Wallflower at the Orgy (7 page)

In the years since,
The Fountainhead
has sold over two and a half million copies in hard and soft cover. Bobbs-Merrill, which has just issued its thirty-second printing, a twenty-fifth anniversary deluxe edition which sells for eight dollars, calls it “the book that just won’t stop selling.” Along with Miss Rand’s other blockbuster,
Atlas Shrugged
, it forms the theoretical basis for the Rand philosophy known as Objectivism. New American Library considers the two books the prize possessions of its paperback backlist. “Once or twice a year we reissue these books,” said Edward Kuhn, former editor-in-chief of NAL, who recently became publisher of the World Publishing Company, another Times-Mirror subsidiary. “And I’m not talking about a printing of ten thousand. These books are reprinted in runs of fifty and one hundred thousand copies. What this means is that every year one hundred thousand new people read
The Fountainhead
—a new generation of readers every five years. Other than with Fitzgerald and Hemingway—and I couldn’t even say Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis—this just doesn’t happen.”

The Fountainhead
is the story of Howard Roark, modern architect, and his fight for integrity, individualism, and ego-fulfillment against the altruistic parasites who believe in Gothic architecture, and more important, against the near heroes who do not believe the fight can be won. It is also the story of Roark’s thoroughly peculiar love affair with one Dominique Francon (whose body is also a clean composition of straight, clean lines and angles, notwithstanding the fact that conventional curves might have been better). Miss Francon is first attracted to Roark while he is working splitting rocks in a granite quarry on her property; she is raped by him on page 219 of the new deluxe edition and page 209 in the paperback. When she discovers, somewhat later, that he
is the only architect whose work she admires, she sets out to protect him from disappointment by making certain no one ever gives him a job. She marries two men just to tick him off. “Dominique is myself in a bad mood,” Miss Rand once said.

The book ends in a blaze of ego when Roark blows up a housing project he has designed after details of it have been altered; he is ultimately acquitted; and he marries Dominique. They live happily ever after, one supposes, in a steel-and-glass house.

When
The Fountainhead
was published, almost every critic who reviewed it missed the point—that the welfare of society must always be subordinate to individual self-interest. Rather than dealing with this theme of ego, most of the reviewers treated it as a Big Book, and (with the exception of the critic for the
New York Times Book Review, who
compared it to
The Magic Mountain
) treated it badly. The reviewer for the daily
New York Times
called it “a whale of a book about architecture” and thought it overwritten and melodramatic. Wrote the critic for
Architectural Forum:
“The architecture profession, may the Lord protect it, has at last been made a background for a novel. According to its publishers,
The Fountainhead
will do for architects what
Arrowsmith
did for doctors. Though we do not recall precisely what
Arrowsmith
did for doctors, it seems likely that
The Fountainhead
may do a lot less for the architects.”

Like most of my contemporaries, I first read
The Fountainhead
when I was eighteen years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect—Frank Lloyd Wright, my friends told me—and his love life. It was the first book I had ever read on modern architecture, and I found it fascinating. I deliberately
skipped over all the passages about egotism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that
The Fountainhead
did a great deal more for architects than
Architectural Forum
ever dreamed: there were thousands of fat, pudgy nonarchitects who could not get dates during college because of the influence
The Fountainhead
had on foolish girls like me.

In any case, about a year after I read the book I sat in on a freshman-orientation seminar which discussed the book (among other novels it was suspected incoming Wellesley girls had read) and was shocked to discover:

• That Howard Roark probably shouldn’t have blown up that housing project.
  
• That altruism was not bad in moderation.
  
• That the book I had loved was virtually a polemic.
  
• That its author was opposed to the welfare state.
  

I also learned, though not in the seminar, that architects were, for the most part, nothing like Howard Roark.

I recently reread
The Fountainhead
, and while I still have a great affection for it and recommend it to anyone taking a plane trip, I am forced to conclude that it is better read when one is young enough to miss the point. Otherwise, one cannot help thinking it is a very silly book. (
Atlas Shrugged
, the saga of a group of Roark-like heroes who go on strike, move to a small Atlantis somewhere in Colorado, and allow the world to go to pot in their absence, is not a silly book. It is a ridiculous book. It is also quite obviously a book by an author whose previous work readers have missed the point
of. It is impossible to miss the point of
Atlas Shrugged
. Nevertheless, it is a book that cannot be put down, and therefore probably should not be picked up in the first place.)

“The Fountainhead
was only an overture to ATLAS SHRUGGED,” Miss Rand has written, emphasizing the disparity between the two books by italicizing the one and capitalizing the other. The philosophy of Objectivism which assumes such pollinating proportions in the latter was only blossoming in the former—though, according to Miss Rand’s official biography, it had begun to develop in Miss Rand shortly after her birth.

Ayn (rhymes with pine) Rand was born in 1905 to Jewish parents in Petrograd. “I know they call it Leningrad now,” she said years later, “but I still call it Petrograd.” She grew up loving the romantic fiction of Victor Hugo, hating Communist ideology, and denouncing God. In 1926, after a Chicago relative offered to sponsor her passage to the United States, Miss Rand joyfully left for New York. As she sailed into Manhattan, she once recalled, “There was one skyscraper that stood out ablaze like the finger of God, and it seemed to me the greatest symbol of free man.… I made a mental note that someday I would write a novel with the skyscraper as a theme.” The tallest skyscraper at that time was the elaborately Gothic Woolworth building.

In the seventeen years that elapsed between her vow and its execution, Miss Rand, among other things, lived at the Studio Club in Hollywood, was an extra in the film
The King of Kings
, wrote motion-picture scenarios, stuffed envelopes, waited on tables, and married Frank O’Connor, a
painter, who is not to be confused with the short-story writer. (His painting of a skyscraper under construction adorns the cover of the deluxe edition of
The Fountainhead.
) In 1934 she and her husband moved to New York; in 1936 her first novel,
We the Living
, was published, and her play,
The Night of January 16
, a melodrama, ran seven months on Broadway. And she set to work—in architect Ely Jacques Kahn’s office—on her new book.

By late 1940 she had completed one-third of the manuscript, then entitled
Second-Hand Lives
, and been rejected by twelve publishers. When funds ran out, she went to work as a reader at Paramount Pictures; there she showed her book to the late Richard Mealand, Paramount story editor. Mealand, who loved it, showed it to Archibald Ogden, editor-in-chief of Bobbs; Ogden, who loved it, sent it to Indianapolis to Bobbs president D. L. Chambers; Chambers, who hated it, sent it back with orders not to buy it. “I do not care much for allegories myself,” he wrote, “I presume you will not wish to proceed further with your negotiations.” Ogden wrote back: “If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you.” To which Chambers wired: “Far be it from me to dampen such enthusiasm. Sign the contract.” Miss Rand signed—and received a modest one-thousand-dollar advance.

The final manuscript—seventy-five thousand words shorter than Miss Rand had written it—continued to displease Chambers. He suggested that the book be cut in half. Without telling Ogden, he ordered the first printing cut from twenty-five thousand copies to twelve thousand and insisted it be printed from type: there was no point in making plates for a book that would clearly never sell out its first printing.

And, of course, it did.
The Fountainhead
—the title was changed at Ogden’s suggestion—has become known in the trade as the classic cult book. The classic book that made its own way. “It was the greatest word-of-mouth book I’ve ever been connected with,” said Bobbs-Merrill’s trade-division sales manager, William Finneran. “Over the years, we spent about two hundred fifty thousand dollars in advertising it, and we might as well have plowed it back into profits for all the good it did for us.” Six slow months after publication—and its purchase by Warner Brothers for a film that starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal—sales began to build; ultimately, the book appeared on the best-seller list twenty-six times through 1945. “I did not know that I was predicting my own future,” Ayn Rand once wrote, “when I described the process of Roark’s success: ‘It was as if an underground stream flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to the surface at random, in unpredictable places.’ ”

As it happened, the places were not all that unpredictable. According to Finneran, the book first began to sell in small cities. A bookstore owner in Detroit told his customers he was not interested in their business unless they bought the book. A Friend of the public library in Cleveland demanded that the library buy twenty-five copies of it. A lady in Minneapolis gave it to all her friends and later claimed credit for the book’s sales. “It started out with people in their thirties emerging from the Depression,” said Finneran, “and I think if you put them through a computer you’d find they were people who have read three books in their whole lives, other than books they had to read in business, and the other two were
Gone with the Wind
and
Anthony Adverse.”

By 1950 an unorganized cult of Rand enthusiasts—none of whom, by the way, had missed the point—was at loose in the land. Miss Rand was then living in a house built by Richard Neutra in the San Fernando Valley, where she had moved six years earlier to write the script of
The Fountainhead
. (The movie, released in 1949, was not financially successful, but Miss Rand loved it. Not a line of her script was altered. “She told me she would blow up the Warner Brothers lot if we changed one word of her beautiful dialogue,” said producer Henry Blanke. “And we believed her. Even Jack Warner believed her. He gave her a cigar.”) There, she received a letter from a UCLA psychology student named Nathaniel Branden asking about the philosophical implication of her novel. Branden became her disciple—and since his family name is Blumenthal, it is probably no coincidence that his adopted name contains his mentor’s last name. When he, his future wife, Barbara, and the O’Connors moved to New York a year later, Branden became the organizer of a group of Rand devotees who met every Saturday night at Miss Rand’s East Thirties apartment. They were known as the Class of 1943, after The Book’s publication date, and Miss Rand referred to them as “the children.”

In 1957, after
Atlas Shrugged
was published by Random House, Branden opened the Nathaniel Branden Institute and has since graduated twenty-five thousand students schooled in the principles of Objectivism: that individualism is preferable to collectivism, selfishness to altruism, and nineteenth-century capitalism to any other kind of economic system. Those beliefs, which run loose through
The Fountainhead
and run amuck through
Atlas Shrugged
are expounded by Miss Rand and Branden in
The Objectivist Newsletter
, which has sixty thousand subscribers. Objectivists occasionally smoke cigarettes with dollar signs on
them. They quote Howard Roark. Like John Galt, the Roark of
Atlas Shrugged
, Branden is an unabashed capitalist and bills his organization as “profit-making.” Miss Rand is said to wear a gold dollar-sign brooch.

One would have liked to ask Miss Rand about that brooch, but she does not give interviews to nonsympathizers. One would have liked to ask her a number of other questions: how she feels about
The Fountainhead’s
continuing success, how she reacts when she thinks of the people in publishing who said it would never sell, what she does when she opens her royalty checks. Presumably, Ayn Rand laughs.