Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (27 page)

Rand was delighted by Branden’s psychological innovations. She began to openly acknowledge him as her teacher as well as her student, her intellectual heir who would carry her work forward. Even though her novels dwelled at length on the internal motivations and conflicts of characters, she had always dismissed psychology as “that sewer.”
⁵³
Now she could learn about the field without actually reading Freud, or the other psychologists whom she freely castigated. Armed with Branden’s theories she became even more confident in her judgments about other people. Still fascinated by his mentor, Branden listened with rapt attention to her memories of the past, her tales of struggle, her frustrations with the world. He offered her what her passive, withdrawn husband could not: both intellectual stimulation and emotional support. Rand began to talk of him as her reward, the payoff for all she had gone through.

Although it started innocently enough, there had always been a current of flirtation between the two. Rand made no secret of her esteem for Nathan, openly identifying him as a genius. His face, she said, was
her
kind of face. The Brandens’ marriage only briefly papered over the growing attraction between Ayn and Nathan. The subtext of their relationship spilled into the open during a long car ride to Canada in the fall of 1954. The two couples and another friend had taken a road trip to visit Barbara’s family. On the ride home Barbara watched her husband and Rand holding hands and nuzzling in the backseat of the car. Sick with jealousy and anger, she confronted him afterward. Nathan denied everything. He and Rand had a special friendship, nothing more. His sentiment was genuine. Nathan worshipped Rand, but it was Barbara he had chosen, or so he consciously believed.

Like Barbara, Ayn had registered a shift. The next day she summoned Nathan to her apartment, where she waited alone. It was a scene out of the best romantic fiction. After some delay, Rand became urgent and direct. She and Nathan had fallen in love, yes? Nathan, overwhelmed, flattered, excited, confused, responded in kind. They kissed hesitantly. There would be no turning back.

But this was still the founder of Objectivism, believing in rationality above all else. They must be honest with their spouses, Rand decided. She called them all to a meeting at her apartment. As Barbara and Frank listened incredulously, Rand’s hypnotic voice filled the room and stilled their protests. The spell she had cast was too strong to break now. At meeting’s end she and Nathan had secured what they requested: a few hours alone each week. Their relationship would be strictly platonic, they assured their spouses. Privacy would allow them to explore the intellectual and emotional connection they could no longer pretend did not exist.

When the inevitable happened, Rand was again honest with both Barbara and Frank. She and Nathan wished now to be lovers, she explained. But it would naturally be a short affair. She had no wish to hold back Nathan, twenty-five years her junior. Her explanation came clothed in the rational philosophy she had taught them all. By giving their feelings full expression, Nathan and Ayn were simply acknowledging the nature of reality.

For all her iconoclasm, Rand had a streak of cultural conventionality deep within. Afraid of what the outside world would say, she insisted the affair be kept a secret. Her work and her reputation would be smeared if anyone found out, she told the others. Uncomfortable with the idea of literally disrupting her marriage bed, Nathan proposed that they rent a small apartment in her building, ostensibly an office, that could be used for their meetings. Rand refused. On the surface everything would continue as usual. Even members of the Collective could have no inkling of the new arrangements between the Branden and O’Connor households.

The officially sanctioned yet secret affair sent all four parties spinning into perilous emotional territory. For all the passion they shared, relations between Nathan and Ayn were not smooth. Ayn was an insecure, jealous lover, constantly pushing Nathan to express his feelings. Not a
naturally emotive person, Nathan struggled to please. They spent many of their assignation hours deep in psychological and philosophical discussion, atonement for Nathan’s latest perceived slight or indifference. Although he was thrilled by the affair, Nathan felt pressured to meet the depth of her romantic feeling for him, a task that became more difficult as the novelty of their relations wore off. He was also pulled away by his loyalty to Barbara, who began suffering intense panic attacks. Nathan, who styled himself a psychologist, could find no reason for Barbara’s anxiety. Neither of them imagined the affair, and the deception it engendered, could be a source of her inner turmoil. Perhaps the hardest hit was Frank, who was displaced from his apartment twice a week when Nathan arrived to rendezvous with his wife. His destination on many of these afternoons and evenings was a neighborhood bar.
⁵⁴

Rand’s liaison with Branden came just as she began writing the most crucial part of
Atlas Shrugged
. The early stages of the book had been fairly trouble-free. She had created a cast of characters that made for pleasant company. There was Hank Rearden, a conflicted industrialist whose new steel alloy is appropriated by the collectivists. Between appearances at the latest jet-set parties, Francisco D’Anconia, a brilliant aristocratic playboy, destroys his family company lest it fall to the enemy. Most fun of all was Dagny Taggart, who gave Rand the chance to present the ideal woman. An engineer like Kira in
We the Living
, Dagny is a proto-feminist heroine, a powerful businesswoman who moves easily from one lover to the next. Like all Rand heroines, Dagny is beautiful as well as brilliant, and socially well born. A glamorous and striking blonde, she is the granddaughter of a pioneering railroad tycoon whose empire she now controls. The book’s driving force is John Galt, a character Rand variously identified as a fictional version of Frank or Nathan. The leader of the strike and the mouthpiece for Rand’s philosophy, Galt is a physicist who invents groundbreaking technologies while working as a menial laborer.

Rand’s difficulties came to a head around Galt’s speech, which occurs toward the very end of the 1,084-page book. Whereas the rest of
Atlas Shrugged
is a fast-paced narrative, full of the tightly plotted twists and turns that Rand loved to write, Galt’s speech is something
different altogether. Rand finally had answers to the first questions the novel had raised, indeed the questions that had driven her for years. Objectivism was the rational, error-free system Rand had not found in the wider world. It began with A = A, her nod to Aristotle’s law of identity. From this basic axiom of existence, it built to a towering edifice that addressed the most important issues of life: economics, morality, sex, knowledge itself. Its centerpiece was Galt’s speech, a philosophical defense of the rational, fully autonomous individual. Not only was man free to choose; he
had
to choose, and the preservation of life itself was not involuntary, but a choice. As Galt explains, “His mind is given to him, its content is not. . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process. . . . [Man] has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil.”
⁵⁵
Rand did not mean this existentially, but literally. Objectivism denied the existence of instincts or innate knowledge that propel humans toward food, shelter, sex. Instead, she held that the choice to live was a rational choice, to be consciously made by man’s mind. What was the role of the mind in man’s existence? Mind was everything.

The catch was that Rand had chosen to express all these ideas in the context of a fictional story. Although she spoke fluidly about her philosophical accomplishments to her young followers, translating her system into fiction was a daunting task. To integrate her ideas into the flow of the story she had to present arguments without arguing, for Galt’s speech is a monologue, not a dialogue. It would have been easy to do, Rand thought, if she were writing a treatise. But how could Galt convincingly express these ideas in the context of a dramatic story? She toggled back and forth uncertainly between clashing genres, feeling her mind “working on two tracks.”
⁵⁶
Every time the words began to flow, Rand realized she was writing as a philosopher, not a novelist. Angrily she would cut herself off and start again. Until Galt’s speech was finished she was unwilling to secure a publisher, making it feel as if the entire project was on hold. Frank, who had watched her write for more than two decades, thought it was the worst time she had ever endured.

Rand’s difficulties cut to a deep problem of self identification. “I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer,” she noted to herself with some pleasure as she began planning the novel nearly ten years before.
⁵⁷
At first it had seemed a winning combination. But given its
long gestation,
Atlas Shrugged
caught Rand once more in the transition from one mode of thinking to another.
The Fountainhead
was marked by Rand’s first encounter with American political life.
Atlas Shrugged
was formed in a different crucible, the clash between fiction and philosophy, the romantic and the rational. Rand drained herself to finish the book, and when it was over she would never write fiction again.
⁵⁸

During the two years she struggled to write Galt’s speech, Rand’s pronounced nervous tension wreaked havoc on those closest to her. The emotional center of Nathan’s, Barbara’s, and Frank’s lives, she set the mood for all. She was irritable, angry, and tense. Nathan’s attentions did little to soothe her. No matter how welcome, he was a distraction to her writing. When he let her down, the price seemed too much to pay. Rand flayed him in private for his inattention, while praising him extravagantly to others. She erupted at Frank for small transgressions, sometimes drawing Nathan into their arguments. She was also infuriated by Barbara’s persistent anxiety attacks and her accompanying pleas for help.

In frustration, Rand developed a new theory of “emotionalism” to explain Barbara’s behavior. Like the idea of social metaphysics, emotionalism was a psychological rendering of the ideals conveyed in Rand’s fiction. Emotionalists were those who, contrary to Objectivist teaching, allowed their emotions, rather than their rationality, to guide them through the world. Rand speculated that emotional repression might be one source of emotionalism; that is, repression might eviscerate the rational faculty altogether. By not acknowledging emotions, the emotionalist was subject to their sway. Certainly this theory did provide some insight into Barbara’s suffering. However, in Rand’s and Nathan’s hands, the idea of emotionalism was not a tool for understanding, but rathera method of judgment. Neither suggested that Barbara’s emotional repression came from her acceptance of the “rational” affair between her husband and her closest friend.

Rand’s new interest in psychological ideas reflected Nathan’s influence. He was now studying for a master’s degree in psychology and continued to expand Objectivism into new areas, with Rand following suit. Emotionalism led Rand to further musings on human psychology, captured under the terms “sub basement” and “superstructure,” her words for the subconscious and conscious mind. The opposite of an
emotionalist would be a rationalist, whose emotions would always be explicable and on the surface. Rand began defining various members of the Collective by their psychology, and she scribbled an excited note to Nathan after a series of musings on emotionalists, rationalists, sub- basement, and superstructure: “My stomach (and brain) is screaming that this is the right track. . . . I am sure that the role of psychology is to discover, identify, and then be able to cure all the essential ‘epistemological’ errors possible to a human consciousness.”
⁵⁹
Psychology offered Rand yet another way to apply Objectivist principles to daily life.

Her changing language also indicated the growing authority she accorded Leonard Peikoff as his studies in philosophy continued. Rand’s vocabulary now included technical terms such as “epistemology” and “metaphysical,” to which she often appended her own prefixes, creating neologisms like “psycho-epistemology.” It was a sharp departure from her previous interests. In place of writers like Paterson, Lane, and Mises, who worked within an established intellectual tradition and drew on a rich social context, Rand’s ideas now came from young men who cited her as their primary inspiration. She was no longer working with terms or concepts that were accessible to outsiders, but instead lived in an Objectivist echo chamber. She read little beyond a daily newspaper, preferring conversation with her associates. She had turned a corner into her own private intellectual world.

Rand was now unreachable by anyone but the Collective. At Nathan’s urging she had stepped out of the conservative movement at its most critical hour. In these years came the founding of
National Review
, the rejuvenation of
The Freeman
, the rise and fall of Senator McCarthy. Rand was disconnected from all these events. Occasionally she saw one of her friends from earlier years, but the Brandens and their circle occupied the bulk of her free time. Whereas
The Fountainhead
and Rand’s first ideas for
Atlas Shrugged
had been shaped by Rand’s immersion in the libertarian world of the 1940s, Objectivism was shaped by the concerns and interests of the Collective. They were with her to celebrate when she wrote the last pages of Galt’s speech in the fall of 1956, and were the only ones who understood its significance to her.

With Galt’s speech finally finished, Rand could relax at last, and so could her three closest friends. The rest of the writing flowed. Barbara’s anxiety abated, her panic attacks fading as fast as they had come on.