eaten mystics" — "professional cannibals" — the men of "evasive eyes and snarling words." It was not an attitude likely to cause intellectuals to rise to her defense. And, as is evident in the reviews, despite the shocking injustice of the "big brother" accusations, many readers were grasping or at least sensing a discrepancy between Ayn's steadfast political convictions and the authoritarianism of personality, the dogmatic conviction that only she possessed the truth, that had been growing in her over the years and had become apparent in her work. Some of these readers, not recognizing that the authoritarianism was present in the writer rather than in the philosophy, hurled their accusations at the wrong target.

But more appeared to be involved in Ayn's state of mind than she understood. Quite simply, she was physically, emotionally, and intellectually exhausted from the savagely intensive effort which had lasted, from the first idea of the novel, through fourteen years. All her life, she had fed her immense energy into her work; she had no reserves left with which to fight another battle.

Still more relevant was the fact that she had completed her life's work. She bad at last, to her full satisfaction, created the ideal man, the figure who had been the source of her decision to be a novelist. Her motivation to write fiction, which had always been central to her sense of identity and had carried her through every day of her fifty-three years — was gone. All at once, fiction ceased to interest or attract her. She had done what she had set out to do, and now there seemed nothing worth doing. She could not conceive of a hero greater than John Galt, and she had no wish merely to present variations on Galt. She had written Atlas Shrugged too young. The motor of her life was gone, and suddenly, shockingly, she felt herself drifting without rudder or direction or purpose.

Her emotional reaction to the completion of her goal was mixed: she was desperately unhappy at the prospect of a future without purpose — but she was simultaneously deeply fulfilled. "I had no more inspiration for fiction," she later said, commenting on the years of depression. "Fiction, to me, is Atlas Shrugged. My mission was done... Until Atlas was completed, I always felt an enormous tension, the drive of a central purpose. My loafing so much during the years after Atlas was malevolent in that I felt desperate about the state of the world, I could not decide what to do with my life nor how to bear going around despising everybody — yet often, alone in my study, it was Atlantis, I'd sit at my desk in happy contemplation, with the feeling of complete peace. While I was working on Atlas, I felt I didn't care if a bomb dropped, just so long as I could finish this book. But after Atlas I was no longer pressured, my lifelong assignment was over, and I felt as if my time from then on was a gift."

In the black agony of depression, Ayn turned to Nathaniel for help. Frank suffered with her and for her, but he could not deal with the issues that were tormenting her. He would listen to her for hours as she railed bitterly against the irrationality of the world, shake his head in sympathy — and then escape to his painting. Her anguish became an increasingly heavy burden for Nathaniel, as she began leaning on him even more than before. All at once, his teacher, his mentor, his lover, was in agony, and it was his job to find a solution for the woman who had always been the source of so much of his own understanding.

For more than two years, Nathaniel spent hours each day in telephone conversation with Ayn, and two or three evenings each week talking with her in an attempt to motivate her once again, struggling to be her psychologist and teacher. He did not see the world as the bleak, irrational place that Ayn now considered it to be, and he searched desperately for reasons to give her hope, reasons to make her feel she was not living in the last days of the Roman Empire, reasons to convince her that there was more in the world around her than blank and corrupt mindlessness. His task was an almost impossible one. Ayn's dark view of the world, although now sharply intensified, was not new in her psychology; it had been present through most of her life, lurking out of sight for years at a time, but still present underground as if it awaited the events that would evoke it.

One must wonder if Ayn's suffering was not in part the price she paid, granted other elements in her psyche, for her astonishing intellectual powers. Historically, it is a price that men and women of vast intelligence have often paid. Such men and women stand alone, cut off from the world by a sense of distance from other people that is not an illness and cannot be cured. With the firsthand, blinding vision of the creator, they endure the loneliness of seeing farther and more clearly than others see, of understanding what others do not understand, of achieving what others cannot achieve, of moving forward with a dedication and tenacity that others cannot grasp. They feel invisible to the world — and in many respects they are invisible, as is every creative genius. For Ayn, the use of her mind, the solving of the most complex of problems, was an effortless, joyous activity, it was the sole unchanging and permanent source of happiness in her life. To think, to see, to understand, to know, seemed to her as simple and uncomplicated as drawing breath; and the conclusions she reached seemed as clear and evident as the need to draw those breaths. Why, then, did others not grasp what was so easy to grasp? Why did they not perceive what was so patently apparent? Why did they not understand what was so simple to understand? Why did they not know what she knew with such blazing clarity?

Ayn's depression brought to an end, with only a few unplanned exceptions, her sexual relationship with Nathaniel. She did not intend the ending to be permanent, she told him. She would recover emotionally, she knew she would recover; but she could not say how long it would take. And while she felt as she did, while her capacity for emotion seemed dead inside her, she was not able to cope with a love affair, she had nothing to give or to want. Her love for Nathaniel had not died, but her whole life, she said, was "on hold," and their romance must also be on hold. Nathaniel agreed without argument — and with some measure of relief. Just as Ayn could not cope with a love affair in her present state, he could not simultaneously be psychologist, the strong shoulder on which she leaned, the man who listened, day after day and month after month, to the worst of her anguished denunciations of the world — and an ardent, romantic lover.

The strain of dealing with Ayn's depression took its toll on Nathaniel. He had always been arrogant and judgmental in his dealings with people. Now, attempting to live his own life while finding for Ayn a reason to live, constantly tense, pressured by the weight of responsibilities to Ayn, he was more coldly arrogant and demanding than ever before. Within Ayn's circle of friends, widened since the inception of the collective, denunciation followed denunciation and moral incrimination followed moral recrimination — always buttressed and validated by the sanction of Ayn Rand, and often occurring in her presence and at her insistence as she became once more the avenging angel she had been during the writing of Galt's speech. Ayn's young friends had been disarmed in advance: they had learned from Ayn that reason required that one not "withhold your contempt from men's vices;" they had learned from Ayn and Nathaniel that irrationality and evasion were often found in the most innocent-seeming errors; they had learned that emotions were not a valid guide of behavior, that one must live by reason, that however loudly their emotions were screaming against the demands and the criticisms, that was not a reason for action.

The ultimate responsibility for the suffering of Ayn's friends lay neither with Ayn nor with Nathaniel. Her friends — including myself — were free; no gun was held to our heads; we could have said: "Enough!" We could have left and found our separate ways to life. We did not say "Enough!" We did not leave. The deadly mixture of idealism and a vulnerability to guilt — with all its variations and permutations in each individual — had formed the stout chains of our own devising that bound us tightly and made us willing to endure more and still more, that made us willing to endure, as the years passed, the awareness that our enthusiasm and zest for life were seeping away, that our authentic benevolence was losing its bright coloration, that our hope was diminishing. We could not abandon reason, we could not abandon morality, no matter what the cost. And that meant we could not, would not, abandon Ayn Rand.

In myself, I felt an emotional deadness steadily growing and beginning to encase me in a sheet of ice. I became perceived as cool, aloof, distant. My remoteness was enhanced by the secret I could not tell: the secret of Ayn and Nathaniel's affair. Often, I felt a desperate need for the release of confiding in a friend; but I believed myself bound by a vow of silence. I could not tell my own secret without revealing secrets that were not mine to share. And so I kept silent — and found myself growing farther and farther away from the people I loved.

A philosophy that exalted individualism and joy was becoming, in practice, a set of dreary duties and a source of agonized emotional repression. A philosophy that was a mighty hymn to the possibilities of human life was becoming, in practice, a dirge. The bright promise was fading. The golden days of enchantment were gone.

53 Truman Talley, then at New American Library with publisher Victor Weybright, has said, "When Victor was negotiating for the paperback rights of Atlas Shrugged, he felt that the novel would have to be cut, because he couldn't price it for more than fifty cents. Ayn Rand refused to cut it, and negotiations ceased. A year later, Victor agreed to do it at ninety-five cents — and even then it had to be printed in '8-point eyestrain."

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was in January of 1958, a few months after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, that the movement which was to make Ayn known not merely as novelist but as philosopher, which was to focus and speed the dissemination, the understanding and the influence of her ideas from one end of the country to the other — and to other continents — had its modest beginning. Ayn would see concrete results of her philosophy in action.

Nathaniel had conceived the idea of organizing Nathaniel Branden Institute 54 soon known as NBI, as a response to the growing tide of requests Ayn was receiving for a detailed, systematic presentation of her philosophy. He prepared a course of twenty lectures entitled "Basic Principles of Objectivism." The course presented Ayn's philosophy, including aspects not yet covered in her written works, and developed some of its implications for psychology; it included such topics as "Objectivity versus subjectivity" — "What is reason?" "The nature of emotions" — "Are the arguments for the existence of God logically defensible?" — "The nature and meaning of volition" — "Why self-esteem is man's deepest psychological need" — "Social metaphysics" — "Foundation of the Objectivist ethics" — "The importance of passing moral judgments" — "The ethics of altruism" — "The principles of a proper political system: Freedom versus compulsion" — "The economics of a free society" — "The psychology of sex" — "The nature and purpose of art."

Ayn was dubious about the presentation of such a course. "When Nathan first had the idea for the lectures," she later explained, "I didn't expect very much to come of them, and I was concerned for him: I thought there was a good chance his project would fail, since the culture in general seemed totally indifferent to our ideas and to ideas in general." But when Nathaniel insisted that he knew the risks involved and believed the lectures had a reasonable chance of success, Ayn agreed that he should attempt it. And she agreed to join him during the question period following each lecture, so that students might direct questions to her.

The lectures had Ayn's intellectual approval, but as a business venture, they were Nathaniel's independent undertaking. Nathaniel and I opened an "office" — which consisted of the combination desk-dining table in our apartment — and sent announcements to people in the New York area who had written especially interesting and intelligent letters to Ayn. We had no experience in the lecture field; we did not know that at that time it was unprecedented to offer lectures on philosophy privately, without a university affiliation. A few years later, the president of a large lecture agency commented, "I'll admit quite candidly that if you had come to me for advice then — I would have told you that what's happened is impossible. Lectures on philosophy?" He shook his head.

The course was presented for the first time to twenty-eight students in a small hotel room. When it was given again in the fall, there were forty-five students; the following February, the enrollment rose to sixty-five. The Institute began placing small advertisements in New York newspapers, and enrollment began to double with each course. The intellectual level of the students was impressive; then, and later, they predominantly consisted of remarkably intelligent men and women. The average age of the students was in the early thirties; in one series, the youngest student was a sixteen-year-old high school girl, the oldest a sixty-year-old professor of physics. The professional range was varied: there were college students, secretaries, businessmen, housewives, writers, economists, artists, teachers, lawyers, engineers, psychiatrists.

Students began asking for courses on other aspects of Objectivism, and NBI arranged for members of the collective to join the Institute as associate lecturers. Alan Greenspan began presenting a course on "The Economics of a Free Society" — Leonard Peikoff offered "A Critical History of Philosophy" — Mary Ann Rukavina gave a series on "The Esthetics of the Visual Arts" — Nathaniel added new courses on "Basic Principles of Objectivist Psychology" and "A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Psychology" — and I developed a course entitled "Principles of Efficient Thinking."

It was soon necessary for NBI to move to larger quarters. Nathaniel cut back on his practice of psychotherapy and spent his time lecturing and writing, and I devoted full time to the Institute as its executive director.

Ayn's first serious interest in the activities of NBI was sparked when mail started pouring in from all over the country — later, from all over the world — as word of the availability of formal presentations of Objectivism began to spread. Many of the letters asked for courses to be made available in other cities. A young Los Angeles couple, Jan and Peter Crosby, asked if the lectures could be put on tape, so that they might hear them. It occurred to me that we could tape our courses, appoint representatives to handle them, to do mailings, to advertise, to arrange for accommodations and thus be able to offer lectures nationwide. It seemed an unlikely idea. How could one induce people to sit around a tape recorder, staring at a blank wall, listening to a lecture on epistemology or ethics or aesthetics? But soon, to Ayn's continuing astonishment, NBI was successfully offering courses in more than thirty cities, from Los Angeles to Toronto to Clear, Alaska, and a stream of requests began arriving from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.

Slowly, by infinitesimal steps, the growing success of NBI, in conjunction with her two years of conversations with Nathaniel, began to pull Ayn out of her depression. "The man who really saved my life during this period," she later said, "was Nathan. I was almost paralyzed, and it was his understanding of the culture which helped me clarify and identify what was really happening. It was only Nathan who kept a steady point in a Hegelian universe.

"I felt that people had given up even the search for rational ideas, and that there was nothing to be done. But as a cultural sign, it was NBI that really changed my mind. With the passage of time, I began to see how even the least promising of students were not the same after the course, they were infinitely better people and more rational. I saw that rational ideas do take, even if in a manner which I did not know before, that part of the process is conscious and part is osmosis, but it works. The enormous response to the lectures gave me a preview of what can be done with a culture, and that pleased me enormously. It was what I needed in order to go on."

For the first time in several years, Ayn began to move outside the narrow circle of her friends to spend time with other people. Through his daughter, Joan Kennedy Taylor, an admirer of Ayn's work and a student at NBI, Ayn had met the renowned composer and music critic Deems Taylor. She began to spend occasional evenings with him, discussing music and listening to recordings of his compositions.

One evening some time later, New York University held a banquet to honor Deems Taylor, which Ayn and Frank attended. At her request, she sat next to John O'Hara; she admired the psychological perceptiveness of his work. O'Hara's biographer, Finnis Farr, was to quote his reaction in O'Hara: "I sat next to a woman called Ayn Rand, the author, whom I had often heard described as a terror, but we got along fine. She is an oddball, born in Russia, but what a talker! Fun, actually... She asked me what my philosophy was, and that, of course, got me going. Turned out that I am diametrically opposed to her philosophy, but I didn't know that till later..."

One day, to her stunned surprise, Ayn answered her telephone to hear the voice of Isabel Paterson. After complimenting her on Atlas Shrugged, Pat explained that she had been unable to sell her own novel. Ayn had seen and liked the initial chapters years ago. Would she recommend it to Random House? Pat asked. Ayn felt that the request was inexcusable after their break and the years of silence, but, she later explained, "I felt such pity I simply said that I didn't know if I could recommend it, I would have to read it first; if she'd drop it off, we could talk about it after I'd read it — and that I'd like to see her."

In the years since their last meeting, Pat had often talked of Ayn, and of how much she missed her and regretted their break. She spoke, too, of Frank, to whom she had been devoted and who was perhaps the one person in her life whom she had never insulted. As Ayn's fortunes were rising, Pats were falling. Her hair-trigger temper, her bitter intransigence, her infinite capacity to embarrass friends publicly, had finally alienated her from all of her allies. One by one, she broke with them — from Rose Wilder Lane, a friend and source of intellectual stimulation over decades, to John Chamberlain, an admiring and admired fellow fighter, to Will Cuppy, the literary critic and writer who was for many years among the closest and most faithful of her friends, to Ayn Rand. Each time — unlike Ayn, who spoke without a suggestion of regret about rejected friends — Pat openly admitted to feeling painful regret over the breaches and painful loneliness for the lost relationships, but the rifts went too deep to be healed.

When she was forced to retire from the Herald Tribune with a tiny pension, she refused, on principle, to collect Social Security benefits. In 1959, elderly, ill and poor, this fiercely independent woman moved in with Muriel Hall and her husband. "We loved it," Muriel said. "It was better than any college education."

Pat had spent the last years working on her novel (still unfinished at her death in 1961). She wanted to find a publisher, and tried to contact old friends in the publishing industry; but she had antagonized all of them, and the novel was rejected. One day she told Muriel, "I think I'll ask Ayn to read it." Muriel's impression was that her real interest was not in literary criticism but in seeing Ayn once more.

Their final visit was a desperately sad one for both women. Ayn had read the manuscript, and was disappointed. She had never particularly admired Pat's fiction, but felt that this one was considerably below Pat's former standards; it was hopeless as a commercial property. Ayn felt obliged to say that she didn't think the novel would sell, and why. "Pat kept asking if I liked such-and-such a passage," Ayn would recall, "and when I could say I did, she beamed. It was heartbreaking. We talked philosophy a bit, and it was the same old mysticism. Then she left."

"There is no possibility of a reconciliation," Pat told Muriel Hall. "There's still a barrier that is never going to disappear."

Pat was to make a very interesting remark about Ayn's work: that Ayn, as a fiction writer, was in one sense the Harriet Beecher Stowe of this century — that like Uncle Tom's Cabin, her fiction had the rare and compelling power to change people's ideas and their lives. And it is true that the single statement most consistently made about Ayn's work by her readers — by people who grasped little of her philosophical ideas and by people who had studied them deeply, by businessmen and philosophers and engineers and students and stock brokers and housewives and newspapermen, by rich and poor and middle class, by liberals and conservatives and libertarians, by Americans and foreigners, by blacks and whites and Jews and Methodists and Catholics — is: "Ayn Rand's books changed my life." Usually, they mean it as a compliment; rarely, they mean it as a criticism. But always, they mean it.

Ayn was soon to feel disappointed in still another friend. Ruth and Buzzy Hill had continued to rent Ayn's California house, although Ayn was shortly to ask them to arrange for its sale, knowing she would never again choose to live there. Nathaniel wrote to Ruth and asked if she would be willing to locate interested people and present his lectures in Ayn's home. Ruth agreed, but asked that she first be allowed to hear a sample lecture, so she could judge the quality of Nathaniel's voice and become familiar with what she would be selling. An indignant letter from Nathaniel arrived, stating that Ayn was offended by her request; since Ayn had recommended him as a lecturer on her philosophy, the meaning of asking him for a sample tape was to discover if she were a reliable judge in such matters. He did not audition, he said. The matter was closed.

A few months later, Ruth was startled to see Ayn, Frank, and Nathaniel coming up the driveway; she had not known they were in Los Angeles on NBI business. As Ruth ran down the driveway to greet Ayn and Frank, she stopped short when she saw Ayn's furious look. She listened, numbed, to an angry tirade: How dare she question Ayn's judgment? How dare she presume to demand an audition of someone Ayn had recommended? Despite her love and admiration for Ayn, Ruth stood her ground firmly. "It was from you," she said quietly, "that I learned the importance of thinking for myself and going only by my own judgment." To be quoted in this context served only to increase Ayn's anger. When she left, she pointedly invited only Buzzy Hill to visit her in New York — although Frank winked at Ruth, as if to say "Don't worry, it will be all right," as he waved good-bye.

It was during these years, from the publication of Atlas Shrugged throughout the sixties, that an influx of new people, drawn to Ayn by her novel and by NBI — people who predominantly were accomplished adults rather than youngsters beginning their careers — began to enter the circle of Ayn's friends. Among them were television producer Ted Yates, writers Ira Levin and Al Ramrus, economists Murray Rothbard and Martin Anderson, historian Robert Hessen, artists Daniel Green and Jose Capuletti, businessman Wilfred Schwartz, psychologists Lee and Joyce Shulman and Roger Callahan, journalist Edith Efron, neurophysiologist Robert Efron, attorneys Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, actress Kay Nolte Smith, and actor and drama coach Phillip Smith. (A second generation began forming in the late sixties: Nathaniel's nephews Jonathan and Leonard Hirschfeld became interested in Objectivism and moved to New York, and my nephew, Jim Weidman, began to spend summers with us.)

These new people were drawn to Ayn by her work and her reputation — and held by the quality of her intelligence and the power of her personality; none had ever encountered so intellectually fascinating and provocative a human being. Friends have commented that they would see Ayn talk to physicists — she had studied almost nothing in the field — who were astounded by her grasp of the essentials of the field and her ability to draw penetrating inferences on the basis of a handful of facts. They saw her talk to economists who were stunned by the breadth and innovative nature of the conclusions she had derived from reading a handful of books on economics. They saw professional philosophers listening thunderstruck as she led them to grasp invaluable principles of metaphysics and epistemology; had the philosophers been told that her reading in academic philosophy was limited to a few college courses, the study of Plato and Aristotle, excerpts from key figures in the history of philosophy, and conversations with those among her friends who were students of philosophy, they would not have believed it.

Ayn did not lecture to men and women working in areas where her own factual knowledge was inadequate; she tended to be well aware of her lack of concrete information. Her method was Socratic: she would, for instance, question a physicist about his field, a barrage of questions posed by a mind that homed in like a laser beam on essentials, which would lead him to identify and examine his own most basic scientific axioms — so basic that he had barely known they were the source from which his thinking and his work proceeded. And the physicist would leave Ayn feeling that he — and his field — had been understood and appreciated as never before. Even in the field of literature, her method tended to be Socratic: she would read a few paragraphs of a writer's work — and after instantly naming for him the most self-revelatory aspects and small touches that he had thought intimately personal and evident only to himself — she would lead him, through a series of probing questions, to grasp and to consider the basic literary premises that motivated him. And the writer would leave Ayn feeling that he — and his field — were understood and appreciated as never before. Her methodology was an epistemological tour de force.

Her new friends felt that they were receiving an inestimably important gift — a gift which made many of them willing to ignore the times when her lack of knowledge did not stop her from pronouncing sweeping judgments. She would dismiss composers such as Wagner and Beethoven as without important merit — because their work was "malevolent." She would dismiss artists such as Rembrandt for the same reason, and the entire Impressionist school as "murky and unfocused." She would dismiss most of the history of literature as anti-Romantic and unstylized, and the history of philosophy, with the sole significant exceptions of Aristotle and aspects of Thomas Aquinas, as mystical, dishonest, and irrational.

The insights that Ayn gave to her friends were not a gift. They carried a price tag. The price was the adulation one was expected to offer her. Increasingly, as the years were passing, Ayn required that, among those who admired her, no other admiration was to threaten her preeminent place. Increasingly, as the years passed, this woman of outstanding talent and originality required that she be seen as the great novelist and the great philosopher. And a second payment was exacted as well: the willingness to accept her moral condemnation of any attitude, any action, any thought or feeling that seemed to her irrational. Some of her new friends circled in her orbit for only a few weeks, some remained for months, some remained for years; but with very few exceptions, the relationships finally were ruptured in anger as Ayn felt her friends to have failed reason, morality, and herself.

Clearly, Ayn never lost her underlying disappointment with the culture around her or the bitterness that accompanied it. But she nevertheless continued to work her way back to a more serene view of the world. In conjunction with the Institute, she entered into a flurry of activities, all geared to promoting the spread of Objectivism. She rarely missed attending the question period of any lecture given at NBI in New York, and worked with its lecturers to improve and perfect their course material; she made herself available to discuss advertisements and publicity and promotion. The results streamed in during the decade of the sixties with a speed and momentum she had not dreamed possible.

It was in 1963 that Ayn traveled to California, where Nathaniel was to give "live" the first lecture of his series, to participate in the question period. In San Francisco, a lecture room was engaged to accommodate two hundred and fifty people; five hundred came. In Los Angeles, NBI's representative engaged a room to hold six hundred people; eleven hundred arrived; the overflow listened in another room, through loudspeakers. The caliber of the students continued to be exceptional; during a series held in Boston, the students helping NBI's representative to process admissions included a neurologist, an anesthesiologist, and a researcher in biochemistry and genetics; the man ushering students to their seats was a biophysicist.

The response to Objectivism throughout the country received little acknowledgment in the press. But a teacher of English wrote, in New University Thought, about the "danger" of Ayn Rand's influence on college students. "For the past two or three semesters," he wrote, "no other author... has threatened to upset Miss Rand's commanding popularity... I have had an opportunity to talk with several other college teachers, from various parts of the nation, and many of them informed me that they too have been troubled by Miss Rand's appeal... it is dismaying to contemplate the possibility that Ayn Rand is the single writer who engages the loyalties of the students I am perhaps ineffectually attempting to reach. All of the students I talked with struck me as intelligent... and most were quite able to verbalize the reasons of their admiration for Miss Rand."

A professor of English at Yeshiva University reported that he had given his freshman English class the assignment of writing a paper on the book they had most enjoyed during the past year and which had most impressed and influenced them. Twenty-five percent of his students wrote on one or other of Ayn's novels.

In the Wall Street Journal John Chamberlain wrote: "Seated about in booths in college-town snack shops, the young Randites talk about their intellectual leader as their fathers and mothers a generation ago talked about Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes, or Thorstein Veblen... And it is normally a matter of two decades before the young take over the seats of power in the name of what they have learned to believe 20 years ago."

The mail that NBI received gave Ayn further insight into the steps of Objectivism's motion through the country. "I heard people arguing about Atlas Shrugged at a dinner party — the book sounded interesting — so I went out and bought it." "I read Atlas Shrugged because people told me it was an evil book that no one should read." "After fighting with my professor for a month, I finally obtained permission to do my term paper on Objectivism." "I discovered the works of Ayn Rand when they were recommended in a course on psychology." "Can you recommend additional readings to supplement discussions of Objectivism in an ethics seminar?" "My psychiatrist suggested that I read Atlas Shrugged as a helpful adjunct to psychotherapy." "I heard about Ayn Rand when Galt's speech was quoted in a political science class!"

Ayn Rand clubs soon began springing up on campuses, organized by college students for the purpose of discussing and studying Ayn's philosophy. Increasing numbers of requests for material arrived from teachers and professors who wished to include a discussion of Objectivism in their classes. Leonard Peikoff gave a course on "Objectivism's Theory of Knowledge" in the Graduate College of the University of Denver. In 1962, Random House published Who Is Ayn Rand?, a book containing an analysis by Nathaniel of Ayn's novels and a biographical essay which I wrote. By the fall of 1963, NBI courses were offered in fifty-four cities in the United States and Canada. During the next year, more than thirty-five hundred students attended, as well as several thousand visitors who audited individual lectures. The most startling location was somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean, on the tour of a Polaris submarine. By 1965, courses were given in eighty cities; arrangements were underway to offer them to American soldiers in Vietnam who had expressed interest, and representatives were organizing courses in Greenland and Pakistan.

NBI opened a publishing wing, NBI Press, and issued Calumet "K" and Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, both with introductions written by Ayn. It was followed by NBI Book Service, through which Ayn's books and other works of interest and value to NBI students on economics, politics and philosophy, were sold by mail order. NBI Art Reproductions was formed, through which prints of paintings by Frank, Joan Mitchell Blumenthal, and a portrait of Ayn by Ilona (Ilona Royce Smithkin), were sold.

These were exciting years for Ayn and for everyone involved with NBI. Working twelve-hour days, often seven days a week, both directors and staff felt themselves engaged in a task of supreme importance: helping to move the philosophical trend of a country from faith to reason, from altruism to self-interest, from collectivism to capitalism; perhaps, it sometimes seemed as NBI's progress became intoxicating, even helping to change the world. The staff of the Institute, from file clerk to head of the production department, consisted almost entirely of young people who had taken or were taking its lecture courses. In the first years, "the production department" consisted of Gerald Rafferty, who had said, "Had I been alive when Aristotle was living, I would have worked for him; I want to work for Ayn Rand," and an aged addressing machine upon which he performed constant miracles of repair, located in the office's kitchen; the staff had to squeeze past both man and machine to reach the coffeepot. They were dedicated to the work they did and cheerfully put in long hours and weekends to advance the intellectual cause that was their own.

And these were more hopeful and optimistic years for Ayn. "I'm beginning to believe that even I will see substantial changes in my lifetime," she said. "Reality and time are on our side. Young people, who will one day have public voices, are reacting more than one could have predicted; they are looking for direction. I expect eventually to see an established movement."

55 Who Is Ayn Rand? was moderately successful, and more successful when it appeared in paperback. It is a book that was written in good faith, but in a spirit of uncritical adulation which neither Nathaniel nor I would defend today.

54 Its original name was Nathaniel Branden Lectures, which was later changed with incorporation.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Since the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn had received countless invitations to speak at universities. In her despair over the intellectual state of the culture, and because of her dislike of formal speech-making, she had refused all of them. But as her spirits had begun to lift — and as Nathaniel and I urged her to accept such invitations, feeling that it would be important as a means of publicizing her work and important as a demonstration to her that there were responsive intelligences in the world outside her living room — she unwillingly began to accept. Her decision was to have unanticipated and beneficent consequences.

It was in 1960 that Ayn agreed to give her first university talk, in response to an invitation from Yale Law School. It seemed an unfortunate choice: the Law School, Ayn said, was a totally un-American hotbed of liberalism and socialism.

On a cold February day, Ayn and Frank, with a group of friends, drove to Yale. In a pattern that was to continue throughout her university appearances, Ayn completed the writing of her talk — she always wrote out her talks in full, and read from the manuscript — in the car, fighting against the car sickness that afflicted her when she tried to write in a moving vehicle.

Lawrence Scott, then a student at Yale, later vividly recalled Ayn's appearance. The only announcement of the talk had been a couple of notices, nestled among hundreds of other notices, on the Law School Bulletin board. "There was no rally, and there were no other mentions of her talk," he said. "On the surface it seemed a few admirers would gather in a small classroom and visit with this very controversial author for an hour or two... On that Friday night, every seat in the Yale Law School auditorium was packed wall to wall. In fact, the overflow was so great that loudspeakers had to be installed in the corridors on two floors — and that still wasn't enough! Additional loudspeakers were placed at the entrance to the school, and crowds gathered there to listen to Ayn Rand in the bitter cold of that night... For fifty minutes, she delivered a stirring and eloquent presentation of 'Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World.' Occasionally, the audience applauded, but there were hisses and groans, too... When the question period began, the young socialist attackers were out in force. One called from the balcony:

'Under your system, who will take care of the janitors?' Without an instant of hesitation, Ayn Rand replied in a powerful voice, and without anger, 'Young man: the janitors!' A roar of applause and laughter filled the auditorium."

When the question period ended, crowds of eager students gathered around Ayn with further questions; those who could not reach her, turned to the friends who had joined her, who for more than an hour happily answered philosophical and political questions. It seemed that Yale was applying for admission to the Union.

After this triumphant first appearance, Ayn accepted invitations from Princeton, Columbia, Hunter College, Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, the University of Michigan, Sarah Lawrence, Brown, and many others. Invariably, in the pattern that had begun with her first work and was to continue for the rest of her life, it was lone individuals who fought against enormous opposition to arrange that she be invited to speak. And invariably, her appearances attracted record audiences. All followed the pattern of Yale: many students and faculty members came to jeer, and remained to question; they came to hiss, and remained to applaud — and always, her audiences overflowed whatever hall had been engaged. It became a joke among her friends that just before a speaking engagement, I would contact the university to ask what size hall they planned to use; whatever answer they gave me, I would explain that they would require a larger room; I would then be told that, by precedent, they knew approximately how many people to expect; when the evening of the talk arrived, there was always a last-minute hectic switch to a larger auditorium, and still students gathered in hallways, other rooms, and under the stars to hear her speak.

Ayn was a strangely powerful speaker: this small, unprepossessing woman, dressed in a flowing black cape, her dress ornamented with a gold dollar sign, reading with little inflection in her heavy Russian accent from a prepared text — had the charismatic power of certainty. Her thoughts were new and intriguing to her audiences, her logic impeccable — her passionate conviction overwhelming in its force. No other modern writer has displayed a comparable capacity to generate intellectual excitement.

Marc Jaffe, now editorial director of Villard Books, commissioned Ayn to write an introduction to Victor Hugo's Ninety-three for Bantam Classics. He later spoke glowingly of his meetings with her, in terms relevant to the success of her lecture appearances. With a cheerful grin, he said, "I've been telling my colleagues that I was the man who was in love with Ayn Rand... at least for ten minutes. What I most remember about our meetings was the almost magical impact she had on me. She was not a beautiful woman, but she had an inexpressible charm, that wonderful deep and resonant voice, the words poured out of her in a way that excited both my mind and my emotions. When we talked about her notions of the romantic novel, I was fascinated and educated; what she said was very important and convincing. I felt that she had such an extraordinary mind and presence. I had read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and I liked them both very much; apart from their wealth of ideas and characters, both have a compelling force that came in good part from the incredible energy of her personality."

But apart from the question periods, lecturing never became an activity Ayn enjoyed. "I didn't, and don't, want to do it," she said. "It's a duty I perform to advance the spread of my ideas. I know why they need to see me in person, that seeing me gives them the reality of Objectivist ideas existing here and now, not merely in a book. If this helps to spread Objectivism, and helps the sale of my books, then it's publicity for which I'm being paid, and I'm willing to do it. I don't like the personal adulation or any of the 'fan' atmosphere. It's not on my terms. I appreciate the intention in an impersonal, professional way, but it means nothing to me personally. When anyone compliments me, my first question is: What's my estimate of the source of the compliments? Is it a mind I respect? When it's a mind that understands what I've done, then it's an enormous pleasure. Anything less than that — no. I don't really want anything but the response of top minds... How I would love to meet a really first-class mind, a first-class person..."

At some of her university appearances, Ayn abandoned her cape for a new mink coat. She called the coat "a gift from We the Living." She had learned from the State Department that during World War II, the Italian Government, as part of its policy of expropriating the works of foreign authors, had allowed a pirated film to be made of We the Living; Italian officials expected it to be effective propaganda because of its anti-Communist stand. Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi had played Kira and Leo. When the movie was released, it was an immediate success; the enthusiasm it generated was even greater than the government had hoped. Proudly, Italian officials sent a print to the Nazi government in Germany — and received a blisteringly angry order to remove it from distribution immediately. The German Government understood what the audiences had grasped, but the Italian Government had not: that every scene in the movie was as much an indictment of fascism and Nazism as of communism; it was an indictment of all dictatorships. The Italian Government complied with the order, and the distribution of the picture was halted. Some years after the end of the war, the American State Department successfully sued the government of Italy for its theft of American literary properties. Ayn's payment was her coat, with several thousand dollars remaining which she was determined to spend only on the most frivolous luxuries she could imagine.

Not surprisingly, Ayn found few luxuries on which to spend her "gift from We the Living" She continued to live modestly, as she had always done, despite the large amounts of money she was earning. She cared nothing for jewelry, except for the occasional inexpensive costume piece that delighted her; she cared nothing for travel or luxurious living; her small apartment continued to please her; she took no vacations; she had no interest in being lavishly entertained or in entertaining; attending the dinner party often given for her after a lecture engagement was a chore she dutifully performed, but rarely took pleasure in. And she never fully trusted her financial ease; she often said that, as a writer, one lived with perpetual insecurity, never knowing how long royalties would continue to be generated. Whatever money she did not require for day-to-day expenses remained in her savings account — to be eroded, as the years passed, by the continuing gallop of inflation. It was only years later that she could be persuaded to risk even the most careful of investments.

As her fame continued to grow, Ayn began writing a weekly column of opinion in The Los Angeles Times, dealing with topical issues from the perspective of Objectivism. The column was tremendously successful. Nick Williams, editor of the newspaper, wrote that he was swamped with letters, and that "the count has been running solidly for Miss Rand." She wrote a warmly beautiful and much-discussed column about the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, defending her as "an image of pure, innocent, childlike joy in living... facing life with the joyous self-flaunting of a child or a kitten who is happy to display its own attractiveness as the best gift it can offer the world" and deploring the fact that she "found herself regarded and ballyhooed as a vulgar symbol of obscenity... found herself answered by concerted efforts to negate, to degrade, to ridicule, to insult, to destroy her achievement."

Ayn had never been a dedicated reader, but in order to write her column she had to keep up with the latest political events in newspapers and magazines. The problem that had tormented her as a writer affected her reading as well. She found herself compulsively arguing with each line of print, rewriting in her mind, analyzing, considering the implications and sources of the writer's position. Reading became a laborious and impossibly time-consuming activity. By the end of the year, she realized she could no longer do it; she was not able to keep up with the material she felt it necessary to read. Regretfully, she discontinued her column.

In 1963, Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, invited Ayn to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. To accept the degree, Ayn took her first airplane flight. She had always refused to fly, insisting that she did not trust "the modern psycho-epistemology [the method of mental functioning] of the mechanics and the pilots." It appeared, rather, that her powerful need for control, her need to run her own life, her abhorrence of ever dropping the reins and putting herself in the hands of someone else, was at the root of her fear. When Nathaniel and I agreed to join her and Frank on the flight to Portland, she uneasily acceded. It was typical of Ayn that, once she made the commitment to fly, she was no longer nervous; the unknown frightened her; a fact of reality did not. All through the flight — which was, at times, unpleasantly bumpy — she thoroughly enjoyed herself. It is remarkable that, in Atlas — before she ever flew — she was able to write with total credibility and full sensory reality a scene in which Dagny Taggart flies her own plane and crashes in Galt's Gulch; she had read a few paragraphs in a book on flying and airplanes, and her power to form abstractions from a handful of concretes gave her the rest.

Ayn spent two full days at Lewis and Clark, where the entire college listened to her lectures and participated in lively discussions of Objectivism. In preparation for the occasion, all of the faculty and all of the student body had read Atlas Shrugged.

It was the president of the college, Dr. John R. Howard, who had originated the proposal to confer the degree on Ayn and who had arranged the study program on Objectivism. When asked how he first became interested in Ayn's ideas, he replied: "A few years ago, when I was president of a college in Illinois, there was a student with whom I was engaged in a rather protracted discussion, involving some disagreement between us. One day, the student walked into my office, put a book down on my desk, and said, 'President Howard, here is a book that you absolutely have to read.' The book was Atlas Shrugged".

During the sixties — as the sales of Atlas continued to skyrocket, as the sales of The Fountainhead ran a close second, as the success of Ayn's university appearances became a legend in campuses across the country, as NBI's advertisements for lectures kept her name in the newspapers nationwide, as more and more cities were added to the NBI list, as more and more study clubs were formed — a profusion of articles about Ayn began to appear in major magazines and newspapers, and requests that she write articles piled up on her desk. The majority of the articles were strongly negative, but through their indication — often distorted — of some aspect of her thinking, they brought her still more readers. An NBI student said: "I had read The Fountainhead in the early fifties, and when I saw Granville Hicks's horrible review of Atlas, all I cared about was that it told me Ayn Rand had written a new book; I left my desk at the office and ran to the nearest bookstore."

When one of Ayn's talks was entered into the Congressional Record, Bennett Cerf said, "Now that you have made the Congressional Record, there is only one peak left for you to climb. I refer, of course, to Playboy magazine." It was a "peak" she did climb. In March of 1964, after lengthy talks between Ayn and Alvin Toffler — talks that he termed "intellectually electric" — his interview was published in Playboy.\ 56 In an introduction to the interview — which was later twice published in book form, along with other interviews of men and women whom Playboy considered "among the movers and shakers of our time" — the editor wrote: "Ayn Rand, an intense, angry young woman of 61, [sic] is among the most outspoken — and important — intellectual voices in America today. She is the author of what is perhaps the most fiercely damned and admired best seller of the decade: Atlas Shrugged... Despite [her] success, the literary establishment considers her an outsider. Almost to a man, critics have either ignored or denounced the book. She is an exile among philosophers, too, although Atlas is as much a work of philosophy as it is a novel. Liberals glower at the very mention of her name; but conservatives, too, swallow hard when she begins to speak. For Ayn Rand, whether anyone likes it or not, is sui generis, indubitably, irrevocably, intransigently individual."

Ayn received an invitation from Boston's prestigious Ford Hall Forum, asking her to give a talk on any subject of her choosing. Her first inclination was to refuse, believing that the Forum predominantly invited speakers of liberal-to-socialist orientation; but once again, in order to spread her ideas, she agreed to appear.

Of all her appearances, Ford Hall Forum became the one she loved. She soon spoke admiringly of the Forum for its commitment to intellectual excellence and its determination, contrary to her original opinion, to throw open its doors to the widest possible diversity of opinion. The enthusiasm that greeted her from the huge crowd in attendance shook the walls of the old building — and astounded the Forum's representatives. From then on, she was invited to return every year; until her death, she missed only two years, because of serious illness; lesser illnesses never kept her from the single public event that had personal meaning for her. Her speeches became landmark occasions for the Forum and for admirers of her work: by early morning before each talk, lines began forming outside the building, as crowds waited in heat or cold or sunshine or rain or snow to be certain of getting the seats that those who arrived in the afternoon would not get; the afternoon crowds would be seated in a second large auditorium where they would listen to the talk over loudspeakers; the evening crowds might or might not be admitted as standees. Her appearances became jokingly known among her admirers as "the Objectivist Easter," an occasion for celebration, and people came to stand uncomplainingly in line from Boston, from New York, from California, from all the states in between, from Canada and Europe and Australia and India. Only a few years before Ayn's death, the Forum honored her at a special banquet attended by more than eleven hundred people; after her death, with the agreement of her estate, they auctioned off the manuscript of one of her talks for ten thousand dollars.

A letter reached Ayn's desk from L. Quincy Mumford, Librarian of Congress. He wrote: "Among the most widely discussed philosophies of our time is that associated with your writings. In your fiction and essays you have made the Objectivist philosophy an issue affecting many levels of public discourse. When the history of our time is written, your work will have a prominent place. In order to insure that your work will be the subject of informed study, I invite you to place your manuscripts and personal papers in the Library of Congress."

Ayn was honored by the request, and agreed to accept it. But the material has not yet been placed with the Library of Congress.

With the spread of her fame and the accelerating influence of her ideas, Ayn's interest in writing had slowly begun to reemerge — but now, it was directed toward the writing of nonfiction.

In 1961, Random House had published Ayn's For the New Intellectual, which contained the main philosophical passages from her four novels, with a new and lengthy introductory essay in which she offered "an analysis of the development of Western culture, the causes of its progress, its decline, its present crisis, and the road to an intellectual renaissance;" in 1963, New American Library issued a paperback edition, with a first printing of two hundred thousand copies.

Philosopher Sidney Hook wrote a criticism of the book in the New York Times, saying: "Despite the great play with the word 'reason,' one is struck by the absence of any serious argument in this unique combination of tautology and extravagant absurdity." In response — since the Times refused to publish letters to the editor in excess of three hundred words — NBI took out an advertisement in which Nathaniel responded to Professor Hook's review. 57

For the New Intellectual was to be the last of Ayn's works published by Random House. After its success, Bennett Cerf expressed interest in bringing out a collection of Ayn's university talks and articles. The selection which she gave him included a speech she had delivered at Ford Hall Forum, entitled "The Fascist New Frontier;" it was an analysis of the similarities between the ideology of fascism and the ideology contained in addresses given by President John F. Kennedy; its central point was that contrary to popular belief, the Kennedy administration's ideology was not socialistic but fascistic — that it had been using, propagating, and stressing the principle that the individual should be sacrificed to the "public interest" as no American administration had ever done before. It was to be the lead essay and the title of the book.

In At Random, Bennett wrote, "I read the piece and absolutely hit the roof. I called her and said we were not going to publish any book that claimed Hitler and Jack Kennedy were alike. Ayn charged in and reminded me that I had said when she came to us that we would publish anything she wrote. I reminded her that I had said fiction. I said, 'You can say anything you want in a novel, but this is something I didn't foresee. All we ask is that you leave this one essay out.' Ayn was enraged... Finally, she gave me her ultimatum, 'You're going to print every word I've written — or I won't let you publish the book.' I said, "That's that. Get yourself another publisher.' When Kennedy was assassinated that fall, I wrote Ayn to ask if she didn't agree now that she was wrong. She didn't agree at all. She said the assassination had nothing to do with what she had to say. It didn't change her opinion one iota... I liked her and still do. I miss her."

Ayn was deeply indignant at Bennett's attitude. She insisted that at their first luncheon, "Bennett assured me that Random House was nonpolitical in its publishing policies, whatever his own views and Donald's might be, and that I would never encounter any political objections there. I included "The Fascist New Frontier' in the collection because the bookstores had heard about the talk and were asking for it. I didn't try to sell Bennett on the project; he sold me on it; he said that the coming election would make the book controversial, sensational, and a big seller. He even enthusiastically exclaimed, "The Fascist New Frontier — by Ayn Rand — what a title!' He said he'd publish the book on his spring list; it was a firm commitment. I even have a note from him in which he wrote, 'I am sending word around to everybody at Random House that we will have a new nonfiction book by you on the Spring 1964 list called The Fascist New Frontier. I think this book will cause a tremendous amount of excitement.'"

She added that about a month later, Bennett called and said his editorial staff was violently protesting publication of the book, which shocked and disturbed him because he had not expected to hear political objections from his editors. "Three weeks later, he was agreeing with his editors; he made the decision not to publish without even consulting me, without giving me a hearing."

It was a sad parting for both Ayn and Bennett. He wrote her a warm letter, saying "I am deeply, deeply sorry that you no longer wish Random House to be your publisher, but I want you to know that wherever you go, I wish you well. I think you are one of the most wonderful people I ever have met in my life, and this decision of yours will not change my feeling in that respect in the least degree. I acted in the way that my heart dictated and could not have done otherwise. You did the same. I hope I may continue to consider you my friend." In her reply, Ayn wished Bennett well, and said, "I shall always give you credit for the many good actions you have taken in regard to me." She always did.

From then on, Ayn's books were published by New American Library, her paperback publisher, which had opened a successful hardcover division. She was on friendly terms with Victor Weybright, NAL's president; she liked and respected him, and their association remained a mutually rewarding one.

It was in writing the introductory essay to For the New Intellectual that Ayn discovered a fact which she found startling: that "nonfiction is my natural way of functioning. I enjoy the actual writing itself. I have difficulties and organizational problems, but it’s an enormous pleasure to me even when it's difficult." She began speaking of writing an ambitious, full-length book on epistemology, on the Objectivist theory of knowledge, presenting her view of the nature, source and validation of concepts, and she began making personal notes on what she envisioned as a project which would take several years. In her notes, she stated:

"Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity — which was all that was necessary (Plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology — by the whole nonsense of the 'moving spheres,' 'the immovable mover,' teleology, etc.

"The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology — the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. It is the base of all other sciences and the one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness — a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge... All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies, or corruptions."

While writing Atlas Shrugged, she had thought that the philosophical material contained in Galt's speech "was all a rational man needed to guide him." She had believed that another philosopher could one day write a fully detailed nonfiction presentation of Objectivism from that material. "The thought of doing it myself was paralyzing to me" she said. "I had no interest in writing for people of lesser intelligence, there would be nothing in it for me. But as I began watching the state of the culture and reading essays on modern philosophy, I began to see that what I took as almost self-evident was not that at all. I began to see that the kind of issues not explicitly covered in Atlas, such as my theory of universals, were much more enormous departures from today's thinking than I had imagined. The magnitude of what needs to be done has become real to me — and I've become interested in it. I've become an intellectual detective, cutting through the nonsense of modern philosophy to find the basic error. I've begun to see that in writing on epistemology, I will be engaged in a crusade for reason, my top value, and that does inspire me."

A contributing influence in Ayn's decision to write nonfiction, she said, was her discussions of philosophy with John Hospers, who is today a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the author of a number of distinguished books on aesthetics and philosophy, and was then a philosophy professor at Brooklyn College. He later spoke of his first meeting with Ayn when she addressed the student body at Brooklyn College. "I had not yet read Atlas Shrugged," he said. "After the lecture — during which her challenging intellect impressed me very much — I asked her to lunch. We talked from noon until six in the evening; the intellectual excitement of that afternoon remains as a high spot in my life. I realized that this was both a tremendously powerful intellect and a powerful personality, a person completely different from anyone I'd ever met. Her ideas did not fit into any of the usual philosophical categories — so I had to discover more."

Ayn and John soon developed a friendly relationship, and over many months he visited her regularly for lengthy philosophical conversations. "Sometimes we'd still be talking at eight in the morning, and she'd make me breakfast, and then I'd go off to teach my classes in a state of intellectual ferment." He read Atlas Shrugged, which he considered an aesthetic triumph. "I was overwhelmed by Ayn's detailed sense of organization, by the structure and texture of the novel — its literary architecture — by her brilliant use of recurring themes, by the power of the passages which deal with intellectual, dramatic confrontations between characters. But most important, it is that rare thing in the modern novel: a book of ideas, developed with consummate skill." In the course of their conversations, and through the readings in economics and politics which she suggested to him, John became convinced of the validity of her moral and political views. Their major area of disagreement was on issues of epistemology. The disagreements were often heated, and Ayn easily grew angry. "Her sudden anger was bewildering," John said. "She was like a different person. But I was always totally fascinated... those compelling eyes that you can't get away from and don't want to get away from — they could be completely benign and benevolent, and a moment later totally merciless... She had a marvelous smile, which melted me many times... I would see this towering intellect, and then, at times, a vulnerable little girl... I loved her, very much... Now, although more than twenty years have passed, it still seems like yesterday, and I can't imagine my life without that experience — it was an emotional and intellectual high which never abated... She gave me a renewed faith in my own profession, when she made it clear that it's not military or political leaders who make history, it's the men of ideas. I missed her enormously... I still do."

As with so many of the people who were important in her life, Ayn broke with John Hospers. At his invitation, she gave a talk at a meeting of the American Society of Aesthetics at Harvard, for which he was Program Chairman; her subject was "Art as Sense of Life." John's assignment, as commentator on her speech, was to present a critical analysis. Ayn took violent exception to his criticisms — and he never saw her again.

The effect of Ayn's conversations with a professional philosopher remained with her, and made her eager to write a nonfiction work on epistemology. She began to feel enthusiastically impatient to begin work, a feeling she had not experienced since finishing Atlas Shrugged. "It's the feeling of entering on a big assignment," she exclaimed happily. "It's wonderful!"

As her initial venture into nonfiction writing apart from the introductory essay to For the New Intellectual, Ayn began writing articles for The Objectivist Newsletter, a four-page monthly consisting of articles analyzing current events from the perspective of Objectivism, and reviews of recommended books. Ayn and Nathaniel were the publishers and editors; I was the managing editor and Elayne Kalberman the circulation manager. The majority of the articles were written by Ayn and Nathaniel, with other writers, such as Alan Greenspan, Leonard Peikoff, and myself, making occasional contributions. Ayn's articles included her public speeches; a number of the articles Nathaniel wrote later appeared in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem.

In 1966, the newsletter became a small magazine, The Objectivist, a monthly journal that dealt with the theoretical aspects of Objectivism, with its application to modern problems, and with the evaluation of present cultural trends. It featured articles by Ayn, by Nathaniel, and other contributors, as well as reviews of recommended books, and reports on Objectivist activities. Within a year, The Objectivist's subscription rate was fifteen thousand copies; within two years, it was more than twenty-one thousand copies, and was continuing to grow.

Ayn began publishing collections of her articles from The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist, organized thematically, in book form. In the years from 1964 to 1971, her nonfiction books were The Virtue of Selfishness, a discussion of the ethics of Objectivism, which included five articles by Nathaniel on related psychological themes — Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, essays on the moral aspects of capitalism, which included articles by Nathaniel, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen — Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a preview of her intended future book on Objectivism, which many professional philosophers consider to be her most important philosophical work — The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature — and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. All of these collections, which have regularly been reprinted and have continued selling in both hardcover and paperback, added substantially to the dissemination of her ideas and to her fame. One important consequence of Ayn's nonfiction writing was that, because purely philosophical presentations of her ideas were in print, more and more college and university theses began to be written on Objectivism, more and more college and university professors began to assign books on Objectivism as required reading in their courses.

The response to Ayn's ideas continued to be astonishing, even to those who were convinced of the validity of those ideas. She appeared on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" on three occasions in 1967 and 1968. Johnny Carson had intended to interview her briefly, but as their time ran out, he scrapped the other appearances scheduled so that Ayn might continue speaking. NBC told her that the mail response was the largest in the history of the show; well over three thousand letters were received — and only twelve of them were negative in tone and content.

By the late sixties, Objectivism had become a firmly established movement, a firmly established part of the American culture. And the movement, begun on a dining-room table, was becoming a society. In 1967, NBI and The Objectivist moved out of their crowded offices at 120 East Thirty-fourth Street — the apartment building where Ayn and Frank now lived, as did Nathaniel and I, and Leonard Peikoff — to the Empire State Building. NBI now had a large auditorium, where lectures were given, a full production department, and ample office space. The move had a symbolic meaning to all those involved in it: the Empire State Building was more than a giant edifice; it was all the skyscrapers of The Fountainhead — it was New York — its soaring height was its own command to rise.

Many close friendships — even a number of marriages — had formed among NBI students. It seemed time to offer the students what they appeared to want: a social life that was integrated to their philosophical interests. To celebrate the anniversary of NBI, a formal dinner and ball was held at a New York hotel for students and their guests; it was so successful that it was repeated two years later; a year after that, it was held in San Francisco. Ayn did not attend the balls: she was uncomfortable at parties, and did not know how to dance; but she reveled vicariously in the sight of her intensely serious-minded students floating happily around a dance floor in evening dress, enjoying themselves in a completely nonphilosophical manner.

NBI organized a tour of Europe during the summer of 1967 for those students particularly interested in art who wanted to visit famous European museums, under the guidance of art historian Mary Ann Sures, formerly Mary Ann Rukavina. The new auditorium made possible opportunities that had not existed before, and NBI began showing a series of movies, "The Romantic Screen," with films such as Dark Victory, The Brothers Karamazov, Quo Vadis, and Shane. Many of the students were accomplished in theater, dance, and music, and they began sharing their talents in performances in the auditorium; one evening, a fashion show was held in which, to the delight of the audience, Frank at his most dashing walked down the aisle in an elegant dinner suit. At the suggestion of one of the more athletic students, two baseball teams were formed — called "Attilas" and "The Witch Doctors" after the philosophical villains Ayn had described in For the New Intellectual — to fight enthusiastically inept battles in Central Park; after each encounter, the less athletic limped about groaning from the pain of formerly unused muscles; after one encounter, the athletic student who had suggested the teams sheepishly arrived at NBI's offices on crutches.

A monthly tradition of dancing evenings at NBI began. Before the formal start of each evening, Robert Berole, a teacher of ballroom dancing, gave group lessons for those unsure of themselves on a dance floor, and demonstrations of each dance in which I — discovering depths of exhibitionism I had not known I possessed, and after painstaking lessons from Robert — joined him. One result of those evenings was that they were the cause of Ayn's decision, at the age of sixty-two, that it was time she learned to dance. She asked Robert Berole to give lessons to Frank and her at their apartment.

Robert was to recall those lessons as fascinating occasions. "Ayn was amazing," he said. "She went about learning to dance just as she went about the most philosophical of activities: with absolute concentration and dedication. During every lesson, she would make elaborate notes on the steps of each dance, so she could work on them before the next lesson. Although she had never danced before, she learned with remarkable speed; I never had to tell her anything twice... The problem was Frank. When they'd be dancing together, he seemed almost paralyzed, he couldn't be spontaneous with her; when he and I worked together, he was fine... After the lesson, Ayn would make coffee, and we'd talk for a couple of hours. It was a privilege I never expected to have. I'll never forget those wonderful conversations, nor how charming and sensitive she was... Ayn particularly wanted to learn the Viennese waltz, the most difficult of all dances; she said it had always been her favorite. We worked on that one most of all."

One evening, Ayn decided that she was ready to dance in public. Wearing a softly colored cocktail dress and impeccably groomed, she arrived at NBI's auditorium — and Ayn and Robert whirled around the dance floor perfectly executing the complex steps of a Viennese waltz. The expression on her face varied between intense concentration and delighted pride in her new accomplishment. It was a picture of Ayn that NBI's students would not forget; they had regarded her with awe as a giant existing somewhere in the stratosphere with the ghosts of Aristotle and Victor Hugo, and now watched with pleasure and astonishment the enchanting child-woman who had replaced the symbol.

But the symbol was waiting in the wings. In step with the rapid progress of Objectivism through the culture, an event was occurring within the narrower confines of the movement itself that was perhaps inevitable, that was tragic, that was ominous in its implications.

NBI students were, in the main, a group of people of unusually high intelligence and ambition, educated, sensitive, idealistic, as has been noted by countless observers; the appeal of Ayn's philosophy was the appeal to intelligence. They were disenchanted with the answers to their questions offered to them by their religious and social traditions, by their teachers, by their thinkers and philosophers. They were seeking understanding; they were seeking knowledge and certainty and reason; they were seeking a serious and intelligible philosophical framework that would enable them to understand the world and rational values by which to guide their lives.

Reading Ayn's books and attending lectures, they felt themselves entering the world they had sought. They felt they were discovering a comprehensive, intelligible, integrated view of existence, a view of unwavering internal consistency, a methodology by which to deal effectively with existence, and a noble, life-celebrating vision of their own possibilities, of the efficacy of their minds, of the heights and the happiness possible to them. And they were discovering the person of Ayn Rand. When she lectured before them or spoke to them individually, she discussed the widest of philosophical issues — and demonstrated the application of those issues to the urgent requirements of their own lives; like John Galt in Atlas, who solved the most complex and abstract problems of theoretical physics in order to build a better motor to benefit human life, she had worked on the most complex problems of philosophy in order to improve man's life on earth; metaphysics and epistemology did not exist in some ivory tower of the intellect, they were the means of providing men with a motor by which to power the course of their lives. Through her person, they encountered the reality of a seductive, hypnotic mind able to dance lightly through the web of problems and unanswered questions that enmeshed their lives and provide solutions of seemingly irrefutable logic. They encountered her special charm, as seductive as her intelligence.

But they encountered, as well, the puzzling shifts of emotional attitude that often characterized Ayn — the dogmatism implicit in her later writings, her conviction that rational consistency required not only the acceptance of the fundamentals of Objectivism but the acceptances of her specific applications of those principles to any and every issue. 58 They encountered the near-deification of Ayn Rand that had emerged from her own inner conflicts and from the attitude of many of her friends, together with her idealization of Nathaniel and others in the circle around her as models to be emulated. (Once, she was asked, "Can heroes such as you write about really exist?" Proudly, she pointed first at herself, then at Frank, then at Nathaniel, and then at me, and replied: "Here is my proof that they can and do exist!" On another occasion, she called out from the audience, when Nathaniel had said that he didn't know if he spoke for Ayn in a particular instance, "You have my blank check, which I've never given to anyone else. You may always speak for me.") They encountered her austere and self-denying preoccupation with the future at the expense of the present — her focus on long-range goals at the expense of short-range pleasures and emotional spontaneity, her conviction that in making decisions and in dealing with other people, emotions are irrelevant and only one's rational judgment may be considered. They encountered her conviction that love and affection, as rewards to be earned, could and should be withdrawn at the least infraction of morality or rationality, that reason demands constantly passing moral judgments on one's own character and that of others. They encountered her view that they, like all men, teetered constantly on the edge of moral depravity, and that to the extent to which they failed to achieve the stature of a Howard Roark or a John Galt, self-contempt and guilt were the appropriate reactions.

They encountered all of this while still reeling from the onslaught of an avalanche of new and exciting ideas which they were struggling to grasp and integrate. Some of them were able to tread carefully through the maze of ideas, implications, and attitudes being simultaneously presented to them. Others left to find their own paths. Many of them accepted the total, as one inseparable package. Those who accepted the package were on their way to becoming true believers, growing self-alienated and alienated from others, intellectually rigid, guilty over their failures, quick to judge and accuse others. It was the path that had been followed by those of us in the circle they were expected to emulate, as they moved from the ecstasy of learning their own powers and the power of reason — to the agony of grasping their supposed failures and flaws and psychological problems and inadequacies — and then back to the ecstasy — and then back again to the agony, in a never-ending cycle of pleasure and pain, until at the end of that path pain became the dominant emotion.

On many occasions, I would walk to the podium when I gave my own lectures, see the admiring glances with which I was greeted, know that I was perceived as supremely controlled, aloof, self-contained, invulnerable — and I would cringe, feeling I was hidden behind a mask I did not know how to remove, a mask that hid suffering and vulnerability and the longing to be recognized as I truly was. I did not yet grasp the nature and meaning of what I saw in myself, in Ayn, in Nathaniel, in many of our friends and many of our students; I knew only that I experienced a growing uneasiness. Sometimes, I would think grimly — it was a thought without context or evaluation — "I'll try until I'm forty, I'll continue the struggle, I'll continue to learn, I'll continue to grow; but then, if I've still found no way to be happy in the life I'm leading — I'll get out. I'll go, I don't care where, but I'll go!" For the present, I was held tightly. Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, "'Things which are not' are indeed mightier than 'things that are.' In all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted." I was still fighting for my beautiful city and my unplanted garden.

In the first years of the lectures, Ayn's appearance at question periods was an event eagerly anticipated by the students. She was usually courteous, considerate, and painstaking in her response if a question seemed to her valid and intelligent; the students recognized the enormous compliment to them which her attitude projected, her assumption that they required and would respond to only a rational argument. But if she did not believe the question to be valid and intelligent, she was scathing in her denunciation; her anger, she would insist, was rationally justified moral indignation. A young man asked: "How can you expect everyone to be rational and to arrive at correct philosophical conclusions, if they have not been taught rationality and have not been exposed to a philosophy of reason?" Ayn exploded. "I did it myself!" she shouted. "No one taught me how to think! Anyone can, who chooses to." The student later said to his friends, "How can she have it both ways? How can she consider herself a great innovator, yet insist that everyone should arrive at the conclusions she did?"

It was the question period — the event she once had most enjoyed — that gradually became the arena in which Ayn was especially bewildering and damaging to her students, all at once becoming enraged by an innocent question and lashing out furiously at the hapless questioner. Margit von Mises was to say, "Lu and I attended one or two of the Nathaniel Branden Institute lectures, and I was shocked at Ayn Rand's behavior. She was on the podium, smoking one of her cigarettes in that long black holder. Someone asked her a question, and she answered in such a rude, disagreeable way that I couldn't understand how anyone could take it. She just killed the questioner with her reply. You can do indescribable harm to people that way. I couldn't understand how she could hurt people, and I disliked her terribly for that."

Ultimately, students either ceased asking her questions, or framed them with such care that they became meaningless. After several years, Nathaniel and I gradually lengthened the time between Ayn's appearances at question periods; since she had come to dislike them, it was not difficult to do.

And yet, when one looks at the life of Ayn Rand, one must wonder if the dogmatic absolutism of her certainty, the blinding conviction of her own rectitude and her special place in the world, the callousness of her intolerance for opinions that were not hers, the unwavering assurance that she was alone to know the truth and that others must seek it from her — the eyes that looked neither to the left nor to the right, but only at the path ahead — the savage innocence of her personality — was not the fuel required for the height of achievement she attained. Just as when one looks at history's great achievers one so often encounters the desperate loneliness and alienation which is perhaps the emotional price paid by men and women who see farther than their brothers, so one also encounters these qualities of Ayn Rand. And one must wonder if they are not precisely the qualities that make possible the courage and uncompromising dedication of those who forge new paths through the unknown, enduring and persevering, shouting defiance at the enormity of the opposition which follows them at every step of their lonely journey, and adding new glories to our world. Would a lesser conviction have made it possible? The unyielding intransigence distorts the life and corrupts the personality of the innovator. But is it a tragic flaw — or is it, in the end, when one pushes past the rubble and the pain, neither tragic nor a flaw?

As the sixties proceeded, Ayn was deeply immersed in work, in lecturing, in providing intellectual guidance for the growing number of NBI lecturers, in writing for The Objectivist, in organizing collections of her articles for book publication, in planning her book on epistemology. And for the first time since the publication of Atlas Shrugged, she began to talk of writing another novel. It was not to be a philosophical novel, it would not present new ideas; it would show in action the meaning of ideas already presented in Atlas. The theme would be "the benevolent universe." In an appalling irony not evident at the time, she decided that the plot would involve the novel's protagonist, a woman, coping with the problem of unrequited love.

Ayn had not worked out the details of the plot, except that the heroine would be a ballet dancer, passionately in love with a man who rejects her and who, by his rejection and by his actions throughout the story, brings her terrible anguish.

Ayn had decided on the novel's ending. The man whom the heroine loves, now deeply in love with her, bitterly regretting what he has done and what he has failed to understand, at last tells her of his love. He asks her forgiveness for the pain she has endured. The last line of the novel was to be: '"What pain?' she asked."

Ayn did not write her book on epistemology. She did not write her novel about unequited love and the unimportance of pain. Instead, what was to come was itself like fiction. What had happened in her professional life after she completed We the Living, was now beginning to happen in her personal life: the events of the last half of the sixties seemed devised by some demonic fiction writer precisely to increase, to harden into unyielding stone her alienation, her anger, her frustration, her sense that the world was savagely, mindlessly irrational.

In one sense, she did write her novel. She wrote it not with pen and paper but in the events of her own life — and with a different last line.

56 At his invitation, Ayn met Hugh Hefner during a trip to Chicago. Hefner spoke glowingly of the intellectual and emotional impact of her work on him. "I liked him," Ayn was to say. "He's very intelligent."

57 Ayn was very angry with the review — an anger which created a difficult situation for me. I was unable, as I was expected to do, to dismiss Sidney Hook as dishonest and corrupt. He had been my professor and faculty advisor when I was studying philosophy at NYU; he was3and is — a man for whom I have the greatest respect and affection, a man of honor, of courage, of outstanding integrity. To my great surprise, when I could not join Ayn in denouncing him, she said nothing, and seemed to accept that I had a personal attitude toward him that was separate from our philosophical differences.

58 British writer Colin Wilson became a victim of this demand for total acceptance. He wrote Ayn an enthusiastic letter praising her work — and including his objections to certain concepts. The response was a harshly denunciatory letter from Nathaniel, who had taken on, at Ayn's request, the job of screening and answering mail which he considered offensive to her; in this category she included letters which disagreed or argued with her philosophical ideas. Wilson persevered, believing that if he could get past Nathaniel to Ayn, a mutually beneficial correspondence would be possible. But his letters continued to be answered by Nathaniel.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ayn was not yet sixty when all the doors of the world began opening for her. Her books had achieved a readership beyond her most extravagant expectations; they were read and pondered and discussed in cities around the world; their influence was beginning to be felt in her adopted country. She was not enormously wealthy, but her time and her comfort were assured for life; she would never again have to work at a job she loathed. Despite the disappointments that had dogged her, she sometimes spoke as if she had gained all her desires and all her dreams. With one exception.

It was in 1964, her spirits and enthusiasm for life rising, that Ayn turned once more to her personal life and to Nathaniel. Nathaniel, she had said, was her tie to the world outside her own consciousness. In a life too often barren of emotional rewards, he was her unexpected gift from the world, the one reward for which she had not had to battle, which had come to her freely. He was the man who had given her a sense of visibility — as a thinker, as an artist, as a person, as a woman — that no one else had given her. He understood her work, and understood her, and because of his understanding, he had fallen in love with her and had made possible a romantic happiness she had long ceased to expect.

She had often said that Nathaniel was her future as well. He was her "intellectual heir," her public spokesman, the man who would carry on her philosophy and her ideals and add to her work by his own intellectual achievements.

It was now six years since she had put their affair on hold; since then, their relationship had rarely been sexual; they were loving friends — who always knew there was more between them, not yet to be given reality. For too long, she had lost her emotional resiliency; for too many years, she had been absorbed in struggling to understand the nature of the culture in which she lived; for too long, the only personal contacts that had been meaningful to her, aside from her relationship with Frank, had been with the small circle of her intimate friends. Now, her need to live fully, to live in the world rather than in the confines of her own mind, to be a woman again, to live vibrantly and joyously, to experience the personal happiness of which she had so long deprived herself, burst free of the chains that bound it. She was ready to resume her sexual affair with Nathaniel.

She did not know that it was much too late. A year earlier, Nathaniel had met a young woman, an NBI student, and had fallen in love with her. Patrecia Gullison was a beautiful and charming girl who worked as a model; she was not intellectual in her interests or approach to life, but she had an unusual emotional spontaneity and openness and, at times, a startlingly acute sensitivity. In their first meetings, Nathaniel did not admit to himself his growing feelings for her, but he found in their occasional encounters a response he had never received before, and that he needed desperately. For the first time in his life, he felt himself to be receiving the priceless gift of a woman's total acceptance. Patrecia did not require him to change, to grow, to learn, to improve; she loved and admired him precisely as he was. Throughout our marriage, Nathaniel and I constantly had made every presumed failure in each other, every deficiency, every confusion, every attribute deemed unworthy, the subject of long analyses and discussion and solemn chastisement. In Ayn's relationship with Nathaniel, the problem was vastly multiplied: she saw shortcomings and criticized him from the perspective of a philosophical height I had not attained. He felt that he was loved only to the extent that he was brilliant, that he manifested the qualities of Ayn's heroes, that he was the master of reality, that he was without flaw or inner conflict. With Patrecia, Nathaniel could be young again, he could be carefree and open and unafraid; he need not guard every word and every thought; he could be himself, and know that who he was satisfied Patrecia utterly. Her love was unconditional. It contradicted everything he had learned about the nature of love, everything he had taught others; and he discovered that he needed it as a drowning man needs air and breath and solidity beneath his feet.

Before their relationship had fully developed, Patrecia, believing Nathaniel to be out of reach, married Lawrence Scott, who was also an NBI student. Nathaniel continued to see her; it seemed an innocent friendship. But as time went by, it began to seem less innocent; both Larry and I began to suspect that the friendship had become love. Patrecia denied it to Larry, and Nathaniel denied it to me; if I doubted his fidelity, Nathaniel often told me, it was a sign that I had unidentified psychological problems; they were friends, and important to each other, nothing more. We did not know that Nathaniel and Patrecia were already involved in a sexual affair.

As I look back on the events of those years, I realize that the truth was evident. I did not see it — I did not fully believe the evidence of my senses — because it appeared to me impossible that Nathaniel would lie to me. He had been completely honest about his affair with Ayn. Why would he not be honest now? — especially when our marriage was in tatters, and there was little left to preserve. And I, too, had become romantically interested in someone else. I had told Nathaniel how I felt, and that I would not deceive him; if there were to be an affair, it would only be with his knowledge and consent. For two years, Nathaniel, expressing what appeared to be a genuine anguish, had refused his consent. It was early in 1964 that he finally acceded — without telling me that for several months he had been involved in a sexual affair with Patrecia. My relationship did not last, as it could not. The man I loved and I were overwhelmed by what appeared to be Nathaniel's magnanimity and benevolence toward us; it was an attitude that was fatal to our relationship. One cannot emotionally carry the burden of intense gratitude to another man, and at the same time feel that he has a right to that man's wife.

Nathaniel did not tell Ayn of his affair. It seemed to him that he could not. He had accepted — he was even teaching, in classes all over the country, as he had taught his clients and friends in therapy — Ayn's theory that romantic love is one's response to one's highest, most exalted values, and that to choose a lesser value over a greater one is an act of spiritual and moral depravity. Now, he was in love, not with Ayn Rand, not with the woman whom he believed exemplified all that was best and noblest in the human spirit — but with a young girl who did not comprehend the great issues and purposes that he told himself were all that was important in life.

Now, like so many of his students, like so many of his friends, Nathaniel swung between suffering and joy. He moved from the joy of his meetings with Patrecia, from the knowledge that he loved passionately and was loved as passionately in return — to the guilt of living a lie with Ayn and with me, the guilt of feeling that his love could not be displayed to the world, that by its very nature, it must be hidden from the day, and the still worse guilt of believing that he had betrayed the best within himself by his romantic choice.

It was then that Ayn told him she was ready to resume their affair. He had known it was coming, he had tried to be prepared, he was not prepared. He leaped to the first semi-honest response he could find. His marriage was shattering, he said; he was upset and had no emotional capacity left for anything else. Shocked, Ayn offered to help solve his marital problems. Nathaniel assured her that once they were resolved, whatever the resolution, their own relationship would be repaired and resurrected. Once more, Ayn put her emotional life on hold.

For several months, Ayn met with Nathaniel and me to discuss the conflicts that divided us, exhibiting a kindness, a generosity, a tenderness that had long seemed absent from her personality. Despite her desire for Nathaniel, despite her hectic professional schedule of public appearances and writing, she devoted priceless hours to the effort to understand and resolve the problems destroying the marriage of the man she loved. She blamed neither of us; there was no hint of moralism in her attitude or conversation, only a deep, loving desire for our happiness. But by then, the marriage that should never have begun had reached its final dead end.

During these months, Ayn was dealing with another problem that was emotionally devastating to her. Frank was growing increasingly frail and thin, and had developed a contraction of the tendons of his hands which seriously interfered with his painting. When he went into the hospital for surgery, Ayn was terrified. She had never been ill; she had never been hospitalized; the world of doctors and hospitals and surgery was strange to her, and frightening. She rarely left Franks side during his hospital stay, she rarely slept, her tension was palpable in the room in which she sat. But the operation was successful, and Frank was soon able to return to his work and to the Art Students League. He had been elected to the Leagues Board of Control, its policy-making organization, where he served ably and conscientiously for three years. He rented a small apartment in the building where he and Ayn lived and converted it into a studio. He needed his work and his separate world of the League and his studio more than he had ever needed them; for the next years, he was to be a silent observer of conversations and encounters that shattered him emotionally, that he should not have been present at, and that he had no way to cope with.

In the summer of 1965 — exhausted from years of struggling to feel what I did not feel, angry at my growing sense that I was not being told the truth about Patrecia — I told Nathaniel that I wanted a divorce. I took an apartment in the same Thirty-fourth Street building where we had lived for several years, and where Ayn and Frank were also living. Nathaniel and I continued to work together and spend time together, even to travel together to NBI lectures and events; we still were comrades-in-arms, we still were fighting for the same ideals; that had been the strongest bond between us, and it remained.

Not long after our marital parting, Larry and Patrecia were separated. Patrecia was free to see Nathaniel more regularly. But she was not free of guilt; Nathaniel had told her of his past relationship with Ayn and the events now unfolding between them. Patrecia felt that she, as well as Nathaniel, owed Ayn a debt that could never be repaid; and now they were betraying her. And she was not free of suffering; she knew Nathaniel believed that in choosing her, he had chosen a lesser value over a higher one, that he did not view her as a full citizen of the world he inhabited, that, even when both their marriages had ended, he still felt it necessary to hide their relationship. She endured the guilt and the pain because she loved him, as she, too, struggled to accept the unacceptable.

A river of anguish and betrayal and deceit was moving to swamp everyone involved in a situation that should never have begun. With Frank well again, and Nathaniel's marriage at an end, Ayn wanted to resume her interrupted love affair. But she was puzzled and upset by Nathaniel's behavior. She felt that he was withdrawing from her, that he was continually busy with other activities and other people, that he had less time for her and less interest in her, that even when they were together his emotional remoteness was interfering with the former closeness of their relationship. He engaged only in abstract philosophical and psychological conversations with her in a manner appropriate to a colleague but not to a lover. And he talked obsessively about his friendship with Patrecia, a young woman whom Ayn liked but did not believe warranted the sacrifice of Nathaniel's time and interest. How did he have time or interest for a friendship in view of what was unresolved between them?

Nathaniel tried to allay Ayn's uneasiness by assurances of his love, assurances that he needed and wanted her, that she was the most important person in his life — and he struggled to believe that it was so. He spoke vaguely of problems troubling him, of physical and emotional exhaustion, of depression, of being overworked, as Ayn tried conscientiously to listen and to help. But as his retreat from her and the progressive deterioration of their relationship continued to escalate through the ensuing months, she began to question the reality of his love. Yet still — struggling vainly with guilt and a sense of failure, desperately telling himself his feeling for Patrecia would somehow miraculously vanish, that Ayn need never know of it, that it would equally miraculously be replaced by a passionate sexual response to Ayn — Nathaniel continued to assure her that the problems besetting their relationship had nothing to do with his love for her.

It was the "triangle," he explained — the triangle consisting of Ayn, Frank, and himself — that seemed to him an insuperable emotional barrier. He was naming something that, like his weariness and depression, was an authentic problem, but not the basic problem. He spoke of his pain during the early days of their affair, his constant awareness that he shared her with another man, that he had no rights in their relationship and could make no claims, that her first loyalty was and had to be to her husband. His emotional state, he said, was caused by the knowledge that if they resumed their affair, he would be sentenced to that pain again; it was the fear of it that was causing his retreat from Ayn.

Trying to ignore her feeling that she was hearing only part of the reasons for his estrangement, her bewilderment that the difficulties of the triangle could be more important to Nathaniel than the value she represented to him — Ayn plunged into a period of working to help Nathaniel with this new conflict. She wrote lengthy papers on her analysis of his psychology, on the meaning and solution to what appeared to be tormenting him, they discussed her papers and her theories for long and futile hours. But the result of her best efforts was not an improvement in their relationship; it became still more gray and strained and empty. The romance whose meaning to her had been the enjoyment of life on earth, was deteriorating into endless psychological sessions, endless excruciatingly difficult labor for her — and the tortured sense that everything she did and said was somehow beside the point, that she was losing him.

Sometimes, she would tell Nathaniel her doubts of his love. Was that the real problem? she demanded. Was he afraid to say he no longer loved her? Always, he denied it, reassured her, insisted that he would make their relationship what it should be once his personal problems were solved, that he was painfully aware he had drifted away, but he would change that — insisting it still more vehemently in the privacy of his own thoughts. I love Ayn, he seemed to be telling himself; Patrecia is only a temporary need in my life. I love Ayn, but I can't release the feeling; something is blocking it — that's the only problem.

Sometimes, Ayn asked him: Is it the age difference? Is that what has come between us? She was to tell me, later, at the worst of her suffering, "As Nathan and I were talking, I looked down at my arm, and I saw the loose skin of a woman in her sixties... and I felt old..." No, he insisted, the age difference did not matter, as it had never mattered. Always he denied it, appalled at the thought of what it would do to her if he admitted the truth: that their twenty-five year age difference was an impediment to him. In 1966, Nathaniel was thirty-six and Ayn was sixty-one; that had become one more barrier he did not know how to cross.

It was toward the end of that year that Nathaniel first told me, truthfully, what was happening between Ayn and himself — and, untruthfully, that he was only now about to begin a sexual affair with Patrecia. I was horrified, and frightened for both Ayn and Nathaniel. I well understood Nathaniel's conviction that he must love Ayn; I had spent years dealing with the identical conflict in my marriage. But he had to tell her the truth, I insisted, or he would destroy them both. When he said he could not, not yet, not without one more effort to break out of his dilemma, I understood; I felt, in some undefined way, that if Ayn were to break with him now — the inevitable result of telling her the truth — her moral disapproval and contempt would shatter him in a manner beyond mending. I agreed to keep his secret, either until he had given up Patrecia and cheerfully returned to his prior relationship with Ayn — or until he had told her the truth. I did not know what my silence was to cost me — or what it was to cost Ayn.

During these increasingly tormented years, although she continued her work, Ayn's world was narrowing down to the dimensions of her relationship with Nathaniel. It was her constant mental focus, her constant emotional focus. She seemed barely to notice Frank's quiet presence, their discussions of his painting grew less frequent, the distance dividing them grew greater. She became more impatient and intolerant of NBI's students, more demanding of her friends, quicker to anger as her personal life fell into disarray. But always, students and friends were told that it was their own irrationality that was the cause of her anger and demands; they could not know that they were struggling in a web of deceit they had not spun.

Ayn's only hold on her belief in Nathaniel's love was brief periods which she later described as "honeymoon periods," when he inexplicably seemed warmer, closer, more loving, when he experienced the return of his early feelings for her, and she could begin to hope that their conflicts were over, that he was not abandoning her after all. But each honeymoon soon ended, as Nathaniel was flung back into guilt, into remorse, into further deceit.

Early in 1968 — as Nathaniel was working, in a hideous irony, on a series of articles for The Objectivist entitled "Self-Esteem and Romantic Love" — Ayn took me into her confidence, describing her bewilderment with Nathaniel and the events that had occurred between them during the past few years. A new "honeymoon period" had just ended as the others had ended, and for the first time in a lifetime of battles she was faced with a battle she could not handle alone. She turned to me for help — for someone to talk to, for someone who would understand what she was enduring, for someone who might be able to explain Nathaniel's unintelligible behavior and might know a way to reach him — in a manner that was infinitely moving and painful. All her life, she had fed her enormous energy into her work and into other people; now, she needed a source of energy outside herself. During the strange and agonized months that followed, our relationship underwent a shift. Ayn, who had always been the strong, unchanging rock in my life, the person I had turned to for advice and knowledge and certainty, could no longer maintain the ruthless repression of pain, the repression of any emotion she saw as weakness, that had ruled her for so many years. She allowed me — and herself — entry into all the hidden vulnerability of her life, and I saw and loved again, as I had so often seen and loved when she listened to her tiddlywink music, the heartbreakingly innocent young girl she once had been. But now, as the wall of repression first cracked and then shattered before my eyes, I was not seeing that young girl's joy and exaltation, but all the rejections of all the years and all the unacknowledged, helpless anguish it had caused her. She leaned on me now as if I were the strong older friend, and she the lost and suffering child.

"The more Nathaniel and I talk," she said, "the less I understand. And I have the feeling that nothing I say or discover will be heard, that I'm working harder on his psychology and I care more about it than he. Why is he able to think brilliantly about theoretical problems of psychology or morality, but not about personal problems? He'll seem to understand something one day — then it's gone the next day. He's warm and loving with me one day, he'll kiss me in a way that's sexual, he'll tell me he can't live without me, and I'll feel that something magnificent is possible between us — then that's gone the next day. Nothing is stable or predictable, I'm always waiting for the ax to fall... He seems neither to want to break with me nor to continue. Perhaps it's good that even in his desperate unhappiness and helplessness, he doesn't want a break; perhaps it means he does love me... I don't know...

"I'm beginning to think that the problem of the triangle is some sort of rationalization. If he feels for me what he says he feels, and sees in me what he says he sees — he'd be willing to be part of a harem. Doesn't he know that the great proof of my love for him is that I chose him despite a happy marriage and the difference in our ages? Doesn't he know that an exclusive commitment for life is impossible?...

"I'm constantly hovering on the edge of breaking with him. I feel that I know nothing about him... He seems dominated by fear — but of what? ... I'm getting enormously exhausted... I cannot stand the mystery of the issue of Patrecia. He swears he's not in love with her, and I believe it. He knows perfectly well that the only other woman I would accept in his life is you, Barbara; it would have to be a woman of your stature. And I can't believe he would ever want someone of lesser stature. But why does he talk about her so much? Why is she important to him? He explains and explains, and none of it makes any sense...

"Theoretically, I believe that he loves me, but it has no emotional reality. Where are the concretes that manifest it? I cannot stand the fact that his feeling for me is totally alien and incomprehensible to me."

I struggled to help her in every way I could devise. She discussed her endless papers about Nathaniel's psychology; at her request, I talked with him about those papers and about Ayn's changing theories of his motivation. And often, I begged him to return to sanity and to Ayn or to tell her the truth before it was too late for all of us. And then I saw his anguish and an anxiety that was leaping out of control, and I knew that he could neither resume his affair with Ayn nor confess the truth to her; I felt, as he appeared to feel, that the day he broke with Ayn would be the final break in his sense of self-value — and that I was demanding the impossible of him. And so I would return to Ayn, and talk with her again, as she evolved theory after theory to explain Nathaniel.

And I lived in my own anguish with the knowledge that I was aiding Nathaniel in his deception, that Ayn trusted me and I was keeping the truth from her. Every direction seemed to lead only to disaster. Was I to destroy Nathaniel by speaking? Or was I to allow Ayn to go on in her suffering, and continue to hope that Nathaniel would be finished with his passion for Patrecia so that Ayn's pain could end? I swung between the two impossible choices, racing from my office to Ayn in the middle of the day, or from my apartment to Ayn in the middle of the night, when she called to say she had a new idea that might explain Nathaniel, or she had no idea at all and she could no longer endure the situation — and then I ran to Nathaniel, to hear him say, tears streaming down his face, "Barbara, please help me! I don't know what to do!" And I wondered what had happened to the two giants of the intellect I had known, now lost and helpless in the morass of their emotions.

Throughout these months of endless nightmare, Ayn talked compulsively to Frank about Nathaniel and her problems with him. Frank saw the wife who was his strong rock, his certainty, his source of knowledge in a world with which he had never learned to cope, tortured by her romantic problems with another man. He did not speak of his feelings, as he had never spoken of them; but once, in sudden, contextless anger, he said, "That man is no damn good! Why won't you see it?" He grew increasingly irritable with Ayn. As a result of years of living in her shadow, of wiping his own desires out of existence, of suffering at the sight of her pain and being helpless to alter it, he snapped at her for the least thing in an anger that added to her emotional upset. Frank was seventy-one; his health and his strength were failing; he had no money except what Ayn had earned. He had nowhere to go. And so he stayed, and endured.

Frank was growing more vague and forgetful. He seemed sometimes not fully to understand what was said to him. Often, in his explosions at Ayn, he seemed emotionally out of control. Allan Blumenthal, who was in private practice as a psychiatrist, told me he believed the change in Frank was probably due to organic processes, the beginning of what we understood as senility. Whatever the physical source, as Frank sat through months of Ayn's conversations it was evident that his wife's devotion to Nathaniel and the torment it caused her were increasingly unbearable to him; he bore it in the only way he knew how: by gradually, month by month, understanding less of what was happening and what was being said, by retreating still farther into silence and passivity, by being present at those conversations only in body, his mind absent and blank. And he bore it another way, which neither Ayn nor any of her friends suspected: he spent many hours each day in his studio, but seemed to be producing less and less; he was not painting, he was drinking, drowning his grief and his failed life in liquor.

By May, Ayn was listening again as Nathaniel spoke of another difficulty besetting him — again real, again beside the point. Ayn's constant anger with him during the early period of their romantic relationship, he said, her moral accusations and condemnation when he did not behave as she thought he should, had caused him to feel that he was trying to deal with the unpredictable; he had never known when or why her fury would descend on him. It had shaken him profoundly with regard to the possibilities of a happy relationship with her. It was the scars of those early troubles, he said, that accounted for his present behavior.

He did not say that a love affair with Ayn Rand would have been impossible for any twenty-four-year-old to cope with, and that, with more maturity, he would never have embarked upon it. It had been a mistake on both their parts, doomed by its very nature. Now the consequences of that mistake were being reaped — and Ayn and Nathaniel were caught in a trap with no exit.

Once again, Ayn tried to solve the problem, but this time she felt no sympathy for it. She was unable to recognize the havoc she had caused, to Nathaniel and to others, by her use of morality as a whip, a scourge, an instrument of damnation. Nor could she look for failure in herself, not even for the most innocent of errors. The fantasy self-image of perfection that she had spent a lifetime constructing was not to be toppled. The destruction of her relationship with Nathaniel could only be his fault, his evasions, his guilt.

"Yes, I am a moralist, first and foremost, before I'm anything else," she told me. "It's my greatest pride... Whatever I project with him, happiness, passion, despair, anger, just creates more guilt in him — I'm in a straitjacket. He sees me as some kind of unpredictable terror... I feel so terribly invisible... He doesn't really love me, it's a duty, he'd really like to find an escape and he's looking for a rationalization... Everything is switching and swimming... My fear is that I'm too much for him, and he wants something else. Everything keeps adding up to this. It's all so crazy, I don't believe anything we've identified about his present state, something is still being hidden from me and from himself — there's something he hasn't faced and doesn't want to face...

"The worst pain of all is my feeling that it was so right that he should fall in love with me... yet he's been trying to kill his feeling, and he's succeeding."

I went to Nathaniel to demand that he tell Ayn he was not in love with her, even if he could not bring himself to tell her about Patrecia. "Don't leave her in this hell!" I said. But when I saw the look on his face, I grew silent. Soon after, he called me late one night to say, "Please come. I need you." I spent the rest of the night holding him in my arms, trying somehow to reassure him, somehow to force energy and hope into him, as he said, "Don't you think I know that my behavior is inexcusable? I'm in a maze, where every avenue leads only to tragedy."

On a morning in early July, Nathaniel telephoned me at NBI and asked me to come to his apartment. Once again, I flew from my desk, ignoring the curious looks of the staff; they could not avoid knowing — observing my continual unexplained absences, the hours I spent on the telephone in hushed conversations with Ayn or Nathaniel, and observing the tension in Nathaniel that hung about him like a black cloud — that something was terribly wrong. Ayn's friends knew it, too, but did not suspect the nature or dimensions of the problem.

When I reached Nathaniel's, he said that Ayn was to visit him that evening at eight o'clock, and that he had decided to tell her a part of the truth; this time, it would be a part that mattered. He would explain that the difference in their ages had become an impassable barrier to his sexual feeling. He wrote out what he wanted to communicate, in order not to stumble inadvertently into formulations even more hurtful than the facts. When she arrived, he would give her the paper, she would read it, and then they would talk. His paper was as tactful as such a document could be — but I shuddered at the thought of what Ayn would feel when she read it. What kind of nightmare would it be for a woman to learn that the man she loves finds her too old to inspire romantic feelings? This would be the final, crushing blow for her, the worst of all the blows she had received.

It was not yet nine o'clock in the evening when my telephone rang. It was Ayn — in a fury. "Come down at once," she demanded, "and see what this monster has done!" I was there within moments. I entered to find Ayn raging at an ashen-faced Nathaniel. The insult to her dignity, too overwhelming to bear, had been hurled out of conscious awareness — it was evident that she was, in those moments, totally unaware of her wounds — and what replaced it was outrage and condemnation. Their relationship — any relationship between them — was over, she cried; she would never see or deal with him again.

Later, I was to ask Nathaniel, "Why didn't you take advantage, over the years, of the 'outs' Ayn offered you about the issue of her age? Why didn't you tell her then?" "Because I never believed that she would accept it," he replied. "I believed she raised it so that I would deny it. I thought that if I admitted it, it would end as it did end, and I would be morally condemned in her eyes and my own."

The tortured situation, in which those involved were simultaneously victims and executioners, began its rapid roll to the disastrous end that had begun fourteen years ago on a sunny winter's day drive from Toronto.

Ayn would not discuss the terrible injury to her of Nathaniel's sexual rejection. A scoundrel had no power to damage her sense of her femininity, she insisted angrily; the man she had thought Nathaniel to be, could have hurt her and did; the man he had become, could not and did not. There was agony in her eyes, and a twisted look to her mouth, but the protective wall of emotional repression had slammed down again. She spoke, instead, of fear and horror and rage and furious indignation — and she shifted back and forth between her initial decision to break totally with Nathaniel, and her wish to give him "one more chance" to solve his problems. Her greatest fear appeared to be that she had given Nathaniel her public sanction, she had said that he spoke for her — and now she believed him to be a man capable of any outrage. "I can't predict what he'll do," she said, "and I'm terrified of what may happen to my name and reputation. I've put them in his hands — this is what the struggle of my life has gone into! — I've turned everything over to him because he said he loved me and I believed him — and now I have to wait in terror to see when he will disgrace me professionally. He must save me from this horror, or disconnect himself from me and my name and close NBI. If he doesn't save my name, then I'll break with him publicly, I'll disgrace him, it doesn't matter what happens to him now, I've got to protect myself!...

"The worst of all is that he has destroyed my view of him... To see as a scoundrel the man I thought closest to me philosophically, personally, romantically — the man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged, and told the world he was my intellectual heir! He has no right to other people or concerns, he has no right to go on vacations and lie in the sun and run around with casual people — he must be with me every evening and try to think and work, he must have no other life or concerns — he can't just say: sorry, I have a problem, so good-bye, I'm leaving you with the problem and me with all the advantages. It's too late to break, after all this hell. He has no right to a private life which is paid for by my life, to his beautiful apartment, paid for by what I went through with Night of January 16th — I will not retire from the scene and let him profit. He can't have a private life and the adulation and wealth that I created, after he has ditched me and abandoned me to my suffering."

Her voice grew low and weary. "How can I believe I will ever be visible to anyone? The best mind I ever knew, the man closest to me in every way, rejected me as a person. Everyone else profits from my ideas, but I am punished for them, punished for the happiness I bring to others, for initiating and living up to those ideas." Her voice was almost too low to be heard as she said, "There is nothing for me to look forward to, nothing to hope for in reality. My life is over. He has forced me into a permanent ivory tower. He took away this earth."

Ayn demanded that Nathaniel immediately cancel his plans for the stage production of The Fountainhead. A year earlier, NBI Theater had been established for the purpose of producing off-Broadway plays. Its first production was to be a dramatization of The Fountainhead, which I had written and which Ayn had enthusiastically approved. There had been considerable interest in the roles among actors: Robert Lansing had expressed the desire to play Roark, and Jessica Walter and Susan Crane were considering the part of Dominique.

Through the winter of 1967 and into the summer of 1968, plans for the play had proceeded. Ralph Roseman, a man of both managerial and aesthetic talent, with years of successful experience as a stage producer and manager both on and off Broadway and in touring companies, was engaged as General Manager. Phillip Smith, an NBI student experienced as a stage director and acting teacher, was to direct. The Jan Hus Playhouse on East Seventy-fourth Street was leased for the production, which was to open in October. Cast auditions were conducted in the NBI auditorium.

In accordance with Ayn's wish, all plans for the production were canceled.

Out of a need that would not die, Ayn still met with Nathaniel, although with much less frequency than before. She said that her purpose was to save her reputation by helping him psychologically. It was evident that that was only part of her purpose. Somewhere inside her remained the last faint remnant of a hope that all the problems and pain would vanish, and Nathaniel would again be the dashing young lover she had known so long ago.

The blows had not stopped falling on Ayn. On an evening in mid-July, she spent more than a dozen hours with Nathaniel, talking and suggesting and advising. It was then that he admitted — saying it was a realization he had come to only now — that he cared for Patrecia more than he had said. He denied that they were having a sexual affair, but he acknowledged the strength of his feelings. When he said, "I know what this must mean to you, to be rejected for a lesser value" — Ayn was outraged. "How dare you speak to me of 'lesser values'?" she demanded. "It's not an issue of that! It's far worse — the girl is nothing! In fact, in reality, this situation is obscene!"

It was the final affront for Ayn. "I don't believe he has just realized that he loves Patrecia" she said. "I believe nothing he has said, now or ever!" With instructions that I was to repeat her words to Nathaniel, whom she categorically refused to see, she said she would wait two months, until just before the fall NBI courses were to begin in New York and across the country, to decide if he would "regain his mind," and learn to apply Objectivism to his behavior no matter what his emotions. "If the rational part of him can still be saved, he may stay at NBI, and he may work on his writing, but Objectivism must become his exclusive career. He may create no disgrace in his personal life that will reflect on me. And I want a statement from him, in writing, that it is his intellectual judgment that my position on Patrecia is understood by him and is objective. The alternative is that I will create a public scandal."

Nathaniel, appalled by Ayn's terms, nevertheless agreed to them. Ayn had no legal power over NBI, although without her sanction it would be impossible to continue. It was not predominantly the fear of public scandal or the possible loss of NBI that motivated his agreement; it was the charismatic force of Ayn Rand. She still remained a moral authority, the fountainhead of morality.

On an evening in August, Ayn told me that she was about to call her attorney and make an appointment to change her will. Should Frank predecease her, Nathaniel was the heir to her estate, with the understanding that Frank would make similar provisions should she die first. "I intend you to be my heir," she said. "I'm changing my will at once." Somehow, I stumbled out my gratitude, invented the excuse of a pressing business meeting, and ran to Nathaniel's apartment.

"I've reached the end," I said. "Ayn is about to make me her heir. I cannot allow it. It is not possible for me to live with that and continue to hide the truth from her. It's too late for you to tell her. I have to do it. There's no argument in the world, no problem in the world, that will prevent it."

Nathaniel agreed. He did not speak of arguments or problems. He seemed relieved that the truth would be known at last, that he would finally be free of the crushing burden of lies.

And Ayn sat alone at the desk at which she had written Atlas Shrugged, mourning the loss of the man who had offered her the possibility of living richly in the world and living ecstatically as a woman, feeling abandoned to an incomprehensible mystery. She did not know that she soon was to lose, as well, the intellectual crusade that had been at the heart of her new fame as a philosopher.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The snowball of events had kept rolling and growing, while the four of us had stood as if at the bottom of a cold steep cliff, paralyzed, watching helplessly as it began its furious rush down the mountain to bury us all in white horror. Now, the events had reached their climax. We were hurled into the snow's pounding maelstrom, and we flailed blindly, unable to see one other, to reach one other, to touch one other's hands one last time.

Early on the morning of August 23, I telephoned Allan Blumenthal. I shuddered at the thought of the effects on Ayn when she learned the full truth; she would need help and support, but she would refuse to accept them from me; she would refuse ever to see me again. As a psychiatrist and a friend, Allan was the logical person to have standing by. I asked him to come to my apartment on an urgent matter. When he arrived, Nathaniel was with me; he had suggested that he be present to verify what I intended to tell Allan.

Breaking my vow of secrecy for the first time, I told Allan the events of the past fourteen years — of Ayn and Nathaniel's affair, of Nathaniel's relationship with Patrecia, of the lies and deceit that had followed. Allan was stunned and indignant, but his negative reaction was predominantly directed toward Ayn. "How could she have begun this whole nightmare?" he demanded. "And with a twenty-four-year-old kid! How could she have done this to Frank and to you, Barbara? How could she have failed to know where it would lead?"

When Frank opened the door that evening, Allan and I entered to greet a tense and agitated Ayn. Something in my voice when I made the appointment had told her there was another blow to come.

For the first and only time, everything I had learned about emotional repression stood me in good stead. When I began to speak, my words were measured and precise and my voice steady. I said that I had something to tell her that would profoundly upset her and would end our friendship. I explained why I had asked Allan to be present, and that it had been necessary for me to tell him of her romance with Nathaniel, because that was what I intended to discuss. For a moment, she looked puzzled; then there was a flash of anger in her eyes. She nodded silently. "Nathaniel has been lying to you," I said. "I've been lying to you. For almost five years, he has been in love with Patrecia and has been having an affair with her. I've known part of the truth for more than a year."

Ayn's face was expressionless as I continued to speak. She interrupted occasionally only to ask a question of fact. I told her the progression of Nathaniel's relationship with Patrecia; I told her what element of truth there had been in Nathaniel's various "explanations" of his withdrawal from her, and what untruths. I explained the cause of the depression and anxiety and guilt he had complained of. I told her my part in the deceit.

There was an eternity of silence in the room. Ayn's eyes seemed to have grown smaller, they had narrowed into slits, her sensuous mouth was pale, it was two white lines slashed across her face. She spoke — and her voice was frightening, because it sounded natural, even, without feeling. "Get him down here."

She leaped to her feet in a motion so violent that it ripped at the air of the room. "Get that bastard down here!" Her voice did not tremble, it was a hiss, as if it were being forced upward by something not visible that was seething and boiling inside her.

"Ayn," Allan said, "it's too dangerous. He can't handle a confrontation now." "Get him down here!" The hiss was louder, its boiling source beginning to rise to the surface. "Ayn" I said, "there's nothing you can say to him, no condemnation that he hasn't already pronounced on himself." "Get that bastard down here or I'll drag him here myself!" The slash of her mouth twisted downward, her jaw seemed frozen — her eyes were terrifying.

Allan went to the telephone. "Nathan, Ayn wants you to come here at once." He turned to Ayn. "He said 'Okay.'" Ayn remained standing. Frank had sunk too deeply into his chair; his eyes were half closed, as if he were almost asleep.

When Nathaniel entered, it seemed for a wild moment that the wrong person had come through the door. Instead of the arrogant, confident man he had been, the man with straight shoulders and a look of fiery intensity, he was a man whose eyes under drooping lids were smudged by purple circles, his body was stooped as if he had no power to hold it erect, his hands were clenched into trembling fists at his sides.

"Sit there" Ayn said, pointing to a straight-backed chair near the door. "I don't want you in my living room." He sagged into the chair, she stood straight before him, her eyes fixed, her mouth loose and wide. And then it began.

The seething agony, the loss, the humiliation and rejection — all poured out of Ayn in a single convulsion. She stood erect, but her intransigent spirit was battered to its knees, as the judgment, the control, the farsighted wisdom that had belonged to Ayn Rand, slipped from her grasp. "You — to whom I offered the world! — to whom I gave my love and the name I'd earned through an unspeakable battle — you did this to me! May you be damned to the hell you put me through! Do you begin to know what you've done? Do you begin to know what you've thrown away? Me! — your highest value, you said, the woman you couldn't live without, the woman you had dreamed of but never hoped to find — you rotten hypocrite!"

Her voice went on and on, filling the room with its implacable agony. There is a point at which pain wrenches the human spirit into twisted, unrecognizable shapes. Ayn had reached that point, as the years of unmet needs seemed for the endless, tragic space of that evening to have shattered what she had been, shattered what she was. Her eyes were huge and blazing. "How did you dare aspire to me! If you ever, for even a moment, had been the man you pretended to be — you would value me romantically above any woman on earth if I were eighty and in a wheel chair! You'd be blind to all other women! But you've never been what I thought you were! It was an act from the beginning, a sick, ugly act!"

Frank's body was limply relaxed, his eyes were closed. There was no presence where he sat.

"It's finished, your whole act!" Ayn cried. "I'll tear down your facade as I built it up! I'll denounce you publicly, I'll destroy you as I created you! I don't even care what it does to me. You won't have the career I gave you, or the name, or the wealth, or the prestige. You'll have nothing — just as you started, just as you came to me, just as you would have remained without me. You would have accomplished nothing if I hadn't handed you my life. I did it all!"

Nathaniel had not moved, he had not spoken. He sat numbly as the flood of sounds washed over him.

"You dared to reject me?" She was no longer screaming, her voice was guttural, choked, and all at once her accent was startlingly heavy — and it seemed for a moment that she no longer knew it was Nathaniel she was denouncing, she was in Russia, she was a girl again, she was damning those who had inflicted upon her a lifetime of rejection — damning her mother who had required as the price of love that she be glamorous and social and pretty, damning her father who had never touched her hand in affection, damning her schoolmates who had profited by her intelligence and excluded her from their lives and activities, damning all the men through all the years who had feared the power of her brain and so had been blind to the woman's body it inhabited — and damning Leo most of all, damning the man to whom she had offered her heart and her soul and who had been indifferent to them. Leo had been born again, more than forty years later, when she had become everything she had wanted to become and achieved everything she had wanted to achieve — and once more he had done to her the unthinkable, the unendurable, once more he had tried to destroy her life, once more she had offered him her heart and her soul and he had thrown them in her face.

As Ayn's voice went relentlessly on, denouncing, threatening, despising, Nathaniel's body gradually began to straighten and his look of passive acceptance faded, replaced by something intent and thoughtful. It was too much; even in his pit of guilt, the things Ayn was saying were too far removed from reality. They were ceasing to reach him, ceasing to destroy him as she wished him to be destroyed.

The choked voice spat out its last terrible sounds. "If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health — you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you'll know it's a sign of still worse moral degradation!" The voice stopped too abruptly, as if stunned by its own words. There was silence.

Suddenly, with a sound that rang through the room like a shot — a shot fired at Nathaniel's heart and her own — Ayn's open hand arced through space to slash across Nathaniel's upturned face. It retreated, arced again — slashed again. And then once more.

"Now get out!" ordered a stranger's voice.

Nathaniel rose to his feet. Three red welts scarred his face. He had not flinched. He had not uttered a word. His glance flicked, once, to me. Then he turned and left the room. And left Ayn's life forever.

Ayn slumped heavily onto the couch. There was neither sound nor movement from Frank. "I've got to plan," she murmured. "I've got to decide what to do... But I can't plan now. I have to sleep. I have to sleep..."

"Ayn," I began, not knowing what my sentence was to be, "I..."

"Not now," she interrupted. "We'll talk later." She looked older than her years, she looked as if there were nothing left inside her but exhaustion. "Do you need me?" asked Allan. "Shall I stay?" "I don't need anyone... Barbara, you did a terrible thing. I think I understand part of it. You were caught between two loyalties. You chose the man you had married... I'm tired... We'll discuss it after I decide what to do about Nathan..."

I nodded, astonished. I had not imagined that the bond between us could withstand what she had learned this night. Something within me whispered: Do I want it? Do I want to continue?

Then Ayn was alone with the silent man half buried in an overstuffed chair.

By the next day, events began moving with breakneck speed.

Ayn told me her demands. Nathaniel was to terminate his role in NBI and its several affiliates, and turn over full ownership to me. He was to transfer his fifty percent share of The Objectivist to her; I would become the magazine's co-editor in his place. He was to inform Ayn's friends and the NBI staff that he was doing so, and that the cause was immoralities he had committed that had caused Ayn to break with him irrevocably. Ayn would write a brief statement in The Objectivist, a single paragraph stating that because of moral failures on Nathaniel's part she had terminated their personal and professional relationship, and that he no longer spoke for her or for Objectivism.

As I listened, I felt, as I had felt the evening before, a great dull void forming between us — and so I reached out to stroke her hair and say, "We'll work it out. I'll do what has to be done. "There was no reason why her decision had to entail the abandonment of the valuable work of NBI; it might be possible to continue running it without Nathaniel. I asked for a few days to think about and project a means of salvaging the lecture operation. Ayn, somewhat hesitantly, agreed.

Then we spoke of her relationship with me. In the end, she said there were mitigating circumstances in my complicity with Nathaniel, and that, despite her strong disapproval of my actions, she did not believe I had acted out of unworthy motives. Our personal and professional relationship need not end.

I took her demands to Nathaniel. He was sunk in a deep, empty passivity. The red welts had faded from his face, replaced by the color of ashes. He answered dully, "I'll do whatever she wants." He knew that when it was over he would have no money, no friends, no honor. But he would have his writing, his work on the book now nearing completion, and he would have Patrecia. The first faint flicker of life and hope was in his eyes. It was ending, the years of nightmare were ending, he would be free of it, free of the load of guilt and suffering and lies that had crushed him to his knees.

A long time later, Nathaniel would say with a bitter smile, "Someone asked me what I did in 1968. I answered: 'I survived.'" I do not know how Ayn or Nathaniel or Frank survived that year, which was yet to bring us its final desolation. I know how I survived it.

Early in 1968, I had begun to see Robert Berole, the NBI student who was teaching Ayn to dance; later in the year, he became manager of NBI Book Service. I felt that I was discovering a near-miracle in the form of a man who cheerfully, benevolently enjoyed life, who was warm and loving and openly emotional, whose high intelligence was singularly reality-bound. Often, when he saw me floating somewhere in space in a cloud of abstract concepts, he would yank me back to the earth where he was so firmly rooted and demand that I look there, at empirical, living reality, for the answers I sought.

One day, feeling obliged to tell him what I could of the events affecting my life — he saw my periods of despair, my endless rushing between Ayn and Nathaniel, the frantic telephone calls I received in the middle of the night — I had said to him: "I'm doing something that I'm not free to explain. It involves my deceit of Ayn. I see no alternative to my present actions, but the situation I'm in can't go on much longer, the truth will come out, and when it does, Ayn will break with me. And she will require that you choose between your loyalty to her and to me. I want you to know that if you choose Ayn, I'll understand it and I won't reproach you." I waited for his answer. He was silent for a moment, looking at me intently — and then he burst out laughing. "Why would I choose Ayn?" he said. "I love you — of course she means a great deal to me — but it's you who make me happy. Why in the world would I choose someone else?" In the most astonished moment of my life, I realized I had no answer to give him. The self-evident had ceased to be self-evident. And slowly, painstakingly, like a child taking its first awkward steps, I began to move down the long road that consisted of allowing my authentic emotions entry into life, learning to respect them, to take them seriously, to listen carefully to their messages. I was to spend seven years with Robert, in the most fulfilling and untroubled relationship I had ever known. When we parted, it was with the knowledge that we would remain loving friends throughout our lives.

Robert was beside me, bringing sanity and perspective with him, as I moved through the trauma of the next weeks.

Ayn began speaking to her friends to tell them that, because of Nathaniel's immoral actions, she had broken off her personal and professional relationship with him. She gave no hint, nor did she plan to, of the love affair whose consequences had led to the break. She spoke of evasion and dishonesty, of personal exploitation of her, of moral corruption and depravity. They saw her open fury and her hidden hurt, they could not doubt her word, they could only wonder what terrible thing Nathaniel had done. They asked no questions and they dealt as best they could with their own devastating shock. For years, Ayn and Nathaniel had been their teachers, their psychologists. Now, they had to redefine their loyalties. The redefinition was the work of a moment; Nathaniel had been the source of too much pain for too long; they rallied to Ayn's support; most of them refused to see or speak with Nathaniel again.

On the evening of August 25, two days after the final confrontation between Ayn and Nathaniel, I went to Nathaniel with Henry Mark Holzer, Ayn's friend and her attorney for matters pertaining to Objectivism. At Ayn's demand, we brought with us papers transferring Nathaniel's half interest in The Objectivist, without financial recompense, to her. Nathaniel raised his pen to sign — then stopped. The magazine held the copyright to all his articles, including the psychological articles which he had written for use in his book. He and Ayn had had an unwritten agreement that each would retain full rights to his or her articles. Before he signed the transfer agreement, he said, he wanted the copyrights to his work legally assigned to him. Hank telephoned Ayn; Nathaniel's articles would remain his property, she agreed. Still, he hesitated: there was nothing in writing to substantiate his claim. Then he picked up the pen and signed his gift to Ayn.

Three days later, I called a meeting of the NBI and The Objectivist staffs. They gathered tensely in the auditorium, wondering if they were at last to be given an explanation of the tensions and chaos of the last months. When Nathaniel entered the room, they whirled to look at him; he had not been in the office for more than a month. I mounted the podium and spoke in a trembling voice. I told them that Ayn had broken with Nathaniel, and that he had resigned from all NBI organizations. I stood at the podium weeping helplessly as Nathaniel rose to speak; his hands gripped the lectern so tightly it seemed that either the lectern or his hands would break. "I have taken an action I know to be wrong," he said. "I have failed to practice the principles I taught to all of you. Miss Rand gave me a blank check on the use of her name, and I defaulted on my responsibility. She is fully within her moral rights in severing our relationship." Within moments, the auditorium was filled with the sounds of shock, of disbelief, of disillusionment, it was filled with the sounds of sobbing and outrage and despair.

The sounds were to keep reverberating as word of Nathaniel's statement raced through the Objectivist movement. NBI's telephone never stopped ringing; students from one end of the country to the other made frantic calls, demanding or pleading to be told what had happened. Was Nathaniel taking drugs? Was that the problem? Was he a secret drinker? Was he a bigamist? Had some horror from his past suddenly revealed itself? What had he done? A flurry of rumors flew back and forth, impossible to cope with or to stop.

During the last days of August, Wilfred Schwartz, NBI and The Objectivist's business adviser, and I, with Robert and a few members of the NBI staff, worked eighteen hours a day to project the financial possibilities of a more modest lecture organization that could function without Nathaniel. We arrived at a set of figures that proved this to be feasible. (Wilfred, who had the major role in preparing the new plan, would later found and head the Federated Group, a large public chain of consumer electronic stores in California and other western states.) We prepared a lengthy report outlining the plan, with a projection of revenue and expense arrived at by a methodology that had been employed by NBI for five years; in those years, estimates had been correct within a two-to-three-percent variation. The Objectivist would continue to be a subtenant of NBI, so that the responsibility for the rental costs would remain where it had been, with NBI. We talked and planned and projected and wrote down figures — and the thought kept pounding in my head: I don't want it to work! — I don't want it to be possible! — I want the whole madness to end! — I want to be through with it all, and free.

On the evening of September 2, Ayn met with Wilfred, Robert, Henry Mark Holzer and myself at her apartment. A frighteningly withdrawn Frank was at her side. Hank had seen our report and our figures, and, as Ayn's attorney, had given it his endorsement; it will work, he had said happily; the lectures can continue profitably. Ayn glanced at our plan for only a moment. And then she exploded. "I don't want it! I won't hand my endorsement and my reputation to anyone, for any reason! I don't want to read this thing" — she shook the thick sheaf of the report — "I can't run a business, and I can't let anyone else run it when it carries my name!" The subject was at an end; she was too agitated to consider any arguments against her position. It was her right to refuse to sanction a newly constituted lecture organization, and I agreed to drop the plan and to proceed with the liquidation of NBI. The philosophical movement that had spanned ten years and several continents, was dead

Since Ayn's final confrontation with Nathaniel, the violence of her attacks on him had not diminished, it had intensified — and she turned once more to the subject at the forefront of her consciousness. He would not destroy her and the work of her life, she cried, pounding the arm of her chair, her eyes dark points of laserlike light. She would not write merely a single paragraph of repudiation in The Objectivist, the whole world must know what he was! She would unmask him, she would destroy him as he had tried to destroy her!

And then she said, "I'll see that his book is never published. I'll stop it. It's all plagiarism of me! There isn't a single original idea in it! I'll use my influence with New American Library to break his contract! He'll never be published!"

Next afternoon, I spoke with two friends of my growing concern at Ayn's reckless accusations and threats against Nathaniel — my concern at her state of mind, and at the possibility of his professional destruction. Later in the day, as I was preparing for an urgent business meeting I had scheduled with Ayn for the evening, I received a message from her, through Hank Holzer, that she had changed the nature and purpose of our meeting. She had asked several of the collective to be present; I was to appear to answer charges of having made false and immoral accusations against her that afternoon.

I called Ayn immediately, but she refused to reconsider her decision, despite the fact that certain business issues had to be decided by the following morning. "I assume you're coming to the meeting. That's the only thing I want to know," she said coldly. "I'm willing to discuss with you anything you care to discuss," I answered. "I'm not willing to appear before a jury of my peers to answer charges." "Are you coming or not?" was her only response. I hesitated for a long moment. I knew what hung in the balance. "No," I said. The telephone slammed down. It was over. It was the end of the passionate engagement of nineteen years of my life.

The work of dismantling NBI began. Ayn had The Objectivist transferred to new quarters. NBI's representatives in other cities were informed that no further lectures would be given. Office equipment, furniture, books and prints were sold. NBI's first addressing machine, once ensconced in my kitchen, was removed from the office — along with a newer addressing machine that an excited staff had triumphantly toasted in champagne the night the first issue of The Objectivist was mailed.

The scene in the offices was of total hysteria. Students kept arriving from New York and from cities dotted around the country, upset, depressed, angry, crying, confused, stunned by the news of Ayn's break with Nathaniel and me and by the closing of NBI. Some of the students had come to denounce me; I had become a pariah along with Nathaniel, as the rumors continued to spread. I moved from selling prints of Frank's paintings and the file cabinets from my private office to endless questions about "what had happened." They knew only that the intellectual movement so important to them had ended; they did not know the reason; and neither Nathaniel nor I felt free to tell them.

The hysteria never completely died away. Even today, almost eighteen years after "the break," as it became known among Objectivists, the pain of disillusionment and bewilderment and indignation still is present in some of NBI's former students. They have never been told the truth. It has not ceased to be a living issue to them.

Students poured into the office; our friends did not. With few exceptions, our friends refused to speak either to Nathaniel or to me, refused to hear our understanding of what had occurred. I would walk from the office to my apartment and pass friends I had known for fifteen years and more — to be met by contemptuously averted faces.

One day, most of the NBI staff was gone; they too walked past me with averted faces, refusing to work for me any longer. The doors of NBI closed.

From the time of her last confrontation with Nathaniel, Ayn had begun demanding an unquestioning loyalty from both friends and students. As she continued to insist that sides in the dispute no one understood had to be taken, friend turned against friend, families split into warring factions, husband raged at wife and young people at parents, accusations were hurled with promiscuous abandon. Those who attempted to question Ayn's demand for loyalty in the absence of knowledge, or who refused to take sides, were denounced. Those who attempted to defend Nathaniel or me, were ostracized at once. Those who aligned themselves with either of us, lost their friends, some lost lovers and jobs and families. To this day, my cousin and friend, Leonard Peikoff, has refused to deal with me or to discuss the events of 1968; by my understanding, he knows and cares only that Ayn was deeply hurt by my actions. And I began to see if this were what the movement had finally created — if it had created true believers devoted to Ayn as to a guru — then perhaps it should never have come into existence. 59

Ayn's despair and grief continued to impel her along a self-destructive path. She took an action more tragically out of character than any of her actions of that year, an action that would never have been possible to her before. She went to Curtis Brown, her literary agents and Nathaniel's, to insist that they cease representing Nathaniel. Gerard McCauley, who represented Nathaniel, later said, "Nathaniel was an unknown at the time, and Ayn was one of our most valuable clients, whom we certainly did not want to lose. But I said that I would quit Curtis Brown if any outside pressures were allowed to determine the writers we represented. There was no problem; nobody at Curtis Brown even considered accepting Ayn's demand. The answer we gave her was an emphatic 'No.'"

In October, Ayn published a six-page article in The Objectivist entitled "To Whom It May Concern." 60 It began with the statement:

"This is to inform my readers and all those interested in Objectivism that Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden are no longer associated with this magazine, with me or with my philosophy.

"I have permanently broken all personal, professional and business association with them, and have withdrawn from them the permission to use my name in connection with their commercial, professional, intellectual or other activities.

"I hereby withdraw my endorsement of them and of their future works and activities. I repudiate both of them, totally and permanently, as spokesmen for me or for Objectivism."

The article outlined what she termed the specifics of the reasons for her repudiation, including Nathaniel's "gradual departure from the principles of Objectivism, a tendency toward non-intellectual concerns" — a trend manifested by such issues as his venture into the theater to produce a stage adaptation of The Fountainhead and his delays in writing articles for the magazine. She wrote that "my personal relationship with Mr. Branden was deteriorating in a puzzling manner: it was turning into a series of his constant demands on my time, constant pleas for advice, for help with his writing, for long discussions of his personal, philosophical and psychological problems... a policy of intellectual and professional exploitation," and that this year she had discovered that "he did not practice what he preached, that he demanded of his students a standard of conduct he failed to demand of himself."

The article continued: "About two months ago... Mr. Branden presented me with a written statement which was so irrational and so offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him." There was no hint of the contents of that written statement, nor of the fourteen years of which it was the culmination.

"About two months later," the article went on, "...Mrs. Branden suddenly confessed that Mr. Branden had been concealing from me certain ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life, which was grossly contradictory to Objectivist morality and which she had known about for two years.

"I confronted Mr. Branden with her accusation and he admitted it. He admitted that his actions had involved the deliberate deception of several persons for a period of some four years... I have never accepted, condoned or tolerated conscious breaches of morality. This was the last of the evidence which caused me to break all professional, as well as personal association with him."

Ayn then outlined what she named as Nathaniel's "attempts to exploit [her] financially" — she wrote of loans from The Objectivist to NBI, which had not been repaid until she had recently demanded it, of "other, less costly instances of the same questionable policy." She did not write that she had often told Nathaniel she did not wish to be troubled with the magazine's financial affairs, that he was to handle them, and that when he had mentioned the loan she had told him to do what he thought best.

Then the article turned to me. "During the period of the growing breach between Mr. Branden and me, she volunteered to act as my ally... it was she who exposed the secret of his private life. I gave her credit for her somewhat belated honesty..." On September 2, Ayn wrote, I had submitted a plan to her for the reorganization of NBI, which "did not offer any relevant factual material, but a projection (by an unspecified method) of future profits to be learned by a lecture organization patterned after NBI... a business arrangement of so questionable a nature that I rejected it at once... Next day, a sudden switch occurred in [her] attitude... Mrs. Branden began to utter veiled threats and undefined accusations against me... Since this change in [her] attitude occurred when [she] realized that my business association with her was finished and that the gold mine involved in [her] use of my name was shut down, draw your own conclusions about the cause and motive of [her] behavior.

"Such is the sordid story, as of this present date... I offer my apology to the readers of this magazine and to the students of NBI, who trusted Mr. and Mrs. Branden on my recommendation."

Following Ayn's article was a statement from NBI's Associate Lecturers: "Because Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, in a series of actions, have betrayed fundamental principles of Objectivism, we condemn and repudiate these two persons irrevocably, and have terminated all association with them and with Nathaniel Branden Institute."

In retrospect, it is evident why Ayn believed it legitimate to write the article she chose to write — to manufacture reasons for her actions and refuse to name their real source. For many years, she had made her position clear: honesty was a high and noble virtue, dishonesty was a moral vice — except when one was put in a position, not of one's own making but through the immorality of another, where truth would be inimical to one's best interests. We do not owe truth to a robber who demands to know where the jewelry is hidden, she often said; we may morally tell him there is no jewelry. That appeared to be how she had interpreted her situation with Nathaniel: that he, not she, had brought her to the point where the truth would expose her to public humiliation; he had made it necessary for her to fight by any means possible for her life, for her reputation, for her work. It was not she who should pay the price of his deceit. Ayn, finally enslaved by the self-image she had created, unable to storm its impregnable barriers, was never to ask herself if she had helped to create the trap with no exits in which she found herself.

When Nathaniel and I read Ayn's article, reeling from the shock of its misleading implications, its half-truths and its fabrications, we knew we had to make an effort to salvage what little remained of our professional and personal reputations. With a feeling of desperate sadness at the need to issue such a response, we wrote our separate statements, had them printed as one article under the title, "In Answer to Ayn Rand," and sent them to The Objectivist mailing list. We answered the specific unwarranted charges Ayn had made against us, while admitting that we had deceived her. We, like Ayn, continued the policy of keeping private the real truth: that the source of all the conflicts and all the dissension and all the actions and all the madness that had followed, was Ayn's and Nathaniel's romantic relationship. Except that, at the conclusion of his statement, quoting Ayn's words that he had given her a "written statement which was so irrational and so offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him" — Nathaniel wrote: "In writing the above, Miss Rand has given me the right to name that which I infinitely would have preferred to leave unnamed, out of respect for her privacy. I am obliged to report what was in that written paper of mine, in the name of justice and of self-defense... It was a tortured, awkward, excruciatingly embarrassed attempt to make clear to her why I felt that an age distance between us of twenty-five years constituted an insuperable barrier, for me, to a romantic relationship."

The postscript to my section of "In Answer to Ayn Rand" stated: "We have learned that Miss Rand has chosen to dispute Mr. Branden's right to the use of his articles published in The Objectivist She has set, as the price of her cooperation in this matter, a number of conditions, chief among which are the following: We must guarantee not to initiate an action for libel against her, and we must further guarantee not to defend ourselves against the charges made in her article, that is, to make no statements or comments of any kind, oral or written, about the article. We have rejected Miss Rand's conditions." On the advice of his attorney, Nathaniel was to include the relevant articles in his book without Ayn's permission; he heard no further word about it.

Later that year, Nathaniel submitted the completed manuscript of The Psychology of Self-Esteem to his publisher, New American Library. His submission, by the terms of his contract, was, he has said, a month or two late. New American Library rejected his book, on the grounds of its lateness.

The Psychology of Self-Esteem was published by Nash Publishing Company in 1969, and went into paperback a year later. As of this date, it has sold almost a million copies.

With the publication of the "To Whom It May Concern" and "In Answer to Ayn Rand," the mail began pouring in. The confusion and grief of NBI's students had not diminished, it had increased in the wake of charges and countercharges whose truth they had no way to determine. Most of the letters Ayn received were supportive and sympathetic. The writers had not forgotten the enormity of their intellectual debt to her; it was clear that she was suffering at the betrayal of the man she had named her "intellectual heir," and they offered her their loyalty and their gratitude. The majority of the letters Nathaniel received, and those I received, were angry and denunciatory; one of them, in a penultimate madness, was a curt note from my broken, an Objectivist, saying that he would no longer handle my account. 61 But more than two hundred of them expressed shock at the absence of authentic explanation in Ayn's article and their sense that something crucial had not been said that might make sense of the whole dispute; the phrase "a woman scorned" appeared in letter after letter.

It was to be said again. Nathaniel and I considered the possibility of suing Ayn for libel. Back issues of The Objectivist would continue to be sold into the indefinite future, and new subscribers would read Ayn's attack, but not our response. Nathaniel's greatest concern was Ayn's charges of financial malfeasance — about which the man who was NBI's accountant and The Objectivisms had said: "Miss Rand certainly is a fiction writer, isn't she" — and a former friend, one of the few willing to speak to us, had said: "Ayn knows perfectly well that Nathan is not dishonest." We soon rejected the idea of suing, unwilling to subject ourselves to more years of dealing with an issue we wished only to leave behind us. But before rejecting it, we made an appointment with George Berger, an attorney in the Louis Nizer office. He knew nothing about us, nothing about our conflict with Ayn; he knew only that we wanted his legal advice regarding a possible libel suit. Before saying more, Nathaniel handed him Ayn's "To Whom It May Concern." He read two or three pages, looked up and asked, "How old is she?" We answered, puzzled by the question, that she was sixty-three; he continued reading. After a few more moments, he shook his head sadly and said, "Hell hath no fury..."

The most painful moment of all the painful moments of that year was my chance meeting with Frank. He entered the elevator in our apartment building one day to find that I had preceded him. He smiled, as gently as always, with a glance that told me his eyes and mind were alive. As we rode up together, he reached out his arms and hugged me, saying in a tone of despair, "Barbara, it's like a nightmare, I don't understand any of it!" — and I answered, clutching him tightly, "Frank, my dearest Frank... I don't either." The car stopped at his floor, he got out, and just before the door closed he turned back to say, "I love you, Barbara." "I love you, Frank," I responded. Then I stared at the closed door, sobbing. I never saw him again. 62

Ayn continued indignantly to deny that Nathaniel had made any significant contribution to her life or her work. She spoke of NBI as "a homemade" business enterprise of which she had never approved, and which had been of little professional value to her. Nathaniel's work in psychology had been merely an offshoot of her intellectual position, without originality or importance. Leonard Peikoff and Mary Ann Sures began giving lectures on aspects of Objectivism; before a prospective student could attend, he was required to sign a paper guaranteeing that he would have no dealings with Nathaniel or Barbara Branden, and that he would not purchase any of their future work. Ayn arranged to have the dedication to Nathaniel removed from all future printings of Atlas Shrugged.

For a time, I was angry with Ayn, but I could not remain angry indefinitely. The tragedy of witnessing the personal deterioration of so great a mind, the deterioration of a personality so valiant and enduring, was vivid in my mind, And I had loved Ayn for too long, she had meant too much to me and had done too much for me — ever to be able, even had I wished to do so, to tear that love out of me. I had seen too often her unique, heart-wrenching charm, and the enchanting young girl who still dwelt somewhere within her, I had witnessed too often, with a sense of wonder, the power and the passion of her intelligence. I had seen the change in her over the years of our friendship, I had seen the disappointments and loneliness of her life intensify her bitterness, her harsh moralism, her anger, the unreality of her view of herself — and I had seen the intransigent battles she had fought, and lost, to remain unscarred. I remembered the early days of our friendship, the exhilaration of my discovery of a new world of ideas, I remembered the days and nights of reading Atlas Shrugged in manuscript and feeling that its pages — and its creator — were speeding me in the direction of everything I wanted. I remembered Ayn's smile whenever I entered her door, and the touch of her hand when something was troubling me, and the hours she spent giving me the best of her intellectual powers in order to remove the frown from my face. I remembered her blowing a kiss whenever we parted. For nineteen years, despite the pain and anguish, it had seemed as if a brilliant, glowing light shone on my life and the world, never to go out. It remained, and still remains. As my love for Ayn Rand remains.

Regrettably, Nathaniel's anger against Ayn and against his former friends who rejected him appears not to have diminished but rather to have escalated during the years since 1968; too often, he has characterized and described them in terms that can only be considered unjust.

During the next years, the influence of Ayn's ideas was to continue, finally reaching vast proportions. But the organized, official movement vanished with the closing of NBI's doors. As it should have vanished, for with it went much of the true believer mentality that had damaged it. Pockets of true believers still remain, but in insignificant numbers. Ayn's influence takes its appropriate form, as each new generation reads her works, profits from them, learns from them, and goes on to lead independent lives of their own choosing.

As 1968 groaned slowly to its end, Ayn began to pick up the pieces of her life, and go on. She had always been a fighter. She would not be stopped now. Her intransigent spirit, battered to its knees, rose again. The future beckoned to her. Its voice was fainter, but still it called to her, and she reached out her arms to embrace it. There were new battles to fight and new ideas to discover and new work to do. She marched on, her eyes fixed on her goal, to the lilt of her tiddlywink music.

59 For a number of years after 1968, I was to speak of myself, Nathaniel, and our friends and students, as having been members of a cult. More recently, as a result of considerable personal investigation and reading in the subject of cults, I have come to believe that that was not a valid designation of the Objectivist movement. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "cult" as "a particular form or system of religious worship." Although the Objectivist movement clearly had many of the trappings of a cult — the aggrandizement of the person of Ayn Rand, the too ready acceptance of her personal opinions on a host of subjects, the incessant moralizing — it is nevertheless significant that the fundamental attraction of Objectivism to both the majority of her students and to her friends was the precise opposite of religious worship. It was the attraction to reason — to the intelligible, the graspable, the definable. It was the attraction to individualism, the view that one's life and one's destiny is and properly should be one's own responsibility, not to be dictated by state or society or any other human being. It was the attraction, not to the vision of a divine creator, but to a heroic vision of man. And it has been interesting for me to observe that among the many hundreds of men and women I have known who were deeply intellectually influenced by Ayn, that fundamental attraction has held: only a handful were later drawn to religion or any other form of cultism. The vast majority have remained committed to rationality and individualism.

60 The issue of The Objectivist in which the article appeared is dated May 1968, but was not issued until October.

61 The ultimate madness was revealed to us several months later, when Nathaniel and I learned that a half-demented former student of NBI had raised the question of whether or not it would be morally appropriate to assassinate Nathaniel because of the suffering he had caused Ayn; the man concluded that it should not be done on practical grounds, but would be morally legitimate. Fortunately, he was shouted down at once by a group of appalled students.

62 Robert and I decided to leave New York and move to Los Angeles; Nathaniel and Patrecia made the same decision. When we arrived, it was to find that most of NBI's California students had little of the near-religious attitude toward Ayn that was so prevalent in New York, where the force of her personality had its greatest impact upon her admirers, many of whom had regular dealings with her. The California students did not attack Ayn; their respect and admiration for her achievements and for the inner qualities that had made them possible, remained unchallenged; but they refused to take sides in an issue they did not understand. For almost two years, I spent much of my time thinking about Ayn and my relationship with her, in order to understand what had brought and held me to her, and the meaning of the events of all those years. When it was over, I had begun to make peace with the past, and I returned to the writing I had always wanted to do.

Nathaniel opened a practice as a therapist, and has published a number of successful books on his psychological theories, many of which are major departures from the views he once held. He and Patrecia were married in 1969. In 1977, Patrecia died in a drowning accident. It was a tragedy for him that paled any other tragedy in his life. Although the pain of Patrecia's death remains, he has since happily remarried.

After moving to Los Angeles, Patrecia and I grew increasingly fond of each other, and I continued to see Nathaniel. After her death, however, the bond of comrades-in-arms between Nathaniel and me began to fray, and finally to split. We have not met in several years.

PART V

DENOUEMENT

Chapter Thirty

The first of Ayn's new battles was to understand Nathaniel and the nineteen years of their relationship. Throughout her life, to understand had been, and would remain, fundamental to her approach to any problem confronting her; what her mind could grasp — however personally painful or shocking it might be — she could deal with and endure. For more than two years following the end of 1968, she was obsessed to interpret Nathaniel's psychology and actions in a manner that would make sense of the tragedy of their last years together.

She did not know that she was herself placing insurmountable barriers in the path of understanding. A tendency, present in her psychology since childhood, had grown and hardened over the years into an unquestioned absolute: that in any conflict between herself and another, the guilt, the blame, the responsibility could lie only with the other. Through sixty-three harsh years, she had forged her own soul and her own psychology — "man is a being of self-made soul," she had written — and the moral rectitude and rationality of that soul was not to be negated. As she had done with other friends with whom she had broken, so she did with Nathaniel: if she was his victim, still writhing in pain and anguish and confusion, then it was axiomatic that he was a moral monster; the estimate of him she once had held could not be allowed reality. Blinded to her own motivations in their relationship, she had no means of understanding his. "I've never had an emotion I could not identify," she continued to say, "or an emotion that clashed with reason."

And so her tormented questions were only: Had Nathaniel always been morally corrupt, or had it been only a seed in the beginning, too small to be noticed, that had blossomed at last to engulf him? If the corruption had always been there, how had he hidden it from her and from the world? What was the specific nature of the corruption? What were the terrible psychological errors he had made that bad ended by drowning his intelligence? How could he have been the brilliant, electric teacher of her philosophy, yet failed to practice it in his own life? Had he ever loved her, or had he deluded her from the beginning? The variations on the questions were endless, and again Ayn wrote paper after paper in an effort to open the door to the mystery that was Nathaniel, never utilizing the key contained in the unasked question: What did 1 do that might have contributed to my own anguish and Nathaniel's? What are the hidden areas in my own psychology, the unnamed needs and the secret drives, that played their part in the events that destroyed our love?

Without that key to that unopened door, the answers she reached were tentative, switching, and unsatisfying. What remained, in the end, was the helpless, bewildered sense that human beings were irredeemably corrupt and irrational, that there was nothing to seek from the world outside her own consciousness and nothing for which to hope ever again — the desolate sense that all her worst fears about the world in which she lived were true.

Her friends struggled vainly to help her. She spent days and evenings and weeks and months discussing Nathaniel with them, going over and over the questions haunting her and the answers she reached that seemed valid one day and invalid the next — but never told them of the love affair whose consequences she needed their help to understand. Whatever some of them might have suspected, they were not given the essential piece of evidence that most basically explained her unhappiness and her wrath. It was only with Allan Blumenthal that she discussed the romance — but always from the absolute that it was Nathaniel who was to blame for whatever was blameworthy and that she was closed to any challenge of that absolute.

For many years, she had forcefully demanded the acquiescence of her younger friends to the fantasy self-image she carried with her; if they doubted it, the doubt lay in their own failures and betrayals. And she had wrapped her mantle around Nathaniel and me, describing us as she described herself, bristling at the remotest suggestion that there could be justification for criticism of either of us; in later years, as her relationship with Nathaniel began to disintegrate, I was alone to carry the burden of perfection. But despite their acquiescence to this unholy deification, which had made clear perception toxic, they could not avoid sight — sight of Ayn and Nathaniel's continuous switching between gentleness and harshness, between sensitive understanding and insensitive moral bludgeoning, between acceptance and rejection, between justice and injustice; and sight of my own chilly remoteness, which seemed a chronic commentary on the unworthiness of others. They had been deeply hurt by their treatment, but many of them had found no one to blame but themselves.

Now, with what appeared to be the defection of Nathaniel, there was an explanation for the pain they had endured. Nathaniel, as their therapist and teacher, privy to their most private inner lives, had wounded them sorely by his harshness and arrogance; it was he who received the full impact of the accumulated anger, hurt, bitterness and resentment of all those years. It was Nathaniel who had been their executioner and through whose fall they could at last account for their long suffering.

The same implicit reasoning was at work in the wider circle of Objectivists around Ayn, the students and friends who were continuing to grieve over the inexplicable death of the movement to which they had given their support and their work and their passionate idealism. They too, had been required to view Ayn, Nathaniel, and me as gods; they too, had suffered at our hands, and had suffered at the guilt of their own perceptions. They too, now found a villain to crucify in the person of Nathaniel. They stoked the fire of Ayn's denunciations, bringing her story after story of injustices, of acts of cruelty, of arrogance, of callousness. Had she required vindication of her new view of Nathaniel, it was given to her in full measure.

Ayn would not consider the possibility of any of her friends attempting to establish a new version of NBI. She did not want it, she had never wanted it, she would not give her name and sanction to anyone for any purpose ever again, she insisted. Lectures on her philosophy were being given in New York, by Allan Blumenthal on music, by Henry Mark Holzer on law, by Mary Ann Rukavina Sures (now married to attorney Charles Sures and living in Maryland) on art, by Leonard Peikoff on metaphysics and epistemology, but no formal organization or fountainhead of a movement existed.

For a while, their dealings with Ayn became easier and more pleasant for her friends and associates. More alone than she had ever been — perhaps relieved that the crushing weight of tension and suffering had been removed from her shoulders — she was touchingly grateful for their support, and all that was gentlest and most generous in her nature asserted itself. The magic that was Ayn Rand began to awake from its long nightmarish sleep, and they saw again the electric charm of her intellectual passion, of the mind that had forged new paths where others dared not go, of the sensitivity that made one feel, in conversation with her, that she knew precisely what one was most hungry to learn and that nothing was of more urgent concern to her. It was the magic that had caught them in the early days of their acquaintance with Ayn. It had held them through all the difficult years. Now, it caught and held them once more.

David Dawson, a former NBI student married to Joan Kennedy Taylor, was able to persuade Ayn to attend a performance of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera House. Attending any event with Ayn was usually a traumatic experience: she rarely went to a movie, a play, a ballet, an opera, and when she did so she would announce her judgments in a clearly audible voice — and her judgments usually were negative. "They must understand what immoral trash they're seeing," she would insist when friends begged her not to disturb the audience. There was nothing her friends could do but wish they could hide under their seats until the ordeal was over. But during the performance of La Boheme, she was raptly silent. As she and Frank walked along Broadway afterward, David recalled, "she was as happy as a child. She was skipping along the street. She kept saying, 'I haven't seen it since Russia — and I've always loved it so. It's wonderful!' I'd never seen her like that. She was wonderful!"

Through the early years of the seventies, Ayn was hard at work on The Objectivist. She was determined to keep the magazine going without Nathaniel, but it was impossible for her to do all the writing for it. Again, her friends rallied to her support, working on articles, book reviews, movie reviews. Few of them were professional writers, they were involved in their own careers and had no real interest in writing — and Ayn's requirements for any article appearing in her magazine were stringent. She was an astonishing editor; when she worked on one's articles one learned principles and specifics of writing that could have filled a year of classes. But she was a strict and unforgiving editor, and upset that the burden of the magazine now rested totally on her shoulders. If an article were not up to her rigorous standards, the writer was subjected to hours of conversation about the flaws in his "psycho-epistemology," his method of thinking, that had led to his literary failures. In one case, a young woman, a budding and later quite successful novelist, abandoned writing for more than a year after an all-encompassing criticism of her work that led her to conclude she was hopelessly without talent. And Leonard Peikoff was to spend fourteen years writing his book, The Ominous Parallels, under Ayn's editorial guidance. A few articles by others did appear in The Objectivist from time to time, and excerpts from Leonard's book, but primarily the work was done by Ayn. It took most of her time and all of her mind, she often worked until the first light of morning fell across her desk, and she grew further embittered by the sense that only she was competent and that all burdens were hers to carry.

The period of enchantment was coming to an end. Ayn's friends began to wonder if the agony they had thought was over had really been the sole result of Nathaniel's actions and Ayn's innocent unawareness of those actions.

Ayn had turned once more to Frank, seeking the special comfort that he alone could give her. He was the one man who had never betrayed her, who had always stood by her, who was her ally and her support through all the triumphs and traumas of her life. It appears that now, at last, she began truly to love the man she had married — or, perhaps, to accept the fact that she always had loved him, loved him as he was and as he had been. She still referred to him as a hero from her novels — she subjected him to the indignity of signing his name to a review of Lillian Gish's The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me which she had written — but that part of her life not spent on writing for The Objectivist and struggling with the dilemma of understanding Nathaniel, now once more revolved around Frank. The old needs returned, the need for his presence, for his approval, for the solace of his arms around her, for the touch of his hand. Ayn's headlong passions had been evoked by Nathaniel; but only Frank could invoke the soft and womanly aspects of her nature. Without the words to name it, he had always accepted and revered her as no one else had ever done, and the personal rejections of a lifetime made his understanding and acceptance more valuable to her than they had ever been before. She clung to him, hating to have him out of her sight, uneasy when they were not together; he was a part of her inner being, without whom she was incomplete. Despite the lifelong passion of her search for "the ideal man," the man of reason and productive genius, it was the relationship that was the most purely emotional of her life which gave her, in the end, the most satisfaction.

Ayn worried over Frank's increasing fragility and vagueness, and the series of minor illnesses that began to afflict him. She knew nothing of medical science, and did not recognize the increasingly clear signs of senility in Frank; it had not yet swamped his personality, he had days and weeks of lucidity, but for frightening periods he could not be reached, lost in the darkening corners of his mind. Even in later years, when the evidence of his mental decay was inescapable, Ayn never used the word "senility" to describe it. She had often said that she had a horror of mental illness, that a person whose mind had eroded, whatever the cause, was no longer a rational being and therefore no longer human in her eyes. But "love is exception-making," she had written — and at the worst of Frank's deterioration, she made her great exception for him, as she had done in so many other ways: Frank remained "human" to her to the end, he remained the husband and comrade he had always been, the one love who had stood steadfastly at her side.

In her inability to recognize what was happening to Frank, she took on another burden: the burden of trying to restore his mind to health. His problems were psycho-epistemological, she concluded; if he was forgetful, vague, often irritable with her, it was because he had not mastered the principles of efficient thinking; he forgot because he had never properly learned and integrated; he was vague because he had never properly conceptualized. Each week, she spent many hours with him, teaching him principles of psycho-epistemology, exerting every effort and every brain cell to train a mind that could no longer be reached by principles or training — not understanding why those sessions were agony for him, why they changed nothing, why his irritation with her kept increasing. It was a futile, tragic effort, but she would not give up, she would not abandon his mind, and week after week and year after year she lectured and explained, as Frank looked at her with increasingly distant blue eyes and struggled to grasp what increasingly he could not grasp.

Joan Blumenthal would later recall that "When Ayn was working with Frank on his psycho-epistemology, often daily, trying to get him to think more clearly and conceptually — which he could not do — asking him to write papers on his mental processes — which he could not do, Allan tried to make her understand that the mental changes in him were due to an organic condition, probably arteriosclerosis. She'd listen, she didn't disagree — and then she'd go back to the lessons. She was torturing him by trying to help him. He'd fly into a rage when she began lecturing him, but it was years before she finally stopped. She kept saying, in utter bewilderment, 'How can he be hostile to me? To me, of all people!'"

By 1971, Frank had formally dropped from the rolls of the Art Students League. Occasionally, he would go there to visit, but he could no longer cope with formal painting classes. His fellow students and teachers were shocked by his physical and mental deterioration. He retained his studio in the apartment building where he and Ayn lived, and continued to spend his days there. And each week, when Ayn's housekeeper went to the studio to clean it, she found no new paintings but, instead, rows of empty liquor bottles.

One evening, Frank collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Ayn was terrified as she had never been before; the thought of losing Frank was beyond bearing. It was believed that he had had a minor heart attack, although the diagnosis could not conclusively be determined; what was determined was that he was suffering from severe arteriosclerosis, diminishing the flow of blood and oxygen to all his organs and most ominously to his heart and brain. Long after Frank returned home from the hospital, Ayn's terror remained; it was never to leave her while he lived.

Yet Ayn still struggled, as she had always struggled, to keep alive her sense of life's promise. At times, she played her tiddlywink music — and all at once she was a girl again, knowing that life was beautiful and rare, that it was a sacred treasure to be guarded with all of one's energy and power. At times, she sat in her study and read sections of Atlas Shrugged, and the flickering fire within her blazed fiercely once more. And then she returned to working with Frank's problems of memory and focus, to running back and forth to the doctor with him, to her anxieties over his health — she returned to her memories of Nathaniel's abandonment and the anger that still seethed within her — she returned to writing articles for The Objectivist, which interested her less and less each month, and to teaching her young writers how to meet her literary requirements — she returned to a world she believed held nothing but irrationality and to a life that gave her, not rapture and fulfillment, but only a dull, empty pain. The promise of life lived within her, but its voice grew fainter.

Then an event occurred that spoke directly to her belief in life's exalted possibilities — an event that was fuel to her dying hopes. At the invitation of NASA, she and Frank attended the launch to the moon of Apollo II. The guests were government officials, foreign dignitaries, and a few intellectuals selected to represent the American people and culture. She wrote one of the most beautiful of all her nonfiction pieces about the occasion. After a movingly evocative description of the physical sight of the launching, she wrote:

"What we had seen, in naked essentials — but in reality, not in a work of art — was the concretized abstraction of man's greatness.

"The meaning of the sight lay in the fact that when those dark-red wings of fire flared open, one knew that one was not looking at a normal occurrence, but at a cataclysm which, if unleashed, by nature, would have wiped man out of existence — and one knew also that this cataclysm was planned, unleashed and controlled by man, that this unimaginable power was ruled by his power and, obediently serving his purpose, was making way for a slender, rising craft. One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with 'human,' for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding!...

"No event in contemporary history was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission's climax: the moment when... there flashed the words: 'Lunar module has landed' — the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual module came shivering from the moon to the screen — and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step... he spoke of man. "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' So it was.

"As to my personal reaction to the entire mission of Apollo II, I can express it best by paraphrasing a passage from Atlas Shrugged that kept coming back to my mind: 'Why did I feel that joyous sense of confidence while watching the mission? In all of its giant course, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the mission was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" — like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind I worship.' The mission was a moral code enacted in space."

A friend spoke of Ayn's reaction to Apollo II. "She was wonderful when she came back from the moon shot," the friend said. "She was so excited, she had loved every moment of it, and her eyes glowed when she talked about it. It was thrilling to hear how she felt, she spoke of what was possible to man — she was more happily animated than I'd seen her in years."

Ayn decided that she could no longer continue publishing The Objectivist. The circulation of the magazine had been falling dangerously; since the end of 1968 — as her articles had grown more bitter, consisting predominantly of denunciations of evils — it had lost six thousand subscribers. And the demands of producing so many articles left her without time for any other activity; she still spoke of writing a novel and a nonfiction work on the epistemology of Objectivism, although she spoke of it less often than before and with less conviction. The magazine was changed to a smaller newsletter format, and renamed The Ayn Rand Letter. The Objectivist, started with such high hopes, toasted in champagne drunk from paper cups the night of its first mailing, when it seemed that the movement would remake the world — was no more.

Over the next years, with the exception of Ford Hall Forum, Ayn refused almost all of the speaking invitations that continued to pour in, and almost all television and radio appearances. Speaking engagements no longer interested her, she had little enthusiasm left for working for "the cause;" when she had appeared on television or radio, she had too often found herself engaged in a pitched battle with an antagonist; she was unwilling to submit herself to it again. "Anyone is free to criticize or attack me," she said. "But not with my help."

She did, however, appear on Edwin Newman's "Speaking Freely," an hour-long unedited interview on NBC. She agreed to appear because of her confidence in Edwin Newman, whom she often watched on television. In recent years, she had begun setting demands for interviews that were almost impossible to meet: she insisted that all questions be submitted to her in advance, that she have veto power over them, that no critics of her work be quoted, that her words not be edited, and that she appear alone, not in a debate. For "Speaking Freely," she submitted no demands; had she submitted them, Edwin Newman would not have accepted them. It was a remarkable interview, in which the vast wasteland of television was illuminated by Ayn's discussion and dissection of complex philosophical issues ranging from Immanuel Kant to her concept of selfishness.

"When she came in, she seemed suspicious and on guard. She probably expected a polemical discussion, but that wasn't the purpose of the program," Edwin Newman later said. "She never did relax, she remained wary, and sat straight up in her chair throughout the discussion, never once leaning back. But she was tremendously attentive. Once it got going, I enjoyed the interview. She was a remarkably well-organized thinker, who knew exactly what she believed; I got direct, specific answers, right to the point. She was so strong in what she thought, so vigorous in the way she set it out. Word had gotten around that she was to appear on the show, and a lot of people came to the building just to catch a glimpse of her. That was most unusual in my experience."

Joseph Michaels, the producer of "Speaking Freely," later explained why Ayn had been invited. By 1972, a rebirth of free enterprise thought was becoming evident throughout the nation, and articles about Ayn and her influence on that rebirth were appearing. At the same time, Alan Greenspan, known to be Ayn's friend and an admirer of her philosophy, was emerging into national prominence.

Alan Greenspan's success was one of Ayn's rare sources of pleasure during the decade of the seventies. An advocate of fiscal responsibility, a balanced budget, and reduced government spending, Alan was an economic adviser to Nixon, and entered government as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford; with Reagan's presidency, he headed the commission which brought about changes in the Social Security laws; he remains, today, an adviser on economics to President Reagan, and a member of the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Ayn was delighted with his accomplishments, and delighted that he spoke openly and proudly about his admiration for her, for her work, for her philosophy. In an interview with Time in 1974, Ayn commented on their first meeting in the early fifties: "He impressed me as very intelligent, brilliant and unhappy. He was groping for a frame of reference. He had no fundamental view of life." Soon convinced of the logic of Ayn's philosophy in general terms, he had read Atlas in manuscript and had found his frame of reference. By the sixties, he was lecturing on economics for NBI, and contributing articles to The Objectivist and to Ayn's book of essays, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, advocating the abolition of antitrust laws and a return to the gold standard. Ayn was quick to acknowledge that Alan neither sought nor required her advice on the economic issues with which he was dealing as presidential adviser. But she was proud that a man who spoke for her economic-political ideas had risen to the inner circles of the White House. When Alan was sworn in as a member of Ford's administration, she and Frank traveled to Washington to attend the ceremony and to meet President Ford.

She was to go to the White House again, this time to attend a state dinner in honor of Malcolm Fraser, the Prime Minister of Australia. It was generally known in Australia that Ayn was his favorite author; when he was asked whom he wished to have at the dinner, he had named Ayn. She was thrilled by the occasion. It had been a long, hard journey from starvation and terror in Soviet Russia to attendance at the White House as the welcome and respected guest of an American President and an Australian Prime Minister. It was a sanction that she needed, and had earned.

In 1972, Ayn had made an excited announcement in The Ayn Rand Letter:

"I am very happy to announce that the motion picture rights to Atlas Shrugged have been bought by Albert S. Ruddy. Mr. Ruddy is Hollywood's top producer, who — in the face of enormous opposition — made the sensationally successful film The Godfather.

"For almost fifteen years, I had refused to sell Atlas Shrugged except on condition that I would have the right of approval of the film script, a right which Hollywood does not grant to authors. Mr. Ruddy had the courage (and the respect for Atlas Shrugged) to break the precedent and agree to my condition. Work on the film will begin at once. If all those concerned do their best — as we intend to — the cultural consequences will be incalculable."

Ayn had always been uneasy at the idea of a movie sale of Atlas. She had survived what was done to the movie of The Fountainhead, she did not know how she would survive if the great work of her life were butchered. And she knew that Atlas, because of its complexity of plot and philosophy, would be much more difficult to film than her earlier novels. Since publication of Atlas, there had been many expressions of interest in the movie and television rights; in the end, Ayn had backed away from each one, increasing her demands for control until one producer after another found them impossible to meet. But Al Ruddy had convinced her of his respect for her work, of his determination to maintain its integrity — and had met her most stringent demands. Their agreement was only oral; no contract had yet been signed.

Al Ruddy held a gala luncheon and press conference at the "21" Club, to announce the forthcoming film production of Atlas Shrugged. The press turned out in full force, and for once Ayn, glowing with hope and triumph, was at ease with reporters. This was her moment, and no one could take it from her.

Shortly after the press conference, while negotiations with Ruddy were continuing and the contract still unsigned, Ayn was approached by Kay and Phillip Smith, both friends of Ayn and former NBI students, both active in theater, requesting her permission to stage an off-Broadway production of Night of January 16th. They had been involved in theater for a number of years, Phillip as director, and Kay, under the stage name of Kay Gillian, as actress. Ayn was happy to grant permission. She respected their work, and she knew that their admiration for her and desire to help spread her ideas would guarantee that there would be no repeat of the personal agony of its original Broadway production. At last, Night of January 16th would be produced as she had written it, as she wanted it — just as it appeared that Atlas would be filmed as she wanted it. A contract was signed, and plans for production were soon underway. The play was retitled by its original name, Penthouse Legend, with Kay as the heroine, with Phillip as director, with Kay and Phillip as co-producers.

It was then that the deal with Al Ruddy fell through. Ayn angrily contended that she had been promised control of the final cut of the movie — which meant that she would have the right, when the shooting was at an end, to veto the movie and order it scrapped; it was improbable that she would do so, but she had insisted that the clause appear in the contract. Al Ruddy contended that he had made no such promise, that he could not have done so, that no producer could do so. All that remained of Ayn's moment of triumph was the small kitten that Ruddy, knowing her love of cats, had given her.

The failure of the movie production of Atlas was a battle painfully lost, but there still were battles to be fought and won. Ayn threw off her bitter disappointment — a disappointment mixed with a faint feeling of relief that her work was not to be distorted — and got to work. She cut out of the playscript Night of January 16th everything relating to the Broadway production, including the gun moll and the detective-story props, and updated some of the lines; the play was restored to its original form, which had never been produced. After thirty-eight years, it was her play again.

When the requisite money had been raised, the McAlpin Rooftop Theater was engaged for the run of the play; it was to open in February of 1973. Candace Leigh, a young publicity agent, was hired to handle the publicity.

"Ayn Rand was delightful!" Candace would recall. "She couldn't have been more gracious; she looked right in your eyes when you spoke, in order to grasp your full meaning. She had almost a little-girl charm about her. She seemed very excited about the play, and very much a part of it. She was willing to do anything for it that made sense, but she insisted on very strict conditions for print interviews; interviewers had to sign a list of conditions: they could use only the photograph that she submitted — the one by Phyllis Cerf on the back of Atlas Shrugged — and they had to submit all quotes and their context for her approval. My heart sank when she told me her requirements; I didn't think anyone would agree. But they did! — some refused, but many of them signed her list without an argument.

"When I called Rex Reed and risked suggesting that he interview Ayn, he said, 'I'd love it! The Fountainhead is my favorite book. It influenced me all through my college years.'"

Rex Reed's interview with Ayn — entitled "Ayn Rand: A Bold Voice in a Mealy-Mouthed Age" — was one of the best and fairest ever published about the woman whom he described as "the lady whose theories are studied by legions of college students like passages from the Bible, and denounced by others as if she were planning to destroy the world next Thursday." He went on to say: "She sits on the edge of a blue-velvet sofa, bristling with energy. In person, she is less formidable than either her writing or her reputation suggests, with round, luminous eyes that don't miss a trick, a Russian lilt to the voice... a natural curiosity about everything, and an intriguing way of shaping words with her hands as though she were fondling rare jade. When she speaks, it is with passion and authority..."

"He told me later," Candace recalled, "that he got more mail in response to the interview than he had ever before received — and more positive letters. He said it was the best interview he ever had."

Ayn warned the Smiths to expect attacks from the reviewers. They must not count on even a single good review, she insisted; that had been the history of her work. But she thought that, with the ready-made audience of Objectivists who would rush to see it, word-of-mouth would spread quickly enough to bypass the reviews and ensure a long run.

The amount of pre-opening publicity the play received was astonishing for a modest off-Broadway production of an old work. The local ABC television station filmed a rehearsal and ran the film on the evening news. Other journalists published interviews, and Ayn appeared on a number of shows. A few times, interviewers spoke of Objectivists as a "cult." "My following is not a cult," Ayn responded hotly. "I am not a cult figure." "Unfortunately," Candace would recall, "she was often her own worst enemy during interviews: she could be very grim and brusque and intimidating when she sensed resistance."

Ayn attended the casting calls and many of the rehearsals. "One day," Kay Smith was to say, "she told me that from now on she was sending Frank to be her emissary; he would attend the rehearsals and report his reactions to her... It was terribly sad. The first day he was there alone, he just sat silently in a corner. He was beyond even trying to participate. Next morning, Ayn called me and said it had been too much for Frank, and from now on she would be coming." Throughout the rehearsal period, Frank responded vaguely if spoken to, but he could seldom initiate a conversation. But both actors and the staff observed that Ayn's expression was invariably warm and loving when she spoke to him or about him.

Previews began two weeks before the opening. The previews were completely sold out. "Ayn was very complimentary about my performance," Kay recalled, "and about the directing, about the production. But Phillip and I knew there were real problems: the actors were competent, but no more than that, and we were seriously undercapitalized. There were a number of things Phillip wanted to do that would have greatly improved the production, but financial constraints made it impossible. He called it 'a C-plus production.'"

After the opening-night performance — again sold out — the Smiths held a celebration party for Ayn and the cast and waited for the reviews. "When the party began," Kay said, "it was very festive and gay. But when the reviews began appearing, the celebration became a wake. The critics were ruthless, the reviews were dreadful. The worst of all was John Simon's television review: it was a massacre."

The play limped along to small houses for another three weeks. Then it closed. Ayn was disappointed, but not crushed. The reviews had not surprised her. But she never doubted the value of her play, as she had never doubted the value of any of her work. "The culture isn't ready for it," she said.

Unfortunately, the play is dated; it required considerably more modernizing than Ayn gave it. That, plus the quality of the production and the inadequacies of some members of the cast, might have doomed it even without the reviews — particularly among sophisticated New York audiences. Nevertheless, it has continued to play in summer stock and repertory theaters across the country. What Ayn loved to call its "gimmicks" — its dramatic flourishes — along with the drama of its central situation and philosophical concepts, its unexpected twists and turns, and the ingenious idea of the jury chosen from the audience, has guaranteed an eager reception wherever it appears.

It was during the year of the production of Penthouse Legend that Ayn's vast energies began to diminish. She felt an aching physical exhaustion, she felt unmotivated, lethargic, often depressed. She did not know why. She grew more suspicious, more guarded in her conversations at the rare social events she attended, as if uneasily backing away from responsibilities too demanding for her to handle. Even to prepare to go out, to dress, to cross the street, to find a taxi, seemed to fray nerves already stretched to their breaking point. Events that might once have pleased her — or infuriated her — now received only an indifferent, dismissive wave of her hand. She was financially secure, she was famous throughout most of the world, she was surrounded by loving, appreciative friends, her revolutionary ideas were continuing their steady march through the American culture — and it seemed as if nothing could rouse her, nothing excite her, nothing engage her depleted energies. Until the day in 1973 that she received a telephone call that promised to change her life.

Late in 1971, an article had appeared in the United States Information Agency's magazine, America Illustrated — a magazine not available in America but distributed within the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange agreement — entitled: "On Discord." It featured photographs and biographical profiles of a number of prominent Americans from every part of the political spectrum; among them were Benjamin Spock, Abbie Hoffman,. Linus Pauling, Robert Welch, Madalyn Murray O'Hair — and Ayn Rand. In Leningrad, in a Russian translation, the magazine was made available at the "Research and Development, U.S.A." exhibit.

In 1972, a stocky, graying Russian woman in her sixties, wandering through the exhibit, was handed a copy of the magazine. She took it, flipped through the pages — and stopped short, fighting a feeling of faintness.

In March of 1973, a letter from Leningrad arrived at the Washington offices of America Illustrated. It was referred to the attention of the editor's assistant, Lilyan Courtois. It read: "I am writing to ask you a favor. Early in 1926, my sister left for Hollywood, U.S.A. Our family corresponded with her until the late 30's, but then the correspondence stopped and I never heard of her again. Late in 1972, I visited the exhibit Research and Development, U.S.A., where, along with some brochures, I was given America magazine, #182 Dec. 1971. In this magazine I came across a picture of my sister and a short feature about her. She is a writer. Her name is Ayn Rand (Mrs. Frank O'Connor). I wrote her a letter, but since I do not know her address, the magazine says she lives in New York, I am asking you to find out her address and forward the attached letter to her."

Lilyan Courtois checked on Ayn's address immediately. About to mail the two letters to her, she thought: This is too important to wait for mail delivery; if this really is Ayn Rand's sister, and not a hoax, Miss Rand will want to know about it at once. She picked up the telephone and dialed Ayn's number.

"I'll never forget our phone conversation," she later said wonderingly. "By the end of it, we both were weeping. I told her about the letter, and as I spoke, she kept crying: 'She's alive! She's alive! Oh my God, I thought she was dead! All these years, I thought she was dead!' She was sobbing, and asking me questions, and sobbing again. It was unbearably moving. In spite of the tears, she sounded so happy and so terribly excited. She said she hadn't seen her sister for forty-seven years. She kept thanking me again and again for telephoning."

It was Nora who had reappeared, as if resurrected from the dead. It was Nora, Ayn's youngest and favorite sister.

Her sister's letters were dispatched to Ayn, and a carefully worded reply was sent to Leningrad by the magazine. The wording was intended to let Nora know that the magazine had done what she had requested, but to say nothing that might create trouble for her with the Russian authorities. It read, in part: "We are pleased to comply with your request. All of us on the editorial staff of America are delighted to know that the copy you received at the 'Research and Development' exhibit was of particular interest to you. Good luck and best wishes."

To Ayn, Lilyan Courtois's call seemed like a miracle. Nora was alive! The little sister who had been so much like Ayn, who had shared the same values and the same interests, who had drawn such wonderful, gay pictures — had survived! Ayn flung herself into action, but she moved carefully and warily, making certain at every step of the process that Nora's safety would not be endangered. Following the advice of the State Department in every detail, she began an exchange of letters with her little sister, and invited Nora and her husband, Victor, to "visit" her in America. It would be like her own "visit" so many years ago. Nora would never return to Russia. Ayn would have her beloved sister with her always. She would have a friend of her own generation, with her own background and her own memories; she would have a friend she could trust and rely on, with whom she could share her life and thoughts for as long as she lived. She would have a sister!

In Leningrad, Nora waited breathlessly, as Ayn once had waited, for the passport and visa that would bring her to America. At last, permission was granted, plane reservations were made, farewells were said, luggage was packed — and Nora and Victor boarded an Aeroflot plane to New York. As they skimmed high over the clouds, a Soviet official spoke to selected passengers to tell them that if they wished to remain in America, arrangements could be made for them. The passengers to whom he spoke included Nora and Victor, and others who, like them, were elderly, unproductive, and living on pensions; the Soviet state would be glad to be free of the need to support them.

Ayn had been making excited plans for their arrival. She intended to give a welcoming party in a few days, she told her friends, and they, happy for her happiness, planned festive parties of their own. If Nora and Victor wished, she would buy them a small house in New Jersey, in an area settled by Russian immigrants; they would have a garden — Nora had loved flowers — and neighbors who spoke their language. There were a few empty apartments in Ayn's building on Thirty-fourth Street; she rented a furnished suite for her sister and brother-in-law, had it scrubbed until it shone, stocked the refrigerator and the kitchen with necessities and with every luxury unobtainable in Russia that she could think of, installed two cheerfully bright telephones, added, as a final touch, the few small mementos she had brought with her from Russia — and tried not to explode from the joyful strain of waiting. Only one thing disturbed her: she still was not feeling well, her energy remained at a low ebb, everything was an effort, and even the excitement of Nora's impending arrival could not rid her of her physical lethargy.

At last, the day of arrival dawned, bright and clear and welcoming. Ayn and Frank hired a chauffeured limousine and set out for the airport. They rushed into Aeroflot, a few minutes late because of unexpected traffic, to find an elderly, shabbily dressed couple huddled nervously together on a bench — but the woman, heavier and more stocky than Ayn, had Ayn's own face — it was the same squarish shape.

with the same huge eyes and firmly sensuous mouth. The two women fell into each other's arms and wept, and clutched each other tightly, and wept again.

The trouble began on the drive home from the airport. Ayn eagerly questioned her sister, asking her about her life, about Russia, about their lost family — they spoke in Russian because Victor did not speak or understand English, although Nora did — but Nora kept pointing fearfully at the chauffeur, whispering, "We must not speak in front of him. He's a spy, don't you understand?" Victor, a small, sharp-faced man, nodded in emphatic agreement. Ayn laughed at first, reassuring them, but Nora shook her head angrily and refused to believe that America was not a hotbed of suspicious ears and watching eyes. A faint edge of tension grew between the two women.

Ayn showed Nora and Victor the apartment she had taken for them. They were awe-struck by its luxury. "It's just like a Hollywood movie set," Nora exclaimed.

When they went to Ayn's apartment, Eloise Huggins, Ayn's devoted housekeeper of many years, was waiting to serve the special combination of Russian and American delicacies that Ayn had ordered. Nora was convinced that Eloise, too, was an agent of some American version of the GPU, and despite Ayn's careful explanations, she refused to speak openly. Leonard Peikoff came in to welcome Nora and Victor; although Ayn introduced him as a man who had been her friend for more than twenty years, Nora fenced with him warily, to Ayn's increasing annoyance, answering his questions with curt brevity, clearly suspicious of him.

Perhaps Nora's uneasiness with strangers was understandable, perhaps inevitable. She had spent a lifetime living with distrust and fear and suspicion. But it seemed to Ayn that Nora understood nothing of the difference between Russia and America. How did she not know what it meant to be in a free country? How did she not know that she was safe, that no dark dungeon awaited her?

It was only when Eloise and Leonard had left that Nora was willing to speak of what her life had been since their parting so long ago. She confirmed what Ayn had long believed: that Anna, Fronz and Natasha Rosenbaum had died in the early forties, in the blood-soaked siege of Leningrad. And Ayn learned, to her indignation, that while Nora and Victor were not Communists, they were "good Soviet citizens," devoted to their beautiful city and unwilling to unequivocally damn their form of government. They lived well by Soviet standards. Until their retirement, Nora had been a set designer and Victor an engineer; he had invented a piece of equipment that had won them a higher pension than their work categories would have warranted, a fifth-floor walkup apartment consisting of a single room, and other small benefits unavailable to most Soviet citizens. Nora and her friends, in private, hushed conversations, spoke often of their desire to be free, she admitted; they were fully aware and resentful of their lack of freedom. "But after all," she added, "what good would freedom really be to me? I'm not a political activist."

Appalled, Ayn began to explain — and explain — and explain — at first calmly and quietly, then more and more angrily as she was met with an intransigence and impatience like her own. Where was her little sister? she began to wonder. Where was the girl whose mind and values had been like her own? Who was this alien Russian woman?

By the time the date of the first planned party arrived, Ayn no longer cared to introduce Nora and Victor to her friends; the parties were canceled. The sisters were engaged in pitched battles about politics, about Russia, about America, about philosophy. And Ayn knew that her sister's values were not hers, that they were not alike, that she was not to have the trusted friend and companion for whom she had longed.

In her desperate disappointment — and in her continuing physical weakness — Ayn was harder on her sister than she might otherwise have been, indifferent to the fact that Nora had been exposed, since childhood, to Soviet values and the Soviet way of life. "That's precisely why she should know better," Ayn insisted. "She's lived with that horror. She knows what it's like. How dare she talk like an apologist! How dare she criticize America!"

Nora soon was critical of everything American. Elayne Kalberman took the couple on tours of the city, which they were eager to see, and which Ayn had neither the energy nor the inclination to conduct. "I took them to Radio City Music Hall," Elayne was to remember, "through Rockefeller Center, up and down Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, into the stores — Nora especially wanted to see Macy's — and she was clearly impressed, clearly happy to be in a world where no one was telling her what to do or think. But she complained constantly about how dirty New York is, about the noise and pollution and crowds. Leningrad wasn't like that, she kept saying proudly. It was exactly the sort of thing that would infuriate Ayn.

"One day — it was both pathetic and annoying — Nora went to the market to buy toothpaste. When she came back, she was terribly upset and indignant. 'I asked one of the staff for toothpaste,' she said, 'and all he would do was show me to a big rack filled with different kinds of toothpaste. He wouldn't tell me which one to buy! Why wouldn't he tell me?' The multitude of choices available in this strange new country frightened her; she couldn't handle it. And she was astounded when Ayn explained that you didn't really have to count your change at the checkout counter; she couldn't believe that the staff wouldn't try to cheat her."

On another occasion — no longer convinced that she and Victor would remain permanently in America — Nora said, "What would I do if I stayed here? In Leningrad, I spend most of my time hunting down the food and other things I want, and waiting in lines. But here, if I go to the grocery store, everything is right there, half the time you don't even need to cook it! I'd have nothing to do!" The impression among the friends of Ayn who heard this comment was that Nora was proud of her ability to maneuver for the things she wanted, proud of her ability to be devious and conniving. In America, where life was easier, there seemed no outlet for that ability.

Ayn was achingly wounded that Nora did not take the trouble to read her books, and expressed little interest in them. And she was outraged when Nora began instead to buy books banned in Russia that she wanted to read — and soon was raving about Solzhenitsyn's work. Ayn detested Solzhenitsyn for his theocratic view of government. The tension and arguments between the two sisters continued to escalate.

Within the first weeks of their arrival, Victor, who had a history of heart trouble, suffered a heart attack. Allan Blumenthal rushed him to Bellevue Hospital, which has one of the finest cardiac care units in the country. He remained hospitalized for many days, at considerable expense to Ayn. Nora was astonished at the high quality of the care he received and by the kindness and concern of the doctors. She explained to Elayne that "doctors in Leningrad won't even talk to relatives of someone who's sick — and you can't get the proper medicines except on the black market." "What would have happened if he'd been this ill in Russia?" Elayne asked. "He probably would have died " Nora answered.

Nevertheless, by the time Victor was released from the hospital and pronounced well again, he and Nora had decided to return to Russia. Ayn and Nora were barely speaking, and when they did speak it was to continue angry arguments. Before leaving, Nora wanted to tour America and to see California's Disneyland. Ayn explained that she could not go on such a trip; she was feeling ill and tired, and she had responsibilities to meet with The Ayn Rand Letter. "That's ridiculous!" Nora snapped. "You're rich and famous — you can do anything you want."

Six weeks after their arrival, Nora and Victor returned to the airport to huddle together nervously on an Aeroflot bench, awaiting the plane that would take them to Leningrad.

Sadly, it does not appear that Ayn's childhood affection for Nora had been returned — or at least, if Nora had once loved her, even the memory of that love was erased in the traumatic encounter between them. I was able to locate Nora in Leningrad in 1982, where she and her husband still lived. I spoke to her by telephone. It was a frustrating interview, and lasted only a few minutes. Nora would not answer any of my questions, although I was requesting information only about the young Ayn Rand, about her personality, her activities, the quality of her mind. At three separate times during the conversation, Nora said only — in explanation of her refusal to answer — "It is our custom to speak only good of the dead, or say nothing at all. Therefore, I cannot tell you anything."

Before telephoning, I had checked with American authorities on Russian affairs, to be certain I would say nothing that might endanger Nora with the Soviets. I was told, "There will be three of you on the telephone: the Russian woman, yourself — and the GPU." It seems likely, therefore, that Nora was inhibited, perhaps frightened, by the knowledge that she dare not speak freely. Nevertheless, one cannot ignore three repetitions of "It is our custom to speak only good of the dead, or say nothing at all; therefore, I cannot tell you anything." Other formulations were possible — even a simple "I don't want to discuss it." In addition, I had the unfortunate task of telling Nora that Ayn had died; when I did so, she showed no sign of emotion; her voice remained calm, cool, severe.

"They're nothing!" Ayn told her friends with disgust. As always, she spoke only of her anger, her disapproval, her moral judgments — but not of her pain and hurt. The pain and hurt were bitter. Once more she had dared to hope for a value from the world, for something that was hers in the sea of irrationality in which she felt herself drowning. Once more her hope had turned to anguish and disillusionment. She was tired, desperately weary; the years were passing and her youth and strength were gone. What more would she have to endure?

There was much more yet to be endured: But before her physical and mental resources faced their most severe test, one small bright flicker of light entered her life, in the form of an invitation to address the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. She had always admired the Point, and now, intrigued by the prospect of seeing it and addressing the class, she accepted the invitation. "It was a wonderful, exciting occasion" a friend who went with Ayn would report. "She was taken on a tour of the Academy, a special banquet was given for her, and wherever she went she was surrounded by generals and colonels and professors and cadets asking her philosophical questions and hanging on every word she said. Ayn really enjoyed it."

The speech Ayn gave at West Point in March of 1974 entitled "Philosophy: Who Needs It" — later published posthumously as the title essay in a collection of her articles — was a fascinating discussion of the practical importance of abstract philosophical concepts.

"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy," she told the rows of gray-uniformed cadets and West Point officials and professors who overflowed the auditorium. "Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown."

Her speech concluded: "West Point has given America a long line of heroes, known and unknown. You, this year's graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on — which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious.

"Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present and future: Thank you."

Ayn raised her hand in a military salute. The audience leaped to its feet as one man, cheering and applauding.

When Ayn returned home, she received word of heated philosophical conversations occurring among the cadets and in the classrooms. West Point requested, and received, permission to reprint her speech in a forthcoming philosophy textbook. Ayn's lecture was to be the text's first article — to serve as future officers' introduction to the subject of philosophy.

Cheered by the response to her talk, Ayn nevertheless felt more exhausted than before. She had learned to be a stoic, and she drove herself ruthlessly, working long and punishing hours on her newsletter and caring for her ailing husband. But at last, her ability to push her flagging energies, taxed beyond their limit, failed her. She could no longer concentrate or work, and finally, capitulating to the urging of friends, she agreed to seek medical advice.

The verdict was lung cancer.

Chapter Thirty-One

They sat in the office of Dr. Murray Dworetzky, he would later recall, discussing, as they had done so often in the years that he had been her internist, Ayn's heavy smoking. Since her late twenties, she had smoked two packages of cigarettes a day. "You've got to stop it" Dr. Dworetzky said. "It's terribly bad for you. It's dangerous."

With a gesture of defiance, Ayn took a long, deep puff from the slim cigarette in its gold and black holder. "But why?" she demanded. "And don't tell me about statistics; I've explained why statistics aren't proof You have to give me a rational explanation. Why should I stop smoking?"

There was a tap on the door, and a nurse entered. "Mrs. O'Connors X-rays, Doctor," she said, sliding one of them into the view box on the wall and switching on the fluorescent bulb that illuminated it. Dr. Dworetzky turned to the x-ray. He froze for an instant, then bent to examine it closely. With a heavy sigh, he turned back to Ayn, his face grim.

"That's why," he said, one finger pointing at a large white shadow in the center of the chest area, where no shadow should have been.

Ayn's face paled. "What's wrong? What is it?"

"I'm... sorry. It looks like a malignancy in one lung." Ayn looked down at the cigarette in her hand. She reached out to the ashtray on the table beside her, snubbed out the cigarette with a firm, precise movement, removed it from its holder and began replacing the holder in her purse; then she stopped, shrugged, and dropped the holder on the table.

"Now tell me everything I need to know," she said, her voice controlled. "But first, will this" — she pointed at the dead cigarette — will it help?"

"I don't know... We'll do what we can. I'm going to refer you to a specialist. The man I have in mind is very good."

Dr. Dworetzky was to say that Ayn "was a very tough, courageous lady. She seemed to have no emotional reaction to the diagnosis. She just asked me questions, as if we were talking about someone else. She remained totally objective... She used to bring Mr. O'Connor in when he needed to see me — he was having a number of medical problems, occasionally acute — and she was always very nervous about his condition, she was extraordinarily devoted to him; she seemed much more anxious when the problem was his than when it was hers."

Ayn was courageous. She might lose emotional control and perspective, she might storm and complain and be frightened — but only when faced with what seemed to her the unintelligible. Uncertainty was unbearable, never certainty, however terrible that certainty might be. For the brief time until her admission to New York Hospital for surgery, her manner was calm, almost serene. She knew that the odds were not in her favor, that she might not survive a malignancy of the lung that had progressed as. far as hers had. That was a fact of reality. She knew that in the person of her thoracic surgeon, Dr. Cranston W. Holman, she was in the best possible hands; what could be done, would be done. That, too, was a fact of reality. She would live with the facts, unselfpityingly — or she would die with the facts. She would spend her time with Frank, she would play her beloved music, she would read her favorite passages from Atlas Shrugged: she would enter Atlantis for a while. Then she would pack her bag and check into the hospital.

She made arrangements for Frank's care for the period of her hospitalization. It was unsafe for him to be alone. There were times when he did not recognize the people he knew — times when he did not recognize Ayn. Whenever he left the building by himself, which he insisted on doing, Ayn was tortured with fear that he might get lost or that he might unwittingly walk out in the street in front of a car. Mary Ann Sures agreed to come in from Maryland to stay with him for a week or two, at which time Leonard Peikoff would take over.

The surgery was long and arduous. When Ayn was finally brought from intensive care to her hospital room, Joan and Allan Blumenthal, who had been anxiously waiting, barely recognized her. It was as if twenty years had been added to her face, and although she had gained a considerable amount of weight in the last few years, her body seemed frail and boneless as a child. Dr. Holman had removed one lobe of the left lung, with the adjacent lymph nodes, he had removed one rib and divided a second rib. There was no evidence that the malignancy had spread to the lymph nodes. The prognosis, although necessarily guarded, was hopeful.

Ayn's will to live was a powerful subconscious force. Despite the tragedies that had punctuated her days, she clung to life with ferocious determination. In many respects, life held little for her now: she was not writing except for the newsletter she cared nothing about; she had no real plans to write; she had broken with so many people for whom she cared; she had lost Nathaniel; she had lost Nora. But she had Frank. One cannot know the precise medical relevancy of the will to live, but it is difficult to doubt that on some level, whether conscious in Ayn's mind or not, Frank's own gentle hold on life was significant in Ayn's survival. She would not leave him for her own sake, for the sake of her love of him — and she would not leave him, for his sake, to the care of strangers.

Ayn awoke from surgery to excruciating pain, typical of this type of operation. Joan spent every day in the hospital with her, and Allan, stealing time from his psychiatric practice, came in once or twice daily. Ayn's absence from home was distressingly difficult for Frank. He could not remember where she was or why; he became extremely agitated that she was not with him, requiring constant reminders and reassurances. Leonard brought him to the hospital in the evenings, where he sat silently by Ayn's bed, looking at her blankly as she held his hand in hers.

Ayn spent more than three weeks in the hospital. They were hard weeks both physically and emotionally. As she slowly began to recover, she seemed to lose the realism and strength that had enabled her to cope so well with her illness before surgery. Her nerves raw from the ordeal she had gone through, devastated that she had lost the iron control of her life and her fate that had been her great pride, that she and her future were helplessly under the guidance of others — she complained of pain even when heavy medication had reduced it considerably. She complained about the staff doctors and nurses: either they were young, and therefore incompetent because of their "modern psycho-epistemology" — or they were past middle age, and therefore too old to be treating her. She was upset that "young hippies in miniskirts" had been assigned to look after her in intensive care.

Several days after surgery, her doctors told her she must begin to move around, she must do a few simple exercises and she must stand and walk as much as possible, in order to minimize the danger of pneumonia or embolism. It was one more problem to cope with, when she had endured all that she could endure, and she flatly refused. "I'm in physical agony," she said. "No one has the right to ask me to do anything when I'm in such pain." Nothing would induce her to change her mind, not medical warnings, not Allan's insistence, not Joan's pleas. She refused even to dangle her feet over the side of the bed. "It's irrational to demand it," she kept insisting angrily. Her outbursts of temper began to antagonize the medical staff; they were in awe of her reputation, and intimidated by her manner. They began using Allan as their middleman to Ayn, rather than approaching her themselves.

"Allan, Leonard, and I," Joan would later say, "discussed among ourselves how serious and dangerous her emotional state was. We felt that she should be told she might be suffering needlessly, both physically and emotionally, because she had repressed a good deal of recent pain — the pain of losing Nathan, then Nora. We felt that if she could acknowledge and release her bottled-up feelings, she might be more relaxed and less prone to outbursts of temper, which would help her recovery. Allan agreed to talk to her about it. She listened to him, and politely disagreed. Then, months later, she told him she'd been terribly upset and angered by what he'd said. She did not repress, she insisted. She had never repressed. "

Joan was to have a similar experience. One day, after Ayn had received a heavy dose of pain medication, she said that she could see the branches of a tree waving across the window pane. How could it reach so high, wasn't she on the ninth floor? — she asked, disturbed by the mystery. Joan realized she was seeing a reflection of the pole holding her intravenous equipment. She explained it to Ayn, adding that it was not uncommon to have mild hallucinatory experiences under heavy medication. Ayn refused to believe it. She continued to insist that it was a tree, she knew it was a tree... "A number of months later," Joan recalled, "she called me in to discuss what she said was a serious matter. When I arrived, she shouted at me over the issue of the tree. How could I have tried to make her doubt her mind? — she demanded. How could I have attempted to undermine her rationality? Clearly, the issue had been festering ever since it occurred. There was no arguing with her. Allan and I were both very hurt. We had done everything possible to help her, I'd been with her constantly when most of her other friends had stayed away because they couldn't cope with her — and none of that seemed to matter."

It was inconceivable to Ayn that anything — illness, medication, stress — could affect her mind. It was axiomatic that the functioning and rationality of her intellect was in her control, even when her body was not. Her free choices ran her mind, nothing else. From time to time in the next months, she would raise, disturbed, the question of how she could have contracted cancer; she tended to think that cancer, as well as many other illnesses, was the result of what she termed "bad premises" — that is, of philosophical-psychological errors and evasions carried to their final dead end in the form of physical destruction. How could she have had a malignancy, when she had no bad premises? She demanded that the nature of her illness be kept secret, she wanted no one to know of it — as if it were shameful.

Joan and Allan asked her to make public her decision to stop smoking. For many years, questions about the dangers of smoking had been raised by NBI students and at Ayn's own lecture appearances. Each time, she had lit a cigarette with a defiant flourish, then discussed the "unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence." "Many people still smoke," Allan and Joan explained, "because they respect you and respect your assessment of the evidence. Since you no longer smoke, you ought to tell them, you needn't mention the lung cancer if you prefer not to, you can simply say you've reconsidered the evidence." Ayn refused. "It's no one's business," she said wearily.

When Ayn returned home, her recovery proceeded very slowly. She still refused to exercise or take the walks she had been told she must take. Only when Frank was ordered to do more walking did she agree to dress, put on high heels, and go out with him to walk miserably for perhaps a half block, clutching his arm for support. Long after she was pronounced able to return to normal living, she spent much of her time in bed, watching detective shows on television at night and game shows during the day; occasionally, she would read a mystery novel, and sometimes she would drag herself to her desk to play hours of solitaire. She was sinking into a deep, lethargic passivity — interrupted only by bursts of anger.

She had good cause for her growing depression. Her life with Frank was becoming a torment. He could no longer handle even the simplest of responsibilities, such as preparing his own breakfast, feeding the cats, paying the rent and utilities bills. On several occasions, Ayn paid the rent only after an eviction notice had been taped to her door. In the early mornings, before Ayn had risen, a member of the newsletter staff came to the apartment with mail or papers requiring her attention. Frank, weaving, incoherent, and smelling of alcohol, would answer the door; he had been drinking throughout the night while Ayn slept. And what had once been his irritability with Ayn, now was becoming a frightening hostility. One evening, in terror that he was about to harm her physically, she packed a suitcase and was prepared to leave the apartment, until at last he calmed down. And once, exploding in a rage, he did strike her, and she had to run, in heartbroken disbelief, to Frank's nurse for help.

Remembering those days with a shudder, a friend said, "All Frank's hostility seemed directed at Ayn, never at anyone else, and that hurt her terribly. When I came into the apartment, he was as sweet and kind as he had always been. Even at his worst, he would stand up when I entered, and hold the chair for me. Sometimes, he'd whisper in my ear, 'Don't eat anything. She's trying to poison me, and maybe she'll try to poison you, too.' I would say, 'Okay, Frank, I won't eat.' And I didn't.

"It may have been because she was always trying to force food on him that his reaction took this form. He was much too thin, but he couldn't eat, not when he was drinking all the time."

Ayn was unable fully to face Franks terrible disintegration. Although he rarely left the building, she bought him a mink coat. He never wore it. She seemed to keep hoping that somehow he would recover. She would tell him, "Please, Frank, if you'll just try to concentrate, you'll remember" — at a time when he could not remember if he had eaten breakfast. As a friend explained, "She was so helplessly dependent on him. One year, when she went to Ford Hall Forum to give a talk, it was impossible for Frank to go with her. I went instead, with a couple of other people. Ayn was literally trembling all the time she was there, her hands were shaking. She said she would never travel without him again."

Ayn's inability to accept the facts of Frank's condition and of his inner life had always been an integral part of their relationship. "When he was hospitalized after his collapse," Joan recalled, "his mind was wandering, he was disoriented, and from time to time he'd say a few rambling words. Ayn couldn't hear him, and she asked me what he was saying. 'He's dreaming about the ranch in California. He thinks he's there again,' I explained. Ayn answered tensely: 'But he hated California. He loves New York."'

Ayn never returned to full physical health and strength. For the rest of her life, she remained tired and lethargic; she would rarely stand rather than sit, sit rather than recline; often, she would spend two or three days in bed, unwilling to move even as far as her desk to play solitaire. And her emotional energy never fully returned; there were sparks of it, there were rare bright flashes of vibrancy and enthusiasm during a discussion of a philosophical subject that particularly intrigued her, but her predominant state was a growing depression. The trauma of lung cancer and the sorrows and disappointments of the last years pressed down on her with crushing force. Once more, she grew angry, impatient, bitter in her criticisms at the smallest suggestion of wrongdoing. She never lost — it seemed her last hold on life — her intense gratification in her work and in what she had achieved; but she found no gratification in the world around her.

She spoke continually of her disappointment in the culture; her focus was increasingly turned to the irrationality of the world and its failure to accept her philosophy. She spoke of it with weary revulsion, with volcanic anger, with distraught wretchedness. At intervals, she would rouse herself sufficiently to attend a small gathering at the home of a friend — only to spend the evening on the same topic, the one topic that had the power fully to engage her. Friends, increasingly concerned with her passivity — the Ayn Rand Letter, now issued monthly rather than twice monthly, and usually many months late, occupied her only a day or two a week — tried to motivate her to undertake some purposeful activity that would interest her. Wasn't it time she thought about another book? they suggested. She expected them to understand that there was no one to write for, she stormed, no audience that she respected. "Besides," she said, "my writing is already out there, and if anyone is interested, they can read it." She ceased discussing future writing projects; several years earlier, she had received a large advance from New American Library for her projected novel on unrequited love; she returned the advance.

The world, once so shining with hope and love and achievement, had turned bleak and cold. She had lost too much, she had suffered too much. She had earned international fame and fortune — but not on the terms she had desired and expected. She had lost Leo and Nathaniel — and now Frank was slipping away, receding from her farther with each day. She had lost too many close friends — Isabel Paterson, Albert Mannheimer, Nora, myself; she had drifted away from Frances and Henry Hazlitt and all her old friends among political conservatives; she had broken with Bennett Cerf; years earlier, she had broken with Edith Efron, a later member of the collective; in the early seventies, she broke with Erika and Henry Mark Holzer, and a few years later with Kay and Phillip Smith. Alan Collins had died, and Archie Ogden. Her ties to her past were gone, most of the people she had loved were gone, life's bright promise had turned to gray ashes. Her alienation and withdrawal from a world she never stopped struggling to understand, but could neither understand nor cope with, had reached its tragic climax, from which not even the greatness of her mind could save her.

Elayne Kalberman once asked her, "If you could do anything you wanted, or be anywhere you wanted, what would you choose?" "I'd choose to be on a cloud," Ayn answered wistfully, "just floating by myself, with nothing and nobody to bother me... drifting serenely above the whole world." One misty winter day, she stood in front of her living room window, gazing silently at the city veiled in fog. Wearily, she said, "What was it all for?"

She asked a friend, "Do you know what it's like to have no one to look up to — always to look down? Can you understand what it means still to hope, always to hope, and never to find it?"

The next few years dragged slowly by. Ayn learned to play Scrabble; many of her evenings were spent bending attentively over a Scrabble board. She spent long hours working on her stamp collection, a hobby of many years. In 1971, she had written an article in the Minkus Stamp Journal entitled "Why I Like Stamp Collecting" — and stamps continued to pour in from admirers all over the world. Her interest in stamps was not as a financial investment, it was aesthetic; she was pleased when she received, or occasionally purchased, a stamp that she enjoyed looking at.

Late in 1975, she discontinued publication of The Ayn Rand Letter, explaining to her readers that it gave her no time to work on a book — that "I do not care to go on analyzing and denouncing the same indecencies of the same irrationalism" — and that "the state of today's culture is so low that I do not care to spend my time watching and discussing it."

The few serious friendships she still maintained were becoming precarious. With the closing of The Ayn Rand Letter, Elayne and Harry Kalberman — Elayne had been the newsletter's subscription manager — began to drift away, to see Ayn less often, unable to deal with her emotional state. Ayn had returned to her former "psychologizing" — the translation of ideas and attitudes she thought irrational into psychological and psycho-epistemological terms — and her friends had to endure constant discussions of their "failings" and "betrayals." Leonard Peikoff was lecturing in New York on various aspects of Objectivism, taping his lectures, and sending them to groups in other cities; but he was reeling from the onslaught of her literary criticisms and insistence on rewrites of his unfinished book, The Ominous Parallels, for which she was to write an introduction. Allan and Joan were constantly on call, dropping their own work in order to comfort Ayn, to listen to her tortured complaints, to listen to her speak of Nora and Nathaniel.

In 1978, Joan and Allan ended their relationship with Ayn. Over the preceding few years, they had had many intense and upsetting discussions with Ayn about painting and music, the two artistic areas which most interested them and about which they were professionally knowledgeable, Joan as a painter and Allan as a former concert pianist. Ayn admired Dali and Vermeer, and dismissed Rembrandt and French Impressionism as essentially without value; she admired Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and operetta music, and dismissed Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Handel. The Blumenthals made clear their disagreement with her choices, but would have been content to let the matter drop; Ayn was not content. Again and again she returned to the subject, again and again she spoke of the psychological and psycho-epistemological errors in their tastes, again and again she argued and scolded and "proved" and "re-proved."

"Her discussions of our artistic and musical choices grew very difficult," Allan was to say, "and often heated and condemning. She was relentless in her pursuit of so-called psychological errors. If an issue were once raised, she would never drop it; after an evening's conversation, she'd telephone the next day to ask what we had concluded about it overnight; if we hadn't thought about it, that led to another conversation about why we hadn't. It was becoming a nightmare."

Joan added, "By then there was something almost reckless in Ayn's attitude toward us. Along with Leonard, she considered us her closest friends, but, often, she would seem deliberately to insult and antagonize us. When we indicated that we would not take it, she would change abruptly and would become kind and loving — she always called me 'darling' after such episodes — and would say that she hadn't meant us to take the criticism personally. There was no other way to take it! At the time, we felt it was self-destructive on Ayn's part; she seemed almost to invite a break, as though it would confirm her attitude toward the world. Then, too, she did not want us to have a private life apart from her. We had friends who were not her friends and that made her unhappy. When we learned not to discuss our other friends or activities with her, she accused us of being secretive. There were endless discussions about the meaning of our desire for privacy... And I had another problem: I could see that Ayn's artistic tastes, and the impressive logic with which she backed them, were impeding the development of my students. It disturbed me very much to see young artists, some of whom were very talented, struggling to do 'benevolent' pictures in the style of Dali, not daring to develop their own way of expressing themselves for fear of being judged irrational. Ayn knew I was troubled; she called my concern for self-expression 'suspicious.'"

And Allan said: "Many of her psychological concepts were perceptive and original; there was a complex logic in her approach, an internal consistency. She would integrate seemingly disparate psychological manifestations into plausible syndromes. But, often, these syndromes were rationalistic constructs that sounded ingenious, but were not necessarily based on reality. They were carefully derived from her preexisting theories of human nature: she tended to reduce human problems to simple, free-will choices — the choice to think or not, to be rational or not — without regard for actual psychological mechanisms... I was appalled by her contempt for those with psychological problems. She would say: 'I don't know how you can work with such people, how you can deal with depravity all the time.' Of course, this attitude contradicted her stated position that psychological problems were morally neutral, that the only issue of moral relevance was an individual's willingness to deal with his problems. One could argue that even that is overly simplified.

"For many years, I had been aware of negative effects of the philosophy on my Objectivist patients. At first, I attributed them to individual misinterpretations. But then I began to see that the problem was too widespread. Objectivism's insistent moralism had made many patients afraid to face their own conflicts and that was counterproductive in psychotherapy. They were afraid of the judgments that they and other Objectivists would have to pass. They experienced, to an unwarranted degree, feelings of inadequacy and guilt and, consequently, they repressed massively. This led to a tragic loss of personal values. Instead of living for their own happiness — one of the ideas that attracted them to Objectivism in the first place — they sought safety by living to be 'moral,' to be what they were 'supposed' to be and, worse, to feel 'appropriate' emotions. Because they had learned the philosophy predominantly from fiction, the students of Objectivism thought they had to be like Ayn Rand heroes: they were not to be confused, not to be unhappy, and not to lack confidence. And because they could not meet these self-expectations, they bore the added burden of moral failure. These were people who were particularly concerned with morality. For them, what was seen as a failure in the moral realm was devastating. In that atmosphere, it was difficult for us to deal with the real problems."

The final break came because of Ayn's continuing insistence that they throw open their personal lives to her and have no life apart from her. They had been unwilling to leave so long as they believed that Frank would be hurt by their absence. But by now, he recognized people only rarely; they knew it was unlikely that he would be aware of their absence.

"I telephoned Ayn and said that we no longer wished to see her," Allan said. "I refused to discuss it further — she knew the reasons, of course, and I knew that any discussion would lead only to more days and weeks and months of futile discussions and recriminations."

Ayn wavered between apathy, hurt, and bewilderment at Joan and Allan's defection. Once more, she changed her will. Allan and Leonard had been her joint heirs; she removed Allan and left Leonard as the heir to her estate. And once more, she considered issuing a public denunciation, on the grounds that patients consulted Allan as a result of her recommendation. A friend argued that she should not do so, and Ayn, suddenly too weary to care, agreed. Her exhaustion, which so exacerbated her hair-trigger temper, was growing more intense: she had recovered from lung surgery, there were no signs of a recurrence of the malignancy, but now her sturdy heart was beginning to fail. She was diagnosed as having arteriosclerosis, for which she required constant medication.

Soon after, her relationship with the Kalbermans came to an end. "Our final conversation was a shouting match," Elayne recalled, "because of the things she was saying about Allan and Joan. I was shocked, and I told her I was shocked; they had been so good to her, particularly when she had had surgery. How could she have forgotten that? She was very upset; she began saying that Joan had tried to undermine her rationality over the issue of the tree, and that Allan had accused her of repression. The conversation went from bad to worse — and that was the end."

Of the original collective, Ayn's closest, most loving friends for years, Nathaniel and I were gone, and Joan and Allan, and Harry and Elayne; Mary Ann was living in Maryland and came to New York only rarely; Alan Greenspan was too busy to see Ayn often. Only Leonard remained to carry the burden of Ayn's unhappiness and Frank's illness. Even Frisco, Ayn's most beloved cat, had died; she sat with him, holding one small gray paw and petting him, throughout the night of his death; she had other cats, but Frisco — Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia — once the tiny kitten who had motored with her from California to New York and had stubbornly dozed on her manuscript pages during the years of writing Atlas, had always been her favorite.

The people who now flocked around Ayn, with whom she talked and with whom she played Scrabble, were for the most part still younger than her former friends and for the most part of an intellectual and spiritual caliber she could not have tolerated in earlier years. She was bitterly lonely, and bitterly afraid as she watched Frank's slow march toward death. Her only sense of the reality of her own universe was the hours she spent alone in her study; only there could she find the world of Howard Roark and John Galt; only there could she find peace. In the late seventies, when her life was running steadily downhill, an event occurred that lifted her spirits higher than they had been in many years. Jaffe Productions expressed interest in producing a television miniseries of Atlas Shrugged, and, somewhat to Ayn's astonishment, agreed to her terms: she was to have total control of the script. Ayn had long thought that a miniseries was a more appropriate form for Atlas than a feature movie: on television, it could run across several evenings and therefore include much more material, and she had always liked the immediacy of the television form. With the feeling that there might once again be point and meaning and a promise to her life, she accepted the offer. Contracts were signed between Ayn, Jaffe Productions, and NBC.

Writer Stirling Silliphant would later recall, "My agent called one day to ask if I'd be interested in flying to New York to be interviewed by Ayn Rand as the possible writer of a ten-hour television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. He explained that she had seen In the Heat of the Night a number of years ago, had thought my film script was brilliant, and believed that I would understand her material. I was overwhelmed and flattered. In my college days, Atlas and her other works had been bibles for students, and I respected her immensely. Her writing style was incredible; she was a lot better writer than she's ever been given credit for.

"I flew to New York to meet her in the offices of Curtis Brown, her agent. As I waited — I arrived early — a little bird-like lady in a long black coat walked in, reminding me of someone's Russian mother. I spent the next hour-and-a-half talking with this little woman — and it was the most fascinating time I've ever spent with another person." Ayn quizzed him mercilessly, requiring detailed answers to why he wanted to do the adaptation, what he liked about the novel, what he saw as the problems inherent in transferring it to the medium of television and how he proposed to solve them. At the end of the meeting she announced: "I want you to do this. No one else is going to do it but you"

They worked together over the next year. For the first time in all the years of suffering, Ayn's thoughts and her hours were filled with a project she loved. As he completed stages of the work, Stirling Silliphant, with his producer Michael Jaffe, flew into New York for week-long meetings with Ayn. "Very specific rules had been set down" he explained. "I could not change a single word of dialogue in Atlas Shrugged; I could omit and juxtapose, but I could not create new dialogue. That was a very big problem, because in a lot of areas her dialogue was dated. But no way could you best this woman in an argument! Nor could I invent new scenes. So it was a question of editing and rearranging rather than a lot of new creative work... But because of this arrangement, the script became an extremely faithful and haunting film version of the book. It kept the original purity and spirit and mood that the author had brought to the work. It would have been an incredible piece of film."

When they began working on John Galt's climactic radio speech — it was to be a television speech — Silliphant insisted that Ayn should be the one to cut and rewrite it; no one else could do it properly. And he suggested that they do something that had never been done on television: the speech should run the entire length of a fifteen-minute act. Ayn agreed to both suggestions, excited and delighted.

Only once during their association did Ayn's wrath descend on Stirling Silliphant. He had added the word "perhaps" to a statement made by Dagny — and Ayn angrily shouted: "You've destroyed Dagny's character on this page! You've made her qualify her thinking! She always knows what she's doing — she doesn't use words like 'perhaps' or 'maybe.'" The offending word was removed.

"Working with her was a great education for me," recalled Silliphant. "I learned so much, she was a brilliant teacher, constantly talking about the use of language, sentence structure, and so on. She could not tolerate sloppiness in language. It was an experience I will value all my life, a felicitous, happy experience. It was my first and only encounter with a world-class literary talent.

"I cared for her, and valued her. But although she could be delightfully charming, I knew that had our relationship become friendly, rather than professional, I would have had problems with her. She did not reflect the kind of humanity or warmth I like in people. And I think that had I challenged her as a writer, rather than being her literary student, there would have been serious trouble. She was the kind of person who required you to play by her rules."

When the script was completed, Ayn, Silliphant, and Michael Jaffe, proud of the work they had done, toasted the script — and each other — with champagne. Then the script was turned in to NBC.

"It was almost that same week," Stirling Silliphant said, "that NBC changed its administrative-production staff. In came Fred Silverman. One of the first things he did was cancel the production of Atlas Shrugged — and it was dead. Michael and I were heartbroken, and Ayn Rand was devastated."

A friend of Ayn was later to say, "I never fully believed that anything would come of the Jaffe project, even though she seemed so excited and happy about it. It was clear almost from the beginning that she didn't really want it to be done, not deep inside her. She was too afraid that it would be ruined."

Perhaps the clearest and saddest evidence of Ayn's underlying despair and pessimism can be found in her attitude toward young writers. She had been wary for many years of anyone who wished to write about her books or her philosophy, she had discouraged such attempts, but now her wariness became a crusade. Mimi Gladstein, professor of literature at the University of Texas at El Paso, wrote to say that she was planning a book, The Ayn Rand Companion, which would consist of a bibliography and an overview of Ayn's fiction and nonfiction. In response, Mimi received a letter threatening her with a lawsuit if she proceeded with the project. Douglas Rasmussen, professor of philosophy at St. John's University, wrote to say that he was planning a book, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, a compilation of essays by a number of distinguished philosophers. He, too, received a letter warning him not to write the book. Ayn's view was that the writers who approached her were attempting to cash in on her efforts and fame in order to receive a renown they could not otherwise earn. Both Mimi and Douglas wrote and successfully published their manuscripts; Ayn had no legal power, of course, to stop them. And both books are valuable additions to the literature on Ayn Rand.

For a great many years, Ayn had repeatedly spoken of her longing to discover novels she could enjoy and admire, novels of her school of fiction, romantic, benevolent, expertly plotted, dealing with serious issues. The longing was a deep, frustrated ache inside her. Yet in these tortured years of the seventies, when a few such novels appeared on her desk, she scarcely glanced at them. She no longer believed the world could have any values to offer her, it was futile even to investigate, she would only be disappointed again. Erika Holzer, Ayn's former friend and an aspiring novelist, had learned her literary principles from Ayn; her work on her novel, Double Crossing — a novel about human rights, laid in the Soviet Union — was directed by those principles. Erika sent a copy of the manuscript to her, at Ayn's suggestion. "All through the years of writing Double Crossing," Erika would say, "I kept thinking that Ayn would be so proud of me when she read it. That was my fuel. I was applying everything I'd learned from her, and speaking out on a subject very close to her heart." Ayn never read the manuscript.

Kay Smith, as Kay Nolte Smith, wrote The Watcher, again in Ayn's general literary tradition. Kay did not send it to her, but Ayn, who had enthusiastically praised Kay's articles for The Objectivist, knew of its publication and did not seek to read it.

Ayn had continued to force herself to appear at Ford Hall Forum, but fewer speaking invitations were coming in after her years of constant refusals. Nor would she have accepted them had they arrived. In May of 1979, however, she agreed to appear on "The Phil Donahue Show." It was a disaster. A young woman in the audience asked Ayn a question which made it clear that she thought her former admiration for Ayn's work had been an aberration of youth — and Ayn, offended and insulted, pounced angrily, shouting at the girl; a substantial part of the show was devoted to their exchange.

In July of that year, she appeared on Tom Snyder's late-night "Tomorrow," to talk about her new book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a collection of articles from The Objectivist published by New American Library. It was an astonishing appearance. These two confident, abrasive people, polar opposites in their convictions, warmed to each other instantly, and some measure of Ayn's charm and color, never far beneath the surface, still ready to respond to the smallest sign of a response from the outside world, leaped into life. No other interviewer had had the courage to treat Ayn as Tom Snyder did; there was something almost paternal, something affectionate and tender, in his manner toward her, and she blossomed during their hour together, feeling safe. At one point, he asked her, "Would you say 'Thank God' for this country?" Ayn replied, smiling broadly, "Yes. I like what that expression means: it means the highest possible." As the interview came to an end, Snyder said, "God bless you" — and Ayn responded, "Thank you. The same to you."

One of the few personal contacts Ayn maintained was with Mimi Sutton, Frank's niece. They had met only rarely in recent years; Mimi was widowed, and could not often travel to New York from her home in Chicago. But they spoke regularly on the telephone, and Mimi never forgot Ayn's birthday or Franks. She was painfully aware that with each birthday call, her beloved uncle grew more confused; she knew that Ayn sometimes had to explain who she was. When she called on September 22, 1979, to congratulate Frank on his eighty-second birthday, Ayn, terribly distraught, explained, "He can't speak to you today When he is rational and can understand, I'll tell him you called. But I'll know you remembered him... and somehow, he'll know it, too."

During Tom Snyder's interview with Ayn, he had said, "Ayn Rand doesn't fear death, does she?" Ayn had replied, "No. Not my own. Only the death of someone I love."

As 1979 drew to a close, Ayn rarely left Frank's side except to eat a hurried, untasted meal and to try to get the few hours' sleep that eluded her. Frank's heart was failing, and only a few rare sparks of his mind still flickered. Ayn held the fragile hands of the man to whom she had been married for fifty years, and kissed his sunken cheeks, and stroked his hair, and wept.

On November 9, as gently and quietly as he had lived, Frank O'Connor slipped out of life.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ayn moved through the next days as if she were carved out of ice — with a glacial control through which one sensed something so fragile that it would shatter at the first touch of heat or light.

Frank was gone, and with him went the last of life. There was nothing to hold her now, only the need to do for Frank the few last tasks that had to be done. When I learned of his death, I thought, with a chill of fear for her, of the lines from an old poem: "He first deceased. She, for a little, tried to live without him, liked it not, and died."

She did what had to be done, rarely dropping her silent remoteness to weep choking, desolate sobs. As arrangements for Franks funeral were being made, she told a friend, "I feel better today. I've learned that when a couple lives together as long as Frank and I did, the one who remains tends not to survive more than six months. I won't have to suffer long."

Franks coffin lay in the funeral home, surrounded by flowers. Groups of friends and admirers of Ayn came to say their last farewell to the man whom no one had ever deeply known but who had warmed them with the tenderness of his spirit. Ayn sat quietly, accepting condolences as if she could not quite hear the words or know who was speaking them; she was listening to the sounds of the organist playing the light lilting music that once had delighted Frank. One of the pieces was an old ballad, "With a Song in My Heart;" Ayn and Frank had first heard it the year they were married, and for both of them it had come to symbolize their coming together so long ago.

The private burial took place on a snowy slope in the nonsectarian Kenisco Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. At Ayn's request, the only ceremony at the graveside was a reading of Franks and her favorite poem, Rudyard Kipling's "If." Then the coffin was lowered into the cold earth.

Ayn endured. Not even her longing for death was stronger than the life force that still beat within her as it had beaten throughout her seventy-four years. She had never learned to succumb; she could not learn it now. Ill, tired, heartbroken, without purpose or hope, she could not abandon the words she had written decades before: "There's your life... something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure." In the name of that sacred treasure, she endured.

She spoke often to Mimi Sutton. "Talk to me about Frank," she would say. "Tell me everything you can remember about when he was young. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it may seem; I want to hear." Mimi would dredge through her memory, telling Ayn the stories she remembered and the stories her family had related — about the sick chickens Frank had nursed back to health in his boyhood — about the plays he and his brothers and sisters had written and performed for the admission price of one pin — about the Sundays when he had sung in the church choir — about the nickname an aunt had given him when he was seven, "my little brown-haired robin." She spoke of Frank's brothers and sisters, of his mother's dreams for her sons, of his hard-drinking father's passionate love of his children. And each time she stopped, Ayn said, "Go on. Please go on. I want to know more."

The empty days dragged by — the weeks, the months, the year of waking each morning and learning not to leap out of bed to go to Frank — the year of learning not to think about the food she would prepare for him, and how she might coax him to eat a few bites — the year of learning not to wake from harrowing nightmares in terror that he was dead — the year of remembering Frank striding in to smile at her after a day of working on the ranch in California, his face and arms bronzed from the sun, his blue-gray eyes startlingly vivid against his tan — the year of remembering the sexual passion of their first years together, the nights of lying in his arms and knowing that she wanted nothing more of life than this — the year of suddenly discovering, with a jolt of panic, that his face and body had blurred in her memory, and running to her study to gaze at photographs of the beautiful, strong young man she had married, and wondering where their days had gone and why, and touching the glass over the paper face with her fingers, then her lips, and sobbing until she was past exhaustion.

There were random activities to occupy her. There was her editorial work on Leonard's manuscript and the introduction for it that she had agreed to write; there was the small magazine The Objectivist Forum, for which she had agreed to act as philosophical consultant; there were the mountains of fan mail that never stopped arriving; there were business matters to be attended to and discussions with her publishers and agents and attorneys; there were her favorite television detective programs and reruns of "The Twilight Zone" and "The Avengers" and "Perry Mason" and "The Untouchables" and "Kojak;" there were Scrabble and stamp collecting and novels by Ian Fleming and Donald Hamilton and S. S. van Dine; and sometimes there were philosophical conversations long into the night. Her hands were occupied, and an infinitesimal portion of her mind. The power of her intelligence and the passionate emotion that had raged through her life, lay dormant.

Until... in a series of tiny, almost unnoticeable inner motions, like a giant eagle slowly stretching the great span of its wings, the unextinguishable life force within her began to stir from its long sleep and to fight for air and light. She seemed to see once more the radiance of the world. There was life outside the four walls of her room, there was work and warmth and achievement still possible on earth as long as life endured, there was the sacred treasure she had always loved — its riches were waiting for her, calling her name, life was demanding to be lived.

She had always hated suffering. She had suffered too much, for too many years. She had always worshipped joy. She had been joyless for too long. She would start to move, she would move without motivation, with too little breath to fill her damaged lungs and too much pain as blood and oxygen struggled to reach her damaged heart... she would move without Frank. Her first steps would be small and halting, but perhaps one day her swift, confident stance would return. She would hold tight to her sacred treasure, she would fight for achievement and joy for all the days that remained to her. There remained one fight more — the best and the last.

Her first halting step was to go through the piles of letters and urgent telephone messages from universities and from television and radio shows, inviting her to appear. The letters had gone unopened for months, the telephone messages had been left unanswered. She decided to venture out into the world again, to fight for her ideas and to work for their dissemination. She chose "The Phil Donahue Show" as her first public appearance since Frank's death. It was to be a test, a way of discovering the limits of her newborn strength.

The show was one of Ayn's most sparkling, enchanting appearances in many years. She seemed alive again, she was serious and intense, she was light and witty, she was passionate and luminously profound. Following the lead of Donahue's questions, she danced effortlessly from a discussion of the importance of taking pride in one's accomplishments to her reasons, as a Romantic writer, for liking "Charlie's Angels," to why she was an atheist, to the damage men do themselves by repressing their emotions, to a discussion of Aristotle as the defender of reason and the father of logic, to the proper function of government as the defender of individual rights, adding: "Whoever tells you that you should exist for the collective, for the State — is, or wants to be, the State." The studio audience laughed and cheered and applauded. A young woman rose to say: "I want to tell you that my husband and I met and married because of our mutual interest in your work. The initial appeal of your writing, for me, was the idea that I should be proud of who I am and what I am."

As the hour drew to an end, Donahue said, "You have recently been widowed. Does the emotional impact of this kind of pain alter your philosophy in any way?" "No," Ayn replied. "It has only altered my position in regard to the world. I lost my top value. I'm not too interested in anything else. But I'll survive it, because I do love the world, and I do love ideas, and I do love man." "Isn't it tempting," Donahue asked, "to hope for a reunion with the person you love?" Ayn responded, "I've asked myself just that — and then I thought that if I really believed it, I'd commit suicide immediately, to go to him... I've asked myself how I'd feel if I thought he were on trial before God or St. Peter — and I'm not with him. My first desire would be to run to help him, to say how good he was."

The Donahue appearance was a beginning for Ayn, it was a first small step back to life. And then the eagle's wings spread wide.

She had abandoned all expectation of discovering a writer who could bring Atlas Shrugged to the screen in the manner she envisioned; she had abandoned all interest in entrusting it to hands and minds that would not understand and cherish it. All her life, she had known that what she wanted was her responsibility to achieve. Very well, she decided. I want Atlas Shrugged to be brought to television as a miniseries. I shall write it, and, if necessary, I shall produce it.

She set to work on a nine-hour adaptation. She had to re-conceive, to approach in a totally new manner, the novel that had taken fourteen years to write. It was as difficult as any task she had undertaken. But as she sat at her desk and the weeks passed and the stack of pages grew, she knew that she was alive again. She was writing fiction, and she wondered why she had ever stopped. She was living in her world again, and she wondered why she had ever left it.

Her work was interrupted by another bout of physical illness. She had been having painful gallbladder attacks; surgery was indicated, but was dangerous because of her weakened heart. Finally, as the attacks grew worse and came oftener, an operation was performed — from which she recovered rapidly and well.

In May of 1981, a friend sent an audiocassette of Ayn's appearance on "The Phil Donahue Show" which I had not seen, to my home in Los Angeles. As I sat listening to it, I was deeply moved by the enthusiasm in her voice and by the love and dignity with which she spoke of Frank, and I knew that I wanted to speak with her once more. It had been almost thirteen years since I had seen her. I had kept informed of her activities and her physical health, as, over the years, I reestablished friendly relationships with those of the former collective and former NBI students and staff who were important to me — Joan and Allan Blumenthal, Edith Efron, Elayne and Harry Kalberman, Alan Greenspan, Henry and Erika Holzer, Kay and Phillip Smith. But now, I felt a sudden longing for some part of my broken contact with Ayn. I went to the telephone, thinking it likely that she would refuse to talk to me, that she would slam the receiver at the sound of my voice. I dialed the telephone number I had not forgotten.

"It's Barbara, Ayn," I said when she answered the telephone. There was a brief, stunned silence. Then she said, a sound of pleasure in her tone, "Barbara! How are you?" I told her that I had been listening to her interview, and what I had felt, and why I was calling. She barely let me finish, she wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, what had happened in my life since I left New York — and all at once, Ayn and I were old friends again, catching up on each other's lives after too long an absence. Perhaps it was her need for that unique emotional understanding of each other we once had shared, perhaps it was her loneliness, perhaps it was my obvious love of Frank, perhaps it was her memory of the good days I had been a part of, before the world had darkened and grown cold — perhaps it was a combination of all these things. We talked for half an hour, until it seemed to both of us that at any moment I might come down from my apartment on Thirty-fourth Street to knock on her door and we would talk philosophy through the night.

"I haven't had much energy since my illness," she said. "I rarely go out in the evening anymore. I've been trying to plan a long-range writing project, but I'm still torn between fiction and nonfiction..."

She interrupted herself to say, "I feel much more benevolent toward you than I would have expected. I truly wish you well. I'm not angry with you, although I'm very angry with Nathan. You probably were his victim, too." Then she went on to speak of her last Ford Hall Forum talk: "There was a mob there, they had to turn people away," to mention her break with the Blumenthals, and to ask me more questions about myself.

I told her I planned to be in New York in a couple of months. Could I visit her? "I'll be glad to see you," she answered. "Let me know when your plans are definite. We'll make a date." As if to warn me that I would find her physically changed, she added, "I'm getting older, as you know if you've seen me on television."

Two months later, as I walked in the early afternoon sunshine from my New York hotel toward Ayn's apartment, I wondered how I would feel when I saw her again. I had missed her, I cared for her as I had always done, but I knew that I could not pick up the strings of our former relationship, should she wish it; I could not again accept a friendship that was not on my terms, that did not permit me to think my own thoughts and feel my own feelings. I was free of the old bonds.

I stood before the apartment door where I had stood so many times, feeling the same faint trembling in my knees I had felt the first night I met her. When the door swung open, a smiling Ayn reached out her hands to take mine — and for a moment we stood silently as the years rolled back — and then we both laughed because we did not know what to say. How does one greet a friend one has not seen for thirteen years, but whom one has seen only yesterday?

Ayn looked more vibrant than she had in many years. She had aged, as she had warned me, one could see her seventy-six years in her face, but there was nothing in her face or stance that suggested illness; her huge dark eyes were shining, she was slenderer than I had ever known her to be. She wore a bright dress in a print she had always loved, and under it her body seemed alive with energy. When I complimented her on her appearance, she twirled around to show me how slim she was — "I weigh exactly what I weighed the day I arrived here from Russia," she said proudly. The apartment, once full of dingy furniture torn by her cats, looked fresh and new, furnished with the glass and chrome and pale gray upholstery over straight-lined sofas and chairs that she preferred. Eloise, her housekeeper, served coffee and the small sweet pastries I remembered.

And then we began to talk. Suddenly, an icy coldness was in her tone as she said, "You don't think you can ignore the past and the break between us. You know we have to talk about it." I had known it could not be ignored, but I had been unable to arrive at a satisfactory policy for dealing with it. Despite her appearance, I knew she was ill, she had lost Frank, she was elderly and terribly tired; I had no wish to upset her with recriminations, nor could I accept unearned guilt. The problem dissolved as she spoke. To my bewilderment, she began making excuses for me that I would never have dreamed of making for myself — and the gist of those excuses was that I had treated her badly out of misguided loyalty to Nathaniel. It was not the truth, but she would not be interrupted, she spoke of both of us as Nathaniel's joint victims, victims of the perverse psychology of a man we had loved and whom neither of us had understood.

Then I remembered that she had written, "The essence of femininity is hero-worship — the desire to look up to a man." And I grasped the meaning of her defence of me. What a woman chooses to do for a man's sake — for the sake of a man she believes to be a hero — cannot profoundly be condemned. It was the hero-worshipper who was defending me. There was the beginning of anger in her voice when she mentioned Nathaniel, an anger that had never died and that revealed itself once more when she said, "Did you know that I've met his wife?" I did know it, I had been told it two years earlier by Nathaniel and Devers; but Ayn did not wait for my response. She chuckled bitterly and said, "I was coming home one day, and I found a woman standing in front of my apartment door who said she was Nathan's wife. I let her in because she insisted; there were people in the hall, and I didn't want a public scene. Can you believe that she wanted me to see Nathan! She talked some nonsense about how we had once loved each other, and should now meet again to say a civilized good-bye. I told her to stop talking like a bad Hollywood script, and that I would never see him, under any circumstances or for any reason. She said that coming to me was her idea, and that Nathan knew nothing about it. She expected me to believe that!... But when she dropped the subject of Nathan, she was rather nice, and we talked for a while. After that, she'd telephone when she was in New York; I think she still hoped she'd win me over to Nathan. Finally, one day after she had called, a messenger came to my door with a beautiful, huge, excessively expensive bouquet of flowers; they were from Devers. I didn't want them" — the anger rose in her voice and paled her face — "I didn't want anything that had come from Nathan. That evening, I had visitors; when they left, I gave them the flowers to take home. Two days later, Devers phoned again, upset that I hadn't called to thank her for the flowers; she had made a point of telling me what hotel she was staying in. I told her" — the anger rose higher, clearly directed not at Devers but at Nathaniel — "that if the gift was a gesture of friendship, it was presumptuous; if it was a bribe, it wasn't nearly enough." She chuckled again, as if pleased by the final slap she had delivered to Nathaniel; she did not speak of him again, except to say tensely, "Do you still see him?"

"No," I answered, "we haven't been friends for some time."

"I'm glad," she said. "He was a bad influence on you."

Ayn's face and body relaxed. She smiled at me warmly as she said, "Now tell me about the last thirteen years." I began speaking about my life, and she told me of hers.

In the hours of that golden afternoon, as the light from the window softened the stem planes of her face, Ayn spoke of Frank with love and longing and despair. "After he died," she said, "I couldn't write at all, not for a long time, I wasn't motivated to do anything... Then I realized that I needed to do something that would be only for my own personal pleasure, something purposeful that I would do only because I enjoyed it. So I've begun taking lessons in mathematics. I have a private tutor who comes once a week to teach me algebra. It's wonderful! He can't believe how quickly I'm learning — he said he's never seen anyone move so swiftly. And it leads me in fascinating philosophical directions — there are so many intriguing connections between algebra and philosophy."

I listened to her, astounded, as she had always had the power to astound me. At the age of seventy-six, her concept of personal pleasure, of an exciting new activity, was to study algebra and to define its relationship to metaphysics and epistemology.

She spoke of politics — she disapproved of Ronald Reagan, whom she considered a typical conservative in his attempt to link politics and religion; she had refused to vote for him. She spoke of the activities she was engaged in and the work she was doing. She told me whom she saw and whom she no longer saw, and we gossiped cheerfully about old friends. We talked politics and philosophy and aesthetics — and it was not 1981, it was 1950, we were young and the world was young, and the glow of ideas outshone the sun.

When I rose to leave long after dusk — we would see each other again, we agreed, on my next visit to New York — we were both solemn, wondering when our next meeting would be... or if it would be. At the door, she blew me a final kiss, as she used to do when we parted, and I blew her a kiss in return. It was the last time I ever saw Ayn Rand.

Walking back to my hotel, I thought of the people, through the years, who had said to me, "How could you have stayed with Ayn all those years? How could you have allowed yourself to be a party to her affair with Nathaniel? How could you have been willing to endure all the pain of so many years? I would never have done it." I understood their perspective, but each time I heard the comment, I had thought, No, you would not have done it. The moments of joy and the passionate engagement, the struggle for the highest possible, would not have been worth their cost in agony. But they were worth it to me.

It was a few months later that I wrote Ayn to tell her I was planning to write her biography. I wanted her to learn it from me, and to understand my reasons. Knowing she always procrastinated about letter-writing, I was not surprised when weeks went by without a response. Finally, I telephoned — but she refused to speak to me. I was certain that her refusal must stem from anger at the prospect of my writing her biography. But many months later, I happened to be speaking to an acquaintance who had a business relationship with Ayn. "Ayn was in the office to talk about a business matter," he told me. "And she said, 'Barbara was in New York a while ago. We spent a day together. She's going to write my biography.' She said it perfectly calmly, there was no anger in her voice or manner — and then we went back to our discussion." I can only assume that if anger was her initial reaction, her attitude later changed.

In the summer of 1981, Ayn received an invitation that was to bring her, at last, a value from the outside world that was in her terms.

At the age of eighteen, James U. Blanchard — later founder and Chairman of the National Committee for Monetary Reform, an organization dedicated to the reestablishment of a gold standard and to educating the American public in the benefits of free market economics — was severely injured in an automobile accident. One afternoon, as he sat listlessly on the front porch of his home, a friend approached, tossed a book on his lap, and said, "You'll really like this." The book was Anthem.

"After I read it," Jim recalled, "I read all her other books nonstop. I got The Objectivist Newsletter and started reading everything it recommended. I became particularly interested in economics, especially the Austrian School, and from that came my interest in investments and later in monetary reform — and from that came financial success... Her work gave me a context within which to structure my life and make decisions — it gave me the sense of a consistent foundation on which I could build. That little book that was thrown on my lap changed my whole life."

In November of 1981, NCMR was to hold its annual conference in New Orleans for businessmen, bankers, financial consultants, entrepreneurs, investors, industrialists, economists, mutual-fund managers, and others in the financial world. Among the speakers would be Louis Rukeyser, Paul Erdman, Adam Smith, Harry Browne, Douglas R. Casey, Harry Schultz, and Howard Ruff.

"I wanted Ayn Rand to be our featured speaker," Jim said. "But I had been asking her to appear for about four years, thinking that the romance of talking to all these millionaires would reach her; there was never an answer to my letters. I began thinking how I might really excite her and convince her to come. I knew that the offer of a considerable fee wouldn't do it. Then I remembered her interest in the railroad industry and in trains — and I wrote again, saying that I would arrange for her to travel to New Orleans in a private rail car, with a butler and a gourmet chef. She accepted. Leonard Peikoff and Cynthia, his wife-to-be, were to join her. And then I faced the problem of finding a private car! I called around desperately for days, until I located Ray Thorpe, president of the Private Rail Car Association. When I told him what I wanted he said, 'Fantastic! Ayn Rand changed my whole life, I love her books. I'll give her my own private car and my personal chef. Ask her for a list of her favorite foods, so the chef can prepare them.'

"It was a marvelous car," Jim continued. "It looked like it was built in the nineteenth century, very ornate, with two private bedrooms and a formal dining area. We stocked it with everything she liked best, and added champagne and caviar. I knew she hadn't been anywhere or done anything for a long time; I wanted her to have the fun of the train ride, and to be where she would be appreciated and would see how many people she had affected — I had a feeling she didn't realize the depth of her influence."

Ayn did not realize the depth of her influence. Her reclusive life and her disinterest in the world outside her doors had prevented her from learning that her ideas were fast becoming a respected and astonishingly potent part of the culture of which she had despaired — that Objectivism was taught in high school and university classrooms across the country, that books and scholarly articles expounding aspects of her philosophy were pouring out of the presses in a growing stream, that men and woman influential in government, in the arts, in the sciences, in industry and finance were carrying her standard because it was their own. Tragically, when she was reaching the pinnacle of the success for which she had yearned, when the voices she had sought were, at last, speaking for her — she was no longer listening.

Ayn arrived in New Orleans after a two-and-a-half-day journey, to be met by Jim and the limousine that would take her to and from her hotel suite. Her eyes were glowing. The trip had been hard, the road-bed rocky, but she had loved the sense of living in the pages of Atlas Shrugged, of riding in the same kind of railroad car as Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden had done.

Jim held a small party for Ayn the evening before her appearance. Among the guests was economic writer Douglas Casey. Doug was to say, "She was very charming and gracious — although it was obvious she would not brook contradiction. I had picked up The Virtue of Selfishness when I was about twenty-two; I read the first page — then I had to put it down: I could not believe it — it wasn't possible that someone was saying these things. Then I read all of her books. I couldn't accept everything, I had to find my own path, but I agree with all her basic values. She's one of the great geniuses of modern history."

More than four thousand people, representing every geographical area in the country and many overseas areas, attended Ayn's speech. "When she got up on the stage," Jim would recall, "she came alive, she was so vibrant even though she was in ill health. The audience got to its feet and gave her a standing ovation — and her speech was constantly interrupted by applause. They loved her."

Ayn's talk, entitled "The Sanction of the Victim," was a tour de force. Its theme was that the producers, who carry the world on their shoulders and keep it alive, are being destroyed by their acceptance of the morality of altruism. They accept all the insults and accusations of materialism hurled against them, instead of proudly asserting their moral right to the profits they earn. "The greatest thrill," Jim said, "was that she announced publically for the first time that she was writing a miniseries script for Atlas, and that there was a strong possibility that she would be looking for outside financing to produce it."

The speech ended with a quote from John Galt:

"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

"But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."

The applause was an unending outburst of gratitude and love from members of a group that had never before received a moral sanction. Ayn stood, thunderstruck, listening to the wild cheering as the audience leaped to its feet. She had not imagined the extent of her power nor expected the tide of passionate admiration that flowed to her from the audience.

"The question-and-answer period was thrilling," Jim said. "She was razor-sharp. When it was over, lines of people crowded around her, wanting to know where they could sign up to invest in the project... Did you know that my wife, Jackie, and I named our son 'Anthem'? We told Ayn about it, and she autographed the copy of the book I had originally read, for my son... I really loved her."

In his Dow Theory Letters of December 3, Richard Russell, who had attended the conference, wrote: "Had an interesting conversation with guest of honor, Ayn Rand... We talked about age (she's in her 70's), and the necessity of having intense interests. She said she would love to see the year 2000. I replied that I had made a study of people who live to be over 100, and I was convinced that she'd make it. She seemed pleased at the prospect."

She was not to make it. By the time the train brought Ayn back to New York, not even her excitement over her triumph could continue to feed energy to her body. She was desperately ill. Her face was gashed with new lines, she moved with enormous effort, her voice was raspy, as if not enough breath were being fed to it.

It was soon evident that her path led downhill. From December through January of 1982, she grew weaker and more frail. In February, she was hospitalized with cardiopulmonary problems. Leonard was with her constantly, knowing she had only a short time to live.

Ayn faced death as she had faced life. Death was a fact of reality. Facts had never frightened her; they did not frighten her now. She was scheduled to give her annual Ford Hall Forum talk in April; when she realized it would be impossible, she asked Leonard to give the talk she had prepared. Her work on the teleplay of Atlas was only one-fourth completed; she told Leonard to do whatever was possible to have it finished and produced. She had been planning a new collection of essays, Philosophy: Who Needs It; she had not completed the choice of articles to be included; she asked Leonard to complete it. She specified the arrangements she wished made for her funeral.

She had often quoted the saying: "It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end." Her world was coming to its end.

Early in March, Ayn said, "I want to go home. I want to die at home." Nothing more could be done for her, and the doctors agreed. She returned, with her nurses, to the apartment where she had lived with Frank. She was not in pain, but she grew progressively weaker as her valiant heart began to fail.

On the evening of March 5, Mimi Sutton telephoned. "The doctor had told me how sick she was, and I wanted to speak to her once more. I don't know if she fully understood, but I said, 'Ayn, I love you"'

The morning of March 6, the nurse telephoned Leonard to come at once. He arrived moments too late. Ayn Rand was dead.

The New York Times wrote: "Ayn Rand's body lay next to the symbol she had adopted as her own — a six-foot dollar sign. Outside the funeral home, her followers, some in jeans and some in furs, stood in the cold waiting to pay her tribute.

"From 7 to 9 o'clock Monday night, 800 admirers of the novelist and philosopher passed through the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home at Madison Avenue and 81st Street. Some wept as they spoke of her in hushed tones, and some glowed as they described how she had changed their lives.

"Those who came to the funeral home to pay their respects reflected Miss Rand's influence in political, economic and intellectual spheres. They included Alan Greenspan, chairman of President Ford's Council of Economic Advisers; Robert M. Bleiberg, editorial director of Barron's magazine; many of the leaders of the Libertarian Party, and professors of philosophy, business management and psychology at schools from Vassar College to York University in Toronto."

Ayn's body lay in an open coffin. Her gold wedding ring was on her finger, where it had been since Frank had placed it there on an April day in 1929. On her breast was a photograph of Frank, to be buried with her. The sounds of music sang through the flower-filled room as the mourners filed by the coffin. It was not a heroic symphony but the music she loved much better. It was her tiddlywink music that was ushering her out of life, as it had ushered her into life from a park bandstand in the Crimea.

As word of Ayn's death spread, it was announced on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. In their reports, she was given at last the title she had most cherished: "Ayn Rand, novelist-philosopher." Throughout America and in cities dotted across the map from Canada to India to Israel, groups of her admirers held memorials on college campuses, in private homes, in parks and in rented halls. They spoke of their love for Ayn Rand, and their grief, they spoke of her achievements and of the inestimable gifts they had received from those achievements.

The private burial was held in Valhalla. Two hundred people stood on a rolling hill by the graveside as huge snowflakes drifted down to cover the earth and the coffin and the bare white branches of trees. Kipling's "If" was read, as it had been read for Frank. As the coffin was slowly lowered to take its place beside Frank's, each of the mourners dropped a flower on the casket.

I visited Ayn and Frank's graves a year later, on a brilliant summer day. I stood on the same rolling hill, now green and softly glowing. Two pale gray stones stood side by side, joined in the back by a narrower strip of stone, near a maple tree and the swaying leaves of a weeping willow. On one stone is engraved: FRANK O'CONNOR, 1897-1979; on the other: AYN RAND O'CONNOR, 1905-1982. "

As I stood remembering, I thought that I had often grieved for Ayn's unhappiness in her last years. And yet, was grief appropriate? In the life of Ayn Rand, I had seen something I had never seen before nor ever heard or read of. Ayn had begun life with a single passionate goal — to create her ideal world and her ideal man. And at the end of her life — despite the odds against her, despite the pain and the losses, despite illness and anguish and death — it was done. Perhaps it is for the rest of mankind that one should grieve.

I stood by the weeping willow and I thought how fitting it would be if the legends of Valhalla were true. Ayn would travel to the paradise of the brave, the paradise assigned to heroes slain in battle. Eight guards would rise to salute her and to escort her on her new journey. But they would not be the guards of the legends. They would be Cyrus, and Enjolras, and Leo, and Frank, and Howard Roark and Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia and John Galt. Ayn had fought for Valhalla — for Atlantis — all of her life, and now she would enter its gates.

Weeping, I remembered what she had said at the conclusion of the interviews I had done with her in 1961. "It's a benevolent universe, and I love it, and any struggle was worth it. Struggle or unhappiness are so enormously unimportant. I don't regret a minute of my life."

PART VI

EPILOGUE

Chapter Thirty-Three

A young black girl, brought up in the American South, joined the Peace Corps in the sixties. Wandering through a rummage shop in Kampala, Uganda, she noticed an old battered copy of a novel entitled Atlas Shrugged. "By the time my Peace Corps tour ended," she later said, "I had undergone the loneliest, most inspiring, and heartrending psycho-intellectual transformation, and all my plans upon returning to the United States had changed." Anne Wortham is now Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The most significant consequence of Ayn Rand's influence in terms of Anne's intellectual output is her book, The Other Side of Racism — a denunciation of coercive egalitarianism and a clarion call to individualism in race relations. In her introductory courses on sociology, The Fountainhead is a text, and has elicited, in enthusiastic student papers, such comments as, "I have already recommended this novel to others and I only hope that they benefit as I did from Rand's insight into man's potential" — and, "The exaltation of man's great ability to achieve and succeed gave me an impetus to improve myself, for myself" and, "The Fountainhead is a monument to the splendor of the ability of men to reason, think, create, build, achieve, and succeed."

Through her teaching and her writings of books and articles in academic journals, Anne Wortham is presenting a new and individualistic view of sociology and a new and individualistic perspective on the black experience. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

An admirer of The Fountainhead, at the threshold of his career as a psychologist, met Ayn Rand in 1950. He began the concentrated study of her ideas and their application to his own field. Today, Nathaniel Branden is a pioneer in the field of self-esteem; among his books are The Psychology of Self-Esteem, The Disowned Self The Psychology of Romantic Love, and Honoring the Self As director of the Biocentric Institute in Los Angeles, he offers workshops in major American cities in self-esteem enhancement, man/woman relationships, and personal transformation.

"Intellectually," Nathaniel said, "I learned more from Ayn Rand than I can possibly summarize. She used to love to say 'check your premises and watch your implications' I really learned that from her, both with regard to my own thinking and statements and those of other people. In other words, I feel she sharpened enormously my ability to think philosophically. Notwithstanding important areas of disagreement between us, I am generally very much in accord with the broad fundamentals of her philosophical perspective, and naturally that influences my own work. I recall that a neurophysiologist once said of Atlas Shrugged, 'This book was written by a great biologist.' I definitely learned what I have come to call the biocentric approach, at a very deep philosophical level, from Ayn... She was a genius. She had provocative and innovative ideas in virtually every sphere of philosophy, from epistemology to aesthetics. I think the creativity of her countless insights will go on being discovered and appreciated and new for a very long time." Readers of Nathaniel's books and participants in his workshops have been and continue to be introduced to the metaphysical, moral, and political ideas of Objectivism through his work. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

An Alaskan legislator switched his allegiance from Republican to Libertarian and was reelected in 1978. During his years in office, Dick Randolph, along with Libertarian legislator Kenneth Fanning, fought for the deregulation of transportation and the privatization of government land, and successfully initiated a program by which royalties from mineral rights are distributed to Alaskans in the amount of four hundred million dollars a year. In 1982, at the request of Dick Randolph and four other representatives, the Alaskan Legislature issued a Citation in memoriam to Ayn Rand: "Controversial, brilliant, and talented, Ayn Rand's impress upon the American literary and political scene was poignant and indelible. She was standard-bearer for those fortunate ones who already believed that all change, progress, innovation and creativity lie within the individual, and mentor and educator for those who only dimly suspected that collectivism was never the blueprint of nature. Only after she had dared to celebrate self-esteem and competition in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead did lagging social engineers and experts on human nature begin to recognize the necessary art of 'selfishness' and redefine it as success... America had no more forceful voice for freedom... "The citation was signed by the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate. "Without Ayn Rand's influence, I would not be in office," Dick Randolph said. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

A twenty-four-year-old woman, who termed herself "a traditional housewife," read Atlas Shrugged and enrolled in NBI's lectures in New York. Today, Jacquelyn Reinach is a writer, composer, and entrepreneur; she is the author of Sweet Pickles, a series of children's books which have sold more than sixty million copies. "Dagny Taggart was an inspiration to me; she is a great feminist role model," Jackie said. "Ayn Rand's works gave me the courage to be and to do what I had dreamed of."

In 1963, a Czechoslovakian professor of physics defected to the United States. It was a difficult, painful decision; he was tormented by guilt, believing that because his former government had "provided" him with an education, he had a moral duty to return the fruits of that gift — until he read the works of Ayn Rand and understood that there can be no unchosen obligations. Today, Petr Beckmann, Professor Emeritus of the University of Colorado, publishes Access To Energy, a newsletter devoted to a rational, fact-based energy policy, and is the author of The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear

A Canadian premedical student met Ayn Rand and began reading her works. Leonard Peikoff switched his major from medicine to philosophy, moved to New York to study with Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, earned his PhD in philosophy, and is today the heir to and an executor of Ayn's literary estate. In 1982, Stein and Day published his book, The Ominous Parallels, in which he maintains that the deepest roots of Nazism lie in three philosophic ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice, and the elevation of society above the individual. Most recently, he has organized The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, whose purpose is to help the spread of Objectivism to schools and colleges, to businessmen and to the general public.

A businessman began reading Atlas Shrugged, and "Within a few hundred pages I sensed clearly that I had ventured upon a lifetime of meaning. The philosophy of Ayn Rand nurtured growth, stability and integrity in my life. Her ideas permeated every aspect of my business, family and creative life." In 1973, in order to translate for his two young children the sense of life presented by Ayn Rand, O. Terry Nelson wrote The Girl Who Owned a City, an exciting story of a group of youngsters suddenly forced to survive in a world without adults; they are led by a heroic thirteen-year-old girl who organizes a new society based on reason and individualism. The novel has sold more than one hundred thousand copies, and is assigned to students in a number of schools across the country. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

A recent law school graduate read Atlas Shrugged and soon afterward met Ayn Rand, becoming her attorney for matters pertaining to Objectivism. "Dealing with Ayn Rand," he has said, "was like taking a post-doctoral course in mental functioning. The universe she created in her work holds out hope, and appeals to the best in man. Her lucidity and brilliance was a light so strong I don't think anything will ever be able to put it out." Today, Henry Mark Holzer is a constitutional lawyer and professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. He is the author of The Gold Clause, Government's Money Monopoly; and the recent Sweet Land of Liberty? The Supreme Court and Individual Rights, an examination of the Court's consistent violation of individual rights in both the economic and social spheres. He co-represented teenage Walter Polovchak, "the littlest defector," seeking to prevent his forcible return to the Soviet Union, and also the 1985 Ukrainian defector, seaman Minoslav Medvid. In 1968, he purchased the Italian film version of We the Living, which Ayn edited before her death, and a subtitled version will be released in 1986. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

A young economist met Ayn and became a member of her "class of '43." Today, Alan Greenspan is one of the country's most prominent economists, adviser to three presidential administrations, and a member of the board of directors of major American corporations. He said, "At the time I met Ayn Rand in my mid-twenties, I had already developed a strong admiration for the efficiency of free-market capitalist economics. She demonstrated to me, however, that not only was laissez-faire capitalism an efficient and productive system, but was also the only system consistent with political freedom. By confronting issues I had never previously encountered, a whole new view of society was opened to me. Ayn Rand was, therefore, instrumental in significantly broadening the scope of my thinking and was clearly a major contributor to my intellectual development, for which I remain profoundly grateful to this day."

It was in 1981 that the New York Times noted, "If there is a novelist with unusual appeal among the Reagan organization, it is Ayn Rand, proponent of enlightened self-interest. Some of Reagan's closest advisors, including his director of domestic policy, Martin Anderson, sat at her feet when they were fledgling disciples and a Reagan Presidency just a gleam in the eye of G.B. Theater's host." David R. Henderson, former senior economist on Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, has said, "Ayn Rand got me thinking about what kind of political system is proper for an autonomous human being to live in, and my thinking about that led me to become an economist. She helped me, perhaps more than anyone else, to live my life." Another among the men and women influenced by Ayn Rand who serve in the Administration is Kathryn Eickhoff, a former student of Nathaniel Branden Institute and Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

A refugee from Budapest, Hungary, smuggled to freedom in 1953, ultimately made his way to the United States. He was introduced to Ayn Rand's work and later became a professor of philosophy at several American universities. Tibor Machan is one of the most dedicated of philosophical fighters for many of the ideas of Ayn Rand, most particularly in the areas of morality and political philosophy. He is senior editor of Reason, senior Fellow of the Reason Foundation, and has written for numerous philosophical journals, magazines and newspapers. He is the editor of The Libertarian Alternative, a book of essays by contemporary defenders of libertarianism containing a comprehensive overview of libertarian thought on freedom and justice; and is at present editing The Main Debate; Capitalism versus Communism, soon to be published by Random House. The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

The publisher and editorial director of one of the nation's most respected and influential financial weeklies read Atlas Shrugged shortly after its publication. "I couldn't put it down," said Robert Bleiberg of Barron's. "It was filling in great gaps in my economic theories and presenting a totally new philosophy. I'm in very substantial agreement with Ayn Rand; all the years have done is to confirm the wisdom of her ideas." Robert Bleiberg became friendly with Ayn, and began the occasional publication of her articles in his magazine, as well as publication of articles and editorials by Alan Greenspan and many others who had been influenced by Objectivism, a practice which he continues to this day. In 1984, Barron's republished Ayn's article on "The Morality of Capitalism," which first appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter in 1965. "She has had an enormous influence on the country," Robert Bleiberg said. "She deserves a great deal of the credit for the fact that we are beginning to get out of the statist muddle of the last decades. The intellectual ferment among defenders of freedom and capitalism over the past ten years or so, the remarkable upsurge, in theory and in practice, of freedom-oriented ideas — the fact that we have a President who cares about the free market — are staggering, and much of it is owing to Ayn Rand. To have arrived at where we are today is an astonishing intellectual voyage — and we have not yet seen the end of it; her influence continues to grow."

On the bookshelves in Robert Bleiberg's office, beside bound volumes of The Wall Street Journal, stand bound volumes of The Objectivist. "To the extent that I have had an influence," he said, "then so has Ayn!" The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

A homemaker, married and the mother of three children, read the works of Ayn Rand and decided to return to school and complete her education, despite she heavy responsibilities involved. "My own move toward independence and liberation," she wrote in the Journal of College English, in an article entitled "Ayn Rand and Feminism: An Unlikely Alliance," "had been inspired by a popular novel. Pre-Friedan and pre-Millet, nascent feminism had been nurtured by the reading of Atlas Shrugged... The neurotic, manipulated, or exploited female continues to be the mainstay of American fiction... [But Rand's] novel has a protagonist who is a good example of a woman who is active, assertive, successful, and still retains the love and sexual admiration of three heroic men." Today, Mimi Gladstein is a literature professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and author of the recent The Ayn Rand Companion. She had an opportunity to witness the effects of the character of Dagny Taggart on the young women students in her course, "Women in Fiction." "The course was very well attended," Mimi said, "and very depressing. In the world's great literature, women are either virtuous — which means passive, uninteresting, and unmotivated — or they are immoral — which means active, colorful, passionate... and doomed to defeat. I saw that my students were becoming more and more upset by this view of women's two possibilities, an alternative that no modem young woman could find acceptable — but I had found no other to offer them. And then it occurred to me to assign and discuss the character of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. My students were ecstatic. Here, at last, was a woman they could admire and emulate, a woman who was both immensely effective and successful in the world, and intensely feminine. They responded with an excitement and pleasure that was gratifying to see. I felt as if I'd given them a treasured gift."

Despite the fact that Ayn Rand has been roundly attacked in the pages of Ms. — and was herself opposed to the feminist movement, focusing on the collectivist orientation of much of that movement — many feminists have found a source of inspiration in her presentation of an heroic woman who renounces neither career nor love, and in her rejection of the view of women as properly being objects of sacrifice in the name of children, family, and society. In an interview in Playboy, tennis champion Billie Jean King discussed the effects on her of Atlas Shrugged, which she read in 1972: "'The book really turned me around, because, at the time, I was going through a bad period in tennis and thinking about quitting. People were constantly calling me and making me feel rotten if I didn't play in their tournament or help them out. I realized then that people were beginning to use my strength as a weakness — that they were using me as a pawn to help their own ends and if I wasn't careful, I'd end up losing myself. So, like Dagny Taggart, I had to learn how to be selfish, although selfish has the wrong connotation. As I see it, being selfish is really doing your own thing. Now I know that if I can make myself happy, I can make other people happy — and if that's being selfish, so be it. That's what I am.'"

A young man appeared at the offices of Nathaniel Branden Institute one day to sign up for courses and to seek — and find — work on NBI's staff. Robert Hessen, today a historian and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, is the author of Steel Titan: The Life of Charles Schwab; In Defense of the Corporation; and most recently he has edited and written an introduction to Berlin Alert: The Memoirs and Reports of Truman Smith, which has attracted major news stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Robert Hessen has said, "There were lots of defenses of capitalism versus socialism when Atlas Shrugged came out in the 1950s, but they were mostly 'bathtub economics' — you know, capitalism is superior because it's more efficient, and it makes bigger and better bathtubs than the Soviet system. Ayn Rand provided a moral defense that had an electrifying effect on people who had never heard capitalism defended in other than technological terms. She made it clear that a free society is also a productive society, but what matters is individual freedom."

"After you read Atlas Shrugged," a young woman concluded, "you don't look at the world with the same perspective." Jennifer Roback is today Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale, a radio commentator and contributor to Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, the scholarly Regulation and the Chicago Law Review, as well as columnist for Business Times. In her courses at Yale on "Economics and Individualism," she includes readings from Ayn Rand.

A politically liberal professor of philosophy listened to a speech given by Ayn Rand, spent the rest of the day talking with her, and began to visit her regularly to discuss political philosophy, morality, and epistemology. In 1971, when a small group of people, disillusioned with the Republican Party, met in Denver to form the Libertarian Party, John Hospers wrote the statement of principles which was adopted unanimously and to roars of approval — a statement of Ayn Rand's principles of man's moral right to freedom, to self-interest, to the unfettered pursuit of his goals, and rejection of the use of physical force except in retaliation against the initiation of force. In 1972, John Hospers became the first presidential candidate of the new party — a party that in a few years would appear on the ballot in fifty states, win more than a million votes, and become the third largest political party in the United States. In an extraordinary break with historical precedent, he, along with his running mate Tonie Nathan — whose interest in libertarianism was created by her reading of Ayn Rand — received a vote in the Electoral College; Tonie Nathan thus became the first woman ever to receive an Electoral College vote. It was cast by college member Roger McBride, then a Republican and later the second Libertarian presidential candidate.

Today, John Hospers is an internationally respected philosopher, professor at USC, author of a number of important books on philosophy and aesthetics and of the first major work on the Objectivist-oriented philosophy of freedom, Libertarianism. He is president of The American Society of Aesthetics, and editor of one of the oldest and most respected journals of philosophy, The Monist; in scholarly journals he has edited over the last twenty years, he has arranged for the publication of numerous articles on aspects of Ayn's philosophy, firmly entrenching her name and importance in the philosophical literature.

John Hospers has said, "Ayn Rand was one of the most original thinkers I have ever met. There is no escape from facing the issues she raised... At a time in my life when I thought I had learned at least the essentials of most philosophical views, being confronted with her, and having the privilege of extended discussions with her over a period of several years, suddenly changed the entire direction of my intellectual life, and placed every other thinker in a new perspective. Whatever subject one discusses thenceforth, one always has to take account of Ayn Rand."

In the years since its inception, the Libertarian Party has been racked by internal conflict between the Objectivist-oriented defenders of limited government and a strong defense posture, and the "anarcho-capitalists" led by noted economist and writer Murray Rothbard, a former student of Ludwig von Mises and a student in the first courses offered by Nathaniel Branden Institute. Though disagreeing with Ayn Rand's key concept of limited government, Murray Rothbard has stated that he "is in agreement basically with all her philosophy," and that it was she who convinced him of the theory of natural rights which his books uphold. In the opinion of many people, the anarchist wing has deeply undermined the effectiveness of the Libertarian Party in recent years. That wing was the particular source of Ayn Rand's indignant repudiation of the party that had been formed in the image of her political philosophy. But her influence in the party still is strong. Ed Clark, 1980 Libertarian presidential candidate and deputy general counsel at Atlantic Richfield, has said "I became involved in libertarian activities as a result of reading Ayn Rand. She was a great novelist, who had a profound effect on me and on hundreds of thousands of Americans. Her ideas are one of the most important streams of thought slowing down the march of collectivism in the Western world."

More important and more influential than the party, which necessarily deals only with narrow and specific political issues, is the wider and rapidly growing worldwide libertarian movement, unaffiliated with the party and concerned with fundamental issues of political philosophy. In recent years, it has had a powerful effect on the nation's discussions of the rights and sanctity of the individual, on the manner in which businessmen and entrepreneurs are viewed, on the new acceptance of the profit motive as a beneficent economic force; it has popularized such issues as the concept of victimless crimes, of deregulation of industry, of restitution for victims of crimes. "Without Ayn Rand," said David Nolan, the original founder of the Libertarian Party, "the libertarian movement would not exist."

In recent years, a number of effective magazines and journals with a libertarian orientation have sprung up, spearheaded by Reason, the best-known, most intellectually consistent and most influential of the libertarian magazines.

Reason — its subtitle is Free Minds and Free Markets — has grown rapidly since its modest beginnings in 1968. Founded by commercial artist Lanny Friedlander, it was purchased in 1969 by attorney Manny Klausner, philosopher Tibor Machan, and engineer Robert W. Poole. Its subscriptions — four hundred in 1970 — now exceed forty thousand copies monthly, and it is beginning to appear on newsstands in major American cities. Among its contributors are Nobel Laureates Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, free-market economist Thomas Sowell, financial writer Howard Ruff; among its regular contributing editors are a former Reagan speechwriter, a prominent financial analyst, a syndicated literary critic, nationally known economists and philosophers; foreign correspondents contribute from countries around the world. Reason's cover story on military testing was presented on "60 Minutes," its article on private fire departments caught the attention of both Newsweek and the ABC nightly news; its discovery of the misuse of funds in Cesar Chavez's farm workers' union was picked up by ABC's "20-20." Excerpts from its articles regularly appear in magazines and newspapers throughout the country.

Reason — as its title and subtitle indicate — was consciously founded on the principles of Objectivism. Robert Poole, its editor and publisher, has said, "By the way we select articles and deal with issues, we try to imply a rational, clear-thinking approach that is consistent with individual rights, private property, and free markets and so forth — the same political and social principles that Ayn Rand advocated... My basic philosophical view of the world was shaped by Rand's thinking. From her I learned the passion for ideas, the appreciation of the power of ideas to change things. It helped give me the idea for what I'm doing now — running a publication and an organization that is trying to change the course of events."

A significant force in attempting to change the course of events is the Reason Foundation. On its advisory board are professors from UCLA, the University of Colorado, the University of Victoria, Pace University, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Rochester, Johns Hopkins University, USC, Tulane University, the University of Chicago, George Mason University, Princeton University — as well as representatives of the Hoover Institution, The Center for Political Economy, and the Heritage Foundation. One of its primary objectives is to encourage and to disseminate information about the privatization of public services and to provide documentation on the thousands of public services that have been privatized; the New York Times acknowledged the Reason Foundation as a "citadel" of information on this subject. "It is no longer possible," said Robert Poole, "to shoot down a privatization proposal by attacking it as an untried idea." Unique among free-market think tanks, the foundation continues to work on the theoretical underpinnings of a free society. In 1983, it initiated an Adjunct Fellows program, assisting promising young academics with their careers, and brought together scholars from diverse fields for a conference on the moral arguments against the welfare state.

The fountainhead is Ayn Rand.

Other free market foundations and organizations devoted to the principles of liberty have sprung up as a direct result of the ideas of Ayn Rand. One of the most influential is the Society for Individual Liberty, a nationwide educational and activist group founded in 1969. Its directors and co-founders, Don Ernsberger and Dave Walter, have said, "SIL is primarily based upon Objectivist principles, and the basic works of Rand continue to be the most powerful influence on our membership."

Another is South Africa's Free Market Foundation, headed by Leon Louw, formed in 1965 by six young libertarians. Its purpose is to provide the intellectual leadership that will challenge the many South African laws that restrict the freedom of both blacks and whites. Leon Louw reported, "Recently, the stature of the foundation was considerably enhanced when 30 prominent South Africans became patrons... drawn largely from the business world but also including trade union, consumer, and public service leaders... Another example of the new free market trends in southern Africa is that autonomous and semi-autonomous pro-free market associations have been or are being formed by local enthusiasts. These include the Soweto Committee for Economic Freedom (largely black members), the Cape Flats Free Enterprise Association (colored people, i.e., mixed blood...)."

In many pro-freedom foundations and organizations that did not arise out of the ideas of Ayn Rand, one nevertheless finds individuals in policy-making positions who have been influenced by her philosophy. They include the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Canada's Fraser Institute, Cato Institute, and the Institute for Humane Studies. "Miss Rand was widely credited with influencing most of the current leaders of the libertarian moment in the United States," wrote the New York Times in 1982.

In the past two decades, bookstores have opened up in the United States and other countries which specialize in pro-freedom literature and particularly feature the books of Ayn Rand. Among them are New York's Laissez-Faire Books, the world's largest seller of books on liberty, Palo Alto Books in California, Second Renaissance Books in Toronto, The Alternative Bookstore in London, Free Forum Books in San Francisco.

"Seated about in booths in college-town snacks shops," wrote John Chamberlain in The Wall Street Journal in 1961, "the young Randites talk about their intellectual leader as their fathers and mothers a generation ago talked about Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes, or Thorstein Veblen... And it is normally a matter of two decades before the young take over the seats of power in the name of what they have learned to believe 20 years ago."

More than twenty years have passed. A new generation sits in college-town snack shops and talks excitedly of their discovery of Ayn Rand, whose books continue to sell half a million copies each year. And the generation that talked of Ayn Rand in 1961 now teaches in the universities, sits on boards of directors, writes speeches for Ronald Reagan, composes and plays the music to which we tap our feet, produces and acts in motion pictures and television, directs publishing houses, advises government officials, produces scholarly works on philosophy, on aesthetics, on morality, on psychology, runs giant corporations and small businesses, writes novels and paints pictures — influenced, in varying degrees and aspects by the ideas of a small Russian woman with a giant brain and a passionately intransigent will.

In the universities — in addition to the above-mentioned Anne Wortham of Harvard, John Hospers of USC, Jennifer Robackof Yale, Henry Mark Holzer of Brooklyn Law School, Tibor Machan of Auburn, and Mimi Gladstein of the University of Texas — their names are Lester Hunt, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; Dean Ahmed, professor of astrophysics at the University of Maryland; John V. Cody, professor of classics at Northwestern University; Graham Chalmers, mathematician at California State University in Long Beach; Allen Gotthelf, Aristotelian scholar; Jack High, professor of economics at George Mason University; Edwin Locke, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland; Eric Mack, professor of philosophy at Tulane University and former Visiting Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard; Jeffrey Paul, professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and Associate Director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center; Tom Nagel, professor of marketing at Boston University; John 0. Nelson, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado; John Ridpath, professor of economics and intellectual history at York University in Toronto; Roger Lee, philosopher in the Department of Education at California State University; Joe Kalt, professor of economics at Harvard University; Fred Miller, professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University; Devon Shawley, head of the physics department at Cypress College; Harry Watson, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago; George Walsh, professor of philosophy at Salisbury State College; and Bruce Dovner, professor of mathematics at California State University. Douglas Rasmussen, professor of philosophy of St. Johns University and Douglas Den Uyl, philosopher at Bellarmine College, are the editors of the recent book The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, published by the University of Illinois Press and containing articles on aspects of Ayn Rand's ideas by a number of eminent philosophers. Among academic economists, reports Jack High of George Mason University, "most of the young economists who are 'Austrians,' [in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises] have been influenced by Ayn Rand."

This listing is only a small indication of the distinguished men and women in the academic world who have read the works of Ayn Rand — many of them once attended lectures at Nathaniel Branden Institute — and who, today, are presenting aspects of those ideas to their students. (I must stress that although some of them consider themselves to be Objectivists, by no means all of them do so; but all have felt to varying extents and in various ways the impact of the ideas of Ayn Rand and, in their work, are carrying forth that impact.) It is unlikely that there is a campus in America without, on its teaching faculty, at least one man or woman whose view of life has been deeply touched by Ayn Rand.

Books continue to issue from academic and mass market publishing houses which deal directly with the ideas of Ayn Rand and/or with concepts derived from her theories. In the scholarly journals of various disciplines, scarcely a month goes by without the appearance of an article concerning theories first defined by Ayn Rand. In the libraries of colleges and universities throughout the country may be found master’s and doctoral theses — in subjects from philosophy to art to physics — written about Objectivism by a new generation of readers. On the campuses, active Objectivist clubs are discussing the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Similar discussion groups have formed in cities across the world — in India and Pakistan and Australia and Holland and Canada and Brazil and Switzerland and Hong Kong, in Austria and Argentina and Poland, in Turkey and Denmark and France and Japan and West Germany and Belgium and Norway and South Africa, in Finland and Sweden and Scotland and Greece and England and Mexico and Israel.

Private schools have been formed which have, as one of their purposes, the educational implementation of the concept of reason and individualism promulgated by Ayn Rand. Among them are the Culbreath Schools, based in California and headed by Myrna Culbreath, which teach remedial reading to adults. "Ayn Rand gave me an intellectual framework," Myrna Culbreath said, "and a knowledge of the important philosophical questions to be asked; she particularly influenced me in the field of epistemology." Myrna is co-writer, with Sondra Marshak, of a series of successful books dealing with the "Star Trek" television series and movies; she reports that a large number of the letters she receives about her books refer to Ayn Rand. Another institution based on Objectivist principles is the Flint School, a shipboard traveling school. A third is the American Renaissance School in White Plains, New York, founded by eight college professors for high-achieving students, a "private, pro-reason, pro-capitalism, profit-making school."

A major source of Ayn Rand's conflict with society was her belief that she was being ignored by the academic world, as indeed she was during the fifties and sixties. But today, it is not only her advocates who recognize the importance of her ideas. The distinguished philosopher Robert Nozick, professor of philosophy at Harvard, defender of libertarian principles and author of the remarkable Anarchy, State and Utopia, wrote a sharply critical article entitled "On the Randian Argument" in The Personalist but said, "I have found her two major novels exciting, powerful, illuminating and thought provoking... combined with a 'sense of life' that is worthy of man... Miss Rand is an interesting thinker, worthy of attention." Professor Nozick discusses Ayn's libertarian concepts in his courses on political philosophy. Charles Murray, writer of Losing Ground, the path-breaking and controversial analysis of the failure of two decades of profligate welfare spending, first read Ayn Rand's works in high school and remains powerfully impressed with her "heroic vision of man and her accuracy and prescience regarding social issues."

Books criticizing the philosophy of Objectivism continue to appear, such as philosopher William F. O'Neill's With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy — in which, despite his disagreements with Objectivism, he concludes, "Whatever else Miss Rand may have achieved, she continues to serve as a useful intellectual catalyst in a society which frequently suffers from philosophical 'tired blood';" and Christian scholar John W. Robbins's Answer to Ayn Rand; and psychologist Albert Ellis's Is Objectivism a Religion?

In books, magazines, and newsletters on economics, finance, and politics, the influence of Ayn Rand is particularly evident. Robert Ringer, bestselling author of such works as Restoring the American Dream and publisher of the newsletter The Tortoise Report, acknowledges his debt to Ayn in helping him to construct his basic philosophy, as does Douglas Casey, economist and author of the hugely successful Crisis Investing and Strategic Investing, and James Blanchard, founder of The National Committee for Monetary Reform and publisher of Wealth magazine and Market Alert Others of a similar orientation are investment advisor Robert Prechter, publisher and editor of The Elliott Wave Theorist, investment writer Mark Tier; Daniel Rosenthal, editor of The Silver and Gold Report, who wrote, "Miss Rand is one of the people who most deserve credit for the revival of the hard-money movement. She was the philosopher who espoused personal success in an era of altruism; capitalism in an era of socialism; and Tibor Machan of Auburn;" Takashi Uratu, Japanese economist presently translating Atlas Shrugged into Japanese; Harry D. Shultz, publisher of The International Harry Shultz Letter, who recommends that his readers send copies of Ayn Rand's books, as part of the fight for freedom, to "press/pulpit/politicians/VIPs/friends/teachers;" John Pugsley, investment writer and publisher; Michael Berger, publisher of On Principle, who created and met the requirements for a self-directed degree program in Objectivism at Antioch College, thus becoming the first person to earn a degree in Objectivism.

Ayn Rand's influence extends far beyond the walls of academia, far beyond the realm of politics and political philosophy, far beyond popular books on economics. It can be found in every aspect of American life. As one looks at the vast panorama of American life, one must marvel at Ayn Rand's ability to generate a series of philosophical definitions and identifications that appear to be altering the face of America. One cannot yet estimate the precise extent of her influence; to do so would require many years of research and study — resulting one day, perhaps, in a book entitled The Biography of an Idea. Nor can one know with certainty the final results of that influence. But in the course of rather intensive investigations, I have observed her impact on every aspect of the American scene to which I have turned.

In the area of industry, a few among the titans who acknowledge her influence are Gordon McLendon, one of the four hundred wealthiest men in America, according to Forbes magazine; John Diebold of The Diebold Group, who is acknowledged as "the father of automation;" Whitney Stevens, former NBI student and chairman of the board and chief executive officer of J. P. Stevens Company; Edward Snider, principal owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, head of Spectator Corporation, and the driving force behind the founding of The Ayn Rand Institute; Jay Snider, president of the Philadelphia Flyers.

Ayn's impact can be found in executives, entrepreneurs and businessmen throughout the country — in Lillian Davison, president of Resource Retrieval, a toxic waste disposal company in New Jersey; in Ray Thorpe, president of the Private Railroad Association; in Robert Kephart, president of Kephart Communications; in Hans Hirschfeld, president of the Horizon Company of Canada; in Mike Oliver, real estate developer; in Lawrence Scott, president of Liaison Ltd.; in Rex Dante, one of the world's foremost memory experts; in Leonard Hirschfeld, marketing consultant; in Milton Engel, gold dealer; in Robert Fritts, housing developer; in Kerry O'Quinn, head of the Star Log Group and publisher of Star Log magazines and Star Log Video Tapes.

It can be found in Mike Mentzer, former Mr. America and Mr. Universe, publisher and editor-in-chief of Workout magazine; in Calvin Nash, an engineer working on nuclear power equipment; in former congressman from Texas Ron Paul, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute; in Neil Peart of the rock group Rush — one of whose songs is entitled "Anthem" and one of whose albums is dedicated to Ayn Rand — and Simon LeBon of Duran Duran; in painters Joan Mitchell Blumenthal and Daniel Green (whose early portrait of Ayn appears on the jacket of For the New Intellectual) and sculptors Jonathan Hirschfeld and Don Ventura; in actors Raquel Welch — whom Ayn was interested in for the role of Dagny Taggart — and Rock Hudson and Jill St. John and Eileen Fulton; in Gerald Rafferty, publisher of Info Books; in neurosurgeon Avner Feldman. It can be found in professional adventurer, philosopher, and writer Jack Wheeler, who, in 1985, under the auspices of Citizens for America, organized the world's first congress of anti-Soviet guerrilla leaders at Jamba, Angola — an event, according to Newsweek, that was organized without the knowledge or approval of the State Department but with "tacit" White House endorsement; in science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who has likened his political views to those of Ayn Rand and introduced a character in one of his novels called "the John Galt of the revolution;" in science fiction writer J. Neil Schulman's The Rainbow Cadenza; in Western writer Winfred Blevins and Edgar Award recipient Kay Nolte Smith; in Edith Efron, author of The News Twisters and The Apocalyptics; in novelists Ruth Beebe Hill and Erika Holzer; in computer writer Adam Smith, who names Ayn's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology as a book that inspired his work; in Ergo, a student newspaper at MIT; and in Aristos, a journal of aesthetics; in the philosophical magazine The Objectivist Forum and newsletter The Intellectual Activist; in composer-conductor George Broderick and musician Douglas Messenger; in screen and television writer Al Ramrus; in Fred Stitt, architect and writer who once worked his way across the country to New York to attend Nathaniel Branden Institute, who teaches at Berkeley's architectural school and whose recent McGraw-Hill book Designing Buildings That Work is dedicated "to my first architectural mentor, Howard Roark."

It can be found in young philosopher David Kelley, whose recent book The Evidence of the Senses is a striking and valuable addition to the field of epistemology; in prominent libertarian writer and lecturer Roy A. Childs, Jr., who has said, "For thousands of people, Atlas Shrugged became more than a novel; it became a way of viewing the world. It became a part of people's minds, and they saw the world through that book."

It can be found in Walter Wingo, U.S. Business Editor of U.S. News and World Report; in William Hernstadt, former state legislator in Nevada and television station owner; in Alan Nitikman of Citicorp's "think tank;" in Wendy McElroy, feminist writer and editor of Freedom, Feminism and the State; in George Smith, author of Atheism: The Case Against God; in Ralph Roseman, senior partner of New York's Theatre Now; in David Hayes, biographer of the Bowery Boys; in psychologists Lee Shulman and Joyce Shulman and Roger Callahan and Edith Packer and Larry Gneiting and psychiatrist Allan Blumenthal; in economist George Reisman, author of Government Against the Economy; in author Karl Hess, former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and Presidents Nixon and Ford; in John Piper, minister and professor of theology; in Walter Block of the Fraser Institute, author of Defending the Undefendable; in Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, authors of the sensationally successful Life Extension.

It can be found in disparate groups of people whose names are not publically known and may never be known: in a man who works on a crew boat ferrying scientists to the South Pole, and who observed that many of the scientists he takes to their months of isolation bring with them copies of Atlas Shrugged; in a young woman from an orthodox Jewish family who, forbidden to study Ayn Rand, stood at the window of her darkened bedroom at night to read Atlas Shrugged by the glow of a street lamp; in a professional gambler; in a young coed who said, "It was only a few weeks after I read Atlas Shrugged that I left the Church;" in a Manhattan retail executive; in a senior at Vassar writing her undergraduate thesis on Ayn Rand. It can be found in an attorney and a barmaid and a woman construction worker; in a car designer for Datsun and a political pollster and a janitor and a Lockheed designer; in a travel agent and a Jesuit priest and a ghost writer and a masseur and a teacher of dressage; in a warehouse worker and a rabbi; in actors and actresses; in athletes and a lazerist and a drama critic and a banker and a farmer and a pediatrician and a gemologist; in a film processor and a financial planner and a nuclear plant engineer and a karate instructor; in an advertising director and a child prodigy in chemistry and a photographer and a veterinarian and a telephone company supervisor. It can be found in a young man who was the source of a solemn and fruitless investigation by both the Naval Investigative Service and the FBI when there was discovered, scratched on the body of a Navy plane, the inscription, "Who is John Galt?" — and in a young teacher who said, his eyes damp, "Ayn Rand taught me that life could be a wonderful experience."

It can be found in the Literary Guild's listing of The Fountainhead, more than forty years after publication, under the title "Best Selling Library;" in a quotation from The Fountainhead, "Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision" in Disney World's Great American Experience exhibit; in the 1984 article in Vanity Fair entitled "The Fountainhead Syndrome" a discussion of the architects who are "the Roarks of the 1980s;" in the course on Objectivism given at The New School for Social Research; in the constant reruns of the movie of The Fountainhead on television and in art theaters; in a college course entitled "Heroic Humanism: A Study of the Major Novels of Ayn Rand;" in the character of Mr. Spock in the "Star Trek" television series and movies; in a television news commentator announcing with approval that "free-wheeling capitalism" is creating wealth in countries in the Far East; in the continuing interest of companies such as MOM and United Artists, of directors such as Michael Cimino, of actors such as Tom Selleck, in a movie version of Atlas Shrugged and/or a remake of The Fountainhead, and in the sale of the movie rights of Anthem to Star Log Group; in the forthcoming release of the movie of the fifty-year-old We the Living; in the high prices offered and paid for first editions of Ayn's books and letters; in the host of crossword puzzles that cannot be completed without the name of the writer of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged; in the question "What Ayn Rand novel begins with 'Who is John Galt?'" in the game of Trivial Pursuit; in bumper stickers which read, "Who is John Galt?;" in desk calendars featuring famous quotations from writers; in the constant public mentions of Ayn in such unlikely places as the popular movie of a few years ago Boys in the Band and a Simon and Garfunkel recording and the film remake of Heaven Can Wait and the movies King of Hearts and Lost in America; in the recommendation of the fast food chain Burger King, that its executives read Ayn's books; in letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines throughout the country, still dotted with comments about Ayn Rand. Ayn often said, only partly joking, that she would know her ideas were having a crucial impact on the culture when they had worked their way down from the ivory towers of the universities through popular writings and finally to mass market comic books; then she could be certain that her philosophy had become a part of the conventional wisdom. She would have been amused to learn that she has won this victory — as witness Steve Ditko, creator of the cartoon "Spider Man."

In the late 1940s, describing the success of The Fountainhead, Ayn said: "I did not know that I was predicting my own future when I described the process of Roark's success: 'It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places."' The stream has become a tidal wave, shooting out in every direction and to every continent of the world. The story of the influence of a series of novels on philosophic thought is unprecedented in literary history; it is a saga worthy of an Ayn Rand novel. It is Ayn's best statement of the power of the lone individual.

As one observes the bright sparks of thought that emanated from one mind and one ferocious will continuing to send out their lengthening rays, perhaps one can also see a small, passionately stalwart figure marching steadfastly forward into history.

63 Not all of the people discussed above, or in the pages that follow, are wholly committed to Objectivism; many have significant disagreements; but all have been powerfully affected by her work and acknowledge an intellectual debt to Ayn Rand.

Content

Barbara Branden
The passion of Ayn Rand

Introduction

PART I PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

PART II WE THE LIVING

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

PART III THE FOUNTAINHEAD

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

PART IV ATLAS SHRUGGED

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

PART V DENOUEMENT

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

PART VI EPILOGUE

Chapter Thirty-Three