Gradually, she and O’Connor took to referring to Nathaniel and Barbara as “the children.” They didn’t mean anything parental by it, Rand insisted. She often repeated her dictum that birth families are unimportant. An acquaintance of the period heard her say that she was “absolutely, violently against” them. She believed in “relatives through choice, not blood.” When another acquaintance asked whether she thought of herself as the young people’s mother, she answered sharply, “Certainly not. They are not my children. They are the children of The Fountainhead.”
Branden shared her view of families. Nonetheless, he was aware that his mentor’s geographic and ethnic origins were very similar to those of his biological parents. He sometimes thought that his literary idol looked very much like one of his mother’s cousins. And though he and Barbara weren’t her actual children, they began to come to her for motherly advice. How should they deal with the left-wing professors and students at UCLA who treated them as pariahs when they argued for her point of view in class? How should they respond when a popular philosophy professor, a logical positivist, insisted that perception is unreliable, logic is arbitrary, and nothing is universally true? Rand responded more protectively than she later would to similar dilemmas, warning “the children” against risking their academic careers by deliberately espousing her ideas. She also trained them to be alert to the implications of all that they were hearing and being taught. “Check your premises!” she would call out in conversation, meaning make sure that the assumptions you argue from are true. She astonished them by skimming a few pages of their college texts and accurately construing the authors’ starting points, arguments, and conclusions. “One could not encounter a human being in whom the psychological attribute of rationality was more pronounced,” Barbara wrote in 1986. Added Nathaniel, in 2008, “She had a Sherlock Holmes ability to ferret out implications that other people might miss,” as well as a prophet’s pleasure in guiding her young fans in mastering her ideas.
Meanwhile, she also learned from them, especially from their encounters with professors. In Atlas Shrugged, Lillian Rearden’s pseudo-intellectual friends the satirical Balph Eubank, a pretentious literary scholar (whose name translates as “barf), and Dr. Simon Pritchett, a pompous purveyor of a “nothing-is-anything” philosophy, are partly based on Rand’s young friends’ university experiences. The novel’s good professor is a philosopher named Hugh Akston, who taught both John Galt and Francisco at Patrick Henry University. As Francisco tells Dr. Pritchett at a party, Akston holds that “everything is something.” This phrase neatly captures Rand’s emerging view of metaphysics, the study of what’s real. Following Aristotle, she argued that reality is absolute: that A is A and facts are facts, independent of feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears. Furthermore, every entity’s existence is also its identity (“everything is something”). To be is to be something in particular. Finally, reason—defined as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses”—allows the formation of concepts. Therein lies the rational foundation of all knowledge, she contended in Atlas Shrugged.
She especially enjoyed talking to Nathaniel about psychology. Universities then favored Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Rand furiously disagreed with both. Freudianism seemed mystical to her; behaviorism was mechanical; and both lacked respect for the human will and the conscious mind. In conversations with him, she began to articulate her own theory of mind, based on her confidence in objective reality and her reverence for reason. She started with the concept of free will, which she defined not as freedom of decision and action, the usual definition, but as “the choice to think or not to think.” Thinking is tied to survival and is volitional, she argued; unlike animals with instincts, people must make the effort to think in order to obtain a steady supply of food, build shelter, make tools—and, eventually, create skyscrapers and trains. People can choose not to think, not to face facts, not to make rational choices; like James Taggart and the other evil characters in Atlas Shrugged, they can decide instead to wish, dream, whine, stamp their feet, or bury their heads in the sand to avoid reality. If they do so, however, they have only two remaining choices going forward: to live off the productivity of others or to die.
In light of this, she argued that psychotherapy should take aim at the removal of mental contradictions and moral defects, which result from a failure to think. Looking to the emotions—fear, elation, guilt—for information about conflicts with the world outside is foolish. “Emotions are not tools of cognition,” she liked to say. At best, they are clues to whether a person’s philosophical premises and “sense of life” are in accordance with reality or need adjustment. In 1961, she wrote that her view of human psychology was that “the head has its reasons which the heart must learn to know.”
To treat neuroses, then, ought to be as simple as recognizing and banishing unrealistic, repressed, or contradictory ideas. As for her own psychology, she claimed that she could account rationally for every emotion she had ever had, a claim more dazzling to Barbara and Nathaniel than any professor’s wall of framed degrees.
Partly as a consequence of these conversations, Branden began to construct a theory he called “the psychology of self-esteem” in which he exalted rationality, productivity, and achievement. Achievement is the most important source of a person’s pride in self, and pride in self is a requisite for independence. Books and papers on this subject would later make him well known as the father of the self-esteem movement and as a significant contributor to the development of cognitive psychology, which holds that by changing one’s thinking one can change one’s feelings and behavior.
As their friendship grew, she and Branden talked of more personal matters. He confessed that he was unsure of himself with the opposite sex. Girls had never liked him, and he, in turn, had almost always found them shallow. In Barbara he had found both intelligence and a shared love of Roarkian values. If he was looking for reassurance, he received it. She said she bet he wouldn’t even notice if a girl did like him and predicted an illustrious future for him, both as a psychologist and as a communicator of ideas. If she could make his life’s path any easier, she would. She also praised Barbara. She could see that Barbara was very intelligent, she said.
In sunlit walks around the ranch, Barbara, too, confided in the older woman, describing her mixed feelings for Nathaniel. On one hand, she said, she admired him immensely. He was brilliant and charismatic. She knew that their dazzling mentor regarded him very highly. He still wanted her. And yet she wasn’t strongly romantically or sexually drawn to him, and she couldn’t understand why not. Lately, she had been worrying that she had some kind of mind-body split. It bothered her, she said, that she was strongly attracted to other boys and had even slept with one or two. What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she love him completely? As Rand walked by her side, collecting small stones—sorting them helped her organize her thoughts about the novel, she said—for once she was unable to offer insight. She couldn’t comprehend that a girl as bright as Barbara, with Barbara’s love of the heroic, wasn’t madly, passionately, sexually in love with Branden.
Barbara’s concern about a mind-body split came directly from Rand’s discussions of romantic love with them while she was writing the chapter of Atlas Shrugged in which Dagny and Hank Rearden have their first sexual encounter. For just as she had devised a theory of the emotions emphasizing reason, so, through the character of Francisco, she proposed a theory of sex based on rational self-interest, the keystone of free-market economics. What she came up with is best illustrated by the predicament of Rearden, the novel’s most complex and sympathetic character.
Like Roark, Rearden has a strong sex drive; unlike Roark, he has a wife, Lillian, who has reinforced an old idea, that sex is an animal function that only degenerate males want or need. Interestingly, like Rand’s mother prior to the revolution, Lillian’s greatest pleasure lies in giving parties and playing hostess to fashionable intellectuals, such as Balph Eu
bank and Simon Pritchett, who are amusingly skewered in Rand’s dialogue. Lillian’s sexual scorn sends Rearden into throes of agony over his desire for Dagny. Francisco, seeing him suffer later in the novel, sets him right. “Love is our response to our highest values,” he explains. “Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” For the hero, then, there is no conflict between the desires of the body and the convictions of the mind. A productive man wants to celebrate his accomplishments and self-esteem in sexual ecstasy with a worthy woman. Moreover, women such as Dagny—and Kira, and Dominique, and presumably Rand—hardly dislike sex. They long to be man worshippers with their bodies and their souls and to mate with the highest possible types of men. Hearing this, Rearden begins to set himself free from his wife’s malignant grasp and to see how the novel’s other villains use his most praiseworthy moral strengths and values against him.
Much later, an older Barbara told a journalist that Rand’s doctrine of man worship made her “want to crawl under a rug.” By then, Barbara had concluded that it was personal longing that had prompted Rand to identify femininity with hero worship: Because she almost always saw further and penetrated more deeply than others did and thus was painfully alone, she longed to find and to yield to a strength greater than her own. As much to the point, perhaps, Rand’s theory of sex seemed to require any truly sane man to be in love with her, since she was the worthiest woman of them all.
In this context, twenty-year-old Barbara became convinced that her ambivalence about Branden was, at best, a sign of confused thinking and a lack of self-esteem. At worst, it was a moral failure. She made a promise to herself to change her thinking.
Meanwhile, for months the two students had been pleading with Rand to tell them more about the novel. Late in the summer of 1950, she gave them eighteen completed chapters to read and watched as they sped through them, page by page. Then she began reading aloud to them from the chapters she was working on. Once a week, in the evening, she, they, and O’Connor—who had already heard each new section as it was being written—gathered in the living room. The young people listened, spellbound, as Nick Carter had once listened to The Fountainhead.
Entering into Rand’s epic narrative of principled resistance to the destruction of the American spirit by small-minded collectivists was like landing on another planet whose bedrock was individual achievement. Describing the power of the book for Branden and herself, Barbara wrote, “We were hearing, on each page, a command to rise to heights of greater nobility than we had ever conceived. We felt that we were now citizens of a world in which man’s mind was efficacious and the human potential was unlimited.” As for the author of this world, Barbara said, “I can’t fully communicate the exhilaration of being in intimate contact with so great a mind and spirit.”
Still, away from the book a few things puzzled and disturbed them. One was a thin edge of anger they sometimes glimpsed in Rand. Two or three times, Barbara experienced the sting of Rand’s displeasure—once, when she mentioned her love of the mountains and the ocean, which the writer interpreted as a rejection of “man,” and another time when she praised the work of Thomas Wolfe, which, in Rand’s view, was chaotic and philosophically vacuous. Rand commented harshly on Wolfe’s neglect of the very elements of fiction that Barbara had already agreed were essential—“plot, theme, characterization, style”—and so overwhelmed the young woman with her logic that Barbara renounced Wolfe on the spot. Years later, in a series of private seminars that were transcribed and collected posthumously in Rand’s The Art of Fiction, the author selected some of Barbara’s favorite passages from Wolfe’s works to illustrate how not to write, asking Barbara to read the passages aloud; Barbara naturally assumed the harsh critique was aimed at her. For Barbara—admiring, self-doubting, and intimidated by Rand’s seemingly unassailable logic—the stifling of her response to Wolfe was remembered as a step in what she thought of as a forced march “into a destructive vise” of repression of real feelings and opinions, as she wrote in 1986. “I was to continue along that path for many years.”
In an era when grooming counted, the Brandens also noticed that Rand was personally untidy. She wore short skirts to showcase her shapely legs, but her stockings were often torn, her skirts were stained, and her hair might be unwashed or uncombed. Frank occasionally snapped at her about such carelessness, Barbara recalled. In this respect, as in others, Rand hadn’t appreciably changed from the quixotic child her mother used to nag.
Most intriguing to them was her marriage. O’Connor, who could have posed for an Esquire ad and who exuded warmth, gentility, and wisdom, was unresponsive to philosophical discussion and even to most books, yet Rand, who usually placed the highest premium on analytical intelligence and self-assertion, called him her “top value.” Seated, she would glance around to be sure he was nearby; she continuously touched him and held his hand. “Frank is my rock,” she told Barbara. To Nathaniel, she said, “He believed in me when no one else did,” and, “We have the same sense of life.” He was silent because he was “too disgusted with people to share what he is with the world,” she told them. In their memoirs, both Brandens would declare that a few years after meeting Rand, the author would confide that her marriage had been in trouble at the time and that she had contemplated divorce; she didn’t divorce Frank primarily because she didn’t want to upset her life while her book remained unfinished. She even confirmed Thaddeus Ashby’s observation that Frank never initiated sex and never had initiated sex in the history of their marriage. In any case, since Barbara and Nathaniel could find no trace of disgust in Frank O’Connor, nor of the energy and conviction that powered Rand’s heroes, they shrugged off their questions and gradually stopped thinking about the nature of this marriage.
In the fall of 1950, Rand began touching Nathaniel, too. She sometimes held his hand as they strolled the grounds and talked about their ideas and her work. Barbara saw nothing odd in the older woman’s affection for Nathaniel. If Nathaniel did, he was not troubled. His feelings bruised by Barbara’s rebuffs, he enjoyed this mild, seemingly safe flirtation. After evenings spent reading Atlas, Rand compared him to the talented, irresistible Francisco, whom she had modeled on swashbuckling heroes such as Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel and on memories of the childhood summer she had spent climbing in the Swiss Alps with a boy. “I could never love anyone but a hero,” she told him more than once. Later, he admitted that he sometimes found these assertions and comparisons confusing. For how, at twenty, was he a hero? How was O’Connor one? At the time, however, Branden basked in her approval. He had been raised by a doting mother and grandmother who had prepared him for life as a young prince, said friends who knew him well. He stepped into the role of Rand’s favorite with a minimum of discomfort.
It was as her protégés that she presented Barbara and Nathaniel to her California acquaintances: Adrian and Janet Gaynor, a young libertarian activist named Herbert Cornuelle and his eighteen-year-old brother Richard, William Mullendore, Lela Rogers, and Morrie Ryskind. Along with the last two, Rand was a defendant in a $2 million lawsuit filed by Emmet Lavery, a playwright and the former president of the Screen Writers Guild, who alleged that Mrs. Rogers had defamed him by calling his latest play, Gentleman from Athens, “communistic” during a Town Hall Meeting of the Air, and that Rand and Ryskind had counseled her to do so. Lavery eventually settled for $30,000, but for a while Rand saw a lot of both Rogers and Ryskind.
The young pair sometimes encountered Albert Mannheimer at the ranch. He flirted pleasantly with Barbara and joined in evening conversations. But his friendship with Rand was waning. The stage play she had spent many hours helping him to finish, The Bees and the Flowers, had been produced at the Cort Theatre in New York in the fall of 1946 but had lasted for only twenty-eight performances. Its lackluster success effectively ended Mannheimer’s theatrical career. Although he was working on a film adaptation of Garson Kanin’s successful Broadway play Born Yesterday, for which
he and Kanin would share an Academy Award nomination, he was discouraged by the inanity of most of his Hollywood assignments. This was especially true in light of his idealization of Howard Roark’s uncompromising drive and Rand’s own larger-than-life example of mixing high-voltage creative work with commercial success. When a girlfriend committed suicide in his Los Angeles apartment, his sense of despair increased. Rand tried to convince him that he was not at fault—that the girl was responsible for her own unhappiness and death—but to little avail. After that, their relationship consisted of little more than her helping him with his psychological problems, she later said. When she realized that he wasn’t going to resolve his emotional conflicts, she drifted away from him, and by the end of 1950 he stopped coming to the ranch.
When Barbara and Nathaniel asked about him, Rand told them that his anxieties had affected his rationality and had destroyed his commitment to philosophy. “I think we replaced him in Ayn’s life,” Barbara said in 2006. Ten years after their parting, Rand would deny that she and Mannheimer had ever been close. Their relationship was really only something that “could be called—should have been a semi-friendship,” she said, while also declaring that Mannheimer and Paterson had been her only friends of any duration from her arrival in the United States until the end of the 1940s. They were “the only two … which I consider serious relationships or semi-friendships or potential friendships,” she said, demoting them in importance even as she spoke. Barbara thought differently, remarking, “She was very, very close to Albert. He was important to her, and the rejection of him was total.”
Altogether, Branden was disappointed by the people in Rand’s social circle. They weren’t good enough for her, he thought. When he hesitantly told her this—and confessed to feeling awkwardly possessive of her—she did not seem to mind. “That’s the Dominique premise,” she explained, “not wanting to share your values with anyone.” It was a precept she had lived by since before encountering Cyrus at the age of nine.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 30