The passion of Ayn Rand

National Review, August 1, 1986 by Joseph Sobran

The Passion of Ayn Rand

The Passion of Ayn Rand, by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 442 pp., $19.95)

THE WORST definition of man, Anatole France said, is that one which defines him as a rational animal. Ayn Rand would not have smiled at this. She saw man as heroic. It was men who kept disappointing her.

She was a shy, unprepossessing girl who grew up in what was becoming Leningrad. Her name then was Alice Rosenbaum; her father was a petitbourgeois who came in for hard times when Bolshevism triumphed. He said he would starve before he would work for the Communist state, and he nearly did, along with his family. Alice was once so famished she begged her mother for an extra pea.

She managed to escape to America, where she lived with some Chicago relatives named (honest!) Portnoy. She was determined to be a writer; so she changed her name to Ayn Rand. She borrowed the first name from a Finnish writer (whom she hadn't read) and the last from a typewriter (after rejecting "Remington').

She went to Hollywood, where she worked as a movie extra and screenwriter and snagged a husband, a big slab of gorgeous male named Frank O'Connor. As Barbara Branden tells it, O'Connor was a sweet but almost totally passive man who failed as an actor and had no choice but to let his wife wear the pants in the family. She made it big, of course, with The Fountainhead in 1943 (she was 38) and became a guru to thousands who were transfixed by the book's shocking individualism.

Miss Rand persisted in comically misperceiving her feckless husband as cut from the same granite as her heroes Howard Roark and John Galt. But O'Connor left something to be desired as a husband, and she latched onto her chief apostle, Nathan Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden before marrying Barbara.

When Miss Rand decided to have an affair with Nathan (as she always called him), she sat down with him, Frank, and Barbara to announce it, in the fashion of rational beings. Frank and Barbara tried to conduct themselves as such beings (Frank was always a good sport), but it got difficult. Frank started drinking. Barbara became a nervous wreck. Nathan took up with a younger woman on the side, less rational but more nubile than Miss Rand. Barbara knew about his two-timing (three-timing might be a better phrase) but her chief fear was that Miss Rand might find out about it.

She did. The time came when Mrs. Branden had to tell her husband's lover that there was yet another woman, and the result was a rage to scramble the New York skyline and bust up the Objectivist movement. Nathan felt guilty about his infidelity to Miss Rand, confessing in Objectivese that he knew he was consorting with a "lesser value' than her. So ideologized was she that she insisted he should have preferred her erotically to all others for her ideas even "if I were eighty and in a wheelchair!'

As her husband sat silent, Miss Rand roared at Branden: "You rotten hypocrite! . . . I'll denounce you publicly, I'll destroy you as I created you! I don't even care what it does to me. . . . If you have an ounce of morality left in you an ounce of psychological health--you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you'll know it's a sign of still worse moral degradation!' This is a good book, but I'm waiting for the opera.

Actually, The Passion of Ayn Rand is an excellent book, especially for those (like me) who had their youthful fling with Objectivism. Mrs. Branden (long since divorced) seems to harbor no rancor toward Miss Rand; in fact she still has enormous admiration for her ideas and celebrates her growing influence. But she admires Miss Rand on her (Mrs. Branden's) own terms.

And that's the right approach. Miss Rand was one of the truly impossible people of all time, an autocratic personality who makes Khomeini seem like Cyrus Vance. Mrs. Branden gives what strikes me as a full, fair, and perceptive account of how she got that way, how she used the lever of her own ideas to pass from the shy girl to the tyrannical matron.

It's something of a miracle that such an eccentric should touch millions of readers so powerfully. She spoke to something deep inside the outsider. She didn't care a fig for respectability; she despised Shakespeare and admired Mickey Spillane. "I refuse to believe that Lear and Macbeth represent what man really is,' she said, though, like Tolstoy, she could have taken a leaf from Lear. She made her own odd tastes the index of others' rationality; her young followers adopted her rigid philosophical dialect and admitted only "appropriate' emotions. When her friendships broke up--as they usually did--her condemnation of her former chums was total. She could never have been her own follower; and one perceptive student wondered how she could at once claim to be a historic innovator and yet blame people for not having reached her own conclusions already.

She wound up very lonely. She had cut off most of her friends (Mrs. Branden movingly recalls visiting her toward the end), and O'Connor became senile, hostile, and violent before he died. But she was devoted to him, even if she never realized what she had done to him.