Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  She had been introduced to Wick by her Hollywood admirer Gouverneur Morris, who, like Ivan Lebedeff and a few others who took the time to read her work and talk to her, was deeply impressed by her personal history, the quality of her mind, and her passionate intellectual commitment to individual achievement. After reading a draft of We the Living (“the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Soviet Russia,” he called it), he sent sections to the famous libertarian newspaperman H. L. Mencken. Mencken, an avid defender of American civil liberties, pronounced the work “excellent” but warned that its anti-Communist message might hurt it with publishers. Whatever the demand for Russian stories such as Red Pawn, Mencken’s letter implied, receptivity might not extend to open criticism of the Soviet state.

  This was Rand’s second explicit warning that the Depression was beginning to produce political monsters of a kind she thought she had left behind in Russia. The first warning had come in the form of a casual remark by a White Russian acquaintance in Hollywood, who offhandedly suggested that certain film-industry Communists might try to prevent the studios from buying Red Pawn. Rand’s response was disbelief and indignation. There couldn’t be more than a handful of Communists in the United States, she averred. This was the home of capitalism, where competence, not rhetoric, earned rewards. And didn’t the Declaration of Independence proclaim the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the very foundation of individualism? She took Mencken’s letter more seriously but remained convinced that the American public had no real understanding of Communism and that even liberal Americans would “scream with horror” if they knew what was happening across the Bering Strait. “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia to tell it to the world,” she declared in a letter to Jean Wick. “This [is] my job.”

  She had not yet begun to follow American party politics, apart from somewhat naively casting her first vote as a U.S. citizen for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1932. Roosevelt had campaigned against Prohibition, which she opposed as an abridgment of individual rights, and had promised to balance the federal budget and support a business revival. (He later changed his approach to almost everything but Prohibition.) In Hollywood, she had been intimate with relatively few people and was largely unaware, she later said, of the degree of “pink” penetration in America or of the growing appeal of Communist battle cries to screenwriters and directors and to some of the nation’s bankrupt farmers, miners, and unemployed industrial workers. In New York, the leftward trend was more evident, especially among the cultural elite; she gradually became aware that many literary celebrities, such as Mencken’s old friend Theodore Dreiser, Heywood Broun, Edmund Wilson, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, and critics Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, and Granville Hicks, were members of or sympathizers with the Communist Party of the United States. At the literary cocktail parties and events that were covered in the gossip columns, they endorsed Stalinism as a noble experiment and drank toasts to the coming of America’s “Red Dawn.” Their message was that capitalism had been tested and had failed; the time had come to try Marxism on the Soviet model. It was only after living in New York for a year or two that Rand began to see the extent of the pro-Communist bias on the American intellectual left. A nineteenth-century Russian at heart, she believed that ideas have the power to change history and that intellectual leaders are the engines and agents of change. It was American intellectuals whom she eventually decided she would have to target and fight.

  Now, however, she was exhilarated by Mencken’s praise of her work. Answering his letter to Gouverneur Morris directly, she hailed him as the world’s greatest exponent of the philosophy of individualism, to which she planned to dedicate her life. She vowed to confront the messengers of collectivism wherever she found them. She began a program of extensive reading to educate herself in American history and politics. To some extent, then, she was prepared to meet resistance to the plot and message of her first and most autobiographical novel.

  We the Living is the least popular of Rand’s four novels—regrettably so, since it is the most lyrical, the most straightforward, and, in some respects, the most persuasive. Legend has it that writing the novel was the fulfillment of a promise she made just before leaving St. Petersburg. At a farewell party given by her parents in late 1925, the story goes, a man she barely knew pleaded with her, if she ever got out, to tell the world that “Russia is a huge cemetery” and that “we are dying here.” She vowed that she would tell them. In We the Living, she did.

  The setting is St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, in 1922 and 1923, years when Rand was a student at the university. The plot is simple. Eighteen-year-old Kira Argounova, returning from the Crimea with her now-impoverished bourgeois family, dreams of becoming an engineer and building American-style skyscrapers and aluminum bridges. Although her parents and sister think she is crazy, she enrolls in the city’s free State Technical Institute to learn engineering. One bitter winter night, walking in the city’s red-light district, she meets young Leo Kovalensky, the proud but world-weary son of a slain aristocrat, and his severe countenance reminds her of her childhood hero, a Viking. Seeing that he is in search of a prostitute she pretends to be one. This is an apt preamble, for Kira’s primary task now becomes to serve as a mirror for Leo’s noble qualities and to try to save him from himself. To her parents’ dismay, she moves in with him. He is a part-time student of philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd, just as Rand was during the same years. Because of his aristocratic background, he is barred from government office work—that is, from almost all work. He sweeps streets for kopeks to support Kira and himself and then, humiliated and defiant, joins a ring of black marketers and begins to drink heavily. When he shows symptoms of tuberculosis, Kira trudges to government offices, pleading with sullen workers-turned-commissars to send him to a state-run hospital; turned away by all, she devises another plan. She seduces young Andrei Taganov, a Bolshevik civil-war hero and campus GPU leader who has fallen in love with her during their heated ideological arguments at school. Richly paid by the Bolsheviks, he showers her with gifts and rubles, unaware that she is using the money to pay for Leo’s treatment at a private sanatorium in the Crimea. When Andrei finally learns the truth, the proud, honest, and until-now idealistic Communist is left to yearn for a love he cannot have.

  To this point, the novel resembles the creaky movie scenario Red Pawn. But We the Living is, in a broad sense, a political novel. Like all of Rand’s books, it is about power. In her journals, she wrote that it was written to demonstrate “the rule of brute force and what it does to the best [people]” within a culture. “The individual against the masses—such is the real, the only theme of the book,” she noted to Jean Wick. Faithful to her monumental theme, she measures each of her characters against the backdrop of totalitarianism and an absence of personal power. Kira’s ex-socialite mother quickly joins a Red teachers’ union to achieve better living conditions for her family. Kira’s uncle Vasili—once a prosperous merchant, like Rand’s father and grandfather—proudly goes on strike and lets his capitalist skills dwindle with his spirit. Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva, an artist like Rand’s sister Nora, endures arrest and Siberian exile for the crime of hiding her anti-Communist boyfriend in her room. Irina’s brother, a villainous upstart named Victor, gains political power by turning his sister in. Irina’s crime is a clear remembrance of Rand’s Russian flame Lev Bekkerman’s youthful act of courage. In fact, We the Living can be partly seen as her attempt to come to terms with Lev, as well as a meditation on the psychological roots of the Russian Revolution.

  In most respects, the beautiful, arrogant, sexually talented Leo Kovalensky is the fictional alter ego of the real-life Lev. In Rand’s notes for the novel, she describes him as “too strong to compromise but too weak to withstand pressure, [the kind of man] who cannot bend but only break.” When Kira first meets him, she finds him irresistibly “implacable” and spiritually defiant: he has a mouth “like that of an ancient chieftain who could
order men to die” and eyes “such as could watch.” To the lovesick young woman, his haughty indifference to everything, including her, suggests his potential greatness had he lived in a free society—meaning, of course, all that he cannot become in Bolshevik Russia. Once free of tuberculosis, he sinks deeper into the criminal underworld and succumbs to alcoholism and despair. At the novel’s climax, he has become a gigolo, the paid companion of a florid, jewel-encrusted middle-aged Communist whore. For Rand, his character solves the riddle of the real-life Lev Bekkerman’s preference for mediocre women over her: both men opt for spiritual self-destruction in the absence of any other kind of personal choice. In writing We the Living, Rand discovers that, for her, this is an indefensible and unacceptable solution; upholding values, even in the airtight atmosphere of a dictatorship, is the only way to go on living. When Leo decides to return to the Crimea with his lusty paramour, Kira and Rand both let him go.

  We the Living is Rand’s only novel to be set in Russia and the only one to portray a collectivist—meaning a Communist or a socialist—character, Andrei, sympathetically. In the future, anyone who barters individual rights for enhancement of “the state,” “the public,” or “the common good,” that is, who uses power to serve some men’s interests at the expense of others, will be a villain. It is also her only novel to end in tragedy. Leo gives up on himself. Andrei commits suicide. As to Kira, the girl who cannot be broken, she abandons her proximate dreams and dies of a gunshot wound while trying to crawl across the border to the West. Rand once told a friend that she, too, would have chanced death by walking to the border if the American consular officer at Riga had not let her board a train.

  Over the years, We the Living has been revised and somewhat attenuated. She finished writing it in 1935. At the height of her fame in the late 1950s, perhaps mindful of her legend, she re-edited it and removed some of its shriller and less republican elements. She toned down her heroine’s cool indifference toward the masses. In the original edition, Andrei tells Kira, “I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that you admire our [Bolshevik] ideals, but loathe our methods.” On the contrary, Kira responds, “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. I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.” Her argument echoes the Nietzschean view that the lower social orders are often impediments to the advance of society’s Supermen, and, if necessary, need to be herded by their betters. By the 1950s, she had reconsidered and tempered this view. Conscious of the controversy over her approach to sex, she also muted the novel’s gauzy sadomasochism, excising a love scene in which Kira imagines that Leo is whipping her. Interestingly, at the same time, she subtly altered erotic encounters so that Kira and other female characters never initiate sex, as they often do in the original edition of the novel; by then she had formulated a strict hierarchy of sexual roles for her male and female protagonists. In spite of such revisions, there is no mistaking the strong bond between Kira’s active pride and her pleasure in being sexually dominated by her lover. This is man worship at the level of erotic arousal and suggests another, more personal, layer of Rand’s interest in power.

  Touchingly, the mature writer didn’t disguise the many passages that pay tribute to her mentor, Victor Hugo—especially the long, lush description of the history of St. Petersburg at the beginning of part 2, which so closely resembles Hugo’s miniature essay on Paris in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Frank O’Connor recalled that, at the time she wrote the book, the St. Petersburg section was her favorite. That was then, she gamely answered him. In the intervening years, she had come to be proudest of the beautifully understated passage in which Andrei destroys his few reminders of Kira before putting a gun to his head.

  In early 1935, as the novel was circulating to publishers, Rand’s mood continued to be optimistic. Here, at last, she seemed to have found people—Woods, Wick, Mencken, others—who could understand her. O’Connor appeared to be settling in. Nick Carter, her favorite O’Connor brother-in-law, was writing for newspapers and lived in a hotel room within easy visiting distance. Her acquaintance Ivan Lebedeff was in and out of town, and she was meeting a few prominent political conservatives: Melville Cane, a distinguished poet, former journalist, friend of Sinclair Lewis, and copyright attorney who became her guide in literary legal matters, and Cane’s partner Pincus Berner and his wife, who would become important friends and allies in years to come. She met and corresponded with Ethel Boileau, the wife of a British baronet and the author of A Gay Family and The Clansmen, who described her own literary mission as a defense of individualism. “Is it still possible to stop collectivism,” Lady Boileau asked Rand in a letter, “or is it too late?” Rand responded by articulating one of her developing core themes: “All achievement and progress has been accomplished, not just by men of ability and certainly not by groups of men, but by a struggle between man and mob;” the struggle, she seemed to suggest, would be won by individuals.

  She also met an impressionable twenty-two-year-old aspiring playwright named Albert Mannheimer, a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama and a junior theater critic for the New York Enquirer. Mannheimer, tall, fair, and curly haired, was an earnest Marxist who had interrupted his studies to make a pilgrimage to Moscow with his friend the future novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg and others, including an eventual member of the Hollywood Ten, Ring Lardner, Jr. Mannheimer, an aspiring playwright, happened to be living in Rand’s apartment building, and a mutual theatrical acquaintance introduced them. When, during their first conversation, he announced that he would convert her to the Communist ideology, she countered by predicting that it was she who would convert him, and do it within a year. It didn’t take that long. He became her first proselyte and unofficial follower. Mesmerized by her intellectual charisma and the logical precision of her thinking, and probably also flattered by her gestures of friendship, he met her often for coffee and intense debate. He became a vehement advocate of capitalism and would grow closer to her in the 1940s.

  Perhaps best of all for Rand, as she awaited word on her play and her novel, was the fact that she was living in New York. She never enjoyed walking, but she saw the sights, and there were many. In the years between her first brief visit and 1935, a construction boom had heightened and beautified the city skyline. On the former site of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, the steel-faceted Empire State Building had risen like a jagged needle, replacing the Woolworth Building as the tallest structure in the world. As a symbol of the wonders that human reason could perform, this building thrilled her; once she began to earn money, she would always try to have a view of its spire from her apartment windows. Meanwhile, the Waldorf-Astoria had been reinvented as an Art Deco masterpiece on Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street and had tripled in size; she would one day draw on its grandeur for the fictional Wayne-Falkland Hotel in Atlas Shrugged. In spite of the collapse of New York’s economy in the Depression, Times Square and the theater district were thriving. Lillian Hellman’s first play, The Children’s Hour, and Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! were two of more than a hundred theatrical productions lighting Broadway. Although Rand and her husband probably couldn’t afford to see many plays, she would have known of both. Odets was a founding member of the nation’s first theater collective, modeled on the Russian Moscow Art Theatre, and he had recently staged a play by John Howard Lawson, president of the Hollywood Screen Writers Guild and an early Communist organizer in Hollywood, later blacklisted, whom she would come to know. Hellman was her own age, thirty, was Jewish, and had been a script reader for MGM while Rand was adapting Red Pawn for Universal. A vocal Communist sympathizer, in 1937 Hellman would travel to Republican Spain and to Moscow on behalf of left-wing causes. Bizarrely, she and Rand would later briefly share the spotlight as star screenwriters for the Paramount-affiliated film producer Hal Wallis. At this point, Rand m
ay have viewed Hellman’s phenomenal theatrical success with a little bit of envy.

  For her own play was idling. All winter and spring, Woods kept promising that casting and rehearsals would begin any day. Funding finally came through in midsummer 1935, when the hard-nosed theatrical mogul Lee Shubert agreed to underwrite the project. That should have been a cause for celebration. Almost immediately, however, pitched battles began. Woods, now reporting to Shubert, turned out to be a good deal less accommodating than he had at first appeared. He and she argued over everything: his demands that she abridge her “highfalutin” courtroom speeches (arbitrarily, she maintained); his insertion into the play of extraneous props (a gun) and characters (a floozy in furs, reportedly Shubert’s mistress); and his tirades about how ponderous ideas had no place in popular entertainment. In her view, he was rapidly dismantling the story she had carefully constructed to test theatergoers’ “sense of life” by removing elements of the motivation of her characters through cuts. When she objected to his changes, he would shout, “But this is your first play! I have forty years of experience in the theater!” Experience meant very little to her; she wanted logic. In exasperation, she reportedly told him that if an elevator operator suggested a change and could explain his reasons, she would happily consider it, but if a literary genius dropped in to propose an alteration without a valid explanation, she would reject it out of hand.

  Given that her greatest gift was, perhaps, as a translator of unfamiliar and counterintuitive ideas into the vernacular of popular melodrama, she must have found Woods’s point of view particularly vexing. Their most furious quarrels, however, were reserved for his decision to hire two hack collaborators, named Hayes and Weitzenkorn, to implement script changes she refused to make—and, incidentally, to siphon off one-tenth of her royalties, set at 10 percent of box-office receipts. With the help of her friend and attorney Melville Cane (and the support of Mrs. Vincent Astor, who was appointed arbiter), she fought the royalty reduction and won. She also managed to install the incomparable actor Walter Pidgeon in the role of tough-guy gangster Guts Regan, Karen Andre’s and Bjorn Faulkner’s accessory in crime. But though she could walk away from Woods’s harangues, she could not prevent his meddling; the contract she had signed gave him the right to hire new writers, change the script, add props, and more. The experience of watching him dilute her work with commercial pap was “miserably painful,” she said. In the end, she came to hate him, her agent, Satenstein, and the adulterated play. Years later, when a friend noticed a published copy of it on her coffee table in California and asked to borrow it, Rand snatched it away and cried, “Don’t read that! I’m going to destroy it.”