Neither God nor Devil

by Daniel J. Flynn

Ayn Rand’s midcentury novels continue to strike a chord because they read as though culled from today’s headlines. Here, Rand’s “looters” raid government coffers to bail out their poorly performing industries; there, Rand’s “moochers” demand that the “producers” pay for their health care. More than a quarter-century since her death, and a half-century since Atlas Shrugged’s publication, Random House has moved more than a quarter-million copies of the 1,168-page tome in 2009 alone. Rumors abound of Rand’s magnum opus finally reaching the big screen, with Cherlize Theron and Angelina Jolie discussed as cinematic Dagny Taggarts. The timing couldn’t be better for reconsiderations of Rand.

The titles of two new biographies – Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right – imply a subject more deity than mortal. The books describe a woman driven to greatness yet paralyzed by fear. Where her acolytes see a god and her detractors a devil, Rand’s biographers see a flawed person of massive achievement.

Like those of her creations Howard Roark and John Galt, Rand’s life was the story of the inner-directed individual standing up against a recalcitrant world. The Russian immigrant transcended a language barrier to become one of the most widely read novelists in the English language. The outspoken right-winger triumphed in two politicized industries – publishing and Hollywood – where the deck seemed most stacked against her. And despite being written out of the conservative movement, Rand became bigger than the movement popes who excommunicated her.

Alisa Rosenbaum didn’t become Ayn Rand without help. Were it not for the rugged individualism at the heart of her philosophy of Objectivism, that wouldn’t be noteworthy, let alone controversial. Both Burns and Heller take pains to highlight the friction between Rand’s philosophy and her life. Rand’s family sacrificed enormously to get her out of post-revolutionary Russia; in America, previously unknown Chicago relatives provided her room, board, and transportation to Hollywood. Despite Rolls-Royce and mink-coat promises, Rand never paid her relatives back. Numerous benefactors moved by her sorry state in 1920s Hollywood, including a donor directing $50 to the neediest girl in a boarding house for Tinseltown wannabes, aided her effort to become a studio scriptwriter. Later, after marrying actor Frank O’Connor but not wanting to bear children, Rand got her in-laws to pay for an abortion.

The handouts aiding her climb would seem trivial if not for Rand’s insistence that she made it from obscurity to fame without assistance. “No one helped me,” Rand boasted in Atlas Shrugged’s afterword, “nor did I think it was anyone’s duty to help me.” This contempt for self-sacrifice on behalf of another – a contempt at the heart of Objectivism – makes any biography depicting Rand as recipient or practitioner of altruism (she would play benefactor after playing beneficiary) controversial among her followers. The inconvenient history serves to indict the practicality of a philosophy whose paragon couldn’t even practice what she preached. The Rand who emerges in Goddess of the Market and Ayn Rand and the World She Made, though, is less hypocrite than human. Who can be faulted, really, for making life’s journey without the occasional lift along the way?

More troubling to Objectivists than the monetary debts Rand incurred is the intellectual debt she owed Isabel Paterson, the cranky right-wing novelist and longtime New York Herald-Tribune columnist, who took Rand under her wing during the 1940s. “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle,” Rand wrote. But Paterson taught Rand economics, contributed to the timelessness of The Fountainhead by convincing its author to delete references to contemporary figures like Hitler and Stalin, used her column to boost her friend’s literary career, and, in vain, tried to shake Rand from her addiction to amphetamines. “As she began to educate herself about philosophy Rand turned to Paterson for a durable frame of reference,” Burns writes. “In New York Paterson had ranted against Kant, Hegel, and Marx, quoting instead Aristotle and the dictum ‘A is A,’” a catchphrase later used incessantly by her pupil. One wonders about the degree to which Paterson served as a negative role model, too, as the tempestuous older woman’s penchant for issuing insults and being insulted herself perhaps gave Rand comfort as she indulged infamously in such socially maladaptive behavior.

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November 14, 2009

Copyright © 2009 The Manhattan Institute