Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Hardcover

Heller, Anne Conover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385513992 ISBN 13: 9780385513999

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 2009

Synopsis

Ayn Rand is best known as the author of the perennially bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Altogether, more than 12 million copies of the two novels have been sold in the United States. The books have attracted three generations of readers, shaped the foundation of the Libertarian movement, and influenced White House economic policies throughout the Reagan years and beyond. A passionate advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, Rand remains a powerful force in the political perceptions of Americans today. Yet twenty-five years after her death, her readers know little about her life.

In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller traces the controversial author’s life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Heller reveals previously unknown facts about Rand’s history and looks at Rand with new research and a fresh perspective.

Based on original research in Russia, dozens of interviews with Rand’s acquaintances and former acolytes, and previously unexamined archives of tapes and letters, AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

ANNE C. HELLER has written for such publications as Lear’s, Mademoiselle, TriQuarterly, and Esquire. She is the former fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, and a former executive editor at Condé Nast Publications. She lives in Manhattan.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Carlos Lozada You can admit it now: Maybe in your teens, or in college, you experimented. Hiding in your dorm or your parents' basement, you took hit after hit. Your friends began wondering why you'd changed, but it was too late. Ayn Rand was in your bloodstream. My own dealer was a libertarian teaching assistant who introduced me to "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" in graduate school; soon I was subscribing to Rand-inspired newsletters and quoting Howard Roark and John Galt -- Rand's two most famous creations -- on the virtues of selfishness and individualism. It took the better part of a year to get over it, but, like so many others, I eventually realized that architects shouldn't go around blowing up buildings and that, above all, you can't really divide all humans into capitalist geniuses and collectivist looters. Now, two new beautifully timed Ayn Rand biographies -- appearing just as the financial crisis and Obamanomics have sparked interest in her defense of pure capitalism -- offer ammunition for fans and skeptics alike. As Jennifer Burns explains in "Goddess of the Market," critics of Rand's one-dimensional characters and overwrought prose miss her underlying political impact. "For over half a century," writes Burns, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to a life on the right," a one-woman awakening for burgeoning conservatives. Yet while Anne C. Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" agrees that Rand has helped shape views on individual rights for three generations of Americans, both books end up revealing how hard it is to live out Rand's worldview -- a difficulty exemplified most painfully by the ultimate devotee: Rand herself. In a life spanning most of the 20th century, Rand sought to live up to her own fictional characters, falling deeper into that world she made and farther from reality. The result was a sad existence, rife with the personal and intellectual contradictions she detested in others. She prized reason above all else yet was notoriously emotional; she claimed to live for no one's approval but agonized over every last critic; she lionized free markets but never invested in stocks; she praised independent thinkers yet demanded mindless loyalty from friends and associates. Not even Rand, it turns out, could be her own true believer. Rand's literary themes and worldview emerged early in life. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, she was a "lonely, alienated child," oppressed by a mother who constantly questioned her worth -- much as Rand would later do to her own acolytes. An academic standout but friendless in school, Alisa saw herself as "a heroine unfairly punished for what was best in her," says Burns, a recurring theme in her fiction. She admired her father's refusal to continue working after the Red Guard confiscated his pharmacy during the Bolshevik revolution. His actions inspired her major work, "Atlas Shrugged," in which capitalists decline to keep producing rather than allow the state to pillage their productivity. Rand was enamored of all things American -- especially movies, which she watched by the hundreds -- and migrated to the United States at age 20, made her way to Hollywood and began working on short fiction and plays. There she met and married Frank O'Connor, a middling actor who was "stunningly beautiful . . . tall, slender, with a classic profile." He helped her acquire U.S. citizenship, encouraged her in the darkest days of her writing, and inspired the look of her male protagonists. Yet he would never live up to their heroism. O'Connor emerges as one of the gloomiest individuals in these biographies, retreating into gardening, painting and alcohol to escape Rand's suffocating presence. As her reputation grew with the 1943 publication of "The Fountainhead" -- the bestselling tale of a hunky young architect who would rather destroy his creation than forsake his independence -- Rand acquired a growing collection of fans, taking a particular liking to admiring and handsome young men. Foremost among these was Nathaniel Branden, who first reached out to her as a "Fountainhead"-obsessed college student. Though 25 years her junior, Branden became the most pivotal relationship in her life. He was her intellectual heir, popularizer and lover. "You are my lifeline to reality," Rand told Branden as she slipped into depression and paranoia after "Atlas Shrugged" received harsh reviews. "Without you, I would not know how to exist in this world." (Her long reliance on amphetamines to power her through marathon writing sessions didn't help her mood, either.) And she even felt pressured by her novel's hero: "John Galt wouldn't feel this," she mused aloud in her New York City home. "I would hate for him to see me like this." One way she got by was through infamous Saturday night salons, all-night affairs attended by Branden, his wife and a small group of her most dedicated followers (including a young Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed "the Undertaker.") In these gatherings, held throughout the 1950s and '60s in Rand's New York City home, Rand would hold court on her philosophy -- now dubbed Objectivism -- and pass judgment on the actions of "the Collective," as the participants called themselves. The moniker, intended ironically, ended up oddly apropos. Acceptance of Rand's entire worldview was a requirement for admission; even deviating from her tastes in art and fashion became verboten. "Check your premises!" Rand would exhort her followers. "In all of her most crucial relationships, Rand would see others favorably largely to the degree that they mirrored her unusual self," Heller explained. The result was a steady stream of friendships gone wrong; whenever Rand decided that someone displayed "anti-life" tendencies, she cast them out. Years later, after a wrenching break with Branden, she privately wished him decades of impotence for daring to start another affair. Crossing Rand was not just bad manners; in her book, it was a moral failing. While Heller's biography is the more comprehensive of the two -- detailing everything from the books Rand loved as a child to her fumbling affair with Branden -- Burns, a historian at the University of Virginia, emphasizes Rand's impact on American conservatism. Though her Russian roots forever informed her politics, Rand's U.S. political awakening flowed from her revulsion against Roosevelt's New Deal. She became a volunteer for Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie in 1940, even conducting opposition research on FDR and blasting the president on New York City street corners. "What she wanted, more than anything else," writes Burns, "was someone who would stand up and argue for the traditional American way of life as she understood it: individualism." But no person or movement ever measured up. Right-wing icons such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were not sufficiently conservative, the libertarian movement was simply stealing her ideas, and not even free-market economist Friedrich Hayek was good enough. ("The man is an ass, with no conception of a free society at all," she scribbled in the margins of Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom.") In the end, up until her death in 1982, it seemed the only one who ever measured up in her mind was, well, Rand herself. Branden later described to Heller the principles he taught to Objectivism students in the 1960s. Among them: "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. . . . No one who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue can be a fully consistent individual." In a made-up world, it was easy to believe it. "It was more and more true that we were living inside the world of 'Atlas Shrugged,' " Branden admitted. He should have checked his premises. lozadac@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum was born to Jewish parents in 1905 Russia. Ayn Rand left Russia in 1926 for America and founded her anticollectivist philosophy, Objectivism, a philosophy of free market capitalism and the pursuit of self-interest as a moral good. Depressive, pill-taking, chain-smoking and manipulative, Rand's life was defined by a longtime Sunset Boulevard–like affair with Nathaniel Branden, who went on to start the self-esteem movement. At the same time, the combustible Rand was married to a passive man with matinee-idol looks. Magazine editor and journalist Heller competently describes Rand's feuds with William F. Buckley and with her sister, who had remained in the U.S.S.R., and the more courtly relationship Rand had with publisher Bennett Cerf. This objective account of the Objectivist Rand will interest her still large and devoted readership. Photos. (Nov. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

chapter 1

ONE

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

1905–1917

y

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism. I was born with that obsession and have never seen and do not know now a cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless and more tragically needed. Call it fate or irony, but I was born, of all countries on earth, in the one least suitable for a fanatic of individualism, Russia.

—“Autobiographical, Sketch,” 1936

When the fierce and extraordinary Ayn Rand was fifty-two years old, about to become world famous, and more than thirty years removed from her birthplace in Russia, she summed up the meaning of her elaborate, invented, cerebral world this way: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” It was a world in which no dictator, no deity, and no well-meaning sense of duty would ever take away the moral right of the gifted individual—Ayn Rand—to live according to her own high-wattage lights.

This was not the world she was born into. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February, 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, then the capital city of the most anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. Later, she would say that she loathed everything Russian, and while this was not entirely true—she retained her appetite for Russian classical music and Russian sweets until the end of her life—she hated the passivity, brutality, and primitive religiosity of the Russia of her youth.

She had good reason for this. Her birth came barely three weeks after the brief but bloody uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, where, on a bright January Sunday morning, twelve thousand of Czar Nicholas II’s cavalrymen opened fire on thirty thousand factory workers, their wives and children, labor organizers, and students who had walked to the Winter Palace to petition for better working conditions and a role in the czar’s all-powerful government. The protest was led by a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, and many marchers were said to be praying as they died. The slaughter gave rise to days of rioting throughout the city and set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which would end not in the quick and brutal suppression of the rebellion’s leaders, as this one did, but in a revolutionary coup that would shake the world and mold Ayn Rand’s worldview.

Rand’s parents, who in 1905 were thirty-four and twenty-five and had been married for just nine months, could hear the gunfire from the windows of their new apartment above a pharmacy on Zabalkanskii Prospekt—the street on which, later that evening, the popular writer Maxim Gorky would hold a meeting of the city’s liberal intellectuals and announce, “The Russian Revolution has begun.” Rand’s father, born Zelman Wolf Zakharovich Rosenbaum but known outside the family by the non-Jewish variant of his name, Zinovy, was a pharmaceutical chemist and the manager of the shop downstairs. Her mother, a homely but self- consciously stylish woman named Khana Berkovna Kaplan, known as Anna, had been trained as a dentist but had stopped practicing after her marriage and pregnancy.

By the time Ayn Rand was born, Zabalkanskii Prospekt and the streets around it were calm again. It was an illusory calm: all over Russia and the vast Russian territories to the south and east, massive labor strikes, anti-czarist peasant insurrections, and anti-Jewish violence were erupting. This would continue, in waves, until 1914, when World War I briefly united the nation against the Germans, and would grow yet more explosive from 1915 to 1919, when the country was war torn and starving. Meanwhile, Marxist political organizations, their leaders in and out of exile in Siberia and Europe, gained a following.

In these years, it was dangerous to be a Jew. As the economy deteriorated and the czar grew more repressive, the brunt of popular anger often fell upon Russia’s five million Jews. At Czar Nicholas II’s court, as elsewhere in Europe, Jews had long been identified with the supposedly pagan notions of a money economy, urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism. Given traditional Russian fear of modernity and fierce anti-Semitism, Jews were ready-made scapegoats onto whom the czar, the landowners, and the police could easily shift workers’ and peasants’ resentment for their poverty and powerlessness.

For Jews outside the capital city, this period brought the worst anti- Semitic violence since the Middle Ages. In the fall of 1905 alone, when Rand was not quite a year old, there were 690 anti-Jewish pogroms and three thousand Jewish murders. In one pogrom in Odessa, in the Crimea, where Rand and her family would relocate in 1918, eight hundred Jews were killed and one hundred thousand were made homeless. The czar’s police were said to have supplied the largely illiterate Russian Orthodox rioters with arms and vodka.

St. Petersburg was relatively safe from pogroms, which was one reason the Rosenbaums had migrated there. But it had its own complicated forms of official anti-Semitism. By 1914, the statutes circumscribing Jewish activities ran to nearly one thousand pages, and anything that wasn’t explicitly permitted was a crime. For decades, Jews who didn’t possess a trade or profession useful to the czar were barred from St. Petersburg; in most cases, unqualified Jews couldn’t even visit for a night. By law, Jews made up no more than 2 percent of the city’s population, and residency papers had to be renewed each year. Jews often changed their names to avoid detection. They and their homes were subject to police searches at all times. Rand’s father, who was born in the poor and pogrom-ridden Russian Pale of Settlement—a vast checkerboard of Jewish ghettos encompassing much of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland—went variously by the names Zelman, Zalman, and Zinovy. He seems to have become a pharmacist, at least in part, because this was one of the professions that permitted Jews to enter the city relatively freely. But the laws were fickle and crafted to give the czar maximum flexibility, and arrest and/or exile were a constant danger.

It was in this volatile and often frightening atmosphere that Rand grew up. She was the eldest of three daughters of this upwardly mobile pharmacist and his religiously observant, socially ambitious wife; Anna would later appear in her daughter’s novels as a series of superficial or spiteful characters. When Rand was two and a half, her sister Natasha was born; when she was five, her youngest and favorite sister Eleanora, called Nora, entered the family.

By the time Nora was born, in 1910, Zinovy had advanced to become the manager of a larger, more centrally located pharmacy. The Zabalkanskii drugstore, along with one a few streets away, in which the young chemist had worked before his marriage, were owned by Anna Rosenbaum’s sister, Dobrulia Kaplan, and her husband, Iezekiil Konheim; the new store, called Aleksandrovskaia, belonged to an affluent and professionally distinguished German Lutheran merchant named Aleksandr Klinge. Klinge’s shop faced Znamenskaya Square on the Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s resplendent main thoroughfare, built extra wide by Peter the Great to accommodate his cavalry and canons against the insurrections of the eighteenth century. Zinovy, now newly established among the Jewish bourgeoisie, moved his wife and daughters into a large, comfortable apartment on the second floor, adjoining the pharmacy. Another one of Anna’s sisters and her husband, a prosperous medical doctor named Isaac Guzarchik, settled with their two daughters on the floor above. There the family lived until they fled the starving city for the Crimea in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution.

Intelligent, self-directed, and solitary from an early age, Rand must have been a difficult child to raise in the first decade of the twentieth century. In spite of the era’s violence and turmoil, the ambience was Victorian: the fashions were for frills, family loyalty, and the feminine arts, all of which went utterly against her grain. Some of her earliest memories were of being unreasonably treated in such matters by her mother, who was the dominating personality in the household and even at times “a tyrant.” In one memory, during the family’s move to the Nevsky Prospekt apartment, Rand and her younger sisters were sent to stay with a neighboring aunt and uncle, perhaps the Konheims. When they returned to Rand’s new home, she asked her mother for a midi blouse like the ones she’d seen her cousins wearing. Anna Rosenbaum refused. She didn’t approve of midi blouses or other fashionable garments for children, Rand recalled fifty years later. Anna was serving tea at the time, and—perhaps as an experiment— Rand asked for a cup of tea. Again her mother refused; children didn’t drink tea. Rand refrained from arguing, although even then the budding logician might have won the argument on points. Instead, she asked herself, Why won’t they let me have what I want? and made a resolution: Someday I will have it. She was four and a half or five years old, although all her life she thought that she had been three. The elaborate and controversial philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of this project. Its most famous expression was a phrase that became the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness, in 1962.

Rand’s first memory is worth describing here. The future author o...

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385513992
• ISBN 13: 9780385513999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592