Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  The trip was Rand’s first outside the United States since O’Connor and she had gone to Mexico in 1929 to establish her permanent residency. Driving home, she was in a gay mood, laughing and cavorting with Branden. Wasn’t he a genius, a great psychologist, a man of destiny? she cried to Barbara and Elayne. Somewhat wryly, they agreed. As dusk fell, she rested her head on his shoulder and took his hand. He put his arm around her, and they murmured to each other. Their voices were low, excluding the others, and their glances were “too personal and lasted too long, as if they were gazing deeply into each other and could not bear to look away,” Barbara wrote in 1986. During that long car ride, Barbara couldn’t ignore the pitch and tone of their voices and finally realized that her twenty-four-year-old husband and his forty-nine-year-old mentor had moved beyond the bounds of mutual admiration and familial affection. “She’s in love with you!” she shouted angrily at her husband, once they were alone in a motel room. “And you’re in love with her!” Branden denied it, both to his wife and, he claimed, to himself; he insisted that the twenty-five-year age difference between them and the fact that they were both married made a romantic liaison impossible, outlandish. What O’Connor thought or said is not known.

  Two days later, back in New York, the sexually ardent older woman invited the young man to come to her apartment in the afternoon. Frank was on duty at the florist’s shop; Barbara was in Midtown, working in her first job as a receptionist for Woman’s Day. With a note of caution and, possibly, an eagerness that had the tone of a demand to Branden, she asked, “Do you understand what happened to us two days ago?” As Branden recalled the scene, he faltered, and she said, “In the car … what we said to each other. It sounded like love. Or have I misunderstood everything?” Now at the height of her mental and emotional powers, she had been rehearsing just such a moment of triangulated passion for at least half her life. Branden, as flattered and incautious as he may have been, was out of his depth. For all his flirtatiousness, he had never really contemplated an actual affair with his literary and intellectual idol, he later said. Nor would he have raised the subject of the car ride if she had not.

  Nonetheless, he felt an unfamiliar sense of elation, power, even mastery. The woman with the magnificent eyes and the penetrating mind was looking to him for romance; and when he looked back at her, “the image [of myself] I saw reflected [in her eyes] was that of a god,” he later wrote. “I am in love with you,” he said aloud. It was a fiction that would last for fourteen years.

  It wasn’t a conscious fiction, not at first. That they had fallen in love struck them both as philosophically inevitable and romantically and morally correct.

  That first afternoon, they told each other that whatever they did they would not hurt each other or their spouses. Rand suggested that the affair be “nonsexual, in the ultimate sense,” meaning that their lovemaking would stop short of intercourse. Branden agreed, disappointed but also relieved, he recalled. As crusaders for integrity and honesty, they prepared to present the facts to Frank and Barbara. They decided to ask for permission to meet by themselves twice a week. “I’m sure they’ll agree to that. We have a right to something,” Branden recalled Rand declaring. He heard anger in her voice and recognized it as a response to the presence of potential impediments. “It was not named but it was felt, and it was in our eyes as we looked at each other in silent understanding,” he wrote in 1989. “We would not be stopped.”

  A few days later, Rand opened the fateful discussion. As recounted by both Brandens, she and Nathaniel were already seated on the living-room sofa, holding hands, as first Barbara and then Frank came in at the end of the workday. According to Nathaniel, Frank appeared calm and expectant; the nervous young suitor gathered that he and his wife had already discussed the situation. Not so Barbara, whom Branden had not informed. Rand said simply that she and Nathaniel were in love. “There is nothing in our feeling [for each other] that can hurt or threaten you,” she assured them. “There’s nothing that alters my love for my husband, or Nathan’s love for his wife. It’s something separate, apart from our normal lives.” Barbara sat, frozen, not surprised by what she heard but stunned into silence nonetheless. As Rand talked, Frank turned pale and looked downcast. “We’re not Platonists,” she continued. “We don’t hold our values in some other realm, unrelated to the realm in which we live our lives. If we mean the values we profess, how can [Nathan and I] not be in love?” She talked for a long time. Once—so Barbara reported—the young wife jumped to her feet and shouted, “No! I won’t be part of this!” at which point, she recalled, Frank also raised his voice, saying, “And I won’t be part of it.” Rand remained calm. They weren’t proposing a sexual union, she explained. The twenty-five-year age difference ruled that out. No, they wanted only to spend a little time together. Wasn’t that a reasonable request? Thirty years later, Barbara told an interviewer, while trying to explain her agreement to such a request, “With Ayn’s mind, once you accepted her premises she’d spin out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape.” Ensorcelled by the older woman’s authority and theories of love and value, Barbara assented. So did O’Connor.

  Two months later, in November, the curtain rose on the second act of the affair. The philosopher and her protégé could not stick to their original agreement to abstain from sex, they informed Frank and Barbara. They defended the rightness and rationality of a full-throttle sexual affair in a series of conversations with their spouses that went on for weeks. Each was the embodiment of the other’s highest values, they pointed out in the language of Atlas Shrugged, and because neither suffered from an irrational mind-body split, they naturally felt sexual longing for each other. Surely Frank and Barbara, both of whom subscribed to Rand’s value theory of sexuality, could understand and accept this new development. In making her case, Rand invoked her years of deprivation. “You both know how little I’ve had in my life, by way of personal reward,” she told them. “This is the very last period in my life when I can think about or permit myself” the pleasure of a passionate sexual affair outside of marriage. “I’m a realist about age,” she added. “What we’re asking for is temporary…. Just to have had it for a little while.”

  A month before her fiftieth birthday, she and Nathaniel received their partners’ permission to meet for sex twice a week. Barbara, to whom Rand had shown both personal kindness and an example of “the epitome and standard of the human potential,” acted on a mixture of gratitude to the writer and guilt over her inability to respond sexually to her husband. Why O’Connor went along with the scheme is not known, but speculation among Rand aficionados divides in two camps. Some, including the Brandens, surmise that he was so devoted to his wife’s well-being, including her sexual well-being, and so conscious of his limitations that he quietly waived his marital rights. Others contend that Frank, who knew and approved of his wife’s fantasies of sexual triangles in her novels, also approved of the affair. As evidence, they cite passages such as this one from her 1949 notes for Atlas, written six months before she met Branden: “[Hank Rearden] takes pleasure in Dagny’s greatness,” she wrote, and this “arouses his sexual desire; he [also] takes pleasure in the thought of Dagny and another man, which is an unconscious acknowledgement that sex, as such, is great and beautiful, not evil and degrading.” A few pages later, she continued, “On the right philosophical premise about sex, my premise … a husband would feel honored if another man wanted his wife; he would not let the other man have her—his exclusive possession [of her] is the material form of her love for him—but he would feel that the other man’s desire was a natural and proper expression of the man’s admiration for his wife, for the values which she represents and which he saw in her.” In this view, Rand changed her mind about whether a husband would “let” another man “have” his wife, but the husband’s arousal remains the same. That she wrote these passages without reference to O’Connor is another possibility, of course.

  Rand swore everyone to silence, not y
et imagining that the affair would “involve all four of us in a life of deception,” as Barbara later said. Because of her concern with privacy, she dismissed Nathaniel’s suggestion that they lease a separate apartment or book hotel rooms for their meetings rather than use the O’Connors’ apartment. She couldn’t risk their being seen together in a hotel lobby or entering a strange apartment and becoming the subject of a scandal. Though proud of her love for him, she said, she drew the line at furnishing gossip to malicious detractors. Like Dagny in her first ecstatic encounters with Francisco as a teenager, she wanted to keep their intimacy “immaculately theirs,” locked away from prying eyes and prurient minds. Frank agreed to leave the apartment twice a week, while the two made love in his bed. Thus, like Hank Rearden after Dagny meets John Galt, the older man stepped aside to make way for a more ideal man.

  The matter settled, Rand comforted the spouses. The affair would last only a year or two, she promised. She would not allow herself to become that ludicrous figure, “an old woman pursuing a younger man.” She decreed that they would all continue to tell the truth to one another. If anyone in the world could handle such a situation, they could. They were superior people; like the characters in her novels, they lived on an emotional plane far above the irrational jealousies and fears of ordinary men. “If the four of us were of lesser stature, this would not have happened,” she assured them. “And if it somehow had [happened], you would not accept it.” Interestingly, her remarks contained echoes of a twenty-year-old letter from her father, who after reading The Night of January 16th wrote to her, “I’m amused that you condemned Karen for her disreputable behavior, as you called it. Don’t you see that words like this do not apply to people like Karen? For those who surround them are of so little stature that they [Karen and her lover Bjorn] cannot be held to the same standard.”

  In any case, the once-lonely Russian girl with a crush on a storybook hero now had the power to win the handsome young prince for herself.

  Ayn and Nathaniel began sleeping together in January or early February of 1955. He later recalled the pleasure he took in playing the role of sexual aggressor with a woman who was ravenous for the experience of sexual surrender. “Ayn frightened most people,” he reflected in 1989. “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would reduce her to a sex object.” He added, “Her progressive loss of control in our encounters disclosed the depths” of her desire to be ravished and submit. Like Dominique, she seems to have found both pleasure and release in “the act of a master taking … possession of her.” The difference was that this master was younger than Roark and that his self-esteem was tied to her approval of him. If Rand was sexually vulnerable, she also had control. Her lover was not an emotional threat. Seen from a certain perspective, he made an ideal mistress, even as Frank had become an ideal wife.

  The affair provided excitement and deep fulfillment at a crucial, and essentially pleasureless, moment in her writing life. By early 1955, she was stuck on the now-famous fourth-from-final chapter of Atlas Shrugged called “This Is John Galt Speaking,” in which Galt presents his radio speech explaining what has gone wrong with the world and what must be done to fix it and giving the first complete account of the history and purpose of the strike. It lays bare Rand’s argument that the evils of altruism—by which Rand meant the proposition that men have no right to exist for their own sake—are at the root of America’s deterioration into a pre-Jeffersonian, potentially preindustrial era in the book, and, in life, into a communistic trap, and it summarizes the values and virtues that make for a purposeful life. When, a decade later, tens of thousands of followers joined Rand study clubs and packed large lecture halls to hear her speak, it was to the radical individualist vision of this speech that they were drawn.

  She had drafted the first line of the speech in the summer of 1953. Having allotted roughly three months to its completion, she was frantic in early 1955, when she had already devoted eighteen months of nonstop effort to it and was not yet finished. She would require an additional eight months before she wrote the final sentence: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” That declaration, repeating the theme of Howard Roark’s courtroom speech and emphasizing the reciprocal nature of individual rights, was important to Rand. The oath is “a dramatized summation of the Objectivist ethics,” she explained in a Playboy interview in 1964, using a term she coined for her system of ideas, and it is the oath taken by each of the strikers on entering Galt’s Gulch. Similarly, Galt tells the millions of people listening to their radios, “Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men.” Although she was living with others’ silent conflicts, Rand intended no irony. She was removing the teeth from reality’s harsh bite.

  For nearly ten years, off and on, she had been promising Alan Collins and Hiram Haydn, who was Archibald Ogden’s replacement at Bobbs-Merrill, that the completed manuscript of the novel was only months away. During the two-plus years she spent constructing John Galt’s speech, she gradually stopped going out into the city she loved. By the start of her affair with Branden, she was seeing few of her distinguished New York friends. She settled into the kind of grueling schedule that had earlier yielded two-thirds of The Fountainhead in twelve months’ time. That year, 1942, had been the happiest of her life. She was not happy in 1954 and 1955, apart from the time she spent with her lover. In place of The Fountainhead’s colorful scenes of adventure and conflict, she was wrestling with the logic of a system of abstractions, laboring to tie together her theories of metaphysics (that reality is objective and cannot be altered by wishes or emotions), epistemology (that knowledge comes through reason and never through feeling), morality (rational self-interest), politics (individual rights), economics (free-market capitalism), and sex (the erotic response to intellectual values). Closing every loophole and presenting the finished doctrine in the form of a dramatic speech by the novel’s leading hero was the most difficult task of her life, she confided to Barbara. It was while working on this famous section of Atlas Shrugged that she began to speak of herself not only as someone with a philosophy of life but also as a philosopher.

  With a few exceptions, none of the ideas contained in the speech were new to her. But shaping them felt like “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” She often worked all day, and sometimes all night, dressed in her favorite nightgown: a floor-length, blue-green cotton tunic trimmed with Hollywood-style rhinestones at the neck. At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for thirty-three days in a row, seeing no one but her husband, Barbara, and Nathaniel, and, on Saturday nights, members of the Collective. The amphetamines she took helped her to stay awake, but she grew so tired that her body sagged. At times she couldn’t eat, sleep, or even talk. She complained of tension in her neck and shoulders. She nagged at O’Connor, who sometimes snapped at her, and she exhibited unpredictable mood swings with the Brandens. Finishing John Galt’s speech pushed her to the limits of her endurance, Barbara wrote, and shortened the distance between intensity and rage. If she had sometimes been self-absorbed, or incurious about others’ points of view, or grandiose, those tendencies became more marked.

  Her love affair with Branden helped to relieve her crippling anxiety and its symptoms, bitterness and anger, as she pushed to finish the difficult expository section of the book. “You are my reward for everything,” she told him—”for my work, for my life.” As the writing dragged on, she depended on him more, both as a companion in her fictional world and as a mirror for the sexually desirable woman she was discovering in herself. “You’re turning me into an animal,” she sometimes told him, playfully. “Really?” he remembered answering with a grin. “What were you before?” “A mind,” she replied, believing it. He was vitally aware of his admiration for her and was amazed that he could bring her so much pleasure, even joy. But something—was it
her age? her expectations of him?—disturbed him, he later noted. And he felt uncomfortable about both Barbara and Frank. Once he recalled entering the apartment to find Ayn quarreling with Frank over the older man’s lack of interest in helping her shop for clothes. Branden went shopping with her against her will, she was saying loudly to her husband, and he and Barbara both gave her advice on what to wear. Why couldn’t Frank be less passive? O’Connor didn’t seem to mind the comparison to Branden or the scolding and even gave the younger man a conspiratorial wink. But Branden felt both too large and too small for the role he was playing, and his uneasiness increased. He also thought that Frank must be suffering, even if he didn’t show it.

  There were other early signs of trouble. Once they began meeting for sex, she protected their time together fiercely and became impatient, to say the least, if anything interfered. This included Branden’s occasional preoccupation with Barbara, who had recently begun suffering from panic attacks and night terrors. One night, Barbara called Rand’s apartment from a pay phone, choking with anxiety and pleading to come over for a little while. She had been walking for hours in a state of panic, an image that brings to mind the haunting scene in which James Taggart’s young wife, Cherryl, commits suicide after wandering the streets. She needed their help, Barbara told Nathaniel. In a rage, Rand took the phone and railed: “Do you think only of yourself? Am I completely invisible to you?” The older woman refused to let her join them, pointing out that no one had helped her in times of trouble. “Why should I be victimized for Barbara’s problems?” she said to Branden afterward, who though horrified and worried stayed with Rand, an indication of the loyalty and fear she already commanded in him. Amazingly, not until much later did either of the Brandens connect Barbara’s increasingly painful anxiety to the affair.