Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  On the afternoon of March 20, 1957, Joan Blumenthal and Mary Ann Sures were on secretarial duty in the East Thirty-sixth Street apartment. After proofreading a stack of typed pages, Blumenthal timidly knocked on Rand’s study door, then cracked it open to announce that she and Sures were ready for more pages. From inside they heard a raspy growl, “If you come in here, I’ll kill you!” Nonplussed by her tone, they rode the elevator to the street and called Leonard Peikoff from a pay phone, since the apartment’s only phone was in Rand’s study, and asked him what to do; and so Peikoff, too, was on hand when she emerged an hour or so later waving a manuscript page that read, “The End.” “One word leads to another!” she said gaily. She had met her Random House deadline one day in advance. Trailing her into the living room, Frank said, “Congratulations, darling,” and everyone fell to hugging everyone else. Someone phoned the Brandens. Sures ran out to buy pastries at a local bakery. Champagne appeared and coffee flowed. Rand danced like a girl to the turn-of-the-century melodies she called her “tiddlywink” music and led the band with her baton. After thirteen years of work, she had memorialized in words her own music, its intricate orchestration, and her determined march toward its completion. Just as Dagny, listening to the last recorded concerto of Richard Halley, recognizes in the chords “a great cry of rebellion … a ‘No’ flung at some vast process of torture,” so Rand now flung her definitive “no” at the despots and conformists who would try to control or exploit such brilliant, creative minds as hers.

  She delivered the book. From his earlier reading of it, Haydn was ambivalent, at best, about its ethics and politics. Although he admired her narrative pace and mastery of plot and was pleased to have been able to attract a best-selling author to his new firm, he had doubts about the novel’s “drab” prose style and core ideas. Pursuing what he thought was his editorial duty, he, too, suggested a number of cuts, including cuts in John Galt’s speech. When Rand refused, he appealed to Bennett Cerf. “You’re some editor!” Cerf barked at him. “I’ll fix it in no time.” The high-spirited founding editor met with the author. “Nobody’s going to read that [speech],” he told her. “You’ve said it all three or four times before. … You’ve got to cut it.” Answering with a comment that became publishing legend, she said, “Would you cut the Bible?” With that, Cerf threw up his hands but cagily asked her to forfeit seven cents in royalties per copy to pay for the additional paper it would take to print the uncut speech and other long passages that put her in excess of the word count in her contract. She agreed. Henceforth, Cerf cheerfully acted as her facilitator and supporter. Haydn resigned himself to being an “apprentice copy editor” who helped her search for and remove words within a paragraph that rhymed, “an obsession with her,” he recalled in his memoir. Task completed, he turned the mammoth manuscript over to Bertha Krantz, the firm’s actual copy editor, who came to know its author well.

  The two women worked together in a corner of Haydn’s large office, discussing changes in punctuation and wording. Copy-editing discussions with an author normally took a week or two, Krantz later said, but in this case they went on for several months. At first, Rand seriously frightened Krantz. The methodical thinker insisted on a logical reason for every change of period and comma; Krantz’s view was that punctuation depends on the eye and ear almost as much as on rules and reason. Often, the author would call across the room to Haydn, “Hiram, is Bert right?” “They were putting a great deal [of money] into the book, and for a long time it was very tense,” Krantz recalled in 1983. Gradually, the copy editor came to regard the famous author as “a little lady” much like herself: they were the same height, build, and coloring, and she guessed correctly that they shared a geographical and ethnic heritage. Moreover, working in close proximity with Rand, Krantz slowly concluded that the author herself was a frightened human being—and not just because of the imminent publication of her magnum opus. On visiting the O’Connors’ apartment for a working lunch, she was shocked to see the advocate of reason don a pair of heavy rubber gloves and scour the dishes in scalding hot water. “There are germs!” Rand exclaimed when Krantz questioned her. As the two became familiar with the details of each other’s lives, Rand nagged Krantz about the dangers of living in a risky neighborhood in the west Bronx, and Krantz noticed that the author, a proponent of the benevolent universe theory of life, sealed herself in her doorman-guarded apartment behind the usual steel locks. “The subway scared the hell out of her,” Krantz recalled, and Rand warned the copy editor not to use it. (“She must have thought I could afford to take a taxi to and from the office,” Krantz remarked, although Rand more probably had in mind a bus.) For a brief time, Rand attempted to convert Krantz to Objectivism, but Krantz politely demurred and Rand didn’t push. She still behaved with old-fashioned good manners, especially in professional relationships.

  Like others over the years, Krantz observed that Rand was silent about her Jewish background. “It was funny to me, and to other people. She certainly never denied being Jewish, but somehow or other there seemed to be a certain evasiveness on her part.” The Random House staffer also remarked, with remembered consternation, that the O’Connors’ apartment was overrun by their unneutered male cat Frisco, named after Francisco d’Anconia. Frisco scratched the upholstered furniture to tatters, beat himself against the walls, and emitted a foul-smelling spray on furniture and rugs. The stench was terrible and permanent, Krantz recalled, as did other visitors to the apartment. When she asked why the O’Connors didn’t have the cat fixed, Rand replied that, unlike humans, cats cannot choose to go against nature or mold it to their wishes, and she would not interfere with them or force them. Krantz retorted that she had never heard a more irrational statement. “That made her angry,” Krantz recalled, “because I used the word ‘irrational.’” The copy editor was equally upset. “It was awful. She was such a brilliant woman. Her rationale was the big things of the world, but it’s the little things we live by.”

  In the end, Krantz felt sorry for Rand. One day, Rand proudly showed Krantz some of Frank’s paintings. “I thought they were such schlock,” Krantz said. “She put on a front for her husband,” but “I thought he was a nebbish. I didn’t know how the hell he could live with her.”

  Not “for one minute,” however, did Krantz or any other staff member at Random House doubt the author’s sincerity in everything she wrote and preached. The women remained on friendly terms for several years. But the self-made Russian messenger of reason was, in the end, impenetrable to Krantz. Rand “built herself,” Krantz said, and became “a slave to the image she built. [I never really knew] what she was like. She wouldn’t let you know.”

  A few months before Atlas Shrugged was published, Bennett Cerf invited his “most interesting” new author to address a Random House sales conference. She stood at the head of the room and talked at length about the characters and meaning of her novel. When she finished, one salesman, still puzzled as to how to explain the book to bookstore owners, asked half-jokingly, “Miss Rand, could you give the essence of your philosophy while standing on one foot?” The salesman must have known that his question paraphrased the question asked of the legendary Israelite Rabbi Hillel, who, when challenged to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, replied, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. That is the whole of the Torah. All the rest is commentary.” (Interestingly, the Christian Golden Rule is affirmative: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The problem with that, as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, is that your neighbor may not want done to him what you want done to you. Hillel’s formulation is elegantly, and, when applied to Rand, suitably individualistic.) She gamely raised a leg and answered, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epistemology: reason. Ethics: self-interest. Politics: capitalism.” The sales staff applauded. Presumably, she was delighted by the classical reference as well as the applause.

  As publication day approached, the excitement at the firm was palpable. Alan
Collins and Bennett Cerf ordered cigarettes stamped with a gold dollar sign, like those smoked by the novel’s striking titans, and presented packages to Rand and guests at a surprise banquet in her honor at the Plaza Hotel. She was pleased when the Random House promotional staff collaborated with Branden and her husband to produce a billboard advertisement in which a glamorous portrait of Frank was overlaid with type that read, “This is John Galt—who said he would stop the motor of the world—and did. Meet him in Atlas Shrugged.” Advance orders from bookstores were unusually strong. As the initial printing of one hundred thousand copies came off the press, Cerf presented the very first to her. One early autumn evening, just before the book’s release to stores, Ayn, Frank, Barbara, and Nathaniel drove up Madison Avenue to see whether the book was in the display window on the ground floor of the Random House offices. It was there, all by itself in solitary splendor, wrapped in a green-blue cover designed by Frank. Barbara cried, “That’s us!” and Ayn roared with pleasure.

  Atlas Shrugged was published on October 10, 1957. The reviews began to appear three days later, and the celebrations ended. They were not merely critical, they were hateful and dishonest. In The New York Times, Rand’s old nemesis from the 1930s, Granville Hicks, branded the novel “a demonstrative act rather than a literary novel,” a creation of demonic will “to crush the enemies of truth.” Without acknowledging the author’s nineteenth-century breadth of scope, her jaw-dropping integration of unfamiliar ideas into a drumbeat plot, or the Dickensian keenness of her eye for bureaucratic villainy, Hicks went on: “[As] loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate.” He suggested it was nothing more than a clumsy mixture of melodrama and didacticism, a 1,168-page “howl” by a harpy wielding “a battering ram.”

  Hicks set the tone for the reviews that followed. The writer for The Washington Post announced, “This is a story of conflict where it’s equally easy to hate both sides.” The Chicago Tribune compared her ideas on mysticism to those of Hitler. “Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?” wailed Time magazine in the opening sentences of its review. If the Los Angeles Times had ever praised her, chief critic Robert Kirsch set out to correct the record. “It would be hard to find [another] such display of grotesque eccentricity outside an insane asylum,” he wrote and, perversely, “[John] Galt is really arguing for a dictatorship.” The New Yorker chimed in with mordant humor. The reviewer, a short-story writer named Donald Malcolm, wrote that, at the novel’s end, the heroes return to the world convinced that “the globe’s two billion or so incompetents, having starved to death,” will finally “know better than to fool around with businessmen.” The Atlantic Monthly berated the novel as “crackbrained ratiocination.” Smaller publications griped that it was wordy and, at $6.95, inordinately expensive.

  There were a few public declarations of support from old-line conservative acquaintances. In Isabel Paterson’s former newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune, John Chamberlain praised the book as a “vibrant and powerful novel of ideas” that, in breadth of ambition and intellectual intensity, rivaled Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Rand’s friend the economist Ruth Alexander, writing for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, went so far as to assert that “Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.” Some out-of-town newspapers praised her writing style, the novel’s clever plot and action, and her ability to unite ideas and suspense. But these tributes were largely lost amid the flood of invective, and in any case they didn’t console or satisfy the author or her circle.

  Privately, old friends sent letters of appreciation. After making many pages of notes about the novel, particularly about its insistent atheism, which he didn’t share, electric company executive William Mullendore wrote, “I am now able to say it: It is a great book,” although he added, “I do believe in the spiritual life.” Ludwig von Mises was more forceful in his praise. “Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel,” he wrote. “It is also—or may I say: first of all—a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society. … You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you [the masses] are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” He told his students, “No one writes about the bureaucrats the way Ayn Rand does.” As private affirmations, these remarks were welcome, but they did nothing to counteract the public scourge. And they didn’t praise her as a writer. She still wanted “superlatives or nothing” and “raves that raved about the right things.” She would not receive them until decades later.

  Bennett Cerf suffered mild apoplexy. After investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, “we thought that we were going to be hooked,” he said in 1971. The worst was yet to come. At Christmastime, William F. Buckley’s National Review ran a savage critique of Atlas Shrugged that has become a model of a successful intellectual ambush. Called “Big Sister Is Watching You,” it was the work of Whittaker Chambers, the very reformed Communist spy whom Haydn had mentioned as evidence that Random House was politically evenhanded. Like Buckley, the exceptionally intelligent if eccentric and oracular Chambers was now a devout Christian, a Quaker, and he didn’t merely disparage the novel, he set out to destroy it, partly in an attempt to discredit her defense of godless capitalism. “Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term,” he huffed. “I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one.” Its heroes and villains, he wrote, derived not from Aristotle but from Nietzsche and Karl Marx. “Just as her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen, so her ulcerous leftists are Nietzsche’s ‘last men,’ both deformed in a way [that would] sicken the fastidious recluse of Sils Maria,” a reference to the summer house where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As to Marx, Chambers wrote, “He, too, admired naked self-interest.” More reasonably, he argued that the problem with Rand’s godless vision of earthly happiness as man’s highest moral purpose was that happiness, as an end in itself, quickly deteriorates into the pursuit of pleasure, “with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. … Randian man,” he continued, “has to be held ‘heroic’ in order not to be beastly,” and all deviations from Randian revelation must be viewed as willful immorality so as to prevent debauchery. “There are ways of dealing with such wickedness,” he thundered in the essay’s most inflammatory passage. “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” Interestingly, within two years of writing the review, in a series of private letters to Buckley, Chambers moved closer to Rand’s position in favor of unrestricted capitalism. He withdrew his support for National Review’s brand of religion-based conservatism and lauded the indispensable dynamism of the nation’s economic system, which “is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative” in any traditional sense. Rand did not learn about his change of heart.

  She had expected attacks, but she had not expected her worldview to be confused with Marxism or Fascism, or for herself to be accused of advocating mass murder. Anguished, she asked Barbara and other friends why American intellectuals such as Chambers couldn’t understand what she was saying. And why hadn’t anyone with cultural standing risen to defend, or at least accurately summarize, her themes of freedom, rationality, no first use of force, and individual rights? “I had expected some kind of better understanding,” she told Nathaniel. Instead, critics focused on her adamant atheism and harshly contemptuous passages and finally placed her outside the realm of the reasonable Right. Wearily, she said, “Historically speaking, [it’s] even earlier than I imagined.” To some degree, history would prove her right.

  Ironically, perhaps, Isabel Paterson, who though no longer a columnist with the Herald Tribune still retained some influence among conservatives, did come to Rand’s defense against Chambers, although R
and probably never knew it. Notwithstanding the older woman’s own early warnings to her former friend about the limits she was placing on her influence by insisting on her atheism, Paterson sent an indignant letter to William F. Buckley in care of his secretary, Gertrude Vogt, who had once been Paterson’s secretary at the Herald Tribune. Chambers’s review was so vicious it could be considered libelous, Paterson wrote, and was absolutely worthless. Because Paterson was now an occasional contributor to National Review, Buckley answered in a vaguely conciliatory manner. Paterson was not satisfied; she told her friend Muriel Hall that the review was “the dirtiest job imaginable” and “If I ever see Mr. Chambers again, I won’t speak to him.” It’s hard not to wonder whether a mending of fences might not have taken place between the two old friends had Paterson said that in print.