On a chilly day last fall in the midst of the economic implosion, I was ambling disconsolately through my neighborhood independent bookstore (that quaint phrase is going to “date” this review in the next few years, I fear) when a gorgeous, rust-colored, graphic and sensuously-thick retro paperback caught my eye. I plucked it off the shelf and hefted it in my hand. It was the Plume Centennial Edition of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943), so thick and filled with gravitas, deckle-edged pages and portrait of the dark-eyed, raven-haired author on the back, smiling faintly.
I flipped open to the Introduction and scanned several paragraphs, immediately taken in by the forthright voice: “Certain writers, of who I am one,” Rand wrote, “do not live, think or write on the range of the moment. Novels, in the proper sense of the word, are not written to vanish in a month or a year.” I nodded in agreement, took the book home, and dove headfirst into the sprawling world of Howard Roark, architect – the man whose only aim in life was to build ever higher. Just two chapters in, I realized the epic saga reminded me of a vintage Hollywood movie set in a chrome-and-glass Gotham City, where skyscrapers loom larger than the protagonists’ egos.
The dense saga propelled forward, its Art Deco machine-like momentum fuelled by an incessant dialectical struggle. Conflict rising and sinking like waves in a hurricane…how are the mighty fallen, yet it is their fate to aspire nevertheless…men and women blinded by love, hurt by excesses of passion, distracted by money…Citizen Kane on steroids. Most of the time, I felt Rand successfully drew me in with her uniquely-overheated language, where there were only gradations of bombast – sensational in the fullest sense. Her failings came when she paused to be certain that I “got” it. “What is the essence of religion?” Mr. Hopton Stoddard asks Howard Roark. “The great aspiration of the human spirit toward the highest, the noblest, the best. The human spirit as the creator and the conqueror of the ideal. The great life-giving force of the universe…” etc. etc. Why, I asked myself, does she have to reiterate what might just as easily read in Bartlett’s Quotations?
However – and this is the big “however” –I did not abandon Rand, but moved on to Atlas Shrugged (1957), more than four hundred pages longer and touted by the author as her apotheosis. Where The Fountainhead is all verticals and limestone pillars, and exhilarating elevator rides to the highest floors of luxury buildings, Atlas is linear, an epic of converging steel railroad tracks, parallel lines meeting needle-like at the unseen opening of a tunnel. Where Fountainhead centered upon a paradigmatic male figure, Atlas gives the reader Dagny Taggart, a closer approximation of the author herself: idealistic, obsessed, determined to make her way, knocking men over like bowling pins.
The “World” in the title of Anne C. Heller’s definitive new book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, is the world of narrative. Growing up Jewish in pogrom-tortured Russia, Victor Hugo was Rand’s (whose birth name was Alissa Rosenbaum) idol. It was in Hugo that she first became acquainted with characters who came to life in books but could never have survived real life. From her mother, Rand took the indefatigable strength of character and the feisty, intransigent perspective on society as an environment in which only “the Best People” were blessed with imagination and the drive to execute their ideals. Where else to enact this unreal drama than in America, land of clichéd opportunity? Where else in America but in Hollywood could a penniless immigrant woman realize her fantasy of writing screenplays as Rand did before writing the novels that made her famous?
Heller artfully positions Rand as “the Agatha Christie of capitalism.” This is precisely on-target. Reading this biography, we gradually come to know a woman short of stature but tall in ambition; brainy and libidinous; a romantic who “hated Emerson”; brazenly irreverent toward all gatekeepers of consumer culture, yet not afraid of her own success; immersed in the craft yet never too moralistic to avoid amphetamines if they got her through the next one hundred pages; married to a beautiful and passive husband, and falling into the arms of another man twenty-five years her junior who became the bearer of her flame and, in the end, the cause of her ultimate unhappiness.
The turbulence of Rand’s life comes through in Heller’s incisive, at times lyrical, always unsparing through-line. Heller’s ultimate goal with this book is to drive readers back to the novels with a fresh eye. I know in my case – true confession – she has succeeded. As you could probably tell from my cursory description of Atlas Shrugged, I only read about a third of the book before my quotidian life got in the way and I put it aside. But tonight I’m going back to where I left off: ”It took an instant for Rearden to tear off his coat, seize a pair of goggles from the first man in sight, and join Francisco at the mouth of the furnace. There was no time to speak, feel or wonder…”
If recent sales trends for Rand’s books continue, more than two million copies of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead will be sold in America this year. We all need a welcome, erudite, impeccably-constructed reintroduction to Rand’s achingly-flawed, opulent and weirdly-moving novels. We will find it in Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made. By Anne C. Heller. Illustrated. 567 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $35.
.jpg)
