Part I – A Sense of Life documentary discussion:
(see “Chronology” list for additional notes)
(1) Notes from Ayn Rand and the World She Made
book by Anne C. Heller (published 2009): (all direct quotes, except in
brackets)
(2) Notes from The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald
E. Merrill (published 1991)
(3 Notes from 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn
Rand book by Scott McConnell (published 2010)
Together The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas
Shrugged (1957) have typically sold more than 300,000 copies a year, easily
making them the equivalent of best-sellers. . .
Recently, in the midst of a financial crisis . . . sales of [Atlas Shrugged] have nearly tripled. . .
. In a 1991 survey jointly sponsored by the Library of Congress and the
Book-of-the-Month Club, Americans named Atlas
Shrugged the book that had most influenced their lives (second only to the
Bible). When the Modern Library asked readers in 1998 to name the twentieth
century’s one hundred greatest books, Atlas
Shrugged and The Fountainhead
were numbers one and two on the list; Anthem
and We the Living were numbers
seven and eight, trumping The Great
Gatsby; The Grapes of Wrath, and Ulysses.
(xii) Yet she has stood outside the pale of respected American literary
practitioners and social critics . . . most readers of her novels know little
about her. (1, xiii)
“If a life can have a theme
song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession,
or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born
with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more
worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed.
Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one
least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia.” – Autobiographical Sketch,
1936 (1,1)
[at age 52 Rand stated:] “My
philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own
happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his
noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” (1,1)
** The Mike Wallace
Interview TV show: 1959. Wallace asked, “Miss Rand, would you agree that,
as Newsweek put it, you are out to
destroy every edifice in the contemporary American way of life?” She blinked,
then answered good-naturedly “Yes. I am challenging the moral code at the base”
of a great many institutions, and that code is altruism. . . . the show
received unprecedented amounts of mail . . . much of it positive. But
journalists . . . were dumbfounded . . . Rand
was considered beyond the pale. “It is hard to imagine the hostility directed
at her,” said wallace’s producer Al Ramrus. “Most of the media treated her like
a leper or the Antichrist” (1, 308-9) [Another quote of Rand’s:] “Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good
will or respect for the rights of others.” (1, 318)
Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovienvna Rosenbaum, a Russian
Jew, on February 2, 1905, in St.
Petersburg, then the capital city of the most
anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. (1,1-2)
Rand received attention and
praise from her family and later, from her teachers and classmates, primarily,
of not only, for being a startlingly intelligent child. [judging based on how
she was as an adult]. . . she must have
been frighteningly intelligent,
observed . . Robert Bidinotto). (1,11)
[during period of Bolshevik Revolution, circa 1917] Rand kept a diary . . . where she wrote down her ideals .
. . she said that she used this diary to work out her views on popular ideas and
maxims of the time, such as that people should “live for the state” or “live for
others,” specifically for the poor. . . . She remembered picturing her beloved
heroes [from books she had read] . . . being forced to set aside their noble
ideals . . . to serve and obey
proletarian “non-entities,” as she called them, simply because those
nonentities were illiterate and poor. Never! People have a right to live for
themselves . . . she burned it [diary]; by then, [it was perilous to keep such
written ideas]. (1,30)
Twelve-year-old Rand was in
the store on the day Bolshevik soldiers arrived, brandishing guns. The anger,
helplessness, and frustration she remembered seeing in her father’s face
remained with her all her life. (1,31).
Letters (1926-1936) to Ayn Rand from her family indicate
that actual living conditions in Leningrad
mirrored living conditions as described in We
the Living. Those letters (nearly nine hundred of them) are housed in the
Ayn Rand Archives. (3, 10)
[circa 1918 while in Crimea] Anna had pleaded with Zinovy [Rand’s father] to
let the family emigrate, but Rand’s father was
certain . . . that Communism couldn’t last. One day, he promised, they would
reclaim their business and property in St.
Petersburg. (1, 36) [At age 16, Rand composed her “first adult novel,” inspired by Victor
Hugo . . . stopped writing in the middle of it; stopped writing plays and
novels altogether, aware she was simply too young to write the way she wanted
to write . . and that the stories she longed to tell could not be told in
Russia.] Instead, she made lists of plots and themes for future projects. By
age thirty, she said, she intended to be famous. (1, 36)
[at Petrograd
State U.]
Determinism, the irreducible feature of a Marxist view of history, was on the
rise at the university. Rand found the notion
offensive . . .She recalled sitting outraged through a lecture in which the
instructor offered proof that individuals act without free will. . . . Rand thought, If you have a reason for what you do, you
are making a choice. Later, she would define free will as the freedom to think
or to avoid thinking in any particular situation. (1, 39) [Rand’s father wanted her to study to become an engineer.]
Rand argued with her father that, as a future
writer, she had to study history in order “to have a factual knowledge of man’s
past” and understand philosophy in order “to achieve an objective definition of
my values.” She promised him that she would one day make a living as a writer .
. . (1, 41).
[In distinguished
professor N.O. Lossky’s class] she was dazzled by Aristotle . . . for him, as
for Rand, man was a rational animal. She
learned to detest Plato and his mysticism . . . the Platonic belief that the
observable world is a mere shadow of ideal forms that can’t be seen; she
associated this, rightly, with mystical Christianity. . . . And she learned
from Lossky an intensely dialectical method of thinking—“thinking in
principles,” she called it . . . (1, 41).
Nietzsche’s
Influence: She was attracted by Nietzsche’s view of the heroic in man and
his denunciation of collectivism and altruism. But she soon discovered
Nietzsche’s explicit repudiation of reason, and “that finished him as an
intellectual ally.” (2, 21) One corollary to Nietzsche’s expanded notion
of human reason is the danger of being ruled by one’s ‘passions’: If emotions
are to contribute to reasoning they must be held under strict control. Though Rand developed her own theory of emotion, her fiction, as
we shall see, emphasized . . . heroic emotional control, sometimes
characterized, incorrectly, as repression. (2, 23)
The logical next step for Nietzsche was the utter
repudiation of religion and the supernatural, and man’s acceptance of human
life as an end in itself. The Nietzschean ‘superman’ accepts the obligation to
make the most of himself, to constantly develop and improve his ability,
courage, and creative will. Nobody can fully understand Rand’s
thinking without realizing that this emphasis on personal ability and strength
of character, on what one is and is becoming, lies at the root of her morality,
as it did for Nietzsche. (2, 23)
[For Nietzsche] it is not sufficient to repudiate the
authority of priests. No exterior moral authority may be recognized, since
‘reason’ is not objective for Nietzsche, it is personal. Thus the ‘superman’
must be a law unto himself—philosophically, and therefore socially. [If two
people’s ‘reason’ are in conflict, ] Then the only resolution lies in force.
Hence the ‘will to power’; the ‘superman’ establishes the correctness of his
views by forcing them upon those who disagrees. . . . [Rand]
repudiated this view. . . . Let it not be thought, however, that Nietzsche was
an advocate of egoism. His concern was with the welfare of the race more than
of the individual. This was at the root of his concept of the ‘superman’.
Nietzsche . . . was profoundly influenced by the concept of evolution. He
believed . . . in the evolution of the human species into a higher order of
being—the ‘superman’ (or ‘overman’) . . . a being who would be to man what
humans are to apes. (2, 23-24)
The earliest
inspiration for Rand’s literary work came
from the adventure melodramas she devoured as a young girl. Above all she was
attracted by the heroes she found in these magazine serials: strong,
resourceful, self-confident men who laughed at danger and were never at a loss
for a way to deal with it. (2, 27)
Rand’s introduction to
American silent films was [a] defining experience of her university years.
There, she got her first glimpse of the New
York skyline, which would become for her an emblem of
creativity and liberty in the capitalist free world. Although Soviet government
censors always added absurd subtitles to the films [propaganda] . . . she and
other Russians understood this to be nonsense . . . The films she saw inspired
her to picture it as “Atlantis”: the ideal existence for intelligent,
purposeful, ruggedly individualistic men and, presumably, women. America,
she decided, was the place on earth . . . and the country in which she wanted
to live and work. (1, 45-6)
[When she came to America:] She kept a journal,
ranking each movie from zero to five, according to her assessment of its plot,
theme, actors, and level of romantic action. (1, 55)
The constant thread which runs through all of her work is
the problem of the moral individual trapped in an evil society. This was Rand’s own dilemma in life. (2, 15) All of Rand’s
fiction shows this cinematic obsession with visual imagery [in discussing We the Living]. (2, 18) . . .
another of Rand’s universal themes: loyalty to
values. (2, 34)
Rand described her fiction
style as ‘Romantic Realism’. . . . Romantic in that her fiction dealt with
ideal people and their pursuit of important values; and a Realist in that the
settings of her stories and the issues they dealt with were those of real life
rather than fantasy. . . . Rand made Atlas Shrugged a more abstract,
conceptual, and symbolic work than her earlier novels; it might be best
described as a work of Romantic Surrealism. The cover painting by George Salter
accurately conveys the mood and style of the novel. (2, 59-60)
Cover painting by George Salter
[Red Pawn setting (a movie
scenario):] a prison, built on the site of a former monastery, provides Rand with her first opportunity to compare mystical Russian
Orthodox Christianity with muscle-bound Communism and point out the
similarities. One of these, an implicitly repugnant assumption that people have
a duty to sacrifice their own interests and ambitions to those of others—others
often inferior to themselves—forms the story’s core idea: that no religion or
ideology may legitimately deprive a man of his absolute right to exist for his
own sake . . . Also, in a letter explaining the finished scenario to a
producer, she summarized her new method of “building a story in tiers,”
starting with a plot that’s gripping enough to carry both the characters and a
deeper philosophic meaning; in this way, she explained, the audience can choose
to ignore the philosophic content and still enjoy the story. (1, 73-74)
[In 1929] Rand dispatched a
carbon copy [of Red Pawn] to Gouverneur Morris, a . . . screenplay writer on
staff at Universal. He later said, “In all my life, [Red Pawn] was the first script sent me by an unknown youngster
which showed positive genius.” Morris became her advocate at Universal. In
September 1932, the studio paid her . . . for the story and hired her . . . to
turn the scenario into a working screenplay . . . (1, 74). [It was never
produced.]
Night of January 16th: . . . inspired by the public uproar
over the 1932 suicide of Swedish Match King and con man Ivar Kreuger and
largely modeled on a popular 1927 play called The Trial of Mary Dugan. . . [Rand
later referred to this] as a “sense-of-life” play, by which she meant that the
events were less important that the characters’ attitudes toward them, and
hence toward life. . . . a secretary is on trial for the murder of her ruthless
boss and lover . . . who at first appears to have committed suicide. Evidence
presented at the trial points in two other, mutually contradictory, directions
. . . The play’s chief innovation, which proved popular, was to leave the
verdict to a jury chosen each night from the audience. [and it had two
different endings depending upon the verdict?] . . . for a first theatrical
effort, it was remarkably successful. [In audience opening night – Frank Capra,
Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, and others.] [Critics missed
the point of her play and focused on the jury “gimmick.” Rand
found this critical oversight hard to bear . . . the fact that the reviews were
“not intelligent.”] (1, 75-77) [In 1935, after play went on Broadway] –
In a decade when average American incomes were well under $1,500 a year, [the
play] was bringing her royalties of between $200 and $1,500 a week. . . .
theatrical rights had been sold to producers in London,
Vienna, Budapest,
Berlin, [etc.] . . . And because
of play’s single courtroom setting made for easy staging, it also became a
favorite of privately run [playhouses] . . . (1, 95).
Mid-1930s: . . . [she] remained convinced that the American
public had no real understanding of Communism and that even liberal Americans
would “scream with horror” if they knew what was happening across the Bering Strait. “No one has ever come out of Soviet Russia
to tell it to the world,” she declared in a letter to Jean Wick. “This [is] my
job.” . . . she was largely unaware, she later said, of the degree of “pink”
penetration in America
or of the growing appeal of Communist battle cries to screenwriters and
directors and to some of the nation’s bankrupt farmers, miners, and unemployed
industrial workers. . . . she gradually became aware that many literary
celebrities . . . were members of or sympathizers with the Communist Party of
the United States.
. . . they endorsed Stalinism as a noble experiment and drank toasts to the
coming of America’s
“red Dawn.” . . . she believed that ideas have the power to change history and
that intellectual leaders are the engines and agents of change. It was American
intellectuals whom she eventually decided she would have to target and fight. .
. . She began a program of extensive reading to educate herself in American
history and politics. (1, 83-84)
We the Living: theme – The individual against the masses; she
measures each of her characters against the backdrop of totalitarianism and an
absence of personal power. [One character, for example – his potential
greatness had he lived in a free society – sinks deeper into the criminal
underworld and succumbs to alcoholism and despair.] It is also her only novel
to end in tragedy. (1, 87) No studios would hire her as a screenwriter
[after this publication. In effect she had been blacklisted by the Hollywood intellectual Left. This lasted until The Fountainhead.] She began to take the
American Communist threat very seriously indeed. (1,95-96)
That a beginning writer, working in a language not her own,
could produce a book so complex, subtle, skillfully structured, and emotionally
powerful, and in the process deal with important philosophical and political
themes in an original manner, marks her at once as a genius. (2, 33)
. . . strong elements of autobiography. Kira Argounova, like
Ayn Rand, is the daughter of a Russian businessman; like Rand, she is a college
student under the Soviet regime; like Rand,
she works as a tour guide in a Bolshevik museum for a while. (2, 33)
“Tell them that Russia is a
vast prison, and that we are all dying slowly,” begged a young man as Rand
prepared to leave the USSR.
And Rand does so, depicting a totalitarian
society with a painful, immediate realism. (2, 33)
A two-part, six-hour Italian film version of We the
Living had been made in Rome in 1942,
without Rand’s permission and without payment.
. . . [When she saw it], she loved its stark, old-fashioned beauty and was
especially pleased by Italian actress Alida Valli’s superb performance as Kira.
From Valli, now in Hollywood . . . Rand claimed to have learned a detail about the film’s
Italian relaeas . . . Two months after the movie oipened to packed theaters . .
. Mussolini ordered the film to be withdrawn and prints and negatives
destroyed, on the grounds that it was anti-Facist as well as anti-Communist.
This proved the kinship of Communism and Facism, “which even Mussolini
recognized,” she wrote to her attorney. Luckily, an Italian producer had
managed to preserve the master negative . . . In the early 1950s, the Italian
government paid her $35,000 in compensation for the unauthorized use of We the Living. . . . (1, 207-8) [Since
Rand had nothing to do with the production,]
the close resemblance between the film and the novel can only be ascribed to
the natural cinematic character of the latter. (2, 37) [See note in chronology list regarding
bringing the movie to American audiences.
See interview with film editor in 100
Voices book regarding the difficulty in editing.]
1935: [She met 22-yr-old Albert Mannheimer, graduate at Yale
School of Drama, junior theater critic for New York Enquirer, aspiring
playwright., and earnest Marxist. When introduced to Rand
[they lived in same apartment building] – during their first conversation, “he
announced that he would convert her to the Communist ideology, she countered by
predicting that it was she who would convert him, and do it within a year. It
didn’t take that long. He became her fist proselyte and unofficial follower.
Mesmerized by her intellectual charisma and the logical precision of her
thinking . . . he met her often for intense debate. He became a vehement
advocate of capitalism . . . (1, 88-89)
Anthem: [Often compared to 1984.]
Although Orwell hated totalitarianism as both stultifying and evil, the novel
treats it as a system that is practical and works
. . . Rand concluded—long before most others—that totalitarianism doesn’t work, because the independent
motivation indispensable to economic and social progress cannot survive in an
atmosphere of intimidation, coercion, and lack of individually earned rewards.
She regarded totalitarianism as both immoral and impractical and would go on to
explain exactly in what ways the two are bound together in her fast-paced
masterpiece of anti-collectivism, Atlas
Shrugged. . . . When [the former Soviet Union]
came unglued in 1991, Western countries were surprised to discover in its
fearsome military and industrial might a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Not
much economic or technological progress had been made during Communism’s
seventy-five year reign. (1, 103-4)
Love Letters screenplay, adapted from novel by Christopher
Massie. Rand’s lifelong fondness for Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac came in handy here; the plot features an
American soldier who writes a second soldier’s love letters and eventually
marries the woman to whom they are addressed (although she is an amnesiac and
possibly a murderess). The movie starred Joseph Cotton and Jenifer Jones and
was a box-office hit but a critical failure.
Top Secret: a documentary about developing the atomic bomb –
she introduces a fictional character, whose teachers espouse unseemly moral
relativism—a growing complaint of Rand’s about postwar culture—is resigned to a
world without heroism or meaning. . . . At the end of the script, John X
enunciates the movie’s message: “Man can harness the universe, but nobody can
harness man.” The unhappy fate in store for a society that dares to try to
harness man was to be magnificently elucidated in Atlas Shrugged. (1, 188-90)
Miscellaneous Anecdotes about Ayn Rand
At 1960 Yale speech (overfull audience), someone shouted:
“under your system, who will take care of the janitors?” She sang out, “Young
man: the janitors!” and the hall erupted in laughter. (1, 318)
Following are observations
from 100 Voices: (3)
- Julius Shulman,
world-renowned architectural photographer – photographed Rand’s
Chatsworth home. Q: Have you met any architects motivated or inspired by
Howard Roark? A: Oh, more than that! You’d be surprised how many
architects. Don’t forget that every architect in the world read that book.
It was one, first, front and center in the life of every architect who was
a modern architect. And invariably, many architects would say to me,
“Well, you know that Ayn Rand patterned Howard Roark after me?” [Raphael
Soriano, Richard Neutra, Greagory Ain. . ] Oh, many people said that!
- Ruth Beebe
Hill was a friend who lived in the O’Connor’s Chatsworth home for
twenty years after they moved to New Your in 1951. [When she first met Rand:] I told her I had memorized a condensed
version of The Fountainhead.
[Two hour performances – only using Ayn Rand sentences. She also had done
150 dramatizations of Anthem.]
Ayn came to hear me do a dramatization of The Fountainhead for the AAUW, the American Association of
University women. . . . at Ayns’s request, nobody knew she was in the
audience. The woman sitting next to her, said to Ayn, “God, I didn’t even
know about it, let alone read this wonderful book. Have you ever read it?”
Ayn later told me that it was one of the top moments in her life, when she
could say: “I wrote it!” She was very proud. And the woman turned her head
away and almost fainted. She didn’t know what to say or do.” (122)
- Evan Wright,
a UCLA student and friend; during his first discussion with Rand: I quoted something to her from Schopenhauer,
and she said, “Did you know that later in the same book that you must be
quoting from, he contradicted himself?” I was stunned—and still am. I
thought, “What am I dealing with here?” she had evidently read all of the
philosophers, knew their works and had her own philosophy. I began to
realize I had a formidable person to talk philosophy with. (140)
- Al Ramus,
television producer, and writer for Mike Wallace: [1958] I had never read Rand,
and from everything I knew or thought I knew, she was a foolish figure
with some flaky ideas. How could she be anything else, since she wasn’t a
liberal? I hadn’t even read The
Fountainhead, because my New
York crowd considered it a best-seller read only
by the lower orders on the IQ scale. But Rand
was different, controversial, so I was curious. [So a friend took him to Rand’s apartment where they spent a couple of hours
there.] That was a life-transforming experience. As Mike Wallace’s writer,
I was always dealing with national and international figures: [e.g.,]
Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley; Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali; Sidney Poitier, bette Davis. Just to name a
few. . . . But I had never met anybody like Ayn Rand. She was so brilliant
and so perceptive, and her comments were so fresh and original. . . . most
prominent writers, political commentators, TV anchors and celebrities
sound more or less like echoes of the New
York Times editorial page. But there was no similarity between
anything Ayn Rand said and the New
York Times. I mean, she really shook me to my boots and jarred my
liberal assumptions. . . . And then we put her on Mike’s TV interview
show, and I was hooked.
- Q: What was
the culture’s reaction to Ayn Rand in those years? She was hated by
the media, academia, the artistic community. No intellectual figure in America
was more loathed than Ayn Rand in those days, because she was so
formidable, uncompromising and challenging. They thought she was nuts,
wacky, dangerous. And most of them had never read her. They would .
. glean an impression from what
somebody else said. . . . Mis Rand’s greatest gift to us, along with her
books, was the example she set for intellectual courage and integrity.
Here was a woman who dared to stand virtually alone against ideas,
political systems and cultures that were dominating the planet and had
been hallowed by intellectuals for centuries. What heoroism. . . . I
doubt whether young Objectivists today can imagine how collectivist and
hostile the culture was, back in the 1950s and 1960s. . . . it was almost
impossible for an avowed Objectivist or even a conservative to work in
the news media. I was lucky . . . writing for Wallace when I was an
ardent socialist . . . Within less than two years, I encountered Ayn Rand
and Atlas Shrugged—and poor
Mike suddenly found himself with a fire-breathing Objectivist on his
hands. I didn’t hide it from anybody, in fact regarded it as a badge of
honor. (157-60)
- Scott Stanley,
editor of various national conservative journals: Q: What influence do you
think Ayn Rand has had? A: I’m sure that, without her advocacy and
influence, the free-market economics of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School would never have gone beyond
that small coterie of lower-case libertarians associated in the 1950s . .
. What she did was to lead free-market economics out of the stuffy
business community and put it into a community of artists and philosophers
and intellectuals. And that was vital. They attracted to it a dimension of
youthful support, which was vital as well, making it possible to raise up
heroes of creativity among the business leaders who followed the age of
mechanics to create electronics and high tech. The lady was a wowser. [!]
(202)
- John Ridpath
– taught intellectual history and economics at York
University in Toronto,
lectured on Rand’s ideas and debated in
defense of capitalism at universities across No. America and in Europe:
Once [Rand] understood any question put to her clearly, she would have no
difficulty in answering it completely, including bringing her questioner
to see other implications of the question, and even to answering, in
advance, ramifications of the discussion she knew the questioner would
arrive at later. And all this transpired in a considerate and
unthreatening manner, even when—in my own opinion—a questioner had
overstepped the boundary of precision and respectfulness. (358)
- Doug
Messenger met Rand at public lectures: The morning after the Ford Hall
Forum talk, we went to Harvard and sneaked into the breakfast room where
Miss Rand was speaking to the Harvard
Business School
[1968]. She was wonderful. They came and they were as rude as can be to
her for the first ten or fifteen minutes, but at the end of the
question-and-answer period, she received a standing ovation. She had won
them over. . . . I remember that a reviewer of the proceedings wrote,
“They came to jeer, but they stayed to cheer.” (381)
- Susan Ludel,
friend [married to Leonard Peikoff from 1968-78]: Q: What was [Rand’s] attitude to
reading Atlas [Shrugged] herself? A: She was afraid to read it
because, no matter what she was doing, if she just wanted to look
something up or find something for an article, she would be completely
drawn right into the book, as a reader. She would lose herself and put
away everything else and want to finish the novel. (3, 407)
- Ken MacKenzie,
legislative aide to Congress, 1970s: !n 1973 and ’74 . . . Congressman
Phil Crane . . . introduced a bill to legalize ownership of gold, which
had been outlawed. . . . I decided it would be good to put in the Congressional Record Alan
Greenspan’s article on gold and economic freedom, which had been published
in The Objectivist. . . . That
amendment got offered, and within a year or two, gold ownership was
legalized, and Mr. Greenspan’s article was read into the Record. (462-63)
- Malcolm Fraser,
prime minister of Australia
from Dec. 1975 – March, 1983; he wanted to meet Ayn Rand at a White House
visit in 1976. He was often quoted in the media as saying that Atlas Shrugged was his favorite
book and Ayn Rand his favorite author: We’d had in Australia a government
that had spent far too much money, who had pretended all problems could be
solved by governments waving some sort of a wand, and we had to draw all
that back and cut expenditure and reduce government activities. . . . My
government was about the first that started to turn back the tide of
excess socialist expenditure. . . [When he met Rand
at the White House:] She said she was delighted to meet the only head of
government implementing the sorts of policies that she was advocating. I
took that as a great compliment. (3, 504, 506)
- Raquel Welch
was interested in Atlas Shrugged
and was hoping to do it as a television miniseries: By the time I arrived
in Hollywood
in the 1960s . . . I felt I was walking into a totally chaotic situation
with no order . . . Because Ayn Rand had a very ordered, logical mind,
there was a lot of what she said that appealed to me. . . . [Rand’s books] encouraged me a lot to continue being
strong-minded and courageous. I felt like I was a loner and somebody who
did have a vision of the kind of woman that I wanted to portray. In many
cases, people would want me for a role, physically, but they wouldn’t want
my persona. They would want to water the role down and make it cute. I
never liked cute women. I always thought that women should be
extraordinary and magnificent. (569)
- Louis
Rukeyser, internationally recognized and influential economic analyst
and commentator. In 1981 he interviewed Ayn Rand in New Orleans on his show Louis Rukeyser’s Business Journal.
He had read Ayn Rand’s novels and thought she was on target, “the minute I
started reading her:” Well, I don’t
know that she influenced me, because I agreed with her. But she certainly
was a seminal thinker . . . She was a brilliant thinker, one of the
leading thinkers of the twentieth century . . . She was ahead of her time.
I have a feeling that the future lies with those who believe in freedom;
that the twentieth century has, among other things, been the testing
ground and discrediting of government as the answer to everyone’s
problems, real and perceived. And I would hope that in the twenty-first
century we proceed down the road that neither lets the government come in
and screw up the economy, as it has shown great capacity to do all over
the world, or, on the other hand, turn to government as the house nanny
and censor. I think that the philosophy that she put forward is the way of
the future. (3, 574)
- Harry
Binswanger met Rand in 1964. He has a
PhD in philosophy, is an author and editor, including much work with
Objectivist publications: Someone told me that a psychologist in her
circle used to say, “Ayn doesn’t have a subconscious—it’s all conscious.”
. . . What he meant was that everything in Ayn’s brain was accessible to
her. She didn’t have any hidden material in there. It was all transparent.
None of it was unavailable to her conscious mind. And it was all just
logic. Except that it was logic with values. That’s important—it wasn’t
cold logic, it was passionate logic (576). After the New Orleans speech in 1981 (shortly
before her death) . . . Now, this was to an audience of three thousand
“god bugs,” hard-money enthusiasts. Somebody in the audience asked her,
“What is the basic reason for a gold standard?” [Instead of giving a
typical financial theory answer about why gold is needed,] Ayn said, “To
keep the looters’ hands off your savings.” The audience burst into
applause. She was the same in 1981 as she was in 1962, in content, in
approach and in spirit (579).
- Jack Bungay:
Hal Wallis’s assistant, and Miss Rand’s secretary in 1946. Q: Was she high energy, high voltage?
A: Oh, high voltage all the time. You wondered, is this battery ever going
to wear out? . . She was thinking
all of the time. This machine never turned off, never. You could feel this
magnetism this dynamo inside this lady that never shut down. . . . and I
used to wonder how she could even sleep. I adored her. (60)
- Ake Sandler,
professor of political science at Los Angeles State College; Rand spoke to his class in 1950. Q: You said she was
the most intelligent woman you have ever met. Could you explain that? A:
First of all, the way she looked at you, like she could read your mind and
know what you were thinking and talking about. I think her intelligence
was so apparent; she seemed to be almost clairvoyant when she looked at
something. She could see it very clearly. She was very concentrated, very
focused. I have never met anybody that brilliant. (132)
- Larry Abrams
(venture capitalist) thought he wanted to be a fiction writer and attended
Rand’s fiction-writing class: She had an
answer for everything. I had never come across anything like that before
or since. People would ask her questions about everything, not just
fiction. There was never a time when she couldn’t answer a question, and
there was never a time after thinking about it, when I thought that her
answer was wrong. . . . Her eyes just held you and you could see the
intelligence radiating from them. (194)
- Larry Cole,
author, educator, and psychotherapist, was a talk-show host in NYC when he
interviewed Miss Rand on his radio show in 1973: Q: What was she like as a guest? I don’t remember using this word
before to describe my first impression of anyone: she was delightful. . .
. She turned out to just be this really lovely, warm and funny person, and
that just knocked me over. [He had read Atlas and other essays of her work.] . . . We had some
call-ins, and she was feisty with people who had her wrong. I was
surprised by her humor, her willingness to listen and her ease of
expression. We had almost an hour together, and it was the most memorable,
wonderful fifty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds I can remember. (465)
Part II – A Sense of Life documentary discussion:
The Fountainhead: “I do
not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any achievement
of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great
their need. I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their
freedom and to take no part in a slave society.” – The Fountainhead. (1, 107)
[The character of Peter Keating gave Rand
first germ of the idea for the novel, and reason for its working title Second-Hand Lives.] [while] clerking in
the wardrobe department of RKO, she became fascinated by her next-door
neighbor, Marcella Bannert . . . an executive assistant to David O. Selznick .
. . and she was ambitious. . . . [Rand] admiring her drive but disliking almost
everything else about her, including . . . the impression she gave of being a Hollywood climber. One day . . . she asked the young
woman to explain what she wanted to achieve in life. Marcella had a ready
answer. If nobody had an automobile, she would not want an automobile. If some
people had an automobile and others didn’t, she would want an automobile. If
some people had two and others had only one or none, she would want two
automobiles, and so one. And she would want people to know that she had more
than they did. The conversation was a revelation to Rand.
By her standards, Marcella seemed not to want anything for herself. Rand’s goal was to create a fiction of ideas out of her
experience and extraordinary gift for imagining and reasoning. Marcella merely
wanted to outstrip the Joneses. . . . Marcella appeared to have no values
except those derived from other people . . . [instead of being selfish, Rand] saw that the young woman was actually “self-less,”
in the sense that she had no authentic self with which to desire or create
anything that was hers alone. . . . explained why she and so many other people
Rand knew conformed to apparently meaningless conventions. (1, 108-9)
[For research, she
went to work incognito as a clerk in Ely Jacques Kahn’s office. He was a
well-known Art Deco architect with a successful practice.] She assiduously
collected background information about his colleagues, whom she later turned
into a gallery of roguish minor characters. . . .He [helped her get an]
introduction to Frank Lloyd Wright. . . . Kahn gave Rand
the key to the novel’s climax. . . . she asked what was the biggest problem in
architecture at the time. “Low-cost housing,” he answered [and explained why].
. . . at lunchtime she furiously scribbled notes. With a flash of irony [she
devised the plot for her climax].
As she left off outlining and began to write, her work
proved slow and grueling. Although she had mastered her story line, finding the
proper nuances of style and emotional vocabulary that fit her theme took more
time and energy than she expected. . . .these matters had to be worked out
sentence by sentence, almost word by word, in her adopted language. . . by
mid-1939 she had only about a third of the novel in first draft. She missed her
deadline with Knopf . . . missed the next deadline a year later. By mutual
assent, then, her contract with the publisher was canceled. (1, 121-2)
[Several publishers turned down The Fountainhead. This episode is legendary in the publishing
world:] Archibald Ogden was a new editor who read the partial manuscript given
to Bobbs-Merrill. He phoned Rand and told her
that the chapters were “great writing in the tradition of real literature,” and
explained to her delight the things he like most, the qualities for which she
most wanted to be admired. His boss, D. L. Chambers, in spite of Ogden’s enthusiasm, wired
him to reject the book. Ogden
wired back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for
you.” Chambers wired back: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign
the contract. But the book better be good.” . . . This time, she was determined
to meet her deadline . . . She set to work like “a writing engine.” . . .
[note: she always wrote her manuscripts long hand.] Isabel Paterson [suggested] to eliminate
explicit references to Hitler, Stalin, Facism, Nazism—to all contemporary
history. “The theme of your book is wider than the politics of the moment . . .
You are really writing about collectivism—any past, present, or future form of
it.” This was excellent advice, and Rand took
it, not only in The Fountainhead but
also in Atlas Shrugged. The novels’
timeless, almost mythical atmosphere is surely one of the reasons for their
enduring popularity. (1, 144-46).
Isabel Patterson was finishing her only work of nonfiction,
an eccentric individualist history of America called The God of the Machine; now largely forgotten, it was influential
in its time. (1, 148)
Sales of The
Fountainhead got off to a slow start. . . . Reviewers were hostile or, at
best, bewildered. . . . positive prepublication buzz had led [Rand]
to expect intelligent, or at least intelligible, commentary. . . . [many
critics described it as a story about architecture]. . . . [finally an
intelligent review that cited the true theme and value of the book] appeared in
The New York Times. . . .written by
Lorine Pruette, a psychologist, and a former college professor. . . Rand later said that Pruette’s review had saved her
world. (1 149-52)
[At this time] . . . after the Hitler-Stalin Pact had come
apart . . . the Soviet Union was an official military ally of the United States
and the Roosevelt administration had taken to promoting it as a freedom-loving
friend. To criticize collectivism or publicly advocate capitalism or even civil
liberties was at best to commit a social gaffe. . . . other publications
gradually took up [the novel’s theme that The
New York Times had identified so well]. By the end of the war, all forms of
government collectivism had permanently lost much of their popular appeal and
would, in fact, become a political taboo, and “individualism” would re-enter
the language of respectable discourse—chiefly, Rand suggested, as a result of
her efforts and Paterson’s
to keep the word alive. (1, 152)
[Alan Collins who conducted negotiations between Rand and
Warner Brothers} advised her to ask for $25,000 and settle for $20,000. [She
had asked for $50,000. The Maltese
Falcon, The Thin Man, and other box-office hits got only $25,000. Ten days
later, Warner Bros. made the hoped-for offer: $50,000, as long as she agreed to
travel to Hollywood
to write the preliminary screenplay.] If Hollywood
had earlier blackballed her as an outspoken anti-Communist, it was pursuing her
now. [ She hoped the studio would hire her to write the final script. At worst,
the publicity from the movie would help to sell the book.] (1, 157)
They continued on to Hollywood
aboard the streamlined Santa Fe Super Chief, world famous for its elaborate
meals and celebrity passengers. . . .Rand
said: “The only advantage of poverty is that you can get out of it. The contrast is wonderful.” (1, 161)
By early February [1944] she had completed the preliminary
screenplay . . . [the producer, Henry] Blanke and the studio bosses were very
pleased with her work. . . Unfortunately, the studio executives soon concluded
that building the sets for the movie would consume unacceptably large amounts
of rationed wood, [etc.] . . .They put The
Fountainhead on hold . . . it remained unproduced until 1948. (1,
163)
She was famous now. . . . Gossip columnists reported on the
progress of her movie . . . her presence in Hollywood produced a flurry of social
invitations. Even after The Fountainhead
had been delayed, actors and actresses were vying for the parts of Dominique
and Roark. Joan Crawford . . . Barbara Stanwyck . . . Veronica Lake
let it be known that the part had been written for her. Rand
preferred Garbo. As to Roark, she had always pictured Gary Cooper . . . Alan
Ladd, Humphrey Bogart. . . [Clark Gable rumored to have demanded that MGM
secure the part for him; MGM reportedly responded by offering Warner Bros.
$425,000 for the movie rights, vindicating Rand’s prediction that the book
would be worth more than she was paid for it.] (1, 167-8) In 1948, when
work resumed on the movie, competition intensified for the part of Dominique. .
. . [Lauren Bacall, Margaret Sullavan, Jennifer Jones, Greta Garbo, Barbara
Stanwyck (now was too old).] Vidor hired Patricia Neal . . . who had only once
before appeared on screen. . . . Rand was
horrified. [But Gary Cooper fell in love with her.] . . . The love affair
between Cooper’s Roark and Neal’s Dominique was genuinely searing and continued
offscreen until 1951. (1, 208-9)
[During a question-and-answer period at a Books and Authors
Club luncheon,] a white-gloved matron asked where all those wonderful sex
scenes in The Fountainhead had come
from. Were they based on Rand’s own
experience? [Her hostess], knowing well that her friend could be prickly, winced,
but Rand responded with perfect poise,
“Wishful thinking,” she said and smiled. Hilarity ensued among the audience of
mostly wealthy women. (1, 178)
The Fountainhead
would continue to be promoted primarily by excited readers, and it gradually
became a publishing legend. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever
been connected with,” said a Bobbs-Merrill sales manager in 1968, on the
novel’s twenty-fifth anniversary. That year, total sales reached two and a half
million copies. (1, 219)
. . . several of the basic ideas of Objectivism are
explicated in The Fountainhead.
Reliance on reason, not yet a major theme, is nonetheless clearly adopted. A
related idea, the impotence of evil, is explicit in the novel. Roark’s final
speech is devoted primarily to the key concepts of creativity and
self-generated action as the proper life for man. . . . During the next 13
years Rand laid the groundwork in metaphysics
and epistemology that would put the Objectivist ethics on a firm footing. (2,
55)
Atlas Shrugged: [The theme came to her during call with Paterson after
publication of The Fountainhead. Paterson wanted her to
write a nonfiction book explaining her philosophy: readers of her novels might
be confused by encountering serious ideas in a novel. Rand’s
response: “No! I’ve presented my case in The
Fountainhead. . . . If [readers] don’t respond, why should I wish to
enlighten or help them further? I’m not an altruist!” Paterson
said people needed to hear Rand’s ideas; the author had a duty to present them
clearly. Oh, no she didn’t, . . . Then Rand said, “What if I went on strike?
What if all the creative minds in the world went on strike?” As an aside, she
added, “That would make a good novel.” . . . When she hung up the phone,
O’Connor remarked, “That would make a
good novel.” At once she saw the extended possibilities of a story line she had
first conceived at the U.
of St. Petersburg: the
story of the heiress who persuades a group of brilliant men to withdraw their
talents from an increasingly evil world and go into hiding. The new novel would
dramatize the consequences to society if all the best artists, inventors, and
businessmen refused to exercise their skills. The novel’s theme would be “the
mind on strike.” (1, 165)
** Among its many strengths, Atlas Shrugged is a uniquely intricate thriller, with a dozen
hair-raising, idea-driven subplots radiating from the main story line,
reinforcing its characters and themes. Dagny and Rearden, two of the last
titans remaining at the helm of their businesses, play the part of the novel’s
philosophical detectives. Why does the stately, omnitalented Francisco, the
chosen son of a proud aristocratic family, boast of being a dissolute playboy
and yet speak like a sage? Why are “the men of the mind,” as Francisco calls
his fellow industrialists, disappearing? . . . In the midst of unrelenting
action, Atlas Shrugged is also an
eleven-hundred-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition “From each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” . . . The novel is
full of detailed parallels with the Russia of Rand’s youth, including the
Communists’ failed attempts to force deposed capitalists to run their old
businesses for the benefit of the state. It is surely also the only
page-turning critique ever written of the Rooseveltian welfare state, the
bureaucratization of the altruistic impulse, and the transformation of America
from a culture of self-reliance to one of entitlement.” (1, 193-94)
The great question of her life, the dilemma of the rational
person in an irrational society, at last was solved . . . The concept of the
“sanction of the victim” provided her answer—and provided also the key plot
device, the strike of the men of the mind . . . (2, 59) The unifying
principle of Atlas Shrugged is the connection
between philosophical ideas and their consequences. . . . [for example] the
Taggart Tunnel catastrophe is not merely an incident in the plot; it also
functions as a demonstration of an important principle: the relationship
between political oppression and the breakdown of social responsibility—and the
consequent destruction of social function. . . a vivid picture of the way even
everyday activities disintegrate when the men of ability and rationality are
driven underground. (2, 65)
By October 1947 . . . As the main plotlines unfolded without
much difficulty, she thought that the book would be shorter and quicker to
write than The Fountainhead . . . But
when she began to consider the philosophic underpinnings of her plot and
characters, she realized that she would have to probe more deeply. . . . she
decided that “my most important job is the formulation of a rational morality
of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.” It would take her
a total of thirteen years to complete the intricate and sweeping web of Atlas Shrugged. (1, 202)
[in The Fountainhead]
Dominique and Wynand are . . . contaminated by Nietzschean morality and the
corresponding despair. Roark is morally perfect, but he is not a full ideal
because he is naïve. He is good without knowing fully why he is good. John
Galt, however, has moral stature and philosophical knowledge. . . . The modern
reader may not realize how radical it was, in 1957, to make a businessman a
hero. . . . Rand
wrote this book in an environment in which ‘entrepreneur’ was almost a dirty
word. . . . Dagny, like the other heroes of Atlas
Shrugged, is an incarnation of the virtue of competence. . . . she is the
person who knows what to do. (2, 66-68)
Closing every loophole and presenting the finished doctrine
in the form of a dramatic speech [sixty pages] by the novel’s leading hero was
the most difficult task of her life . . . none of the ideas contained in the
speech were new to her. But shaping them felt like “drops-of-water-in-a-desert
kind of torture.” (1, 260-1)
On Saturday nights . . . The novel was giving [The
Collective] undreamed-of-intellectual stimulation . . . Some recalled these
evenings with Rand as a high point
of their lives. “In a world that was hurtling toward collectivism and darkness,
we were listening to the ideas of a woman who was a strong, bright light that
pointed the way toward freedom,” said one. (1, 264)
The final sentence: “I swear by my life and my love of it
that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live
for mine.” . . . The oath is “a dramatized summation of the Objectivist
ethics,” she explained in a Playboy
interview in 1964 . . . it is the oath taken by each of the strikers on
entering Galt’s Gulch. . . . (1, 260)
If The Fountainhead
introduced a new and radical brand of American individualism, Atlas Shrugged resurrected interest in
American capitalism at a time when it was under pressure by both the liberal
Left and the Christian Right. Rand didn’t
praise capitalism as the best of a bad set of choices, as the Buckleyites did,
or even as a means by which the poor would prosper, although she believed it
was. She defined it, lovingly, as the only economic system in history to be
rooted in and inextricable from individual rights: the freedom to choose an
occupation, to earn and spend money in a free market of consumer goods, and to
own the fruits of one’s own creativity and labor in the form of private
property. Capitalism set the individual, especially the creative individual,
free to invent, produce, and thrive. . . . she put it more aggressively. “Those
who are anti-business are anti-life.” (1, 270)
** If We the Living
had exposed the lethal effects of totalitarian state power on the best and most
spirited individuals in a closed society; if Anthem had charted an escape from the tyranny of brotherhood; and
if The Fountainhead had defined the
struggle of a free, active, self-reliant individual against a culture of
suffocating conformity, then Atlas
Shrugged extended the perspective to reveal a new ideological and social
order, one in which those who are independent, purposeful, creative, and proud
no longer have to fight or suffer. It was an oblation to her father and
grandfather and a public tribute to her own gifts and strengths. (1,
270-1)
[per her contract, she submitted most of her manuscript,
minus Galt’s speech and last unfinished chapters, to Bobbs-Merrill. . . .] The
sales manager, presumably speaking for the president, declared that, in its
present form, “the book is unsaleable and unpublishable.” Rand
had heard that before. . . .This time, in vivid contrast to 1943, the
publishing world tripped over itself to court her. More than a dozen companies
phoned or wrote . . . (1, 271)
The jovial [Bennet] Cerf [What’s My Line?] [Random House publisher] surprised her by
announcing, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent.” But, he added, “If we
publish you, Miss Rand, nobody is going to try to censor you. You write
anything you darn please, and we’ll publish it.” . . . she was so impressed
with his self-confidence that she chose him and Random House almost on the
spot. . . . [Random House agreed to all of her terms.] Cerf told her that upon
reading part I, chapter 8, “The John Galt Line” . . . he ran out of his office
into the hallway, shouting, “It’s magnificent!” . . . Back in her apartment,
she exclaimed, “This is life as it should be and ought to be—and, for once,
is!” To [her friend], she said, “They didn’t pretend to be converted, but they
knew these were important ideas and they were very affected by the book. And
Bennett was chortling [over] how they’d antagonize their neighbors” by
publishing it. Of course, Cerf could not imagine just how hostile and brutal
the antagonism would turn out to be. (1, 274)
She and Cerf quickly became friends. [The two couples often
socialized together.] . . . Years later, he remembered the mischievous pleasure
he . . . took in introducing her to liberal friends. “What I loved to do was
trot her out for people who sneered at me for publishing her. Ayn would
invariably charm them.” . . . [during one evening at Ayn’s Cerf recalls:] We
couldn’t get George [Axelrod, the man who wrote The Seven Year Itch, who was always being psycho-analyzed, Cerf
noted] to go home. . . Later that night he said, ‘She knows me better after
five hours than my analyst does after five years.’” The worldly Cerf was . . .
amused, by the way “she peers right through you. She has . . . a wonderful way
of pinning you to the wall.” (1, 274-5)
She warned both Cerf and her circle of young friends not to
expect too much [with the publishing of Atlas].
“I am challenging the cultural tradition of two and a half thousand years,” she
explained. . . . Cerf knew that the reviews would be mixed, at best. But the
others anticipated drumrolls and accolades. . . . Peikoff [her intellectual
heir], now twenty-four . . . , foresaw a renaissance of political liberty and a
restoration of an idealized nineteenth-century-style laissez-faire economy.
Alan Greenspan, . . . by far the groups’ most sophisticated member, couldn’t
shake off the conviction that her arguments in Atlas Shrugged were so “radiantly exact” as to compel agreement by
all honest men and women. (1, 277)
[The group of friends, expecting an avalanche of reader
fans] decided they needed a name for her system of ideas other than Randianism,
which had occasionally cropped up. . . . She liked “existentialism,” . . .
because it echoed Aristotle’s maxim that “existence exists.” But Jean-Paul
Sartre and his band of “bad guys” had beaten them to it. . . . The settled on .
. . the name “Objectivism,” which they intended as an homage to the
immutability of objective reality and the competence of perception and reason
to grasp and understand it. It also conveyed an urgent emphasis on the
scientific method, Rand thought; she had
become especially concerned with countering the influence of John Dewey and his
followers’ subjectivist theories of education. (1, 278)
She delivered the book [to Random House]. [Haydn, the
editor, suggested cuts, especially in Galt’s speech; she refused; he admonished
Cerf to convince her to do so.] Cerf barked at him. ‘I’ll fix it in no time.” .
. . “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 . . . that
put her in excess of the word count in her contract. She agreed. . . . 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” . . .
(1, 279)
A few months before Atlas
Shrugged was published, Bennett Cerf invited [her] to address a Random
House sales conference. . . . 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.” . . . She gamely raised a leg and
answered, “Metaphysics: objective reality. Epsitemology: reason. Ethics:
self-interest. Politics: capitalism.” The sales staff applauded. Presumably,
she was delighted by the classical reference as well as by the applause. (1,
281-2)
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. . . .
There were a few public declarations of support from old-line conservative
acquaintances. . . . 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.
(1, 282-3)
[Rand mused] 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? . . . instead, critics focused on her adamant atheism and
harshly contemptuous passages . . . [Even] William F. Buckley’s National Review ran a savage critique .
. . it was the work of Whittaker Chambers, the very reformed Communist spy . .
. who was now a devout [Quaker] Christian . . . and he didn’t merely disparage
the novel, he set out to destroy it. . . . (1, 284-5) In scarcely
disguised phrases Chambers portrayed Rand as a
Nazi, likening her to the SS monsters who perpetrated the Holocaust—an
accusation calculated to maximally offend a Jew. Rand never forgot this libel; Rand never forgave Buckley for his bad faith. Her enemies
on the Right . . . pursued her with relentless hate. (2, 130)
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. . . . it
quickly ascended to number five on The
New York Times best-seller list. . . . and remained a best-seller for seven
months. . . . Fifty years after publication, without advertising . . . still
being sold at . . . a rate of 150,000 copies a year. (1, 286-7)
NBI: Nathaniel
Brandon Institute: NBI reply cards in Atlas
Shrugged worked. . . . sold recordings of New York lectures to remote locations. . . .
distributed pamphlets, books, furnished speakers and material to Ayn Rand
clubs. . . . Rand saw that [they] were creating an unexpected new avenue by
which, she thought, ideas could infiltrate a corrupt culture: from the middle
class upward, instead of from the intellectual class down, as in Russia and, indeed, among leftists in the United States.
With NBI, she saw her philosophy taking root “in a way I did not know.” The
“whole enormous response to [NBI] gave me a preview of what can be done with a
culture.” (1, 314-5)
The Saturday Evening
Post published an article about Ayn Rand. The writer, John Kobler, wondered
how she had charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously
as “clergymen quoted Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” She was “the free enterprise
system’s Joan of Arc, with a Yankee dollar [for] her Cross of Lorraine.” (1, 326) [meant to be a put-down, but Rand would have loved it!]
Conservatives
abhorred much of her doctrine—the rejection of religion, the call for pure
laissez-faire, and the repudiation of altruism and traditional ethical values.
. . . her open advocacy of “selfishness” threatened to discredit the movement
and supply ammunition to its enemies. It became important to the conservative
intellectual leadership to destroy Rand, or at
minimum to repudiate her as a conservative. (2, 130)
Rand rejected the libertarian cause. She
alleged that its promoters had stolen her ideas while failing even to try
to master her complete philosophy. The presence of Murray Rothbard and John Hospers
[former friends of hers; Hospers was a Philosophy PHd?] among the movement’s
leadership didn’t improve her opinion. (1, 384)
HERO-WORSHIP: Rand wrote: “Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman
has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and
morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of
her worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might
lack. . . . [the feminine woman’s] worship is an abstract emotion for the
metaphysical concept of masculinity as such.” . . . Rand
is explicit that the feminine woman’s desire to look up to man “does not mean
dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority.” (her essay “About a
Woman President” in The Voice of Reason) (2, 70)
EVIL / SANCTION OF
THE VICTIM: Consider Rand’s
description of the Halley Fourth Concerto (Atlas
Shrugged): “It was a “No” flung at
some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the
agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying:
“There is no necessity for pain—why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those
who will not accept its necessity?—we who hold the love and the secret of joy,
to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom? . . . It was her
quest, her cry.” (2, 84)
. . . Ayn Rand, like Dagny Taggart, finally found an answer
that satisfied her: the sanction of the victim. . . . If reason is an absolute,
if the good is the rational, then evil is irrational—which means:
illogical—which means: unworkable. Evil, being based on contradiction of
reality, is inherently self-destructive; left to itself, it must disappear.
How, then, can evil even exist? There can be only one answer: Evil is made
possible only by the generous but ill-advised support and assistance, the
sanction, of the good. If good people were completely consistent, completely
uncompromising, completely intolerant of evil, evil could not endure. Here is
the root of a key theme of Atlas Shrugged.
Rand pitilessly exposes the essence of
envy—the hatred of the good for being good. And she exposes altruism as the
tool and weapon of evil, the false morality that teaches its victims to hate
what is good in themselves. . . . The triumph and tragedy of the Objectivist
movement grew out of Rand’s conviction that
she must deny sanction to evil at all costs. (2, 85)
Her contribution to Philosophy: [Note: specifics of Objectivism may
be presented at a later time in a series of lectures – Introduction to
Objectivism]
·
Built a full System with strong logical links
all the way through (See Kelly’s Chart and book). Most philosophers
‘specialize’ in certain branches (epistemology, ethics, politics, etc.)
·
Rand stated
repeatedly and emphatically that she regarded philosophy not as an academic
exercise but as a critical need for every human being. Her interest was in the
application of philosophy to the problems of real life. Like Aristotle, Rand regarded it as her task to help people to know—to make it possible to find knowledge and
certainty. Most modern philosophers have been more attracted to the opposing
approach, the tradition of Socrates. They are critical and not uncommonly
skeptical, and see it as the duty of philosophy to make people question their
beliefs and realize that they know nothing. . . . Philosophy courses, with some
exceptions, seem designed to leave students with the impression that philosophy
means never having to say you’re certain. . . . the dialectical method itself
smuggles into the student’s mind the doctrines of which it is an expression:
That no truth is ever certain, that no question is ever settled, that no
argument is irrefutable. . . It is her focus on substantive problems, her
anti-skeptical approach, and her assertion that one can attain knowledge and
certainty on fundamental issues, which make her philosophy so attractive to
intelligent young men and women (2, 88-89)
·
Rand took the
viewpoint—by no means universal among philosophers—that philosophy is
hierarchical. One’s conclusions about metaphysics constrain, if not determine,
one’s conclusions about epistemology; which in turn constrain one’s views on
ethics; which in turn constrain one’s views on politics and esthetics. She was
thus led to place a very strong emphasis on correct metaphysics as the root of
philosophical thought. (2, 91) [and at the root of the problems of
society and evil]
·
[Although she is considered controversial
because of her ethical and political views,] What has really driven opposing
philosophers up the wall . . . [is] her claim to certainty . . . [Objectivism’s]
promise of a route to knowledge—real knowledge, certain knowledge. A case can
be made that it is her epistemology
that is most radical. (2, 92) Rand
obviously acknowledged the role of proof in reasoning; she did, after all,
glory in the appellation ‘Mrs. Logic’! But she was less interested in how one
establishes the truth of particular propositions, than in how one develops a
complete structure of interrelated knowledge. Thus her epistemology is
centered, not on the methodology of logical inference, but on a theory of
concepts. (2, 93)
·
She rejects most (if not all) of the major
dichotomies, e.g., the mind-body dichotomy, primary versus secondary qualities
(of entities); analytic versus synthetic statements; noumenal versus phenomenal
reality (Immanuel Kant); spiritual versus material world;
·
Allan Gotthelf, professor of philosophy,
distinguished Aristotle scholar, and a founder of the Ayn Rand Society—a
professional society affiliated with the American Philosophical Association,
Eastern Division, said to Ayn Rand: “. . . you’ve done for consciousness what
Aristotle did for existence.” I think I may have said Aristotle basically gave
us the principle that existence has identity. She gave us the view that
consciousness has identity. Aristotle brought a clarity to the world—entities,
attributes, cause and effect, and so forth. She did that for consciousness with
concepts, free will, art and much else. (3, 348)
·
She challenges modern philosophy’s view that
statements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’, in the moral sense of these terms, differ
essentially from ordinary statements of fact. ‘Normative’ statements, it is
said cannot be proved; they are a matter of personal preference, or social
rules, or religious prescription. She asserts . . . the distinction between
‘good’ and ‘bad’ is not arbitrary or intuitive but logically derivable from the
facts of reality. (2, 106) Rand’s
radical individualism inevitably made her one of the most controversial
political thinkers of her time. (127)
Selected Bibliography
of Ayn Rand's Writings
Novels
Atlas Shrugged (1957)
The
Fountainhead (1943)
Anthem (1938, 1946)
We the
Living (1936, 1959)
Books and Essays
Philosophy: Who Needs
It (1982)
Introduction
to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd edn.
(1990)
The Virtue
of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
(1964)
Capitalism:
The Unknown Ideal (1966)
Return of
the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1998)
The Romantic
Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature
(1969)
For the New
Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
(1961)
The Voice of
Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1988)
Selections
The Ayn Rand Lexicon, ed. H. Binswanger (1986)
The Ayn Rand
Reader, ed. G. Hull and L. Peikoff
(1999)
Journals, Letters, and Marginalia
Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. D. Harriman (1997)
Letters of
Ayn Rand, ed. M.S. Berliner (1995)
Ayn Rand's
Marginalia, ed. R. Mayhew (1995)
Lecture Course Transcripts
The Art of Fiction: A
Guide for Writers and Readers, ed.
Tore Boeckmann (2000)
The Art of
Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers, ed. Robert Mayhew (2001)
Exposition based on extensive discussions with,
and a lecture course authorized by, Ayn Rand
·
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, L. Peikoff (1991)
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged discussion points:
Book 2 (Ideas of Rand) – use this source when
developing discussions about the films The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged
Use this as source also, if I later develop specific
lectures on Objectivist philosophy