Myself, I figured this out back when I read her books for the first time as a teenager: The first copies I had, were from my parents' library, dusty old paper-backed editions of Anthem and We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. I loved every page of them. I loved the passion, and the free-market ideals, which went well with the Reagan Republicanism my parents had taught me. And I especially loved the cover photo of Ms. Rand that was on the back of each book:
This slim, pretty woman with the dark eyes and the passionate stare was the very embodiment of the individualistic romanticism she stood for, I thought. Surely she was what Dagney Taggart would have looked like if she were a real person.
Those were old copies of the books that I was reading. It was no wonder, I thought, that they had an old picture, of someone who was after all, still alive, on the backs of them. It wasn't until I got to college and went out and bought my own copy of Atlas Shrugged, and saw that the author photo had not been changed, that I started to wonder. After all, this was what Ayn Rand looked like in the early 80's, when I started college:
I know, I know. We all get older. And precious few of us get prettier as we age. But wouldn't Dagney Taggart have shown what she looked like in real time? Wasn't that the kind of gutsy individualist she was? ...That her creator was? I won't say I went right out and got rid of all my Ayn Rand books or anything, but in my mind, this was evidence of vanity on her part, and I thought less of her.
Actually, her books sort of led to the same conclusion. They were romantic books, not in the Nietzschean sense that she intended, but in the sense that they resembled the Barbara Cartland books that I also enjoyed back then, when I was young and foolish. They were one-dimensional characters, who were either good or evil, and never nuanced or partly one and partly the other. And you could always tell whether a character was good or bad by how they looked. Dagney Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged for instance, was slim and drop-dead gorgeous, while her rival, the cynical "moocher" Lillian Reardon was aging and running to fat. The plotlines were simple conflicts of good and evil, with the good always winning, and the heroine always ending up with the most attractive male available. Yes, they were basically romance novels, and after I grew skeptical of Rand's so-called "philosophy", that was how I read them.
To understand Ayn Rand, here is what you need to know: First off, she came of age in Russia, during the Russian Revolution. Just twelve years old when the Bolsheviks seized control of her homeland, she attended college in Petrograd, where she was kicked out halfway through her studies for being a member of the bourgeoisie, and just barely managed to complete her studies.
Soviet Russia has the reputation for being the culmination of all Karl Marx's collectivist ideals. That it was a cold, harsh place, run by a brutal regime, people say, is just proof that collectivism, or any kind of state-socialism, does not work. Certainly, this was Ayn Rand's view of the situation.
In reality, the Soviet Union was marked from the beginning, by the brutality of its founder Vladimir Lenin. Right from the time his Bolshevik Party took power, Lenin's policies were those of violence and oppression. One of the first things he did after taking power, was to establish a secret police force called the Cheka, who were given permission to arrest anyone even suspected of opposing the Bolshevik Regime. Another early move was to institute forced labor policies over the peasantry, and take full state control over food production away from them, giving it instead to bureaucrats, who knew nothing about farming. Lenin had the advantage that he was the hero of the Revolution at home, while abroad he was the creator of a Golden new age, that was going to show the truth of all Karl Marx's predictions. People liked to delude themselves that Soviet Russia did not really take its turn toward brutality and oppression until after he died and Joseph Stalin took over, but in reality, Stalin only followed in the direction that Lenin had been headed all along.
But, growing up in such a terrible atmosphere, perhaps it is no wonder that Ayn Rand developed such a loathing, not just for the state, but for collectives, or anything beyond the individual as well.
In 1925, Ayn Rand came to the United States. Initially, she came to visit relatives, but she was so impressed by the contrast between capitalist America, and the postwar Russia she had left, that she went out and found a job and a place to live so that she could stay.
People like to talk about her idealization during that era, of serial killer William Edward Hickman. And certainly, Hickman was just the sort of arrogant, sociopathic individualist that a Nietzsche-fangirl such as Rand was would be sure to love. But myself, I think you can get a better understanding of the woman by looking at the job she got in the United States, which was a job as a screenwriter, for Cecil B. DeMille.
DeMille was known for his blockbusters, for huge, dramatic films, with bigger-than life sets, lots of drama, and thousands upon thousands of extras. He made the careers of stars such as Gloria Swanson and Richard Dix.
He brought the unforgettable spectacle of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea to the screen in 1956.
And he fed the romantic imagination of one little Jewish girl in the screenwriters' department, who would go on to create her own morality plays, as huge and dramatic as his own (albeit with a lot more long, preachy parts in them).
Ayn Rand's philosophy did not hold up in the real world, because it was never intended to. It was the worldview of the blockbuster movie or of the romance novel, not something real people could ever really base their lives on. She loved to construct firm rules about how life should be lived, that she said could be applied to anyone and in all circumstances, but she always envisioned those rules being played out by beautiful people in gorgeous settings, never by children, or by the poor, or by dumpy, Jewish ladies who were approaching middle age.
The most telling story about Ayn Rand in my opinion, is the one about her love affair with Nathaniel Branden: When she was 35 years old and at the height of her fame, Rand met up with the 18-year old Branden. At first, he was her intellectual disciple, then later, when she became attracted to him, they became lovers. She made sure to have both of them bring their spouses into one room so they could announce the beginning of their love affair. She wanted both Barbara Branden, and her own husband Frank O'Connor to understand, their relationship conformed to strict philosophical principles. It was the meeting of mind with mind, not just two married people getting together for a quick shag.
Where things got rough, was when Branden went on to become attracted to another woman. Who'd have thought it: A guy that would cheat on his wife, would also cheat on his mistress. But Rand was outraged. This was a total violation (even though her heroine Dagney Taggart does the same thing, dumping her lover Hank Reardon as soon as the more attractive John Galt shows an interest in her). She renounced Branden and threw him entirely out of the Objectivist movement the two of them had once led together.
This will always be my picture of Ayn Rand: Not the diamond-edged individualist heroine she's held to be to this day, by her fans, but the aging, spurned lover, taking what little revenge she can, when a man fails to live up to her movie-hero expectations. She was just human, that's the crux of it. The tragedy is, that her philosophy was one that didn't allow for humanness. Her own had to be covered up, the people who recognized it thrown out her presence, and the photos that showed it, ignored and replaced with earlier, lovelier ones. And the humanness of others? That was their "weakness", their collectivist, "moocher" side.
HyperSmash
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