Ayn Rand and the World She Made
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assertion that has been bitterly disputed: TPOAR, p. 272, and JD, p. 166; TPOARC, p. 142. Because of its implications for the cruel effect of the affair on FO, the extent of his drinking has been a subject of controversy. The Brandens present evidence that FO drank alcoholically. AR’s executor, LP, and other acquaintances dispute this. My research suggests that, at least toward the end of his life, FO drank heavily and secretly.
“I confused loneliness”: Speech by NB, New York City, June 22, 1989; courtesy of Liberty Audio and Film Service, 2214 Hey Road, Richmond, VA 23224.
“This affair is sexual”: JD, p. 217.
“Where have you gone to?”: MYWAR, p. 142.
he told himself: JD, p. 163.
“I never did, until things started showing at the seams”: Author interview with JMB and Allan Blumenthal, March 23, 2004.
“Ayn wasn’t very clean”: Taped interview with Barbara Weiss, AR’s secretary from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, conducted by BB, September 25, 1983.
264 “In a world that was hurtling toward collectivism”: Author interview with Al Ramrus, March 5, 2007.
“as though I were entering Atlantis”: Leonard Peikoff, “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand,” The Voice of Reason, p. 353.
“She wanted us to discuss”: Author interview with EK, July 21, 2006.
“like an old tank”: Facets of Ayn Rand, pp. 33, 39.
aware of the author standing half hidden: Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.
gave them the going wage: Facets of Ayn Rand, p. 38; interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.
rent check slipped their minds: Videotaped interview with Hank and Erica Holzer, AR’s personal attorneys, 1965–70, by Duncan Scott, the Objectivist History Project, February 9, 2006.
packets of fan letters arrived from Bobbs-Merrill: Author interview with BB, October 14, 2007.
“very good—to be answered”: Videotaped interview with Robert Hessen by Duncan Scott, OHP, November 10, 2004.
Nickerson began to attend: 100 Voices, Kathleen and Richard Nickerson, p. 180.
“spiritual bodyguard”: Author interview with NB, December 11, 2008.
“desperately”: Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.
paid little attention to girls: Author interviews with BB (October 14, 2007) and others.
“devastating”: Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.
“who neither agrees or disagrees”: AS, p. 971.
“kangaroo courts”: Ayn Rand and Her Movement,” p. 8.
Peikoff was a particular target: MYWAR, p. 158.
“When she laid out her argument”: Author interview with BB, December 16, 2005.
“The six months I had spent”: Author interview with Daryn Kent-Duncan, April 25, 2005.
“he regards reason and emotion as antagonists”: MYWAR, p. 165.
he who “pulled the trigger”: MYWAR, p. 172.
that is, Albert Jay Nock’s Remnant: AR’s returning strikers mirror Nock’s Remnant of conservative true believers who will one day redeem the world, a tribute she may be slyly acknowledging when she writes, in John Galt’s speech, “Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, your mind” (AS, p. 932).
TWELVE: ATL ASSHRUGGED: 1957
“If anyone should ask me”: “The Goal of My Writing,” The Romantic Manifesto, p. 172.
“Those who are anti-business are anti-life”: Letter to John Chamberlain, November 27, 1948 (LOAR, p. 413).
decided not to show the text: JD, p. 201.
“To the glory of mankind”: AS, p. 385.
“the book is unsaleable and un-publishable”: TPOAR, p. 284.
tripped over itself to court her: TPOAR, p. 285.
dozen companies phoned or wrote: Reported by BC in a 1971 oral history interview from which his memoir At Random (1977) was taken; recorded by Robin Hawkins, 1968, for the Columbia University Oral History Project, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, used by permission of Christopher Cerf; number 719, p. 945.
Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, were Communists: Words & Faces, p. 260. In his oral history interview, BC said that AR had explained to Hiram Haydn that, in Cerf’s words, “her sycophants had told her that we were way over on the left” (p. 944). In TPOAR, BB writes that the novelist had long considered Random House to be a left-wing publisher (p. 285).
“the exact replica”: Words & Faces, p. 257.
she tolerated him [Hayden]: Although “he would not have known it,” BB recalled, “she didn’t like him.” In fact, “with a few exceptions, I can’t remember her ever saying that she liked someone without adding a list of qualifications” (author correspondence with BB, June 26, 2008).
lunch took place in the Trianon Room: Words & Faces, p. 260.
“an infinite number” of questions: Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977).
was delighted with his answer: Words & Faces, p. 261.
“nobody is going to try to censor you”: At Random. BC later claimed that he meant he would publish anything she wrote as fiction.
posthumously published memoir: At Random was edited by Christopher Cerf and published posthumously, based on BC’s oral history interview on file at Columbia University’s Oral History Project, number 719.
“They spoke as I would want”: TPOAR, p. 286.
To all of these terms the men agreed: Internal memo, Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 57.
should not exceed 600,000 words: Letter to AR from BC (Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 57).
“This is life as it should be”: JD, p. 202.
“They didn’t pretend to be converted”: TPOAR, p. 288.
“What I loved to do”: BC’s oral history interview, p. 943.
“she peers right through you”: BC’s oral history interview, p. 944.
“a remarkable woman”: Donald Klopfer, in an oral history interview on file at the Columbia University Oral History Project archives, number 1091, p. 79.
a spell of bright optimism: TPOAR, p. 290.
“I am challenging the cultural tradition”: TPOAR, p. 294.
“Whether or not the world”: Unpublished letter to AR from BB, August 29, 1951, courtesy of MSC.
foresaw a renaissance of political liberty: TPOAR, p. 294; author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.
Alan Greenspan: MYWAR, p. 167.
He often said that Ayn Rand put the moral basis: Author interview with JMB, March 23, 2004. “I was limited until I met her,” Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin Press). “Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do, and why they do it. … She introduced me to a vast realm from which I’d shut myself off” (p. 53).
Until 2008: NYT, October 23, 2008; TON, August 1963, p. 31.
early months of 1957: First draft of AS (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 11, folders 10–12).
he would slip away to paint: TPOAR, p. 281; “Portrait of An Artist,” p. 1.
what she called his “exalted sense of life”: Facets of Ayn Rand, p. 119.
“There were no historical influences at all in his work”: WIAR, p. 230. Since this book was written under AR’s supervision and with her guidance, this view of FO’s originality was almost surely hers.
he enrolled in the Art Students League: Author correspondence with Stephanie Cassidy, archivist, Art Students League; Facets of Ayn Rand, pp. 118–19.
Robert Brackman and Robert Beverly Hale: Author interview with Don Ventura, March 19, 2004.
popular among the students: McConnell, “Recollections of Ayn Rand I.”
women, particularly, admired his good looks: TPOAR, p. 282.
“I did not yet know about his drinking”: MYWAR, p. 162.
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Rand had honored her lover: About becoming AR’s “intellectual heir,” NB said in 2004, “[Now] I don’t know what it means, but I thought I did then. I guess it meant ‘the anointed one to carry on the tradition,’ ‘the keeper of the flame’” (author interview with NB, May 5, 2004).
“The idea of the greatest literary
masterpiece”: MYWAR, p. 194.
didn’t occur to him until later: MYWAR, pp. 176–77.
limit his freedom: Author interview with NB, April 6, 2008.
“my manifesto, my profession of faith”: Unpublished letter to Newman Flower, January 2, 1938 (quoted in EOA, p. 71).
had best-seller stamped all over it: Words & Faces, p. 261.
“contextual absolutism” and “contextualism”: Rand also used the word opsolitism to describe her philosophy in a 1961 speech at the University of Michigan.
“showed us how to live without truth”: Norman Podhoretz, “Intellectuals and Writers, Then and Now,” Partisan Review, Fall 2002 (vol. 69, no. 4), pp. 507–40.
“One word leads to another!”: “Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged,” recorded speech by BB, Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., October 6, 2007.
the last recorded concerto of Richard Halley: Halley’s Fifth Concerto was inspired by love songs from Boris Godunov, according to follower Howard Odzer (100 Voices, Howard Odzer, p. 191–92).
“drab” prose style and core ideas: Words & Faces, p. 262.
“Nobody’s going to read that [speech]”: BC’s oral history interview on file at the Columbia University Oral History Project archives (number 719, p. 950.)
to pay for the additional paper: Unpublished letter to AR from BC, May 9, 1957, Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 57.
“an obsession with her”: Words & Faces, p. 261.
“They were putting a great deal [of money]”: Unpublished taped interview with Bertha Krantz, conducted by BB, September 20, 1983.
“a slave to the image she built”: Unpublished taped interview with Bertha Krantz, conducted by BB, September 20, 1983.
A few months before Atlas Shrugged: BCs oral history interview, p. 948.
“Metaphysics: objective reality”: TPOAR, p. 294.
presented packages to Rand: TPOAR, p. 295.
“This is John Galt”: TPOAR, p. 296.
“That’s us!”: TPOAR, p. 294.
old nemesis from the 1930s, Granville Hicks: By 1957, Hicks had left the Communist Party. In the Times, he was identified as a literary consultant to The New Leader, a biweekly magazine published by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs.
“howl” by a harpy: Granville Hicks, “A Parable of Buried Talents,” NYT, October 13, 1957, p. 266.
“where it’s equally easy to hate both sides”: Earl P. Brown, “From the U.S.A.,” Washington Post, October 13, 1957, p. E6.
compared her ideas on mysticism to those of Hitler: Earl Wagenknecht, “As Thriller or Parable, Novel Is Absorbing,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 13, 1957, p. B1.
“Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?”: “The Solid-Gold Dollar Sign,” Time, October 14, 1957.
“display of grotesque eccentricity”: Robert R. Kirsch, “The Book Report,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1957, p. B5.
“the globe’s two billion or so incompetents”: Donald Malcolm, “The New Rand Atlas,” The New Yorker, October 26, 1957, pp. 194–96.
“crackbrained ratiocination”: “Come the Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1957, pp. 249–50.
ambition and intellectual intensity: John Chamberlain, “Ayn Rand’s Political Parable and Thundering Melodrama,” New York Herald Tribune, October 15, 1957, section 6, p. 1.
“Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history”: TPOAR, p. 298.
“I am now able to say it”: Unpublished letter to AR from William C. Mullendore, William C. Mullendore Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Subject Series, box 23, folder “Ayn Rand.”
“a cogent analysis of the evils”: Unpublished letter from LVM, January 23, 1958, courtesy of Bettina Bien Greaves.
“No one writes about the bureaucrats the way Ayn Rand does”: Author interview with Bettina Bien Greaves, December 22, 2006.
“we thought that we were going to be hooked”: BC’s oral history interview, p. 945.
partly in an attempt: “Godless Capitalism,” pp. 359–85.
“To a gas chamber—go!”: Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review, December 28, 1957, p. 120.
“is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be”: Whittaker Chambers, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1969, pp. 227–28, cited in “Godless Capitalism,” p. 375.
She had expected attacks: AR claimed never to have read the Whittaker Chambers review of AS (LOAR, p. 572) but to have been told about it by others.
Anguished, she asked Barbara: TPOAR, p. 304.
285 “even earlier than I imagined”: MYWAR, p. 203.
Paterson sent an indignant letter: The Woman and the Dynamo, p. 351.
if so, she refused to go: Author interview with WFB, June 12, 2006.
lampooned her: William F. Buckley, Jr., Getting It Right (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2003).
“I believe she died under the impression”: Author interview with WFB, June 12, 2006.
thought that he had been drinking: MYWAR, p. 201.
“She was a valiant human being”: Author interview with WFB, June 12, 2006.
confused its author’s increasingly authoritarian personality: TPOAR, p. 302.
“To hear a woman”: “Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.“
“Her personal bitterness was at odds with her philosophy”: “An Interview with Barbara Branden,” p. 8.
ascended to number five: “Best Seller List,” NYT Book Review, October 27, 1957, p. 4.
Five years after its first printing: TON, December 1962 (vol. 1, no. 12), p. 47.
150,000 copies a year: Author correspondence with Richard Ralston, publishing manager of ARI, March 3, 2004.
the intelligent common man: Author interview with JKT, May 21, 2004.
“the largely abandoned class”: Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Twilight of the Goddess,” The New Yorker, July 24, 1995, p. 76.
Other notes identify: JOAR, pp. 706–716.
She would resume musing: “Two Possible Books,” November 30, 1957, and February 10, 1959 (JOAR, pp. 706–11).
organized a letter-writing campaign: “In and Out of Books: Class of ‘43,” p. 136.
“We were all strongly encouraged”: Author interview with EK, NB’s sister, on July 21, 2006.
wrote to The New York Times: “Letters to the Editor,” NYT, November 3, 1957, p. 283.
lacked compassion and “proceeds from hate”: Patricia Donegan, “A Point of View,” Commonweal, November 8, 1957, p. 156.
he pointed out: “Communications,” Commonweal, December 20, 1957, p. 313.
Leonard Peikoff, Daryn Kent, and … John Chamberlain: “Letters to the Editor,” National Review, January 18, 1958, p. 71.
canceling subscriptions to Time: 100 Voices, Kathleen Nickerson, p. 181.
Her life’s mission to create: December 15, 1960 (JOAR, p. 704).
“She had left Galt’s Gulch”: “Ayn Rand and Her Movement,” p. 7.
“Ayn had disappeared into [the] alternate reality”: MYWAR, p. 195.
“Something was gone”: “Interview with Nathaniel Branden,” p. 6.
“What kind of world is this?”: MYWAR, p. 205.
“I felt like my job was to protect her”: Author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.
“one part of my destiny”: MYWAR, p. 194.
“With my lecture course”: Author interview with NB, May 5, 2004.
she didn’t want to give her enemies an opportunity: Author interview with Robert Hessen, October 17, 2007.
289 Bennett Cerf and Hiram Haydn pled a shortage of time: Unpublished taped interv
iew of Bertha Krantz by BB, dated September 20, 1983.
mentioned the author’s name in the first line of copy: Circular advertising NB’s first lecture series, Hiram Haydn correspondence, Bennett Cerf Collection, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 436.
“she-messiah”: “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek, March 27, 1961.
“We [are] like Siamese twins”: MYWAR, pp. 121-22.
THIRTEEN: THE PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER: 1958–1963
“My personal life is a postscript to my novels”: “About the Author,” AS, p. 107.
“hangers-on,” “brownnosers”: From BC’s oral history interview on file at the Columbia University Oral History Project archives, number 719, conducted by Mary R. Hawkins, 1971, pp. 903–952.
“the very whining, toadying quality”: Words & Faces, p. 258.
“If anyone can pick a single rational flaw”: Mike Wallace, “Should the Strong Inherit the Earth?” NYP, December 9, 1957, ghosted by Edith Efron.
Barbara and Nathaniel persuaded her: Author correspondence with BB, June 27, 2008.
gave a lecture called “Faith and Force”: “Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker.”
At Brooklyn College: In April 1958; “Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker.”
“I was awed by the power”: 100 Voices, Fred Feingersh, p. 176.
“Why Human Beings Repress and Drive Underground”: NBI flyer, September 1964, courtesy of Lee Clifford.
“Lectures on Objectivism”: Advertisement, NYT, October 7, 1962, p. X4.
attendance rose steadily: MYWAR, p. 206.
During the question periods: TPOAR, p. 329.
“every word, every sentence was magic”: “Interview with Henry Mark Holzer,” p. 6.
enlisted Alan Greenspan: TPOAR, p. 307.
By popular demand: 100 Voices, Kathleen Nickerson, p. 181. AR’s lectures on plot, theme, characterization, and style were recorded, transcribed, edited, and, in 2000, published as The Art of Fiction.
began in early 1958: 100 Voices, Larry Abrams, p. 194.
For six months: 100 Voices, Larry Abrams, footnote, p. 194.
if self-referential: In another example of her tendency toward self-reference, during an NBI question-and-answer period she mentioned that her favorite painting was Salvador Dalí’s Crucifixion. Students, who all knew that she was an atheist, were confused. She explained that the Christ in the painting reminded her of Galt on the torture device at the end of AS (100 Voices, Allan Gotthelf, p. 330).