Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (6 page)

As she waited for the play to go up, Rand turned her attention to selling her novel, completed a year before.
We the Living
is the most autobiographical of Rand’s works. It is set in a milieu she knew well, the world of the Russian cultured classes who had lost nearly everything in the Revolution. The novel follows the fate of two bourgeois families, the Argounovs and the Ivanovitches, who, like the Rosenbaums, tumble from an exalted position in society to a life of poverty. The main characters are Kira, Leo, and Andrei, three young people who struggle against the injustices and violence of the Soviet regime. Petrograd itself is a palpable presence in the novel. Her tone elegiac and wistful, Rand describes its streets and monuments with evocative detail.

Rand’s anti-Communism is woven into every scene in the novel and its overall structure. Kira, the heroine, is an independent and determined career woman who boldly flouts social convention, sharing an apartment with her lover, Leo, the son of a famous general executed for counterrevolutionary activity. Due to their class background, Leo and Kira are expelled from university and are unable to find work because they do not belong to the Communist Party. When Leo falls ill with tuberculosis he is denied medical care for the same reason. “Why—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics—can’t one aristocrat die?” an official asks Kira.
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In desperation Kira begins a clandestine affair with Andrei, a sexy Communist with connections to the secret police. Andrei passes his salary on to Kira, who uses it to fund Leo’s stay in a sanatorium.

Rand’s sympathetic portrait of Andrei is striking, particularly when contrasted to her later villains. For all Rand’s hatred of Communism, Andrei is one of her most fully realized and compelling characters. Ruthless in pursuit of his ideals, he has the strength and wisdom to recognize the corruption inherent in the Communist system. In one of the book’s most gripping scenes, Andrei raids Leo’s apartment and discovers his connection to Kira. When Kira confesses that money was a primary motivation for her affair with him, Andrei is devastated. She is unapologetic: “If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering?” Stung by her words, Andrei begins to understand the consequences of his ideals in action. He is further disillusioned when his superiors prosecute Leo for speculation yet hush up the involvement of several Communist Party members in the scheme. At his next Party Club meeting Andrei denounces the Party and defends individualism. Soon afterward he commits suicide, an act Rand frames as the final, noble decision of a man who recognizes the evil of the system he has served yet refuses to let it poison his soul.
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The novel ends on an even bleaker note. Kira has saved Leo’s life but not his spirit. Denied gainful employment, he turns to crime and then abandons Kira for a wealthy older woman. Kira concludes, “It was I against a hundred and fifty million people. I lost.” At the end of the story Kira is shot while attempting to cross the Siberian border to freedom. Rand paints her death in dramatic detail: “She lay on the edge of a hill and looked down at the sky. One hand, white and still, hung over the edge, and little red drops rolled slowly in the snow, down the slope.” Through all the romantic intrigue Rand’s didactic message is clear: Communism is a cruel system that crushes the virtuous and rewards the corrupt.
⁵¹

We the Living
was Rand’s first attempt to link her idée fixe of individualism to larger social and political problems. It exhibits much of her previous contempt for the masses, but its overall theme has a gravity and relevance missing from her earlier work. In her notes for the novel she used the word “collectivism” for the first time; her book would demonstrate “its spirit, influence, ramifications,” she jotted in a brief aside. Rand’s use of the concept demonstrated her new familiarity with contemporary American language. As the country sank deeper into depression during the mid-1930s there was much discussion of collective solutions
and collective action.
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Like many others, Rand saw Russia as emblematic of collectivism. This identification lay at the heart of her attack.

According to Rand, collectivism was inherently problematic, for it prioritized the common good over the lives of individuals. Russia, with its purges, secret police, and stolen property, provided the clearest example of this truth. But she wanted her novel to show that the problem went beyond Russia, for it was the very principles of Communism, not just the practice, that were flawed. Rand was unwilling to grant collectivism any moral high ground. As Kira informs Andrei, “I loathe your ideals.”
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This was the first germ of Rand’s critique of altruism. It also marked an important expansion and maturation of her thought. Her first works had focused on the clash between exceptional individuals and their immediate society. Now she began to examine how these forces played out on a larger canvas.

This move to a social framework transformed Rand’s writing. In Soviet Russia she found a setting that could give full and plausible expression to her own embedded emotional patterns. When set within an oppressive society, the lonely, embattled individual became not an antisocial loner but an admirable freedom fighter. Drawing from her past also helped Rand check her wilder flights of imagination. The novel’s plot is fanciful, but most of the book’s characters ring true. Rand based many of them on people she knew in Russia and drew liberally from her own experiences to describe the frustration and angst of living under Soviet Communism.
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Rand expected the novel to sell quickly. She knew it was not the best work she could produce, but it was far better than anything she had written before. She also had some powerful connections on her side. Her Hollywood booster, Gouverneur Morris, called her latest work “the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of Soviet Russia” and sent the manuscript to his friend H. L. Mencken, the famed book critic. Like Rand, Mencken had a strong appreciation for Nietzsche. An unabashed elitist, he delighted in mocking the stupidity and pretensions of the American “boo-boisie.” With time Mencken was growing increasingly conservative politically, and he proved receptive to Rand’s individualist message. He reported back to Morris that
We the Living
was “a really excellent piece of work,” and the two of them lent their names to Rand’s manuscript. Even so, Rand’s agent reported one failure after another.
⁵⁵

It began to dawn on Rand that there were Communist sympathizers, or “pinks,” in America. At first she had assumed, “[T]hey did not matter in the least . . . this was
the
capitalist country of the world, and by everything I could observe, Leftism or socialism was not an issue.”
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But now she began to hear that although publishers liked the book, they found its politics objectionable. Reviewers and editorial board members explained to Rand’s agent that she was simply wrong about Soviet Russia and misunderstood the noble experiment being conducted there. Some added that though conditions might have been poor in the revolutionary period that Rand described, everything was different now.
⁵⁷

It is true that
We the Living
flew in the face of everything most educated Americans thought they knew about Russia. As the Great Depression ground on and unemployment soared, intellectuals began unfavorably comparing their faltering capitalist economy to Russian Communism. Karl Marx had predicted that capitalism would fall under the weight of its own contradictions, and now with the economic crisis gripping the West, his predictions seem to be coming true. By contrast Russia seemed an emblematic modern nation, making the staggering leap from a feudal past to an industrial future with ease.
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High-profile visitors to Russia reinforced this perception. Important Americans who visited the USSR were given the red carpet treatment and credulously reported back the fantasy they had been fed. More than ten years after the Revolution, Communism was finally reaching full flower, according to the
New York Times
reporter Walter Duranty, a Stalin fan who vigorously debunked accounts of the Ukraine famine, a man-made disaster that would leave millions dead. The Soviet economy was booming; Russia had even eliminated juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and mental illness, according to the psychiatrist Frankwood Williams, author of the optimistic
Russia, Youth, and the Present-Day World
.
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There was a sense of inevitability about it all. In educated, reformminded circles it became conventional wisdom that the United States would simply have to move toward Communism or, at the very least, socialism. Whittaker Chambers, a Communist since the 1920s, remembered the Party’s sudden surge in popularity: “These were the first quotas of the great drift from Columbia, Harvard, and elsewhere . . . from 1930 on, a small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with
scarcely any effort on its part.” Many who did not join remained sympathetic fellow travelers. During the Popular Front period of 1935–39, when the Communist Party encouraged an alliance with the American left, well-meaning liberals flocked to myriad antifascist, pro-labor front organizations. Far more than just a political party, Communism was a whole climate of opinion.
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Nowhere was the mood more pronounced than in New York’s artistic and literary circles. One of the Party’s most powerful front groups was the American Writers’ Congress, which called for a “new literature” to support a new society, and even convinced President Roosevelt to accept an honorary membership. “The Stalinists and their friends, under multiform disguises, have managed to penetrate into the offices of publishing houses, the editorial staffs of magazines, and the book-review sections of conservative newspapers,” wrote Phillip Rahv, founder of
Partisan Review
, in 1938. The result was de facto censorship, he asserted.
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Not that Rahv was opposed to Marxism; indeed, he led the charge of the Trotskyites, a rival Communist faction. The debate was not about the merits of Communism; it was about
what form
of Communism was best.

Rand had fled Soviet Russia only to find herself still surrounded by Communists. None of the talk about a new economic order impressed her. Her struggles in Hollywood only reinforced her belief in individualistic values, and she remained committed to the competitive market system her father had thrived under during her youth. Even now, in the depth of the depression, Rand scoffed at any collective solution to the country’s economic agony.

She was particularly outraged by the glowing reports about life in Russia. The Rosenbaums’ letters made clear that conditions had only deteriorated in the years since she had left. Even her highly educated and extremely resourceful family was just scraping by. Her artistic sisters were working as tour guides and dutifully attending political meetings to keep their employment. In his new role as house husband Rand’s father scoured the streets for days in search of a lightbulb. The household rejoiced when Anna Rosenbaum was once able to purchase an entire bag of apples.
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Rand had a manuscript that exposed the horrors of life under Communism, but wealthy New Yorkers who had never been to Russia only sniffed at her testimony.

Adding to her cynicism was a battle with Al Woods over
Night of January 16th
that consumed most of 1935. The clash was in some ways inevitable. Rand was a jealous author, unwilling to consider any changes to her plot or dialogue, especially those monologues about the importance of individualism. Woods was a moneymaker, primarily interested in the play for its unusual jury setup. He had little interest in arguing with Rand, instead steamrolling her by talking about all the other hits he had produced. By the time of the first performance she had essentially disowned the play. Later the two would enter arbitration over her royalties.
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It was the start of a pattern that would mark Rand’s career. Her name was finally in lights above Broadway, but fame, when it came, was almost as difficult for her as anonymity.

Just as Rand reached her lowest point with Woods, she learned that her new literary agent had managed to sell
We the Living
to Macmillan. Like other publishers, the editorial board at Macmillan had balked at the novel’s ideological messages but eventually decided to take a gamble on the work.

The reviews that
We the Living
garnered when it was published in 1936 only reinforced Rand’s suspicions that something was terribly wrong in America. The newspapers were filled with propaganda about Russia, but it was Rand’s true-to-life novel that was dismissed as a sham. “The tale is good reading, and bad pleading. It is not a valuable document concerning the Russian experiment,” wrote the
Cincinnati Times-Star. The Nation
doubted that “petty officials in Soviet Russia ride to the opera in foreign limousines while the worker goes wheatless and meatless.” Trying to strike a conciliatory note, a Toronto newspaper noted that the 1920s were “a transition period in the life of the nation.” That Rand’s testimony was inconsistent with “the descriptions of competent observers like Anna Louis Strong and Walter Duranty does not necessarily discredit it entirely.”
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Even reviewers who praised Rand’s writing seemed to assume that her rendition of life in Russia was as imaginative as the improbable love triangle that structured the plot.