Clash of Titans

by Tom Pratt

  The scene closes with Rearden attempting to withdraw to a window looking out at the glow of his mills, when a guest, Paul Larkin, fellow businessman, who has heard the whole thing tells him he shouldn’t have given the money. Lillian chimes in climactically:

  Then Lillian’s voice came, cold and gay: “But you’re wrong, Paul, you’re so wrong! What would happen to Henry’s vanity if he didn’t have us to throw alms to? What would become of his strength if he didn’t have weaker people to dominate? What would he do with himself if he didn’t keep us around as dependents? It’s quite all right, really, I’m not criticizing him, it’s just a law of human nature.” She took the metal bracelet and held it up, letting it glitter in the lamplight. “A chain,” she said. “Appropriate, isn’t it? It’s the chain by which he holds us all in bondage.” (p. 43)

  The “chain” makes its next appearance at the soire Lillian had been planning three months later. Once again the room is full of aristocrats of society and business and government she has invited to impress them all with her wealth, contacts, genius for party planning, and in many ways her ability to control Henry and show him off to his evident chagrin. She wears it, in contrast to a gaudy display of excess jewelry—a trait not normally associated with her sedate style—on her bare arm, as if to make it appear especially cheap and tinny by comparison to what she can obviously afford. This will become a source of conversation and eventually of confrontation with Dagny, who offers to take the piece from her and wear it proudly (this event to which we have referred above). The significance is that Dagny knows very well what the piece of Rearden Metal actually represents in value to herself and to Hank, a factor in their personal and business relationship. It prompts a later furtive exchange of apology and regret, that is really not regret for the thing itself but for the circumstance that prompted it. Henry is torn between his mixed feelings for Lillian and for Dagny and is unable to discern the nature of his sense of rational self-condemnation for not truly siding with his wife publicly, while not feeling truly guilty of immoral behavior.

  This backdoor drama plays out as the public conversations go back and forth among the various players, including Francisco d’Anconia, who has come for the express purpose of meeting and speaking to Rearden. Meanwhile, he works the room among investors in his recently nationalized mines (in Mexico, by the People’s Government), playing devil’s advocate to their consternation at losing their money because of the profligacy of a playboy. The mines have been worked to apparent exhaustion and due to incompetency in management and finance they are now worthless, even though hundreds of people have been paid handsome salaries to no profit. The Mexican government has gotten nothing for its trouble. Francisco is clearly mocking the investors in the room as he lauds the project for its public spirited commitment to fair wages and jobs for “those who never had a chance” and no profits turned for the owners, just concern for the workers and the “common good.”

  Other conversations reveal the underlying assumptions of those whose feelings for the good “of the whole” as opposed to the “selfish individual” inform their values and their politics. Dr. Pritchett, the “philosopher,” muses on the nature of man: “Man’s metaphysical pretensions,” he said, “are preposterous. A miserable bit of protoplasm, full of ugly little concepts and mean little emotions—and it imagines itself important! Really, you know, that is the root of all the troubles in the world.” (p. 131) He announces loudly that man has no standards by which to judge the good and the bad, the “ugly and mean.” “The philosophers of the past were superficial,” Dr. Pritchett went on. “It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.” (p. 132) To a skeptical young woman he asserts, “It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult,” said Dr. Pritchett. “Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more . . . tractable.” (p. 132)

  This issue of “tractability” is the essence of new legislation that has been enacted, the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, an “emergency” measure that took from certain businessmen to give to others in the name of “competition.” Its supposed purpose was to help the smaller businesses against the bigger businesses in the name of the common good. It is a nightmare of inconsistencies and irrationality and crony capitalism. Pritchett defends it to a businessman:

  “Oh, that?” said Dr. Pritchett. “But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.” “But, look . . . isn’t that sort of a contradiction?” “Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid.” “But it stands to reason that if—” “Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naïve of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age.” “But I don’t quite understand how we can—” “You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction.” “A contradiction of what?” asked the matron. “Of itself.” (pp. 132-133)

  When the lady will not give up so easily he continues to “explain” to her that “the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained.” Further, “The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man.” When a young woman listening in asks what is left when we prove such things, he replies, “Instinct.” (p. 133)

  Across the room Balph Ewbank, a writer of literature few people will buy, applies the same kind of thinking to his own field. “The literature of the past,” said Balph Eubank, “was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being—all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for the first time, by exposing the real essence of life.” He is asked by another woman what the essence of life is and he replies “defeat and suffering.” He says that happiness is “a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial.” He continues by proposing an Equal Opportunity Bill for literary production that will eliminate what he regards as the lack of “literary taste” among the common people. He regards this as a great “social problem.” “Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They’re too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed.” (p. 133) To Mort Liddy, a composer of popular musical material for commercial use, he continues, “There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books.” (p. 134) When Liddy says that might affect the bank accounts of writers, Ewbank retorts, “So much the better. Only those whose motive is not moneymaking should be allowed to write.” (p. 134)

  Another young lady protests that there might be more than 10,000 people who would want to read a single book. He says it doesn’t matter if more want to read it, even if, as she protests, it has a good story and is interesting to millions. His trump card is placed on the table when he avers, “Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature.” Dr. Pritchett happens to walk by as he announces this bit of wisdom and adds, “Quite so. Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy.” Liddy completes the trifecta, “Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music.” (p. 134) Li
llian Rearden floats into the group in her role as party manager and Ewbank seizes the moment to say, “Lillian, my angel, did I tell you that I’m dedicating my new novel to you?” She asks the title and he replies, The Heart is a Milkman, and says it’s about “frustration” when she asks its subject. One of the young ladies blurts out “But, Mr. Eubank, if everything is frustration, what is there to live for?” “Brother-love,” said Balph Eubank grimly. (p. 134) Such is the last gasp of an irrational world that mistakes mystical feeling for love and rational thought for unfeeling detachment.

  The evening ends with Hank standing over the bed of his disinterested wife of eight years, as she prattles on about the party and the guests and trivialities and as he loathes himself for desiring her sexually. She has never responded wholeheartedly to him in that way, deliberately (it seems) silently taunting him with her lack of desire and his inability to make his mind command his body not to desire her. It is a mystery to him as he once again fights that battle while she sits in the bed filing her nails and speaking inanities to his way of thinking. Finally he conquers his inner conflict and tells her never to invite people she thinks he will like to another of her parties, to which she responds affirmatively. He leaves unable to resolve the nature of the world she inhabits and her reasons for having married him, or for that matter he her. Rand’s heroic characters all deal with sexuality in this manner. They are torn by the experience of sexual desire and its disconnect from their rational existence. They refuse the tawdry dysfunction and dissolution of casual sex and the whorehouse (Rand’s word). Ultimately they only find sexual satisfaction when they are united in their own complete nature, body and spirit (as Rand uses this terminology), in union with another of like mind and character. Sexuality of this kind is the expression of the values to which they are already unalterably committed. When they experience desire that is not rooted in this belief in the unity of existence, they suffer, or they simply do not experience significant desire.

  By way of contrast Lillian and James Taggart engage in a sexual “affair” that can only be called desultory and low beyond measure for its lack of any sense of desire or purpose other than to spite Henry. They know themselves to be merely acting out parts, and their self-loathing is evident (and they really loathe one another), but they seem to be driven to it somehow because there is some sense of obligation and expectedness about it, as if they needed to prove they could do it. Against this backdrop another tragedy occurs that brings into sharpest relief the contradictions of this chapter.

  Cherryl Brooks was not married to Taggart long before she began to suspect he was not what he had seemed to her in the beginning. Through the first year of their marriage she continued to see unfold before her the real man he was, the one she really did not wish to see. She had done her best to live up to his expectations and her own aspirations as the wife of such a powerful and wealthy man. She even enlisted a paid agency to educate her in the ways of aristocratic life, ways so unlike her lowly upbringing in the slums.

  She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad’s triumph. (p. 874)

  She never understood the contempt in his laughter when he found out what she was doing. Gradually, though, she began to learn the rules of the parties and affairs they attended and found herself getting more comfortable in the surroundings, comfortable enough to become a keen observer of the goings on.

  The time came when she began to understand the kind of people her husband had around her. At first she assumed he had no real knowledge of their evil or was simply being polite to them. Over time it became evident to her that he might have actually been taken in by them. She began to question their character and values to Jim. She thought knowledge would remove the fog from her understanding and return the glitter to her vision of Jim, but it did not:

  Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim’s world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood’s slums—the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud. She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse. (p. 875)

  The time came when she could stand it no more and began to speak her mind. “Dr. Simon Pritchett is a phony—a mean, scared old phony,” she declared one evening after a party. Jim’s protestations were no longer acceptable as she continued to maintain what seemed obvious to her and couldn’t possibly have escaped him, in her estimation of him. Finally he tells her that he is not taken in by them at all but is engaged in a game that he expects to win where the aristocracy of pull deals with its own viciously and terminally (in the political and economic sense, but not necessarily without implications for the physical as well). The growing knowledge of the implications of this revelation haunt her life and cause continuing discussions and exchanges of anguished recriminations between them. He continues to seek her “trust” in him and she continues to try, but she knows from her own background that “honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.” He gets her to state her love for him and then says she must have faith in him: Love is faith, you know. Don’t you see that I need it? I don’t trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don’t you know that I need you?” Later her torture of mind is described in a way that shouts for rational assessment of the entire question raised by the issues in this chapter:

  The thing that made her pace her room—hours later, in tortured restlessness—was that she wished desperately to believe him and did not believe a word of it, yet knew that it was true. It was true, but not in the manner he implied, not in any manner or meaning she could ever hope to grasp. It was true that he needed her, but the nature of his need kept slipping past her every effort to define it. She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness—almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration—yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him. He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness. (p. 877)

  Eventually her inner turmoil over the faith he requires of her and the truth she seeks cannot remain unresolved. She determines to go to Taggart headquarters and learn what it is Jim really does in his business. All she meets are evasive, but gradually she learns that it is Dagny and not Jim that runs Taggart Transcontinental. It is Eddie Willers who fills in all the missing pieces. “He told her the whole story, quietly, impersonally, pronouncing no verdict, expressing no opinion, never encroaching on her emotions by any sign of concern for them, speaking with the shining austerity and the awesome power of facts. He told her who ran Taggart Transcontinental.
He told her the story of the John Galt Line. She listened, and what she felt was not shock, but worse: the lack of shock, as if she had always known it.” (p. 880) The confrontation with Jim that follows is a microcosm of the living relationships of so many in like marriages—the guilty accused courts irrationality in the innocent accuser for the purpose of evasion of any accountability and a pretense at exoneration. Jim ultimately whines, “Have you thought of my feelings? Have you thought of what this would do to my feelings? You should have considered my feelings first! That’s the first obligation of any wife—and of a woman in your position in particular! There’s nothing lower and uglier than ingratitude!” Cherryl realizes what is happening, “For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim. But she could not hold the fact inside her brain. She felt a stab of horror, the convulsion of a mind rejecting a sight that would destroy it.” Near the end of the conversation Jim, still seeking that which he cannot possibly expect or demand, blurts, “There isn’t any love in the world. People don’t feel. I feel things. Who cares about that? All they care for is time schedules and freight loads and money.” (p. 881)

  Over dreary days and nights the story drags out and conversations never change. The gist of it all is that she has lost any sense of his being heroic in the realization that he is a tragic and cowardly figure trading on the effort and productivity and pull of others. The love he seeks is causeless. Even a love that finds heroic character and courageous striving attractive cannot be worthy of that which he seeks. She cannot grasp such a craving that treats her love for him, that has been dashed on the cold hard facts of his lying and cheating and double-dealing under the guise of love for his fellowman, as if it were the cheap “gold-digger” ambition of someone marrying for money. He will not accept the idea that marrying for a vision of heroic character is not the same. He denounces her, “You have the mean, scheming, calculating little soul of a shopkeeper who trades, but never gives! Love is a gift—a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What’s the generosity of loving a man for his virtues? What do you give him? Nothing. It’s no more than cold justice. No more than he’s earned.” This last seems to turn over the last card in the hand she has been dealt, and she slowly and deliberately chooses her words to let him and her own mind hear them clearly: