Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand. - book reviews

National Review, August 4, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand, by Nathaniel Branden (Houghton Mifflin, 436 pp., $21.95)

AYN RAND'S Objectivist movement effectively came to a sudden end in 1968, when Miss Rand learned that her chief disciple and sometime lover, Nathaniel Branden, was having an affair with a younger disciple. To make matters slightly worse, Mrs. Branden, also an Objectivist insider, had known of the affair and connived in keeping Miss Rand in the dark about it.

Barbara Branden has already written about the episode in her biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, and her unflattering portrait of her ex-husband led many to wonder what his own memoir would have to say about it all. Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand evens the score. Branden portrays Barbara as a weak tramp who became a frigid wife, and Miss Rand herself as a raving tyrant.

It happened like this. After reading The Fountainhead in his teens, young Nathan Blumenthal, of Toronto, wrote a couple of philosophical fan letters to the author, who lived in Los Angeles with her husband. She invited him to visit; they hit it off ecstatically, and on subsequent visits he took his girlfriend along. The four became close, so close that when Nathan and Barbara moved to New York, Miss Rand followed, her husband in tow. She was working on a big new novel, The Strike, in which her revolutionary philosophy of reason and laissez-faire was to be fully developed and dramatized. Nathan led the formation of a circle of young followers, who expected publication of the book to change the world.

By the time the book appeared, in 1957, as Atlas Shrugged, the Rand cult was operating. Moreover, Ayn and Nathan (who had changed his name to the more Randesque Nathaniel Branden) had become lovers, her argument that this was a supremely "rational" arrangement having overpowered the objections of Barbara and the feckless Mr. Rand, Frank O'Connor.

Surprisingly, Miss Rand fell into deep depression after the publication of her book, It sold well, and didn't stop selling, but the reviews were murder. Besides, she had put all her energy into the novel, and had no followup act. But Branden, 25 years younger, saw the chance to expand the circle of her admirers into a movement that could change the world in the long run and make money in the short run. As their love affair lapsed into remission, he took charge of the cult. She named him "my intellectual heir" and praised him as a "hero," like Howard Roark and John Galt.

The Objectivist movement grew, with seminars and a newsletter. But at its core, it was a small cluster of mostly Jewish kids, very bright but timid, callow, naive, who accepted Miss Rand's whims as laws. For all her celebration of reason and individualism, she demanded blind loyalty and inflicted merciless humiliation on followers who differed with her. Never mind her doctrines; a good Objectivist had to share her tastes. She damned Shakespeare and Tolstoy, preferring Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane. She condemned Beethoven, a heroic innovator if there ever was one, for his "malevolent sense of life"; she liked Rachmaninoff and operetta. At group meetings, Branden flayed deviants on her behalf, doubling as a psychological counselor in off-hours for those who could afford it (and take it).

The atmosphere was so fear-ridden that even Branden eventually sickened of it. He had his own fears: Miss Rand made heavy demands on him, and sometimes withering accusations in private. He naturally recoiled, and by the time she wanted to resume their sexual affair, he had fallen in love with a new girl in the group, a beautiful young woman who seemed to adore him unconditionally, in definance of all Randian rationality.

Branden understandably hesitated to tell Miss Rand about this new development. But he hesitated for five years, during which time he staved off her romantic advances while assuring her that he loved her. This is a judgment call, of course, but I think it would be generous to allow a man six months to extricate himself from such a situation.

Among other things, his livelihood was at stake. He never directly says this, so we are not invited to think it crossed his mind. He hints that money was Barbara's motive for joining in the deception, whereas he was intent on not hurting Ayn. You see the difference. At times he is rough on himself, but not nearly rough enough. At any rate, this intellectual giant had reached the age of thirty without being qualified for any role in life except changing the world. And even this might be harder to achieve without Miss Rand's patronage.

She must have been a terror, all right. She cut herself off from people her own age and confined her social contact to young people she could tyrannize. Her husband seemed to bear her open adultery with a kind of boneless benevolence (a friend of mine who met him once describes him as "filet of human being"), but his cuckoldry drove him to drink. In Branden, Miss Rand thought she'd found the great love that had always eluded her, but she acted as if she owned him, with an anxious possessiveness no reader of her novels would suspect her capable of. Still, she has her own pathos: no man she respected ever found her desirable, except a lad who might almost have been her son.