Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  Rand ignored Chambers, but she never forgave William F. Buckley, Jr., for his bad faith. After 1957, she did her best to avoid him. At her death, he wrote in his National Review obituary of her that she made it a practice to ask potential party hosts whether he was on the guest list; if so, she refused to go. For his part, he told acerbic stories about her throughout the 1960s and 1970s and, in 2003, lampooned her as a pontificating, bob-haired, chain-smoking poobah in his novel Getting It Right. Yet he insisted that the selection of Chambers to review her book was not a conscious act of sabotage and that no one at National Review was out to get her. “I believe she died under the impression that I had done it to punish her for her [religious] faithlessness,” he said. “But [pairing Chambers with the book] was a coincidence.” Like other former friends with whom she had—and would—cut off contact, he seemed to miss her. In years to come, he sent her nonliturgical postcards suggesting they make up. He sometimes phoned at night. Rand thought that he had been drinking on such occasions and hung up. Yet a quarter century after her death and just two years before his own, he paid tribute to her singularity. “She was a valiant human being,” he told an interviewer.

  Years later, in The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara astutely observed that the foes of Atlas Shrugged often confused its author’s increasingly authoritarian personality and narrative voice with her philosophy of radical individualism, thus discarding a fascinating baby with the bathwater. “To hear a woman whose main political idea was [that there should be] no first use of force called a fascist—it seemed impossible,” recalled Barbara. But Rand’s certainty that she alone understood the truth and that people who lived by other convictions, especially liberals, religious adherents, and public intellectuals, were mystics of spirit, savages, looting thugs, beggars, parasites, gibberers, carrion eaters, cavemen, and headhunters did have the ring of Big Sister, even if the ideological content of the novel did not. “Her personal bitterness was at odds with her philosophy,” Barbara told an interviewer in 1992. Rand’s language, never pitch-perfect, was abusive and becoming more so.

  Bennett Cerf’s concern that the novel would be a financial calamity proved baseless. It prospered with ordinary readers almost from the start. Within six weeks it had sold almost seventy thousand copies. Jostling for attention amid a weird assortment of old-fashioned and forward-looking best-sellers, including James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed, Pearl Buck’s Letter from Peking, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, Grace Metalious’s taboo-breaking Peyton Place, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, it quickly ascended to number five on The New York Times best-seller list. The belligerent reviews slowed its rise to fame, but it recovered and remained a best-seller for seven months. Five years after its first printing, it had sold more than a million copies. Decade after decade, readers retained their appetite for it. Fifty years after publication, without advertising or the benefit of appearing on most college reading lists, it was still being sold at an astonishing rate of 150,000 copies a year. In a 1991 poll, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, readers selected it as the book that had most influenced their lives, after the Bible. In a separate 1998 poll by Modern Library, in which readers chose the best one hundred novels of the twentieth century, it and The Fountainhead took first and second place, with Anthem and We the Living following in seventh and eighth place on the list. In other words, readers found all four of her novels among the top eight in a century filled with brilliant work. (Interestingly, in a corresponding list of critics’ literary choices, Rand’s novels are entirely absent.) Bennett Cerf had been dead for twenty years by 1991, but had he lived he might have laughed merrily to learn that, after all, in one respect at least, Atlas Shrugged was like the Bible.

  Again, fan letters arrived by the thousands, from readers whom Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor characterized as the intelligent common man and whom journalist Claudia Pierpont described as “the largely abandoned class of thinking non-intellectuals.” The letters of thanks and appreciation would continue until her death. The novelist grew wealthy. She achieved fame commensurate with her teenaged dreams. And, for good and ill, she fulfilled the mission she had lived for: to create her ideal man and a microcosmic ideal world in which he and all other “real people” could breathe freely and love passionately—and love most passionately those whose strengths and values most resembled her conception of her own. Nevertheless, the critical backlash in which the novel thrashed and almost sank darkened her outlook and shriveled her spirit, and she had no additional goal to ignite her drive and occupy her mind.

  She did her best not to succumb. A month after the appearance of the Chambers review, she began making notes for a new novel, which she called To Lorne Dieterling and described as a story of unrequited love. In it, a writer (in later drafts, a dancer) named Hella Maris falls in love with “a man of action,” Lorne Dieterling, who spurns her to marry a worldly woman named Gloria Thornton, who is better suited to advance his unspecified ambitions. Dieterling’s mistake is to “sacrifice values for the sake of ‘living on earth,’” Rand wrote, “for the sake of action, motivated by a passionate pro-life premise [and] an unbreached (‘Narcissus’-like) self-esteem, but thrown off by the wrong premise of taking action as a primary.” (Ten years later, she would repeat this description of a “wrong premise” while analyzing what had gone wrong with her lover Branden.) Other notes identify the novel’s theme in terms of her old preoccupation: “the art of psychological survival in a malevolent world.” The essence of the story would be “the universe of my ‘tiddlywink’ music.” After a day or two of work, however, she set her notes aside. She would resume musing on the characters and their relationships intermittently throughout the 1960s, but she never wrote the novel.

  Branden and his circle were deeply bewildered and angered by the injustice of the critics’ assaults on Rand. Anxious to defend the ideas he believed in and lift her spirits, he organized a letter-writing campaign by her senior and junior confederates, who together now officially numbered twenty-nine. “We were all strongly encouraged,” said one follower, “in fact, it was practically demanded by Nathaniel, that we send letters to the editors and the writers of these negative reviews. We were told that after all Ayn had given us, we owed her absolutely full support, and that it would be traitorous not to ‘smite’ anyone who criticized her.” Alan Greenspan and Barbara Branden wrote to The New York Times. Murray Rothbard, newly returned to the fold, answered Commonweal’s charge that Atlas lacked compassion and “proceeds from hate;” he pointed out that its author displayed a lot of compassion—for the heroic individuals who were being eaten alive by society’s looters. Leonard Peikoff, Daryn Kent, and Rand’s old friend and ally John Chamberlain took on Chambers and National Review, though without making much headway against the editors’ cozy assurance that they had bested Rand. Branden talked everyone into canceling subscriptions to Time.

  Like the Willkie campaign, the mostly brutal reception of Atlas Shrugged seems to have been a turning point for Rand. Battered by black moods, her sense of estrangement from others deepened. That “wounded stranger,” pain, returned and required forceful measures to be stilled, and her hope for literary justice, which she said she had given up after the publication of We the Living, permanently died away and was replaced by a taste for loyalty and adulation, at least from the young. Her life’s mission to create an ideal man and delineate the ideas and worldly conditions that would allow him to live, love, create, and produce had been completed. But the society outside her study door did not accept her novel as its model. “She had left Galt’s Gulch and come out into a rather sleazy world,” said Barbara Branden. “She was tired.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that, to some degree, she continued to inhabit the world of her novel. “Ayn had disappeared into [the] alternate reality [of Atlas Shrugged] and was not coming back,” Nathaniel Branden wrote. “Something was gone, and gone irretrievably.”

  Something had changed for Nathaniel as well. “What kind of world i
s this?” he remembered saying to his wife, and, “Ayn has done enough. She’s entitled to rest. It’s our turn now.” From that point on, “I felt like my job was to protect her from the world, from disappointment, from suffering,” he said. For months, he had been making plans for a series of public lectures called “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,” combining an elegantly structured and highly detailed description of her philosophy with his own corresponding theories of psychology and the nature and source of self-esteem. He felt certain that “one part of my destiny was to transmit her message to the world.” He also wanted to defend and vindicate her art and vision. “With my lecture course, I was her crusader in a sacred cause,” he later told an interviewer. The lectures would systematize and amplify her ideas on existence, knowledge, economics, politics, ethics, art, and romantic love in an orderly way that was impossible in a novel.

  Like any capitalist, he hoped to make a profit and decided to charge $3.50 for each of twenty lectures, or $70 for the series. Rand had concerns about the venture. Who would pay to hear a young psychologist with no institutional affiliation talk about philosophy? And what would the public association with her unpopular ideas do to his future? Eventually, she agreed, on the condition that he not name the organization after her. More than ever, she was protective of her name and ideas; she didn’t want to give her enemies an opportunity to seize on her friends’ errors of knowledge and attribute them to her. So the series was designated the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, soon to become the Nathaniel Branden Institute, or NBI.

  NBI’s twenty-seven-year-old founder immediately began to recruit an audience. He contacted mutual acquaintances. (Bennett Cerf and Hiram Haydn pled a shortage of time; Rand’s friend Joan Kennedy Taylor attended.) He also sifted through Rand’s fan letters and sent flyers to intelligent-seeming admirers within driving distance of New York. His flyers were addressed to “the readers and admirers of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged” and, with Rand’s permission, mentioned the author’s name in the first line of copy. Members of the junior and senior collectives eagerly signed on, but even they didn’t foresee the almost Elmer Gantry—like talent that Branden would bring to the presentation of her ideas. If she was a “she-messiah,” as Newsweek called her in 1961, he was the rock upon which her 1960s following was built. Even those who disliked him—and over the years, there were many—admired his almost single-handed organization of Objectivism into a detailed philosophic system, a national movement, and, briefly, a familiar national brand, and recognized the fact that he set the foundation for Objectivism’s better-known stepchild, the 1970s libertarian movement.

  As his famous mentor’s bodyguard and philosophical double (“We [are] like Siamese twins,” she once told him. “Our minds work exactly the same way”), his responsibilities multiplied. At her request, he and Barbara helped to select the forums for her public appearances, sat in on her interviews, accompanied her to important appointments, screened her visitors, and held a presumptively unfriendly world at bay. When he explained her theory that ethics should be consistent with the requirements of actual human life or issued orders for action to various ranks of loyalists, he spoke with Rand’s authority. In New York, he became the face and voice of her philosophy. From this time forward, what he wanted, he most often got.

  * In October 2008, Greenspan, then eighty-two, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “those of us who have looked to the self-interest of the lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” That testimony constituted his retraction of assertions he’d made in a 1963 essay he published in Rand’s The Objectivist Newsletter, “The Assault on Integrity,” in which he wrote, “It is precisely the ‘greed’ of the businessman, or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.”

  THIRTEEN

  THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER

  1958–1963

  My personal life is a postscript to my novels. It consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.’ I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books—it has worked for me, as it has worked for my characters. The concretes differ, the abstractions are the same.

  —“About the Author,” Atlas Shrugged, 1957

  Bennett Cerf and Hiram Haydn were among the first to notice the change in Rand. In professional settings, their “most interesting” author was a simple, often modest, spellbinding person, even if she was singularly sure of her ideas and impossible to vanquish in an argument. But as Cerf remarked years later, she was also behaving like a movie queen with a retinue, trailing a crowd of followers he didn’t especially like. Looking back in 1971, he called Nathaniel Branden and his circle “hangers-on,” “brownnosers,” “sycophants,” “stooges.” Editor Haydn saw them as a group of unattractive malcontents. When she and they were in a room together, he wrote, “the very whining, toadying quality of the camp followers threw into brilliant relief the wholly dedicated, crusading, intrepid nature of the leader.” Both men had only a limited view of Rand, but they recognized an important effect on her of her expanding group of admirers: Every time its members told her, one another, and outsiders that she was a genius on a world historical scale, they encouraged her to add a layer of polish to her self-regard. She began to act the part of a Madame de Stael of contemporary philosophy.

  Although she always considered herself a novelist above all, in interviews she presented herself as a woman of ideas. Turning the tables on her literary critics, she displayed the elegantly constructed epistemology and ethics of John Galt’s speech as proof that the world of Atlas Shrugged was not only plausible but philosophically inevitable: the perfect product of impersonal reason. In a New York Post interview published two months after the novel’s debut, she went further, designating herself the world’s best, or at least most consistent, philosopher. Asked, “Are you the most creative thinker alive today?” she said, “If anyone can pick a single rational flaw in my philosophy, I would be delighted to acknowledge him and learn something from him. Until then—I am.” At the time of the interview, she hadn’t yet published a single line of nonfiction philosophical writing.

  As requests for interviews and appearances poured in, Barbara and Nathaniel persuaded her to give a number of public lectures. They predicted that she would be a riveting speaker and that live audiences would energize her after the embittering print reception of Atlas Shrugged. Reluctantly, she agreed. Given her popularity among the young, colleges seemed a likely setting. In early 1958, she gave a lecture called “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World” to student groups at Queens College, NYU, and City College in New York, contrasting the fruit of reason (freedom) with the historical consequences of mysticism and tyranny (the annihilation of independent thought). Although she was anxious about possible hecklers, the lecture went well. Dressed in her trademark black cape adorned with a provocative gold lapel pin in the shape of a dollar sign—a gift from the Brandens, which she would wear until her death—she impressed students with her lucidity and passion for ideas. At Brooklyn College, she gave a talk to the nation’s first Ayn Rand Club titled “Zero Worship,” her unforgettable name for the altruists’ supposed tendency to revere the poor and undistinguished and to hate and envy the productive rich. Here, a crowd of hostile students and teachers did come to heckle her, but she found that she relished the give-and-take, just as she had enjoyed debating with passersby on Fourteenth Street during the Willkie campaign. “I was awed by the power of what she had to say,” said a member of the audience that day. During the question-and-answer period, “she didn’t take anything personally; she was completely devoted to her principles.” There and elsewhere, her meticulous arguments for individual liberty startled many students into taking a fresh look at their assumptions.

  At the same time, she was enjoying watching as Branden thoroughly and deftly systematized the ideas in John Galt’s speech into a series of twenty lectures of his own. These included “W
hat Is Philosophy?” “The Meaning and Nature of Volition,” “God,” “The Psychology of Sex,” and, most characteristically, “Why Human Beings Repress and Drive Underground Not the Worst Within Them but the Best.” For the initial series, which began in January 1958 and was held every week in a meeting room in the small, elegant Sheraton Russell Hotel on Park Avenue, only a block or two from the O’Connors’ and the Brandens’ apartments, twenty-eight people signed up. Branden was a natural showman: handsome, virile, articulate, young, impassioned, even poetic. He was passionate about Rand’s ideas and he loved to perform. Word spread that the NBI lectures were mandatory for New Yorkers interested in Rand’s books or in a life of individualism, and during his second season in the fall of 1958, forty-five people enrolled. At Barbara’s suggestion, he began placing small announcements in The New York Times, titled “Lectures on Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand & Its Application to Human Psychology.” The text promised that Miss Rand herself would answer questions after every lecture. From that point on, attendance rose steadily until it peaked at an average of about two hundred people in each twice-yearly series of lectures—an immense turnout for a private study group. Apart from Rand’s growing circle of devotees, participants were much like her core readers: scientists and engineers, college and graduate students, professors, nurses, doctors, businesspeople, lawyers, artists, and lost souls. They listened, spellbound, to Branden’s descriptions of the almost limitless human potential—a phrase she first used in Atlas Shrugged—of lives rooted in a philosophy of reason, purpose, and self-esteem. During the question periods, the famous novelist was gracious, serene, and thrillingly lucid in these early lectures. One regular participant, an attorney, remembered that her “every word, every sentence was magic.”