Photo of Ayn Rand: Photograph by Phyllis Cerf
A NOTE FROM CEO Tal Tsfany
Welcome to the Fall Issue of Ayn Rand Today
This year, during the many events the Ayn Rand Institute produced around the world, I witnessed the enthusiasm of young people for Ayn Rand’s ideas. I got to speak to many of them about the power Objectivism has to help them achieve happiness. ARI instructors Onkar Ghate, Ben Bayer, and Aaron Smith took part in in-person live events full of effervescent hope for a better future that young people seek but only Rand’s vision provides.
We have the rational ideas to fight the horrendous decline we see on campuses and to offer a path to a brighter future. That’s why we are so excited about launching our newest educational programming, which meets students where they are in life.
With Ayn Rand University Flex, our new self-paced educational offering, we can meet the desires of young people and prepare them for a variety of careers. We will be educating more intellectual professionals while also investing in in-depth resources for our future professional intellectuals. You can read more about this program on page 3.
Of course, the foundation of everything we do is focused on promoting Ayn Rand’s life-changing books. This fall, as students return to their classrooms, teachers are ordering classroom books from us, as they have since 2002. We are shipping tens of thousands of Ayn Rand books. Great art has the potential to provide inspiration at pivotal moments in our lives, as it did in Ayn Rand’s life. You can read more about her experience on page 31.
Sharing Ayn Rand’s books and teaching her ideas is made possible by you, our donors. I can think of no better impact to have on the world right now.
Tal Tsfany is President and CEO of the Ayn
Rand Institute.
ARU FLEX:
BY REINIER SCHUUR
In the summer of 2012, I started at the Objectivist Academic Center, the predecessor program to Ayn Rand University.
The value I got from that program is something I continue to benefit from. I had already been consuming ARI’s content, but it was the structured classes, assignments, and expert guidance from ARI’s high-caliber faculty that truly accelerated my understanding of Objectivism.
But for some, that structure can be a barrier to learning with ARI. This is especially the case for busy professionals who would love to learn from ARI’s experts but who do not have the same flexibility they might have had in their early twenties.
This posed a challenge that ARU’s faculty was determined to solve: how can we make ARU’s expertguided content accessible to those who cannot commit to ARU’s structured educational programs? With this question in mind, ARI instructor and fellow Aaron Smith started a pilot program with a select group of busy professionals eager to try out a new education product—one tailored specifically to their needs.
The first step was easy: make sure students had access to world-class content. ARU has accumulated years’ worth of high-quality recorded lectures by our faculty
that have never been released to the wider public. Putting these assets to good use, Smith assigned students to do the readings for and watch the recorded lectures of Onkar Ghate’s linchpin course Seminar on Objectivism. The students could start listening to these lectures and completing the associated assignments at any time, at their own pace.
Ghate’s lectures alone can be life-changing, but to ensure that students got their full impact, we paired them with graded assignments. These question-based assignments are pivotal in helping students internalize class material on a much deeper level. But instead of requiring students to turn in assignments on a weekly basis, we let them submit their work at their own pace If their schedule was packed, they could take a month to make it through a lesson. If they had some free time, they could do two or three assignments in a row.
The final component of this pilot program was weekly discussion sessions where students could discuss previous lectures and receive feedback on their assignments from ARU faculty. They could attend as often or as seldom as they wished.
The pilot program combined the best of both worlds: access to ARU’s best lectures and expert guidance from faculty—with enough flexibility so that even the busiest professional could reap the rewards of studying with us.
The best way to illustrate the outcome of this pilot program is to look at the experience of one of its students. Jackson Ford is a lawyer who defends businesses in court, a professional commitment that regularly requires him to work 60-plus hours a week at unpredictable hours. On top of that, Jackson is a first-time father of a baby girl. If we could develop a program that allowed someone as busy as Jackson to benefit from ARU’s expert-guided content, then we’d know that we had a product that could reach many more like him.
The result? Jackson, along with the other participants of this pilot program, thoroughly enjoyed this new flexible way to access ARU. Jackson was surprised how much he was able to accelerate his learning of Objectivism with just a few hours every week with this flexible model— learning that made a meaningful impact on his life. As Jackson explains, “Discussing Ayn Rand’s essays and the cardinal value of purpose with Aaron Smith enabled me to apply this knowledge to my own life in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to from listening to the lectures alone.”
Ayn Rand University’s expanded educational offerings allows students from anywhere in the world to access ARU’s world-class lectures and expert guidance—part of our mission to spread the life-changing impact of Objectivist philosophy.
Based on the success of this pilot program, Tal Tsfany announced at OCON 2024 the launch of ARU Flex—a growing library of self-paced courses designed to meet the needs of students at every level of familiarity with Ayn Rand. Our first two courses are available now for anyone who wants to take them: Objectivism Through Ayn Rand’s Fiction and Advanced Seminar on Objectivism.
At ARU we are very excited about ARU Flex as a new way to learn and as a means to furthering our mission of advancing Objectivism within the culture.
You can start taking ARU Flex courses today by visiting ARU.AYNRAND.ORG
Reinier Schuur is a junior fellow at ARI working on health policy.
IT IS EARLIER THAN YOU THINK
BY AYN RAND
Photograph by Phyllis Cerf
In 1960 Ayn Rand began making favorable public comments about Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ended up running for president on the Republican ticket in 1964. Goldwater, Rand said, had the potential to become a beacon for American conservatives by taking a “clear-cut, unequivocal stand” in favor of capitalism and freedom. She especially liked his foreign policy, with its proud assertion of American self-interest and self-esteem, and she recommended that her readers vote for him. But when Goldwater rode a landslide to defeat in 1964, Rand issued a sobering assessment of America’s political culture. This essay’s title, “It Is Earlier than You Think,” perfectly encapsulates a key observation: Freedom cannot prevail in practical politics until the way is paved by a cultural movement that makes the case for capitalism on moral-intellectual grounds. Sixty years later, Rand’s philosophic analysis has enduring relevance for thinking about America’s culture. We are pleased to present her essay (published originally in the December 1964 issue of the Objectivist Newsletter) in two parts, with the conclusion to appear in this year’s Annual Report issue of Ayn Rand Today.
Nothing is as futile as a movement without goals, or a crusade without ideals, or a battle without ammunition.
The Objectivist Newsletter began publication in January 1962. The first paragraphs of my first article in the first issue read as follows:
“Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles— specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context.
“Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice.
When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as ‘conservatism.’”
In my lecture “Conservatism: An Obituary,” on December 7, 1960, I said:
“Nothing is as futile as a movement without goals, or a crusade without ideals, or a battle without ammunition. A bad argument is worse than ineffectual: it lends credence to the
Ayn Rand sharply observed that, as a presidential candidate, Sen. Goldwater “had courage, frankness, integrity—and nothing to say.” She writes, “The keynote and danger signal was sounded by the campaign’s slogan: ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ One could hope that this was merely an ill-advised, embarrassing catch phrase. But it wasn’t. Whoever had chosen it meant it. The whole of what was to be a philosophical campaign was devoted to an attempt to by-pass the mind.” (Bettmann via Getty Images)
arguments of your opponents. A halfbattle is worse than none: it does not end in mere defeat—it helps and hastens the victory of your enemies.”
This is the lesson to be learned from the last presidential election. History has seldom offered so clear, awesome and awful a demonstration of that lesson on so large a scale.
It is not necessary to expect full philosophical consistency from a political candidate. But the extent of the philosophical vacuum exhibited
in Barry Goldwater’s campaign was unprecedented. In this respect, his campaign was unique.
It was as if history had adopted the method of a scientific laboratory or of fiction writing: the method of eliminating all the variables and presenting a single attribute in naked, dramatized isolation. In former campaigns, Republican candidates had been guilty of compromise, evasion, cowardice, “me-too’ism.” Barry Goldwater was not; he had courage, frankness, integrity—and nothing to say.
columnist James Reston recognized that the Republican presidential nominee had valuable issues for debate. Reston declared, “Senator Goldwater . . . . has arrested the attention of the nation. He may not have the answers, but at least he has raised some good questions, and the Democrats, if they are wise, will stop moaning about Barry and his allies, and start dealing with his arguments.” (Bettman via Getty Images)
This is what gave the campaign that aura of unreality which now, in retrospect, still makes it hard to believe. None of the usual causes of political disasters were applicable: there were no “vested interests” that could have profited by a campaign of that kind; there were no “practical” reasons for that pointless, aimless performance. There was only one reason: a candidate who had promised to fight on the battlefield of philosophy, but did not know the meaning of that word.
Barry Goldwater did not lack moral courage: what he lacked was intellectual courage—a quality one cannot acquire except from a set of firm philosophical convictions. His past record, in that respect, had been mixed, but immeasurably superior to what emerged in the campaign. He was not a leader but a product of today’s culture. In a fictionlike manner, he was the personified embodiment of a desperate, incoherent, inarticulate public need. When that
Barry Goldwater did not lack moral courage: what he lacked was intellectual courage . . .
to hold its breath respectfully, sensing, rather than knowing, that it needed the kind of crusade he had promised to lead. The attitude, not of his supporters, but of his enemies was particularly significant and gave an indication of what might have been possible.
The entire campaign can be summed up in two quotations from James Reston, the columnist of The N.Y. Times, who is one of the best exponents of the “liberal” consensus.
need threw him to the crest—not of a “mainstream,” but of a churning, direction-less underground current—one of two things had to happen: either the best premises of his mixed ideological equipment had to rise to the occasion and give voice to that current—or, being precariously inadequate, they had to collapse. They collapsed.
There was a brief moment—following his nomination and his acceptance speech—when the country seemed
On July 22, James Reston, who opposed Sen. Goldwater, wrote a column that had an oddly solemn, respectful, almost wistfully hopeful tone. He said, among other things: “Underneath all the popular personal and partisan issues, the Republican Presidential nominee, whether you like him or not, has raised some basic questions that have troubled men since the days of Aristotle.
“What sort of world is this where men aspire to good and yet so often achieve evil? Where lies the source of authority: In the laws of man or nature? What of the relationships of the individual to the community, to the state, and to the eternal? What is man’s place in it all, and how are his ideals, and his values,
related not only to an increasingly complicated and crowded world but to the universe? . . .
“It has been a long time since we have had a really good debate in the United States on the fundamentals of our society. . . . A savage conflict between the parties on ideological grounds cannot be avoided now, but it can have some real advantages. Ideally, the purpose of an election is to clarify and not to confuse the issues, to destroy and not perpetuate illusion, to make a little clearer what we are and where we are.
“Senator Goldwater has set the stage for this. He has offered his choice. He has arrested the attention of the nation. He may not have the answers, but at least he has raised some good questions, and the Democrats, if they are wise, will stop moaning about Barry and his allies, and start dealing with his arguments.”
On October 11, James Reston wrote that Sen. Goldwater’s “campaign has descended from philosophy to wisecracks . . .
“He began with the philosophy of ‘the whole man’ in San Francisco, with Edmund Burke, and the Natural Law, with
It has been a long time since we have had a really good debate in the United States on the fundamentals of our society . . .
Hobbes, and the law of the jungle, with Natural Rights, and Adam Smith, and Locke and the Sanctity of Property, and the inequality of man.
“But he is ending up with Bob Hope and the McCarthy charges of ‘soft on Communism,’ and even with that old gag, originally applied to Nixon: ‘Would you buy a used car from Lyndon Johnson?’”
What took place between these two dates was a fantastic waste of an unrepeatable historical opportunity.
The keynote and danger signal was sounded by the campaign’s slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right.” One could hope that this was merely an illadvised, embarrassing catch phrase. But it wasn’t. Whoever had chosen it meant it.
The whole of what was to be a philosophical campaign was devoted to an attempt to by-pass the mind.
From the height of the loftiest forum on earth, the doorstep to the White House—with the whole country and the whole world stopped to hear him—with the country perishing by default, in blind confusion, and the world snarling its ignorant hatred at the social system it had
never discovered, the American system, the system of freedom: capitalism— after decades of the totalitarian statists’ ferocious struggle to prevent mankind from discovering it—decades of suppressions, misrepresentations, falsehoods, smears—with two months of the world’s attention at his command, two months in which to blast through the muck and proclaim capitalism’s credo to a desperate world—the champion of capitalism was talking about home,
family, prayer and the corruption of government underlings!
The “savage conflict between the parties on ideological grounds” never materialized. There was less ideological content in this campaign than in any of the previous ones. A crusade may be savage, it may be violent, it may be ruthless. But a boring crusade is an incredible contradiction in terms. Yet that is what we witnessed.
Sen. Goldwater making his formal acceptance speech as the Republican nominee for the presidency at the Republican National Convention on July 16, 1964. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
The only “ideology” that the Republican candidate offered us was like a newspaper consisting of headlines over blank spaces where the facts, the proofs, the explanations should have appeared. The headlines were vague generalities—the worn-out bromides of the past thirty years.
“Big Government Is Bad.” Why is it bad? Blank out. “Freedom Is Good.” How does it work? Blank out. “Foreign Policy Must Be Firm.” What does firmness consist of? Blank out. “The Record Of The Present Administration Is Disastrous.” What is that record? Blank out.
Observe also the chaotic make-up of the candidate’s ideological newspaper— the lack of any hierarchical order of importance. On page 1, and without any explanatory or ideological headline—a story proposing to sell the TVA (which is not the worst nor the most urgent example of governmental encroachment). Somewhere on page 27—a headline about “Free Enterprise,” without any story. On page 1, a story proposing to give the NATO commander permission to use “conventional” nuclear weapons (a technical military matter, which civilian voters are not qualified to judge). On
page 28, a headline about “Winning The Cold War,” over a blank space. On page 38, a sub-head announcing that the NATO commander possesses a similar permission already and has possessed it for some time past. Et cetera.
All of this added up to a terrifying jumble of floating abstractions and out-ofcontext, concrete-bound inessentials—an appalling inability to relate abstractions to concretes, or principles to facts— an inability to grasp what constitutes evidence, demonstration, argument, proof—and, consequently, a senseless
All of this added up to a terrifying jumble of floating abstractions and out-of-context, concrete-bound inessentials—an appalling inability to relate abstractions to concretes, or principles to facts . . .
shuttling between arbitrary assertions and irrelevant trivia, and a loud, daily confession of philosophical impotence. There was no discussion of capitalism. There was no discussion of statism. There was no discussion of the blatantly vulnerable record of the government’s policies in the last thirty years. There was no discussion. There were no issues.
In psychological, if not existential, fact, the campaign ended in mid-October, when Senator Goldwater chose to concede his defeat in one of the least
attractive forms possible. It was the form of a truly shameful switch: the attempt to substitute the question of personal “morals” for all the crucial questions of our age, and offer it as the cardinal issue of the campaign.
The man who had promised us “a choice, not an echo”—a choice between freedom or slavery, between capitalism or socialism, between victory or surrender to Soviet Russia—was offering us, instead, a choice between his sidekicks or Mr. Johnson’s, was proclaiming so novel an issue as an “honest” administration versus
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater on the night of the New Hampshire primary, March 10, 1964. (Universal History Archive via Getty Images)
a “dishonest” one, and was warning us that the major threat to our lives and future lay in the personal characters of the Messrs. Baker, Estes and Jenkins.
That was that.
The press had not been fair to Sen. Goldwater and the smear campaign against him had been uncommonly vicious. But a smear does not work and does not stick, unless the victim gives ground for it by his own actions. Nothing that the smear-specialists said about him could ever be as damaging to Sen. Goldwater as that switch to the so-called “morals” issue.
Sen. Goldwater complained that the “trigger-happy” label had hurt his campaign. So it did; and it was a smear. But if one wants to reassure the country and prove that one is not an
advocate of war, one does not do it by such statements as: “Only men without conscience—only men who deny their creator—would initiate any kind of war” (forgetting that the bloodiest wars of history were religious ones)—or: “I want to remind you that I’m a father. I have two sons of military age. I have two sons-in-law of military age. I have grandchildren. I’ve been through a war. I never want to see another one. I understand war. And I never want to see your children or mine ever have to go to war again.” (As if wars were started by the personal whim of rulers and only of childless rulers.)
This leads us to the climax of the campaign (from which the above is a quotation)—to Sen. Goldwater’s last television appearance, on the night before the election. After all of his warnings
Left: President Lyndon B. Johnson during his reelection campaign speaking against Sen. Goldwater for his “dangerous” foreign policies; right: Sen. Goldwater addressing a mixed crowd of supporters and opponents at a campaign event in Ohio in September 1964. (Bettman via Getty images)
about the life-or-death importance of this election, with such issues as freedom, slavery, communist conquest, nuclear annihilation hanging in the balance— what we saw was a group of “folks next door,” placidly exchanging vapid small talk, of a kind which might have been appropriate at the conclusion of a family picnic, but which could hardly be said to suggest an atmosphere of national danger, dedication or solemnity. I hasten to say that I do not mean to imply anything derogatory to the members of Sen. Goldwater’s family: they looked like charming, intelligent people who were as acutely embarrassed by their ordeal as were the members of the TV audience. I mean to place the blame on whoever conceived of that show.
Yet, in a fiction-like way, that show was an appropriate finale: it expressed the
spirit and style of the campaign, it summarized the candidate’s view of the voters he was addressing.
If you were a dramatist, could you invent a better way to dramatize anti-intellectuality?
Unbelievable as it is, Sen. Goldwater seems actually to have believed that philosophy is a matter of the heart, not of the mind, that ideas are of no importance, and that the most profound ideological conflict in history could be won without recourse to the intellect. He believed, apparently, that the principles of “the American way of life” were a kind of self-evident primary, clearly understood and firmly entrenched in the souls of the people, and that a few old-fashioned slogans were sufficient to bring them forth. He believed, apparently, that statism and collectivism were merely the corrupt aberrations of a small, inconsequential minority: of the intellectuals—but that the broad masses had remained pure in heart, loyal to their American “tradition,” and that they needed nothing, in order to save the country, but a chance to rally behind a leader who announced himself as a “conservative.”
To be continued in the next issue of Ayn Rand Today.
LEONARD PEIKOFF ON THE FOUNTAINHEAD
Mayhew
An Interview by Robert
In 2023, ARI obtained special permission to reprint online the contents of four pathbreaking scholarly books on Ayn Rand’s novels. Dozens of chapters from these books have now been republished on New Ideal, making them available for the first time free of charge to a worldwide audience that includes intellectually ambitious young people, students in Ayn Rand University, and Rand fans everywhere. The chapter republished here, from Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” examines the personal meaning of Rand’s first bestseller in the life of her foremost student, Leonard Peikoff. (The chapter is based on a 2005 interview he gave to philosophy professor and ARI board member Robert Mayhew, editor of all four books. Dr. Peikoff read the transcript, which Dr. Mayhew edited, but noted that he had not read all of the other essays in the book, so inclusion of his interview should not be taken to imply approval of any other contributions.) The editors of Ayn Rand Today are pleased to offer this interview in three installments: Part 1 appeared in our Spring Issue, Part 2 is included in this issue, and Part 3 will be published in our Annual Report issue of Ayn Rand Today later this year. We are grateful to ARI donors for supporting the licensing of these four books.
What other scenes and lines are your personal favorites?
It’s hard to say, because there are far too many. But at random, without claiming that this is exhaustive or in any order of importance: I liked the scenes with Wynand and Roark on the yacht, because it gave me an idea of what it would be like to have a real friend. I love the section on the strike against the Banner and Wynand’s holding out. The single line in The Fountainhead which had the greatest suspense for me was during the strike, when the Board of Directors says to Wynand that they can save the paper if he gives in to the union’s demands, but if not, it’s over; and then they say to him: “Yes or no?” When I first read The Fountainhead, I hoped so intensely for Wynand, and I put my hand over the page and was afraid to go on and read what she wrote. This is one of my top scenes, and now I see why it had to end as it did.
Of course, the “rape” scene—who could omit that? I suppose that should be number one. I like all the love scenes. I reacted strongly to the scene where Dominique visited Roark in Clayton, Ohio, and he was walking her back to
the train, and a piece of old newspaper blew against her legs, and she picked it up and started to fold it, and he said, “What are you doing?” “Something to read on the train,” she said. Then he grabs the paper and throws it away because it was clear that she wanted something, anything, that pertained to him, even trash—that it would take on the glow of a supreme value because of its connection to him. I loved both characters as impassioned valuers. Of course, he wouldn’t allow an empty symbol, such as trash.
Another scene I like is the first time Roark and Dominique meet again after the “rape” scene, at a cocktail party, and Ayn writes that he knew how brutal it was for her and admired her strength. Then she describes how Dominique felt: “as if there were no floor around her but the few square inches under her soles and she were safe so long as she did not move or look down”—as though there was a precipice everywhere else. I thought it was such a vivid way of communicating her paralyzed, astounded inner state.
I love the way Dominique fought for the newspaper during the strike, and of course I love her columns. I also think Toohey’s columns were excellent—very
witty, very vicious. I could go on forever. But the implication I want to avoid is that because I mentioned these scenes, therefore I don’t like many other scenes just as much. That’s not true.
With the understanding that the same disclaimer applies to this next question, what are some of your favorite lines?
I can quote a couple, but it’s like asking about a symphony, “What’s your favorite bar?” If I re-read the book
from the point of view of my favorite lines, and had to underscore them, there would be thousands. But here are a few that occur to me now: When Dominique and Peter are at home alone and she never expresses an opinion on anything, and he explains that the essence of being a person is judging and valuing, and asks her: “Where’s your I?” She replies: “Where’s yours, Peter?” It’s so powerful. He made a speech that focused on her external behavior—on home decoration and going to parties and so on—and then in three words she
Left: Ayn Rand in 1943, the year The Fountainhead was published; right: Ayn Rand’s handwritten notes from 1938, outlining the narrative for part 1, chapter 1, of The Fountainhead. (Ayn Rand [Ayn Rand Institute]; © Leonard Peikoff [Ayn Rand Archives])
said to him all the same things, but on a deeper, psychological level, and one which he could not help but see. That is brilliant writing.
Here’s another line, which I think of whenever I hear a typical professor of philosophy, especially linguistic analysts, dismiss Ayn Rand’s ideas: “The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.” This helps me to keep in proper perspective the kind of people in the intellectual world today; there’s no use arguing with them, because they’re ants and can’t hear and that’s it.
I love the fact that the novel starts and ends on the words “Howard Roark”: “Howard Roark laughed” and “Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.” That emphasizes that he is the core of the novel.
I once took a course in creative writing and was told that it’s important to give some single touch to a lesser character that will stick in the reader’s mind as: this is the type of person he is. Not a speech or whatever, but some little touch. Ayn did that perfectly.
Leonard Peikoff first met Ayn Rand in this living room in 1951 and peppered her with questions about The Fountainhead. (© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [2004.R.10])
Offhand, Ralston Holcombe comes to mind. She described his wonderful mane of hair that “rose over his forehead and fell to his shoulder” and then “left dandruff on the back of his collar.” That touch made him memorable—and killed him, no matter what he did thereafter. Another one here pertains to Gus Webb. The touch I always remember is: Gus Webb at a party at Lois Cook’s, with Jules Fougler saying that he doesn’t like Gus Webb; when asked why, Fougler replies: “Because he doesn’t wash his ears.” Ever since, Gus Webb to me is the one who doesn’t wash his ears—with all the dirt of soul this implies. The book is full of lines like that, where one touch or estimate after another is brilliantly expressed. Her descriptions are always so great—so clever or witty or economical or sarcastic (in the good sense).
What is distinctive about The Fountainhead, compared to We the Living and Atlas Shrugged?
It has a distinctive focus. The emphasis of The Fountainhead is that idealism is possible and practical on earth. Its focus is on man’s capacity to achieve and succeed as an individual.
We the Living is denunciatory: its focus is on those who destroy man’s capacity to achieve and succeed—on the enemies of this capacity, rather than on its existence and glory. Atlas Shrugged is on a higher level, because it takes for granted that men of achievement and success are possible on earth, and then shows how they are making their own destroyers possible. So all three books are centered in one way or another on man’s capacity to achieve values, but each with a different emphasis and perspective.
The Fountainhead is the most intimately personal of the three novels. We the Living is a social novel, in the sense that it describes Russia under Communism and how that system destroys the best among men. Atlas Shrugged is also, in its own way, a novel about the decay and collapse of a society. But The Fountainhead does not involve government, except at the very end, in regard to the Cortlandt project. The assumption of The Fountainhead is: we’re living in a free (and for now politically safe) society, and these are the choices men make in it. The novel is concerned with the good choices and the bad choices. So it’s on a personal level, not focused on society as a whole.
It has political implications, of course, but that’s not part of the theme, in the way politics is essential to the other novels.
Another difference is that in We the Living, Ayn was still on the premise of making the woman the protagonist. With The Fountainhead, however, a man is the hero, and the woman is essentially someone in love with him. In Atlas Shrugged, of course, Galt is the supreme hero.
If you could imagine the characters of The Fountainhead in Atlas Shrugged for a moment, I think Roark would be one of the strikers, like Rearden, but he would not be on the level of Galt. He’s too young, he’s learning throughout the novel what people are like, he doesn’t have the philosophic mastery or understanding that Galt has. Even towards the end, he is naive enough to work with Keating on the Cortlandt project; Galt wouldn’t have tolerated such an idea.
I think all this parallels Ayn’s own growth. I hold, as a hypothesis, the view that any (or at least many) creative persons who work across time go through three stages in writing. The first stage is
denouncing, ridding your subconscious of the evil background from which you sprung. That’s We the Living. For the next stage, your mental slate is now clear, and you present without obstruction your positive vision of life, but in simple, essentialized terms, without any “higher mathematics”: here’s the hero, here’s the villain, here’s the conflict. That’s The Fountainhead. Then, in the final stage, you take the totality of the knowledge you’ve gained and present the positives in your magnum opus, synthesizing all of your knowledge of good and of evil, identifying fundamentals that are much more complex than was possible to you earlier. That’s Atlas Shrugged.
Let’s move to the characters that give a lot of readers a hard time: Wynand and especially Dominique. Can you say something about what they have in common, and how they’re different?
Yes, I can. But I want to start by saying, without giving offense, that Ayn Rand felt a particular indignation against people who said they didn’t understand
Dominique’s psychology. She could accept that they might have problems with Wynand or Toohey, but if they couldn’t understand Dominique, then she concluded that they had no concept of idealism—because the essence of Dominique, as I said earlier, is an embittered idealism.
Dominique wants the ideal, she’s in love with the good, she won’t settle for anything less—however, she’s convinced that, by the nature of people as she observes them, the good simply cannot be achieved. Since she won’t settle for less, she chooses to want and take nothing from the world. To appreciate
Leonard Peikoff, left, and Robert Mayhew.
Ayn Rand in her office at the Neutra House, circa 1948. (Henri Glarner [Ayn Rand Archives])
Cover: © Bobbs-Merrill (Ayn Rand Archives);
photo: © ARI
her character, you must be able to understand her passionate idealism and her complete despair.
Both Dominique and Wynand are valuers in despair; so far they are alike: they’re both idealists who believe that ideals cannot be achieved in a world filled with rotten people. So he and Dominique were similar. On this point, Ayn has Dominique say to him: “I think we have a great deal in common, you and I. We’ve committed the same treason somewhere.” But the difference between Wynand and Dominique is profound, because of how each acts in the face of his malevolence. Dominique withdraws from the world: she says people are irrational, so values are impossible, so I want nothing to do with the world. Wynand says: if that’s the way people are, I’m going to become one of them, in effect, a super-powerful one, who can force them to obey my values instead of the other way around. She chooses in effect to enter a convent rather than to corrupt her soul; he chooses to enter a brothel in order to become a dictator, who survives by having power over people who sicken him. That is quite a difference between them!
Why does Wynand have to fail, while Dominique can be redeemed?
Because Wynand betrays and destroys his values in action. For example, whatever his motivation or rationalization, in actual fact his power-lust is the only thing really hurting Roark—both professionally and personally. Whereas Dominique can be redeemed because, given her moral purity, all she needed was knowledge— that she was wrong about the universe being malevolent. She did give a few commissions to Roark’s competitors, but that was more symbolic than practically significant.
Dominique loved Roark and devoutly wished he could survive unbroken. But Wynand set out to prove that Roark could be broken; and when Roark shows that he can’t, Wynand says: “Don’t think it was one of those temptations when you tempt just to test your victim and are happy to be beaten. . . . Don’t make that excuse for me. . . . I’m not glad and I’m not grateful to you for this.” And that was true, for Wynand the power-luster— and thus Wynand the unredeemable.
To be continued in the next issue of Ayn Rand Today.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FICTION:
AYN RAND’S ESCAPE FROM PETROGRAD
“ . . . if it’ ‘ s the last, I want it to be my kind of world.”
In her youth, Ayn Rand experienced firsthand one of the most violent revolutions in history—the communist takeover of Russia that started in October 1917. Looking back at one indelible episode from her life in that tumultuous period, we can see how great art helped a young Ayn Rand to cope with those hellish events and preserve a vision of “her kind of world.”
Born Alisa Rosenbaum, Rand was raised in a secular Jewish family in St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1914). During the revolution, the Bolsheviks seized any money deposited in banks, nationalized businesses, and confiscated property, including her father’s pharmacy. Targeted as enemies of the revolution, middle-class families like the Rosenbaums struggled to survive as supply lines of food and fuel were collapsing in the war-ravaged country.
The family fled the city in the fall of 1918 with whatever possessions they could carry. After spending their winter in Ukraine, they boarded a train to Crimea, a part of Russia not controlled by the communists. But their journey by rail was cut short: the tracks ahead had been destroyed. The Rosenbaums, along with several other passengers, were forced to proceed to their destination via horse-drawn carts.
(© Leonard Peikoff [Ayn Rand Archives])
In the middle of the night, as the carts rattled along a country road, a gunshot suddenly rang out. Armed men forced the procession of horse carts to stop. They ordered everyone to disembark, hand over their money, and stand with their backs turned while the robbers searched the carts for valuables. In biographical interviews now housed in the Ayn Rand Archives, Rand recalled that “they warned that anyone who tried to hide money would be shot. I later discovered,
Ayn Rand’s passport photo, circa 1925.
(© Leonard Peikoff [Ayn Rand Archives])
incidentally, that while they were searching the first wagon, Father took his money and slipped it into the straw of that carriage . . . he was really taking a chance on his life.”
With guns drawn upon her, the fourteenyear-old Rand recalled being frightened, but was unable to “really take it seriously. You know the sense in which, at that age . . . one can’t quite believe it is the end.” At that moment, a single thought gave her courage: the heroic life and
death of Enjolras from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a character Rand had “fallen in love with” in her youth. As she recounted decades later, “I thought: If I am shot now, at least I have had something. . . . The Enjolras scene out of Les Misérables. . . . if they are going to shoot, I want to die as well as he did. And I‘ve always remembered it since—when you speak of the importance of fiction to young people. . . . if they are going to shoot, that‘s what I want to be thinking of last—not of Russia nor the horrors.”
Founder of the Russian Communist Party and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, in Teatralnaya Square (then Sverdlov Square), on May 5, 1920. (Grigory Petrovich Goldstein)
As she recounted decades later, “. . . if they are going to shoot, I want to die as well as he did.”
The robbers did not find the money that Rand’s father had hidden, and the family proceeded to Crimea. They endured constant uncertainty for the next two years, as the town they lived in changed hands multiple times during the civil war. As Rand later recalled, “That is when we began to starve, literally. . . . There were enormous epidemics of [scurvy] . . . you could not tell from day to day whether you would have food or not.” Despite all this, Rand’s father held out hope that he could reclaim his business and property.
The family returned to Petrograd in the fall of 1921, an experience that would serve as inspiration for her first novel, We the Living
Ayn Rand’s harrowing journey from Petrograd to Crimea reminds us that great art has the power to uplift a person’s soul, even in the face of terrible evils. For Rand, Hugo’s romantic literature offered a vision of the world as it “might be and ought to be,” a respite from the hardship all around her. “I remember it as the most dramatic form of what Hugo meant to me or of what literature can mean to you. . . . What I like about myself in that scene and what I would still want to be my attitude is the conscious thinking: if it‘s the last, I want it to be my kind of world.”
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