Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Twice Rand wrote to the curmudgeonly old midwesterner, asking to interview him. Her first letter was answered, “Dear Mr. Rand,” by a secretary who explained that Mr. Wright was traveling; in fact, Wright was in the midst of planning Taliesin West, his retreat in Arizona. In the fall of 1938, she arranged to be introduced to him after a lecture he gave at the National Association of Real Estate Boards in New York. “I spent three hundred and fifty dollars out of my savings to buy a black velvet dress and shoes and a cape, everything to match, at [the expensive Fifth Avenue department store] Bonwit Teller, which I had never entered before,” she later told a friend. “I felt this would be an unrepeatable occasion, because I was to meet a man who was really great.” According to Wright’s biographer, he felt no immediate rapport with her and was suspicious of her intentions. Still, in November 1938 she wrote again, enclosing a draft of the first three chapters of the novel. He replied that “no man named ‘Roark’ with flaming red hair” could possibly be an architectural genius or hope to “lick” the building-trades conspiracy. She responded to this by telegram, imploring him to see her. Wright’s secretary again informed her that the architect had gone away. Once The Fountainhead was published, she and Wright would become acquaintances, briefly and tempestuously.

  Meanwhile, she scoured the works of architectural and social historians and compared their attitudes to those of Wright. She found most of them to be conventional thinkers, unwitting collectivists, or worse. She gave her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, the pretenses and mannerisms of those she especially disliked: the elegant theoretician Lewis Mumford, who cast a cold eye on technology and praised the architecture of communal life; Heywood Broun, a popular syndicated columnist, champion of the underdog, and founder of the pro-Communist Newspaper Guild; Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker’s book critic and host of the popular radio show Information Please, from whom Toohey received his encyclopedic memory; and British socialist Harold Laski. At the urging of her friend Pincus Berner and his wife, in 1937 she attended one of Laski’s guest lectures at the New School for Social Research and hated him; the following year, she went back to look him over in greater detail. She committed his elegant slouch and air of snide superiority to memory. She said, “You could sense the bared teeth behind [his] smile.” He was Toohey in the flesh.

  In early notes for The Fountainhead in 1935, she had briefly sketched the novel’s fifth main character, the New York Banner’s owner and publisher, Gail Wynand. Now she elaborated Wynand’s role in her intricate drama of good and evil. Wynand is a self-made millionaire who owns a vast empire of real estate holdings and newspapers and employs Dominique and Toohey to add a touch of culture to his flagship paper. A combination of William Randolph Hearst and a Horatio Alger character, he is a poor boy from Hell’s Kitchen whose overriding ambition has been to gain power over the illiterate brutes who once used to beat him up by giving them the pablum they want and growing rich. In Dominique, he gradually recognizes a kindred spirit and decides to marry her. Wishing to humiliate her new husband, Keating, she agrees to marry him. The newspaper magnate offers Keating a plum architectural assignment in exchange for divorcing Dominique. Keating, in moral free fall, takes the deal.

  Like Dominique, Wynand cares for no one, with the possible exception of Dominique herself. He hates both his own pandering and the mob his newspaper serves. Then, while searching for an architect to design a dream home for himself and his new wife, he meets Howard Roark. Unaware of Roark’s history with Dominique, or that Dominique and Toohey have been using the Banner to discredit the young architect, he hires and befriends Roark. By the time he understands Roark’s immense moral and aesthetic value, however, it is too late to save his paper or himself. Toohey has mobilized popular resentment against Roark, and against Wynand’s patronage of Roark, into an advertising boycott and a strike by the newspaper’s reporters and editors. In a failed effort to preserve his business, Wynand also forfeits what remains of his self-esteem by denouncing the one person he respects, Roark. Rand intended Wynand to be the book’s great tragic figure: a Nietzschean antihero who allows the weakling Toohey to destroy his empire because he misunderstands the nature of power. In fact, his character was partly her critique of Nietzsche’s will to power; although she, like Nietzsche, still held the masses in contempt, she no longer believed in dominating or forcing them. “You were a ruler of men,” Wynand famously tells himself. “You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.” Because rulers are dependent on their subjects for their power, they also live at second hand. Wynand “rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say,” Rand noted. Roark, on the other hand, needs no power other than his own dynamic drive to create and build. Never does he suggest that the masses are there to serve him, as both Kira and Nietzsche do.

  Toohey, whose sole aim is power and is therefore the incarnation of collectivist evil, can destroy the Banner, but his plans to take it over and run it are thwarted by Wynand’s simple last-minute remedy of halting the presses and closing the paper. This was Rand’s trial run of an idea that would become a major element in Atlas Shrugged and in her vision of utopia: the impotence of evil to produce anything or prevail against creators, unless good people cooperate with evil and give it strength.

  In her notebooks, she defined The Fountainhead’s theme as “individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but within a man’s soul.” Apart from the heroic theme and the sex, and notwithstanding the seemingly implausible events of the story, what makes the book phenomenally compelling is her remarkable ability to tie her ideas about individualism and the proper use of power to her plot and characters, and then tie her characters to one another. Thus, in her notes, Roark is “the man who can be [an individualist hero] and is [one].” Dominique, who in spite of her combativeness actually yearns for Roark’s eventual triumph, is a priestess and “the woman for a man like Roark.” Wynand is “the man who could have been [a hero] but isn’t.” Cleverly, passive Peter Keating is “the man who never could be [a hero] and doesn’t know it,” while Toohey is “the man who never could be [a hero]—and [does know] it.” Because Toohey is aware of his fundamental lack of generative power and wants to recast the world in his image, he is the embodiment of evil: a collectivist avenger who acts as the Lenin of The Fountainhead.

  By the early fall of 1937, Rand had outlined everything but the novel’s climax. She wanted to organize the plot so that Roark would not only be sued in civil court for his unorthodox design of the Stoddard Temple but would also undergo a criminal trial in which he would expound the author’s views on the rights of the creative individual. The trouble was, she couldn’t come up with a crime to get him there. Meanwhile, she needed to invent or elaborate dozens of secondary characters, from the Banner’s staff of reporters and editors to a chorus of draftsmen and minor architects, and to learn how a contemporary architect ran his office.

  She decided to go to work for Ely Jacques Kahn, a well-known Art Deco architect and an admirer of Swiss modernist Le Corbusier. Kahn had a successful New York commercial practice. He instantly understood what she was after, and was intrigued by her description of her novel in progress as a vindication of modern architecture. He hired her, incognito, as a clerk in his office at Park Avenue and Thirty-third Street. He proved immensely useful to her. She studied his drafting techniques and the pecking order in his workmen’s rooms. He brought her along to professional seminars and parties. She pumped him for gossip and stories, and he complied. She assiduously collected background information about his colleagues, whom she later turned into a gallery of roguish minor characters. He even helped to engineer her introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright’s National Association of Real Estate Boards lecture. He contributed his own traits to the figure of Guy Francon, Peter Keating’s socially connected mentor and partner. Francon is portrayed as the most successful and least industrious architect in New York—the last part definitely not an attribute of Kahn’s.

  Here and el
sewhere she picked up and deployed the finer points of well-known New York buildings and 1930s personalities, which makes The Fountainhead an amusing parody as well as a juggernaut of romantic ideas. The inspiration for Henry Cameron’s landmark Dana Building, for example, was probably Louis Sullivan’s gemlike Bayard-Condict Building, the only Sullivan structure in Manhattan, and its name seems to have been chosen in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana House in Springfield, Illinois. Peter Keating’s winning entry for the Cosmo-Slotnick competition closely resembles the 1926 Paramount Building; it, too, was built as the result of a public competition, which was won by a firm called Rapp & Rapp. A real architect named Gordon Bunshaft, a pioneer of the boxy International Style, provided the model for the pompous, tweedy Gordon Prescott, and the famous architect Cass Gilbert served as inspiration for the Renaissance-loving character of Ralston Halcombe. In creating the novelist and Toohey protégé Lois Cook, Rand parodied Gertrude Stein and added a Russian touch; not only is Cook an American cubist, like Stein, but she is also an early 1920s Russian futurist who, in the words of Russian historian Bernice Rosenthal, “valorizes [that group’s] cacophony, disharmony, and even a kind of crudeness” in her home and work. The debauched old Banner theater critic, Jules Fougler, may well be Brooks Atkinson, the reviewer who so brashly condemned The Night of January 16th as “hokum.” Toohey’s millionaire patron Mitchell Layton seems to have been based on the department-store magnate Marshall Field III, and his nonsense-playwright sidekick, Ike the Genius, on William Saroyan, a client of Pincus Berner’s. When at the end of The Fountainhead, newspaper mogul Gail Wynand commissions Roark to build a skyscraper in Hell’s Kitchen, he is completing a dream announced by William Randolph Hearst in 1921.

  Most important, Kahn gave Rand the key to the novel’s climax. Chatting with him one day, she asked what was the biggest problem in architecture at the time. “Low-cost housing,” he answered and went on to explain how lack of adequate funding limited the quality of public construction for the poor. At lunchtime, she rushed downstairs, sat at the counter at Schrafft’s, and furiously scribbled notes. With a flash of irony, she imagined Roark designing a star-shaped public housing project that is both cheap and beautifully engineered—not because he believes in publicly funded housing, but because Keating has again come to him and begged for help and he is intrigued by the challenge. In exchange for the glory that Keating will receive as the nominal creator of the prize-winning Cortlandt Homes, Roark imposes one condition: His old classmate must swear to protect his blueprints from the slightest design alteration. Weak willed and by now habitually amoral, Keating does not keep his promise. He permits Toohey and a band of out-of-work hangers-on to disfigure and mar every element of Roark’s cluster of six asymmetrical buildings. Roark, acting on the premise that a creative individual has the right to confer or withdraw the products of his own mind as he sees fit, gets some dynamite and blows up the almost-completed project. He is arrested and put on trial. The prosecution argues that he is a monster for placing his ego above the need for shelter by the city’s Depression-battered poor. In his own defense, Roark delivers an eight-page speech, which can be summed up as a passionate plea for egoism “in its real meaning,” as Rand phrased it at the very beginning of her notes. “All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good,” Roark declares in court. “All that which proceeds from man’s dependence on men is evil.” Collectivism and altruism (collectivism’s religious twin) are the second-handers’ best tools for yoking the creator to their own aims, which they need to do because they can’t create anything new or worthwhile themselves. Witness Peter Keating, who testifies for the prosecution against his benefactor Roark; in the last throes of a “selflessness” that has devoured his soul, he leaves the stand and creeps home, permanently ruined and disgraced.

  Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Rand is channeling the ideas of Albert Jay Nock, who argued that members of a society can be grouped in one or the other of two opposing camps: either they are “economic man,” those who produce what they need to survive, or “political man,” those who use charm or coercion to live off the productivity of others. Rand’s fascinating contribution to this formulation is her depiction of its psychology: Nock’s political man is her psychological second-hander; his economic man is her individualist hero, reliant on his own ego as the fountainhead of productivity and value. In Roark’s self-defense at trial, he says, “The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” Roark refuses to be conquered. Expecting no help, he asserts his right to deny his help to others. The jurors—and millions of Rand’s readers throughout the years—may find his crime shocking, but they also find his logic eloquent, his pride compelling, and his notion of individualism peculiarly American. They acquit him.

  In fact, in his own way, Roark is as American as Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield. Self-determination, originality, defiance of authority, hard work—these are qualities Americans prize in themselves and in the national character. Yet, as a few perceptive readers have pointed out, in certain ways Roark is also an exquisite portrait of a nineteenth-century Eastern European Jew. The rights he claims for himself would, if universally acknowledged, create a perfect barrier against the anti-Semitic violence and thievery Rand knew at first and second hand in Russia; for centuries Jews’ special contributions to banking, manufacturing, trade, and capital formation had been punished by Christians even while they used them for their own ends. When Roark dedicates his destruction of the Cortlandt Homes “to every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, [and] abuse [that every creative individual] was [ever] made to spend,” and “to every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit,” he speaks for Rand’s father and grandfather, not only as Russians but also as Jews.

  Russian history and temperament also figure not so subtly in the book. In Roarkland, as in Russia, productivity is prized far more than its Western cousins accumulation, acquisition, and pleasure; no good character in The Fountainhead wants anything material or relational for himself, and even the bad characters’ deepest ambitions are spiritual. Keating wants adulation so that he can have the illusion of a self. Toohey wants to make use of his only gift: manipulation. “Enjoyment is not my destiny,” he tells Keating. “I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits. I shall rule.” Much of the novel’s thrilling intensity comes from the dangers posed by Roark’s insistence on spiritual integrity—his unwillingness to compromise any aspect of his vision. Compromise is said to be an insult in Russia; in America—a functioning democracy—it is a way of life. Finally, Roark feels no sexual jealousy, even when his beautiful mistress sleeps with and marries first Peter Keating and then Gail Wynand. In fact, he seems to feel closer to Wynand because he knows what the mogul doesn’t know: that the two men share a knowledge of Dominique’s body. Free love and sexual equality were standard notions in Russian intellectual circles from the middle 1800s onward. They certainly weren’t standard in America in the 1930s and 1940s; and Rand’s hard-breathing fantasies and blithe acceptance of serial sexual affairs were to create as much surprise and buzz among readers of the time as did her hero’s pride in blowing up a housing project.

  In later years, when Frank O’Connor took up painting, Rand would say that she envied him his simple pleasure in applying paint to canvas. As she left off outlining and began to write, her work proved slow and grueling. Although she had mastered her story line, finding the proper nuances of style and an emotional vocabulary that fit her theme took more time and energy than she expected. As with We the Living, these matters had to be worked out sentence by sentence, almost word by word, in her adopted language. She wrote and rewrote, cut and restored, bending over her handmade walnut desk every day and deep into the night. For inspiration, she gazed at the publicity photograph of an ethereal young O’Connor she had hung above her desk. The portrait of Frank “makes John Barrymore look like an office boy,” a visitor once remarked. By mid-1939 she had only abou
t a third of the novel in first draft.

  She missed her deadline with Knopf. Blanche Knopf gave her an extension of one year, until June 28, 1940. For a number of reasons, she missed that deadline, too, and couldn’t say with certainty when she would finish. By mutual assent, then, her contract with the publisher was canceled. As Watkins once again began to circulate her outline and early chapters, Rand grew alarmed about money. Her theatrical royalties were slowing and her savings were slipping through her fingers. She could look forward to no advance or sales. But her inner world was richer and more luminous than ever, and the moral ideas she and Roark were testing “in man’s soul” would soon also be tested in the political sphere and begin to harden into code.