St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and
Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The
third was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have
thought so too. In 1998 readers responding to a Modern Library poll
identified Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as the two greatest
novels of the twentieth century—surpassing Ulysses, To the Lighthouse
and Invisible Man. In 1991 a survey by the Library of Congress and the
Book-of-the-Month Club found that with the exception of the Bible, no
book has influenced more American readers than Atlas Shrugged.
Thomas Hobbes sensed the revolutionary impulses of early modern Europe
and transformed them into a defense of the most hidebound form of
rule.
One of those readers might well have been Farrah Fawcett. Not long
before she died, the actress called Rand a "literary genius" whose
refusal to make her art "like everyone else's" inspired Fawcett's
experiments in painting and sculpture. The admiration, it seems, was
mutual. Rand watched Charlie's Angels each week and, according to
Fawcett, "saw something" in the show "that the critics didn't."
She described the show as a "triumph of concept and casting." Ayn
said that while Angels was uniquely American, it was also the
exception to American television in that it was the only show to
capture true "romanticism"—it intentionally depicted the world not as
it was, but as it should be. Aaron Spelling was probably the only
other person to see Angels that way, although he referred to it as
"comfort television."
So taken was Rand with Fawcett that she hoped the actress (or if not
her, Raquel Welch) would play the part of Dagny Taggart in a TV
version of Atlas Shrugged on NBC. Unfortunately, network head Fred
Silverman killed the project in 1978. "I'll always think of 'Dagny
Taggart' as the best role I was supposed to play but never did,"
Fawcett said.
Rand's following in Hollywood has always been strong. Barbara Stanwyck
and Veronica Lake fought to play the part of Dominique Francon in the
movie version of The Fountainhead. Never to be outdone in that
department, Joan Crawford threw a dinner party for Rand in which she
dressed as Francon, wearing a streaming white gown dotted with
aquamarine gemstones. More recently, the author of The Virtue of
Selfishness and the statement "if civilization is to survive, it is
the altruist morality that men have to reject" has found an unlikely
pair of fans in the Hollywood humanitarian set. Rand "has a very
interesting philosophy," says Angelina Jolie. "You re-evaluate your
own life and what's important to you." The Fountainhead "is so dense
and complex," marvels Brad Pitt, "it would have to be a six-hour
movie." (The 1949 film version has a running time of 113 minutes, and
it feels long.) Christina Ricci claims that The Fountainhead is her
favorite book because it taught her that "you're not a bad person if
you don't love everyone." Rob Lowe boasts that Atlas Shrugged is "a
stupendous achievement, and I just adore it." And any boyfriend of Eva
Mendes, the actress says, "has to be an Ayn Rand fan."
But Rand, at least according to her fiction, shouldn't have attracted
any fans at all. The central plot device of her novels is the conflict
between the creative individual and the hostile mass. The greater the
individual's achievement, the greater the mass's resistance. As Howard
Roark, The Fountainhead's architect hero, puts it:
The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the
inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new
thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The
first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered
impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was
considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They
fought, they suffered and they paid.
Rand clearly thought of herself as one of these creators. In an
interview with Mike Wallace she declared herself "the most creative
thinker alive." That was in 1957, when Arendt, Quine, Sartre, Camus,
Lukács, Adorno, Murdoch, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Rawls, Anscombe and
Popper were all at work. It was also the year of the first performance
of Endgame and the publication of Pnin, Doctor Zhivago and The Cat in
the Hat. Two years later, Rand told Wallace that "the only philosopher
who ever influenced me" was Aristotle. Otherwise, everything came "out
of my own mind." She boasted to her friends and to her publisher at
Random House, Bennet Cerf, that she was "challenging the cultural
tradition of two and a half thousand years." She saw herself as she
saw Roark, who said, "I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no
tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one." But tens of
thousands of fans were already standing with her. In 1945, just two
years after its publication, The Fountainhead sold 100,000 copies. In
1957, the year Atlas Shrugged was published, it sat on the New York
Times bestseller list for twenty-one weeks.
Rand may have been uneasy about the challenge her popularity posed to
her worldview, for she spent much of her later life spinning tales
about the chilly response she and her work had received. She falsely
claimed that twelve publishers rejected The Fountainhead before it
found a home. She styled herself the victim of a terrible but
necessary isolation, claiming that "all achievement and progress has
been accomplished, not just by men of ability and certainly not by
groups of men, but by a struggle between man and mob." But how many
lonely writers emerge from their study, having just written "The End"
on the last page of their novel, to be greeted by a chorus of
congratulations from a waiting circle of fans?
Had she been a more careful reader of her work, Rand might have seen
this irony coming. However much she liked to pit the genius against
the mass, her fiction always betrayed a secret communion between the
two. Each of her two most famous novels gives its estranged hero an
opportunity to defend himself in a lengthy speech before the untutored
and the unlettered. Roark declaims before a jury of "the hardest
faces" that includes "a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a
gardener and three factory workers." John Galt takes to the airwaves
in Atlas Shrugged, addressing millions of listeners for hours on end.
In each instance, the hero is understood, his genius acclaimed, his
alienation resolved. And that's because, as Galt explains, there are
"no conflicts of interest among rational men"—which is just a Randian
way of saying that every story has a happy ending.
The chief conflict in Rand's novels, then, is not between the
individual and the masses. It is between the demigod-creator and all
those unproductive elements of society—the intellectuals, bureaucrats
and middlemen—that stand between him and the masses. Aesthetically,
this makes for kitsch; politically, it bends toward fascism.
Admittedly, the argument that there is a connection between fascism
and kitsch has taken a beating over the years. Yet surely the example
of Rand—and the publication of two new Rand biographies, Anne Heller's
Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the
Marketщ۬is suggestive enough to put the question of that connection
back on the table.
She was born on February 2, three weeks after the failed revolution of
1905. Her parents were Jewish. They lived in St. Petersburg, a city
long governed by hatred of the Jews. By 1914 its register of
anti-Semitic restrictions ran to nearly 1,000 pages, including one
statute limiting Jews to no more than 2 percent of the population.
They named her Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum.
When she was 4 or 5 she asked her mother if she could have a blouse
like the one her cousins wore. Her mother said no. She asked for a cup
of tea like the one being served to the grown-ups. Again her mother
said no. She wondered why she couldn't have what she wanted. Someday,
she vowed, she would. In later life, Rand would make much of this
experience. Heller does too: "The elaborate and controversial
philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties
was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of
this project."
The story, as told, is pure Rand. There's the focus on a single
incident as portent or precipitant of dramatic fate. There's the
elevation of childhood commonplace to grand philosophy. What child,
after all, hasn't bridled at being denied what she wants? Though Rand
seems to have taken youthful selfishness to its outermost limits—as a
child she disliked Robin Hood; as a teenager she watched her family
nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater—her solipsism
was neither so rare nor so precious as to warrant more than the usual
amount of adolescent self-absorption. There is, finally, the
inadvertent revelation that one's worldview constitutes little more
than a case of arrested development. "It is not that chewing gum
undermines metaphysics," Max Horkheimer once wrote about mass culture,
"but that it is metaphysics—this is what must be made clear." Rand
made it very, very clear.
