Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Two months later, in April, she wrote “The Individualist Manifesto.” The thirty-three-page polemical essay presented her moral philosophy in the fullness of its development at that time. It echoed and amplified Anthem’s closing cry for the sovereignty of the individual mind—“I am. I think. I will”—and anticipated the author’s famous moral and political tracts of the 1960s.

  The first thing right-thinking people must understand, she explained in the manifesto, is that man is an independent entity, an end unto himself, and never a means to an end. Since this is so, he has certain inalienable rights. These are not granted by any state, society, or collective, but rather they shield against all governments and societies. They constitute “Man’s protection against all other men” and are absolute. They include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bloodthirsty tyrants throughout history have tried to strip men of their rights or lure them into giving up their rights on behalf of the poor, the fatherland, enhanced security, or the common good. Never has a despot confessed to seeking power for himself; he always claims to be serving some nobler purpose. Caveat civis: Those who tell you to give up your rights for the sake of someone or something else typically want to be that someone or something else.

  Second, the government exists to protect your rights, and only to protect your rights; you do not exist to obey or serve the state. (In fact, citizens owe the government nothing, not even taxes; government funding should be by voluntary means.) As Communism proved, primary allegiance to the state was a recipe for slavery and stagnation. In fact, taking a leaf from Albert Jay Nock, Rand and Paterson both argued that governments have rarely contributed anything material or spiritual to humankind’s development. Most governments have hounded geniuses to martyrdom. The sole affirmative function of the state is to safeguard individuals from one another so that they may create and work in peace.

  Third, there is “and ever has been” one fountainhead of progress: the individual person in a state of political and economic freedom. This was the source of the wheel, the steam engine, the electric lightbulb, and all great music, art, and literature. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only system ever evolved to operate solely on the basis of individual human reason juxtaposed against an opportunity or a need, and as such must be thanked for 150 years of industrial creativity and material progress such as the world had never known.

  Perhaps most important, capitalism, unlike Communism, doesn’t demand the impossible. It doesn’t ask people to turn themselves inside out and twist their desires into halos to serve its ends, as Communism does. Although free markets do benefit most men as a consequence of the phenomenal productivity they make possible, that is a side effect, she argued. Capitalism gives man’s “natural, healthy egoism” the scope and freedom to allow him to enrich himself, if he so wishes—and as a result enriches others. “Selfishness is a magnificent force,” she declared, arguing that not a single great genius has ever been motivated by a desire to help others or by anything other than a perfectly natural selfish commitment to his own ideas and vision. While this is debatable—later, even Rand sometimes seemed driven by a desire to guide others—it is an emotionally powerful rebuttal to the tenets of the dark, punitive Christianity and cynical Stalinism she abhorred.

  Finally, capitalism doesn’t serve the strong at the expense of the weak, as liberals claimed, for two reasons. First, the weak would never be able to create an equivalent level of progress or prosperity on their own, and they benefit from its creation by those more competent and motivated than themselves. Second, capitalism is a system of free and voluntary trade. Theoretically, no one is compelled to sell his labor or goods at, say, a fixed state price or to buy another’s goods based on force. The flaws and abuses of capitalism are a result of the introduction of collectivist premises in the form of government regulation and favoritism, such as tax favoritism, as she would argue dramatically and in detail in Atlas Shrugged.

  Although she had been intimate with Paterson for only a few months when she wrote the manifesto, the older woman’s influence shows in the milder language and the egalitarianism of the essay. Two months earlier, “To All Innocent Fifth Columnists” had bullied and belittled almost as much as it had argued from principle. The manifesto proceeds in relative sweet reasonableness. She was clearly modifying her early Nietzschean belief in the native superiority and proud birthright of the best relative to ordinary men, which permeates her writing of the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1936 edition of We the Living, for example, the masses are “mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned” for the sake of those who are gifted, according to Kira. In the manifesto, as in the last two-thirds of The Fountainhead and in Atlas Shrugged, heroes—i.e., the creators and producers of useful new goods and ideas—are to be judged by what they make and do, not by their station or native gifts. In late-night chats with Paterson, Rand was refining her understanding of a uniquely American brand of individualism, based on a commitment to the natural and equal rights of men. The heart of Americanism, she wrote, is the principle that “Man, each single, solitary, individual man, has a sacred value which [we] respect.” In America, heroes are made, not born.

  While Rand and Pollock were recruiting for their unnamed organization, Ann Watkins was doing her best to find a new publisher for The Fountainhead. She sent the author’s outline and first few chapters to eight publishers, including Simon & Schuster; Harcourt Brace; Dodd, Mead; and Doubleday. This time there were no offers, although, as with We the Living, there were close calls. At Doubleday, after an encouraging luncheon with editors, Rand and Watkins returned to the agent’s office to learn that a Mr. Thompson had vetoed the editors’ consensus to publish the book—a “bad” disappointment for Rand, she said. At Simon & Schuster, an executive tried to prove the firm’s conservative credentials by boasting that it had published the work of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s more “democratic” former sidekick. With his love of democracy thus established, he rejected The Fountainhead. Rand found this episode funny, akin to being spurned by a cartoon character, she said.

  But Watkins was losing patience. Like Jean Wick, she began to display some peevishness. The book might sell if only the characters were more human, she complained to Rand. Why couldn’t they do something, instead of talking all the time? And why did Roark have to be so stiff and unsympathetic? Poor, exasperated Watkins, a link in a long chain of doubters past and future, may have been right about Roark but sadly missed the point. The tale of the architect is fundamentally an allegory of good and evil; it takes place in a sealed world where ethical and psychological ideas, not plausible characters, serve as glue. What Watkins was trying to say was that Roark is a character without inner conflicts, a fact that makes him seem two-dimensional and at times inhuman. As the ideal man, Rand would have answered, Roark can have no doubts or conflicts. For her, mixed emotions were a sign of faulty thinking. Her hero’s values, emotions, and actions flow in a unified stream from the fountainhead of his creative values. Here, moral integrity is forceful, ruthless, and erotic.

  Rand, in turn, had come to doubt Watkins’s reliability. She had not forgotten the debacle of We the Living at Macmillan, nor the time spent on projects her agent had encouraged her to write but couldn’t sell. As for The Fountainhead, at first Watkins had been enthusiastic—so much so that before the Knopf contract came along she had gaily promised that she could get an advance on the book anytime Rand ran out of money. That promise had turned out to be unfounded. Now Rand conjectured that Watkins was embarrassed by it and wanted to find someone else to blame for her inability to fulfill it—namely, Rand. She also guessed that the agent was talking about her behind her back, secretly criticizing her to others.

  The showdown came one day when Watkins mused aloud that there was simply something wrong with the novel. She didn’t know what. Name it, Rand demanded. Watkins couldn’t name it and, furthermore, was fed up with being asked to give reasons for things she knew by instinct to be true. She added that Rand’s inflexibility ab
out the book was making it impossible to sell. At this point, the women hung up on each other and the relationship was severed, either because Watkins resigned in protest, as Rand suggested in a letter, or because Rand abruptly broke off with her, which is what Rand later told a friend. The letter, written to the agent on the afternoon of the dispute, was conciliatory but not apologetic. “Even instincts have reasons behind them,” she pleaded. “Words, thoughts, reasons—if we drop them we will have nothing left. … If you really meant what you said, ‘Let us try to clear up [our differences]’—let’s try to do that,” she concluded. Watkins didn’t respond by letter, and it’s not clear whether she responded at all. Although she continued to handle business transactions concerning The Night of January 16th and We the Living, Rand had lost a champion and a friend as well as her sales representative for The Fountainhead. She had no publisher, no agent, no money.

  In truth, there weren’t many business transactions for an agent to handle. Royalties from The Night of January 16th had slowed to a trickle. We the Living was out of print. Even with a cheaper apartment and pared-down expenses, Rand urgently needed money. Before the rupture, Watkins had sent the completed chapters of The Fountainhead to Richard Mealand, the head of the New York office of Paramount Pictures, who sometimes bought unpublished stories for the screen. Mealand couldn’t persuade his Hollywood bosses to buy the novel in progress, but he was electrified by what he read, according to Rand. In the late spring of 1941, she went to see him. Still unable to find screen-writing assignments, she asked for work as a freelance reader. He hired her on the spot. Her job was to evaluate the film potential of about-to-be-published books and stories—the same work she had done during her early months with Cecil B. DeMille. Her pay ranged from six dollars for a short evaluation to twenty-five dollars for a long one. She was a slow reader and worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to earn as much as she could. Mealand and his assistant, Frances Hazlitt, wife of the distinguished free-market economist and journalist Henry Hazlitt, were touched to see that she was not in the least above her job but was unusually conscientious and hardworking. They took her under their wing, into their social circle, and gave her all the work they could find.

  Although she and Pollock continued to try to stitch together a conservative advocacy organization, meetings tapered off and the recruiting slowed. To her astonishment, many potential members reacted to her manifesto as if it were written in an unfamiliar language. Her placid definitions of individualism (a political philosophy that holds each man to be “an independent entity” who cannot be deprived of his rights for any reason) and of collectivism (the subjugation of the individual to a group) proved surprisingly controversial. She began to see that Willkie wasn’t the only cloudy thinker on the Right. While she wasn’t ready to dismiss all self-styled conservatives as hopeless traitors, the way she later did, the right-leaning, post-Willkie journalists and businessmen she was meeting struck her as anti-intellectual and smug. She faced the prospect of educating them before they could educate the public. The thought was wearying. She lost interest.

  Ever after, she remembered the 1940 campaign and its aftermath as harsh, exhausting, and gloomy—her own real-life descent into the granite quarry to hack out a livelihood from stone.

  It was also a frightening moment in world history. In September 1941, the Nazis, having invaded Russia, launched a nine-hundred-day bombardment and blockade of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called), in which as many as a million people died of gunshot wounds, illness, and starvation; she had no way of knowing whether her parents and sisters were alive and able to feed themselves. At the end of September, when the Nazis occupied Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine, soldiers slew almost thirty-four thousand Jews in the massacre at Babi Yar; in the same month Germany began constructing the gas chambers at Auschwitz. New tyrants were reenacting old atrocities, and no one knew whether they could be stopped. Personally, Rand felt powerless, although she characteristically expressed her powerlessness in anger and self-pity. “If I were a defender of Communism, I’d be a Hollywood millionaire by now, with a swimming pool and a private orchestra to play ‘The Internationale,’ “she wrote to a businessman acquaintance in September. She referred to herself as a proletarian capitalist. Mostly, she yearned for the resources to return to work on The Fountainhead as another person might long for a vacation.

  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, hope appeared. According to the account she later gave to friends and followers, she had purposely not told Mealand that her literary agent had decamped or that the chapters he had read were gathering dust on her desktop. She didn’t want him to think she was desperate for help. But he found out and insisted on introducing her to a few of his Paramount publishing contacts. After a false start with Little, Brown and Company, he and she decided to approach a bright young man who had just been hired as chief editor in the New York office of the Indiana-based Bobbs-Merrill Company. Earlier that year, Bobbs-Merrill had published a now-classic book-length exposé called The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, by United Press’s former Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons. It had kicked up a storm of angry controversy on the Left. That impressed Rand. Mealand made a phone call, and she dropped off the manuscript of The Fountainhead at the Bobbs-Merrill office on Park Avenue and Thirty-first Street, where she met the new young editor, Archibald Ogden. She noted, skeptically, that his dress was collegiate and his manner overly “palsy.” He reminded her of Peter Keating.

  Just as with Rand’s first encounter with Cecil B. DeMille, there is another version of this story. The estimable Muriel Hall, Isabel Paterson’s executor, who worked for decades as a research editor at Time and Life, recalled Paterson’s having told her proudly that it was she, Paterson, who provided Rand with an introduction to Ogden at Bobbs-Merrill. “Pat had contacts there, and she could bludgeon people,” Hall said. “She told [Ogden] that he had to publish that book, and he did. I don’t think Rand ever credited her with that.” Perhaps Rand didn’t know of Paterson’s efforts, or perhaps both accounts are true; Mealand and Paterson may each have helped to propel the book to print. In any case, in letters and biographical interviews from 1960 and 1961, Rand didn’t mention receiving support from her friend. Hall was certain that Paterson could not have made it up. “She was not given to bragging. She was absolutely straight arrow, factual,” Hall said.

  Within a week of receiving the manuscript, Ogden telephoned. He had read her chapters. He thought they were “great writing in the tradition of real literature,” he told her. He listed the things he liked most: the ambitious theme, the emblematic characterizations, the brilliant writing, the heroic sensibility. Since it was for exactly these qualities that she most wanted to be admired, she prized Ogden’s compliments for the rest of her life. He went to bat for the book with his boss, D. L. Chambers, the president of Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. When Chambers wired him to reject the book, he wired back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.” Chambers responded: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract. But the book better be good.”

  Ogden’s second congratulatory phone call came at ten o’clock one wintry morning when Rand had been up all night typing a rush report for Paramount. She listened, breathless, and hung up the phone. Then she left the apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street to deliver the report to Paramount. Mealand and Frances Hazlitt were on hand to congratulate her. Since Ogden hadn’t been able to talk his famously frugal boss into paying the full $1,200 advance she had requested to meet expenses, they also pledged their continuing support; they promised to give her weekend reading assignments until the book was finished.

  At home that evening, she probably danced around the living room with Frank and Nick to one of her old-world recordings; the German march song “Marionettes at Midnight” was her favorite at the time. All her adult life, whenever she was happy, she put an old 78 rpm disc on the record player, waved her arms, and stomped about, pretending to be conducting
an orchestra—typically, to the beat of a light-hearted waltz, a European operetta, or a march remembered from her childhood, recordings of which she had carried with her from St. Petersburg to Chicago, to Los Angeles, and back to New York. During celebrations she also liked to place funny hats on her pet stuffed lion cubs, Oscar and Oswald, a gift from O’Connor soon after their marriage. Friends often remarked that she seemed startlingly childish in her pleasure. But then, in many ways, she remained a demanding and entitled child.

  On December 10, 1941, three days after the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor and catapulted the nation into World War II, she signed a contract with Bobbs-Merrill. She promised to deliver The Fountainhead, two-thirds of which remained to be written, in a little more than a year’s time. She received an advance of one thousand dollars. Her new due date was January 1, 1943.