Now that Paul Ryan is the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, his literary and philosophical love/hate affair with Ayn Rand has been brought even more into the spotlight than it was when he was just the handsome hayseed pushing the poor toward the abyss. Having gone through my own period of Randian fascination a long time ago, this gives me a chance at a little nostalgia.
I started reading Rand right after her death in 1982. A loud, if not large, part of the world was outraged, outraged that the great thinker’s passing was eclipsed by John Belushi’s well-publicized death by overdose the same week. I read enough indignant editorials and letters to the editor that I started wondering what the heck she was all about. I’d heard her name, but I don’t even think I’d seen the 1949 film version of “The Fountainhead” with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. (And when I did, I was more interested in the years-long love affair that started between Cooper and Neal during the filming than I was with the plot.) “Fountainhead” (1943) was the novel I chose first – in part because I’ve always been an architecture fan, so I thought I’d connect best with it. From there I moved on to “Anthem” (1938), “We the Living” (1936) and the mother of them all, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957).
The first thing that struck me was how artificial the environment is in most of Rand’s writing. The collectivism that she railed against didn’t exist in the US to nearly the degree necessary to support her arguments, so she had to tweak it. The result was a bizarrely socialized America that I couldn’t imagine ever existing. That’s probably why I was interested in her work but never even considered becoming an acolyte. Her fiction was – to me – even farther from reality than the stories of Asimov or Bradbury. At least science fiction was somewhat plausible.
Rand’s characters seldom acted like actual people, either. Their actions could almost never stand alone without some protracted explanation. A kiss was never just a kiss; a smile was never just a smile. If a Rand heroine smiled it would be more like:
She smiled. It was a smile of derision, the kind of derision one gives to an imbecilic colleague with whom one must deal. Yet it was a smile tinged with some measure of pity, the grudging pity one holds for those who don’t deserve it in spite of their pathetic status.
In a word, it was exhausting, like reading in in unfamiliar language.
By the time I got to “Atlas Shrugged,” I realized that all the books tell the same story. There were slight variations, but essentially the same story. The heroine in each is the same woman. Dagny Taggert, Dominique Francon, Kira Argounova – all strong, independent, rail-thin twenty-somethings who eventually have to be taken by force by the ideal man of their particular story. The men evolved more. Each of them moved more toward Rand’s perfect specimen: John Galt. Still, the evolution was not extensive. It was more a trip from A to C or D.
“Atlas” also made clear what I think of as the “magic” of Rand’s world. In a Rand novel, the “good” people don’t all rise to the top; they rise to the exact place they are “supposed” to reach. The magic is that they all know precisely where their high level is and they are happy to stop there. The “bad” people are the ones who scheme and scrape for more than they “should” have, and the higher they rise, the more evil they are. The good are strong and can bear up under any amount of torture and strain to be true to their vision. The bad are soft and weak and live only by duplicity. In this sense the stories are very much like old westerns. White hats against black hats.
I will say I was impressed by Rand’s fan base. I read “Atlas” while living in Manhattan and I have never before or since been so besieged by people who wanted to hold impromptu book chats. From the cashier at Zaro’s, the bagel shop in Grand Central Station, to the guy who ran up to me in the subway, eyes ablaze with excitement, saying, “Oh my God, I LOVE that book! What page are you on? Have you figured out who John Galt is yet?” Even though I wasn’t fully committed, it still felt cool to be part of a new club I’d never known existed. It was like being a Trekkie on the down low.
Here’s my take on Ms. Rand: Since she’s so much a part of the dialogue now, I think reading some of her work is a good idea. But you can get everything you need out of one book: “We the Living.” It’s (relatively) short, it contains all the basic Randian themes and because it takes place in Soviet Russia, it’s actually kind of believable. If you insist on reading one of the more famous books, go with “The Fountainhead.” “Atlas Shrugged” is easily twice as long as it needs to be, which will be painfully clear to you if you do attempt it. Take it from a guy who even slogged through John Galt’s big 70-page speech, which could have been edited down to no more than five without losing any substance. I finished as a sheer act of will – much like John Galt would have.
Hm. Maybe I’m a little more Randian than I thought.