Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Rand became more demanding. She liked to talk to Branden about their feelings for each other and got angry when the twenty-five-year-old man squirmed and changed the subject. What’s the matter with you? she asked, again and again. Why are you being emotionally distant? Are you repressed? “Repression”—that is, refusing to face painful ideas, impulses, and feelings—became her code word for her lover’s inability or reluctance to discuss their romance. Yet the one time he tried to talk about his distress over Frank and Barbara, she instantly displayed a “distant, icy rage,” he wrote. “She became more than a stranger; she became an adversary.” She often phoned him as soon as he had walked the two blocks home at night, “still angry, scolding, accusing, denouncing him for what she termed his ‘emotional distance,’ for his periods of coldness and emotional withdrawal,” Barbara noted in 2007. The young husband, who had felt proud of his ascendant manhood, now sometimes drooped with a sense of failure. Still, he wanted to succeed as Rand’s lover and keep her high regard.

  Barbara forgave her friend and mentor for the night of the telephone call and every other apparent act of callousness. She told herself that the writer was under enormous emotional and intellectual pressure, which was true, and that she had earned the right to an undisturbed weekly idyll in Atlantis. But Rand did not as easily let go of the event. She decided that Barbara must have a psychological problem and briefly put aside her work on Galt’s speech to draft a paper on the subject of Barbara as an “emotionalist,” using a term that Nathaniel had coined to describe a person who understands the world through the filter of his emotions, rather than by reason. Such people tend to recoil from the pain of disappointment, she noted, which distorted their perception of reality. Barbara accepted this hypothesis. So did Nathaniel. From that time forward, he became his wife’s officially acknowledged therapist, guiding her to repair her “premises” and “sense of life.” He remained in that role for as long as they were married. “You cannot imagine what a nightmare” it became, Barbara told an interviewer in 1991. Branden, by the mid-1950s enrolled in a master’s degree program in psychology at NYU, went on to write his thesis on anxiety as a crisis of self-esteem. He considered turning the theory into a book. He also began to offer therapy based on Rand’s and his ideas at low prices to members of the Collective.

  Rand and her protégé introduced other specialized words and phrases into their daily discussions. To indicate a person’s general style of learning and thinking, they referred to his or her “psycho-epistemology.” To identify people they thought were overly concerned with the opinions and approval of others, Branden created a category he called “social metaphysics,” which encompassed a detailed analysis of the disordered mind of “second-handers” and which became a much-feared diagnosis. People who confused wishes with horses were labeled “subjectivists.” Beginning with these terms and a few others, Rand’s circle adopted a psychological argot that separated them from other members of their age group and, later, provided defensive characterizations of unfriendly outsiders.

  Few knew that “emotionalist” applied to Barbara, let alone that Rand also consigned O’Connor to that type. Apart from his flower arranging, the genial man had found little to do. He and Branden sometimes met in the foyer and shook hands as he left the apartment in deference to his wife. The Brandens later claimed to have discovered that he was drinking heavily in a local bar—an assertion that has been bitterly disputed by Rand’s hard-core followers, but that what evidence there is suggests is true.

  It didn’t take long for Nathaniel to conclude that he was in over his head. As he told an audience of Rand fans in 1989, “I confused loneliness, marital frustration, incredible admiration and hero worship for Ayn with romantic love.” Once, he said, he tested the waters of retreat, wondering aloud whether they had made a mistake by introducing sex into their friendship. To his horror, she replied coldly, “This affair is sexual or it’s nothing.” She added, “If we are not man and woman to each other, in the full sense—if we are merely disembodied minds—our philosophy is meaningless.” He naturally heard in this both a warning and a threat and never again raised the subject. Her demands for emotional intimacy, which accompanied the sex (“Where have you gone to? You’ve disappeared,” she’d badger him), would cease when the affair ended, he told himself, within another year or two.

  Still the Collective noticed nothing unusual, with the exception of graduate art student Joan Mitchell Blumenthal, Barbara’s oldest friend. “One night very early in the game,” Blumenthal recalled, “Ayn was posing for me. She had on a filmy nightgown. She was primping, and I asked her what she was looking so self-satisfied about. She said, ‘I’ll tell you someday, but I can’t tell you now.’ That was all. And I said to myself, ‘Oh.’ And then—this will give you some idea of the fear and trembling around this thing—I decided not to tell Allan,” her new husband, who was Nathaniel’s cousin and a doctor. “I never did, until things started showing at the seams.” For most of the circle, Ayn’s sexuality was invisible, even inconceivable, perhaps especially as she labored day and night over John Galt’s speech. Long after learning the facts of the affair, one follower explained it, in part, by saying, “Ayn wasn’t very clean. I couldn’t picture Nathan in her bed.”

  On Saturday nights, Rand and her protégé often sat slightly apart from the rest of the group, at the dining-room table or on a couch, while Barbara, Joan and Allan, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, and Mary Ann Sures devoured the latest aphoristic developments in John Galt’s code of life. The novel was giving them undreamed-of intellectual stimulation, role models to test themselves against, and, with Rand’s progress on the speech, a road map for living. Some recalled these evenings with Rand as a high point of their lives. “In a world that was hurtling toward collectivism and darkness, we were listening to the ideas of a woman who was a strong, bright light that pointed the way toward freedom,” said one. “I often felt, greeting her, as though I were entering Atlantis, where the human ideal is not merely an elusive projection but is real, alive, here—seated across the room on blue-green pillows,” wrote another. “She wanted us to discuss [her writing], which we did, and those discussions were one of the most exhilarating, exciting, wonderful times of my life,” recalled Nathaniel’s sister Elayne.

  As the manuscript pages piled up, some of the women, including Mary Ann Sures, volunteered to work as part-time secretaries. Using Rand’s ancient manual typewriter, “like an old tank,” on the dining table in the O’Connors’ foyer, Sures typed and retyped sections of the novel. The foyer was about ten paces from the study; sometimes, Sures recalled, when she and another helper were reading freshly typed pages to each other as a proofreading technique, they were aware of the author standing half hidden behind the study door, listening for narrative pace and rhythm. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, she was scrupulous about paying her assistants for their work. Sures recalled that she gave them the going wage, down to the quarter hour. As had also been true in California, however, she and Frank sometimes forgot to pay other bills. Some months, sending in the rent check slipped their minds and they received an eviction notice from the landlord. One afternoon, recalled Sures, a man from Consolidated Edison showed up at the door to turn off the electricity after three overdue notices had gone unpaid. It was Frank’s responsibility to handle bills, Rand told Sures, but she didn’t seem upset about it. The lights stayed on, and she greeted him with “darling”s and “Cubbyhole”s when he came home.

  Meanwhile, The Fountainhead was far from forgotten. Every few weeks, packets of fan letters arrived from Bobbs-Merrill. Sorting through them, Rand scribbled notes, typically on the order of “very good—to be answered” or “swine—to be damned to the eternal fires of hell.” Some of the most irritating or interesting of these letters she showed to the Brandens, who, when they spotted an especially intelligent correspondent who lived within commuting distance of New York, might ask him or her to a gathering of the Collective. After a few introductory meetin
gs, one such newcomer, Kathleen Nickerson, was told to write to Rand explaining why she was attracted to the novelist’s philosophy. The letter passed muster, and Nickerson began to attend group events. Thus the novelist’s base of active followers gradually expanded. As newcomers demonstrated allegiance to the principles of Rand’s philosophy, they took their places in a concentric circle outside of the original Collective. In this way, a junior Collective grew up. Except at odd times and at parties, new followers typically didn’t see much of the philosopher herself. While she remained bent over the manuscript of Galt’s speech, Branden took over as surrogate, mediator, and “spiritual bodyguard,” as they half-humorously called him. He created his own hierarchy, one that would prove helpful in managing the crowds of enthusiasts who he rightly predicted would flock to her after the publication of Atlas Shrugged.

  In late 1955, a young woman named Daryn Kent entered the second circle. Four years earlier, at the age of seventeen, she had left home to become a theatrical performer in New York. At twenty-one, a friend had suggested she read The Fountainhead, and, having read it, she was thrilled by Rand’s view of life as a heroic adventure. She sent a fan letter to the author, and after a few weeks received a phone call from Leonard Peikoff. He and she met in a restaurant on West Fifty-fifth Street, talked for hours about Rand’s philosophy, and agreed that she should meet the Brandens. The Brandens liked her. Within a few months, she and Peikoff were “in love” and living together in his apartment, and she was earning money by typing Atlas Shrugged for Rand.

  Peikoff hadn’t really wanted her to move in with him, Kent later said, but she had wanted to, “desperately,” and he eventually agreed. Later, she learned that Leonard, Rand, and the Brandens had together decided that Leonard should phone her. Although he eventually married four times (twice to Rand’s secretaries), acquaintances said that the quick, funny, ungainly young philosophy student typically paid little attention to girls. The three Objectivist elders thought he should have a girlfriend, and Kent appeared to be an excellent candidate. Trouble soon erupted. “I was a needy person,” she recalled. “I was far too possessive, and I’m sure I made demands on him that he was unprepared to meet.” Before long, his unhappiness came to Rand’s attention. One day, Kent arrived home from acting class to find a note from Leonard instructing her to come to the novelist’s apartment that evening. There she discovered Ayn, Nathaniel, Leonard, Frank, and Barbara already seated. She sat on a corner of the sofa, not yet realizing that she was the person they were waiting for. Branden picked up a straight chair, placed it facing her in the middle of the room, seated himself, and said, “Tonight we’re going to have a psychological session, and the patient is you.”

  The drama that unfolded that evening offered a disturbing glimpse of the imperious underside of Rand’s emerging vision. It was “devastating” to Kent, she said, because it represented “damnation by people I worshipped as models of what man could be and should be. Fifty years later, I still find it hard to talk about.” Branden launched into a highly personal inquiry that went on for two or three hours. “He dissected every move I’d made and everything I’d done, and ended up concluding that I was an Ellsworth Toohey and a queen bee in sexual matters.” At times, when he was making a particularly trenchant point, Rand clapped her hands, applauding like a child. “I had had a lifetime of being told I was nothing and nobody from nowhere,” Kent recalled, adding that this was the first time she had believed it. “I felt myself sinking into that sofa and disappearing completely.” In the end, she was offered an ultimatum: do everything possible to remedy her thinking and adjust her attitudes or be expelled. Choosing to stay, she entered psychotherapy with Branden. She paid for sessions by typing for him. That night Barbara accompanied her to Peikoff’s apartment and helped her to pack and move out.

  Rand was arguing the need for unhesitating moral judgment in Galt’s speech. Anyone who refuses to judge others, “who neither agrees or disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility,” she wrote, “is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.” Without the tacit consent of good people, the world’s leeches, looters, and tyrants could not survive, let alone rule. Not to condemn was to consent. Something in this theatrical call to moral judgment appealed to Branden, who gradually became not only Rand’s deputy but also her enforcer. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, such mock trials, or “kangaroo courts,” as Barbara called them, became increasingly common. At one time or another every member of the original group, and many newcomers, endured at least one such improvised courtroom scene; and from the late 1950s on, younger students were expelled by Nathaniel “and just shattered,” said Barbara, who recalled her husband’s most bruising interrogations as “savagery.” Peikoff was a particular target, since the sweet-natured but nerdish philosophy major sometimes fell under the influence of “non-objective” philosophers, such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, or innocently befriended academic scoffers at Rand’s ideas. As a result, he was often chastised by both Rand and Branden, and was once harshly rebuked and banished for two years—to teach at the University of Denver. But he always returned to Rand’s side. He and others who remained learned to trade occasional humiliation for intimate exposure to Rand’s penetrating thought and personal insights. “When she laid out her argument [against you],” said Barbara, “people thought that she was right. When she laid out your flaws, what she said made sense.” Her magnetism drew and held them. As Kent recalled, “The six months I had spent [in the group] were like a new world. All my life, I’d wanted to know people who talked about ideas. I’d wanted to find a point of view that made real sense to me. Most of all, I’d wanted to believe that man is good. She was the first person I had ever heard say that man is good and can be good, that there is a way to achieve what you want to achieve, and that you should aim high and have a right to aim high.” Rand’s soaring testimonials to individual accomplishment and her consummate ability to make sense of the world were qualities her followers deeply prized. The young actress stayed close to Rand for another fifteen years, then walked away after a final, pitiless deflation of her hopes.

  On one Saturday night during this period, Ayn and Nathaniel ducked into the kitchen to fetch coffee and sweets for the group gathered in the living room. Excitement about Rand’s progress on Galt’s speech was running high. In answer to a question about why so many critics attacked her celebration of individualism and strict justice as cold or cruel, she explained that people often think “pro-reason” means “anti-emotion.” The truth, she said, is just the opposite. Among rational men and women, emotion and reason go hand in hand. “If a person tells you that he regards reason and emotion as antagonists, he is telling you that his emotions are irrational and that he wants to get away with something dishonest,” she told them. As she and Branden prepared the snacks, they were both in a heady mood. So when she whispered, “Darling, there’s something I think I was wrong about,” he answered playfully, “Impossible. What could that be?” Why, the limited duration of their affair, she answered, beaming, and added, “Can you think of any good reason why we can’t go on like this forever?” With his own emotions sounding an inner siren, and a sudden feeling that a gun was pointed at his head, he had no doubt that it was he who “pulled the trigger,” he later wrote. “No. I can’t,” he answered, irrationally, confusedly, and fatefully.

  Rand completed Galt’s speech on October 13, 1955. She took three weeks off, and then plunged directly into drafting the last three chapters of the book. Here the novel picks up pace. Wesley Mouch, a wily government bureaucrat, and his placid boss, Mr. Thompson, the American “Head of State,” kidnap John Galt and torture him in an effort to force him to save the nation from economic ruin. Galt not only refuses to become the despot they want him to be, he helps his incompetent kidnappers to repair a broken-down electrical shock machine to which they have strapped him, all the while mocking their primitive notions, as Cyrus and Roark h
ad laughed before him. Dagny, along with Rearden, Francisco, and an anti-Robin Hood pirate (and former college classmate of Francisco’s and Galt’s) named Ragnar Danneskjöld, rescue him, but not before the railroad heiress shoots and kills a burly government guard who bars their way, thus demonstrating the legitimacy of using force against those who use force first. (Dagny’s predecessor was Rand’s girlish English heroine from 1915 who machine-gunned the invading Germans.) As the group of heroes returns in John Galt’s plane to their utopia in Colorado, the lights of New York City flicker and go out. This is the sign that Galt and his fellow strikers—that is, Albert Jay Nock’s Remnant of right-thinking men—have been waiting for. Back in the valley, Ayn Rand’s ideal man and his companions prepare to leave their enclave of justice, independence, and free trade to return to the world, which is now prepared to admit how much it needs the men of the mind, the moralists, and the producers.

  While she worked on the final chapters, the Collective prepared for the intellectual sea change they thought the book would bring.

  TWELVE

  ATLAS SHRUGGED

  1957

  If anyone should ask me what it is that I have said to the glory of Man, I will answer only by paraphrasing Howard Roark: I will hold up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and say: “The explanation rests.”