FIVE
THE FOUNTAINHEAD
1936–1941
I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need. I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.
—The Fountainhead, 1943
The story of The Fountainhead, Rand once explained, is the story of how a moral man can live in a corrupt society.
Howard Roark is The Fountainhead’s moral man, of course, and also Ayn Rand’s first full portrait of an individualist hero. By vocation, he is a gifted young architect beginning his career. He wants to create bold new buildings, but he is surrounded by frightened conformists and envious schemers who conspire to stop him. When he persists, his most relentless enemy, Ellsworth M. Toohey, an architecture critic and the novel’s archvillain, tries to destroy him. But Roark prevails. He takes his case for the inalienable rights of the creative individual into court, where a jury of twelve thinking Americans takes his side. He goes on to design and erect the most original skyscraper in New York. As the novel closes, the flame-haired hero perches atop the building’s pinnacle, the world—and his beautiful new wife—at his feet.
The first and last words of The Fountainhead are “Howard Roark,” and Howard Roark is the novel’s embodied message. In the opening scene, the reader meets him as a gaunt nineteen-year-old, standing naked on the edge of a cliff, high above a lake, with his hair—“neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind”—blowing in the wind. He laughs, just as Rand remembered Cyrus laughing in his cage, mocking his enemies. He has been expelled that morning from the architectural school of the prestigious Stanton Institute of Technology. His offense: refusing to follow the school curriculum and spend months designing Tudor-style chapels and Renaissance villas. He has been drawing his own unprecedented buildings. His defiant laughter echoes from the rocks that surround him as he dives into the lake. These rocks are there for him, he thinks: “waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.” Who will let you design buildings without an architectural degree? the dean asks him in an exit interview. “Who will stop me?” he asks in return.
In one form or another, Ayn Rand had been daydreaming about Roark all her life. In figure, he is tall, thin to the point of gauntness, and almost always rigid with creative tension, although in repose he can be as supple as a cat. He possesses Cyrus’s moral certainty, self-confidence, and even insolence. Like Zarathustra, he welcomes difficulties that propel him beyond ordinary, drab humanity to the formation of new values. Like Enjolras, he is single-minded in pursuit of his goal. He differs from Leo Kovalensky in that nothing can shake his self-esteem, and from Andrei Taganov in that he has no desire to convert others to his creed. He would “walk over corpses” to be an architect, one of the characters says about him. No matter what inducements or penalties he faces he won’t compromise his architectural vision by a single pilaster. He is not afraid of disappointment or of pain. In her notes, Rand calls him “the noble soul par excellence,” paying homage to Nietzsche’s definition of a hero as “a soul that has reverence for itself.” He is the archetype of the creator in a dissipated world. As he leaves Stanton for New York to pursue his career, he soon discovers that almost everyone will try to stop him.
Familiar to Rand as his character was, not least because it resembled her own, Roark did not provide the first germ of the idea for The Fountainhead. His glossy, callow schoolmate and opposite number, Peter Keating, did. Rand liked to tell the story of how she conceived of Peter Keating, who gave the novel its original title, Second-Hand Lives. In 1931 or 1932, while she was still living on North Gower Street and clerking in the wardrobe department of RKO, she became fascinated by her next-door neighbor, Marcella Bannert, the young woman who had helped her to place Red Pawn at Universal Pictures. Marcella was an executive assistant to David O. Selznick, at that time RKO’s chief of production, and she was ambitious. Every day, the Russian émigré observed the American go-getter, admiring her obvious drive but disliking almost everything else about her, including her choice of a career and the impression she gave of being a Hollywood climber. One day, to pin down the differences between them, she asked the young woman to explain what she wanted to achieve in life. Marcella had a ready answer. If nobody had an automobile, she would not want an automobile. If some people had an automobile and others didn’t, she would want an automobile. If some people had two and others had only one or none, she would want two automobiles, and so on. And she would want people to know that she had more than they did.
The conversation was a revelation to Rand. By her standards, Marcella seemed not to want anything for herself. Rand’s goal was to create a fiction of ideas out of her experience and extraordinary gift for imagining and reasoning. Marcella merely wanted to outstrip the Joneses. The prickly young moral philosopher’s judgments about people were based on whether they shared her values and “sense of life.” Marcella appeared to have no values except those derived from other people; she prized what they prized and wanted more of whatever they had, evidently to fill an emptiness inside. Although some people might have called Marcella selfish because she set her sights on luxury and status, Rand didn’t look at it that way. On reflection, she saw that the young woman was actually “selfless,” in the sense that she had no authentic self with which to desire or create anything that was hers alone. Marcella’s quality of selflessness, or lack of passionately held ideas and values, explained why she and so many other people Rand knew conformed to apparently meaningless conventions. It gave her the key to a problem that had puzzled her since childhood: why people who were so much less intelligent and passionate than she was treated her with such unfriendly indifference or even malice, seemingly because of her gifts. Pondering her conversation with Marcella, she concluded that her resolve to do and think what she wanted, so different from what others seemed to want, challenged the premises of their existence. Not only was she a genius surrounded by mediocrities, as her mother had often reminded her in letters. She also possessed a moral independence and integrity that the others did not. To some degree, she, like her 1934 character Kay Gonda, shamed them merely by living.
Marcella’s admission stirred a broader revelation. It explained the psychological source of what she called “the collectivist motivation,” by which she meant the drive to seek the meaning of one’s life outside oneself. Collectivists hunger for an all-knowing deity, an altruistic purpose, or a dictator to tell them what to do as a fig leaf for their own inadequacy and emptiness; they love what is average and “selfless” and fear what is exceptional, original, and has to be created by the self. Such people live by others’ choices. They exist at second hand. The absence of an authentic selfishness—that is, a desire to live according to one’s own principles, based on the action of one’s own mind—this, she decided, was what the Bolshevik mobs, Russian Orthodox votaries, and ordinary Americans had in common.
And so Peter Keating was born, with the soul of a second-hander. Vain, affable, dependent on his popularity for self-respect, and without specific talent, he enters the book in a mild state of adolescent self-inflation and ends in a frightening and irreversible moral decay. Unlike his college housemate Roark, he graduates from the Stanton Institute at the top of his class, amid a sea of envious admirers, yet he has no gift for architecture. He leans on Roark for help with his most difficult assignments and cheerfully stabs competitors in the back. He hates Roark’s asceticism, talent, and purpose, as well as the fact that Roark knows that Keating is a fraud. Rand describes him this way: “He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them.” As she began to outline The Fountainhead, Keating became the emblem of all that Roark is n
ot.
There was another probable source for the character of Keating, however, one that Rand may not herself have been aware of. A year or so after talking with Marcella, she received a letter from her mother describing a seeming change of personality in her sister Nora. Nora had won a prize at school for being the most socially active teacher, the letter said, and the young woman was positively jubilant about it. Anna chafed at this, fretting that Nora had grown far too concerned with what other people thought of her; she seemed to live to make others jealous, Anna wrote. That Nora may not have changed as much as Anna and Rand imagined didn’t occur to either of them, since until then it had been Rand whose preferences Nora had mimicked and admiration she had wanted. It isn’t known how Rand answered, but she surely identified one influence that she may have believed was at work on her favorite sister, for she hadn’t forgotten Anna’s social climbing in the years before the revolution or her constant nagging to be nice to other people. (Late in The Fountainhead, for example, Roark chuckles at people who attend a lecture only in order to tell their friends that they heard a famous person speak, echoing Rand’s memories of her mother.) Thus she had an old, embittering, and ready model on which to fit her new insights into second-hand lives.
Once in New York, the penniless Roark goes to work for the great Henry Cameron, a grizzled genius and an alcoholic outcast whose character is based on Louis Sullivan. Cameron is the only living architect from whom Roark is sure that he can learn the fine points of his trade; the old man is famous for having built the first skyscrapers that looked like skyscrapers and not like Gothic castles curling into the clouds. Keating, too, heads for New York, but he joins the high-society architectural firm of Francon & Heyer. Through mild (at first) duplicity, imitation, and flattery, Keating quickly rises in the firm. Meanwhile, Roark and the out-of-favor Cameron sit day after day, without paid commissions, in a dim studio in lower Manhattan. Eventually, Cameron dies, and Roark survives in poverty on a few small commissions his admirers send his way. He is beginning to develop a reputation.
One day Keating comes to ask a favor. Will Roark help him enter a global competition to design and build the new Cosmo-Slotnick movie studio headquarters in midtown Manhattan, just as he used to help him with thorny school assignments? Keating is desperate: Unless he can win the contest, he fears public humiliation and the loss of a prospective partnership in Francon & Heyer. Out of enthusiasm for a chance to design a tall building, Roark agrees and overnight devises an elegant and innovative plan for a skyscraper. Yet even with Roark’s blueprint in hand, the talentless Keating can’t quite believe he’ll win. So one afternoon he pays a visit to the firm’s ill, elderly partner, Lucius Heyer, and tries to blackmail the old man into stepping aside in favor of himself. Heyer falls to the floor and dies of fright. A few days later, Keating learns that Heyer has left him a small fortune. Furthermore, he has won the Cosmo-Slotnick competition. With cameras rolling and lights blazing, he is hailed and feted by New York’s glittering architectural fraternity, while the brilliant, self-directed Roark, now destitute, rides a train from the city of his dreams to a Connecticut granite quarry, where a job awaits him breaking rocks.
It is while laboring in the quarry that he meets—and notoriously “rapes”—the tall, slender, elegant heiress Dominique Francon. Dominique is the daughter of Peter Keating’s now-partner Guy Francon and of a mother who was very rich and left Dominique a fortune. She happens to be spending a quiet summer at her father’s Connecticut estate, although she usually lives and works in the city as a home-decorating columnist for the New York Banner. When she first glimpses Roark, at work, he wears a thin cotton shirt that clings damply to his chest, his shirtsleeves are rolled at the elbows, and a strand of hair falls into his face: He is Cyrus with an orange cap of hair. She instantly understands that he is the ideal man, not only for herself but abstractly, absolutely. Against the considerable force of her concentrated determination to care for no one, she becomes consumed with love for him.
Sex permeates The Fountainhead. In various scenes, Roark’s construction blowtorch becomes a flame he holds on a leash, shuddering with violence; Dominique sees skyscrapers as molten fire that thrusts and shoots through the earth’s crust to freedom and release. And sadomasochism permeates the sex. The most celebrated scene in the novel is the so-called rape scene. Having once seen Roark, Dominique fights to keep herself from going back to the quarry to peep at him while he hacks and drills in the blistering sun. She goes anyway, and he becomes aware that she is watching him. The first time he looks at her she experiences his contemptuous gaze as a slap in the face. She feels a “convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure.” She doesn’t yet know who the orange-haired young worker is, but she already hates him, this dusty, lowly creature who is performing a convict’s labor, yet he is the only man she has ever lusted after. Later, she returns on horseback with a whip and intercepts him as he walks to his boardinghouse. When he mockingly signals that he understands why the proud Miss Francon has followed him there, she whips him across the face and gallops away. This is a wonderful silent-film-era melodramatic set piece, except that Dominique’s attraction to Roark and his to her have a deeper—a philosophical—meaning. He is “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover,” as Rand says of him late in the novel. And it is through him that Dominique will find her own real, passionate, active self, a somewhat second-handed strategy that is somehow all right for the novel’s heroine though not for the novel’s men.
Roark’s slashed face is the only invitation he needs. What follows is sexual assault—or consensual sadism and masochism, depending on how you look at it. Rand thought of the sex as consensual and, indeed, provoked by Dominique. Late at night, Roark lets himself into the heroine’s expensively scented bedroom through a terrace window. He stands in his dirty work clothes, hands on hips, legs astride, and lets her look at him. She crouches in terror beside her dressing table. He is laughing. He picks her up and throws her on the bed. Although she is in her mid-twenties, she is a virgin. She fights “like an animal,” Rand informs us. As she fights, she thinks that if he were less detached, less cruel, she would not want him. But he is even colder and crueler than she thought. He ravishes her “as an act of scorn,” the author writes in a famous passage. “The act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.” After waiting for so many years for Leo Kovalensky—and possibly O’Connor—to brandish his whip, Ayn Rand has finally made and met someone who does.
Dominique has to be one of the most contrary characters in twentieth-century fiction. Her love for Roark ignites both her sexuality and her malice. Before she sees him again, he is called back to Manhattan to design an important building. At summer’s end, she, too, returns to the city, and after a week or two she finds out who he is. She discovers that she loves his buildings and, as a result, sets out to deprive him of commissions and destroy his reputation through her popular newspaper column. She does this not from anger, jealousy, wounded pride, or even rebelliousness; her motive is a contorted form of hero worship that drives her to protect what she loves from the desensitized gaze and dirty hands of the world. Rand once said that Dominique is “myself in a bad mood.” Like Rand as a child, the heroine wants what she values to be hers alone; others aren’t worthy even to admire it. Like Kay Gonda, she lives in a permanent state of gloom over the lack of heroic standards in the ordinary world. She tries to sabotage the hero’s work in part to save him and his beautiful prospective buildings from contamination by the “soot-stained” mob. To add to her contrariness, her belligerence and sexuality are tied together: on nights when her column has been particularly damaging to his ambitions, she goes to his room and lets him sleep with her. They both find ecstasy in their struggle with each other. But even this ecstasy is unacceptable to Dominique. On the night she tells Roark that she loves him, she also announces that she has married Peter Keating. “When I think what you are,” she
says to Roark, “I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind.” She adds, “They’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first.”
The mob emits a kind of muffled roar in The Fountainhead. The novel opens in 1922 and ends in 1940, but most of the action takes place during the Red Decade of the 1930s. The New York Banner, a mass-market newspaper that publishes Dominique’s column, specializes in maudlin stories about the hardships and religious piety of slum dwellers, single mothers, subnormal children, and the poor. On that note appears the novel’s fourth major character, Ellsworth M. Toohey, the Banner’s spindly, power-hungry architecture critic and a collectivist malefactor; he has a concave chest, lacquered hair, and a Hitler mustache. He is almost Dickensian in his malicious genius for undercutting his superiors’ achievements and for striking becoming poses on behalf of the downtrodden. His purpose is to undermine the social importance of integrity and originality, in order both to conceal his own lack of creativity and to flatter the lumpen mass of men and women who are the Banner’s readers. He and Dominique join forces, albeit with different motives, to bring down the now slowly up-and-coming “Mr. Superman,” Howard Roark.
By the spring of 1937, Rand had outlined most of the book, along with a number of subplots she would later cut. In order to provide authentic details of the characters and settings, she now needed a thorough introduction to architecture. She turned for help to the legendary reference librarians at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. They supplied her with stacks of expertly vetted materials on architectural history and theory. Looking for clues to the design philosophy of Cameron and Roark, she began by studying the masters of early skyscraper design and of clean, fluid modernist styling. This led her directly to Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, one of the first books she read was Wright’s 1932 masterpiece of American iconoclasm, An Autobiography. She later said that she had barely heard of Wright before encountering the book, but she couldn’t have chosen a more suitable self-made creator, or a more useful model for Roark, without reviving Thomas Edison. As she fine-tuned her hero’s professional experience and mission, she borrowed Wright’s organic architectural style, his emphasis on “Truth in Architecture,” his contempt for imitation and mediocrity, his transcendent indifference to clients’ good opinion, and even his famous “temple to man,” turning Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, into Roark’s Stoddard Temple in New York. Although Rand would later deny it, whole scenes from the novel are modified from or inspired by Wright’s account of his life. Roark’s rebellion against the dean of Stanton, for example, echoes the young Wright’s argument with his patron, his uncle Dan, against learning to work in traditional styles. A Mr. Austin is an early admirer of the fledgling Wright; Roark’s first client is named Austin Heller. (At one point in her notes, Rand substitutes the name of H. L. Mencken for that of Heller, suggesting that he was another model for the civil-libertarian Austin Heller.) Wright describes the nights he spent in a wooden shanty he constructed while supervising the creation of a nude female sculpture for his Midway Gardens project; Roark stays late into the night in a shack on the grounds of the Stoddard Temple while sculptor Steven Mallory creates a magnificent nude statue of Dominique Francon.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 15