Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

—”The Goal of My Writing,” 1963

  If The Fountainhead introduced a new and radical brand of American individualism, Atlas Shrugged resurrected interest in American capitalism at a time when it was under pressure by both the liberal Left and the Christian Right. Rand didn’t praise capitalism as the best of a bad set of choices, as the Buckleyites did, or even as a means by which the poor would prosper, although she believed it was. She defined it, lovingly, as the only economic system in history to be rooted in and inextricable from individual rights: the freedom to choose an occupation, to earn and spend money in a free market of consumer goods, and to own the fruits of one’s own creativity and labor in the form of private property. Capitalism set the individual, especially the creative individual, free to invent, produce, and thrive. When reflecting on the novel’s theme in a letter to her friend John Chamberlain, she put it more aggressively. “Those who are anti-business are anti-life,” she wrote.

  If We the Living had exposed the lethal effects of totalitarian state power on the best and most spirited individuals in a closed society; if Anthem had charted an escape from the tyranny of brotherhood; and if The Fountainhead had defined the struggle of a free, active, self-reliant individual against a culture of suffocating conformity, then Atlas Shrugged extended the perspective to reveal a new ideological and social order, one in which those who are independent, purposeful, creative, and proud no longer have to fight or suffer. It was an oblation to her father and grandfather and a public tribute to her own gifts and strengths.

  Minus Galt’s speech and the last unfinished chapters, this was the book that she presented to publishers in November 1956. She had decided not to show the text of the speech to interested parties until after the first round of negotiations. Her original contract with Bobbs-Merrill for The Fountainhead required her to submit the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged to that firm before offering it to others. She did so. But she was determined to keep the firm from buying it. Still angry at BobbsMerrill for its failures to support The Fountainhead, she was drawing up a list of terms she thought it would refuse to meet when the company’s sales director Ross Baker phoned and invited her and Collins to meet him over dinner. “What is it you want to discuss?” she asked on the phone. The book she had submitted was far too long, he replied. He wanted to mention sections that might be trimmed or cut, including, she later learned, to her horror, Francisco d’Anconia’s masterful fivepage speech about the benefits of a money economy and the profit motive, ending with a paean to America: “To the glory of mankind,” he tells the guests at James Taggart’s wedding reception, “there was for the first and only time a country of money, and I have no higher or more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. … Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created,” and thus they invented the felicitous phrase “to make money.” Even without being aware of specific cuts, however, she declined the sales director’s invitation to dinner and told him that the book must be published exactly as written. Baker, presumably speaking for Bobbs-Merrill’s president, declared that, in its present form, “the book is unsaleable and unpublishable.” Rand had heard that before. She thanked him and set out to find the publisher she wanted for the achievement of her life.

  This time, in vivid contrast to 1943, the publishing world tripped over itself to court her. More than a dozen companies phoned or wrote, to Collins or to her, some sending flowers or invitations to a lavish meal. She and her agent analyzed her many options, and if they experienced a pleasant sense of vindication at having finally bested conventional wisdom, they had earned it.

  She made a chart, and she and Collins narrowed the field to four firms. Since Archibald Ogden was now a consultant for Viking Press and would be her editor should Viking buy the book, Viking was placed on the list. So was McGraw-Hill, for its superior promotional resources, and Knopf, where Blanche and her husband, Alfred, were gradually turning the business over to their son, whom she had met and liked. Last, she considered Random House. That’s where Hiram Haydn, a well-respected and personable editor who had earlier replaced Ogden at Bobbs-Merrill, had recently signed on as editor-in-chief. She phoned him, gently chided him for being out of touch, and explained that she was wavering about including Random House in her final list because she had heard that the firm’s directors, the celebrated Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, were Communists.

  Haydn laughed. One of his assignments at Bobbs-Merrill in the middle 1950s had been to take Rand out to lunch every few months, with the goal of gradually restoring her good opinion of Bobbs-Merrill. He failed, but he enjoyed the lunches and the office visits. In his memoir, Words & Faces, he remembered Rand as short and square, with a Dutch bob and a tricorne hat, “the exact replica of the one in the famous Bonaparte portrait—the sulky [portrait] in which he pokes around in his waistcoat with his fingers.” In cool weather she donned her hallmark short black cape, he recalled, which flowed dramatically in the breeze and which she wore, he remembered that she once confided to him, in imitation of Supergirl. But he had been even more astonished by her style of arguing than by her style of dress. Like Rothbard, he recalled that she would zero in on any inconsistency in her companion’s case, exploiting weaknesses with Socratic questions and airtight arguments. Eventually, she always “emerged victorious, whether because her partner finally capitulated or because he lost by default through exhaustion.” She was “dialectically invincible.” He grew to enjoy watching his peers innocently attempt to argue with her. Invariably they ended up among “the corpses on the Randian battlefield,” he wrote. He appreciated her, and she tolerated him.

  Haydn pointed out that Random House had published Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, a fascinating book-length confession by a right-wing former Communist spy who had fingered Alger Hiss as a Russian agent in a series of congressional hearings and a trial. For once, Haydn wrote, he won an argument with the logician. She agreed that she and her agent would attend a lunch with Haydn, Cerf, and Klopfer a week later.

  The lunch took place in the Trianon Room at the old Ambassador Hotel, on Park Avenue at Fifty-first Street, just around the corner from the Random House offices in a magnificent neo-Gothic mansion neighboring on and belonging to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Over eggs Benedict, she asked Haydn, Cerf, and Klopfer “an infinite number” of questions about their approach to publishing and their attitude toward her work. Haydn recalled that Cerf, a wily entrepreneur as well as a best-selling humor anthologist and a popular guest on the television game show What’s My Line?, answered her question, “What are your premises?” with a bold declaration that he was smarter than other publishers and had built a great company from scratch, without subsidies or special favors. She was delighted with his answer. She explained that Atlas represented a moral defense of capitalism and contained a complete, unique, and radically anti-Left philosophy and was impressed when Klopfer, Cerf’s distinguished business partner, shrewdly remarked that a moral defense of capitalism would have to be in conflict with Judeo-Christian ethics. The jovial Cerf surprised her by announcing, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent.” But, he added, “If we publish you, Miss Rand, nobody is going to try to censor you. You write anything you darn please, and we’ll publish it.” No one else had dared to tell her this, Cerf remarked in his posthumously published memoir, At Random. As a result, “I came out very high” on her grid. When he proposed an auction among her four top choices for publisher, each of whom would read the manuscript and respond with editorial comments on a given date, she was so impressed with his self-confidence that she chose him and Random House almost on the spot.

  “They spoke as I would want publishers to speak,” she told Barbara Branden after the lunch: They faced ideas openly, heard what she had said, were enthusiastic about her earlier work, and answered all her questions. Barbara had rarely seen her so pleased.

  And the men were pleased with her. They appreciated her quick, inventive mind and moral c
ourage. When all three had read the nearly completed manuscript, they arranged for another meeting. As soon as Rand and Alan Collins seated themselves in Cerf’s office, Cerf declared, “It’s a great book. Name your own terms.” She and her agent had discussed what to ask for: an advance of $50,000, a 15 percent author’s royalty, a guaranteed first printing of 75,000 to 100,000 copies, and a $25,000 advertising budget. To all of these terms the men agreed, adding that the length of the novel should not exceed 600,000 words. Business settled, Cerf told her that upon reading part I, chapter 8, “The John Galt Line,” in which Dagny and Rearden ride the rails straight into each other’s arms, he ran out of his office into the hallway, shouting, “It’s magnificent!” Klopfer reported that he had begun to look at factories and smokestacks, and at his own success, with a new appreciation. Back in her apartment, she exclaimed, “This is life as it should be and ought to be—and, for once, is!” To Barbara, she said, “They didn’t pretend to be converted, but they knew these were important ideas and they were very affected by the book. And Bennett was chortling [over] how they’d antagonize their neighbors” by publishing it. Of course, Cerf could not imagine just how hostile and brutal the antagonism would turn out to be.

  She and Cerf quickly became friends. He and his wife, Phyllis, attended dinner parties on East Thirty-sixth Street, where they met the Brandens and other members of Rand’s circle, and the O’Connors spent occasional weekends visiting the Cerfs in their weekend house near the village of Mount Kisco in New York. On first meeting Phyllis, who happened to be Lela Rogers’s niece, Ginger Rogers’s cousin, and a former Hollywood actress, Rand recognized her; to Phyllis’s amazement, the smoky-voiced writer recalled once having dressed her for a movie role in the RKO wardrobe department. Rand met other Random House authors and some of Cerf’s wide circle of acquaintances. Years later, he remembered the mischievous pleasure he, like Haydn, took in introducing her to liberal friends. “What I loved to do was trot her out for people who sneered at me for publishing her. Ayn would invariably charm them. For example, Clifton Fadiman”—one of her models for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead—”sat up with her until about three in the morning one time.” George Axelrod, the man who wrote The Seven Year Itch—”he’s always being [psycho]analyzed,” Cerf noted—”at the end of a long, long evening disappeared with Ayn into another room. We couldn’t get George to go home. We were at Ayn’s for dinner. Later that night he said, ‘She knows me better after five hours than my analyst does after five years.’” The worldly Cerf was unruffled, even amused, by the way “she peers right through you. She has … a wonderful way of pinning you to the wall.” Klopfer, who kept his distance, found her “a remarkable woman,” though also “wacky as a fruitcake.”

  The months immediately preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged brought a spell of bright optimism after a long season of emotional and intellectual exhaustion. The hard work of writing the novel was finished; the remaining chapters involved a pleasurable “cashing in,” as Rand put it, of clues and themes already well established. For the first time, she felt secure in having the support of a truly outstanding agent, editor, and publisher, all of whom grasped her ideas, her objectives, and the breadth of her accomplishment. Although she did not delude herself that the cultural elite of the late 1950s—Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson—would embrace her work any more cordially than the elite of the 1940s had, let alone undergo a capitalist conversion on the basis of the novel, she did believe that no attentive reader could misunderstand her message or its kinship to the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers. Her Enlightenment sense of life (though clearly not the facts of history) assured her that ideas based on human reason would always, eventually, triumph over small-minded schemes devised by the irrational and the power hungry, and that ideas rule the world.

  She warned both Cerf and her circle of young friends not to expect too much. “I am challenging the cultural tradition of two and a half thousand years,” she explained, with her usual sense of grandeur concerning her work. Cerf knew that the reviews would be mixed, at best. But the others anticipated drumrolls and accolades. Years earlier, Barbara had written to her, “Whether or not the world [deserves; crossed out] to be saved will depend on how they respond to your book.” She still thought so. Peikoff, now twenty-four and half hysterical with admiration for his favorite writer, foresaw a renaissance of political liberty and a restoration of an idealized nineteenth-century-style laissez-faire economy. Alan Greenspan, the oldest in the group at thirty-one and by far its most sophisticated member, couldn’t shake off the conviction that her arguments in Atlas Shrugged were so “radiantly exact” as to compel agreement by all honest men and women. He often said that Ayn Rand put the moral basis under capitalism for him. Until 2008, he never changed his mind.*

  As Rand hurried to finish the last three chapters in the early months of 1957, O’Connor was painting. He had taken up painting in 1955, when, as a dare, Joan Blumenthal had offered to teach everyone in the inner circle how to draw and paint. Most who signed up bumbled along, but O’Connor took to painting as he had taken to gardening, avidly and with remarkable focus. Using a corner of the bedroom as his workroom, he sketched and painted constantly and again established a certain degree of independence for himself. After greeting the Collective on Saturday evenings, he would slip away to paint imaginary views of modern towers and tree branches with chiseled leaves. As long as he was nearby, Rand didn’t object to his not appearing by her side; she was proud that he was giving visual expression to what she called his “exalted sense of life.” She marveled at what she regarded as his talent and often said that she saw a striking similarity between his artistic vision and her own. “There were no historical influences at all in his work,” noted Barbara Branden, probably echoing Rand, in 1962. Rand maintained the same about her fiction and philosophy. Yet she decided that he would benefit from professional training and asked Mary Ann Sures, a graduate student in art history, to search for a suitable art school for him, and after the publication of Atlas Shrugged he enrolled in the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street. His teachers, portrait painter Robert Brackman and Robert Beverly Hale, an expert in anatomy, praised and encouraged him, and he was popular among the students. The women, particularly, admired his good looks and natural gallantry, recalled Joan Blumenthal, who was also a student at the League. Best of all, for a period of time no one knew that he was Ayn Rand’s husband. Branden later hypothesized that his absorption in painting drew his attention away from his wife’s affair during these years; he appeared unconcerned about it, Branden wrote in 1989, except, perhaps, for exhibiting “a sense of relief that I had lifted a burden” of wifely demands from his shoulders. Portraying O’Connor as a beaten man, which he wasn’t yet, Branden added, “I did not know about his drinking.”

  Months earlier, Rand had honored her lover by naming him her “intellectual heir,” the mark of distinction she had earlier conferred on Albert Mannheimer, although Branden didn’t know that. On one of their intimate evenings together in the fall of 1956, over dinner at the Russian Tea Room, she confided that she would also like to dedicate Atlas Shrugged to him, along with her husband. The dedication page would read, “To Frank O’Connor and Nathaniel Branden,” the two indispensable men in her life. Again she cautioned him that aligning himself publicly with her might bring him trouble. He didn’t care, he answered proudly. “The idea of the greatest literary masterpiece I’ve ever read being dedicated to me is almost more than I can hold in my brain,” he told her. It didn’t occur to him until later that such a monumental gesture by Rand might bind him more permanently in his romance with her or otherwise limit his freedom. As they rose to leave the restaurant, she murmured, “Do you ever wonder what people think when they look at us?” He answered gaily that they probably mistook her for his daughter and told her that he loved her.

  In her author’s note at the end of Atlas Shrugged, she explained the double dedication. O’Connor, she wrote, em
bodied the “values of character I wanted to find in a man. I met such a man, and we have been married for twenty-eight years.” While writing The Fountainhead, however, she had kept in mind an ideal reader: someone with “as rational and independent a mind as I could conceive of.” She had found that reader in a nineteen-year-old fan named Nathaniel Branden, she wrote, adding grandly, “He is my intellectual heir.” Then and later, she did not seem to notice the apparent irony of an “intellectual heir” of independent mind.

  Rand once called the futuristic novella Anthem “my manifesto, my profession of faith, the essence of my entire philosophy.” It was the hero of Anthem who gave meaning to the honorific, first in the case of Mannheimer and then in the case of Branden. As she explained her thinking to Barbara, the Collective as a whole reflected “what I had once told Nathan about himself—that I was regarding [him] as Equality 7–2521 in Anthem,” meaning as the progenitor of a new and better world. When she asked herself, “Of what importance is posterity to me?” she answered, “‘It’s not posterity [I care about] but the exceptional man, or my kind of man, in the future.’ Nathan is that man in the next generation.” Thus, as she saw it, the fate of her lover and disciple had already been chronicled in the fantasy world of Anthem. In some measure, then, and in some recess of her mind, she preferred to leave the corrupted world she lived in lightless, as in both Anthem and Atlas Shrugged, and thus prepared to receive her torchbearer and message.

  If The Fountainhead had released an outpouring of excitement, hope, and yearning among hundreds of thousands of readers, Rand and Branden were aware that Atlas Shrugged might well set off an avalanche. As Hiram Haydn noted, the book had best-seller stamped all over it.

  They decided they needed a name for her system of ideas other than Randianism, which had occasionally cropped up. They discussed what word would best describe it. She liked “existentialism,” Branden said in 2004, because it echoed Aristotle’s maxim that “existence exists.” But Jean-Paul Sartre and his band of “bad guys” had beaten them to it. They briefly considered “contextual absolutism” and “contextualism” but gave them up for lack of sex appeal. They settled on the only slightly spicier name “Objectivism,” which they intended as an homage to the immutability of objective reality and the competence of perception and reason to grasp and understand it. It also conveyed an urgent emphasis on the scientific method, Rand thought; she had become especially concerned with countering the influence of John Dewey and his followers’ subjectivist theories of education. She was probably unaware that such ideas partly derived from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s eloquent responses to the unintended consequences of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War. Yet she knew that it was Dewey who, in the 1950s, “showed us how to live without truth or any theory of reality [and] made us aware that what we think and believe has no foundation anywhere,” as Norman Podhoretz later put it. In many ways still a Russian thinker, she located the origin of this problem in ideas, especially those of Hegel and Kant, rather than in the peculiarities of American and European history.