Counter-Currents
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It’s been 80 years since Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead was published by Bobbs-Merrill, and almost exactly 37 years since I first read it. I was in college at the time and, although I did not realize it, searching for some source of meaning in my life. The previous year I had gone through a Satanist phase, occasioned by reading Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and failing to see the humor in it. That had been followed by a very, very brief Marxist phase.
Perusing the public library, I had come across a red-covered volume titled, as I recall, Principles of Scientific Socialism and written by Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA. The book was written in an accessible style and, though it raised many questions in my mind, it seemed to offer ideas that made sense out of everything — which is what I was desperately seeking. Besides, it scandalized my mother, which delighted me. She informed me that if I became a Communist she would have to disown me. Two minutes of conversation were sufficient to establish that she had no idea what Communism was. Still, I must give her credit for good instincts.
And it was my mother who was also, quite literally, the vehicle of my abrupt conversion to anti-Communism. Just about a month after I read Gus Hall’s book, my mother announced one afternoon that she was going to the public library and asked if I’d like to tag along. I said yes. This one, uncharacteristically spontaneous act changed my life momentously. I shudder to think how things might have turned out had I declined. At the library, in one of those revolving racks of paperbacks, I found a fat, 700-page book with small print: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I had heard of it before, but very vaguely. I knew next to nothing about it.
I showed the book to my mother. “People thought she was crazy,” she said. That was enough of a recommendation for me. I added The Fountainhead to my mother’s pile and moments later I was next to her in the car, reading Rand’s Introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel. In it, she noted that some readers had wondered if she or the novel’s main character, Howard Roark, were religious. Rand commented that she thought she had made her atheism (and Roark’s) perfectly obvious. For me, this was the clincher — the thing that guaranteed that I would plow all the way through this daunting tome. You see, at the time I was going through my Village Atheist period. I am embarrassed to say it now, as my views and values have changed so much, but at the time I felt I could not respect an author who was religious.
The Fountainhead is the story of Howard Roark, an iconoclastic architect who insists on his buildings being built exactly as he designs them, and refuses to compromise. He is surrounded by mediocrities who have never had an original thought in their lives, but who have learned how to game the system. They flourish while Roark is reduced to working in a granite quarry — though ultimately he triumphs. These people are leading what Rand called “second-hand lives,” the novel’s original title. Even two of the story’s most sympathetic characters — Dominique Francon, the woman Roark loves, and Gail Wynand, his best friend — are portraits in second-handedness.
A ”second-hander,” in Rand’s vocabulary, is a person who somehow derives his sense of selfhood from other people. In other words, he gets his views and his values second-hand. One of the novel’s major characters, Peter Keating, is a second-hander in a very simple and obvious way: He is an abject conformist and parasite. He has never had an original idea of his own. He makes up his mind about every issue by consulting public opinion. Keating is a highly successful but untalented architect, who simply copies the styles of the past and never comes up with anything new.
The case of Dominique Francon is more complicated. She worships greatness; she seeks the exceptional in life. More than anything, she admires man’s capacity to create things of beauty. But she is so terrified of society and what it is capable of doing to exceptional men, she actively seeks to destroy examples of human greatness rather than see them exposed to the bad taste and ressentiment of “the mob.” In this way, she is ruled by others, though her core values are identical to Roark’s. Wynand is the fabulously wealthy owner of The New York Banner, a newspaper that engages in the worst sort of yellow journalism. Wynand’s second-handedness consists in the fact that he seeks power over other men. Rather than using his considerable talent and intellect to create something of real value, he panders to the taste of the masses and imagines that he controls them. In fact, they control him.
The Fountainhead is the story of how the lives of these characters intersect. However, there is an additional character I cannot fail to mention. The improbably-named Ellsworth Toohey is the villain of the piece. Like other Russian novelists, Rand crafted character names to convey something about the characters themselves. Toohey is a glib, obsequious “public intellectual” who poses as a selfless humanitarian. In fact, he seeks power over others by controlling them through guilt. He also acts to destroy men of real talent (like Roark) while championing mediocrity (like Keating) out of a hatred for the exceptional and in the name of “equality.”
A completely self-aware villain, who eventually confesses his motives to Keating, Toohey is an implausible character — but at the same time Rand’s portrayal of him is a brilliant, and often very amusing, dissection of the Left. In seeing the Left as moved by ressentiment, Rand was influenced by Nietzsche, whom she read avidly as a teenager. In fact, Rand originally intended to open each of The Fountainhead’s four parts with a quotation from Nietzsche. She decided against this, fearing (correctly) that readers would assume she was a disciple of the philosopher. Plus, the character of Gail Wynand, with his parasitic “will-to-power,” was actually intended as a “refutation” of Nietzsche (though it is a superficial one).
Of course, I was aware of none of this when I read the novel for the first time. I recall that the first thing that impressed me was Rand’s description of how other characters reacted to Howard Roark. They tended to find him off-putting, intimidating, cold, and inexplicable. Often, they resented him. I could identify with this. For most of my life, people have reacted to me oddly. They have found me, well, off-putting, intimidating, cold, and inexplicable. In school, it got back to me that my professors thought me “arrogant” — just like Roark’s experience at the Stanton Institute of Technology (though unlike Roark, I was not expelled). As I read the novel, I began to identify with Roark — though to some extent this was self-flattery. (I’ll discuss my mature impressions of the character later on.)
The other thing that really struck me was how serious all the characters were about ideas. Much of the novel consists in intellectual conversations that go on for pages. At one point, Roark makes a speech that spans about eight pages. I didn’t know what to make of such people. At this point in my life, I’m afraid I had arrived at a kind of glib, adolescent cynicism about ideas. Rand’s characters made me feel ashamed of myself. They took life seriously; I did not. I felt I needed to be more like them. And I longed to have friendships like they did. Friendships with other smart people who shared my values, despised mediocrity and conformity, and liked to talk about ideas into the wee hours. I’m pleased to say that, eventually, I developed such friendships.
By the time I had finished The Fountainhead, I was completely seduced by Rand. However, I was not entirely cured of Gus Hall’s Marxism — not yet. I had been reading about Abraham Maslow in psychology class. Maslow is the one who theorized that the goal of human life is “self-actualization,” which we become capable of reaching when the more mundane needs of life have been satisfied. Howard Roark seemed to me like a self-actualized individual. If socialism might be the best way to satisfy life’s mundane needs, couldn’t socialism produce a whole society of Howard Roarks? Fortunately, I was completely cured of this naïveté when I read Rand’s next — and final — novel, Atlas Shrugged.
It is impossible for me to fully convey to you how exciting it was to read Ayn Rand for the first time. It was a truly golden period in my life. It felt like an entirely new world had opened up for me. Reading Rand, especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, was one of the most exciting experiences of my entire life. And it changed my life in extremely important ways. I had had some vague idea that after college I was going to try to break into Hollywood as a writer (cinema was one of my passions). After reading The Fountainhead, I decided to devote my life to ideas. I cleaned up my act — lost weight and finally lost my virginity.
Now, all the above is a long lead-in to the following: On a whim, I recently reread The Fountainhead. I was going through a dry spell so far as reading goes and just couldn’t find a new book that interested me. When I began the novel, I was amazed at how much I remembered with great clarity, as if I had read the book yesterday (as I mentioned, I first read it almost exactly 37 years ago). There were certain details, however, that I had forgotten. These often surprised and delighted me.
I went back to the book with some initial hesitation. It’s always very disheartening — for me, at least — to go back to something I loved long ago, only to find that it has not aged well and I can no longer enjoy it. This is true of some of the films and television shows I loved as a boy. I didn’t want my golden memories of The Fountainhead to lose their luster. So, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that I found the novel quite enjoyable. Now and then there would be a line I thought an editor could have improved on. But, on the whole, Rand is an excellent writer. My opinion of her talent remains undiminished. And once again I did find the book to be inspiring — though with the addition of 37 years of maturity, my reaction was a bit more subdued.
Interestingly, just as happened the first time I read the novel, I felt a sense of shame. I felt a keen sense that I had, to a degree, betrayed my youthful idealism. In the intervening years I’ve suffered, at times, from depression and self-doubt. And I’ve become more neurotic with age. It’s hard to imagine Howard Roark needing to check the stove several times before leaving the house, or worrying about his prostate. Of course, Rand had a sensible answer to this. She didn’t think that real-life heroes were without flaws. Her fiction portrayed men as they “might be and ought to be.” “In life one ignores the unimportant; in art one omits it,” she once said. Still, the stove-checking is beneath me, and I know it.
Ayn Rand
I still share Rand’s — and Roark’s and Dominique’s and Wynand’s — misanthropy (more on that in a moment). But in order to survive in my career — from which I am now blessedly retired — it was necessary for me to care, for the first time in my life, what other people thought of me. It was necessary for me to charm others and sometimes to outright con them. I lived a lie for many years, concealing my true opinions from everyone around me. I did all this with a skill Peter Keating would have admired. These reflections have been good for me. Rereading The Fountainhead has made me want to recapture a bit of the old Jef, before he started compromising.
Unlike the first time, however, the novel has not filled me with a sense of optimism. The world of today seems to me to be far worse than the world Rand depicts — even with all its moochers, looters, parasites, and second-handers. In today’s world, Roark would have been “canceled” in about 15 minutes given his apparently non-consensual sex with Dominique, his toxic masculinity, and his accursed whiteness. He would never have built anything at all. Today’s Tooheys would have seen to it that all those jobs went to BIPOC architects (if, indeed, there are any). Roark would have remained permanently in the granite quarry — if he’d managed to avoid jail.
Today, every newspaper and media outlet is The New York Banner. In our world, Roark’s Stoddard Temple would not be turned into a school for “sub-normal” children — for the simple reason that every school is now a school for sub-normal children. When Keating’s career began to falter, he would have come out as Petra Keating. Dominique would be a lipstick lesbian with an eating disorder, defiling herself on TikTok, Madonna-like, with various phallic objects. If Roark had dynamited Cortlandt and been acquitted (which seems highly improbable, even in Rand’s world), he would have lost everything in the subsequent civil suit. But there is a happy ending, folks. Readers have often commented that there is something “homoerotic” about the Roark-Wynand friendship. In today’s world, they would have gone all the way, married, and adopted a sub-normal African child (is there any other kind?).
In short, the character with whom I now identify most strongly is Dominique. I really do feel like we are living in a world where, to use her words, beauty and greatness have no chance. Unlike Dominique, however, I’m not acting to destroy what remains of beauty and greatness before the mob can get at them. Instead, I am acting to defend those things — especially the beauty and greatness of the West.
I no longer identify with Howard Roark, if I ever really did. Rereading the novel, I found Roark to be little more than a cipher. He’s rather boring, actually — and, in my lay opinion, most definitely somewhere on the autism spectrum. Ironically, given that Roark is Rand’s first attempt at the projection of an “ideal man,” the characterizations of Keating, Dominique, Wynand, and Toohey are far more vivid. By the end of the novel, we feel like we know them, whereas Roark just seems like that creepy redhead somebody brought to the party who didn’t say a word to anyone, but ate all the dip.
As much as I admire The Fountainhead, if I still agreed with Rand’s philosophy, obviously I would not be writing for Counter-Currents. But of all Rand’s works, The Fountainhead is the one I find least philosophically problematic (which is not the same thing as saying that it is unproblematic). That’s because all the madness about the virtues of unbridled greed and laissez-faire capitalism appear for the first time in Atlas Shrugged. In The Fountainhead, there are only hints of these things. Indeed, if you read The Fountainhead knowing nothing else about Rand, you might come away with the impression that she is a critic of capitalism.
In The Fountainhead, every time Rand refers to anything commercial, anything that is a product of the market, it is to comment wryly on its vulgarity. Most amusing is the fictitious Hollywood studio she creates, Cosmo-Slotnick Pictures, which releases films with titles like I’ll Take a Sailor, Wives for Sale, and Knock Me Flat. Wynand, of course, makes his fortune by pandering to the bad taste and moral hypocrisy of the masses. But almost everything in capitalism works that way! Additionally, most of the businessmen portrayed in the novel are cowardly or downright crooked. If you had never heard of Atlas Shrugged, you could very well form the impression from The Fountainhead that Rand is a quasi-Nietzschean champion of an aristocracy of naturally superior men. (Indeed, there are comments in Rand’s journals that suggest she at one time entertained exactly such thoughts!)
Philosophically, The Fountainhead concerns itself mainly with the opposition between second-handedness and individualism. I find myself in complete agreement with Rand’s contempt for the second-hander. This, too, is something that has gotten worse over time. Peter Keating is bad, but nowhere near as bad as the mindless NPCs we have today with their clucking over “misinformation,” their craft beer, and their Pfizer tattoos. But individualism is quite another matter. Rand’s ideal is basically “every man for himself,” with charity toward none.
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Her depictions of Roark’s friendships are often moving. In addition to his friendship with Gail Wynand, there is also Steven Mallory (a sculptor), Austen Heller (a writer, modeled on H. L. Mencken), Mike (a construction worker), and others. These people clearly love Roark, and he returns the feeling. But there is absolutely no general feeling of benevolence directed toward outsiders — I mean, those outside this circle of friends. In fact, The Fountainhead has to be recognized as one of the most misanthropic novels ever written.
Rand would vigorously protest this claim — which has been made by many others, and about other Rand books as well. One reviewer of Atlas Shrugged noted that it “makes well poisoning seem like one of the kindlier arts”; another — former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers — wrote “From almost any page . . . a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’” Rand would have responded that all of her work was a hymn to man’s greatness, not an attack on man. But one has to distinguish between men as they are and men as they ought to be — meaning, men as they seldom are. With a very small number of exceptions, Rand despised actual human beings, and The Fountainhead is simply dripping with contempt for humanity.
The following is a typical passage. In it, we hear the thoughts of Gail Wynand late in the novel, after he has seen the light:
That woman sitting on the stoop of an old brownstone house, her fat white knees spread apart — the man pushing the white brocade of his stomach out of a cab in front of a great hotel — the little man sipping root beer at a drugstore counter — the woman leaning over a stained mattress on the sill of a tenement window — the taxi driver parked on a corner — the lady with orchids, drunk at the table of a sidewalk café — the toothless woman selling chewing gum — the man in shirt sleeves, leaning against the door of a pool room — they are my masters. My owners, my rulers without a face.
Now, I am not making the claim that we need to love everyone. I am not Ellsworth Toohey. But in a healthy, functioning, cohesive society, there does need to be a general feeling of benevolence towards others — the feeling that we are all in this together; the ability to empathize, to feel “he’s like me.” But Rand didn’t care anything at all about cohesion. She despised what she called “collectivism” (you can always spot an Objectivist writer, because nowadays they’re the only ones who still use that word!). When Roark announces that he will “never be a part of any collective,” I immediately thought, “Too late!” We’re all born into a collective; born into a society that rears us, impresses its standards and mores upon us, and limits us in various ways, but also makes it possible for us to realize ourselves in other ways.
An Objectivist might agree with the above, and then defend being a good citizen and acting to safeguard the social structure by arguing that it is in our “rational self-interest” to do so. But that’s not why real people do it. That’s not why they take into consideration “the common good” (a concept Rand despised). They experience “fellow feeling”; that feeling I described above as “He’s like me.” If you want a sense of what a Randian society would really be like, just look around you. There’s no fellow feeling anymore. That’s gone, and we now live in a “low-trust” society. It really is “every man for himself.” During the Great Depression, hobos used to come to my grandmother’s door begging for a meal. She would have them wait on the porch, go to the kitchen, make them a sandwich, and bring it out to them. Can you imagine that happening today, even in a small town?
“Diversity,” of course, is one of the principal reasons why we now live in a low-trust society. As most of my readers know, studies show that diversity destroys social trust, even among people of the same group. One of the main reasons European-style socialism has never really been able to take root in the United States is that the “producers” (that’s Rand-speak; let’s just call them white people) do not want their money going to “those other people,” with whom they do not identify. If those other people weren’t other at all, but just like them, opinions would likely be quite different. It’s so easy to be an Objectivist in the US (where Rand has always been most popular). A majority of white Americans already reject socialism, because most of its intended beneficiaries in the US are so genetically dissimilar to them. But they don’t reckon with this consciously. It’s easier to claim that the real reason they reject socialism is their commitment to rugged individualism.
Why did Rand have so little fellow feeling? After all, The Fountainhead was written at a time when America was much more cohesive, and it was much easier to identify with your fellow countrymen. I can testify from several years spent in the Objectivist movement that it is filled with spergs and sociopaths. Rand and especially her erstwhile lover and collaborator Nathaniel Branden exhibited some distinctly anti-social personality traits. But another factor must be mentioned, something I have not so far discussed: Rand’s Jewishness.
Now, I’m as Jew-wise as the next guy on the Right, but, like T. S. Eliot, we need to be intelligent about it. I’m not one of those people who thinks everything ever done by any Jew is worthless because either it’s (a) derivative, or (b) all part of a sinister plan to advance Jewish interests. Occasionally, Jews do something that fits neither category. Mahler’s Fifth Symphony comes to mind. So does The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead is a genuinely great novel, filled with prose that is powerful and often quite beautiful, well-plotted, and intellectually stimulating. Is there a Jewish angle — I mean, a way in which Rand’s Jewishness influenced the book?
It is possible to do a Kevin MacDonald on The Fountainhead and argue that its anti-collectivism serves Jewish interests. Breaking down all sense of collective identity other than their own is a standard Jewish strategy. But if Rand’s anti-collectivism is a pro-Jewish strategy, I’m convinced it was purely unconscious on her part. Please remember that Kevin MacDonald’s position is not that Jews are always consciously acting to promote Jewish interests. Sometimes they are, but often their pro-Jewishness is not conscious at all, but simply a matter of how they are wired; how they behave instinctively.
I do think it is plausible to see Rand’s misanthropy as influenced by her Jewishness. It’s got to be the case that at least one of the reasons Rand failed to identify, on any fundamental level, with most of the people around her is that the genetic dissimilarity was too great. Here, too, however, I am convinced that this was mostly subconscious on Rand’s part. To judge by Rand’s fiction, and her marriage to Frank O’Connor, she was attracted to Nordic types (rather like the Jewish male’s attraction to the shiksa). But genetic similarity played a strong role in the formation of the Objectivist movement. Nathaniel Branden — real name: Nathan Blumenthal — was a Jew; indeed, he supplanted O’Connor for a period, at least in terms of Rand’s sexual interests. Branden’s wife, Barbara, was a Jew, as was her cousin Leonard Peikoff, who eventually became pope of the entire movement.
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The West Coast branch of Objectivism, centered on The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), is heavily Jewish. Its founding board of governors included Harry Binswanger, Robert Hessen, George Reisman, and Peter Schwartz — all Jews. ARI has been staunchly Zionist for years — despite the fact that this is a form of collectivism. Indeed, it was headed for many years by Yaron Brook, a former First Sergeant in Israeli military intelligence. Fascinatingly, the East Coast branch of Objectivism, centered on The Atlas Society, is much less Jewish. One day, somebody needs to give Objectivism the full Kevin MacDonald treatment, but that is beyond the scope of the present essay. In the meantime, check out my parody of Rand and the Objectivist movement in my novel, Heidegger in Chicago.
As someone once said, “Everyone has their favorite Jew.” Mine is Ayn. I have moved far away from Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but I don’t at all regret my youthful dalliance with it. Had I not encountered Rand all those years ago, my life might have taken a much different course, and I might have been the poorer for it. Rereading The Fountainhead has been a delight. If you have never read the novel, I hope I’ve persuaded you to give it a look.
Lastly, I am giving notice that if one word of this essay is altered, I will dynamite the website.
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20 comments
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was a sophomore in college and I, too, got all excited and motivated to “do something.” Oh, how the years ravage us. I actually can’t imagine sitting through the 150,000 pages (it certainly would feel like that many now) of that book again, and from most of what I’ve read about Rand, I probably would have despised her. That being said, I think The Fountainhead is a far superior book. I guess I’d consider re-reading it, but I’m so far removed from Rand’s way of thinking, I’m not really sure what the point would be.
I actually thought We The Living was a really eloquent and readable condemnation of Bolshevism without being weighed down by all the preachiness of her later works.
Read The Fountainhead the summer before my sophmore year in university, while “backpacking through Europe”. I have fond memories of reading it on a giant rock in Cinqueterre in Italy while having no where to sleep (no youth hostels). When I got back to Minnesota, I briefly described my life as the pre- and post-Fountainhead years. lol. I read Atlas Shrugged the following summer (2002, I think) while studying abroad in Ireland. I influenced two girls in whom I was interested to read them. One a crazy feminist, the other an artsy type. I eventually got over my obsession with Ayn Rand, but in the 90s, it seemed that everyone who was slightly intello went through a Rand phase. Though the books are not without merit. I think what made me get more or less disillusioned with her was that movie The Passion of Ayn Rand. The whole Nathaniel Brandon affair seemed to discredit her somewhat.
Interesting side note, Rand is pretty much unknown outside of the English-speaking world. Her books weren’t even translated into French until not too long ago (I wanted to give them to French/French Canadian friends).
“Rand is pretty much unknown outside of the English-speaking world”
She was pretty obscure in England, when I was a lad. The only time I came across her books in my home town was at a street stall. It had a few American paperbacks for sale, with Ayn Rand sitting alongside Edgar Cayce. Giving them a glance, I assumed they were both weird cult leaders.
Never read her novels, but later in life I did sample some of her non-fiction titles, which contain perceptive criticism of leftist ideas. I must give Cayce a read one day . . .
I believe that. I remember looking for English language copies of Rand’s novels in London in 2001 or 2002, when I couldn’t find French translations, and there it was hard to find. I ended up finding a small black paperback of The Fountainhead looking like it was from the 1970s.
“Rand is pretty much unknown outside of the English-speaking world.”
Though I’m not an objectivist nor a randroid, I’ve read most of Rand’s works aeons ago with no need for the few existing French translations. This allowed me to write a few comments about her here :
http://guerrecivileetyaourtallege3.hautetfort.com/archive/2017/09/26/le-jeu-des-deux-images-287-5983640.html
Sorry, it’s in French. 😉 For the unlikely curious ones, translation with Google Translate seems adequate.
I’ve read all of Rand’s novels and some of the nonfiction. I’d say she’s an important writer with lots of good points, though I was never all the way in. My favorite was Atlas Shrugged, followed by the underrated classic We the Living. I’d say The Fountainhead was worth a read, though it’s difficult to get over how irrational Dominique acts much of the time.
About the “general feeling of benevolence” and its absence today: ironically, today we hear about nothing but “loving everyone”, “we are the world” etc.
The problem is that actual compassion requires, as you say, the feeling that “he’s just like me” which requires some degree of similarity, in real life. Hence, precisely not multiculturalism, diversity, integration, One World, etc.
The liberal who “loves everyone” actually doesn’t (and I’m not the first one to notice that liberals tend to be real shits in real life), but by making the over-extended claim of “loving everyone” he gains moral brownie points (or “social credit” as in China). “I love more people than you do!”
Someone who truly “loved everyone” would be a sucker, and likely not last very long, nor would a society of such people. Dostoevsky portrays such a person as his titular “Idiot” which of course comes from the Greek idiotes, someone not taking part in society (like idiolect or idiocyncratic). As Walter Kaufmann notes, this is why Nietzsche calls Jesus an idiot (in The Antichrist): not because he’s stupid but because his way of life is a-social.
Figures like Christ or the Buddha — saints — are ideals not because it’s warm and snuggly to love everyone, but because, as Schopenhauer would say, they have overcome the illusion of the principle of individuation. They have become superhuman, and presumably care not if they are robbed or killed.
Though a good regulatory ideal, no functioning society could work like that, which is why Hindu and Buddhist countries have armies and police, and Zen monks supported Hirohito; even the Cathars had an army to fight against the Catholic army.
The liberal wants the glory of being a saint, but without the hard work involved in becoming a saint and then living like one; and in the process, is chipping away at the real social bonds that enable societies to work and protect themselves: replace police with social workers and then open the borders. I mean, that’s what we’d want, and they’re just like us!
It all goes back to Protestantism, which wanted to return to “original Christianity,” which might have worked in a desert commune; the Catholic and Orthodox “compromises with paganism” were necessary to create and maintain a functioning society.
On the other hand, perhaps we have an enemy that is deliberately exploiting our expansive sense of community, while zealously keeping itself apart? Now, who could that be?
*The Fountainhead* is probably Rand’s best work, whatever its literary flaws. Many speeches are excellent — though usually considered too long by many (*Atlas Shrugged*’s ones being even more verbose !) — as are many scenes. Among them, this one, where trash press mogul Gail Wynand reminds his employees of their mission and their target :
//
One day he brought into the office a man he had picked off the street. It was an ordinary man, neither well-dressed nor shabby, neither tall nor short, neither dark nor quite blond ; he had the kind of face one could not remember even while looking at it. He was frightening by being so totally indifferentiated; he lacked even the positive distinction of a half-wit. Wynand took him through the building, introduced him to every member of the staff and let him go. Then Wynand called his staff together and told them : “When in doubt about your work, remember that man’s face. You’re writing for him.”
“But, Mr. Wynand,” said a young editor, “one can’t remember his face.”
“That’s the point,” said Wynand.
//
As a former journalist, I appreciated. I’ve seen a few of our readers and read their mails : anonymous and gray indeed. No hope of Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces”, but Raspail’s *Septentrion* Rudeau faces.
In *The early Ayn Rand*, the short story “Her second career” is to be read. It may be the only occasion Rand admitted the role of luck in a existence.
I never read The Fountainhead, but I did read We the Living and slogged through John Galt’s speech when I read Atlas Shrugged.
We the Living was my favorite of two books I have read, only because it was half as long as Atlas Shrugged and I was spared a John Galt type speech.
In all seriousness, while I moved past my “Libertarian” laissez-faire phase, Rand does a good job of critiquing communism and collectivism, particularly in We the Living, which is essentially and autobiography.
Rand came from a well-to-do bourgeois family if I remember correctly, and they fled after the Bolsheviks took control. Her perspective on that era is important, despite the Jewish taint that her Objectivism suffers from.
In *We the Living*, the ending has a nice “Live Free, Die Well” tone — victory in defeat. With a sword in hand, Kira would have become the Viking which inspired her (in *The Early Ayn Rand*, read “Kira’s Viking” short story about a Viking laughing at kings, at priests and at men — almost howardian a character, at least a western one).
//
She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity — did it matter ? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
//
Ayn Rand’s writings are often silly, but there is a purity of intention in The Fountainhead that makes it survive as a readable classic. Editors were correct to cut out any Nietzschean or atheistical bumpf. The characters are enough. Howard Roark is a hero, Peter Keating is pathetic, Gail Wynand is a well-intentioned sell-out, Dominique Francon is a weak-willed idealist who takes a while to see the light.
The puzzling character is Ellsworth Toohey. He is vaguely based on Harold Laski (more obviously in the attenuated film version than in the book) but Rand doesn’t dig into his backstory. Laski was a first-generation Manchester Jew, prominent enough to be a visiting lecturer at Harvard and longtime professor at the London School of Economics. (Joseph P. Kennedy sent both his eldest sons to LSE to learn at Laski’s knee, so they’d understand sinister Marxism from the fountainhead, as it were.) But like many Rand characters, Toohey is depicted as just a generic Irish-American intellectual, with no rhyme or reason behind his crackbrained posturing.
“Ayn Rand’s writings are often silly” : indeed. For lack of time, I’ll use a Google translation, please forgive me : “With Ayn Rand, the theses are *very* simple (which does not prevent the Randian cultists from needing intermediaries to understand the holy writings of their divinity!), the characters (kind supermen or evil parasites) are carved with a rough billhook (the relationships between men and women are sometimes completely grotesque), the writing is flat and elementary (close to the one used in *pulps* of the 1930s, including *Anthem* whose style is not biblical but simply clumsy, despite a good initial idea, poorly exploited). However, the strange strength of his two best texts (*The fountainhead* and *Atlas shrugged*) cannot be denied, which makes us forget all their faults, the first of all being the tiresome repetition of almost identical developments, notably in *Atlas shrugged* ( you have to be a *true believer* like Mr. Peikoff to believe that nothing is useless in the sacred texts of the idol). Anger is sometimes a good advisor: divinely inspired by her fierce hatred of collectivism and egalitarianism, Rand the romantic formulated judicious reflections, imagined extraordinary scenes (the factory where Galt works became a communist utopia, Anconia and the nationalization of his copper mine, Toohey and his presentation to Keating), wrote memorable speeches (Roark’s pleading) which we take pleasure in discovering and rereading, if only for their *radical* opposition to the terrifying and suffocating *conformism* (this is the only and simple possible translation for “political correctness” instead of the expressions “political correctness” and “intellectual terrorism”) which reigns unchallenged, and increasingly, in contemporary societies. She even foresaw the terrible decay of social institutions as well as the panic of a state (I refuse to put a capital letter here) increasingly tyrannical as it sees its enemies more numerous and must fall. the mask of his feigned benevolence.”
About Toohey, I’d say there’s a very good reason for him to be what he is : a lucid jealousy. He knows he’s not of the creative kind (he can pass exams needing only memory, but not logic and not the ability to discover) ; thus he hates all creators equally. Contrarily to every normal being who merely wants to control his own life and not the lives of others, he wants everyone to obey (him or society, this is the same). Hence this scene between him and Keating :
//
“Why do you want to kill Howard?”
“I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped–and alive. He’ll get up when they tell him to. He’ll eat what they give him. He’ll move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told. He’ll walk to the jute mill, when he’s told, and he’ll work as he’s told. They’ll push him, if he doesn’t move fast enough, and they’ll slap his face when they feel like it, and they’ll beat him with rubber hose if he doesn’t obey. And he’ll obey. He’ll take orders. He’ll take orders!”
//
*Mother* state says it clearly and openly : “You will obey me !” (“for the greater good”, “for the climate” and other blatant lies) because “Can you rule a thinking man? We don’t want any thinking men.”
Even despicable Toohey has a tiny glimpse of humanity when he says (but he may be lying just in order to make himself better than he is). Adressing to Keating who betrayed Roark once more, he says :
//
“If you want to know how hard it is, I’ll tell you: right now I want to burn this paper. Make what you wish of that. I don’t claim too great a credit, because I know that tomorrow I’ll send this to the district attorney. Roark will never know it-and it would make no difference to him if he knew-but in the truth of things, there was one moment when I wanted to burn this paper.”
//
Toohey’s last appearance is a complete literary and psychological failure :
//
But Mr. Talbot as a man?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “What’s his particular god? What would he go to pieces without?
//
A real hidden high-level master in power (and even a mere journalist) would not have to ask such questions.
Royalists disappointed with their king used to say “Vive le roi quand même !”, “Long live the King, anyway !” The same applies to Rand.
Sorry for the too numerous quotes, but I’m of the “tolle, lege” school. 😉
It has been a long time since I read “The Fountainhead” but I did like it although it was too long. I never tried to read “Atlas S” although I know that most scholars of Rand consider that book was her masterpiece. I had a friend who was getting into Libertarianism and he was try to get through “Atlas” but was struggling. I told him that there a movie about “Atlas” coming out. I don’t know if it ever did. He said “wow, there is a movie. Why didn’t you tell me.” There is a movie called “The Passion of Ayn Rand” which is a bio of her that is pretty interesting.
“His two best texts”: Well holy good night you did use Google Translate. From French?
I had to look up “billhook.” I saw one a couple of days ago in a caption but didn’t know what it was.
I thought Rand’s plotting and characterization in The Fountainhead was well done. Atlas Shrugged was too much of a muchness, Rand writing for her frenetic, cigarette-smoking acolytes.
One of the delights of the first book, for me, was seeing her attempts to interpret and draw a heroic America. The simulacrum is a little off, of course, like an Eton in Kathmandu, but you get to see what really stands out in a foreigner’s (or in Russian Jewish) perception. She’d heard expressions she probably didn’t understand, e.g., the “cold water flat,” in one of Howard Roark’s little lectures—apparently assuming it’s a kind of slum tenement instead of merely an apartment where your electric and gas bill include the cost of a hot-water heater. Her notion of America was right up there with Louis B. Mayer’s, only even more derivative because she took most of her impressions from the silver screen.
The complaint that her characters are unrealistic or two-dimensional is a common one, but I put them in the same category as the snobbish “Mr. Dickens could never draw a gentleman.” You need to caricature your puppets slightly so their motives are clear and memorable.
I’m a stove checker too.
It’s really a pity that life-changing reading experiences like these only happen in youth, at least in this shattering intensity. The rest of your life you will warm your soul with this ever-diminishing, ever-fading glow, even if your opinions mature and change a lot.
I have never read either Fountainhead or Atlas, but I keep on being fond of Ayn Rand because of the 1949 film version with Gary Cooper. What do you think of it, Jef?
I like the film version quite a lot, though it is not without its flaws. Rand did an intelligent job of distilling the essence of the novel into a 2 hour movie. However, in the process her message became more blunt, obvious, and heavy-handed. This is especially true of the things the negative characters say. E.g., “Why take chances when you can stand in the middle?” or: “Do you wish to defy our common standards?!?!” The film is ultrastylized and some view it as a camp classic. I think there are some genuinely moving scenes. The BW photography is good. The music score by Max Steiner is one of his best. The acting is so-so; the performers tend to overplay or underplay their parts. Cooper is okay, but clearly didn’t know what to make of Roark. Douglas plays Toohey as too openly villainous. Neal is appropriately neurotic as Dominique. Overall, I have great affection for the film. And I don’t think it deserved the opprobrium Rand heaped on it in later years.
As an undergraduate in the ’60’s in the onslaught of liberalism everywhere, Atlas Shrugged hit me like a thunderclap and changed my world view forever. I read Rand’s other novels and much of her non-fiction work, essays collected in books and published in her newsletter of which I was a reader. It was like a breath of fresh air, a rational, well spoken opposition and alternative to thread bare platitudes and mushiness of 60’s liberalism and worship of the USSR.
I also read Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek and other acolytes of the “Austrial School” of economics and became personally acquainted with her former colleague, Nathaniel Branden. I’ve changed a lot of my views since then, but I still remember how liberating it was to read a morally confident writer challenging the prevailing “collectivism” of the day. She never talked about race, as far as I know, but did denounce racism. Back then whites were 90% of the population and white genocide was incomprehensible.
As long as it was, the theme of Atlas Shrugged was the role of intelligence in civilization and what happens when intelligent people go “on strike” by withdrawing their participation from civilization. It collapses. This is unfolding before out eyes today, not because intelligent people are going out on strike, but because they’re being hunted down and “cancelled.”
In Atlas Shrugged Rand’s band of people joint together and found a colony where they can survive and bide their while civilization collapses on the outside. At some point they will come out of seclusion and help rebuild it. In Atlas Shrugs decline is not reversed but allowed to run its course in order the set the stage for a re-birth by survivors. Whether the decline of own civilization can be reversed or must be allowed to run its natural course is one of the questions we face.
Thank you. Your reaction is veru much like my own.
I enjoyed this essay/memoir a lot, and especially the author’s openness and how literature defines his growth. Very engaging. Ayn Rand discovered Nietzsche when she was a college student at Petrograd University. She also liked film epics like Lubitsch’s Madame Du Berry and Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, which might explain the epic style of her novels. Strangely, when she went to Hollywood, she stared at Cecil B. DeMille, who, intrigued, offered her a lift. He put her on as a screenwriter. None of her scripts were filmed.
Rand said in her notes that “The first purpose of the book (The Fountainhead) is a defense of Egotism in its real meaning.”
Otto Friedrich wrote City of nets, a very readable book of 1940’s Hollywood, and writes of Rand:
Rand, while in Hollywood, spoke with a female executive and said “Can you tell me what you want? what is your goal in life?” The woman replied “I’ll tell you what I want. If nobody owns an automobile, then I want to have one automobile. If some people have one, then I want to have two.”
“I see,” said Miss Rand, dismayed at the pointlessness of such a goal. Her ambition was a relentless pursuit of the truth, regardless of material rewards.
As Friedrich wrote: “In the spirit of the times, she turned these contrasting female dummies into contrasting male dummies. Thus were born Howard Roark, Peter Keating and Dominique. While Rand opposed communism, she depicts businessmen in The Fountainhead as very philistine. Because she was a right-wing polemicist, she was brought before HUAC as a friendly witness to note communist influence in Hollywood. She claims the 1944 film Song of Russia was full of Soviet propaganda.
The Fountainhead sold little, but picked up and Hollywood wanted to film it. The original stars were to be Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck, but later the actors were Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, as well as Raymond Massey.
Rand insisted on total control over her script. No rewrites were allowed, and actors improvising were forbidden. The movie stands as she wrote it. As Friedrich wrote:
“Perhaps that counts for the listless quality in this expensively glossy production. Her erotic imagery, however, was faithfully preserved.”
As Norma Sayre said: “Cooper played all his love scenes with all the sexuality of an ironing board. Only those who have read the novel could have followed the tormented logic of the script. The screen version can be revered as one of the funniest films of any period.”
I did actually see The Fountainhead at a showing when I was in college, and there were a lot of twittering from the audience.
You might also be interested in Ayn Rand’s play The Night of January 16th, where a jury is taken from the audience, and they give the verdict of who the murderer in the play is.
It used to get a lot of productions in my youth, especially in small town theater groups.
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