The old girl, still kickin': Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's massive ideological novel, turns 50

National Review, Nov 19, 2007 by Terry Teachout

As I write these words, the 146th best-selling book on Amazon.com is the trade-paperback edition of a 1,200-page-long, 50-year-old mystery novel about a physicist, two industrialists, and a South American playboy with four (count 'em, four) middle names. Though the novel in question contains a fair amount of sex, its centerpiece is a 56-page monologue about the modern-day implications of Aristotelian philosophy. The author, a squat, vain Russian emigre, was so sure she'd penned a masterpiece that she refused to let anyone change a line of it, and so stubborn that she managed to impose her will on her publisher, who readily admitted to finding her philosophy "absolutely horrifying." Be that as it may, Random House's Bennett Cerf had been in the book-selling game long enough to know a cash cow when he saw one, so he ordered up a first printing of 100,000 copies--and sold them all.

Cerf recalled his friendly but uneasy professional relationship with Ayn Rand in At Random, his genial autobiography:

   I remember when Atlas Shrugged was being edited by Hiram Haydn. The
   hero, John Galt, makes a speech that lasts about thirty-eight pages
   [sic!]. All that he says in it has been said over and over already
   in the book, but Hiram couldn't get her to cut a word.... I said,
   "Ayn, nobody's going to read that. You've said it all three or four
   times before, and it's thirty-odd pages long. You've got to cut
   it." She looked at me calmly and said, "Would you cut the Bible?"
   So I gave up.

Cerf dictated that anecdote to an oral historian in 1968. I read Atlas Shrugged four years later. I was 16, and it made a deep impression on me, as it does on most impressionable teenagers. Ten years after that, I wrote an essay called "Farewell, Dagny Taggart" (the title refers to Rand's businesswoman-heroine) that was published in NATIONAL REVIEW on the 25th anniversary of the book's publication. It was the second piece I'd written for the magazine--for any magazine, if truth be told. In it I told how reading Atlas Shrugged, for all its glaring flaws, had jolted me out of a good many ill-considered assumptions about the way the world works. I then went on to seek out a more thoughtful philosophy, and in short order stumbled across my first copy of NR, from which all else, including my writing career, was to follow.

Might such classics of 20th-century conservative thought as The Road to Serfdom or The Conservative Mind (both of which I read a couple of years later) have had a similar effect on me had either book been available, as Atlas Shrugged was, in the high-school library of the small Missouri town in which I grew up? Very likely not--and that was my point. For the great virtue of Atlas Shrugged, as I saw in 1982, is that it is so well suited to the needs of the "frustrated adolescent in search of fresh ideas" that I had been a decade earlier: "It seems likely that most people who read it are 16-year-olds (of various ages) who find themselves carried away by the sheer mind-clearing exhilaration of unrestrained adolescent individualism; and I know a sizable number of readers, myself included, who have gone on from there to the infinitely greener pastures of true conservatism."

'BIG SISTER'

To give Rand even that much credit in the pages of NR was a significant concession, for she had long since been read out of the conservative movement by none other than Whittaker Chambers. The author of Witness was very much a living memory at NR in 1982, though he had died two decades before and the dozen-odd pieces he had written during his two-year tenure as a senior editor remained uncollected. But "Big Sister Is Watching You," his 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, was still being talked about, and while few conservatives of my generation had actually read the essay--it was not until 1989 that I edited Ghosts on the Roof, the collection of Chambers's magazine journalism in which it first appeared in book form--the general feeling was that it had settled Rand's hash once and for all.

It was Chambers more than anyone else who persuaded Eisenhower-era conservatives that to make common cause with Ayn Rand, however tempting, would be a grave mistake. Because of the rip-roaring popular success of The Fountainhead, her name was already fairly well known to the general public in 1957, and it would have been understandable had the editors of NR opted to ride on the coattails of an author whose last book had been made into a big-budget Hollywood movie. But the still-nascent conservative movement was then disreputable to a degree now unthinkable outside the groves of academe and the New York Times Building, and it was important to Bill Buckley and his colleagues that their enterprise be purged of extremists who might lead it into even hotter water.

Enter NR's senior ex-Communist, who not only knew extremism when he saw it but was a card-carrying aesthete to boot, meaning that he was as alert to the literary weaknesses of Atlas Shrugged as he was to its intellectual deficiencies: