by Ayn Rand
As a small instance: at one point, Miss Rand wishes to convey Vesta’s feeling of helplessness in Roark’s bed, her desperate need to confess her love to him and yet at the same time to hide it because of his aloofness. Miss Rand does not describe this conflict in any such terms, which are mere generalities. She makes the conflict real by a perceptual description, at once strikingly original and yet nothing more than a selective account of an ordinary physical fact: “He listened silently to her breathless voice whispering to him, when she could not stop it: ‘I love you, Howard . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .’ her lips pressed to his arm, to his shoulder, as if her mouth were telling it to his skin, and it was not from her nor for him.” One can see the mouth on the skin as a kind of movie close-up; and implicit in the sight, in this context, is the meaning, the attempt at concealment (“and it was not from her nor for him”).
A further requirement of Ayn Rand’s method is that she use language exactly.
Miss Rand must name the precise data which lead to the abstraction, and the precise abstraction to which they lead. On either level, a mere approximation, or any touch of vagueness, will not do; such defaults would weaken or destroy the inner logic of the writing, and thereby its power and integrity. Miss Rand, therefore, is sensitive to the slightest shade of wording or connotation that might possibly be overgeneralized, unclear, or misleading; she is sensitive to any wording that might blur what she is seeking to capture. She wishes both the facts and the meaning to confront the reader cleanly, starkly, unmistakably. (Thus her scorn for those writers who equate artistry with ambiguity.)
When Roark first meets Vesta, for instance, he likes her—that is the fact—but “liking” by itself is not enough here. What is his exact feeling? “He liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.” Or, on the level of meaning: when Vesta feels Roark’s aloofness in bed, “it was as if the nights they shared gave her no rights.” The last two words are followed immediately by: “. . . not the right to the confidence of a friend, not the right to the consideration of an acquaintance, not even the right to the courtesy of a stranger passing her on the street.” Now we know what it means for her to have “no rights.”
The same use of language governs Ayn Rand’s dialogue. An admirer of her work once observed that her characters do not talk naturalistically—that is, the way people talk. They state the essence of what people mean. And they state it exactly. (This is true even of villains in her novels, who seek not to communicate, but to evade.) When Vesta feels ambivalence for Roark, as an example, there is a kind of surgical conscientiousness involved as she struggles to name it, to name the exact shade of her feeling, in all its complexity and contradiction.
Howard, I love you. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it should be like this. I love you and I can’t stand you. And also, I wouldn’t love you if I could stand you, if you were any different. But what you are—that frightens me, Howard. I don’t know why. It frightens me because it’s something in me which I don’t want. No. Because it’s something in me which I do want, but I’d rather not want it. . . .
Such painstaking, virtually scientific precision could by itself constitute an admirable literary style. But in Ayn Rand’s work it is integrated with what may seem to some to be an opposite, even contradictory feature: extravagant drama, vivid imagery, passionate evaluations (by the characters and the author)—in short, a pervasive emotional quality animating the writing. The emotional quality is not a contradiction; it is an essential attribute of the style, a consequence of the element of abstractions. A writer who identifies the conceptual meaning of the facts he conveys is able to judge and communicate their value significance. The mind that stops to ask about something, “What is it?” goes on to ask, “So what?” and to let us know the answer. A style describing concretes without reference to their abstract meaning would tend to emerge as dry or repressed (for example, the style of Sinclair Lewis or John O’Hara). A style featuring abstractions without reference to concretes would, if it tried to be evaluative, emerge as bombastic or feverish (for example, the style of Thomas Wolfe). In contrast to both types, Ayn Rand offers us a rare combination: the most scrupulous, subtly analyzed factuality, giving rise to the most violent, freewheeling emotionality. The first makes the second believable and worthy of respect; the second makes the first exciting.
Serious Romantic writers in the nineteenth century (there are none left now) stressed values in their work, and often achieved color, drama, passion. But they did it, usually, by retreating to a realm of remote history or of fantasy—that is, by abandoning actual, contemporary reality. Serious Naturalists of one or two generations ago stressed facts, and often achieved an impressively accurate reproduction of contemporary reality—but, usually, at the price of abandoning broad abstractions, universal meanings, value judgments. (Today’s writers generally abandon everything and achieve nothing.) By uniting the two essentials of human cognition, perception and conception, Ayn Rand’s writing (like her philosophy) is able to unite facts and values.
Ayn Rand described her literary orientation as Romantic Realism (see The Romantic Manifesto). The term is applicable on every level of her writing. For her, “romanticism” does not mean escape from life; nor does “realism” mean escape from values. The universe she creates in her novels is not a realm of impossible fantasy, but the world as it might be (the principle of Realism)—and as it ought to be (the principle of Romanticism). Her characters are not knights in armor or Martians in spaceships, but architects, businessmen, scientists, politicians—men of our era dealing with real, contemporary problems (Realism)—and she presents these characters not as helpless victims of society, but as heroes (or villains) shaped by their own choices and values (Romanticism).
“Romantic Realism” applies equally to her style. The re-creation of concretes, the commitment to perceptual fact, the painstaking precision and clarity of the descriptions—this is Realism in a sense deeper than fidelity to the man on the street. It is fidelity to physical reality as such. The commitment to abstractions, to broader significance, to evaluation, drama, passion—this is the Romanticist element.
Ayn Rand’s writing (like everyone else’s) is made only of abstractions (words). Because of her method, however, she can make words convey at the same time the reality of a given event, its meaning, and its feeling. The reader experiences the material as a surge of power that reaches him on all levels: it reaches his senses and his mind, his mind and his emotions.
Although Ayn Rand’s writing is thoroughly conscious, it is not self-conscious; it is natural, economical, flowing. It does not strike one as literary pyrotechnics (although it is that). Like all great literature, it strikes one as a simple statement of the inevitable.
The above indicates my reasons for wanting to publish these scenes. Taken by themselves as pieces of writing, “Vesta Dunning” and “Roark and Cameron” are a fitting conclusion to this survey of Ayn Rand’s early work and development.
The following is what the author of “The Husband I Bought” was capable of twelve years later.
—L. P.
Vesta Dunning
The snow fell in a thick curtain, as if a pillow were being shaken from the top windows of the tenement, and through the flakes sticking to his eyelashes, Roark could barely see the entrance of his home. He shook the iced drops from the upturned collar of his coat, a threadbare coat that served meagerly through the February storms of New York. He found the entrance and stopped in the dark hall, where a single yellow light bulb made a mosaic of glistening snakes in the melting slush on the floor, and he shook his cap out, gathering a tiny pool of cold, biting water in the palm of his hand. He swung into the black hole of the stairway, for the climb to the sixth floor.
It was long past the dinner hour, and only a faint odor of grease and onions remained in the stairshaft, floating from behind the closed, grimy doo
rs on the landings. He had worked late. Three new commissions had come unexpectedly into the office, and Cameron had exhausted his stock of blasphemy, a bracing, joyous blasphemy ringing through the drafting room as a tonic. “Just like in the old days,” Simpson had said, and in the early dusk of the office, in the unhealthy light, in the freezing drafts from the snow piled on the window ledges there had reigned for days an air of morning and spring. Roark was tired tonight, and he went up the stairs closing his eyes often, pressing his lids down to let them rest from the strain of microscopically thin black lines that had had to be drawn unerringly all day long, lines that stood now as a white cobweb on dark red whenever he closed his eyes. But he went up swiftly, his body alive in a bright, exhilarating exhaustion, a weariness demanding action, not rest, to relieve it.
He had reached the fourth floor, and he stopped. High on the dark wall facing the smeared window, the red glow of a soda-biscuit sign across the river lighted the landing, and black dots of snowflakes’ shadows rolled, whirling, over the red patch. Two flights up, behind the closed door of his room, he heard a voice speaking.
He rose a few steps, and stood pressed to the wall, and listened. It was a woman’s voice, young, clear, resonant, and it was raised in full force, as if addressing a huge crowd. He heard, incredibly, this:. . . but do not question me. I do not answer questions.
You have a choice to make: accept me now
or go your own silent, starless way
to an unsung defeat in uncontested battle.
I stand before you here, I am unarmed;
I offer you tonight my only weapon—
the weapon of that certainty I carry,
unchangeable, untouched and unshared.
Tomorrow’s battle I have won tonight
if you but follow me. We’ll lift together
the siege of Orleans and win the freedom
I am alone to see and to believe. . . .
The voice was exultant, breaking under an emotion it could not control. It seemed to fail suddenly in the wrong places, speaking the words not as they should have been spoken on a stage, but as a person would fling them out in delirium, unable to hold them, choking upon them. It was the voice of a somnambulist, unconscious of its own sounds, knowing only the violence and the ecstasy of the dream from which it came.
Then it stopped and there was no sound in the room above. Roark went up swiftly and threw the door open.
A girl stood in the middle of the room, with her back to him. She whirled about, when she heard the door knock against the wall. His eyes could not catch the speed of her movement. He had not seen her turn. But there she was suddenly, facing him, as if she had sprung up from the floor and frozen for a second. Her short brown hair stood up wildly with the wind of the motion. Her thin body stood as it had stopped, twisted in loose, incredible angles, awkward, except for her long, slim legs that could not be awkward, even when planted firmly, stubbornly wide apart, as they were now.
“What do you want here?” she snapped ferociously.
“Well,” said Roark, “don’t you think that I should ask you that?”
She looked at him, at the room.
“Oh,” she said, something extinguishing itself in her voice, “I suppose it’s your room. I’m sorry.”
She made a brusque movement to go. But he stepped in front of the door.
“What were you doing here?” he asked.
“It’s your own fault. You should lock your room when you go out. Then you won’t have to be angry at people for coming in.”
“I’m not angry. And there’s nothing here to lock up.”
“Well, I am angry! You heard me here, didn’t you? Why didn’t you knock?”
But she was looking at him closely, her eyes widening, clearing slowly with the perception of his face; he could almost see each line of his face being imprinted, reflected upon hers; and suddenly she smiled, a wide, swift, irresistible smile that seemed to click like a windshield wiper and sweep everything else, the anger, the doubt, the wonder, off her face. He could not decide whether she was attractive or not; somehow, one couldn’t be aware of her face, but only of its expressions: changing, snapping, jerking expressions, like projections of a jolting film that unrolled somewhere beyond the muscles of her face. He noticed a wide mouth, a short, impertinent nose turned up, dark, greenish eyes. There was a certain quality for which he looked unconsciously upon every face that passed him; a quality of awareness, of will, of purpose, a quality hard and precise; lacking it, the faces passed him unnoticed; with its presence—and he found it rarely—they stopped his eyes for a brief, curious moment of wonder. He saw it now, undefinable and unmistakable, upon her face; he liked that face, coldly, impersonally, almost indifferently; but sharply and quite personally, he liked the thing in her voice which he had heard before he entered.
“I’m sorry you heard me,” she said, smiling, still with a hard little tone of reproach in her voice. “I don’t want anyone to hear that. . . . But then, it’s you,” she added. “So I guess it’s all right.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Yes, I think so. It is all right. What were you reciting?”
“Joan d’Arc. It’s from an old German play I found. It’s of no interest to you or anyone.”
“Where are you going to do it?”
“I’m not doing it anywhere—yet. It’s never been produced here. What I’m doing is the part of Polly Mae—five sides—in You’re Telling Me at the Majestic. Opens February the nineteenth. Don’t come. I won’t give you any passes and I don’t want you to see it.”
“I don’t want to see it. But I want to know how you got here.”
“Oh. . . .” She laughed, suddenly at ease. “Well, sit down. . . . Oh, it’s really you who should invite me to sit down.” With which she was sitting on the edge of his table, her shoulders hunched, her legs flung out, sloppily contorted, one foot twisted, pointing in, and grotesquely graceful. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I haven’t touched anything here. It’s on account of Helen. She’s my roommate. I have nothing against her, except the eight-hour working day.”
“What?”
“I mean she’s got to be home at five. I wish someone’d exploit her good and hard for a change, but no, she gets off every single evening. She’s secretary to a warehouse around here. You have a marvelous room. Sloppy, but look at the space! You can’t appreciate what it means to live in a clothes closet—or have you seen the other rooms in this house? Anyway, mine’s on the fifth floor, just below you. And when I want to rehearse in the evenings, with Helen down there, I have to do it on the stairs. You see?”
“No.”
“Well, go out and see how cold it is on the stairs today. And I saw your door half open. So I couldn’t resist it. And then, it was too grand a chance up here to waste it on Polly Mae. Did you ever notice what space will do to your voice? I guess I forgot that someone would come here eventually. . . . My name’s Vesta Dunning. Yours is Howard Roark—it’s plastered here all over the place—you have a funny handwriting—and you’re an architect.”
“So you haven’t touched anything here?”
“Oh, I just looked at the drawings. There’s one—it’s crazy, but it’s marvelous!” She was up and across the room in a streak, and she stopped, as if she had applied brakes at full speed, at the shelf he had built for his drawings. She always stopped in jerks, as if the momentum of her every movement would carry her on forever and it took a conscious effort to end it. She had the inertia of motion; only stillness seemed to require the impulse of energy.
“This one,” she said, picking out a sketch. “What on earth ever gave you an idea like that? When I’m a famous actress, I’ll hire you to build this for me.”
He was standing beside her; she felt his sleeve against her arm as he took the sketch from her, looked at it, put it back on the shelf.
“When you’re a famous actress,” he said, “you won’t want a house like t
hat.”
“Why?” she asked. “Oh, you mean because of Polly Mae, don’t you?” Her voice was hard. “You’re a strange person. I didn’t think anyone would understand it like that, like I do. . . . But you’ve heard the other also.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at her.
“You’ve heard it. You know. You know what it will mean when I’m a famous actress.”
“Do you think your public will like it?”
“What?”
“Joan d’Arc.”
“I don’t care if they don’t. I’ll make them like it. I don’t want to give them what they ask for. I want to make them ask for what I want to give. What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing. I’m not laughing. Go on.”
“I know, you think it’s cheap and shabby, acting and all that. I do too. But not what I’m going to make of it. I don’t want to be a star with a permanent wave. I’m not good-looking anyway. That’s not what I’m after. I hate her—Polly Mae. But I’m not afraid of her. I’ve got to use her to go where I’m going. And where I’m going—it’s to the murder of Polly Mae. The end of her in all the minds that have been told to like her. Just to show them what else is possible, what can exist, but doesn’t, but will exist through me, to make it real when God failed to . . . Look, I’ve never spoken of it to anyone, why am I telling it to you? . . . Well, I don’t care if you hear this also, whether you understand it or not, and I think you understand, but what I want is . . .”