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The Early Ayn Rand

Page 45

by Ayn Rand


  INGALLS: If, tomorrow at noon, Walter, you give this invention to the world—then, the day after tomorrow, Soviet Russia, Communist China, and every other dictatorship, every other scum on the face of the earth, will have the secret of the greatest military weapon ever invented.

  BRECKENRIDGE: Are you going to start on that again? I thought we had settled it this afternoon.

  INGALLS: This afternoon, Walter, I begged you. I had never begged a man before. I am not doing that now.

  BRECKENRIDGE: You’re interfering with the fireworks. Drop it, Steve. I’m not interested.

  INGALLS: No, you’re not interested in the consequences. Humanitarians never are. All you see ahead is lighted slums and free electric power on the farms. But you don’t want to know that the same invention and the same grand gesture of yours will also send death through the air, and blow up ammunition depots, and turn cities into rubble.

  BRECKENRIDGE: I am not concerned with war. I am taking a much farther perspective. I am looking down the centuries. What if one or two generations have to suffer?

  INGALLS: And so, at a desperate time, when your country needs the exclusive secret and control of a weapon such as this, you will give it away to anyone and everyone.

  BRECKENRIDGE: My country will have an equal chance with the rest of the world.

  INGALLS: An equal chance to be destroyed? Is that what you’re after? But you will never understand. You have no concern for your country, for your friends, for your property, or for yourself. You don’t have the courage to hold that which is yours, to hold it proudly, wisely, openly, and to use it for your own honest good. You don’t even know that that takes courage.

  BRECKENRIDGE: I do not wish to discuss it.

  INGALLS: You are not concerned with mankind, Walter. If you were, you’d know that when you give things to mankind, you give them also to mankind’s enemies.

  BRECKENRIDGE: You have always lacked faith in your fellow men. Your narrow patriotism is old-fashioned, Steve. And if you think that my decision is so dangerous, why don’t you report me to the government?

  INGALLS: There are too many friends of Serge Sookin’s in the government—at present. It’s I who must stop you.

  BRECKENRIDGE: You? There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re only a junior partner.

  INGALLS: Yes, Walter, that’s all I am. Sixteen years ago, when we formed our partnership and started the Breckenridge Laboratories, I was very young. I did not care for mankind and I did not care for fame. I was willing to give you most of the profits, and all the glory, and your name on my inventions—they were my inventions, Walter, mine alone, all of them, and nobody knew it outside the laboratory. I cared for nothing but my work. You knew how to handle people. I didn’t. And I agreed to everything you wanted—just to have a chance at the work I loved. You told me that I was selfish, while you—you loved people and wanted to help them. Well, I’ve seen your kind of help. And I’ve seen also that it was I, I the selfish individualist, who helped mankind by producing the Vitamin X separator and the cheap violet ray and the electric saw—[Points to machine]—and this. While you accepted gratitude for it—and ruined all those you touched. I’ve seen what you’ve done to men. It was I who gave you the means to do it. It was I who made it possible for you. It is my responsibility now. I created you—I’m going to destroy you. [BRECKENRIDGE glances up at him swiftly, understands, jerks his hand away from the machine and to his coat pocket] What are you looking for? This? [Takes the gun out of his pocket and shows it to BRECKENRIDGE. Then slips it back into his pocket] Don’t move, Walter.

  BRECKENRIDGE: [His voice a little hoarse, but still assured] Have you lost your mind? Do you expect me to believe that you’re going to kill me, here, now, with a house full of people a few steps away?

  INGALLS: Yes, Walter.

  BRECKENRIDGE: Are you prepared to hang for it?

  INGALLS: No.

  BRECKENRIDGE: How do you expect to get away with it? [INGALLS does not answer, but takes out a cigarette and lights it] Stop playing for effects! Answer me!

  INGALLS: I am answering you. [Indicating the cigarette] Watch this cigarette, Walter. You have as long a time left to live as it will take this cigarette to burn. When it burns down to the brand, I’m going to throw it here in the grass. It will be found near your body. The gun will be found here—with my fingerprints on it. My handkerchief will be found here on a branch. Your watch will be smashed to set the time. I will have no alibi of any kind. It will be the sloppiest and most obvious murder ever committed. And that is why it will be the perfect crime.

  BRECKENRIDGE: [Fear coming a little closer to him] You . . . you wouldn’t . . .

  INGALLS: But that’s not all. I’m going to let your friend Serge Sookin hang for your murder. He’s tried once to do just what I’m going to do for him. Let him take his punishment now. I’m going to frame myself. And I’m also going to frame him to look as if he’d framed me. I’ll give him an alibi—and then I’ll blow it up. Right now, he is in Stamford, buying a newspaper. But it won’t do him any good, because, at this moment, up in my room, I have an early edition of today’s Courier. Do you understand, Walter?

  BRECKENRIDGE: [His voice hoarse, barely audible] You . . . Goddamn fiend . . .!

  INGALLS: You wanted to know why I let you see me kissing Helen today. To give myself a plausible motive of sorts. Just the kind that would tempt a Serge to frame me. You see, I can’t let Greg Hastings guess my real motive. I didn’t know that Helen would play her part so well. I never dreamed that possible or I wouldn’t have done it. It’s the only thing that I regret.

  BRECKENRIDGE: You . . . won’t . . . get away with it. . . .

  INGALLS: The greatest chance I’m taking is that I must not let Greg Hastings guess the real nature of my invention. If he guesses that—he’ll know I did it. But I have to take that chance. [Looks at his cigarette] Your time is up. [Puts the butt out and tosses it aside]

  BRECKENRIDGE: [In utter panic] No! You won’t! You won’t! You can’t! [Makes a movement to run]

  INGALLS: [Whipping the gun out] I told you not to move. [BRECKENRIDGE stops] Don’t run, Walter. Take it straight for once. If you run—you’ll only help me. I’m a good shot—and nobody would believe that I’d shoot a man in the back. [And now this is the real STEVE INGALLS—hard, alive, taut with energy, his voice ringing—the inventor, the chance-taker, the genius—as he stands pointing the gun at BRECKENRIDGE] Walter! I won’t let you do to the world what you’ve done to all your friends. We can protect ourselves against men who would do us evil. But God save us from the men who would do us good! This is the only humanitarian act I’ve ever committed—the only one any man can ever commit. I’m setting men free. Free to suffer. Free to struggle. Free to take chances. But free, Walter, free! Don’t forget, tomorrow is Independence Day!

  [BRECKENRIDGE whirls around and disappears in the dark. INGALLS does not move from the spot, only turns without hurry, lifts the gun, and fires into the darkness]

  [The spotlight vanishes. Blackout]

  [When the full lights come back, INGALLS is sitting calmly in a chair, finishing his story. ADRIENNE stands tensely, silently before him]

  INGALLS: I’ve told you this because I wanted you to know that I don’t regret it. Had circumstances forced me to take a valuable life—I wouldn’t hesitate to offer my own life in return. But I don’t think that of Walter. Nor of Serge. . . . Now you know what I am. [Rises, stands looking at her] Now, Adrienne, repeat it—if you still want me to hear it.

  ADRIENNE: [Looking at him, her head high] No, Steve. I can’t repeat it now. I said that I was inexcusably, contemptibly in love with you and had been for years. I can’t say that any longer. I will say that I’m in love with you—so terribly proudly in love with you—and will be for years . . . and years . . . and forever. . . . [He does not move, only bows his head slowly, accepting his vindication]

  CURTAIN

  “Do you think,” Ayn Rand said to me when I finished reading, “
that I would ever give the central action in a story of mine to anyone but the hero?”

  The Fountainhead (unpublished excerpts)

  1938

  Editor’s Preface

  In 1938, after devoting about three years to architectural research, Ayn Rand started writing The Fountainhead. She finished in late 1942, and the novel was published the next year. In less than a decade, the book became world-famous; by now, it has sold more than six million copies. Ayn Rand’s own view of The Fountainhead can be found in her introduction to the 25th Anniversary Edition.

  For this anthology, I have selected two sets of excerpts cut by Miss Rand from the original manuscript; these are the only unpublished passages of substantial length. Both are from the early part of the novel, written in 1938. As is true of the passages from We the Living, neither has received Ayn Rand’s customary final editing, and the titles are my own invention.

  “Vesta Dunning” is the story of Howard Roark’s first love affair, with a young actress, before he found Dominique. In the manuscript, the story is interwoven with other plot developments; it is offered here as a continuous, uninterrupted narrative.

  Vesta Dunning is an eloquent example of a person of “mixed premises,” to use a term of Ayn Rand’s. In part, Vesta shares Howard Roark’s view of life; in part, she is a secondhander, willing to prostitute her talent in order to win the approval of others, a policy she tries to defend as a means to a noble end. Miss Rand cut Vesta from the novel, she told me, when she realized that there was too great a similarity between Vesta and Gail Wynand, the newspaper publisher (who also pursued a secondhander’s course in the name of achieving noble ends). In some respects, there is a marked similarity between Vesta and Peter Keating, too; in fact, as the material makes plain, some of Keating’s dialogue was written originally for Vesta.

  “Roark and Cameron” comprises two distinct scenes involving both men. The first takes place when Roark is working in New York City for Henry Cameron, the once-famous architect who is now forgotten by the world; the second occurs some time later, at the site of the Heller house, Roark’s first commission after starting in private architectural practice on his own. Evidently, Miss Rand cut the scenes because she decided that so detailed a treatment of Roark’s relationship to Cameron was inessential to the purpose of the novel at this point—that is, the establishing of Roark’s character and the development of the plot.

  Despite the intrinsic interest of this manuscript material, I have serious misgivings about publishing it. In certain respects, the scenes are inconsistent with the final novel (which may very well have contributed to their being cut). It is doubtful to me whether Roark, as presented in the novel, would have had an affair with Vesta. It is doubtful whether, in the Cameron scene, Roark would have lost his temper to the extent of punching a man. Furthermore, Roark’s statements are not always as exact philosophically as Miss Rand’s final editing would have made them. The Roark in the novel, for instance, would not have said that he is too selfish to love anyone (in the novel he says that selfishness is a precondition of love); nor would he have said, without a clearer context, that he hates the world. Aside from these specifics, the general tone of Roark’s characterization does not always seem right; without the context of the rest of the novel, he comes across, I think, as overly severe at times to Vesta, and also as overly abstracted and antisocial. Undoubtedly, this is also partly an issue of exact nuance and wording, which Miss Rand would have adjusted had she decided to retain the material.

  The admirers of The Fountainhead see the novel, and Roark, as finished realities. The author obviously shared this view. I must therefore stress that the following is not to be taken as part of The Fountainhead. These scenes do not contribute to the novel’s theme or meaning, and they do not cast further light on Roark’s character or motivation. They are offered as individual, self-contained pieces, to be read as such. If I may state the point paradoxically, for emphasis: these events did not happen to Roark—they are pure fiction!

  Despite my misgivings, I could not convince myself to keep the material hidden, for a single reason: it is too well written. Miss Rand told me once that she regretted having to cut the Vesta Dunning affair because it contained “some of my best writing.” This is true, and it is from this perspective that the passages are best approached. Even in this unedited material, one can see some characteristic features of Ayn Rand’s mature literary style. More than any other single attribute of her writing, her style reveals the extent of her growth in the space of a decade.

  The feature of Ayn Rand’s style most apparent in these scenes is one that perfectly reflects her basic philosophy. I mean her ability to integrate concretes and abstractions.

  Philosophically, Ayn Rand is Aristotelian. She does not believe in any Platonic world of abstractions; nor does she accept the view that concepts are merely arbitrary social conventions, with its implication that reality consists of unintelligible concretes. Following Aristotle, she holds that the world of physical entities is reality, and that it can be understood by man through the use of his conceptual faculty. Concepts, she holds, are not supernatural or conventional; they are objective forms of cognition based on, and ultimately making comprehensible, the facts of reality perceived by our senses. (Ayn Rand’s distinctive theory of concepts is presented in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) For man, therefore, the proper method of knowledge is not perception alone or conception alone, but the integration of the two—which means, in effect, the union of concretes and abstractions.

  One literary expression of this epistemology is Ayn Rand’s commitment to integrating theme and plot. The plot of an Ayn Rand novel is a purposeful progression of events, not a series of random occurrences. The events add up to a general thematic idea, which is thus implicit in and conveyed by the story, not arbitrarily superimposed on it. The plot, in short, is a progression of concretes integrated by and conveying an abstraction.

  The same epistemology is essential to Ayn Rand’s style of writing, whether she is describing physical nature, human action, or the most delicate, hidden emotion. The style consists in integrating the facts being described and their meaning.

  Consider, for example, the following paragraph, which describes Vesta on the screen:. . . She had not learned the proper camera angles, she had not learned the correct screen makeup; her mouth was too large, her cheeks too gaunt, her hair uncombed, her movements too jerky and angular. She was like nothing ever seen in a film before, she was a contradiction to all standards, she was awkward, crude, shocking, she was like a breath of fresh air. The studio had expected her to be hated; she was suddenly worshiped by the public. She was not pretty, nor gracious, nor gentle, nor sweet; she played the part of a young girl not as a tubercular flower, but as a steel knife. A reviewer said that she was a cross between a medieval pageboy and a gun moll. She achieved the incredible: she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.

  The paragraph begins with a description of Vesta’s mouth, her hair, her movements, etc. This description re-creates the concrete reality, sets the physical essentials of a young Katharine Hepburn type before us, so that we can, in effect, perceive the event (Vesta onscreen) through our own eyes. On this basis, we are offered some preliminary abstractions, giving a first layer of meaning to these facts; Vesta comes across, we learn, not as pretty, gentle, sweet, but as crude, shocking, fresh—and we accept this account, we see its inner logic, because we know the supporting facts. Then we are given some vivid images comparing Vesta to utterly different entities of a similar meaning (a steel knife, a gun moll, etc.); this helps both to keep the reality real (i.e., to keep it concrete) and to develop the meaning further. The images seem to flow naturally out of the earlier material; they do not strike us as forced or as superfluous, “literary” embellishments. Finally, after this buildup, we are given a single abstraction which unites all of it—the facts, the preliminary abstractions, the images. We are given an integrating
concept, which names a definitive meaning, to carry forward with us: “. . . she was the first woman who ever allowed herself to make strength attractive on the screen.” By this time, we do not have to guess at the meaning of “strength,” even though it is a very broad abstraction; we know what is meant by it in this context, because we have seen the data that give rise to the concept here. And we believe the term; we do not feel that it is empty or arbitrary, or that we have to take the author’s word for it. We do not even feel that it is the conclusion of an extended argument (though in effect it is). We take it here virtually as a statement of the self-evident, as a statement of what we ourselves by now are ready to conclude.

  This method is not, of course, repeated in every paragraph. It is applied only where the material requires it. Nor is the order of development always the same; nor are the specific steps—there may be more or fewer of them. But this kind of approach, in some form and on some level, is always present. It is one of the elements that make Ayn Rand’s writing so powerful. Concretes by themselves are meaningless, and cannot even be retained for long; abstractions by themselves are vague or empty. But concretes illuminated by an abstraction acquire meaning, and thereby permanence in our minds; and abstractions illustrated by concretes acquire specificity, reality, the power to convince. The result is that both aspects of the writing become important to the reader, who experiences at once the vividness of sensory perception and the clarity of a rational thought process.

  Essential to Ayn Rand’s method is that the concretes really be concrete, i.e., perceptual. The entity or attribute must be described as the reader would actually see it if he were present. Yet, at the same time, the description must pave the way for the abstraction. The description, therefore, must be highly selective; it must dispense with all premature commentary and all irrelevant data, however naturalistic. It must present those facts, and those only, that are essential if the reader is to apprehend the scene from the angle the author requires. This demands of the writing an extreme ingenuity and purposefulness. The author must continuously invent the telling detail, the fresh perspective, the eloquent juxtaposition, that will create in the reader the awareness of a perceptual reality—which contains an implicit meaning, the specific meaning intended by the author.

 

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