The Fountainhead (30 page)

“Not that way,” said Roark.

 

In April Mr. Nathaniel Janss, of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company, called Roark to his office. Mr. Janss was frank and blunt. He stated that his company was planning the erection of a small office building—thirty stories—on lower Broadway, and that he was not sold on Roark as the architect, in fact he was more or less opposed to him, but his friend Austen Heller had insisted that he should meet Roark and talk to him about it; Mr. Janss did not think very much of Roark’s stuff, but Heller had simply bullied him and he would listen to Roark before deciding on anyone, and what did Roark have to say on the subject?

Roark had a great deal to say. He said it calmly, and this was difficult, at first, because he wanted that building, because what he felt was the desire to wrench that building out of Mr. Janss at the point of a gun, if he’d had one. But after a few minutes, it became simple and easy, the thought of the gun vanished, and even his desire for the building; it was not a commission to get and he was not there to get it; he was only speaking of buildings.

“Mr. Janss, when you buy an automobile, you don’t want it to have rose garlands about the windows, a lion on each fender and an angel sitting on the roof. Why don’t you?”

“That would be silly,” stated Mr. Janss.

“Why would it be silly? Now I think it would be beautiful. Besides, Louis the Fourteenth had a carriage like that and what was good enough for Louis is good enough for us. We shouldn’t go in for rash innovations and we shouldn’t break with tradition.”

“Now you know damn well you don’t believe anything of the sort!”

“I know I don’t. But that’s what you believe, isn’t it? Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. Will you tell me why, when it comes to a building, you don’t want it to look as if it had any sense or purpose, you want to choke it with trimmings, you want to sacrifice its purpose to its envelope—not knowing even why you want that kind of an envelope? You want it to look like a hybrid beast produced by crossing the bastards of ten different species until you get a creature without guts, without heart or brain, a creature all pelt, tail, claws and feathers? Why? You must tell me, because I’ve never been able to understand it.”

“Well,” said Mr. Janss, “I’ve never thought of it that way.” He added, without great conviction: “But we want our building to have dignity, you know, and beauty, what they call real beauty.”

“What who calls what beauty?”

“Well-1-1 ...”

“Tell me, Mr. Janss, do you really think that Greek columns and fruit baskets are beautiful on a modern, steel office building?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought anything about why a building was beautiful, one way or another,” Mr. Janss confessed, “but I guess that’s what the public wants.”

“Why do you suppose they want it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why should you care what they want?”

“You’ve got to consider the public.”

“Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?”

“You can’t force it down their throats.”

“You don’t have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason—oh, I know, it’s something no one really wants to have on his side—and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia.”

“Why do you think that I don’t want reason on my side?”

“It’s not you, Mr. Janss. It’s the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid.”

“That’s true, you know,” said Mr. Janss.

At the conclusion of the interview, Mr. Janss said thoughtfully:

“I can’t say that it doesn’t make sense, Mr. Roark. Let me think it over. You’ll hear from me shortly.”

Mr. Janss called him a week later. “It’s the Board of Directors that will have to decide. Are you willing to try, Roark? Draw up the plans and some preliminary sketches. I’ll submit them to the Board. I can’t promise anything. But I’m for you and I’ll fight them on it.”

Roark worked on the plans for two weeks of days and nights. The plans were submitted. Then he was called before the board of directors of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company. He stood at the side of a long table and he spoke, his eyes moving slowly from face to face. He tried not to look down at the table, but on the lower rim of his vision there remained the white spot of his drawings spread before the twelve men. He was asked a great many questions. Mr. Janss jumped up at times to answer instead, to pound the table with his fist, to snarl: “Don’t you see? Isn’t it clear? ... What of it, Mr. Grant? What if no one has ever built anything like it? ... Gothic, Mr. Hubbard? Why
must
we have Gothic? ... I’ve a jolly good mind to resign if you turn this down!”

Roark spoke quietly. He was the only man in the room who felt certain of his own words. He felt also that he had no hope. The twelve faces before him had a variety of countenances, but there was something, neither color nor feature, upon all of them, as a common denominator, something that dissolved their expressions, so that they were not faces any longer but only empty ovals of flesh. He was addressing everyone. He was addressing no one. He felt no answer, not even the echo of his own words striking against the membrane of an eardrum. His words were falling down a well, hitting stone salients on their way, and each salient refused to stop them, threw them farther, tossed them from one another, sent them to seek a bottom that did not exist.

He was told that he would be informed of the Board’s decision. He knew that decision in advance. When he received the letter, he read it without feeling. The letter was from Mr. Janss and it began: “Dear Mr. Roark, I am sorry to inform you that our Board of Directors find themselves unable to grant you the commission for ...” There was a plea in the letter’s brutal, offensive formality: the plea of a man who could not face him.

 

John Fargo had started in life as a pushcart peddler. At fifty he owned a modest fortune and a prosperous department store on lower Sixth Avenue. For years he had fought successfully against a larger store across the street, one of many inherited by a numerous family. In the fall of last year the family had moved that particular branch to new quarters, farther uptown. They were convinced that the center of the city’s retail business was shifting north and they had decided to hasten the downfall of their former neighborhood by leaving their old store vacant, a grim reminder and embarrassment to their competitor across the street. John Fargo had answered by announcing that he would build a new store of his own, on the very same spot, next door to his old one; a store newer and smarter than any the city had seen; he would, he declared, keep the prestige of his old neighborhood.

When he called Roark to his office he did not say that he would have to decide later or think things over. He said: “You’re the architect.” He sat, his feet on his desk, smoking a pipe, snapping out words and puffs of smoke together. “I’ll tell you what space I need and how much I want to spend. If you need more—say so. The rest is up to you. I don’t know much about buildings. But I know a man who knows when I see him. Go ahead.”

Fargo had chosen Roark because Fargo had driven, one day, past Gowan’s Service Station, and stopped, and gone in, and asked a few questions. After that, he bribed Heller’s cook to show him through the house in Heller’s absence. Fargo needed no further argument.

 

Late in May, when the drafting table in Roark’s office was buried deep in sketches for the Fargo store, he received another commission.

Mr. Whitford Sanborn, the client, owned an office building that had been built for him many years ago by Henry Cameron. When Mr. Sanborn decided that he needed a new country residence he rejected his wife’s suggestions of other architects; he wrote to Henry Cameron. Cameron wrote a ten-page letter in answer; the first three lines of the letter stated that he had retired from practice; the rest of it was about Howard Roark. Roark never learned what had been said in that letter; Sanborn would not show it to him and Cameron would not tell him. But Sanborn signed him to build the country residence, in spite of Mrs. Sanborn’s violent objections.

Mrs. Sanborn was the president of many charity organizations and this had given her an addiction to autocracy such as no other avocation could develop. Mrs. Sanborn wished a French chateau built upon their new estate on the Hudson. She wished it to look stately and ancient, as if it had always belonged to the family; of course, she admitted, people would know that it hadn’t, but it would
appear
as if it had.

Mr. Sanborn signed the contract after Roark had explained to him in detail the kind of a house he was to expect; Mr. Sanborn had agreed to it readily, had not wished even to wait for sketches. “But of course, Fanny,” Mr. Sanborn said wearily, “I want a modern house. I told you that long ago. That’s what Cameron would have designed.” “What in heaven’s name does Cameron mean now?” she asked. “I don’t know, Fanny. I know only that there’s no building in New York like the one he did for me.”

The arguments continued for many long evenings in the dark, cluttered, polished mahogany splendor of the Sanborns’ Victorian drawing room. Mr. Sanborn wavered. Roark asked, his arm sweeping out at the room around them: “Is
this
what you want?” “Well, if you’re going to be impertinent ...” Mrs. Sanborn began, but Mr. Sanborn exploded: “Christ, Fanny! He’s right! That’s just what I
don’t
want! That’s just what I’m sick of!”

Roark saw no one until his sketches were ready. The house—of plain field stone, with great windows and many terraces—stood in the gardens over the river, as spacious as the spread of water, as open as the gardens, and one had to follow its lines attentively to find the exact steps by which it was tied to the sweep of the gardens, so gradual was the rise of the terraces, the approach to and the full reality of the walls; it seemed only that the trees flowed into the house and through it; it seemed that the house was not a barrier against sunlight, but a bowl to gather it, to concentrate it into brighter radiance than that of the air outside.

Mr. Sanborn was first to see the sketches. He studied them, and then he said: “I ... I don’t know quite how to say it, Mr. Roark. It’s great. Cameron was right about you.”

After others had seen the sketches Mr. Sanborn was not certain of this any longer. Mrs. Sanborn said that the house was awful. And the long evening arguments were resumed. “Now why,
why
can’t we add turrets there, on the corners?” Mrs. Sanborn asked. “There’s plenty of room on those flat roofs.” When she had been talked out of the turrets, she inquired: “Why can’t we have mullioned windows? What difference would that make? God knows, the windows are large enough—though why they have to be so large I fail to see, it gives one no privacy at all—but I’m willing to accept your windows, Mr. Roark, if you’re so stubborn about it, but why can’t you put mullions on the panes? It will soften things, and it gives a regal air, you know, a feudal sort of mood.”

The friends and relatives to whom Mrs. Sanborn hurried with the sketches did not like the house at all. Mrs. Walling called it preposterous, and Mrs. Hooper—crude. Mr. Melander said he wouldn’t have it as a present. Mrs. Applebee stated that it looked like a shoe factory. Miss Davitt glanced at the sketches and said with approval: “Oh, how very artistic, my dear! Who designed it? ... Roark? ... Roark? ... Never heard of him.... Well, frankly, Fanny, it looks like something phony.”

The two children of the family were divided on the question. June Sanborn, aged nineteen, had always thought that all architects were romantic, and she had been delighted to learn that they would have a very young architect; but she did not like Roark’s appearance and his indifference to her hints, so she declared that the house was hideous and she, for one, would refuse to live in it. Richard Sanborn, aged twenty-four, who had been a brilliant student in college and was now slowly drinking himself to death, startled his family by emerging from his usual lethargy and declaring that the house was magnificent. No one could tell whether it was esthetic appreciation or hatred of his mother or both.

Whitford Sanborn swayed with every new current. He would mutter: “Well, now, not mullions, of course, that’s utter rubbish, but couldn’t you give her a cornice, Mr. Roark, to keep peace in the family? Just a kind of a crenelated cornice, it wouldn’t spoil anything. Or would it?”

The arguments ended when Roark declared that he would not build the house unless Mr. Sanborn approved the sketches just as they were and signed his approval on every sheet of the drawings. Mr. Sanborn signed.

Mrs. Sanborn was pleased to learn, shortly afterward, that no reputable contractor would undertake the erection of the house. “You see?” she started triumphantly. Mr. Sanborn refused to see. He found an obscure firm that accepted the commission grudgingly and as a special favor to him. Mrs. Sanborn learned that she had an ally in the contractor, and she broke social precedent to the extent of inviting him for tea. She had long since lost all coherent ideas about the house; she merely hated Roark. Her contractor hated all architects on principle.

The construction of the Sanborn house proceeded through the months of summer and fall, each day bringing new battles. “But, of course, Mr. Roark, I told you I wanted three closets in my bedroom, I remember distinctly, it was on a Friday and we were sitting in the drawing room and Mr. Sanborn was sitting in the big chair by the window and I was ... What about the plans? What plans? How do you expect me to understand plans?” “Aunt Rosalie says she can’t possibly climb a circular stairway, Mr. Roark. What are we going to do? Select our guests to fit your house?” “Mr. Hulburt says that kind of a ceiling won’t hold.... Oh, yes, Mr. Hulburt knows a lot about architecture. He’s spent two summers in Venice.” “June, poor darling, says her room will be dark as a cellar.... Well, that’s the way she feels, Mr. Roark. Even if it isn’t dark, but if it makes her feel dark, it’s the same thing.” Roark stayed up nights, redrafting the plans for the alterations which he could not avoid. It meant days of tearing down floors, stairways, partitions already erected; it meant extras piling up on the contractor’s budget. The contractor shrugged and said: “I told you so. That’s what always happens when you get one of those fancy architects. You wait and see what this thing will cost you before he gets through.”