Her greatest objective was to gain time to work on her new novel. She had been musing about its theme since her late teens and had made her first extensive notes about it in December 1935. It would tell the story of a roughhewn American architectural genius named Howard Roark and his quest to create a new kind of architecture. At its heart would stand a great American skyscraper, a symbol of America, of human achievement, and of life on earth. In We the Living, she had focused on young people and on events she had actually lived through because she knew she wasn’t yet ready to create a world; now she was ready. Her first novel had been a practice drill, a preparation for this one. By the summer of 1936, she said, she had earned the right to put her affirmative vision of what it meant to be an individualist—i.e., a champion of the sovereign, self-determining individual—down on paper. She began to construct an outline of characters and events that she thought were intrinsically important. The novel’s working title was Second-Hand Lives, but it would become famous as The Fountainhead.
As she pondered the egoistic, single-minded, hot-blooded character of Howard Roark, whom she was consciously molding into her ideal man, the first notes of marital discord between her and O’Connor sounded. He was far from sexually dominant, or even highly sexed. He had limited ability to discuss ideas with her. By all accounts—and there were many people who knew and loved him—he was sweet, gallant, stoic, funny, emotionally inexpressive, easily led, and profoundly passive. Professionally, he had found little to occupy him in New York and was dependent on Ayn. Although he auditioned for parts in plays, the only roles he is known to have been offered were parts in his wife’s productions and related dramas. He took odd jobs but quit them, apparently at her behest; selling shoes, for example, which he did for a few weeks in 1943, didn’t fit her romantic image of him. He decorated their apartments inexpensively and, according to visitors, imaginatively and beautifully. As teenagers, he and his brothers had cooked meals and done housework during their mother’s illness, so it didn’t seem unnatural that he and Nick should now take over many household chores to give her time to write. As she became better known, he joked that he was “Mr. Ayn Rand.” But it was not a joke. Without paid employment, his working-class values sometimes troubled him. If the situation had occurred four or five decades later, “there would not have been so much hurt pride,” his niece Mimi later said. It’s difficult to know whether his financial dependency troubled her, since now and in the future she did not complain. Neither did he. He seemed to lack the drive and focus to begin a new career, and by 1936 she was the sole breadwinner.
For the first time, they began to lose their tempers with each other. A quiet man in the best of times, he withdrew from conversation. She was brimming with new ideas about the psychology of individualism, Americans’ sorry slide toward collectivism, and the many political and, now, architectural texts and periodicals she was reading. She craved intellectual companionship. For relief, she turned to Albert Mannheimer, the curly-headed young convert to capitalism, and to Nick, who joined the O’Connors for dinner almost every night. Nick was charming, funny, well read, intelligent, a good critic, and a gifted storyteller, although he seemed as lackadaisical about his writing career as his younger brother was about acting. He and Joe O’Connor had both served in World War I, and he had been wounded in a chlorine gas attack. He collected disability payments for lung disease, later diagnosed as tuberculosis. He often had free time.
Nick became Rand’s own first Commandant Kareyev, the man who stands between the heroine and her hero and so preserves their union. “He supervised,” said Frank and Nick’s niece Mimi, who visited Nick and the O’Connors twice in the middle 1930s and more often after that. “He was Noel Coward.” Like Rand’s later young male protégés, he talked with her about ideas and her current work in progress late into the night, while O’Connor dozed in a chair, but he differed from them in important ways. He didn’t flatter her, and he acted as her practical guide in matters of dress and entertaining. In the 1930s, Rand had a “peasant” face and figure and no clothing style at all, said Millicent Patton. Typically, she wore a housedress all day long, remembered Mimi, and went around wiping her hands on it. (“My father was appalled,” said the niece.) But she had rococo tastes when dressing up. Once, Mimi recalled, her aunt by marriage gaily modeled “a small white Dutch hat with a starched peak and a blue netty veil,” which couldn’t have looked worse. While Frank tactfully hemmed and hawed at the sight of the whimsical headpiece on the logical head, Nick told her to take it off. He steered her—not always successfully—to simpler, more tailored clothing and a conventional entertaining style. This was important, because she was meeting influential people at political events and cocktail parties and beginning to give dinners. Also, in contrast to the younger men who came later, he was never a candidate for seduction. He was a homosexual, although Rand probably did not know it. (“She would have been the last person on earth to realize that Nick was gay,” said a 1960s friend, even though by then Rand condemned homosexuality on philosophical grounds.) The good-looking husband, the lively brother-in-law, and the diminutive dark-haired Russian woman with hypnotizing eyes now made a threesome.
For most of the summer of 1936, Ayn, Frank, and Nick, with the occasional addition of Mannheimer, remained in the broiling heat and humidity of New York City. In August, O’Connor left to play Guts Regan in a Connecticut summer-stock production of The Night of January 16th, while Rand remained behind. They had never before been parted. In spite of whatever tensions may have existed between them, she missed him terribly; for much of their marriage, she would feel safe only when he was by her side. They exchanged love letters, hers alternating between news—of an overnight houseguest named Marjorie Hiss (the wife of a cousin of Alger Hiss whom Rand had met at the Studio Club), the impish behavior of their housecats, the contract she had finally signed with producer Jerome Mayer—and a startling, incongruous baby talk they reserved for each other. (She called him Cubbyhole; he called her Fluff.)
She had spent the spring and early summer poring over architectural texts as background material for The Fountainhead, but now she set aside her books and musings to tackle what soon became a months-long effort to turn We the Living into a stage play for Mayer’s expected 1937 production. At Ann Watkins’s urging, she also rewrote a novella she had completed but not published in Hollywood in 1934 as a play; both agent and author were eager to strike again on Broadway while The Night of January 16th was remembered as a hit. Called Ideal, the novella-turned-play featured a Greta Garbo—like movie star named Kay Gonda who quotes Nietzsche and, with tragic demeanor, seeks one fan from among her millions who will agree to risk his life for what he claims to be his ideal: her. Finding only a lonely drifter named Johnnie Dawes, a less violent version of the murderer-hero of the unpublished 1928 novella The Little Street, Kay Gonda reflects that most of her audience really hates her, because she embodies a commitment to romantic ideals that they are afraid to live by. As she flashes back to the original source of her exalted expectations of life—the sight of a very young man standing on a rock, his slender body like “a string trembling to a note of ecstasy no man had ever heard”—the reader of the play has his first glimpse of Howard Roark. Ideal is about fidelity and unfaithfulness to values, a theme that foreshadows the preoccupations of The Fountainhead. Watkins couldn’t find a producer for it, and although Rand’s Russian-American friend Ivan Lebedeff’s wife, a gifted German-born actress named Wera Engels, tried with Rand’s encouragement to interest European producers in the play, negotiations broke down. While Ideal didn’t find a home, either as a novella or as a stage play, Gonda’s ultimate problem, the conviction that she is morally superior to her audience, is one that both Roark and Rand would soon confront. (As a clue to how much Rand identified with Roark and other male figures in her fiction, in a Freudian slip during this period she referred to Kay Gonda as a “truly heroic man.”) When Jerome Mayer, like A. H. Woods before him, ran into funding problems, the stage
adaptation of We the Living was put on hold.
In July 1937, Rand moved with her husband to Connecticut for his second season in summer stock. They settled in shady Stony Creek, on the Long Island Sound, where, she told friends, she was soon doing her best work. While O’Connor rehearsed the role of Guts Regan and parts in other plays (“It will be very good experience for him,” she wrote somewhat condescendingly to a Hollywood friend), she walked on the beach with visitors Albert Mannheimer and Nick Carter and mused on the evolving shape of The Fountainhead. She was within two miles of the town’s famous pink-granite quarries, which she may have visited as research for the all-important quarry scene in which her heroine, Dominique, meets Howard Roark. But plotting the novel was complicated—“I was going crazy” trying to tie the characters together in a climactic scene, she said—so, as a rest, she composed the short, futuristic novel Anthem while propped on a rubber raft in the sand. A mannered but still entrancing story, Anthem envisions a primitive world in which the word “I” has been erased from human memory and replaced by the collective “we.” Characters repeat things to “ourselves” and intone mottos such as “We are nothing. Mankind is all. We exist through, by, and for the State.” After the hero, a subversively inquisitive figure called Equality 7–2521, falls in love with Liberty 5–3000 in an act of individual choice that is punishable by death, he finds himself investigating other secrets, including the key to electricity, a lost art of the “Unmentionable Times,” and the use and meaning of “I.” Although it is written in an approximation of Nietzschean aphoristic English, with biblical overtones, it neatly exposes the ultimate logic of totalitarianism: perfect conformity for perfect control. Rand’s purpose was to demonstrate that brainwashed slaves of the state cannot produce technological achievement—a theme she would revisit—and that only autonomous selves can fall in love. The choice of electricity to stand for individual accomplishment is interesting. In the Bible, God commands, “Let there be light.” With Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric lightbulb, the power of light was placed in human hands. In a sense, then, electricity made human beings deities, as Professor Bernice Rosenthal has pointed out. In fact, electricity was highly controversial in Russia during Rand’s childhood; people “either condemned or exalted it” for the reason that light belonged to God, observed Dr. Rosenthal. To seal the connection between God and the individual self, Rand makes her primitive society dimly aware of an “Unspeakable Word,” which in Jewish tradition is “Yahweh” and in Anthem is “I.”
That Equality 7–2521 happens to be twenty-one years old when he and Liberty take flight and give themselves new names—Prometheus (bringer of firelight) and Gaea (mother of the gods)—is interesting, given that that was the age at which Rand left Russia and adopted a new identity. In fact, she had conceived Anthem as a four-act play during her university years. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), it appears to have been strongly influenced by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamiatin’s little-known dystopian novel We, written in St. Petersburg in 1920. We, the tale of D-503 and his forced choice between love for a female and loyalty to the all-powerful “One State,” was constructed as a series of diary entries, as was Anthem. It was censored by the Communist government, but it circulated samizdat style among artistic groups throughout the city. Rand would almost surely have encountered it in meetings of one of her writing clubs. Anthem also echoes H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, popular in turn-of-the-century Russia, and Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Place of the Gods,” a short story that tracks a primitive future man as he stumbles upon a glittering twentieth-century city, which Rand read that summer in The Saturday Evening Post. This was the first time she had seen a science fiction or fantasy story in a mainstream American magazine, let alone a widely circulated, highly respected conservative magazine that paid authors exceptionally well. She wrote Anthem start to finish in three weeks, hoping to sell it to the Post.
Anthem has most often been compared to 1984, in which the hero, Winston Smith, also attempts to rediscover the lost world of the pre-totalitarian past. But unlike Equality 7–2521, Smith is captured and succumbs to torture. Rand admirers point out another, related difference. Although Orwell hated totalitarianism as both stultifying and evil, the novel treats it as a system that is practical and works; Oceana stands as a hyperindustrialized society containing such advanced technology that individual citizens cannot fight back against it. Rand concluded—long before most others—that totalitarianism doesn’t work, because the independent motivation indispensable to economic and social progress cannot survive in an atmosphere of intimidation, coercion, and lack of individually earned rewards. She regarded totalitarianism as both immoral and impractical and would go on to explain exactly in what ways the two are bound together in her fast-paced masterpiece of anticollectivism, Atlas Shrugged. Her insight was predictive, at least in the case of the former Soviet Union. When it came unglued in 1991, Western countries were surprised to discover in its fearsome military and industrial might a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Not much economic or technological progress had been made during Communism’s seventy-five year reign.
Watkins couldn’t place Anthem in The Saturday Evening Post or in any other magazine, and Macmillan and two other publishers rejected it as a book. (One of Macmillan’s readers, perhaps the ubiquitous Granville Hicks, imprudently observed that the author of Anthem “does not understand socialism,” Rand wryly recalled in the early 1960s.) The novella was published in 1938, when Cassell & Company brought it out in England under the title Ego. Eight years later, in the wake of the immense commercial success of The Fountainhead, she revised it, added a preface, and let a political ally’s small West Coast press publish and distribute it in pamphlet form. A beautifully illustrated magazine version appeared in 1953. And when a paperback edition became available in the 1960s, some high schools made it mandatory reading. To date, a total of three and a half million copies have been sold. Rand loved this story, perhaps more than her later, celebrated work. It was “more precious to me than anything I have ever considered writing,” she revealed in a 1938 letter to Cassell.
Rand was fond of Watkins, whose rescue at a low moment in her career she never forgot. But the agent’s inability to sell Anthem and Ideal disturbed her. Then, in the fall of 1937, she accidentally discovered that the agent had neglected to keep an eye on Macmillan’s postpublication handling of We the Living. She had run out of author’s copies of the book, and when she made a routine request to the publisher for more, she was dumbfounded to find out that the novel was out of print. Macmillan, in violation of its contract, had failed to reprint the book when inventory ran low. Far worse, it had destroyed the type the novel had been set with and couldn’t reprint it. For Rand, this calamity was compounded by the fact that We the Living’s sales had actually been rising in 1937, not falling, as typically happens in the second year after publication. She agreed to meet with a Macmillan editor, James Putnam, who—not especially contrite—offered her a deal: He would arrange to have the type reset and to issue a new edition, at considerable cost, if she would sign a contract with Macmillan for the publication of The Fountainhead. Furious and heartsick as she was, this sounded attractive. She decided to accept the offer on one condition: that along with a $250 advance against royalties, payable now, the publisher would guarantee a $1,200 budget for promotion of the new book. The editor refused. Rand walked away, taking the copyright to We the Living with her. Not until the late 1950s would readers again be able to buy and read her arresting first novel. Her trust in Watkins was wearing thin.
The O’Connors moved again—in fact, they moved twice between autumn 1937 and autumn 1940—and again settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By early 1938, with Nick’s help, Rand was feeling socially at ease enough to throw a party in Town Hall for her aristocratic British friend by mail, Lady Boileau. Boileau was visiting America to promote her new novel, Ballade in G Minor, to give conservative political
speeches, and to meet with such luminaries as Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park and Washington, D.C. J. Edgar Hoover arranged for a special tour of FBI headquarters for her, where, Boileau gaily reported, she shot a Tommy gun. She pronounced the FBI director “charming.” Years later, Rand herself would try, and fail, to see him.
The year 1938 brought rumors of impending war in Europe. It also brought a welcome burst of economic activity after a short but devastating recession in the midst of the lingering Depression. Rand’s own financial condition improved that summer when RKO made an offer of ten thousand dollars to acquire the long-expired MGM film rights to The Night of January 16th. The studio intended to cast Claudette Colbert or, even less plausibly, Lucille Ball as the solemn Karen Andre. The fee would have to be split with the detestable A. H. Woods, but five thousand dollars was better than nothing. This was especially so because Watkins had found a publishing company that was enthusiastic about bringing out The Fountainhead but refused to pay the author an advance on royalties until the novel was completed. The publisher was Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., one of New York’s best and most reputable firms. Rand’s editor would be the founder’s stylish wife, Blanche Knopf, whom Rand later came to think of as “a phony.” Even without payment, there was both promise and protection in consigning her unfinished book to a well-regarded publisher. On June 27, 1938, the thirty-three-year-old novelist and playwright signed a contract with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her a year to finish.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 14