Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (16 page)

Exhausted but happy, Rand decamped to Isabel Paterson’s country house in Connecticut with Frank in tow. There she shocked Paterson by announcing she expected sales of at least 100,000. Otherwise she would consider herself a failure, Rand tactlessly informed Paterson, author of eight novels, none of which had sold more than several thousand copies. Although Paterson had been unfailingly supportive of Rand’s writing, she was far from confident that Rand’s novel would sell.
The Fountainhead
was not to her taste—too many adjectives, too much drama. She even declined to review the book for the
Herald Tribune,
a decision she carefully kept from Rand.

Rand had better luck with the
New York Times,
which gave
The Fountainhead
the best review of her career, in May, just a month after the book was released. Lorine Pruette called Rand “a writer of great power”: “She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly.” Pruette went beyond the novel’s style and also praised its content, writing that readers would be inspired to think “through some of the basic concepts of our times” and noting, “This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.” A host of lesser newspapers echoed her words. A reviewer in Pittsburgh said
The Fountainhead
“could conceivably change the life of anyone who read it,” and the Providence
Journal
wrote, “With one book [Rand] at once takes a position of importance among contemporary American novelists.” The exceptions came primarily from more highbrow literary outlets like the
Times Literary Supplement,
which found, “Miss Rand can only create gargoyles, not characters,” and
The Nation,
where Diana Trilling sniffed about the book’s caricatures.
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By the summer
The Fountainhead
began to appear on best-seller lists, driven both by review attention and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Paterson undoubtedly played a role in the book’s early success, for although she had declined to review
The Fountainhead
she plumped Rand from the safe distance of her column, mentioning her eight times in 1943.
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In these years Paterson was at the height of her fame as a book reviewer, and “Turns with a Bookworm” was valuable publicity for Rand. Sales continued to grow into the fall, a development that confirmed Rand’s expectations but confounded most others, including the business office of her publisher. Against the advice of Rand’s editor, the press had printed only a small first run, expecting sales of ten thousand books at maximum. Soon they were scrambling to keep up with demand. By year’s end they had sold nearly fifty thousand copies and gone through six printings. That Bobbs-Merrill failed to anticipate the book’s success is understandable.
The Fountainhead
is a strange book, long, moody, feverish. Even after Rand’s furious last-minute editing it took up nearly seven hundred pages.

What was it that readers found in
The Fountainhead
’s pages? At the most basic level the book told an exciting story, and told it well. When freighted with Rand’s symbolic connotations, architecture became exciting and lively. In one striking scene Rand portrays a rebellious action by
Roark that wins him his first major client, Austen Heller. While Heller is looking at a watercolor drawing of his proposed house, which has drawn on Roark’s ideas but blended them with those of other architects, Roark suddenly intervenes, destroying the watercolor by demonstrating how he had originally designed the house.

Roark turned. He was at the other side of the table. He seized the sketch, his hand flashed forward and a pencil ripped across the drawing, slashing raw black lines over the untouchable watercolor. The lines blasted off the Ionic columns, the pediment, the entrance, the spire, the blinds, the bricks; they flung up two wings of stone; they rent the windows wide; they splintered the balcony and hurled a terrace over the sea. It was being done before the others had grasped the moment when it began. . . . Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction needed; it was like a handshake. (126)

On the spot, Heller offers Roark his first major commission. Rand’s tense, dramatic description brings the moment alive in all its emotional significance. As even the snooty
Times Literary Supplement
admitted, “She contrives from somewhere a surprising amount of readability.”
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With several plays, movie scenarios, and a novel behind her, Rand had developed a fast-paced, sweeping style that easily sustained her readers’ interest.

Yet for many readers
The Fountainhead
was far more than a story. The book inspired a range of passionate reactions, as can be seen in the large volume of fan mail Rand began to receive.
⁴⁴
In breathless, urgent letters, readers recounted the impact the book had on their lives. For many
The Fountainhead
had the power of revelation. As one reader told Rand after finishing the book, echoing DeWitt Emery’s sentiments, “It is like being awake for the first time.” This metaphor of awakening was among the most common devices readers used to describe the impact of Rand’s writing. Adolescents responded with particular fervor to her insistence that dreams, aspirations, and the voice of self be heeded, whatever the consequences. An eighteen-year-old aspiring writer clung to the book as to a lifeline: “But now, when I reach the point—and I reach it often these days—where the pain can go down no further; I read part, any part, of
The Fountainhead
.” Rand had anticipated responses like these, and indeed hoped to stir her reader’s deepest feelings. Writing to Emery
shortly after the book’s release she told him, “It’s time we realize—as the Reds do—that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an
emotional,
as well as intellectual response to our cause.” Sales of
The Fountainhead
confirmed Rand’s understanding. Rather than tapering off after reviews and commentary had faded from public memory, the book’s sales increased steadily year after year. Readers were discovering the book, experiencing its powers, and pressing copies on all their friends.
⁴⁵

Among the most dedicated fans were many who used Rand’s characters as templates for self-assessment and self-improvement. Worried by Rand’s condemnation of “second-handers,” they wondered if they fell into this category. An army lieutenant confessed to Rand, “However, admire him and agree with Roark as I do, I haven’t the personal guts, if you call it that, to emulate him. . . . Perhaps I am, after all, closer to Gail Wynand, because I have no reason to believe I could hold out longer than he did.” Others credited
The Fountainhead
with rescuing them from conformity or surrender. After finishing the book one reader told Rand, “I was profoundly challenged and frightened. The challenge has outlived the fright. . . . Thank you.” A young woman compared herself to each of the book’s characters in turn, finally concluding, “I am myself—believe in that, living by what I really want.” By compelling readers to accept or reject parallels between themselves and her characters, Rand inspired many readers to reflect on their own choices and motivations in life.
⁴⁶

For others the book was a more intellectual experience. Rand’s rejection of traditional morality and her counterintuitive theory of selfishness provoked many readers to thought, debate, and discussion. Her book was particularly popular among soldiers, who found in Rand’s enormous tome both relief from boredom and a welcome meditation on the reasons for U.S. involvement in the war. As a serviceman stationed in Texas put it, “Though I do not entirely agree with hypotheses established in this book, I must admit that this material warrants much serious consideration. Indeed, superficially it appears to offer a logical recapitulation of the forces behind present-day global turmoil.” Several letter writers told Rand that her novel was a hot commodity among their military units, eagerly passed from reader to reader. An army private wrote, “[
The Fountainhead
was] giving my brain some well needed
exercise,” and a book reviewer from Boston recounted, “My husband and I lived in [
The Fountainhead
] for several weeks, discussed it frontwards and backwards, in and out, the ‘what’ the ‘why’ the ‘wherefore.’” Even those who disagreed with Rand enjoyed thinking through the questions she raised. This intellectual excitement was engendered by Rand’s careful encoding of ideas in a fictional plot. Many who would never have read a treatise on ethics or politics found the novel drew them quickly into the world of ideas.
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From the start Rand hoped to twin the emotional and intellectual parts of the novel. Ideally readers would experience strong feelings of identification with both her characters and her political views. She told DeWitt Emery, “When you read it, you’ll see what an indictment of the New Deal it is, what it does to the ‘humanitarians’ and what effect it could have on the next election—although I never mentioned the New Deal by name.”
⁴⁸
Rand’s belief that fiction could have important political consequences sprang from her Russian background and her careful observations of the New York left. As anti-Communists were hustled out of Leningrad State University, Rand had realized that the most innocuous of literary works could have political meaning. She kept this in mind during her first years in the United States, when she sent her family American novels to translate into Russian. These books were an important source of income for the Rosenbaums, but they had to pass the Soviet censors. Rand became an expert in picking out which type of story would gain the approval of the Communists. These same works, she believed, were slowly poisoning the American system and had contributed to Willkie’s defeat. “The people are so saturated with the collectivism of New Deal propaganda that they cannot even grasp what Mr. Willkie really stood for,” she wrote in a fund-raising letter. “That propaganda has gone much deeper than mere politics. And it has to be fought in a sphere deeper than politics.”
⁴⁹
The Fountainhead
would expose Americans to values and ideals that supported individualism rather than collectivism.

Plenty of readers understood and embraced
The Fountainhead
’s deeper meaning. In a letter to Rand one woman attacked the Office of Price Administration, a federal government agency established to regulate commodity prices and rents after the war broke out: “I am assuming that you view with growing horror the government’s paternal treatment
of its poor and needy. I do, for when we begin trading our freedom for monetary security, we lose both.” Another confessed, “My hatred of Roosevelt became in time almost a mania. He stood for almost everything I hated. It is quite clear that your own feeling equaled or exceeded mine.” Rand’s individualism ran against the mainstream intellectual currents of her day, but it echoed the common Victorian idea that dependence would create weakness or lead to moral degradation. As a Presbyterian minister from Indiana testified, “In Howard Roark I rediscovered the ‘individual’—the individual I had been brought up to be and believe in, but who had been lost somewhere in the miasma of intellectual, moral, and spiritual confusions spawned in the unhealthy jungle of preachers, professors, and the poverty of the Depression.” Rand was right to sense that there still existed a strong antigovernment tradition in America and an almost instinctual fear of bureaucratization, regulation, and centralization. Even as it promoted a new morality, politically the novel reaffirmed the wisdom of the old ways.
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To those who already leaned libertarian the novel offered a striking counterpoint to traditional ideas of laissez-faire. As she had intended,
The Fountainhead
made individualism a living, breathing faith. Rand’s emphasis on creativity, productivity, and the power of individuals came as a bracing tonic to James Ingebretsen, who was just out of the army when he read
The Fountainhead
and Nock’s
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
. As he explained to a friend, “Howard Roark is the answer to Nock[,] meaning creation, not escape, is the answer to the messy world we are living in. Freedom, not enslavement to others, is the answer for all of us. And so my course is crystal clear to me now.” Shortly after writing this letter Ingebretsen moved to Los Angeles, where he helped organize the Pamphleteers, one of the first libertarian groups founded in the postwar era. Similarly the journalist John Chamberlain found that the combination of old and new solidified his political opinions. Chamberlain read Rand’s book in conjunction with Paterson’s
God of the Machine
and yet a third libertarian book published in 1943, Rose Wilder Lane’s
The Discovery of Freedom
. He remembered that the three writers “turned Nock’s conception of social power into a detailed reality”: “These books made it plain that if life was to be something more than a naked scramble for government favors, a new attitude towards the producer must be created.” In the 1930s Chamberlain had been
known for his mildly socialist leanings, but in the postwar era he would emerge as a high-profile voice of libertarianism, writing for the
Wall Street Journal, Life
, and
Time
.
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The Fountainhead
offered renewed energy to libertarianism at a critical time. Somnolent for years, anti–New Deal groups such as the Committee for Constitutional Government and the American Economic Foundation began to reawaken in the early 1940s. These groups immediately recognized Rand as a kindred spirit. In the fall of 1943 she partook in a published debate sponsored by the American Economic Foundation. Her opponent was Oswald Garrison Villard, former editor of
The Nation,
and the question at hand, “Collectivism or Individualism—which promises postwar progress?” She sold a very condensed version of her “Manifesto” to the Committee for Constitutional Government, which placed it in
Reader’s Digest
as “The Only Road to Tomorrow.” Soon to become a font of popular anti-Communism,
Reader’s Digest
helped Rand become identified as an overtly political author.
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