CHAPTER ONE The Believers They knew it, those Objectivists. One of them said to me, "I hope we have an impact on you." He knew. That remark was made to me at one of the monthly meetings of Ayn Rand followers in Manhattan. I was becoming a regular participant. Oddly, I was liking it and growing fond of the people who attended. Even odder was that I was enjoying her novels and becoming vaguely simpatico to her beliefs, even though they were contrary to everything I had been taught and experienced since infancy. Her novels were compelling and persuasive in ways that I couldn't quite put my finger on.
The publisher Bennett Cerf had a similar reaction to Rand as a person. He said in his memoirs that "I found myself liking her, though I had not expected to."1 Atlas Shrugged was on my coffee table, gathering dust, for several weeks before I picked it up. I had a copy of one of its innumerable softcover editions, with a foreword by her aide, heir, and sidekick Leonard Peikoff. Eventually I forced myself to read it. Initially, I was in agreement with my teenage self that this book wasn't very good. I was repelled by Rand's leaden phraseology and too-cute way of naming her characters. The villains have names like "Balph" and "Slagenhop.
" A public official who advocates mooching is named "Wesley Mouch." It was Dickensian without being witty. They are physically repulsive and they spout inanities; clay pigeons tossed in the air so Rand could blast them with a shotgun. For example: "A very young girl in white evening gown asked timidly, 'What is the essence of life, Mr. Eubank?' 'Suffering,' said Balph Eubank, 'defeat and suffering.'" Eubank favors a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. But what if it's a good story? "'Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature,' said Balph Eubank, contemptuously."2 Some of my notes as I read the book: "Implausible.
" "Anti-American." "Defense needs/establishment absent." (Odd for a book published at the height of the Cold War.) "Characters live in moral vacuum." "Contempt for poor." But then, as the pages flipped by, my resistance eroded. I began to admire her skill at pacing such an immense work of fiction. The Hollywood screenwriter in her was becoming evident.
I felt ashamed. It was as if I was savoring Mein Kampf, chortling along with der Führer as he expounded wittily on the disease-carrying vermin that were my ancestral burden. I carried around this massive book in a tote bag, keeping its title hidden as I walked the collectivist streets of Greenwich Village, avoiding the eyes of passersby. It became plain to me that her appeal is more than just political. Her novels serve collectively as the Big Book of Objectivism, a self-help manual as well as a work of fiction and ideological hornbook. Embedded in her work is a singular view of the psychology of human relationships, sans family. She never had children and didn't provide much insight into the parent-child relationship, but she certainly had strong opinions on how to deal with moochers, sorry SOBs, and louses that might be found within one's family. The basic message is that one jettisons them without a second thought.
And as for adultery: What of it? What's good enough for Hank Rearden is surely good enough for any follower of his exploits as a thin, sexy steel manufacturer, long-suffering breadwinner for an ungrateful family and Dagny's main squeeze. Racy sex scenes, steamy romantic triangles, and an unconventional view of nuptial relations are the sugar that Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead spread on the sour grapefruit of philosophical exposition. Neither is an homage to family values, to say the least. In both novels, all of the major characters are isolated, existential figures, sort of what you'd find in a film noir. Not an Ozzie nor a Harriet nor a Ward Cleaver was to be found in Ayn Rand's fantasy world. Few children, fewer behaving like children. No Wally, no Beaver. June Cleaver would have been a hard-charging exec or the inventor of an ore-refining process.
The Fred Rutherfords and other second-handers and collectivists in the Cleaver family circle would have been treated with the kind of cold contempt that only a Rand character could dish out. Atlas and Fountainhead made it easy to love individualism and no-government capitalism because it was a world of healthy, young heroes and repulsive villains. There were no inconvenient elderly defecating upon themselves in nursing homes. No paraplegic war veterans without means of support. No refugees from far-off lands with unmarketable skills. No KKK rallies. No exploitation of the poor. No rat-infested slums.
No racial minorities. Poverty and unemployment are a distant, alien presence. The only member of the underclass Dagny encounters is a railroad hobo who turns out to be an Objectivist with a lead on Galt. There is nobody and nothing to interrupt the monotonous picture, nothing to upset the stereotypes, no migrant workers toiling for pennies. Rand, acting as God, made those people invisible while she whitened the hearts of American business. The only societal problem in the world of Atlas Shrugged is that government is mean to business and unfair to the wealthy. The two inanely skewed Rand opuses were the intellectual backstory of the group meetings that I attended. The members were polite and tolerant if one was not up to speed on Rand's works, just as they were reasonably courteous to the occasional collectivist who happened by, but it was hard to follow the discussions without having a working knowledge of her novels and nomenclature.
"Checking premises" was one common catchphrase. Rand liked to say that people who disagreed with her were utilizing incorrect premises in their thought processes. I was introduced to these meetings by my initial tour guide to Objectivism, a man who was literally a tour guide. His name was Frederick Cookinham, and in his spare time he gave walking tours of "Ayn Rand's New York."3 He is the author of a rambling but intriguing self-published volume of Ayn Rand-inspired thought, The Age of Rand: Imagining an Objectivist Future World . Despite the title, it spends more time mulling Rand's philosophy than imagining the future. It's a thoughtful book, at times amusing, a quality not often found in Objectivist literature. It takes a skeptical attitude toward the keepers of the Objectivist flame at the Ayn Rand Institute, and is far from hero-worshiping when it comes to Rand herself.
For example, he points out that though Rand opposed racism, "there remain so many references in her writings to the 'pest holes of Asia' and 'naked savages' who want foreign aid from the United States, that her assumption is clear, despite her actually defining a 'savage' as someone who believes in magic." Fred was disturbed by Rand's opinion of Mahatma Gandhi, as contained in a 1948 letter from Rand to right-wing writer Isabel Paterson one week after Gandhi was killed.4 She called his assassination "an almost cruel piece of historical irony" and said that it was almost as if a higher intelligence in the universe had carried out a "nice sardonic gesture." Rand said, "Here was a man who spent his life fighting to get the British out of India in the name of peace, brotherly love and non-violence. He got what he asked for." Fred was nonplussed. "What is she saying here?" Seemed pretty obvious to me: Gandhi was an altruist and got the fate that he deserved. It was a good example of the cold-bloodedness that she so often displayed.
Fred doesn't resolve his dilemma, and points out, somewhat dubiously, that Rand and Gandhi are actually "allies," at least in a limited sense, as both believed that the ends justify the means. Personally I can't conceive of two individuals with less in common, even if Gandhi did display individuality of an almost Roarkish dimension. It was clear from reading his book, and from joining him on his walking tour, that Fred was an independent thinker, certainly no cultist.5 I met him for lunch at an Au Bon Pain sandwich-and-coffee joint in Lower Manhattan, not far from where Rand was famously photographed with Federal Hall in the background, wearing a solid-gold dollar-sign brooch. Fred was in his mid-fifties, had a salt-and-pepper beard and a disconcerting resemblance to Richard Dreyfuss. He worked as a proofreader for a law firm when not giving tours, and sang in a light-opera company in his spare time. Like most people I met who sipped from the cup of Rand, Fred first stumbled upon her books at an early age. He was eleven when he found Anthem , one of Rand's early novellas, and Atlas Shrugged in his brother's bookcase.
He eagerly consumed the shorter book, which was the story of a tyrannical society in which collectivism runs rampant, a harsher version of the fantasy world of Atlas Shrugged , in which people are referred to by numbers and the word "I" is eliminated. Atlas was far too big for him to read immediately, but the book intrigued him, and he began reading it when he was thirteen. He plowed right through it. At the State University of New York in Cortland, he told me over our sandwiches, "the first thing I did was join the Libertarian Party." At the time, libertarians were a freewheeling, quasi-anarchist g.