The Journals of Ayn Rand (44 page)

Roark’s life is the simple, single-tracked pursuit of his only goat—architecture. It is the continuous struggle of his own truth against men. He experiences every hardship, every defeat, every agony that men can place in his way. But it leaves him untouched—within. His conflict is with the outside world, not with himself. He never achieves universal recognition—which he never sought. But he wins the freedom to work as he believes, he fights through to the chance of creating great buildings. His buildings—not his love nor his compliance—are his gift to the world. And by ignoring men, he gives them creations of great value. At the end of the story, we leave him at the height of his work and of his power. And in that work, he has found a height of happiness unknown to most men, he has made the world a better place by the fact of making such happiness possible, by the fact of making it exist within his own soul—and the realization of man’s capacity for ecstasy is the only reason for this world’s existence. Or so the author believes.

Keating achieves the kind of success he seeks, early and easily. He wins great popular acclaim. But the emptiness and the uncertainty within him allow him no happiness. He has never known peace with himself. Such joy as he finds in life is only a guilty, unhealthy, unsafe satisfaction. He has not the courage of his own desires—and he passes up the only chance at happiness he had, his sincere love for Catherine. His success goes as it came—through the whim of others. His popularity fades as that of all current fashions; undeserved from the first, his fame dwindles and dies; he is replaced by other popular heroes of the same type. And it is only when people begin to desert him that he begins to question his own soul, to realize dimly what it was that he missed, what it was that he had always envied, feared and resented in Roark. When he understands it, it is too late. We leave him, a man without hope, without future, without past, a man who had lived through others, had brought them nothing but sorrow and left them nothing but bad imitations of every bad building created before him.

Toohey proceeds successfully on his chosen course of destroying all those whose lives touch his. He fails only with three human beings: Roark, Dominique, and Wynand. Roark is the great, consuming hatred of his life, the symbol of all that he must destroy. He is helpless before Roark; he cannot touch Roark spiritually—and he knows it. So he marshals every social weapon he controls—to break Roark’s career. And Toohey holds a great power over society, carefully built up through the years. But he fails. He cannot prevent Roark’s ultimate triumph. In regard to Dominique, Toohey is one of the few who understand her real nature. He goads her on to self-destruction. He helps to bring about her marriage to Wynand—a marriage he hoped would destroy them both. He has a special interest in Wynand: he works slowly, through many years, to obtain editorial control of the Wynand papers, on which he is employed as a special columnist-commentator. He understands Wynand. He knows that Wynand’s bitter cynicism is only a mask for the kind of spirit Toohey dreads; he knows that Wynand is not basically corrupt. He hopes to achieve that corruption through Dominique, whom he considers to be the worst possible influence that Wynand could encounter. He fails in his calculations. At the end of the story, he loses that particular battle by losing his position with the Wynand papers. But another great newspaper signs him up at once. Toohey, like time, marches on.

Wynand’s retribution comes first in the person of Dominique, in that he falls desperately in love with her; desperately—because it is his first complete, sincere and personal emotion. When he marries her, he knows that she does not love him, but he does not know that she loves Roark, that the marriage is only her way of defying and degrading her love for Roark, the bitterest way she could find. She chooses Wynand as the most completely vicious man she knows. She is disappointed in this; she herself brings the first awakening of Wynand’s essential self. His love for her becomes the symbol of everything he has missed in life: an experience completely his own, to be guarded savagely against all other men, those other men whose public property he is.

But it is Roark who is life’s final revenge upon Wynand. When [they] meet, Wynand is 54, Roark is 37. Wynand does not suspect that Dominique had been Roark’s mistress, and his attitude toward Roark has no relation to Dominique. Instead of the usual hatred which men of Roark’s integrity had always aroused in him, Wynand’s reaction is a great, irresistible, unformu lated wave of recognition and admiration. He does not understand or analyze it for a long time. He knows only that he needs Roark in some odd, unaccountable manner. Slowly, through their strange relationship of unspoken understanding, Wynand begins to realize that Roark is the symbol of everything he has betrayed; Roark achieved what he had lacked the courage to achieve; Roark is his own self, as he might have been; Roark is his revenge against society, against that mob whom Roark defies and to whom Wynand has surrendered. And although Roark is an external reproach to him, although the mere fact of Roark’s existence brings him the first spiritual suffering he has ever allowed himself to experience—Roark becomes Wynand’s obsession. Wynand is actually in love with Roark. It is love in every sense but the physical; its base is not in homosexuality; Wynand has never had any tendency in that direction. It is more hero-worship than love, and more religion than hero-worship. Actually, it is Wynand’s tribute to his own unrealized greatness. This love has no relation to his love for Dominique; it is not faithlessness to Dominique; and yet, were he ever asked to choose between the two, Wynand would have chosen Roark. Wynand welcomes the torture of loving a man whom he should hate. He finds a dim, twisted sense of atonement in his love for his worst spiritual enemy. He is punishing himself for what he has done—by bowing before what he should have done. It is his first acceptance of an ideal—and his first suffering for its sake. Roark becomes the most precious thing in his life.

Roark’s attitude toward Wynand is a deep understanding; in a way—respect ; and the only pity he has ever felt for any human being. As to Dominique, she sees the situation, resents it and is frightened by it. To her, there is no other reality and no other concern but Roark. She is jealous of Wynand, of any feeling Roark might have in response to Wynand’s adoration of him. It is a triangle—in which the husband and wife are both in love with the same man.

It is when—through Toohey’s efforts—Roark becomes the center of a sensational scandal and faces a trial involving a possible sentence of life-imprisonment, that Wynand attempts to defend Roark through the influence of his newspapers. Roark is the object of great public indignation. Wynand wants to defend him, more passionately than he would want to defend his own life. But he cannot fight the monster of public opinion. He is forced to make his papers clamor for Roark’s conviction. He is forced to betray his first and only god.

It is Wynand’s final tragedy. He faces the full understanding of his own spiritual degradation and of that illusory power over men for the sake of which he had allowed his degradation. Roark is acquitted. In the circumstances surrounding the trial, Wynand learns the truth about the past of Roark and Dominique, and that they still love each other. He loses them both. He is forced to divorce Dominique. He has nothing left but his newspaper empire, which he now hates—with all its energy, spirit and prestige gone.

Dominique comes back to Roark—completely, finally and voluntarily, understanding through him the meaning of life as he has lived it, as she is prepared to live it for the first time.

This, very generally and very roughly, is the story.

 

 

[
Shortly after
The Fountainhead’s
publication, Warner Brothers
bought
the movie rights. The following notes were made as AR began work on the screenplay.
]

General Theme:
Man’s integrity.

Plot Theme:
Howard Roark, an architect, a man of genius, originality and complete spiritual independence, holds the truth of his convictions above all things in life. He fights against society for his creative freedom, he refuses to compromise in any way, he builds only as he believes, he will not submit to conventions, traditions, popular taste, money or fame. Dominique Francon, the woman he loves, thinks that his fight is hopeless. Afraid that society will hurt and corrupt him, she tries to block his career in order to save him from certain disaster. When the disaster comes and he faces public disgrace, she decides to take her revenge on the man responsible for it, Gail Wynand, a powerful, corrupt newspaper publisher. She marries Wynand, determined to break him. But Roark rises slowly, in spite of every obstacle. When he finally meets Wynand in person, Dominique is terrified to see that the two men love and understand each other. Roark’s integrity reaches Wynand’s better self, Roark is the ideal which Wynand has betrayed in his ambition for power. Without intending it, Roark achieves his own revenge—by becoming Wynand’s best friend. Dominique finds herself suffering in a strange triangle—jealous of her husband’s devotion to the man she loves. When Roark’s life and career are threatened in a final test, when he becomes the victim of public fury and has to stand trial, alone, hated, opposed and denounced by all—Wynand makes a supreme effort toward his own redemption. He stands by Roark and defends him. Wynand loses, defeated and broken by the corrupt machine he himself had created. But Roark wins without his help—wins by the power of his own truth. Roark is acquitted—and Dominique comes to him, free to find happiness with him, realizing that the battle is never hopeless, that nothing can defeat man’s integrity.
[Note that the movie’s plot is to focus on Roark, Wynand, and Dominique; Keating and Toohey are not even mentioned.
]

Independence—as against obeying the wishes of others, as against the “social” spirit, which is: Keating, who tried to live by public polls; Wynand, who tried to use the mob; Toohey, who consciously used collectivism for the purpose of gaining power and enslaving mankind.

Therefore, Roark’s speech must summarize the above, give it a statement—the
good
is not the
social,
but the
individual,
not the herd-instinct, but independence; to live for yourself or for others is an issue of the spirit, the choice between one’s own judgment and the surrender of one’s judgment, between integrity and mental prostitution. The form of a society will be the result of this basic issue.

 

 

 

 

[Almost five years later, Warner Brothers began to make the movie. Shortly before the start of principal photography, the director (King Vidor) asked AR to write instructions for the scene in which, after Kiki Holcombe’s party, Dominique comes to Roark’s apartment. Patricia Neal, Vidor said, needed a better understanding of Dominique’s psychology. The instructions helped; AR commented later that this was “the best acted scene in the movie
.”]

This scene contains the entire progression of Roark’s and Dominique’s love affair in the book. Dominique’s part in the scene gives her a chance to show every aspect of her character.

Dominique’s basic attitude is the violent conflict between her passion for Roark and her despair. The more she admires him, the more certain she is that he will be destroyed. She is so hurt herself that she is driven to hurt him, but her cruelty to him is only an extreme expression of her love. We must be certain that there is never a touch of feminine cattiness, vanity or malice in Dominique’s performance. She defies Roark because she worships him. She defies him for the pleasure of seeing him master her. Her real desire is always to see him win.

The different aspects of Dominique’s character and mood in the scene go in this order: Defiance—bitterness—sex—feminine helplessness.

1. At the beginning of the scene, Dominique is coldly, arrogantly defiant. This is her way of paying Roark for the rape. Her attitude, in effect, is: Well, if you want to break me down, I will break down with a vengeance, I will go all the way—and it won’t do you any good. She is challenging him by overdoing her surrender. To achieve this effect, she must read her lines coldly, arrogantly, with an undertone of bitter mockery. When she speaks of how much she loves him and how much she missed him, her voice must sound as if she were throwing insults in his face, throwing them coldly, contemptuously and deliberately. Then the lines will sound as if they are torn out of her against her will—and this will convey a feeling of passion for him much greater than any sentimental reading could achieve.

2. These are the speeches where Dominique shows all her bitterness against the world—and, in doing it, she shows her own uncompromising idealism and her admiration for Roark. In this bitter form, she pays him the greatest compliments. This is her real declaration of love for him—because here she states the reasons for her love: she loves all the things which the world hates him for. While she speaks about his business and clients, her voice has more emotion than she showed in the preceding moments when she spoke of love. This is where she begins to show despair, but not openly; it is merely in the bitterness and tension of the way she speaks; she must speak as if every word hurt her.