In spite of the war, now began the happiest year of Ayn Rand’s life, she later said. This time, she was determined to meet her deadline; the more vehement and explosive parts of the story were yet to be written, and she didn’t want to give her new publisher an excuse for backing out. If she did, there might not be another chance. She set to work like “a writing engine” on a tour de force that would change the American cultural landscape.
All her life, Rand displayed a mental capacity for work that few could equal. But her youthful physical inertia never left her; she avoided exercise, gained weight easily, and lacked the bodily stamina to keep pace with her penetrating mind and her ambitions. In 1942, with a pressing deadline before her, she began to take amphetamines, probably Benzedrine, which was still relatively new on the market and was easily available in pill form with a doctor’s prescription. In mild doses, amphetamines improve temper and self-confidence, enhance energy and mental acuity, reduce appetite, and stave off sleep. Over time or in larger doses, they can lead to mood swings, irritability, uncontrolled emotional outbursts, impaired judgment, and paranoia, all of which Rand was susceptible to without chemical assistance. During the final months of composing her breakthrough novel, the drug seems to have worked well for her; allied with an indomitable will to succeed and renewed hope, amphetamines made it possible for her to write both day and night. She sometimes didn’t go to bed at all; for two or three days running she would take catnaps on the couch in her clothes, then get up and resume writing. For appointments outside the apartment, she would make herself “clean and respectable.” Once she worked for thirty hours straight, pausing only to eat the meals that Nick and Frank prepared.
Rand continued to write in longhand and to read aloud to the O’Connor brothers, who would sometimes suggest American expressions or idiomatic bits of dialogue. Then she would expertly type her new pages, making alterations based on how they sounded. She regularly consulted Paterson, too, particularly about her characters’ speeches. Among other suggestions the older woman made was one to eliminate explicit references to Hitler, Stalin, Fascism, Nazism—to all contemporary history. “The theme of your book is wider than the politics of the moment,” Paterson told her. “You are really writing about collectivism—any past, present, or future form of it.” This was excellent advice, and Rand took it, not only in The Fountainhead but also in Atlas Shrugged. The novels’ timeless, almost mythical atmosphere is surely one of the reasons for their enduring popularity.
Rand depended on Nick to help proofread pages as they rolled from her typewriter. When working hours ended, he sat into the night and discussed the day’s progress with her. Although she cherished Frank’s intuitive and sympathetic grasp of her viewpoint and intentions, she valued Nick’s more nuanced reaction to developments of plot, character, literary technique, and, most importantly, style. Rand’s grasp of the American idiom was still spotty. According to the O’Connors’ friend Millicent Patton, Nick claimed that he had even written some of the novel’s dialogue— the light party banter and repartee; Patton added that Nick would occasionally stop by and show her draft pages with his contributions. What seems at least equally likely is that Frank and Nick suggested or corrected her dialogue and pointed out opportunities for humor.
In the first draft of The Fountainhead on file at the U.S. Library of Congress, her handwriting changed in 1942; as the year progressed, where it had been fairly large, loopy, and legible it became rushed and cramped, possibly as an effect of the amphetamines. She stayed in, chain-smoked cigarettes, and sped through complex scenes illuminating Roark’s setbacks and victories, his friendships and betrayals, his contorted love affair, and finally his acquittal at trial. She dated her chapters, and her velocity and precision seem almost unbelievable. Whereas it had taken her years to plan and compose the first third of the novel, over the twelve months of 1942 she averaged a chapter a week. When her scrawled sentences were typed, the pacing flew and there were few corrections.
On July 4, 1942, she began part 4, the final section of The Fountainhead. It opens with a boy who has recently finished college and wants to compose music happening upon a beautiful summer resort in the grassy Monadnock Valley of Pennsylvania. The resort has not yet opened and is uninhabited and lovely. Roark has designed and built it. The boy, gazing at the small, gemlike glass houses and gardens falling over natural field-stone ledges, sees that architecture can be a kind of music in stone and gains courage from its perfection to pursue his own vocation, much as Rand had once found inspiration in Victor Hugo. Of the months Roark and his workmen have spent building the resort—which has been financed by swindlers hoping to lose money—Rand wrote a description that must also have characterized her own experience in 1942. “The year at Monadnock Valley remained in [Roark’s and the workers’] minds as the strange time when the earth stopped turning and they lived through twelve months of spring. … They remembered only the feeling which is the meaning of spring—one’s answer to the first blades of grass, the first buds on tree branches, the first blue of the sky—the singing answer, not to grass, trees and sky, but to the great sense of beginning, of triumphant progression, of certainty in an achievement that nothing will stop.” In the resort’s first season, it becomes a phenomenal success, to the shock and ruination of its crooked backers.
Her work with Channing Pollock placed indefinitely on hold, her admirer Albert Mannheimer having left New York to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood, she saw almost no one that year, apart from the O’Connor brothers and Isabel Paterson. Paterson, too, was finishing a book, her first and only work of nonfiction, an eccentric individualist history of America called The God of the Machine; now largely forgotten, it was influential in its time. Like The Fountainhead, The God of the Machine was scheduled for publication in the spring of 1943. The two friends, who talked by phone most nights, entered into a good-natured competition to see who could finish first. Paterson appears to have won by a week or two. Her prose recalls the somberness of a moment when America was not yet assured of winning World War II. “Whoever is fortunate enough to be an American citizen,” she wrote in her final paragraph, “came into the greatest inheritance man has ever enjoyed. … If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish.”
The human race had no need to perish yet, for Rand had also finished The Fountainhead on time. The principle of individual freedom was alive and well, with a new hero for freedom-loving people to emulate. On the novel’s closing page, Roark’s almost-completed skyscraper rises as an emblem of the independent mind in action. To both Rand and her heroine, Dominique, who stands at the building’s base, the sight is as thrilling as the male principle itself. The tower springs and thrusts. It “breaks through the clay, the iron, the granite” of the earth and, carrying the earth’s fire to the surface, “shoots out to freedom.” As Dominique boards a construction elevator and rides skyward to join her new husband at the pinnacle, she floats above the world’s greatest city’s busy merchant banks, gaudily decorated movie theaters, and solemn church spires until “there was only the ocean, the sky, and the figure of Howard Roark.” So ends The Fountainhead. So began Rand’s life of fame.
SEVEN
MONEY
1943
Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: “I will it!”
—Anthem, 1938
Sales of The Fountainhead got off to a slow start. The 754-page novel was delivered to bookstores on May 7, 1943. Much of the first printing of 7,500 copies remained unsold on bookstore shelves throughout the summer.
Reviewers were hostile or, at best, bewildered. The first important review of the novel appeared in The New York Times on May 12, five days after publication, and was written by the Times’s acid-tongued daily book critic, Orville Prescott. Prescott appeared to be battling his own fascination with the author’s “concentrated intellectual passion” (for the profession of architecture, h
e thought), flair for melodrama, and “grotesquely peculiar characters” in what amounted to a giddy denunciation of the book. “Miss Rand must have a hidden dynamo of superhuman energy purring inside her head,” he offered. “Her book is so highly charged it seems to vibrate and emit a shower of sparks.” Unfortunately, he continued, the sparks lighted up a fictional world of such “dirty, crawling” malice, animal lust, lechery, and twisted conspiracies that the Marquis de Sade, Cesare Borgia, and Adolf Hitler would all feel at home there. In the end, he declared, the plot and characters were on a par with a grade-B Boris Karloff movie. The best that could be said for the book was that its setting suggested a path for new and better novels about architecture.
Rand never commented publicly on this review, but it must have kindled both fury and fear, especially because positive prepublication buzz had led her to expect intelligent, or at least intelligible, commentary. More cause for distress quickly followed. The Chicago Daily Tribune, among many out-of-town newspapers, endorsed the novel but also mistook it for a story about architecture. At Isabel Paterson’s paper, the New York Herald Tribune, a mysterious unnamed conservative female writer refused to review it, Paterson told Rand, and Irita Van Doren assigned the book to Albert Guerard, later a celebrated professor of English at Stanford University. He angered Rand by identifying Roark with Nietzsche’s Superman and by placing himself warily on either side of the fence, as she colorfully put it. (Whoever the mysterious female refusenik was, Rand exclaimed to Paterson, she deserved to be damned for letting Guerard get his hands on The Fountainhead. Some years later this review would become a bitter point of reference in an escalating quarrel between the women.) Diana Trilling, writing for The Nation, was positively indignant, calling the book “an orgy of glorification” of the building trades and of their ten-foot-tall, flame-haired, capital-G Genius Howard Roark. Mrs. Trilling spoke for many reviewers when she wrote, “Anyone who is taken in by [The Fountainhead] deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing.”
Unknown to Mrs. Trilling, a scarcity of paper, if not actual wartime rationing, had played an active part in the publication of The Fountainhead. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which took place three days before Bobbs-Merrill signed Rand’s contract, the U.S. government warned of coming civilian shortages of everything from gasoline to wood fiber as it mobilized the army. If the book contract had been delayed by a week, Rand’s editor, Archibald Ogden, later confided to her, the company would have canceled the contract; it couldn’t have guaranteed access to the paper to print such an unusually long novel, given its other publishing commitments. As it was, shortages partly explain a riddle of the novel’s structure: why the alluring Dominique Francon doesn’t appear until late in chapter 9, when, as Rand well knew, the rules of melodrama call for a love interest to be present from the start. To save paper, she had voluntarily cut out about a third of the manuscript before it went to press, eliminating, among other things, an early sexual liaison between Roark and a young stage actress named Vesta Dunning. Dunning’s hunger for adulation mirrored Gail Wynand’s drive for popular influence, she decided, and so was thematically repetitive. Besides, she reflected, Roark’s affair with Dunning—which also included a “rape” scene—diluted the intensity of his relationship with Dominique. Yet because there had been no time to rewrite chapters 1 through 9, the disappearance of the stage actress left a romantic gap. As a result, Rand always thought that the first quarter of the novel read more slowly than the rest.
Paper scarcity may also have contributed to the slow pace of the novel’s climb to best-sellerdom. Until the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, Rand regularly protested that Bobbs-Merrill was assigning too much paper to other books and not enough to hers and that the policy of allotting equal proportions of paper to all books slowed shipments of The Fountainhead to bookstores, sabotaged sales, and kept her off the regional best-seller lists. “What about our other authors?” Bobbs-Merrill’s production department exclaimed. That was their problem, she replied. The Fountainhead was her book, her chance, and she wasn’t going to let it slip by out of an ill-conceived concern for others, whose books, she conjectured, were less important and had less potential than her own. At one point, she hired an attorney and hinted that she might sue. As often in these matters, her reasoning made sense if you accepted her assumptions—in this case, that the practice of rewarding (others’) need rather than (her) excellence was tantamount to socialism and exemplified a second-hander’s way of avoiding making a literary or a business judgment. But her manner did not win her friends.
The single most perceptive review of The Fountainhead appeared on May 16, 1943, in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Archibald Ogden telephoned Rand in her apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street to read the review aloud to her. She didn’t want to hear it, she told him; she had already seen and heard enough. He answered that she would be happy to hear this. The reviewer was Lorine Pruette, a psychologist, a former Smith College professor, and an early feminist writer. She not only praised The Fountainhead as a masterful and thrilling tour de force; she predicted that it would cause all thoughtful readers to re-evaluate their basic attitudes about the pressing issues of the day. Calling the prose brilliant, beautiful, and bitter, she wrote, “Good novels of ideas are rare at any time. This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that [I] can recall.” Unlike Prescott and others, she understood the theme. It was not architecture. It was the inherent nobility of the autonomous individual as he defies collective power. “Rand has taken her stand against collectivism, ‘the rule of the second-hander, that ancient monster,’” Pruette wrote. “She has written a hymn in praise of the individual.” The psychologist identified Ellsworth Toohey as an illustration of the Fascist mind in action. She cited key passages from Roark’s defining courtroom speech, which deeply pleased Rand. Most important, she was not afraid to call attention to a controversial political and philosophical issue, collectivism, risking disapprobation by the outspoken left.
Rand later said that Pruette’s review had saved her world. It was the first to refer to individualism, a concept she passionately wanted to see discussed in print. Only by explicit reference to it could she hope to reach “my kind of readers,” she told a friend, echoing her father’s phrase in tribute to her. At that historical moment—after the Hitler-Stalin Pact had come apart and Stalin was marshaling millions of men to fight German troops on Soviet soil—the Soviet Union was an official military ally of the United States and the Roosevelt administration had taken to promoting it as a freedom-loving friend. To criticize collectivism or publicly advocate capitalism or even civil liberties was at best to commit a social gaffe, she said, and chronicles of the period bear her out. To her mind, a fear of retaliation or rebuke was the only plausible reason for reviewers to be silent about her theme. Her message was so overstated, she remarked to a business acquaintance (“it’s practically in every line”), that critics had to make a deliberate decision to ignore it. All the more reason to laud Pruette.
Once The New York Times had identified the novel’s theme, other publications gradually took it up. By the end of the war, all forms of government collectivism had permanently lost much of their popular appeal and would, in fact, become a political taboo, and “individualism” would re-enter the language of respectable discourse—chiefly, Rand suggested, as a result of her efforts and Paterson’s to keep the word alive. She was not a timid propagandist. Nevertheless, it took half a decade before most readers of The Fountainhead consciously noticed that it was a tract as well as a story.
What drove demand for the book, at least at first, was the titillating sex, along with the contrarian spectacle of a red-blooded American hero serenely blowing up a Depression-era public housing project. At lunch counters and cocktail parties, in beauty parlors and at bridge games, Dominique’s masochism and Roark’s triumphant selfishness became topics of electrified debate among both men and women. Not since Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie had ba
d behavior been so gleefully rewarded by an author.
While sales still stalled, however, Rand was understandably irritated with her publisher for the few small, conventional ads it took out for the book, and Ogden lacked the power to persuade the ad department to take a bolder tack. So she decided to raise private money for an ad campaign focused on her ideas. The day after Pruette’s review appeared, she mailed a copy of it to DeWitt Emery, president of the Pittsburgh-based National Small Business Men’s Association and an early supporter of her suspended political organization. She asked him to endorse her cause with potential donors, since, she argued, greater sales of The Fountainhead would benefit all political conservatives. The public mood “is going our way,” she argued, but the nation’s influential intellectuals had imposed a blockade against the dissemination of conservative ideas. The Fountainhead provided the heavy artillery to overpower the blockade. Novels moved people emotionally first and intellectually second, she explained to Emery, and this made them the most compelling kind of propaganda. She knew this because she had witnessed the power of nineteenth-century novels to transform her native country and provoke revolution. American Reds also knew it, she argued, which explained why they were so “savagely” bent on maintaining their hold over the creators and purveyors of ideas in Hollywood and New York. In case anyone suspected that she was trying to line her pockets through accelerated sales, she offered to turn over a share of her royalties to all donors until every dollar spent had been repaid.
She couldn’t fund the campaign herself because she was again out of money. Her thousand-dollar advance from Bobbs-Merrill had long since disappeared into rent, groceries, and an occasional cafeteria dinner. Although by midsummer The Fountainhead was already moving toward the black side of the ledger, she would have to wait to collect any royalties until a six- to nine-month accounting period had passed. At the invitation of Richard Mealand and Frances Hazlitt, she went back to work full time at Paramount.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 20