Apparently Ayn Rand is back “in.” There’s a new biography out — and the review is the number one emailed article at the NYTimes. She has apparently also inspired a lot of fall fashion lines this season (not kidding). I have a sordid history with the Ayn Rand phenomenon that I would appreciate if you did not force me to recount. But I feel compelled to respond to the resurgence of Objectivism, mainly by reprinting (without permission) excerpts from an article by David Brooks (not exactly a lefty!). What you’ll discover is that the great humorless Rand is, in fact, one of the greatest comediennes of all time.
The Wonder That Is Me:
Ayn Rand spoke as if from a mountaintop, even in her own head.
By DAVID BROOKS
Many people remember their youthful passion for Ayn Rand the way they remember teen-age make-out parties. It seemed daring at the time, but now the memory of it just makes you feel queasy. Still, Rand’s novels continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year, with total sales topping 20 million. So while her philosophy — which is the elephantiasis of individualism — retains only a core of devoted followers, there is still her fantastic commercial success to be reckoned with. If nothing else, ”Journals of Ayn Rand” will be useful to any writer who wants to know what it takes to be one of the best-selling authors of the century.
The journals’ central lesson is that one should never underestimate the importance of pomposity. ”I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being,” Rand wrote to herself in 1946, while planning ”Atlas Shrugged.” And though bits of her philosophy changed over time, her awesome regard for her own genius remained the animating heart of her work.
From the beginning of her career, when she was a screenwriter of silent films for Cecil B. DeMille, to her death in 1982, she was a combatant in her own version of class warfare: ”The actual performance of men in society is a constant, fierce, undefined struggle between the genius and the parasite. . . . The genius must have his freedom and his independence. . . . But he is crippled, hobbled, tied, held back constantly by the encroachments and restrictions of the parasites who get their unearned sustenance from him.” The pesky parasites, in her view, had invented religion (”the great poison of mankind”), family life (”dull, petty, purposeless”), compassion and generosity to skim off the fruits of the great achievers like Rand herself.
If that’s your philosophy, then your books probably aren’t going to be full of whimsical badinage, but they will have enough Promethean vigor to propel one through page after page of hectoring. And Rand always let her readers know that they were on the side of the geniuses. ”Here’s what I say to the parasites, in effect,” she writes in a typically hypercharged passage in these journals: ” ‘You miserable little bastards! You can’t conceive of or value our scale of living — but you think you can get its advantages without its essence, by enslaving and destroying us. You think you can enjoy our advantages on your level. All right. Try it.’ ” It’s ironic that in the century that saw the rise and fall of Marxism, the greatest agitprop novelist of them all should be a virulent anti-Marxist, and should construct her own epic class struggle by turning Marx on his head.
… It took her seven years to think through and write ”The Fountainhead” and 13 years to complete ”Atlas Shrugged.” The essays in preparation for ”Atlas Shrugged” cover 274 pages in these journals, and John Galt’s climactic speech alone took her two years to write.
”One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself,” she writes, adopting as a philosophy of life a creed most of us reserve for getting a taxi. And true to this ultra-individualist conception, she was a solitary thinker. Current events rarely intruded into her thought processes. (Whittaker Chambers was being unfair when he famously declared that one could hear the echo of the gas chamber in her books, but this was a woman who could write blithely about human parasites as news of the Holocaust was trickling back from Europe.) She seems to have read very little of the philosophers who preceded her (though Rousseau, for example, anticipated most of her ideas and dismissed them with a flick of his wrist). And she describes almost no human contact in these notes, though there is a current of misogyny throughout: ”Some architects will not work for a woman client, regardless of the fee. (Good for them!)”
NEEDLESS to say, she does not confront the central paradox of her career, that a doctrine designed to celebrate the few has in fact been avidly consumed by so many. That a woman who thought of herself as at war with the masses was feted by Johnny Carson on ”The Tonight Show.” That a philosophy glorifying the untrammeled individual has attracted numerous unthinking followers …
But there are glimpses in these pages of the brilliant insight she drew from her Soviet childhood — that collectivism destroys souls as well as societies — which was made absurd only by the philosophy she piled on top of it. My harsh assessment won’t bother Randians, who expect this sort of thing from parasites like me. (Condemning a Randian is like hitting a masochist; it just confirms his worldview.) But for aspiring novelists who’d like to see their books sell like Rand’s, the bad news from these journals is that you can’t fake it. Even if you are only writing a potboiler, you have to feel in your bones that it is a classic for the ages. You have to be convinced in your core or cores that you are a transcendent genius, and that your book is the flowering of your deepest soul. If these journals are any guide, authors should be pompous, egomaniacal, humorless and vehement.
As if this were something they need to be told. <!—->
The Unknown Banana 