Meanwhile, We the Living was being read with serious interest by some of New York’s best editors, but was also gathering rejection letters. Some turned it down because they couldn’t imagine who would buy and read a novel about 1920s Russia. Others were wary or skeptical of the anti-Soviet theme. Jean Wick didn’t always pass their comments along to Rand, and when she did, the agent seemed bewildered as to how to answer. Gradually, the author realized that her agent didn’t understand the novel, let alone how to sell it. She wrote detailed explanations for Wick to refer to when talking to editors. We the Living wasn’t merely about postrevolutionary Russia, she pointed out, although it did possess the sales advantage of being, she claimed (apparently accurately), the first novel on the subject written in English by a Russian writer. Nor did the narrative need an infusion of more emotion, Hollywood style, as Wick took to arguing it did. This was not a love story—at least, not one that made sense without reference to its totalitarian setting. It was a novel of crucial topical importance, exposing as both thoughtless and corrupt the liberal-collectivist dream of stripping prerogatives from the wealthy to enhance the welfare of the poor. Such a dream always ended in the destruction of the best—in other words, of those who asked for no help and simply wanted to be left alone, and therefore had the greatest claim to life. This was a theme the American public, now more than ever, needed to hear. Defining collectivism as a system of thought or action in which the individual person is subordinated to the common interests of a group, she told Wick that its worldwide growth was “the greatest problem of our century.” Later, in a foreword to the 1959 edition, she wrote, “We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925. It is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or—which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent—a socialist America.”
Wick thought all this sounded much too intellectual, and said so. By this time, Rand had heard the word “intellectual” used pejoratively once too often. By summer, with the help of friends, she found a new literary agent, the highly respected Ann Watkins. Watkins began to circulate the manuscript again.
Then suddenly, after nine months of delays, The Night of January 16th was scheduled to open in mid-September. On September 8, Rand, O’Connor, and Nick Carter headed to Philadelphia by train to attend the weeklong tryouts at the Chestnut Street Opera House. These began badly and descended into chaos; with opening night on Broadway scarcely a week away, collaborator Weitzenkorn was summoned to make yet another round of last-minute changes. Rand, furious, exhausted, and fearful for her nascent reputation and her novel, felt as if she were about to go under the knife of a surgeon who hadn’t been told which of her vital organs to remove. Walking in the street one day, she burst into frustrated tears. She was without any power to control her written words or her created world, never a tolerable state for Ayn Rand.
A telegram from Watkins saved the situation from utter heartbreak. Macmillan, at one time the publishers of Henry James and H. G. Wells, had made an offer to publish We the Living. The company would pay a $250 advance against royalties and bring the book out in April 1936. The author and the O’Connor brothers, spirits suddenly high, celebrated in a Philadelphia hotel room. Selling the novel was the most wonderful thing to happen in her life to date, she wrote to Gouverneur Morris.
The Night of January 16th premiered at the Shubert-owned Ambassador Theatre in New York on the unusually chilly evening of September 16, 1935. The theater was packed and so, said Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, was the jury, with Jack Dempsey, the fighter, serving as foreman and Sidney Satenstein’s brother and other insiders filling jurors’ seats and meting out justice from the stage. The celebrity jury acquitted Karen Andre, but Atkinson wasn’t able to acquit the play of corny devices and “hokum.” The Wall Street Journal gave it a respectful nod, recommending it to theatergoers as adroit and amusing entertainment, and that view prevailed; the play quickly started earning money at the box office. Once again, though, reviewers overlooked the playwright’s underlying theme, the do-or-die contest between the Nietzschean-heroic outsider and the safe, conventional “sense of life” displayed by witnesses for the prosecution. That said, Rand’s message must have been hard to find amid Woods’s clumsy changes. The embarrassed playwright and her husband sat in the back row of the theater on opening night, adjusting themselves to the disturbing reflection that this was no longer Ayn Rand’s work.
Three days later, she signed a contract with Macmillan. We the Living was set to run to an immense six hundred printed pages, but the publisher did not ask for cutting or any other alterations, the author happily reported to Gouverneur Morris. She left unsaid what she soon learned: that there had been a heated battle about whether to publish the book at all. As she recounted the story in the early 1960s, a Macmillan editor and poet named Stanley Young had championed the book on literary grounds; Granville Hicks, a well-known critic who read manuscripts for Macmillan, opposed it, taking issue with Rand’s dark portrait of Soviet Russia. Hicks had recently joined the U.S. Communist Party and, in that fall of 1935, was completing his own book for Macmillan, an admiring biography of the American Communist John Reed. Twenty-two years later, to Rand’s horror, Hicks would also be assigned to review Atlas Shrugged for the influential New York Times Book Review and would like it less, if possible, than We the Living.
Luckily, Hicks lost the argument, and Macmillan published We the Living on April 7, 1936. Rand, immensely proud, mailed copies to her Chicago relatives, her Hollywood acquaintances, and a few friends. Cecil B. DeMille received a copy. So did Sarah Lipton, dedicated “with profound gratitude for saving me from the kind of hell described in this book.” She inscribed a copy to Ivan Lebedeff, her “Dear Old Man,” thanking him for his help and for his faith in her, and to O’Connor’s father, Dennis, whom she had not met but addressed as “my American father.”
For a first novel, We the Living received an impressive amount of attention, especially since novels by Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier, Sinclair Lewis, and, in translation, Charles Baudelaire appeared in the same week, and the impending release by Macmillan of another first novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, was already creating a whirlwind of anticipation. In late April, Rand told a New York Times reporter that she was proud (“as well she might be,” the reporter noted) of the fact that her first film script, her first stage play, and her first novel had all found immediate buyers. This is important to note, because later she would brood over and often exaggerate the difficulties she encountered in finding sponsors for her books and plays and the injustices she met with at the hands of prejudiced or malevolent editors and others. Her followers would believe and repeat these tales of hostility and neglect as though they were true talismans of Rand’s secret, superior world.
Indeed, the reviews were mixed, as they were bound to be in a culture deeply divided about its capitalist past and future. Yet many reviewers demonstrated remarkable perception. Conservative periodicals, those that looked back longingly to the freewheeling culture of the mid-1920s, found much to admire. The book section of the New York Herald Tribune hailed the novel’s “wild cry for the right[s] of the individual” and its “subdued fire and intensity.” The neutral Washington Post remarked on Rand’s beautiful writing and provocative love scenes, which “would cause Boccaccio … to writhe with jealousy.” Rand told one interviewer that she was pleased to have been told that she wrote like a man and to have her work compared with that of Joseph Conrad; she volunteered the additional information that she detested the “inherent sentimentality” that permeated women’s writing. The major jibes came from the practitioners of the 1930s radical vogue. The liberal New York Times marveled at the Russian émigré’s command of English and her narrative power but dismissed her theme as “slavishly warped to the dictates of propaganda”—whose propaganda it didn’t say. The Marxist-friendly Nation mocked the author’s infelicities of style to show that she was “out to puncture a bubble—w
ith a bludgeon.” Though both the Times and the Nation might have known that Soviet Communism was not a bubble, especially in 1936, when its henchmen were systematically slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s perceived political enemies, the Nation did have a point: now and in the future, the author’s rhetorical pitch and tin ear for American diction caused more than a few influential readers to be deaf to her demands for intellectual respect. Unfortunately, even here the Nation wasn’t on completely firm footing; as an example, it cited a passage describing Bolsheviks as “crippled, creeping, crawling, broken monstrosities” but failed to mention that the alliterative excess was enclosed in a speech by Andrei Taganov, signaling his change of heart about Bolshevism and marking him for demotion and ultimately death.
Whatever their merits, the reviews ended Ayn Rand’s expectations of receiving literary “justice,” she later said. We the Living sold about two thousand copies, a respectable sale for the time, and appeared on a few regional best-seller lists. But Macmillan didn’t support the book with advertising or promotion, which wasn’t unusual for the time but which surprised and angered the first-time novelist. Still, even after the publicity storm stirred up by Gone with the Wind had carried off most of the book-buying public, readers quietly continued to buy and read We the Living.
And she was earning money. In a decade when average American incomes were well under $1,500 a year, The Night of January 16th was bringing her royalties of between $200 and $1,200 a week. By the time the play had closed on April 4, 1936, three days before the publication of her novel, theatrical rights had been sold to producers in London, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Switzerland, Poland, and elsewhere. A return engagement was already filling seats in the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, and a road show was about to open in Chicago. Somewhat ironically, Watkins had negotiated a contract with Franklin Roosevelt’s new federal Works Progress Administration to bring performances of the play to local theaters across the country. Although by 1936 Rand strongly disapproved of Roosevelt and his New Deal programs, the WPA provided her with royalties of ten dollars per performance, a small fortune, throughout the later 1930s. And because the play’s single courtroom setting made for easy staging, it also became a favorite of privately run summer-stock companies, generating a sometimes larger, sometimes smaller stream of income until her death. Meanwhile, We the Living was experiencing an afterlife: British publisher Cassell & Company planned to distribute a U.K. edition in the fall of 1936, and Rand and Jerome Mayer, a theatrical producer and director, opened discussions about taking the novel to Broadway as a play.
Financially prudent, Rand decided to earn extra money by returning to her old trade, screenwriting, and working as a contract writer based either in New York or Hollywood. Well established as a novelist and playwright, she took it for granted that the film industry would now offer her good-quality writing projects and more money; with this in mind, Watkins got in touch with a Hollywood associate, who contacted executives at the major movie studios. None of them would hire her. Rand was certain that she was being ostracized because of her anti-Soviet stance, both in We the Living and in public speeches and print and radio interviews, and the Hollywood associate apparently confirmed her suspicions. “She talks too much about Soviet Russia,” the associate told Watkins. She saw this as retaliation—as, in effect, blacklisting by the Hollywood intellectual Left. Later, she said, “This [blacklisting] lasted until The Fountainhead.” She began to take the American Communist threat very seriously indeed.
It’s hard not to conclude that Ayn Rand sometimes lacked good judgment, or at least good timing.
She called herself shy, and she was shy in social situations, but when speaking before an audience, teaching, or discussing serious ideas, she was animated, inspiring, and charismatic. In the spring and summer of 1936, after the publication of We the Living, she was in demand as an anti-Soviet speaker. She lectured at the then-famous New York Town Hall Club on “Whitewashed Russia,” where she asked the audience to imagine being ruled by a group of men who have not been elected and cannot be recalled, who control all public information, who distribute all food, housing, and employment. They cannot be criticized; they dispatch political adversaries to dungeons or death without a trial or hearing. They claim that individual rights do not exist. Would her listeners wish to live under the thumb of these “two million snow-white [Stalinist] angels,” as she characterized the Left’s view of them? She gave dozens of radio and print interviews in which she described her bourgeois Russian background, elaborated on her hatred of the Bolsheviks, and mentioned the approximate date and circumstances of her escape to the United States. In one New York newspaper interview in late spring, titled “Only High ‘Ransom’ for Passports Opens [Soviet] Border, Says Miss Rand,” the interviewer observed that the Russian-born author, whose first remark was, “If the [Soviet] borders were ever opened there would be a migration like that of the early Middle Ages,” was also known as Mrs. Frank O’Connor. A picture of the author and her husband seated in their living room appeared above the text of the interview, with a caption explaining that they lived in an apartment on Park Avenue.
At the same time, Rand was making a determined effort to rescue her parents from their life of hardship in Russia. Although the Rosenbaums no longer remained in danger of starving, they, like much of the rest of Soviet Russia, had settled into an underfed, fearful, precarious, and dreary routine that she considered inhuman. She appears to have been deeply in earnest about bringing them to America. Since becoming a citizen herself in March 1931, she had kept up an intermittent correspondence with the U.S. State Department and other agencies, in hopes of obtaining immigration visas for all four members of her family, but she and O’Connor were thwarted by the requirement that they show sufficient income to get an affidavit of support. Now they had the income, from her royalties.
There is a mystery here. Even as she renewed her efforts to get her family out of Russia, she was publicly presenting herself as an anti-Communist activist. That she wasn’t aware that Soviet agents might be watching her—and might easily confirm that Alissa Rosenbaum, Mrs. Frank O’Connor, and Ayn Rand were different names for the same woman—is hard to believe. She took normal, recommended precautions, such as using only her legal, married name in government correspondence and not sending her parents a copy of her book. But in the 1930s, there was a Soviet government agency whose specific job it was to read correspondence from abroad, and Russian agents at home and in the United States and Europe were notorious for their ruthlessness and skill in tracking and spying on Russian émigrés. Her Chicago relatives were sure that she was conscious of the risk she took in publishing We the Living and in giving interviews. Said Fern Brown’s cousin Roger Salamon, “The fact that [her parents] never came out of Russia was due to We the Living. My grandmother [Sarah Lipton] and mother [Beatrice Collier, daughter of Sarah Lipton and her second or third husband, Harry Collier] used to talk about it. She had an agenda, and if she wanted to do it, she did it.” Perhaps the task of “telling it to the world,” though more impersonal, was more compelling. That she later felt uneasy about the danger in which she may have placed her family can be guessed from the fact that, in 1961, she told her friend Barbara Branden that she had never revealed her new name to her family in Russia. “She lied,” said Branden. After her death, hundreds of letters from her parents and sisters were discovered among her papers, many mentioning her pseudonym and applauding the soon-to-be-famous “Ayn Rand.”
By this time, Nora had fallen in love with an engineer named Fedor Drobyshev and was married and teaching in a Soviet school. Natasha no longer wanted to come to America. But Anna and Zinovy, in ill health and in need of medical care not available in Russia, were willing to make the journey, and she redoubled her efforts to have them join her. At first she was optimistic, even excited. In June 1936, she wrote to her mother’s cousin Sarah Lipton (by now remarried and named Satrin) that she hoped to get word of their date of arrival any day. One of the r
easons she may have looked for work in Hollywood was to care for her parents there, where it was warm.
The Rosenbaums’ prospects would have been precarious in any case. For the next few months, telegrams flew back and forth between Leningrad and New York. In the end, the official Soviet answer was no. “Cannot get permission,” read the Rosenbaums’ final telegram in May 1937. Whether the result would have been different had Rand kept out of the public spotlight is debatable, but her timing didn’t help. Shortly afterward, the U.S. government warned that communicating in any manner with acquaintances in the Soviet Union could endanger their lives. The letters between Rand and the Rosenbaums ceased, and all was silence.
Rand wasn’t interested in luxuries; her focus was on producing and earning, not on spending. But she began to use her royalty income for goals she had long deferred. One of these was to move out of the tiny furnished room she and O’Connor had shared for more than a year. They left Sixty-sixth Street and rented a larger room at 129 East Sixty-first Street and then moved into a sunny seventeenth-floor apartment in a handsome Art Deco residential hotel at Park Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, where the newspaper photograph was taken. With more space to fill, they bought a set of blond Art Deco bedroom furniture and a sleek modern sofa. She shopped for needed clothes—unfortunately tending toward faddish or frilly outfits—and began to wear the sculptural black cape that became her trademark in the 1940s. That was all; the rest of the money would be saved and applied to future projects.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 13